James Baldwin, John Edgar Wideman, Luis J. Rodriguez, and Ruben Salazar--along with Hunter S. Thompson, explore what it means to be an outsider in a culture.
What do you see as common links in their themes?
How does reporting strengthen their writing?
How does their use of language and voice make their writing memorable?
How do they reference their own race, gender, class or sexual-orientation identities in their non-fiction writing?
Read aloud from each of these. See how they differ. How does the place of publication or the era of publication influence their production and the audience consumption of what they write? Considering the manifold forms of media, who or where today reports and writes the way these authors do?
What do you discover about these authors when you Google them?
For example, Luis J. Rodriguez http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0907/p02s04-lign.html
When you read them deeply?
BH
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Riis is voyeuristic in How the Other Half Lives. As the title implies, his work is an investigation into the dark world of immigration in New York. What captures his attention are the tenements that threaten the landscape of a city. What he finds is the incubator of American diversity in the 19th century. Riis exposes the animal-like living conditions of the poor of New York, but cannot convey what is truly like to live in one of these small, crowded, smelly rooms. He never stayed there because he didn’t have to, which is the most traumatizing aspect of living in these places; the tenant had no life outside of the tenement.
ReplyDeleteRiis is also pragmatic in his purpose. The journalist offers a solution to what he considers to be the problem, the tenements. Riis uncovers a variety of other problems, but he approaches the problem of housing not considering that it is only a symptom to the problem.
Despite the poor living conditions, the biggest problem for the immigrants of Riis’ world was the social alienation of their experience. These people lived segregated from ‘the other half,’ the half that lives the life that the immigrants presumably heard about when they decided to get on the transatlantic vessel.
This social alienation continues to be the main problem in America. Not only are the poor in this country financially isolated, but they are usually also separated by ‘the color line.’ Their role in society is parasitic. They only receive attention when they become a problem, a point that is well illustrated by Rodriguez in an anecdote. As a child he remembers sitting in a corner of a classroom, ignored and bored. It wasn’t until he was empowered by a gang and a stone that flew threw a window that the school noticed him.
The gang is what the community perceives as the problem. Rodriguez is no longer ignored. Yet his behavior is a reaction to the world around him, a direct result of the alienation caused by his social status, the minority, the immigrant. “I was also told, several times, by white people, that ‘race relations‘ there were excellent. I failed to find a single Negro who agreed with this, which is the usual story of ‘race relations‘ in this country,” Baldwin wrote.
Although it is impossible to truly experience the life of those who struggle, DuBois, Baldwin and Rodriguez are examples of exceptional people who overcome the poverty and alienation that nursed them. Their writings are personal and illustrate their helplessness. All three show concern for the future generations of their communities, as they recognize that for them it might be too late.
The good news is that there is a way of exposing the inside world of the outsiders. DuBois, Baldwin and Rodriguez write as ambassadors from the other side of the tracks. Isn’t this the participation that is necessary for ultimate integration?
- Juan Pablo Garcia
W.E.B. Du Bois writes of the double-consciousness African Americans have in his time. They must be both black and an American at once, which means they view the world through two different viewpoints.
ReplyDeleteAfrican-Americans had to meet certain standards to be considered a true African-American, whatever that means. If they strayed too far – i.e. they acted white – then they wouldn’t be accepted by their black community. These blacks could never fit into the white community, no matter how hard they tried, because of their skin color.
John Edgar Wideman writes of the same thing in his selection from Brothers and Keepers. While in college, he had family and friends still in the ghetto. He tried to maintain a certain image, a certain persona, while with his family so he could fit in when he returned home from school on vacation. Once he got back to school, he would have to be a different person to fit into that role.
The concept of double-consciousness is something I’ve thought about much because I’m multiracial. My father was born in the United States, and my mother was born in Trinidad and Tobago. I’ve lived all of my life in the United States, but it’s difficult to forget that half of me is from a different country, a different lifestyle.
I’ve been to Trinidad and Tobago a few times, and the lifestyle there is much different than the United States. The pace of life is much easier, there is less emphasis on what others think, and everything is simpler. Here in the United States, I’ve lived a life that was based on doing things quickly and trying to be the best I could be in the eyes of others.
Whenever I think about what life is like in Trinidad and Tobago, I seem to consider myself out of place here in the United States. There, I would be out of place for wearing nice clothes out. It’s not that they don’t wear nice clothes there, but it’s just a more casual place. There’s less emphasis on being dressed up.
