Dear reader, I am preparing for an election vigil at home on Tuesday, where there will be tapas and accommodation and shared nail biting. The worst possible outcome is probably that Kamala Harris wins narrowly, but that the opponents refuse to accept the result. How is American democracy doing then? I try to calm my fears by gaining insight, through listening to podcasts and reading books about the United States. You get a warm recommendation and a dissuasion from me today. Regular Bokbrevet readers may have noticed that some time has passed since the last letter. That’s because, in quick order: Cold – autumn holiday – witch’s shot. I am therefore writing to you lying down, while I chew painkillers against my lower back. The book letter must be published! 🙂 If you Google books + USA politics, you will get an enormous number of exciting hits. One can get the impression that every journalist and professor has delivered their interpretation of American society. Among new releases, I went instead for “Melania” by former first lady Melania Trump. I have previously enjoyed Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris’ autobiographies, and thought it might be fun to read memoirs from the other political side. Melania has been very invisible, so who is she really? Photo: KENA BETANCUR / AFP Most of all, I wondered what it’s like to have Donald Trump as a husband. Does he have a soft and considerate side? Is the love between them real, or is it an efficient trade of beauty and youth in exchange for wealth and status? After reading the book, I am just as wise. I have tried to find out whether Melania wrote it entirely herself or had the help of a ghostwriter, without success. It might as well have been written by ChatGPT. Here there is no personality, no self-irony, no touching scenes behind the facade. The language is most reminiscent of the clichés from a job application, such as this sentence: I continue to approach tasks with a methodical mindset, striving for excellence in what I do. When she has her son Barron, she says motherhood has changed her for good. BUT WHICH WAY, MELANIA? CAN YOU BE A LITTLE MORE SPECIFIC? I have to play platitude bingo with myself to persevere. Melania has chosen a matt, black cover for her book. Here displayed in an American bookstore with other current books on the occasion of the election. Photo: Kent J. Edwards / Reuters Writing his memoirs gives him the opportunity to explain his side of the story in scandals in the press, and we get that. Melania received a lot of criticism when she repeated verbatim some sentences from a speech Michelle Obama had given. Of course, this is not Melania’s fault, we learn. She had told her speechwriter that she was INSPIRED by Michelle’s speech, not that she was going to copy it. Melania talks about growing up in Slovenia (then Yugoslavia) under the Iron Curtain, but the communist regime did not bother her family significantly. She only remembers that it took a little longer in customs when they were going on an alpine holiday in Austria. Melania is certainly a hard-working and determined woman, as she describes herself. But she doesn’t show much awareness of the privileges she comes from or lives with, enjoying the sunrise from Trump tower with a good espresso I really wish the book had surprised me positively. For example, I genuinely wonder what it must have been like for her to learn that her husband had an affair with a porn star when they had been married for a year and their son was a newborn. But such adversity does not fit into this portrayal of success. Either Melania Trump does not have a very deep personality, or someone else has carefully taken care that she does not say anything that could be perceived negatively. This book should be paid to read, and luckily I did. Our white ghetto When my family moved to New York in 1987, my parents wanted us to go to a normal, public school, but that it should also be a good school. The solution was to settle in Scarsdale, a suburb 40 minutes by train from Manhattan. There were many Jewish and East Asian families there, two groups that value education and are willing to pay high council tax for good schools. In all of Scarsdale High School, I can remember only one African-American boy. We lived in a bubble. BRIGHT FUTURE: With a diploma from Scarsdale High School, the way was open to the best universities. This was not the case for other public schools in the area. Photo: Siss Vik/news The commuter train itself was an example of America’s class distinctions matching what in the USA they call race: In the morning rush, the trains out to Scarsdale were full of cleaners and servants with brown skin, while the trains to Manhattan carried white men in suit up for well-paid office jobs. (The editor of the New York Times was one of them.) It was always a shock to me to see the landscape change from slums to the projects when the train passed through Harlem. Brown mammoth blocks towered from the asphalt, without parks and gardens. It is one of the most inhumane housing estates I have seen. For a 16-year-old from Norway, New York was a wonderfully exciting multicultural metropolis. But as you can see, it was also very clear that each ethnic group had its ghetto, and that the economy was not evenly distributed. Obama’s victory in 2008 was symbolic for many. Photo: Matt Rourke / AP When Barack Obama became president in 2008, I cried for joy. Now we were done with racism in the USA, as it were. Then came Trump, the killing of George Floyd, the rise of the Proud Boys. Everything seemed reset. The same feelings are taken by Ketil Raknes as a starting point for his new book, “White power”. He recalls his own enthusiasm for Obama’s victory, but in retrospect he believes he was naive and ignorant. Ketil Raknes went to Washington DC to witness Obama’s inauguration because it was a great historical moment Photo: Ketil Raknes When we ask why half of the American population supports Trump, no matter how much he lies, one can put on