i love that this blog is what i sounded like when i left, and i came home telling 'that's what she said' jokes. (to which andrew replied, 'well, i'm glad grad school's over.') that's what you get when you spend a bunch of time in very close quarters and on the road with 21-year-olds. it sort of softens the edges, yes?
whatever, i can still analyze critically. i just also remember what it's like to treat my body like a used car, which i neglected quite a bit when i was in book-a-day mode. a bruise or 40 keeps me grounded, even when i earn said bruises while flying through the air.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
segregated spaces vs. community self-identity
do communities have a right to come together to identify themselves as a community and decide on how to best shape their environment to meet their needs without having to account for anyone else's? yes. indeed, it has been discussed for the last 2 years as the aim. but what when these communities are 'problematic'? all white? all rich? too much power? a community can be a community in space so long as it has equal power to any other community in any other space? maybe that's it. but see, such are the ideals in our constitution, but we haven't been able to pull it off.
if the spaces are exclusionary, the communities that come together to self-identify are bound to be exclusive. do they have a right to have gotten in the space they inhabit by oppressing, expressly excluding others based on anything other than criminal activity? no. how far does this extend? ...i don't know. maybe to nation-states. but people need something to organize themselves by, because people love to organize themselves. for a while, it was by geography and creed, and then by nationality. sometimes, now, by region like the EU. identity boundaries grow like capitalism. which is amoral. and maybe immoral. maybe people don't have a right to divide by income or wealth, maybe that's the fundamental problem. housing doesn't work as a commodity.
and here i go blaming capitalism, but our democratic ideals are moral and our economics are amoral. (or maybe even immoral.) and our democratic ideals are employed by flawed humans (which is what we're all stuck being) and to discuss power is to scratch at something so primal, psychological and mystical that we can't really even talk about power itself but only how we observe evidence of it. humans seek to control their environments, their realities, their identities and their externalities. control requires power. why the urge for this extends to such a significant scale? why does having power so frequently means taking others' power? i have no idea! and to try to answer that is to pontificate about the Nature of Man. ask the bible how that's going for them. and economics, while completely subject to people's emotions, masquerades as this right-angle-having, straight-line-making, rule-having, no-nonsense amoral system.
and humans -- at least a lot of them -- can get their head around it. it's even reassuring, in a world that looks to our category-loving brains to not have any rules.
maybe faith is just a manifestation of the tendency of the human psyche to seek rules in a way it can comprehend, and Nature is too vast for us to trust it without knowing the rules. power. control. anxiety. faith. religion tells us not only that there are rules, but someone or something is in charge of it, and handling the management. we understand heirarchy and can handle having a boss.
maybe economy was something that we constructed to handle our level of management, and made rules that fit our brain, our thinking patterns. control on the ground, between one another. every now and then, our economy with its sort of rules intersect with Nature and religion's rules, and we have to negotiate. our rules are going well. we understand them. they govern a system that seems to function on its own, and we forget that it was a manifestation of our thinking, quit asking questions, in fact ask it for advice. it impedes on people and we point to it indignantly. there are rules! eventually, it would work so well and so cleanly that it would trump Nature, and religion. we're the boss now. it's not right, we just made a monster and it functions just like our brains work so we understand it, love it for being rational in an irrational world, overlook our human additions and our emotional contributions, live within its confines.
at any rate, through us history our economy grew, and our national identity grew around our economy more than around our democracy. rights -- a moral question -- intersects awkwardly with economics -- an amoral system that governs us as profoundly and more instantaneously. in a free market capitalist model, people have the 'right' to as much material wealth as they can acquire, without really having the right to not acquire any wealth.
we don't have any national position on human rights, anyway. human rights are not a concern of nation-states, a product of economics, wealth-acquisition by following rules that fit human brains. human rights are god's department, and he got demoted.
