Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Freispiel, Berlin

By Justin E. H. Smith 

I've just arrived in Berlin to begin a year-long research fellowship at a well-known Institute for Philosophy. All the really smart philosophers left here in the 1930s, but Berlin retains an unmistakable luster. Come here as a philosopher, and you are assumed to be thinking some very profound thoughts. 

Day 1

I’ve rented a furnished apartment in Kreuzberg, and it came equipped not only with the usual couches and tables and IKEA dishware, but also with a Terminator 2: Judgment Day pinball machine. Digital samples of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice bellow you missed, and get out, and of course Hasta la vista, baby. I recovered long ago from the absurdity of Schwarzenegger’s governorship in my home state – that he was vastly less qualified than Ronald Reagan or even Gary Coleman for the same position, that his father was a Nazi, that he himself has been caught on film gleefully doing the Hitler salute. But when, here in the shadow of the Reichstag, the digital message beneath his grim, sunglassed image flashes “Los Angeles, July 11, 2029: Judgment Day,” it is different. Everything is different.

Don't Check My Chromosome

Race and Music in America

By Justin E. H. Smith

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Books consulted or discussed in this essay:

William L. Benzon, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (Basic Books, 2002)

Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (Belknap Press, 2004)

Cecil Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy (Harvard University Press, 2003)

David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford University Press, 2006)

William Labov et al., Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change (Walter de Gruyter, 2006)

Jason Tanz, Other People's Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America (Bloomsbury, 2006)

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A prisoner in a maximum-security facility in Warren, Ohio, where I once did some do-gooding, or tried, offered me this bit of folk wisdom: "You've got your white people, see, and you've got your black people; you've got your Chinese people, and you've got your Puerto Rican people. It's as simple as that." He himself was Mexican but for some reason his own people did not make the cut.

Is it as simple as that? 18th-century natural philosophers would have included Laplanders, and placed them at the bottom of the hierarchy (the great Aufklärer Alexander von Humboldt did try in his way to stick up for them, arguing that they are not really swarthy at all, just dirty).  My Mexican felon had probably never heard of Laplanders, let alone Saami, but in any case he was being more comprehensive than Americans typically feel the need to be.  For us, the taxonomy is usually binary: in the beginning, God created Black and White.

Translation

Heinrich Heine
The Homecoming

XXI.

How can you sleep peacefully,
Knowing, I live still?
When the old anger comes again,
I'll bend this yoke to my will.

Do you know the old song:
How there once was a dead knave,
Who grabbed his beloved at midnight
And pulled her into his grave?

Believe me, you magnificent,
You all-too lovely kid,
I'm still alive, and stronger,
Than any dead man is!