I’ve lived a life here quite the opposite of the – stereotypical, yes, truthful, yes – Caribbean model. I’ve been busy all of the time, pounding out words, reading pages and everything else. There, there is no place for that struggle, that need for speed.
At times, I feel bad that I don’t know more about my mother’s side of the family. I enjoy eating roti and curry, but I rarely eat it. I enjoy the thought of going to Trinidad and Tobago, but it’s been years since I’ve been back. I feel out of place considering the people I hang out with, but it’s a life I’m comfortable with.
I think I should lime (Trinidadian for relax) more often.
--Daniel Paulling
I also noted the similarity of dual-consciousness explored by Du Bois and Wideman. Wideman says he became “an expert at going with the flow, protecting [him]self by taking on the emotional or intellectual coloring of whatever circumstance [he] found [him]self in” all in fear of his family discovering he was a “traitor.” And to a certain extent I saw “Brothers and Keepers” as the inevitable personalization of the problem Du Bois foresaw: the “color-line.”
ReplyDeleteBut is the feeling of “taking on the coloring” unique to racial experiences? Is outsider status reserved for educated black men? I don’t think so. In literature spanning centuries and continents you find the same theme. Most individuals struggle with accepting multiple frames of reference for their own existence. Can one person embody everything a culture represents and therefore be an insider? No.
There is an obscure (and probably widely debunked since I read of it) theory that contends that the left and right sides of the brain may not have communicated directly in the earliest forms of sapiens. Those near-humans might have believed that certain thoughts were coming from outside their own minds. Obviously the lobes of our brains are connected, but perhaps our souls are still striving to catch up.
Du Bois treated this duality with distanced evaluation of the situation, enumerated statistics and reports. I struggled to get a sense of his own point of view from what he wrote, except that from the perspective of a former 20th century high school history student I knew the information he was recording was not what the history books wanted future generations to read.
The acknowledgement of his own split awareness I only saw late in the second chapter when he wrote that “nothing is more convenient than to heap on the Freedman’s Bureau all the evils of that evil day, and damn it utterly for every mistake and blunder than was made.” Perhaps his educated assessment was warring with the opinions of the people whose sorrows and trials he was trying to bring to light.
Even in the naïve self-introduction speeches of my freshmen students I see the conflict between trying to be both part of the culture of college and unique enough to survive with familial values intact. For many of them it is a dance between testing the limits within their new culture and exaggerating the connection to their old culture – whichever is more appropriate for the assignment, the lunchroom conversation or the hallway bravado. They will introduce themselves immediately as being from one small town or another, but promptly refute any argument that they wish to be identified that way, they are now budding professional athletes (at a tiny NAIA school), or teachers, or partiers.
Du Bois and Wideman resonate with all readers because of that universal theme, at once reminding us that are experiences are similar and also revealing a truth about problems that we may never see close at hand.
Journalists tend to know a little about a lot. It’s the nature of the profession. They’re expected to get up to speed quickly, but as for mastering a subject, well, there are experts for that. The benefit of this model is that most reporters can be thrown into something with little to no background information and quickly turn a suitable story. But the problem with this, which is particularly apparent after reading writers such as Rodriguez and Baldwin, is that without deep knowledge and experience writers often lack an authentic and authoritative voice. Baldwin and Rodriguez bring an experience to their work that a journalist who hasn’t lived it couldn’t possibly imitate. Good journalism shows and doesn’t tell. Because they had been there, these writers were not only able to show me East L.A. and Atlanta, they were able to make me feel them, smell them, and hear them.
ReplyDeleteBaldwin and Rodriguez are in their own ways both insiders and outsiders. They have a unique and valuable perspective to share. Baldwin was black and could see himself in the eyes of the old man on the bus. “He sees, in effect, his ancestors, who, in everything they do and are, proclaim his inescapable identity” (197). But he was also from the North and had lived in Paris for a time. He could draw on both experiences in his writing. Similarly, Rodriguez grew up in the barrios in and around Los Angeles, running with gangs, doing drugs and seeing friends get killed. He left that place physically, but it clearly continued to inform his writing. For these authors, racism and violence, the “negro problem” and the immigrant experience, were not just abstract concepts — they were lived experiences. Such experiences are often missing from journalism, which can be good without them, but with them it can be great.