so this is a long and super weird way to say that yes, in matters of geography and governance, communities have the right to identify and participate in government to shape their environment, but they don't have a right to hold more wealth, food, access to government or natural amenities than any other community identifying the same way. do people have the right to exclude once they've identified, even when not being exclusive was one of the requisites to community formation? um, yes? no? fuck. i dont know, this shit's at the root of governments and identity formation and human nature and economic structures and the history of human diaspora. 72 hours just isn't enough time for me to get this one resolved.
if the spaces are exclusionary, the communities that come together to self-identify are bound to be exclusive. do they have a right to have gotten in the space they inhabit by oppressing, expressly excluding others based on anything other than criminal activity? no. how far does this extend? ...i don't know. maybe to nation-states. but people need something to organize themselves by, because people love to organize themselves. for a while, it was by geography and creed, and then by nationality. sometimes, now, by region like the EU. identity boundaries grow like capitalism. which is amoral. and maybe immoral. maybe people don't have a right to divide by income or wealth, maybe that's the fundamental problem. housing doesn't work as a commodity.
and here i go blaming capitalism, but our democratic ideals are moral and our economics are amoral. (or maybe even immoral.) and our democratic ideals are employed by flawed humans (which is what we're all stuck being) and to discuss power is to scratch at something so primal, psychological and mystical that we can't really even talk about power itself but only how we observe evidence of it. humans seek to control their environments, their realities, their identities and their externalities. control requires power. why the urge for this extends to such a significant scale? why does having power so frequently means taking others' power? i have no idea! and to try to answer that is to pontificate about the Nature of Man. ask the bible how that's going for them. and economics, while completely subject to people's emotions, masquerades as this right-angle-having, straight-line-making, rule-having, no-nonsense amoral system.
and humans -- at least a lot of them -- can get their head around it. it's even reassuring, in a world that looks to our category-loving brains to not have any rules.
maybe faith is just a manifestation of the tendency of the human psyche to seek rules in a way it can comprehend, and Nature is too vast for us to trust it without knowing the rules. power. control. anxiety. faith. religion tells us not only that there are rules, but someone or something is in charge of it, and handling the management. we understand heirarchy and can handle having a boss.
maybe economy was something that we constructed to handle our level of management, and made rules that fit our brain, our thinking patterns. control on the ground, between one another. every now and then, our economy with its sort of rules intersect with Nature and religion's rules, and we have to negotiate. our rules are going well. we understand them. they govern a system that seems to function on its own, and we forget that it was a manifestation of our thinking, quit asking questions, in fact ask it for advice. it impedes on people and we point to it indignantly. there are rules! eventually, it would work so well and so cleanly that it would trump Nature, and religion. we're the boss now. it's not right, we just made a monster and it functions just like our brains work so we understand it, love it for being rational in an irrational world, overlook our human additions and our emotional contributions, live within its confines.
at any rate, through us history our economy grew, and our national identity grew around our economy more than around our democracy. rights -- a moral question -- intersects awkwardly with economics -- an amoral system that governs us as profoundly and more instantaneously. in a free market capitalist model, people have the 'right' to as much material wealth as they can acquire, without really having the right to not acquire any wealth.
we don't have any national position on human rights, anyway. human rights are not a concern of nation-states, a product of economics, wealth-acquisition by following rules that fit human brains. human rights are god's department, and he got demoted.
so this is a long and super weird way to say that yes, in matters of geography and governance, communities have the right to identify and participate in government to shape their environment, but they don't have a right to hold more wealth, food, access to government or natural amenities than any other community identifying the same way. do people have the right to exclude once they've identified, even when not being exclusive was one of the requisites to community formation? um, yes? no? fuck. i dont know, this shit's at the root of governments and identity formation and human nature and economic structures and the history of human diaspora. 72 hours just isn't enough time for me to get this one resolved.
