Reading roundup

The Hours
Michael Cunningham

A riff on Mrs. Dalloway, with its themes of madness, beauty, sexuality, and choosing between living and death, it is a fine novel, loaded with clever parallels and references to the original that only occasionally distract or become too contrived. 

James
Percival Everett

Having read about the novel, I was little worried that it would be too didactic or woke for my tastes, but in fact it is primarily a rollicking good adventure yarn, and in that regard not unlike its inspiration / foil Huckleberry Finn. Everett has serious fun with Jim's code-switching when speaking with his peers versus the white folks, if on occasion he is inclined to explain rather than show. Although the evils of enslavement, and its corruption of all levels of American society, are on display here, Everett's depictions never rise to the level of eloquence or horror of, say, Beloved, or The Known World. And in the end, in light of the plot's central revelation, what the f*** has become of Huck? I guess that question is left to the late Mr. Clemens to answer. This is not Huck's story, after all.

Desolation Island
The Far Side of the World
Patrick O'Brian

Ahoy mateys! I'd read a couple of his books before, and I was happy to return for more. Yes, they follow a formula. Yes, there are only so many things that can happen, so they keep happening, book after book: storms, doldrums, shipwrecks, battles at sea, floggings, scurvy. And yes, you have to make a choice between keeping Wikipedia close to hand so you can translate all the nautical jargon, or just blow through it like a westerly in the South Atlantic, counting on context and the pure music of the words. Anyway, our heroes Aubrey and Maturin are so compelling, the storytelling so gripping, the writing so facile, the moral sensibility so empathetic if traditional, you welcome yet another chase across the high seas, whether Aubrey is the hunter or the quarry. Call it science fiction: You are dropped right onto an alien spacecraft, with its own peculiar technology, language, culture, and rules. But better than most science fiction: Informed by historical and physical reality, and written by a master prose stylist.

Harlem Shuffle

Up to now I had read only one of Colson Whitehead's novels: The Intuitionist, his debut. I found that book ambitious but contrived, a flawed first try; somehow I had not sampled another until his latest, Harlem Shuffle. Harlem Shuffle is a pretty straight-ahead literary crime novel, set between 1959 and 1964 in– good guess!– Harlem and environs. The crime genre imposes its own set of rules on storytelling, and Whitehead embraces the discipline with gusto.

Our hero is Ray Carney, who owns a successful furniture store catering to the growing if tenuous postwar Black middle class. Despite having grown up around crooks, including his truly bad-guy father, Carney runs a legitimate business– well, mostly legit, at least most of the time, at least in the beginning. As often happens in such books, one thing leads to another, and Carney finds it increasingly difficult to escape his criminal connections and relations– especially his trouble-making cousin Freddie– not to mention the demands of his own ambition as a "striver." The story is deftly told, the main characters are vividly drawn, and the writing is first-rate. 

Whitehead is particularly good on the everyday corruption of life in the city. Even as an upstanding businessman, Carney is forced to count various payoffs as a cost of doing business: an envelope for the beat cop, an envelope for mob protection. Most galling, and consequential, is the envelope for the Harlem banker to ease Carney's way into membership of the Black elite's Dumas Club. Corruption and criminality are baked into the Manhattan economy for Blacks and whites alike, so fencing a few items of questionable provenance is less a matter of crossing a line than a choice of product lines and assessing risk vs. return. 

If you are a regular reader of crime fiction, Harlem Shuffle's characters and themes will call to mind the recent crop of excellent historically informed crime and suspense novels about complex Black characters struggling to keep their moral compass while navigating the waters of racist America– novels written by such "genre" writers as Walter Mosley, of course, and more recently Attica Locke and S.A. Cosby. It's no insult to be listed in that company. Although Colson Whitehead is renowned as a writer of "serious" literature, and I'm eager to explore more of his contributions there, if there's a sequel to Harlem Shuffle, I'm on it.

Your FSA/OWI Photo of the Day

Driving While Black (and young and male) in 1941 Pacolet, South Carolina (population 352 in 1940), must have been... well, you'd like to ask these fellows...

Untitled photo, possibly related to: Negro youngsters and their Model "T" near Pacolet, South Carolina, Jack Delano, 1941.

