Detroit History; Black Boys in Public Schools; the TBR pile

I've got a couple of books going at the moment. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas J. Sugrue has been such a mix of what I already knew and what has completely taken me by surprise. The influx of Black people during WWII was not a surprise to me; I knew that bit of history. It was likewise not exactly a shocking revelation to me that that they were often shunted to the most dangerous, filthy jobs--one that was described in pretty graphic detail was a job workers called the "mankiller," in which the worker had to lift a heavy white-hot spring coil off a fabricating machine, to chest height, and then submerse it in a cooling bath, all within a few seconds.

I was disturbed by how deliberate the maintenance of black ghettos was, even as they were increasingly overcrowded and underserved by public works. That Cobo Arena is named for the mayor who pretty much devoted himself to maintaining a segregated city and blocking the construction of affordable public housing for black people makes me want to vow never to go there again. Well, maybe once. To spit on it.

What surprised me is that I had (from my own narcissistic perspective, I guess--did anything that happened before you were aware of it really matter?) always imagined that Detroit had a kind of Golden Age that stretched from World War II until the deep recession of 1981/82, when I was in high school.

But in fact, Detroit had something more like a Golden Blip during and for a couple of years after WWII. By 1950, there were no more parcels of land near railroad tracks that were big enough for manufacturing plants, so development within the city came to a standstill. Automakers had to build new plants someplace, so they build them in Ohio, in the South, in California--places with weak unions, lower taxes, and vast tracts of undeveloped land.

I was amazed to learn that Detroit lost 70,000 jobs in the decade of the 50s. Jobs were lost to automation (no more "mankiller" once a machine could do it...but then, no more job, either), to companies' shifting of manufacturing to other locations, and by the weeding out of the many auto companies and related industries that had sprung up during the Blip and later failed.

By the end of the 60s, the city had lost a total of 130,000 jobs. When the book was written in 1996, the author was able to say that Detroit had sustained a steady decline in jobs for over 40 years. Who knew?

After WWII, companies like Lockheed stayed in the defense business, but in Detroit, auto companies couldn't re-tool factories and get car production up and running fast enough, in anticipation of high demand as soldiers came home, got married, bought houses, had families.

But putting so many of its eggs into auto production made Detroit perpetually vulnerable. New cars are one of the first things people put off buying in an economic downturn, even a small one. So, rather than being the powerhouse I imagined it to be, Detroit spent most of the 20th century limping along, booming and busting, struggling with race relations and economic downturns and business failures.

I'm not done with the book; I'm in 1960, where:

Only 15 years after World War II, Detroit's landscape was dominated by rotting hulks of factory buildings, closed and abandoned, surrounded by blocks of boarded up stores and restaurants. Older neighborhoods, whose streets were lined with the proud homes that middle-class and working-class Detroiters had constructed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were now pockmarked with the shells of burned-out and empty buildings, lying among rubbish-strewn vacant lots. (pp. 147-148)

That is not the image I would have come up with for Detroit in that era. The first Detroit history I was aware of were the late-60s race riots, and white flight (my mother says that white people from Detroit used to drive out to South Lyon, where we lived when I was very young, and knock on doors in our neighborhood, offering to buy houses that weren't even on the market). I always thought of that as a kind of sudden explosion, but it had been simmering for 25 years.

This may be the kind of academic book I don't end up finishing; I'm interested, but not sure how much tolerance I have for year-by-year analyses of housing patterns broken down by race--though there's a chapter coming up about how class divisions within the black community created conflict in the 60s and 70s that looks pretty good.

Mostly, it's a sad, sad story. And I'd like to warn any of my Black friends away from reading it, the same way I'd warn a rape victim not to rent I Spit on Your Grave because--well, because it seems like the history of Detroit from 1944 to 1996 is pretty much a 50-year parade of white people fucking Black people over on purpose, viciously, humiliatingly, and with malice aforethought. I know Detroit is not alone in this by any means. But you probably don't need to hear it again.

I'm also reading Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity by Ann Arnett Ferguson. It's a meaty book, written by a sociologist using participant-observer techniques. Since it was a dissertation, it's perhaps a bit heavy on jargon ("This can be understood as a transgressive act...[that] can be seen as redressing a fundamental social lack.") though readable enough overall. What I am finding especially interesting--as I did when I read Literacy With an Attitude: Educating Working Class Children in Their Own Self-Interest--is how people who not only don't intend to stereotype children, but in fact may see themselves as deliberately doing the opposite, nonetheless manage to conspire with other factors in children's lives to push them into predetermined roles. (On the other hand, an administrator in the school introduces the author to a 10-year-old boy with the words, "There's a jail cell out there with that boy's name on it," so it's not all about damaged institutions overriding individual good intentions.)