Monday, May 26, 2008
"The traditional neighborhood"
I suppose i should lay off the term 'traditional neighborhood.' My first response is usually, 'whose tradition?' but i guess the answer is really everyone's, and then recognize exclusions in the construction of them along the way. minorities weren't included in the original creation of colonial towns and main streets, or residential architecture. the plantation obviously isn't black folks' tradition. getting run out of town, blocked from employment and relegated to poorly thought-out sects of cities and housing projects wouldn't be a tradition to take pride in, and in fact jane jacobs illustrates that immigrant communities in 'blighted' areas of the city hold many lessons. i guess my concern is that 'traditional' still considers a residence a standalone building, but 'whose tradition' is a bit hyperbolic. i know whose, but this doesn't preclude it from being a decent model (although still expandable, and requiring investigation and democratization).
brand: how buildings learn
Reading Stuart Brand’s “How Buildings Learn” is enjoyable and fascinating – thinking about how form follows function…sometimes…or form is ego-filled and aesthetic, architects don’t use the spaces they create and insist upon their talents and genius being ‘art’ rather than ‘craft’ is particularly familiar. But he starts the book by saying, “We shape buildings, and they shape us, and on and on.” This is what I’m intrigued by.
DeCearteau says it too – we give meaning to things in the way that we use them over the way they were intended, and he goes so far as to imply that the original intentions are methods of control, oppression, etc. (Kevin Lynch makes similar allusions in ‘Good City Form.’)
The thing I’m waiting to see from Brand is an acknowledgement of the wealthy framework that he writes from. (I understand now that wealth is associated with whiteness because of the way racism evolved in this country as a color-coded construct, and non-whites were systematically denied and blocked from acquiring wealth. This went on overtly for years, impeding generations the opportunity of family wealth, property, inheretance, etc. which probably impacts non-whites as much if not more than current conditions and obstacles to equality.) He’s heralded low-road buildings for their flexibility for users and lack of impact on aesthetics, but analyzing Building 20 on MIT’s campus and the way it functions for science geniuses is something different than analyzing run-down and vacant warehouse spaces or abandoned row-homes in impoverished neighborhoods and their flexibility for prostitutes, drug sales, or squatting. Yes, it IS fascinating that adultery goes on in storage spaces, but these are paid-for, gated and locked rental properties that must be afforded. Is there the same intrigue for unexpected nooks where an old mattress waits for a trick? I think there is, but it’s absent from Brand’s analysis so far.
The other thing that I’m finding annoying is his strict focus on signature homes and buildings. The patterns are worth noting in the way that corporate, residential, and institutional spaces behave and change, but what about a read on tract development with homogenous aesthetics, strict imposed neighborhood restrictions, limited floorplan choices that have to function broadly for a certain targeted audience (ooh, how does floorplan creation and approval for tract development forecast the kind of people and lifestyles that will reside there? No big cavernous, messable studio space means no sculpture artists working where they live, for one.) Or a look on what Kevin Lynch assesses regarding economic restrictions and site development – that the urge to recoup expenses and work at an industrial, global-economy pace makes places all developed and finished at once instead of over time and with any human touch or authenticity.
His inclusion of weather is an interesting link to place. He talks about weather interacting with low-road buildings and it being interesting and not something to blame on anyone since the building was intended for a different purpose, and new modern magazine architects building high-concept, anti-box shapes that ‘cook the building’s contents – people and books’ or almost always leak.
He also mentions that modernism became the ‘international style’ (because no one wants to claim it, he quotes) and that cities started to look like one another. I think this could also be tied not only to the style but to the global-economic conditions. We’re moving around more than ever, we’re participating in a global economy more than ever. If buildings reflect values and historical contexts, it’s powerful to observe that the places that are participating in this international system are also adapting an international style. It certainly doesn’t relate to the style’s ability to mold to surroundings and situations specific to place, as he goes on and on to say in the ‘magazine architecture’ style – it’s about architect’s egos and art more than place. But it’s important to think about power as this aesthetic spreads, who’s behind it and what it says and whether people are subscribing to it or not. China is a good place to look at this, and the buildings going up in anticipation for the Olympics and Kkskdjf’s wierdy black something building is a good example. It’s overusing materials like crazy in a country with the highest human population in the world and limited resources as it is, in a growing climate of concern for ecology and sustainability – to reflect what? Something about the values and trends of architecture, sure, but situated in a historical, economic and cultural context that must be considered.