The problem of course is that these authors don’t make much of an attempt to adhere to traditional standards of journalism. In fact, it can be argued that these pieces aren’t journalism at all. (I haven’t even mentioned The Souls of Black Folk because that work is more history, sociology, even philosophy.) Baldwin and Rodriguez were trying to tell stories that were meaningful and true to their experiences, while also trying to persuade readers of the need for change. Rodriguez says so explicitly: “This work is an argument for the reorganization of American society” (10). To use these works as a critique of other journalism is therefore a bit unfair, but I’ll do so anyway. There is something to be said for a writer who has lived a bit.
The “good” world is the white world. You can choose to believe you don’t deserve the privileges of that world, or you can fight back, get an education, move into the white world. At least with the first choice, you’ll fit in, be considered another one of your kind. With the latter, you don’t fit in at all – not with your kind, not with the white kind. This is one of the social problems addressed by W.E.B. Du Bois, John Edgar Wideman and Ruben Salazar. All three moved beyond the expectations of their race. They graduated from college and had successful professional careers. They experienced what Du Bois calls the “two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (p. 2). Wideman describes it as “either/or. Rich or poor. White or black. Win or lose” (p. 27), and Salazar characterized by writing that the pull of a Mexican-American’s dual identity “can leave you with only the hyphen” (p. 33).
ReplyDeleteWhat struck me is how each author wrote compellingly about similar social issues in such diverse styles, which largely reflected each author’s professional background. Du Bois’ writing is the most overt. His essays are written with an authoritative yet sympathetic voice. He points out the faults of the government and Booker T. Washington but does so politely. Unlike Wideman, he doesn’t use slang or black dialect, and I think doing so would have trivialized his argument that African-Americans can be valuable to society. His reporting certainly lends him authority, especially as he enumerates his points. He softens this calculated, scholarly tone with anecdotes and Biblical reference, which makes his work more approachable.
I was surprised at how much Ruben Salazar stuck to the objectivity badge of journalism, though he was the only one of the three professionally trained in journalism. Based on his comment, “Don’t you ever call me a Chicano newsman,” he seems to have two dualities to face: Mexican and American, Chicano and journalist. He provides a voice for the Chicano movement (including some of Du Bois’ techniques of showing how minorities have value and relying on historical facts), but he does not outwardly lend his support to their – his – cause. Perhaps this was the only way he could get these facts published in The Los Angeles Times.
Wideman’s experience as a novelist shines through in his style though sometimes his use of multiple techniques can be distracting. His combination of scholarly, ornamented language in some places and street language in others helps create this sense of dueling cultures. What impressed me was how he took clichés and used them in unconventional ways. For example, “Papa’s got a brand-new bag. And you were gon act a nigger and let the cat out” (p. 28). Some of my other favorite descriptions he used were “wedding-car tin-can tail of farts” and “the words slithered out of one corner of his face, like garbage dumped off one end of a cafeteria tray.”
What had the most impact on me in this week’s readings was: “Is freedom inextricably linked with both, running from and running to?” I had never thought of it this way. When minorities run to better opportunities, their families often feel as if they’re running from their culture. Sadly, this is largely still true, particularly in the South. I’ve recognized it more in the past four years, when I’ve been in an interracial relationship. My boyfriend, Clyde, attended a largely white private high school and joined a largely white fraternity. He attends mostly white Catholic churches, though he was raised Baptist, and remembers getting funny looks when buying country music CDs while most of his neighbors were buying rap. I’ve heard white friends say to him, “Clyde, I’m blacker than you.” They’re not trying to be rude; they don’t realize the struggles. Honestly, for most of my life, neither did I.
I often think of a story I heard from a professor in a class I took called “The Black Freedom Movement.” The story describes a young white man talking to an elderly black man, saying, “I think blacks should be given a school! I think blacks should be given an education! I think blacks should be given the opportunity to read and write!” To which the black man replied, “You don’t get it. It’s not yours to give.”
ReplyDeleteI found that story to ring true throughout all the readings for this week. As Du Bois says, “Their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them” (Du Bois 2). The idea that freedom, education, safety and other necessities to life are all objects that white people have the authority to give to minorities is an age-old flaw in race relations and only perpetuates subordinance.
This misconception of how to solve problems of race and poverty, which honestly I think plays to larger ignorance to humanity as a whole, was a part of the stereotypes the authors wrote to dismantle. I especially enjoyed Rodriguez’s discussion of gangs and dealing drugs. Gang members and their subculture are often only thought of as deviant and violent. But when put into a greater social context, and consider the young men who grow up low-income areas in inner cities and battle poverty, the police and situations of high violence, joining a gang might be the only option. As Rodriguez says when talking about poverty in Los Angeles, “Sophisticated survival structures involved, including gangs, out of the bone and sinew tossed up by this environment” (Rodriguez 8). The same could be said for dealing drugs or standing look out for drug dealers as means of income.