different glasses to examine and explain American society. Racism is such a spectacle, and Raknes argues well that it is a central key to understanding today’s irreconcilable dividing lines. He chooses to limit himself to racism against black Americans, because their history is so special. The problem is encapsulated already from the start. It begins positively and progressively with the Declaration of Independence from 1776: We believe that these are self-evident truths: That all men are born equal, and that they have been given certain inalienable rights by their creator. But in the next step, when the Constitution must organize who will be allowed to vote and how, the founding fathers run into problems. Should we count slaves in the population? Who has the right to vote? Many of the nation’s founders were slave owners, including Thomas Jefferson. He had over 130 slaves and increased his own workforce by fathering seven children on the young slave woman Sally Hemings. Photo: Siss Vik/news The founders quarreled a lot and ended up with a strange compromise: We let the slaves count 60 percent as people in the census, but black people do not have the right to vote. In this way, the southern states became powerful in terms of elections, and the USA got a complicated electoral system that has undergone very few changes until today. The quarrel between North and South, between slave owners and opponents of slavery, characterizes election campaigns long after the Civil War is over. Presidents who I think of as good guys, like JFK and Franklin D. Roosevelt, failed to propose improvements for blacks because they depended on votes from states where racism was rife. One reason for Ketil Raknes to look at the history of the United States with an eye on racism is how suppressed the history of American racism has been. He talks about a national amnesia. By not telling about whites’ oppression of blacks, one chooses to cover up what has happened. Colson Whitehead in Oslo in 2017. Photo: Henning Gulli / news When I interviewed Colson Whitehead about his bestseller “The Underground Railroad”, he told me that his teachers had done with slavery in one school hour. In working on the novel, he read up on slaves’ own accounts, both from the southern states and the northern states. He was particularly disheartened to read about how parents and children were torn apart, and married couples divorced and sold separately. When he came up the stairs from his study to cook dinner for the family, he could imagine with horror being torn from his wife or two daughters. His book and films such as “12 Years a Slave” and “Django Unchained” have helped to fill in the gaps in history lessons. But the wind has turned. Florida Governor Ron de Santis is now anxious that white children will be made to feel guilty by such stories. The image of six-year-old Ruby Bridges having to be escorted to and from a “white” school in New Orleans in 1960 to protect her from the mob is iconic. Photo: Uncredited / AP You know how horrible things can seem extra strong if they are told very neutrally? Raknes keeps a sober tone and leans on numbers and facts. Several times I have to go back a paragraph and check: Was this really what it said?? For example: I know that many blacks were lynched in the southern states in the 19th and 20th centuries. But I didn’t know that the whites cut off toes and fingers and sent them to the family, or that they took pictures of the corpse and made postcards of it. That the Nazis went on a study trip to the United States to learn how to create a racist state hardly comes as a surprise after such facts. Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery in Maryland and became one of the most important voices for the abolition of slavery. Photo: Handout. / Reuters Ketil Raknes has organized the book around four central champions of civil rights: Frederick Douglass, WEB Dubois, Martin Luther King jr. and Barack Obama. The first was an escaped slave, the last became president. So the world has moved on. But something that darkens my mind is that these champions of equal rights start out with optimism and idealism, but end up losing faith in the American project. Raknes says that although Martin Luther King Jr. stands as a symbol of equality and peaceful protest today, he was greatly hated in his time. The FBI defined him as a very dangerous man, wiretapped him and ran smear campaigns against him. When John F. Kennedy was shot, King said: – It’s going to happen to me too. He got it right. When a black American sees a red cap with the text Make America Great Again on it, he or she may wonder: When was America really great? Was it before blacks got the right to vote? Was it when whites had their own restaurants, schools and buses? Has America really ever been so incredibly great if you’re black? Photo: Mike Blake / Reuters The main point of “White Power” is that the Americans will not succeed in creating a nation where everyone is truly considered equal until they come to terms with their history. The first step is to acquire knowledge. For a Norwegian reader, this book will be a good start. Competition Thank you for many correct answers to the book title quiz in the previous book letter, you are clever! Due to the autumn holidays and witch shots, sending out the bookmarks to ten lucky people has stagnated, but it will happen ASAP next week, I promise. And so to this week’s competition. I thought I had a good grasp of black American history until I read “White Power.” How are you? I challenge you to a mini-quiz based on the book. I read a lot during the autumn holidays and have a lot of new things on my mind now that we have just put this election campaign behind us. Hope you dress warmly in wool and have some good books on your bedside table! Siss Quiz: What do you know about American racism? Published 02.11.2024, at 09.01
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Book letter #41 Melania Trump’s autobiography is boring as hell – Siss Vik’s book letter
