Forgiveness is one thing, but let's try not to completely forget.
Last night, I listened to an episode of Melvyn Bragg's "In Our Time" radio series, the episode which deals with Rudyard Kipling. Early in this episode, Professor Daniel Karlin describes Kipling's earliest memories as having been of an "astonishing multicultural" nature. Citing Kipling's posthumously-published memoir Something of Myself, Karlin mentioned that the book begins with an invocation to Allah, then affectionately mentions a Catholic and a Hindu servant who raised him and says that his first language was not English, but Hindi. Karlin seemed convinced that this was enough to prove that the notion that Kipling had had something to do with English nationalism, was quite absurd. By this point, 4 minutes into the broadcast, I was already half-convinced that Karlin was absurd, and the rest of the episode took care of the other half. Kipling's nationalism is as plain to see as Karlin's blindness to Kipling's nationalism.
I was surprised by this description of Kipling's earliest memories. I was reminded once again of the fact that the well-known Eurocentric bigot Richard Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya. But I was reminded in part because a video relating in some way to Dawkins was linked to the right of where "In Our Time" was playing on YouTube on my computer screen. I paused the episode of "In Our Time," informed YouTube that I did not wish to see the link to the Dawkins video, and returned to the radio show.
And although I learned all sorts of amazing things about Kipling, from his friendship with Henry James to his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, I heard what seemed to me to be very, very little about Kipiling's racism. Bragg mentioned Gandhi's comment that what Kipling called the "White Man's Burden" was actually a yoke which whites put around the necks of non-whites. And someone called Kipling's views on race "horrible, horrible, horrible," but if I remember correctly, they did so in the subordinate clause of a sentence.
And for a while I was puzzled, thinking about Kipling's undeniable artistic achievements and his experiences in India and his racism, and Dawkins' undeniable scientific achievements and his birthplace in Kenya and his racism.
And then suddenly I remembered all of the Confederate officers who had been raised by black mammies, and all of the Southern men before and since the Civil War likewise raised by black slaves or servants whom they naturally loved liked mothers, as late as the 1960's because in the 1980's I knew some of them when I was a student in Knoxville, Tennessee, and for all I know they might still have mammies in some publicity-shy corners of the South.
So, of course, there would be nothing at all unusual for a Protestant English boy in Kipling's time to be raised by Catholics and Hindus in India, or for a boy in Dawkins' time to grow up in Nairobi, and still somehow not be enlightened by it. I recalled the Confederate slave-owners who believed that they were good to their slaves and that their slaves loved them, and regarded runaway slaves as anomalies, and who were absolutely astonished when, during the Civil War, all of their slaves ran away and never came back. I recalled that I already knew all of this. And that I knew that most of the Englishmen in India in Kipling's time and in Kenya in Dawkins' time were just as surrounded by non-whites as Kipling and Dawkins, without it having automatically enlightened them as to the racist nature of the British Empire.
And then I thought about how often the British monarchy were discussed on "In Our Time," without the tone of discussion coming anywhere near John Lydon's "God save the Queen/The fascist regime/They've made you a moron/A potential H-bomb." They've also made Melvyn Bragg the life peer Baron Bragg, of Wigton in the County of Cumbria.
We see what we want to, and very often blind ourselves to the rest. It's a notable achievement when someone can stand up against a political system which benefits them -- a pre-Civil-War Southern planter, or a pre-Civil-War New York cotton merchant, against slavery; an Empire-era English gentlemen in India against British rule; an Alaskan receiving an annual Permanent Fund Dividend check against global warming; a professor of literature against the messy aspects of a great writer's biography, etc.
A notable achievement, and one which we must repeat unceasingly. You too, Melvyn.
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