DeCearteau says it too – we give meaning to things in the way that we use them over the way they were intended, and he goes so far as to imply that the original intentions are methods of control, oppression, etc. (Kevin Lynch makes similar allusions in ‘Good City Form.’)
The thing I’m waiting to see from Brand is an acknowledgement of the wealthy framework that he writes from. (I understand now that wealth is associated with whiteness because of the way racism evolved in this country as a color-coded construct, and non-whites were systematically denied and blocked from acquiring wealth. This went on overtly for years, impeding generations the opportunity of family wealth, property, inheretance, etc. which probably impacts non-whites as much if not more than current conditions and obstacles to equality.) He’s heralded low-road buildings for their flexibility for users and lack of impact on aesthetics, but analyzing Building 20 on MIT’s campus and the way it functions for science geniuses is something different than analyzing run-down and vacant warehouse spaces or abandoned row-homes in impoverished neighborhoods and their flexibility for prostitutes, drug sales, or squatting. Yes, it IS fascinating that adultery goes on in storage spaces, but these are paid-for, gated and locked rental properties that must be afforded. Is there the same intrigue for unexpected nooks where an old mattress waits for a trick? I think there is, but it’s absent from Brand’s analysis so far.
The other thing that I’m finding annoying is his strict focus on signature homes and buildings. The patterns are worth noting in the way that corporate, residential, and institutional spaces behave and change, but what about a read on tract development with homogenous aesthetics, strict imposed neighborhood restrictions, limited floorplan choices that have to function broadly for a certain targeted audience (ooh, how does floorplan creation and approval for tract development forecast the kind of people and lifestyles that will reside there? No big cavernous, messable studio space means no sculpture artists working where they live, for one.) Or a look on what Kevin Lynch assesses regarding economic restrictions and site development – that the urge to recoup expenses and work at an industrial, global-economy pace makes places all developed and finished at once instead of over time and with any human touch or authenticity.
His inclusion of weather is an interesting link to place. He talks about weather interacting with low-road buildings and it being interesting and not something to blame on anyone since the building was intended for a different purpose, and new modern magazine architects building high-concept, anti-box shapes that ‘cook the building’s contents – people and books’ or almost always leak.
He also mentions that modernism became the ‘international style’ (because no one wants to claim it, he quotes) and that cities started to look like one another. I think this could also be tied not only to the style but to the global-economic conditions. We’re moving around more than ever, we’re participating in a global economy more than ever. If buildings reflect values and historical contexts, it’s powerful to observe that the places that are participating in this international system are also adapting an international style. It certainly doesn’t relate to the style’s ability to mold to surroundings and situations specific to place, as he goes on and on to say in the ‘magazine architecture’ style – it’s about architect’s egos and art more than place. But it’s important to think about power as this aesthetic spreads, who’s behind it and what it says and whether people are subscribing to it or not. China is a good place to look at this, and the buildings going up in anticipation for the Olympics and Kkskdjf’s wierdy black something building is a good example. It’s overusing materials like crazy in a country with the highest human population in the world and limited resources as it is, in a growing climate of concern for ecology and sustainability – to reflect what? Something about the values and trends of architecture, sure, but situated in a historical, economic and cultural context that must be considered.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
"At the very end of his book Mann confronts the clash between environmentalists and developers, a theme that has lurked in the background of much of his text. He sees this endless controversy as a clash between two conflicting philosophical principles: nomos (rationality, artifice) and physis (irrationality, nature). He comes down tentatively and without much conviction somewhere in the middle. We have to accept the need to bring order to nature, but at the same time we must respect the rights and historical accomplishments of native peoples, who were anything but the ignorant savages we heard about in school. Our learned tour guide seems unwilling to choose sides."
