Week 6 - Me to Me


Dear 14yr old Anna,

You have a lot to learn, and so do I being only twenty and a freshman in college. But right now, I want to introduce a couple of things to you so that when you move to Alabama in a couple of weeks you are prepared to view the world with a more critical eye, and adjust your actions accordingly. Right now you live in upstate New York in a town of only 1,800 and 97% white, and thinking about race in any sort of real manifestation has never really crossed your mind because no one has ever asked you to, not your parents, not your teachers, not the media you consume – but it will as soon as you enter Alabama and feel the unease of becoming a part of something you do not understand at all. The South now, in 2012, has everyone suspended in a hegemony with levels and categories so tight and so restricting, breaking out of them is not only exceedingly difficult for everyone, but dangerous and almost impossible for black folks. Isabel Wilkerson writes in The Warmth of Other Suns that when black Southerners migrated to the North in the 1900s, they “stepped in a hierarchy that assigned them a station beneath everyone else” (pg. 419). This image can perhaps help you picture the nature of the United States, amplified in the Deep South. This nature is one that has molds for every person in a racial hierarchy that gives people the script for what to say, how to act, what places to enter. In specifically the South, the hegemonies that exist simultaneously assign each person a role according to their identity before they are even born while also casting blackness outside of all roles in America. Wilkerson also writes that “the very thing that made black life hard in the north, the very nature of northern hostility – unwritten, mercurial, opaque, and eminently deniable – made it hard for King to nail down an obvious right-versus-wrong cause to protest”, and this true for the caste system you are about to enter. Notice it. Critique it. Notice your own whiteness. Critique your own whiteness.

Love,
Anna of today

Comments

  1. Yeji JungMay 8, 2018 at 11:34 AM

    Anna,

    It seems like this is a moment to recognize that Wilkerson's statement about the nature of northern hostility—"unwritten, mercurial, opaque, and eminently deniable"—was (is?) in fact at play in your small white town of upstate New York. The fact that you didn't have to notice your whiteness, that that was comfortable for you, was still a function of white hostility. I have no idea what life in that town was like, but as we know and are learning, enclaves of whiteness don't exist in a vacuum; they are not the default, in a way that throws ethnic enclaves or communities of color into relief as divergent. This could all be nothing new, but thanks for letting me into your process.

    I appreciate your thoughtfulness, and your intentions to listen and learn and then act on that. I hope that doesn't come off as patronizing; I have messed up enough on being accountable to my immense privilege and power that I can empathize a bit on what this all can be like. I can't say it's enough to try because I feel pretty doubtful of that for myself. But I think the process of letting your grip on whatever insecurities (probs re: power ultimately) loosen and listening to listen first instead of being defensive—and then changing your mind and actions based on that—is powerful. I guess the next step is figuring out how to be reciprocal with that labor and learning. Again, not to say this is new for you. But it's something I'm continually learning, and hope the same for you.

    Yeji

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 10 Response

As Professor Hobbs named this class "Racial Identity in the American Imagination , " I want to explore the reasons why the word imagination was used. This class could have, in fact, been called "Racial Identity in America." Was imagination used to underscore the fact that race is a construct? Does thinking of racial identity through the lens of imagination color our reading of texts or understandings of the history of race in America? For instance, I think The Hemingses of Monticello would be interesting to think through in terms of imagination in individual actors in comparison to American Racial Imagination as a whole.
Read more

Respone to Sadhana Week 6

Sadhana, In your response to Wilkerson you note the connection between "the act of leaving and the act of creating newness." You discuss the way that migration and creating a new beginning can become. in and of themselves, acts of resistance. I am similarly fascinated with Wilkerson's preoccupation with these themes. For me, the most provocative argument in the book is Wilkerson's framing of the Great Migration in relation to the "classic" narratives of European immigration and pursuit of the American Dream. As she puts it in the final paragraph of the epilogue, "By their actions, they did not dream the American Dream, the willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing. They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts." Wilkerson's narratives intentionally resonate with European immigrants' American Dream stories. Why...
Read more

Response to Callan - Week 10

I really appreciate your thoughts on distinguishing how we talk about "race" and "racial identity." It's interesting that you bring this up, because I've definitely struggled in other history classes about the vagueness of some terms and how race and racial identity are often conflated. I think something that I've really appreciated about this class is the opportunity to get in touch with and look at the experiences of people with different identities. I feel like our discussions have helped me think more critically about information I see every day, in addition to what I've learned from classes in the past. In regards to Sing, Unburied, Sing, I feel that the book brought up further questions for me about what it means to "be" or "become" American. I find myself comparing the book to other works that we've read this quarter, and considering how it is different and similar. Furthermore, I feel that I find leaving this class w...
Read more