bringing together key themes

Taleisha's drawing on identity

Still from "Claudine"

still from "Django Unchained"

Yesterday, the students in this class were pushed to think about four key themes addressed so far in this course in preparation for next week's mid-term: identity, resistance, labor and housing. The idea is to get them to think about how these concepts relate to African American life across time.

Inspired by Lynda Barry's work, I began by asking them to write or draw images related to the idea of "identity." Taleisha's drawing, which takes into account how you see yourself and how others see you, is posted above. 

The 1974 movie "Claudine," which presents the story of a mother on welfare, further pushed our thinking. I love that  movie and enjoyed hearing the students laugh. Diahann Carroll should have won an Oscar for it. We also discussed the readings including Barry's picture book on a friendship between a white girl and black girl in the United States some time in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Their experiences in a segregated city were juxtaposed against that of blacks and Germans in antebellum Buffalo as presented by historians James Horton and Hartmut Keil. I told them that although Quentin Tarantino's 2012 "Django Unchained" is not without problems, Tarantino nailed it when he allowed us to see an enslaved black woman speaking German before the  Civil War. As Horton and Keil reveal, blacks and Germans often lived beside each other peacefully during the antebellum period. There are reasons why their interactions were quite different from those African Americans had with other Europeans, namely the Irish. Among the reasons is how Irish immigrants often arrived in the States poor unlike the Germans who were fleeing a failed revolution.

I look forward to seeing how the students find meaning in all of these ideas when they take the midterm next week. Stay tuned for more of their initial thoughts on identity.

"...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.