Tuxedo Junction

Dr. Lenzy Wallace, who directed our high school jazz band, must have had his moments of frustration and doubt. We weren't very good, through no fault of his. I'm no racial essentialist no-how, so I don't for a moment think that white folk are less capable of swinging than black folk, but the suburban white kids in Storrs CT did NOT swing, for whatever reason. Perhaps Lenzy should have forced us to listen to recordings of the tunes he selected for us to play, such as "Tuxedo Junction." Erskine Hawkins, who co-wrote it and made this 1939 recording with his once-college dance band, knew how to swing and chicken-scratch his way to perfection. Who knows, a little bit of the humor and easy elegance might have sunk in with us.

Toni Morrison, RIP

John Leonard, on when she received the Nobel. A more optimistic time, perhaps, not so long ago.

Well I'll be darned

I'm not fond of the language of "sin." And David Brooks sees absolutely nothing new here that was not always sitting squarely in front of his face. But it's still quite something to read a defense of reparations coming from his pen.

The pardon

Better than the average Trump decision!

I Am Not Your Negro

Raoul Peck's documentary is not perfect, but damn close enough. James Baldwin is both subject and co-auteur here, some 30 years after his death. As conscience and philosopher of the civil rights movement, Baldwin readily acknowledges that he stood outside the movement in a number of ways– his exile to Paris, of course, but more fundamentally his not having put his life on the line as his three heroes– Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X– quite literally did. But in reality, the danger was always there for an outspoken and haughty black man, the smartest and most articulate man in the room– the danger doubled given his homosexuality.

The film is visually stunning, and you could listen to Baldwin's impassioned, dignified, and yes, superior accent (what to call it... Harlem Brahmin?) all day long. Samuel L. Jackson's voice-over narration is a different animal entirely, but Baldwin's voice rings through the words.

I had some problems with the movie's critique of whiteness through film and TV clips of Doris Day and the like. I'm not big fan of Doris Day, but I also know enough about whiteness to know that she is not its only manifestation, and from Doris to the hate crimes of the people responsible for Medgar Evers's murder is a stretch. Peck aspires to define whiteness as intrinsically the denial of blackness, but there are many shades of white, and even John Ford's westerns were more subtle in their politics than Peck is willing to acknowledge here.

That said, the movie is essential, and Baldwin is too. As Darryl Pinckney wrote in his review of the film, I Am Not Your Negro "is a kind of tone poem to a freedom movement not yet finished." Now streaming on a service near you.

Now at the de Young Museum, Part 2

The quilters of Gee's Bend, AL, created some of the greatest works of art in U.S. history. To see these jaunty, audacious, thoroughly modern creations up close and personal is a revelation, and a privilege.

Willie "Ma Willie" Abrams, "'Roman Stripes' Variation", c. 1975:

And my personal favorite, Annie Mae Young, "'Bars' Work-Clothes Quilt," c. 1970:

Race and police killings

A thoughtful piece by Sendhil Mullainathan. It does not refute the message of Black Lives Matter, but properly places it in a broader and even more challenging perspective. I do wish the headline had treated "data" as a plural...

Nothing new under the sun

This Chris Mooney blog post reports on a startling new "discovery": White racial prejudice appears to be greater in states that have a higher percentage African-American! Chris calls for more research: "... there is still more research to do in order to further home in and refine explanations for the striking pattern shown in the map at the start of this article." He suggests that such research might include seeing whether the geographical pattern holds at the county level as well.

Hmmm... that sounds familiar. Perhaps it's because people have been looking at this question for over half a century. Social psychologists have been talking about a "threat effect" of large numbers of minority members since the work of H.M. Blalock and Gordon Allport in the 1950s. Various studies have employed county-level data. Why, I even did so myself in the context of examining the racial wage gap.

The issue is complex and ambiguous, for obvious reasons: exposure to "diversity" may increase familiarity and reduce prejudice, but once the percentage minority is sufficiently large, whites may perceive minorities as a threat, leading to increased racism, discrimination, and potentially collective action. Of course, historical and cultural context are important. But my read is that the net effect in the United States, at least within the South, is that the threat effect dominates. Furthermore, given a distribution of white prejudice, an increase in the percentage black leads to more blacks coming into contact with prejudiced whites for employment and other social interactions. The result, as Gary Becker hypothesized and Charles and Guryan (JPE 2008) and I (JEH 2007) showed, is that discriminatory outcomes are more likely in places with relative more minority members, even holding racism constant.

See Chris? All it takes is a little search on Google Scholar!

