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Books, Reviews

London: The Biography

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1800059This book is a massive undertaking, both for the author and the reader, and the amount of extraordinary, fascinating and brilliant detail in here is mind-boggling. It pulls from an awe-inspiring number of primary sources to provide the most delectable quotes on everything from pubs to fashion to murders to popular food. In fact, I can’t think of a subject that isn’t in here, and it’s all woven together in a form that is almost like fiction. It muses, ponders, revels in minutiae. This is the first book I started reading after my father died about a year and a half ago, I hadn’t been able to read anything at all for a month or two and this was perfect for getting back into it, reading a couple of chapters at a time, setting down, coming back to. I loved loved loved so much of it, both the tidbits of history, but also the ways in which Ackroyd combined them, sometimes by theme or period or area. It’s changed how I walked around London streets, how I see the Thames every time I cross it, the ways I contrast old and new and am always seeking out the echoes of past times. I was a bit that way before, I confess, but now I have a much better feeling for what might be there and understanding of what I find.

It’s hard to judge a work of this size and scope with so much that is amazing in it. But as I read I became increasingly critical of the celebration of commercialism. It all comes to a head in the final chapters which left me angry. A sort of mystical view of London steadily emerged, a sort of organic living creature of a city with its own requirements and demands of its inhabitants. I liked playing with ideas about the ways in which a city shapes its residents, but was disappointed to find Ackroyd’s jubilation at the financial centres surviving the blitz as proof that the living beating heart of London might well be commerce and finance. There is a celebration of Thatcher’s big bang of 1986 loosing regulations on bangs — that would ultimately lead to our current economic crisis. And he writes

If the city had a voice it might be saying: There will always be those who fail or who are unfortunate, just as there will always be those who cannot cope with the world as presently constituted, but I can encompass them all.
…Lincoln’s Inn Fields was occupied once more by the homeless, after an interval of 150 years, while areas like Waterloo Bridge and the Embankment became the setting for what were known as ‘cardboard cities’. … Despite civic and government initiatives, they are still there. They are now part of the recognisable population; they are Londoners, joining the endless parade. Or perhaps, by sitting upon the sidelines, they remind everyone else that it is a parade.

I threw the book across the room. As though the homeless and the masses of poor are a natural phenomenon like weather, and not caused by deindustrialisation, the roll back of the welfare state and Thatcher’s own policies channeling wealth away from them towards the already wealthy. As though they are separate from ‘us’,  there for ‘our’ amusement. That Lincoln’s Inn field should have been free of the homeless for 150 years was an accomplishment of society hard fought and bitterly won. Their return is an indictment of our current direction, not an ornament to London’s wealth, or a gaze that seeks to remind the well-to-do of how wonderful they are.

Had I only stopped reading with the Blitz I would have unqualifiedly loved this book, as it is I am torn between giving it a five and giving it a one. I look back and wonder how much of this view seeped into the history. I am sure it did in celebrating trade, muting struggle and resistance. But in terms of how theatre changed over time, the love of jellied eels and pies, the roles of gravediggers, the building of churches, the vast panoply of literary views and all such topics,this is quite wonderful.

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Books, Intersections, Reviews

Roediger on How Race Survived US History

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7986411This was quite a brilliant look at how and why the idea of race has developed in the United States. I haven’t read Roediger before so I can’t really compare it to his previous work, but given it’s written for a more popular audience, which I think is important, I did not mind the lack of footnotes. While it was reasonably short, I confess it took me a long time to get through and I’m not sure if that was because of the language or the weight of the ideas, but I didn’t regret a second.

It begins with a definition of race. For Roediger race is not a natural category, it is something new. It has been laboriously constructed to divide and sort people and thereby define how they relate to property, management, punishment and citizenship. The first of the two clearest examples of how this works is of course slavery, which took many different people of many different languages and cultures and defined them as black, as uncivilised and less than Europeans if not less than human, and only worthy of being slaves. The second is in the conquest and genocide of the Native Americans. Initially seen in the period of British rule as tribes with whom to ally with or fight against in the wars against other European powers, as a new nation began to create itself and push its boundaries they quickly became defined as red, as savages, as shiftless and lazy, and therefore worthy of being dispossessed of their lands. When they fought back? Jefferson himself argued shortly before his death that they be exterminated.

Through these stories we begin to come to grips with the two other key ideas about race contained in the book. The first is that of ‘whiteness as property’. Skin colour comes to define almost everything about an individual: where they live and work, what they can aspire to, the texture of their everyday life. When all else fails you can still cling to whiteness to put yourself above other people. You are a citizen. You cannot be enslaved. You are better than others. Your skin colour has a value, whiteness comes to be worth something in itself, something that distinguishes you and puts you above others. There was a time before this was true, when indentured servants and slaves escaped together, when the mixing of races was voluntary rather than from the rape of slaves. Laws made of whiteness something to be defended: banning interracial marriage, penalizing indentured servants who run in the company of a non-white, ruling that children share the freedom or the servitude of their mother, ruling people of color less than human and non-citizens. It was a combination of enticement and terror, whites either acted to their own benefit by buying into it or were punished severely for its transgression.

On the opposite side you found a law in Barbados from 1668: “An Act declaring the Negro-Slaves of this Island to be Real Estates.”

The second point is based on Stuart Hall (who I love). As Roediger says of him, he “acutely points out that racism emerges and is recreated from the imperatives of new sets of realities, not just from the bad habits of the past” [xiii]. The first key is that there are imperatives that drive this social construction of race, such as the desire for free labor to develop open land, the greed for land and expansion both in terms of speculation and profit, and to vent the building anger of the working white classes who are not finding in America their promised prosperity and demanding free land while threatening revolution. The second: that these imperatives do not just happen in some past time and continue on through inertia or habit (though the weight of the past cannot be treated lightly). The key is that racism still exists because new imperatives exist to ensure that it does. Until we understand them, we cannot end racism.

