The last couple of weekends, we collected our little pencils and little notebooks and put on our little glasses and backpacks and set forth to the Chicago Humanities Festival, where this year’s theme was “Animal: What Makes Us Human,” in hopes of bettering ourselves through education. Here are some things we learned.
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Race in America has to be learned—not just by native-born children, but by adult immigrants, too. In particular, a person who comes to the United States from Nigeria—already “black” by American standards—has to learn their own race. In Nigeria there is ethnicity, but not race. When Americanah author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie came from Nigeria to attend college in the U.S., she said, she discovered four American tribalisms: class, political ideology, regional affiliation (north/south), and race. Certain moments were as instructive as they were surprising: One professor was visibly taken aback that she, a black woman, had the best essay in his class. An African-American man, a stranger, addressed her casually as “sister.” She quickly understood that she was supposed to understand the meanings of these subtle moments, even as they’re conditioned by a specifically American history. What Adichie finds most interesting now is the discomfort and “coded language” Americans use to talk about race — and our confused, fraught, offending, and offended feelings around it. Can we Americans have an honest conversation about race? Only if we’re willing to be uncomfortable, Adichie said, and to acknowledge our privileges—such as her privilege as outsider: “I can say more. The history is not mine—there’s not as much at stake in potential discomfort.” —Connie Vaughn
“Historians need pigs,”
In recent cultural depictions, Tatar said, Little Red Riding Hood has evolved from a preyed-upon innocent to a predator herself. She cited the 2005 movie Hard Candy, in which a 14-year-old girl tortures a man suspected of sexually assaulting other children. Earlier Little Red Riding Hoods learned that if they wanted to be safe, they needed to be polite and obedient, and not wander off the path—as opposed to, say, slaughtering potential offenders. Now there’s “a new culture of warrior women” who are “as ruthless as the predators once were,” Tatar said. This role reversal has been criticized by some as faux feminism. Tatar herself thinks the brutal new Little Red Riding Hood may be an overcorrection, and she hopes a less martial one will result from further evolution. —Steve Bogira
a “caw” that signals danger and a “haw” that means only meat. In a lyric, fantastical piece she read from her notebook, the genre-bending poet Anne Carson told the story of a man who strikes up a friendship with a talking crow named Short Pants. After Short Pants’s mate, Fury, is shot to death, the human-bird relationship falls apart. If this wide-ranging story can be said to be about one thing, it may be the subject of how we human animals feel grief and loneliness. “We want to believe that other creatures grieve like we do,” said Carson. In suggesting we project our experience onto our avian friends and other animals, Carson also raised a question, without seeming pedantic or abstract, about whether we project certain ideas of what we’re going through onto our own experience. Might not grieving contain a large dose of humor that we’re not supposed to talk about? A serious poet with a silly story about serious questions gives us a glimpse into how we do, and don’t, know ourselves. —Connie Vaughn
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In 1976, at the age of 28, Jenette Kahn became publisher of DC Comics, where she’d go on to serve as president and editor in chief in her 26 years there. A Harvard graduate in art history, Kahn worked to elevate comics from a “disposable, ephemeral” medium to an art form. Noticing that the comics industry was more evolved in the UK than in America, she took trips to recruit now legendary talent like Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and David McKean. Part of bringing these artists on board involved overthrowing the industry’s “draconian” copyright system, which prevented artists from receiving royalties. Kahn argued that the best writers and artists must have had “wonderful ideas in the drawer they were never going to show us” if they weren’t supported.