-Robert Finn, reviewing 1491 by Charles C. Mann
http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews2/140004006X.asp
why why why why is nature so often portrayed as Other, and particularly as irrational? nature is the definition of rational, despite its inability to organize itself into an mf grid.
this is the designer in me who learned the golden rectangle before learning point, line and shape as well as the girl who learned permaculture in the jungle. nature knows what it's doing, we need to learn to trust it and quit trying to live with our feet floating above the ground. but it gets at christy's question, too, about the re-imaging of dirt away from 'abject' to 'romantic' and appealing to wealthy/white folks being attracted to a photo of, say, a white hand with dirt under the fingernails holding up a dirty bunch of carrots. there was a time when this wouldn't have been acceptable, and now its premium. how'd that happen? what are the implications? is it culturally biased/culturally exclusive/a move in the right direction facilitated by cultural luxury but relevant universally? i don't know.
ok more reading, seriously.
-Robert Finn, reviewing 1491 by Charles C. Mann
http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews2/140004006X.asp
why why why why is nature so often portrayed as Other, and particularly as irrational? nature is the definition of rational, despite its inability to organize itself into an mf grid.
this is the designer in me who learned the golden rectangle before learning point, line and shape as well as the girl who learned permaculture in the jungle. nature knows what it's doing, we need to learn to trust it and quit trying to live with our feet floating above the ground. but it gets at christy's question, too, about the re-imaging of dirt away from 'abject' to 'romantic' and appealing to wealthy/white folks being attracted to a photo of, say, a white hand with dirt under the fingernails holding up a dirty bunch of carrots. there was a time when this wouldn't have been acceptable, and now its premium. how'd that happen? what are the implications? is it culturally biased/culturally exclusive/a move in the right direction facilitated by cultural luxury but relevant universally? i don't know.
ok more reading, seriously.
design for ecological democracy
doesn't that sound grandiose?
its hard to argue with randy hester, and its also refreshing to read practical things and examples of beautiful development and urban design projects. the thing he does the best, though, is figure out how to ask the 'right' questions to get the 'right' answers out of people, in a way that's hard to accuse of being manipulative. he has a pretty impressive arsenal for public process: so far, my favorites are sacred space mapping and power mapping. both of these are strategies to get the community to understand something important about the process, that understanding will make them be better able to tackle the problem at hand. (knowing that there are places that are important to place history/identity that are shared [or universally disliked] and that there may be bigger forces driving a project than it first appears, and knowing their motivations is important.)
it's all about framing the question correctly, and this is something that has always been interesting to me -- and a little bit easier than other things. what is the problem we're trying to solve? are we trying to create a better car, or are we trying to have a transportation option that maximizes privacy, flexibility and independence? what of these features are most/least important? is there another way to solve it? do we need to make housing subsidies fair, or do we need to make housing affordable? hester illustrates this beautifully when he talks about manteo, north carolina. when the town was sold the idea of becoming a tourist desitination, public participation provided a number of suggestions about where to put big, placeless hotels. when the idea was to revitalize manteo without sacrificing what makes manteo a unique place, the unique amenities came forward and reinvigorated a unique craft, which boomed and brought tourists to manteo to see what it was all about.
he also explains a case study of harvard's day care playground, where at first blush parents wanted a playground that mimicked plastic suburban ones. upon closer examination, the parents wanted a lot of nature and hiding coves and a big tree that the kids could climb. the difference? the first time, they were asked, what kind of playground do you want? and the second time, they were asked, what are your best memories of play from your childhood that you would want your children to experience as well, and what's the best way to make that happen? (granted, he says that to get to the answers, the parents were willing to undergo a guided visualization that was something like self-hypnosis. good luck doing that with city council.)
but it takes an unraveling of the question, and examining the assumptions in the presentation. ask questions to questions. get to the bottom of things. i've always had a tendency toward this sort of thing, and grad school has really helped me do it better.