In a nutshell: “White supremacy persisted not only by working against the forces of freedom, of openness, and of economic rationality in US history, but also by working through them. Such complexities complicate the verb ‘survive’ in this book’s title, in that many of the forces pushing against the logic of racism at the same time validated, created, and recreated white supremacy.” [xv]

He goes on to explore and draw out these ideas through American history, looking at 4 key points where racism could have ceased, but didn’t. In very simplified terms:

How did it survive a revolution? Because honestly, it’s a bit ingenuous to revolt in the name of ideals of liberty and self-determination against British oppression while you yourself hold slaves. This is the classic ‘American dilemma’, which Roediger argues to be false. The revolution was funded by slavery, and Du Bois noted that the Constitution was in fact a huge blow to the slave liberation movement, Roediger sums it up succinctly: “[the constitution] made even indentured whites (their race unnamed) into “free persons”, it read Indians (who were named) out of citizenship, and it counted enslaved “other persons” (named neither racially nor in their servile position, by what one delegate called an “ashamed” constitutional convention) not as holders of political power, but as sources of such power for their own enslavers.” [51] Thus America becomes a white man’s country, welding together large and fractious class divisions through the imperative of expanding into Indian territory and maintaining race status.

How did it survive capitalism? Because even the Marxists argued that race would dissolve in the crucible of the working class. But in fact capital thrives on having different groups of workers in a hierarchy and in competition with each other, and it became policy to play these groups off one another. And slavery was not some pre-capitalist formation, it grew up with capitalism.

How did it survive jubilee and the abolition of slavery? That was the moment there was the most hope…but “Jubilee did not collapse under the weight of internal contradictions, but under extended assault.” The rise of the KKK, in one small town in Louisiana 60 republican party members were murdered during reconstruction. And then the fateful election where the Republicans gave up reconstruction all together and abandoned blacks to their fate for an uncontested election. Hayes almost certainly lost the popular vote, but he became president anyway.

How did it survive the immigration of those white Europeans most discriminated against? Through a process of coercion and aspiration and immense exploitation they slowly became accepted as white. In a sense they thus agreed to accept the rules of privilege rather than struggle against them.

And so it is still with us, Obama notwithstanding. The main point is “how unlikely it is that a force so longstanding, formative, and persistently recreated as white supremacy has been in United States history will be abolished by accident, as a result of the momentum of forces like capitalism or immigration that themselves have no anti-racist agenda.” [xv] We have to actively fight it, and to do so we have to understand it. This book takes us a great deal of the way I think. It is very US specific, while the drama of race has played out globally (as has the US role) and yet none of that is connected here which I found an absence. But this is an important book.

Books, Reviews

As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods

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2906999Stephen Grant Meyer (1999) Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

This is a great book on the subject, impeccably researched as you can tell with even a cursory glance at the copious notes. Its conclusions are not at all pleasant nor hopeful, but chime directly with my own experience in LA. They are that racism is the fundamental factor explaining segregation, and that this racism in the general white population is what drove discriminatory legislation and institutional practices, rather than the other way around. As he says, “Realty companies, lending institutions, and governments have engaged in activities that sustain the community’s segregationist wishes. In so doing, however, they represent the will of their constituencies.” This certainly counters other arguments, like those found in Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier, explaining segregation primarily through the action of such external forces on individuals who may wish to do the right thing really.

The evidence is there, and it is a strong argument because Meyer does not ignore external forces, there is a great deal in here about racially restrictive zoning and covenants, discriminatory practices in real estate, the role of the FHA and etc. But he marshals a massive amount of everyday evidence of the extremely violent reactions of everyday white folks to a black face moving into their neighborhood in cities across the nation. The South may be special, but his argument is that racism exists alive and well across the rest of the country, and the South just might be distracting us from that. There have been thousands of bombings, death threats, mobs demanding that people get out. In Los Angeles. In Berkeley. In Cincinatti. In Chicago. And while the NAACP and others have fought immensely hard (it took the assassination of Martin Luther King to get the Fair Housing Act passed in its third year of deliberation, only a week after his death) to enact legislation and establish legal precedents that make official policies of segregation illegal and prosecutable (if barely), the truth remains that America continues to be a highly segregated country. In fact, many studies show higher levels of segregation now than in the 1960s.

This is a terrible catalog of injustice, though it also charts the courage and inspiration of those who stood against it. But more importantly than reclaiming a deeper and truer sense of our history, its importance lies in how we struggle for the rights of all people to live wherever they may choose without threat, harassment, or discomfort. If this is true, the struggle for this right cannot be solely, or even primarily based on legal or policy strategies, it has to tackle something deeper and uglier than mere laws on paper. That is left to the imagination I am afraid.

I think in many ways Meyer is absolutely right. I found it particularly poignant when he looks at the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, and the way that Northern whites were in full support of campaigns against Jim Crow in the South, yet dropped away from the movement or even opposed it when blacks attempted to achieve fair housing in their own cities. That hasn’t changed at all, just ask anyone working in the inner cities. But I feel that there is something else going on, something that is not more fundamental than race but that articulates with it, to use the words of Stuart Hall, whose work I’m still trying to wrap my head around. And to carry on the struggle, it’s important to understand how capitalism or neoliberalism intersects with this fundamental reality of racism. But I haven’t the answers to that yet.