"...I can remember when the houses White, White, White, Japanese, White, White...."

Self portrait of artist Lynda Barry

The snow has melted. While it was here, we had lots of time to catch up on our reading since the University was closed for two days. I really look forward to seeing how the students in this class thought through the Robin Kelley Race Rebels reading (by the way, Kelley will be on our campus 7 pm Thursday in Gorgas Library 205 in conjunction with an exhibit on the Scottsboro boys). 

Kelley draws our attention to  black working class labor issues in postwar Los Angeles. We will pivot from him to Lynda Barry's wonderful picture book The Good Times Are Killing Me, which is also set after World War II in an unnamed city (feels like it is also the West Coast). As mentioned earlier in this blog, one of my favorite parts of the book finds Edna Arkins, a young pre-adolescent girl and protagonist, saying: "...I can remember when the houses White, White, White, Japanese, White, White....Then it seemed like just about everybody kept moving out until now our street is Chinese, Negro, Negro, White, Japanese, Filipino and about the same but in different orders for down the whole street and across the alley." I fell in the love with this book after buying it in a university bookstore when I was an undergrad at the University of Miami many years ago. 

I selected Barry's book for this coming week because it allows us to think about another issue that has been important to African Americans across time: housing. As I told the students, for many years whites and blacks lived beside each other and sometimes in a peaceful manner as James Horton and Hartmut Keil's look at pre-Civil War Buffalo, New York, our second reading for this coming week, demonstrates. 

19th century Buffalo, Perry-Casteneda Map Collection

What permitted blacks and German Americans in the particular to live peacefully beside each other before the Civil War? What makes it more difficult for blacks and whites to sometimes live together by the time we get to the late 1960s-early 1970s world Barry paints in her book? Moreover, how can we tie housing issues together with ones concerning labor, resistance and identity, the three themes in earlier readings? 

No matter how we do it, we will want to do it fearlessly as our midterm exam is Feb. 12. One of the five questions the students may pick from for their short essay on this first exam allows them to write a poem. Seeing as Barry as allows her students to draw in class, I think she would approve. Check it out.

"time isn't ticking down for them"

The Throne's "Paris," a Jay-Z and Kanye West hit, won two Grammys this year.

Kelley's look at black working class resistance.

When I first heard Kanye West and Jay-Z’s Grammy Award-winning hit about the City of Lights, “Ni***s in Paris,” I loved the beat. I googled the lyrics and discovered it contained the usual profanity and misogyny. But I also saw the sentence, “We ain’t even s'posed to be here.” In saying this, West and Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter, two of the music industry’s most wealthy performers, were saying as African American men from Chicago and Brooklyn, they were not supposed to be in Paris.  Black men like them were not supposed to have had the success they had. The song made me made think deeply about race, but also about cities as a category of analysis and how that might work in a course. But how to get beyond the lyrics? I found some measure of relief when I learned more about the everyday hidden politics in the black working class during my  preliminary exam readings. Tying such a topic in with some aspects of hip hop music,  historian Robin Kelley urges us to develop “a nuanced understanding" of the "social relations among young people, in all of their diversity and complexity.” Well aware of the hazards of anachronistic discussions, the students in this course "in all of their diversity and complexity" indeed manifested a nuanced understanding of the West-Carter tune, a song hardly unknown to them. They even juxtaposed it against - of all things - this week's examination of race relations in antebellum Buffalo and Cincinnati, as told by James Oliver Horton and Hartmut Keil and Nikki Taylor respectively. These scholars  helped the students to discern the importance of being precise when discussing racial conflict  in the United States before the Civil War. For example, the students  learned it is not enough to simply say "whites oppressed blacks." "Which whites, when, where and why?" might be better ways to approach such a discussion. Among other things, they learned the degree to which German immigrants’ relations with African Americans, while far from perfect, seemed more peaceful during the antebellum period than black-Irish relations because the Germans often arrived in the States possessing many skills unlike the Irish who faced job competition with African Americans long  relegated to the lowest paying jobs. But how to tie this situation to  a rap song from the 21st century?  The students tackled that task with an in-class written reflection. Most reflected on how the social position of many antebellum blacks poses tensions with the wealth flaunted by West and Carter in modern-day Paris (and elsewhere). Wrote Kalynn, “We’ve looked at African Americans in [cities] ...oppressed by their social position. Ni***s in Paris” portrays the opposite of that struggle.” Chiming in, Tiffany noted how the African Americans in Taylor’s study believed Cincinnati had “more economic opportunity” and “social equality” than areas in the South that "were deeply entrenched in the institution of slavery…’Ye and Jay’s flow speaks to the potential for progress” beyond such a past. Lauria also discerned the progress African Americans like West and Carter have made since the antebellum era. She was drawn to their song's lyric, “Got a broke clock/Rollies that don’t tick tock,” saying it referred to these young men’s success and how “time isn’t ticking down for them.” However, not entirely convinced the struggle is over, Shariyah focused on the ways in which West and Carter “creatively” demonstrate the idea of resistance in African Americans. This is something she also observed in whites, especially the Irish. Said Shariyah, the Irish “were at one point classified…in the same category as blacks. [They even] lived in the same neighborhoods [until] they realized that the color of your skin meant “currency.” Roosevelt was attentive to the condition of whites, especially Germans in Buffalo including those who married African Americans.  He was reminded of such interracial relations when he recalled the "Paris"  lyric referencing “getting married” (Prince William ain't do it right if you ask me/Cause if I was him I would have married Kate & Ashley). Aaron, another student, had  yet another observation, which shall be shortly posted. You can blame his instructor for the delay. Cray.