Category: Academic

Transcript:

Tammy: So do you want to talk about some of the biographies and stuff that originated after she passed and how you know those versions of her might like the older versions the contemporary versions might not be so accurate?

Rosanne: I think that’s very true and of course, as you said earlier that’s true in so much of our history. Someone decided what we should share, what was acceptable, and you could — I think from Emerson’s point of view, I understand that he wanted people to love his friend. So he was he was filtering out what he thought would get in their way of understanding how great she was but then of course the next guy reads that book and only reports that much and that much. I mean it’s true also of the various iterations of the Diary of Anne Frank. Her father only lets certain things out because he didn’t want people to know that she sometimes wrote that she was mad at her mother because that was the woman he loved and he wanted you know and then later people have added those things in to say but here’s the real picture. It doesn’t mean she was a terrible little girl. It just means every teenager goes “my mom is making me crazy” It just gives her the more humanity to know all those dimensions and I think, yes, that’s what’s missing in these early biographies and we have to go back and really look at her writing — what exists — and then analyze that to get a sense of who she was but I think her activities tell us that. So teaching for Bronson Alcott tells us she was okay with an inter-racial group. She thought that you know desegregation was the proper thing to do. We wouldn’t do that. You could work for somebody else. You could tutor for anybody. You chose that job and you knew it was controversial and other people would judge you by it.

Transcript:

It makes perfect sense that she would have been testing the waters for all of it because she’s also married to a foreigner, right, and a Catholic and Catholics were not accepted in the country at that time either because of you know loving the Pope and all that stuff. So she probably was. I would say it’s probably that her son probably wasn’t necessarily — didn’t necessarily have darker skin because Giovanni comes from one more northern part of the country and we probably at that time we weren’t as discriminatory because Italy was kind of part of Europe and France and then you know Lafayette was a good guy and we’re sort of immigrants. Yeah. I don’t think it’s — it happens in the early 1900s because that’s when the great mass of unwashed poor folks show up and we want to put them to work in our crummy jobs and our seamstress factories and things like that and the guys are working on the railroad but yeah…

All the immigrants. And you know and the problem is or the luck the privilege is we assimilate so that we look white which of course is bullshit. There’s no such thing as white. It makes me crazy. Caucasian you know. I always tell students caucasian is the dumbest word in the world because there’s no land of “cauc.” It’s literally the dude right the dude who studied all the skulls to do the hierarchy of all the different ethnicities. He thought the prettiest skulls came from the people who lived in the Caucus mountains of Russia and so he qualified them as Caucasian but that’s not a thing, right?