When you work at the library like I do, you are bound to be attacked by a book every now and then. They leap off shelves armed with hard, sharp corners. But I’m a trooper. I can take the physical pain. Unfortunately, the books in the library are often (literally) stuck with something a lot more painful and harmful than a little knock on the head.

Open a book and open up some racism. This is not lynching, it is not hate speech in the sense that we normally think of it, but the racism is there – and perhaps more dangerous for its subtlety.

The books in Baker and Berry libraries have different bookplates usually glued onto the inside covers. There is the Lone Pine bookplate, there are text-only labels that recognize the contributors who make the purchase of books possible. Then you have the bookplate of the squatting "Indian" smoking a pipe while the "civilized" white man perches on a trees stump and educates him.

This bookplate harkens back to and reflects the sentiment of the first days of the College when "civilizing Indians" was the school’s mission. Of course, First Nations peoples never needed "civilization" – they had been perfectly well off in the civilization department long before Europeans had come to this continent. Nonetheless, many books in Dartmouth’s collection, both new and old, continue to bear this insulting emblem. It is still placed on new books as they come in.

And there are other dangers to encounter in the library. If you venture over to Berry Level 3 and look at some book spines, you’ll see the "Orient" section comprised of books primarily written in Chinese. Each call number has "ORIENT" on the first line. For those shaking their heads as to how this is racism, they need only look to the history of the "Orient" and its relationship with the Imperialist western powers.

The "Occident" and the "Orient" were and still are posited as polar opposites where the "Oriental" is typed as sneaky, stupid, and dirty – among other things. The book labels hold only about an inch of type – too small to be harmful, right? – but that inch of type is repeated over and over again. And that is a very real, very widely disseminated expression of racism.

Some folks will surely pass this off as political correctness going hypersensitive again. Maybe they would say, "It might be racist, but we have bigger, more pressing and important things to worry about than bookplates and call-numbers. We have research papers and term projects to do, and if you want to leave the library we have real crimes to address."

This line of thinking has a real and strong pull. It was partly my initial reaction. The word that first popped into my head as I thought about this was benign. We are dealing with low-key "benign" racism. But a little deeper reflection led me to ask how could racism ever be benign? Humanity will always be injured by racism and bigotry. When we go to the big picture, little banal things like call numbers and bookplates go by the wayside, but the little things add up. They are the bricks that form a larger, stronger foundation for racism. If people grow up in an environment that accepts and perpetuates racism as the status quo, racism will always be the status quo.

We get upset about "incidents" as they are often termed, but how shocked should we be by events like these? A lot of attention will be given to Allen Iverson being heckled by fans who call him "monkey" and "nigger" – and to his homophobic retorts. A lot of attention will be given to frat brothers harassing a woman with racist and misogynistic shouts. We can decry these moments of hate until we can decry no more, and it might be a while until something considered similarly outrageous happens again.

But these incidents will never be under control, because people are not made in outrageous isolated moments even if that is all we remember. People are made in the Everyday. And everyday in Baker and Berry Library thousands and thousands of books have little stickers that give racism the thumbs-up.

I do not see us peeling off these stickers anytime soon. It would certainly be a major pain in the rear: there are a lot of stickers! But we can stop putting them on new, incoming books. We can at least begin to re-label book spines. We must be willing to fight more innocuous, everyday racism with as much energy as we fight racist incidents.

made the assumption that Orozco’s murals were serious art. My article was not about the Orozco murals except in how they related to the Hovey Murals. I did not think it was appropriate for me to extensively research Orozco’s work, given the scope of my article. My understanding of the Orozco murals is that they are about civilization on this continent before and after colonialism. They address the injustices incurred by indigenous people of this land. Humphrey did not like them because they were “Mex,” critical of Christianity and done by a communist painter. Humphrey could not have cared less about a holocaust as terrible as any humanity has undertaken and endured. So his response was the pitiful murals hidden away in Thayer’s basement.

The point of the article was to bring awareness of Humphrey’s paintings, and what I believe they represent, into our readership’s onsciousness. I thought the pictures we printed obviously displayed the “noble savage” stereotype, and that it would have been redundant and insulting to spend time writing about it, but I am apparently proven wrong. I did state, however, that the murals “represent the Charter of Dartmouth College that made ‘civilizing & christianizing Children of Pagans’ [i.e. Native Americans] the foundation of our Ivy League institution.” Here’s a big newsflash: Native Americans did not need “civilizing,” they had a flourishing civilization before white people showed up and deemed them “Savages.” A colonist view held that they were dumb animals, not people, because they looked, spoke and acted differently. That’s racism, that’s what these murals are about in large part. I also could have mentioned the negative consequences of alcohol on Native Americans from early colonial treaty negotiations to today’s alcoholism problems in that community. My apologies.

