sexism

Anti-‘Woke’ Folk Should Do a Literary Soak

Posted by

113

Colson Whitehead photo by Chris Close/Doubleday.

The Trump Administration’s countless nasty actions during its first six weeks include a crusade against DEI (Diversity/Equity/Inclusion) in the United States — a crusade that once again shows that Donald and company are white supremacists. They’re also sexist, anti-LGBTQ+, uncaring about people with disabilities, etc.

Their wrongheadedness has meant, among other things, firings of many federal employees who are not white males and crackdowns on merit-based multicultural hiring. Buttressing everything is the Trump Administration’s racist view that Caucasian men are the most competent people for any job — a view proven false time and time again, including when one looks at Trump’s grossly unqualified white male picks for Cabinet posts and other high positions.

Some on the anti-DEI bandwagon acknowledge that racism, misogyny, and homophobia once existed but contend that they’re now things of the past. Yes, things have gotten better, but true equality is still a distant goal. Also, there has of course been much recent backsliding into intolerance “thanks” to Trump, many of his fellow Republicans, some Democrats, and others.

One way people can see the very problematic nature of an anti-DEI attitude is to read novels. Many fictional works spotlight talented characters who are not white males, and often depict the challenges those characters face in a world still teeming with bias.

For instance, I’m currently reading Kate Quinn’s excellent 2021 novel The Rose Code — in which the abilities of World War II codebreakers Osla Kendall, Mab Churt, and Beth Finch are inspiring, as are the struggles of those three young Englishwomen against sexism and being underestimated.

But for the rest of this post, I’m going to only mention novels featuring impressive Black female and male characters who give the lie to alleged white male superiority as they often deal with a LOT in a society that devalues them and too often threatens them.

Just before starting The Rose Code, I read Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel The Nickel Boys — and there’s no doubt that African-American character Elwood Curtis is smarter, nicer, and harder-working than any other teen (Black or white) we “meet” in the segregated northern Florida of the early 1960s. But a racist criminal “justice” system sends Elwood to a brutal juvenile reformatory on a charge he’s innocent of, and the results are not pretty — including what we learn in the powerful twist near the book’s conclusion.

But that was more than 60 years ago, you say? Whitehead, who also sets The Nickel Boys in more-recent times, shows how prejudice never completely goes away; it continues to reverberate. Trauma lingers across many a decade (as does a much smaller amount of intergenerational wealth among Black people compared to white people).

A few other memorable characters whose lives were at least partly affected by America’s warped racial dynamics include Joe King Oliver of Walter Mosley’s Down the River unto the Sea (2018), Starr Carter of Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give (2017), Ifemelu of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), Kiki Belsey of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), Celie of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), Dana Franklin of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979), Macon Dead III of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), Kunta Kinte of Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), John Grimes of James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953), the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Bigger Thomas of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and Janie Crawford of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). I found every one of those novels well worth reading, and I wish everyone trashing DEI would read them, too.

There are of course many bias-slammed Black characters skillfully created by white authors, too. Among them are Donte Drumm, a teen who ends up on Death Row for a murder he didn’t commit in John Grisham’s The Confession (2010); and the also falsely accused Tom Robinson in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Hmm…kind of similar story lines, 50 years apart.

Some of the characters mentioned in this post “overcome,” some do not.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “The grass will get greener this spring or when I buy a big can of green paint.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a newly hired township manager, bad sidewalks, and more — is here.

Fictional Characters Who Treat Women As Badly As Donald Trump Does

Posted by

102

I wish Donald Trump were fictional, but, alas, he’s real. Yet the Republican presidential candidate does remind me of literature’s sexist louts who emotionally and/or physically abuse women. Some of the men are rich and some not so rich, but all possess a high quotient of creepiness.

And those fictional characters are painful to read about, until they get their satisfying comeuppance. Perhaps it’s revenge at the hands of people they hurt, or perhaps they die young. But sometimes the jerks of literature continue to thrive, which is frustrating but also realistic. As realistic as Donald Trump, who — though destined to probably lose next month’s election — has mostly lived a charmed life despite being awful and amoral.

So many examples of repulsively sexist guys in fiction, but I’ll discuss just a few.

For instance, the father in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is a disgusting human being who treats women (and many a man) like garbage. His first name is Fyodor, but thankfully he’s not an autobiographical version of Dostoyevsky.

Also in 19th-century literature, we have Heathcliff (who, in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, deeply loves Catherine Earnshaw but is cruel to various other women in his life); Edward Casaubon (who’s condescending and contemptuous toward his young wife Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch); Gilbert Osmond (the loathsome, unloving husband of the appealing Isabel Archer in Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady); Roger Chillingworth (the vengeful, lost-then-reappears husband of Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter); and Sir Percival Glyde (the nasty schemer in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White who, under the direction of the more powerful Count Fosco, takes part in an ugly scheme whose victims include Glyde’s wife Laura Fairlie).

In post-1900 literature, we have these repellent men — among many others — guilty of domestic violence against their wives: police officer Norman Daniels of Stephen King’s Rose Madder; company heir Seth Duncan of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novel Worth Dying For, and Frank Bennett of Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.

Two of Janie Crawford’s husbands (Joe Starks and Tea Cake) in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God are guilty of physically hurting Janie, though Tea Cake has a decent side, too. Still, there’s never a legitimate reason for a man to attack a woman.

More lowlifes: Slave owner Rufus Weylin, who is unspeakably cruel to slave Alice Greenwood in Octavia Butler’s Kindred; the vile Alphonso, who beats and rapes his daughter Celie in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple; racist town drunk Bob Ewell, who abuses his daughter in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird; Esteban Trueba, who rapes a number of peasant women living on the land he owns in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits; and all the rotten males who treat women as nothing but breeding machines in the patriarchal dystopia depicted in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Monstrous actions all.

Do you have other examples of odious, sexist men of fiction? With a slight variation on “trump cards,” we could call them “Trump cads.”

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else.)

I’ve finished and am now rewriting/polishing a book called Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Writers, but am still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as “Dear Abby” and Ann Landers, and other notables such as Coretta Scott King, Walter Cronkite, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.