Coates on "Black Pathology and the Closing of the Progressive Mind"

I'm not sure I'm with TNC 100% here. His is the minority view, in both American meanings of the term minority. But as far as I'm concerned, the burden of proof is on those who disagree with him, including me. It's a powerful statement.

Beautiful

Thanks, TNC.

March on Washington, part 2

• TNC nails it again. Please read.
• Party of Lincoln?

Bayard Rustin

An American hero who, like A. Philip Randolph, needs to be remembered on days like today... and every day.

On (not) blaming the victim

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a nice post on the Moynihan Report and a recent update from the Urban Institute. Moynihan notoriously argued that many "current" (as of 1965) problems of African-Americans could be traced not only to active discrimination by whites, but also and perhaps moreso to the "tangle of pathology" associated with black family structure--in particular, single parenthood. That claim certainly smacked of blaming the victims, or at least the victims' culture, but as TNC points out, Moynihan was very clear about the historical roots of "negro" family structure in centuries of racial oppression, and therefore who was to blame.

Moynihan's emphasis on family structure remains controversial, but decades of research leave little doubt that pernicious feedback loops operating between racial discrimination and stigma, poverty, segregation, and family structure and function play a central role in the perpetuation of African-American disadvantage. In his recent posts, TNC has been emphasizing the role of concentration of poverty, segregation, and neighborhood effects, although my reading of recent research on the importance of neighborhood spillovers suggests that the evidence is mixed.

Race still matters, whether operating through present or historical oppression. But could the challenges of racial injustice nonetheless be confronted effectively with "color-blind" or "color-neutral" policy? The practical and political attractions of doing so are pretty obvious, and hence we observe the conversation often shifting from race to poverty, inequality, and class: e.g., class-based affirmative action plans, early childhood interventions, etc. TNC thinks the answer is No: "...liberals today are arguing that 300 years of immoral policy can be undone by changing the subject...."

I remain agnostic. Vicious cycles are vicious, but they offer the advantage that one can try to break the adverse feedback loop in multiple locations. Vigorous enforcement of "color-blind" anti-discrimination law, full-employment macro policy, generously supported universal early childhood development programs, sensible and race-neutral drug enforcement policy, and a stronger safety net... these could add up to a virtuous cycle for African-Americans, and many other disadvantaged Americans as well. A fella can dream, can't he?

The opportunity gap and the political gap

This piece by Lane Kenworthy provides a concise and well-informed discussion of the causes of and potential policy solutions for the apparent decline in intergenerational economic mobility in the United States--that is, the failure of equal opportunity. A central tenet of the "American creed" is that over their life course, people should have a roughly equal chance of pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. Recent trends toward greatly increased income and wealth inequality would sit a little better with many if they were not accompanied by a caste-like divide reproduced across generations.

Because he advocates a more activist and redistributive role for government, Kenworthy's prescriptions will appeal more to liberals than to conservatives. But he does not short-change the views of James Heckman and others, generally associated with the right, that changes in family structure have played an important--perhaps central--role in reducing upward intergenerational mobility in the past several decades. Policy interventions in families are constrained by the requirements of basic liberty and respect for the private sphere, but there is still much that a thoughtful and sensitive government could do to provide support and assistance to disadvantaged parents and kids.

Or so say the wonks. But even if the wonks offer some good ideas about how to narrow the opportunity gap, we also face a gap in political will. Last night I joined a standing-room crowd at Santa Clara U to hear Bobby Seale speak. He was plugging his books and movie projects, but in the meantime offered a compelling if somewhat meandering account of the history of the Black Panthers. If some of his recollections were self-serving (a young person could get the impression the Panthers were right up there with ma and apple pie), it was nonetheless bracing to be reminded of a time in American history when grassroots activism was forcing social change, while simultaneously promoting community self-help in the form of school breakfast programs, health clinics, etc.

Seale believes that what scared J Edgar Hoover most was not those angry black men and women with their afros, rhetoric, and guns, but those free breakfasts for little kids. That was ground zero for the revolution. The wonks would agree.

The employment crisis

Here's the employment-population ratio for prime-age (25-54) black men since 1994. Yes, down by ten percentage points in just three years. What is the debt plan doing for these folks?


Addendum: the longer view, black men 20 years and older... the lowest level since we have been collecting modern data...


Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, seasonally adjusted