its hard to argue with randy hester, and its also refreshing to read practical things and examples of beautiful development and urban design projects. the thing he does the best, though, is figure out how to ask the 'right' questions to get the 'right' answers out of people, in a way that's hard to accuse of being manipulative. he has a pretty impressive arsenal for public process: so far, my favorites are sacred space mapping and power mapping. both of these are strategies to get the community to understand something important about the process, that understanding will make them be better able to tackle the problem at hand. (knowing that there are places that are important to place history/identity that are shared [or universally disliked] and that there may be bigger forces driving a project than it first appears, and knowing their motivations is important.)
it's all about framing the question correctly, and this is something that has always been interesting to me -- and a little bit easier than other things. what is the problem we're trying to solve? are we trying to create a better car, or are we trying to have a transportation option that maximizes privacy, flexibility and independence? what of these features are most/least important? is there another way to solve it? do we need to make housing subsidies fair, or do we need to make housing affordable? hester illustrates this beautifully when he talks about manteo, north carolina. when the town was sold the idea of becoming a tourist desitination, public participation provided a number of suggestions about where to put big, placeless hotels. when the idea was to revitalize manteo without sacrificing what makes manteo a unique place, the unique amenities came forward and reinvigorated a unique craft, which boomed and brought tourists to manteo to see what it was all about.
he also explains a case study of harvard's day care playground, where at first blush parents wanted a playground that mimicked plastic suburban ones. upon closer examination, the parents wanted a lot of nature and hiding coves and a big tree that the kids could climb. the difference? the first time, they were asked, what kind of playground do you want? and the second time, they were asked, what are your best memories of play from your childhood that you would want your children to experience as well, and what's the best way to make that happen? (granted, he says that to get to the answers, the parents were willing to undergo a guided visualization that was something like self-hypnosis. good luck doing that with city council.)
but it takes an unraveling of the question, and examining the assumptions in the presentation. ask questions to questions. get to the bottom of things. i've always had a tendency toward this sort of thing, and grad school has really helped me do it better.
Monday, May 19, 2008
James Loewen : Sundown Towns
Ok, so apparently I wasn’t ready to take the time to write the answer to that question and managed to avoid writing altogether. Oops.
Fair enough, I wrote until I puked last Monday and opted to give it a rest on Tuesday, and then Wednesday was lost largely to driving to Berkeley to meet with advisor Laura and buy Even in Sweden. Ever since starting said book, I’ve been in a bit of elevated anxiety about this whole thing, since that book is poetic and beautiful and sort of ethereal when I was just getting the hang of hard and dense, and I suspect that whatever Laura asks me is going to come from that book and I don’t know how to work it yet.
So I had myself a little freakout. No big deal. Get back to it.
Sundown Towns is a really great, useful book. It’s sort of written in this tone that seems to aim to be a New York Times bestseller instead of an academic staple—and this is maybe why academics don’t know/love James Loewen as much as I think they should. Things I like the best:
• His account of the Nadir of race relations:
To express that US history has been one improvement upon the next, marching ever forward to the luminous future is to really mislead and misrepresent the truth about where we’ve been as a nation and it particularly confounds the state of race (mostly black-white) relations. There were moral advocates for the liberation of black slaves in the 1840s and 1850s, and while ultimately the elimination of slavery was done in an effort to save the Union (important mostly to economics and, in some ways, a move to keep more power in the hands of fewer people) there were real efforts to incorporate blacks into mainstream society because it was the moral thing to do, and it was a strength of the Republican party. Due to political forces that he spells out better than I can remember without the book in front of me, things started reversing for blacks starting around 1890 and continued to rescind until the civil rights movement. Which wasn’t that long ago. Which my parents lived through. Which ran deep and can’t be corrected overnight, especially when it had such huge impacts on spatial segregation and a huge gaping divide between 2 races/cultures who have now gigantic obstacles in getting to know one another. (Well, whites have trouble getting to know black culture in any sort of honest way. Blacks have to know white culture to a larger degree because they have to come to it and work within it to survive in many ways, but I think it could be said that this isn’t the most honest way to know white culture either.)