The author of Bad Boys is also interested in the narratives educators tell themselves about why children are the way they are (family factors are a common one), and in the ways that classroom misbehavior and deliberate challenges to authority can become adaptive responses for Black boys, a source of self-esteem and peer respect.

At the school she studied, she was also interested to discover that the room where kids served in-school detentions was essentially hidden from the rest of the school; it couldn't be reached from the school's interior, but only through an exterior door that let onto the playground, the windows were arranged in such a way that people couldn't see inside; the children serving detention had playground and lunch times separately from the rest of the children in the school. Not only would it be almost impossible to stumble upon this room, she could barely find it after she'd been given directions.

Her sense that problem Black children were being hidden away led to her exploring, and finding evidence for, the theory that one of the school's agendas was to hide problems in the school from white families, for fear they would exercise their options to take their children elsewhere to be educated.

I don't always love the author--her analytic sections seem very good to me, as do her descriptions of what she observes in the school. But memoirish "field notes" sections between chapters seem a little precious and self-indulgent to me, and I have taken to skipping them, mostly. I hope her next, post-dissertation book won't read quite so much like she's trying to impress her committee with her grasp of theory and jargon. I may get worn out and come to feel I've learned as much as I need to know about how Black boys get shafted in school--especially since it's really no surprise to anybody that they do. So this is another one that has felt worthwhile but that I might not read every page of.

On the other hand, I have just learned that the publication of One Was a Soldier, the new Clare Ferguson/ Russ Van Alstyne mystery, has been pushed back to March of 2011, so I may read every single page of both these books, including the footnotes, because what else am I going to have to do?

In my to-be-read pile:

Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say): Reflections on Literature and Faith by Frederich Buechner

Claiming Abraham: Reading the Qur'an and the Bible Side by Side by Michael Lodahl

Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time by Sarah Ruden

Walt Whitman's Song of Myself: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition by Ezra Greenspan, which I really want to dive into in the next 10 days because I am leading my workshop on Song of Myself at the summer gathering and I always like to know something about the poem that I didn't know before when I teach it.

I also have an annotated edition of Song of Myself (published just a few months ago) to take along. Very excited about that. We can look stuff up!

Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love: Race, Class, and Gender in US Adoption by Christine Ward Gailey. This one may end up back in the library bag unread; it's possible I've read so much about race etc. in US adoption that the marginal utility of reading another 200-page book on the subject is approaching the vanishing point. Though the class and gender stuff could be new and interesting.

The Preaching Life by Barbara Brown Taylor. I've started this several times and not finished it because it's so good I want to be able to really take it in and digest it and never feel like I have time to do it justice.

Liturgies of Quakerism by Ben Pink Dandelion. I paid a lot of money for this last year at the summer gathering, after considering it for several years, and I have tried several times to get through it. Here's what I said last time I attempted it, in September:

I’m not sure I’ll ever get through The Liturgies of Quakerism. This is an import from Britain, and it cost $35. I’d been looking at it in the bookstore catalog, and at the Gathering bookstore for a couple years, and thinking, “That’s a lot of money for a book.” Finally this summer, I decided to buy it. I am very interested in this notion that Quakers have a liturgy and curious about what that might mean.

However, this is my third attempt at the book since I bought it, and I have yet to make it past page 2, “The liturgy functions as a hermeneutic of sorts that, through its ordo, helps to make sense of numinous experiences,” or page 3’s “A rhetorical transaction, therefore, may be best understood as operating at some point on a continuum of conscious choice-making on the receiver’s part.”

It’s not that I’m not equipped to read this sort of thing; a graduate degree in Political Philosophy and two years of graduate work in literature render it all very familiar. It’s just that one of the consolations of having dropped out of grad school eight years ago when Eric was born was the freedom to never have to read about hermeneutics or rhetorical transactions or “the artificial tensions and releases created by consonance and dissonance” or how the Quietist experience is “inherently related to a realized eschatology” or the “de-coupling of a sense of end-time and a sense of intimacy.”

I think there’s a lot of good stuff in this book. I just don’t know that I have the intellectual energy to cope with the language. On the other hand, I paid $35 for the damn thing. I suppose if I were to add up all the $10 words I would see that I was getting much more than my money’s worth.