Go Read It: J.K. Rowling Gets Political, and Ta-Nehisi Coates Honors Confederacy Heritage Month

Many of J.K. Rowling's critics and fans have speculated about what sort of underlying political messages the author might have been trying to send in the Harry Potter series, and whether the fictional heroes and villains she portrays in her fantasy wizarding world have real world models in the form of certain European or American heads of state (MSNBC political pundit Keith Olbermann has said Rowling told him she told really did hide an endorsement of Barack Obama in Book 7).

But this week in The Times, Rowling made a very clear, straightforward political statement in her article, The Single Mother's Manifesto, in which she argues that Britain's conservative Tory Party has a history of cutting programs that help impoverished children and publicly vilifying single parents for political gain -- a history that belies the compassionate conservative image the party is pushing in this year's election. (We all remember how well "Compassionate Conservatism" worked out here in the U.S., right?)

But beyond an astute, passionate analysis of political situation in Britian The Single Mother's Manifesto is a scathing indictment of general Western social attitudes toward struggling single mothers, and a concise call to remember the social consequences societies face when they fail to support the very children and families who most need the help of their community. Trust me: whether or not you pay any attention to the finer points of politics across the pond, if you are a parent who has ever struggled to pay for decent health care, housing, or schooling for your child (or even if you're just a Harry Potter fan who has long wondered what sort of passionate political voice might be hiding under all that allegory) Rowling's manifesto is well worth 15 minutes of your reading time. 

Elsewhere on the web, this week The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates has come up with a brilliant way to honor Confederacy Heritage Month! Wait -- what's that, you say? There's a Confederacy Heritage Month?

Why, yes, there is! At least, there is now, in the fine Southern states of Virginia, and Mississippi, where both states' white Republican governors have recently issued official celebratory proclamations declaring April Confederacy Heritage Month -- proclamations that, somehow, accidentally, originally totally failed to mention slavery as being part of the Confederacy's heritage. (Don't worry, though! Mississippi's Governor Barber assures us that the controversy over this teensy tiny little oversight "doesn't amount to diddly.")

Ta-Nehisi Coates, apparently never one to miss an opportunity to turn lemons ridiculous institutionalized ignorance and bigotry into lemonade the start of an educational, intellectual conversation on American society, has decided to celebrate Confederate Heritage Month by posting a series of historical papers, drawings and photographs that document, in the faces and voices of real people, the horrific realities of Southern slave culture.

In his post Honoring CHM: One Drop, Coates reminds us both that slavery was all too often a family affair, and American slaves weren't always as black as some imagined them to be. 

Comments

[Cynematic]

"The Ghost of Bobby Lee," also part of Coates' Confederate History Month series, was particularly damning in documenting the unwillingness of Texas, Virginia, Mississippi, and South Carolina to relinquish the "peculiar institution," which is why they seceded.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/04/the-ghost-of-bobby-lee/38813/

Preservation of slavery as the main economic engine of the South and of racism as the main form of social organization lies at the heart of the Confederacy's "states' rights" rhetoric.