• The way you try to solve a problem depends entirely on how you understand or frame the problem:
This is obvious, but it starts to explain why running black folks out of towns came to be—because the problem was black people, and the solution is to get black people out. If the problem was racism, the solution would have to be something else. Why was the problem black people? I’ll have to go back and dig for Loewen’s unraveling of this. George Fredrickson is helpful here, too, in explaining that racist ideologies were in place from a history of exclusion, rationalizing slavery by considering black folks sub-human, and eugenics (scientific linking of genetic traits to moral traits).
• Black people showed up in, and were run out of towns in every state in the US. Racism and exclusion was not just a southern problem.
• Often, there’s a story of one black criminal (substantiated or not) that served as the catalyst to ridding a town of all blacks and becoming sundown towns. These catalyst stories don’t account for drawing the conclusion that if one black person committed a crime, this somehow means that all black people need to go. There’s that issue of framing the problem again.
• Black people were written out of suburban CC&Rs explicitly. They were also denied access to federal housing assistance after WWII.
RANDOM THOUGHT: The fact that this shit isn’t taught to everyone is a fucking travesty. My mom didn’t know this!! I forget that other people don’t know. And the implications are HUGE—not knowing that black people were explicitly excluded from advantages offered to white people within my parents’ lifetime makes it so much easier to assess that POC, especially blacks, are poor because they’re not motivated/don’t work hard enough/prefer living off of handouts even though this flies in the face of real rational self-interest that our current economic theory is founded upon. (See also Elizabeth Blackmar’s free riders and shirkers.) Blacks were relegated to inferior housing in urban centers in a system that uses property tax to fund schools (so sent to schools with less resources) and denied access to decent wage-paying jobs until … well, until civil rights, but spatial segregation, hollowed cities, shitty school system structures, and still alive-and-well prejudice means that blacks still earn less than whites on average in the same positions and have more obstacles to becoming qualified for jobs with decent earning potential in a cut-throat economy exporting labor and expecting government to act like a private agency and sell to the lowest bidder instead of guaranteeing a living wage. Fuck. It also pushes racism into this reaaallly insidious, underground victim-blaming place. I think this is what Racism Without Racists is about, and some of what’s behind the part of the cabrini green question that wonders why ‘they just didn’t take care of what they were given.’ If ‘they’ would just behave like the rest of us [white people], they’d get along fine. I’m not racist, I just think they need to try harder and quit being so lazy. Uh, ok.
• Impacts on black people/impacts on white people:
I need to finish reading these chapters, but he offers pretty familiar-to-me-sounding accounts of white people growing up without any real contact to black people saying all sorts of racist stuff and using epithets while claiming to not be racist or not mean anything by it.
RANDOM THOUGHT AGAIN: Racism is more than a black/white issue, but lots of what I’m reading is focusing there. Even in Sweden will be an important addition because it talks so much more about immigrants, mostly Arab/Muslim, being ‘problematic’ and the issue of national identity and national culture being something to investigate. This means also re-reading Bellah and that ‘On Nationalism’ article from Ari Kelman’s class. Maybe I can talk Rebecca into re-reading it too and having dinner with me one day…
Fair enough, I wrote until I puked last Monday and opted to give it a rest on Tuesday, and then Wednesday was lost largely to driving to Berkeley to meet with advisor Laura and buy Even in Sweden. Ever since starting said book, I’ve been in a bit of elevated anxiety about this whole thing, since that book is poetic and beautiful and sort of ethereal when I was just getting the hang of hard and dense, and I suspect that whatever Laura asks me is going to come from that book and I don’t know how to work it yet.
So I had myself a little freakout. No big deal. Get back to it.
