Horse Sense: Servants and Servanthood in Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park"

This is an abridged, adited version of an article originally published in Persuasions Online, Vol 44, No, 1, Winter 2023, titled "What the Coachman Said: Servants and Servanthood in Mansfield Park."

- By Tom Phillips 

Jane Austen 

“‘It is a pleasure to see a lady with such a heart for riding! . . . I never see one sit a horse better’” Thus begins a singular speech in the Jane Austen canon, spoken by a serving-man, invoking fear and trembling, body and spirit.  Addressed to Fanny Price early in Mansfield Park, it foreshadows a tale of upheaval in England, the British empire, and the world.

My Life with the Cops

                     Run chillun run, the pattyroller git you --                                                                                  Run chillun run, it's almost day. 

                                                       -- Slave song 

One evening in the 1940's, a young James Baldwin took the subway downtown to 42nd Street, just to see what was going on in midtown Manhattan. A policeman asked him what he was doing there, then told him to go back to Harlem where he belonged.  

One evening in the 1950's, a young Tom Phillips walked out of a bar in Roslyn Heights, Long Island, in the poorer section of town around the railroad station.  Emerging from a parked patrol car, a policeman asked me what I was doing "in there."  I said I was having a beer.  He informed me that everyone else in the bar was black.  "So what?" I said.  At this he grew defensive.  He had nothing against black people, he said, he'd "worked with them for many years."  It was just that I didn't belong there.   

Neither of these events would be likely today.  Black people are common on 42nd Street, which has become an urban extension of Disney World.  And the poorer parts of Roslyn have been torn down to make way for parking lots and condominiums.  My classmate and teammate Sam Brown, whom I saw in that bar that night, now lives in Roosevelt, farther out in a suburbia that has become more segregated as it has grown more affluent.  Such are the changes over time, but the basic principle remains: each race has its place.  And the cops will let you know it.  

4th of July Special: What America Means to Me

--   By Tom Phillips 

"Flag"  Jasper Johns, 1954

Huddled at home, trying to focus on something other than the din of illicit fireworks, I meditate on my high-school essay question:  What does America mean to me?  

I used to think it stood for Freedom.  Americans do enjoy an individual freedom of speech, thought, and worship that is nearly absolute. This is what keeps me here in my native land.  But Freedom is a tricky term, understood in many ways.  

For white supremacists, it has meant freedom to practice slavery, then segregation and discrimination, unequal justice enforced by racial terror.  For African-Americans it means the hope of freedom from white supremacy: Freedom to vote, to walk or drive through any neighborhood, to run for exercise rather than for your life. 

For Franklin D. Roosevelt, it meant freedom from want, freedom from fear.  For conservatives in the 21st Century, it means freedom from taxes, from caring for the poor, even freedom to endanger others' lives by not covering your face. 

So Freedom's just another word to fight about.   

Think of US as an acronym for Ultimate Struggle.  Ever since the English set foot in Virginia and Massachusetts, the country has been torn between two irreconcilable world-views.  Let's call them the System and the Movement.  S & M. 

Hip-Hop Round-trip: London to NY

"Blak Whyte Gray"
Boy Blue:  Michael "Mikey J" Asante, Creative Direction and Music; Kenrick "H2O" Sandy, Choreography
Lincoln Center White Light Festival 
November 16, 2018

-- By Tom Phillips 

"Whyte" 

Members of Boy Blue held a post-performance chat last night after the US premiere of "Blak Whyte Gray," and it was a shock to hear their British accents. Their intense and acrobatic hip-hop dancing was straight from the streets of New York -- having made a round trip from east London.

Flipping the usual progression from darkness to light, this young British troupe gives us a three-part journey of liberation that starts with "Whyte" and ends with "Blak." The progress is upward, from a kind of enslavement to a celebration of strength and freedom.  But the opening depiction of present-day slavery seemed the most relevant to an American audience.

History Without Hate?

-- By Tom Phillips
"this election showed... the emergence of white people as a minority-style political bloc."  NY Times, 12/4/2016

“Let the grassroots turn on the hate"   Stephen Bannon, Trump adviser 
 
When one of my daughters was in middle school--  a public school, in New York City -- she came home one day with the following reflection:  "I hate English people."

 I asked why, and she answered with a litany of all the horrors visited by English colonialists on native peoples in the course of their imperial rule.  That was all she knew about "English people."  She didn't even know she was one of them.

When I informed her of her own heritage -- Anglo-Saxon and Celtic -- she was puzzled.  She was old enough to realize the implication -- that she ought to hate herself.  

The next day I went in to talk to the teacher.  When she heard what this 12-year-old had got out of her class, she too was puzzled.  The last thing she wanted was for students to hate themselves.  The school was also busy teaching self-esteem and self-love.  Unfortunately, they were pitching that message to a diverse student body by giving them someone to hate -- an undefined class of imperialists loosely interpreted as "English people."

This is one of the ways that white people in America came to think of ourselves as an oppressed minority.  We're not, of course.  We're still a privileged plurality, assured of special treatment by the cops, the courts, and financial institutions.  But as long as as we teach history in a way that casts Anglo-Europeans mainly or exclusively as oppressors, we reject and alienate them just as we have rejected minorities in the past.  This is one source of the resentment felt by less fortunate whites against an intellectual regime they have characterized as "politically correct."  The hate they are now acting out is payback for their long years not just in the economic doldrums, but also the doghouse of history.