It is my hope that individuals will explore these issues on their own. I meant this article to be more of a starting point or springboard. I did not mean to come off as condescending, but people on this campus and in this country do not have respect for the native peoples of this land and how colonialism has affected and continues to affect them. Remember, the Trail of Tears was not an isolated incident. The same thing at the root of that atrocity is the same thing at the root of the Hovey murals: a perspective of racism that disrespects other people’s humanity. People need to be encouraged to find out these things for themselves, rather than be dictated to on the subject. Then these ideas might stick, social responsibility might mean something to individuals. I hope in at least some small way my article contributed towards that end.

Sincerely,

Michael Marlow

hen you walk into Thayer dining hall, you are probably thinking about the rumbling in your stomach much more than the bit of controversial history that lies a yard or so beneath your feet. In fact, there is a good chance that you have not even heard of the Hovey murals: many Dartmouth students have not. They lie tightly covered in what is now a game room in the basement of Thayer Dining Hall and have not been unveiled since the early ’90s.

The Hovey murals are, depending on whom you ask, a number of things. They are a sample of ’30s "pub art" that Walter Beach Humphries, class of ’14, painted in the late ’30s. They depict a drinking song written by Richard Hovey, class of‘96, about the founder of the college Eleazar Wheelock.

Wheelock is pictured with naked "squaws" and drunken "Indians." They are an example of the overt racism of the times and a reactionary response to the Orozco murals in Baker Library. They represent the Charter of Dartmouth College that made "civilizing & christianizing Children of Pagans" [i.e. Native Americans] the foundation of our Ivy League institution. But more importantly, the murals represent the Dartmouth community's ongoing inaction regarding its own demons.

When the times caught up with the racism of the murals beginning in the early ’70s, it was no longer acceptable to display them, except on Commencement and Reunion occasions for alumni; afterwards they were deemed unsuitable for any social gathering. There have been attempts to remove them and also a proposal to convert Hovey’s Grill into a gallery space. The murals are now in much the same state as they have been since ’92: covered and unavailable for public viewing. If a faculty member wished to use them for teaching, in theory, they could be uncovered. But at the cost of $1000 it is unlikely to happen. They were last unveiled when Michael Dorris, former Chairman of the Native American Council, gave a lecture on the murals in ’92.

Since the seventies, when the murals were first challenged as offensive and insulting, there has been a great deal of concern about censorship. Some claim that it is akin to burning books to cover up this "art." But we should question whether the murals are art at all, and if they are, whether that alone is justification for keeping them. If they are to be preserved, we should realize we are only preserving them as a reminder that they are reactionary and disgraceful.

Over the years, the attention paid to the Hovey murals has accredited them with more artistic and educational value than they deserve. The murals provide entertainment value at best: entertainment gained only through ignoring the offensive messages contained within. As it stands now, the murals are safe-housed, certainly not educating anyone. The Student Life Initiative effectively reopened Hovey’s Grill as a game room because of a lack of available social space. To uncover and display the murals in this light-hearted context would subtly legitimate their racism.

Only a few feet away from Hovey’s Grill in the basement of Thayer lies the much-frequented men's bathroom. Three years ago the walls of the stalls contained a variety of vulgar phrases and drawings. Their overall ugliness led the college to paint over and erase this "art." The possibilities of the Centerbrook project, a plan to combine Collis, Robinson and Thayer into a super student center could necessitate the gutting of Hovey’s Grill and other spaces which currently do not meet fire and safety codes. Such a move would force a final decision on the murals. Removing the murals to another location has not been considered cost-effective, and if that remains the case, there is no reason why they should not be gutted along with the room.

Giving the murals the dubious title of "pub art" is the closest we can come to endowing them with an aesthetic purpose. Humphries painted the murals in reaction to Orozco's paintings in Baker Library. He launched a campaign to gain support for his project, even incorporating a short advertising jingle entitled, "Song of 500 Gallons: Why Not Turn Nose Paint into Real Paint?"

The idea was that Orozco's depictions of "nose-painted Indians" should be replaced by a "real" painting: his. The subtitle sums up Humphries' lack of respect for the indigenous peoples of this country, but he has much more to say. His song begins, "Oh give me some paint and a wall-space that ain’t / All covered up yet by Oroz / Oh give me the hues that an artist would use / And a brush to apply them." Later, it reads, "I’ll never go Mex, I'll picture no necks / Ground down neath a rebel's rough shoe; / My forms aboriginous will all be indigenous." These words reflect not only Humphries' disrespect for Orozco, but reveal that Humphries' so-called "art" is little more than an immature and malicious joke in re-sponse to Orozco’s serious work. As Humphries himself said, he wanted "to use [the Orozco murals] as a foil for my own ideas."

Even if we did consider the Hovey murals art, we cannot overlook the fact that they are steeped in the unconscious white colonial perspective. Art needs a direct object: something is not merely art, it is art to someone. If Humphries' murals are art, they are art to those who find aesthetic worth in cartoonish pictures laden with stereotypes. The fact that people still do not comprehend why these murals are racist or even know that they exist shows a greater need for a more basic understanding of who we are and how we treat each other. Censorship and political correctness at this juncture are cloaks for racism and oppression.