Sundown Towns is a really great, useful book. It’s sort of written in this tone that seems to aim to be a New York Times bestseller instead of an academic staple—and this is maybe why academics don’t know/love James Loewen as much as I think they should. Things I like the best:
• His account of the Nadir of race relations:
To express that US history has been one improvement upon the next, marching ever forward to the luminous future is to really mislead and misrepresent the truth about where we’ve been as a nation and it particularly confounds the state of race (mostly black-white) relations. There were moral advocates for the liberation of black slaves in the 1840s and 1850s, and while ultimately the elimination of slavery was done in an effort to save the Union (important mostly to economics and, in some ways, a move to keep more power in the hands of fewer people) there were real efforts to incorporate blacks into mainstream society because it was the moral thing to do, and it was a strength of the Republican party. Due to political forces that he spells out better than I can remember without the book in front of me, things started reversing for blacks starting around 1890 and continued to rescind until the civil rights movement. Which wasn’t that long ago. Which my parents lived through. Which ran deep and can’t be corrected overnight, especially when it had such huge impacts on spatial segregation and a huge gaping divide between 2 races/cultures who have now gigantic obstacles in getting to know one another. (Well, whites have trouble getting to know black culture in any sort of honest way. Blacks have to know white culture to a larger degree because they have to come to it and work within it to survive in many ways, but I think it could be said that this isn’t the most honest way to know white culture either.)
• The way you try to solve a problem depends entirely on how you understand or frame the problem:
This is obvious, but it starts to explain why running black folks out of towns came to be—because the problem was black people, and the solution is to get black people out. If the problem was racism, the solution would have to be something else. Why was the problem black people? I’ll have to go back and dig for Loewen’s unraveling of this. George Fredrickson is helpful here, too, in explaining that racist ideologies were in place from a history of exclusion, rationalizing slavery by considering black folks sub-human, and eugenics (scientific linking of genetic traits to moral traits).
• Black people showed up in, and were run out of towns in every state in the US. Racism and exclusion was not just a southern problem.
• Often, there’s a story of one black criminal (substantiated or not) that served as the catalyst to ridding a town of all blacks and becoming sundown towns. These catalyst stories don’t account for drawing the conclusion that if one black person committed a crime, this somehow means that all black people need to go. There’s that issue of framing the problem again.
• Black people were written out of suburban CC&Rs explicitly. They were also denied access to federal housing assistance after WWII.
RANDOM THOUGHT: The fact that this shit isn’t taught to everyone is a fucking travesty. My mom didn’t know this!! I forget that other people don’t know. And the implications are HUGE—not knowing that black people were explicitly excluded from advantages offered to white people within my parents’ lifetime makes it so much easier to assess that POC, especially blacks, are poor because they’re not motivated/don’t work hard enough/prefer living off of handouts even though this flies in the face of real rational self-interest that our current economic theory is founded upon. (See also Elizabeth Blackmar’s free riders and shirkers.) Blacks were relegated to inferior housing in urban centers in a system that uses property tax to fund schools (so sent to schools with less resources) and denied access to decent wage-paying jobs until … well, until civil rights, but spatial segregation, hollowed cities, shitty school system structures, and still alive-and-well prejudice means that blacks still earn less than whites on average in the same positions and have more obstacles to becoming qualified for jobs with decent earning potential in a cut-throat economy exporting labor and expecting government to act like a private agency and sell to the lowest bidder instead of guaranteeing a living wage. Fuck. It also pushes racism into this reaaallly insidious, underground victim-blaming place. I think this is what Racism Without Racists is about, and some of what’s behind the part of the cabrini green question that wonders why ‘they just didn’t take care of what they were given.’ If ‘they’ would just behave like the rest of us [white people], they’d get along fine. I’m not racist, I just think they need to try harder and quit being so lazy. Uh, ok.
• Impacts on black people/impacts on white people:
I need to finish reading these chapters, but he offers pretty familiar-to-me-sounding accounts of white people growing up without any real contact to black people saying all sorts of racist stuff and using epithets while claiming to not be racist or not mean anything by it.
RANDOM THOUGHT AGAIN: Racism is more than a black/white issue, but lots of what I’m reading is focusing there. Even in Sweden will be an important addition because it talks so much more about immigrants, mostly Arab/Muslim, being ‘problematic’ and the issue of national identity and national culture being something to investigate. This means also re-reading Bellah and that ‘On Nationalism’ article from Ari Kelman’s class. Maybe I can talk Rebecca into re-reading it too and having dinner with me one day…
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