These authors, especially Rodriguez, so eloquently convey it means to be poor and a minority in America because they have been there. They not only understand the inner-workings of minority communities but also make them approachable to an outsider. And they don’t stop there. Salazar especially sheds light on the other half of the picture, conveying what the brutality and force with which the police handle minorities.
This type of writing is crucial to advocacy journalism: An insider’s look at oppression provides the readers with empathy and understanding. In these stories, opportunity for action can arise when “something of beauty collides with something of truth” (Rodriguez 11).
I have to echo several of the points made here already. One of the things that I found to be most important in Du Bois' piece was also the dualistic roles that blacks were, and still are in some ways, expected to maintain. And while Du Bois was concerned, even over a century ago, with uncovering the injustices and illogical nature of this idea, the problem still plagues our society — now in the form of biracial duality more often.
ReplyDeleteHe also explores to the dual role found in calling blacks "folk," which is explained at length in the introduction. His use of folk in particular stands for the "most oppressed and despised group in America" that simultaneously represents a powerful artistic force that is recognized with dignity and separate identity.
Somehow, Du Bois and Riis have become so significantly distanced in my mind, while remaining interlinked in their overall intention to uncover injustices in the world. Riis was indeed much more of a voyeur, like Juan Pablo said, and he went about his work in a different, more graphic way. Riis’ overall goal was to expose his injustices of choice in any manner he could think of, and he didn’t seem to care what got in his way.
Du Bois went about his mission in an abstract way. The injustices he wished to bring to light were more difficult to see, as they only appear in instances of personal interaction or confrontation. He also chose to write about it in a more abstract way by using metaphors and symbolism to his advantage.
I found his “veil” metaphor to be one of the most powerful aspects of his writing. Put simply, the “veil” represents black life in America, but it comes to mean so many more complex things by the end of the excerpt. Du Bois almost takes on the veil as the thing he wants to explain the most; though he is supposedly an insider in this group, he somehow struggles to define it concretely.
The title of Berkley’s blog post this week actually got me thinking — Du Bois himself is an example of extraordinary otherness. His works all challenged anything close to the norm at that time, and his personal accomplishments represent many, many firsts in black culture. In spite of the negativity he likely was faced with, even after achieving his level of fame, notoriety and scholarly status, he continued to seek out the root of the problem that blacks were, and are, faced with in America.
—Taryn Wood
For some, the concept of a recession is laughable. A big national joke. Some guys in suits come on TV and furrow their brows and say, well, things don’t look so hot right now.
ReplyDeleteHa, ha.
There are whole classes of Americans whose entire lives have been a recession. A recession extending back for generations.
So we can’t talk about ethnicity in America and not talk about money. As Du Bois said, “To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”
The concept of a meritocracy — that anyone can attain anything through hard work — has been both America’s greatest promise and its greatest obstacle to equality. The history of American minority political thought has been one of its thinkers negotiating the treacherous terrain left behind by a white establishment that thought “Booker T. made it — why can’t you?”
The possibility of a single success in a land of opportunity is enough to erase sympathy for failure.
So we count on writers like Du Bois and Rodriguez and Baldwin to illuminate the human reality of inequality — the reality beyond the sociology and the economics. We need them for the stories of what it means to be imperfect — to be human — in communities where responses to imperfection are punishing. Perhaps the most astonishing element of Riis’ work was how seemingly alienated he had become from the very world he had grown up in.
Riis walked through the slums and viewed the bedlam of destitution that America could so easily bestow — but his prognoses only empowered the people who had allowed such conditions to exist in the first place. His solutions were posed to landlords and politicians: build better tenements. Enforce health codes.
Du Bois instead gave the black community a name for its self-consciousness: the veil. Du Bois gave the black community a cosmology that rejected the singular importance of materialism. If the government that promised 40 acres and a mule could never be counted on to come through with its end of the deal — and if legitimate civil equality would never truly be granted — then the battle for the souls of a people would have to be waged from the great dais of metaphor.
In other words, Du Bois gave the black community an ideal.
I’ve decided to focus on the first paragraph of Du Bois’ “The Souls of Black Folk” for its poetic voice and lasting relevance to race identity today. While taking the form at times of a manifesto, these few pages often ascend into striking analyses of what it means to be part of what he calls the “Negro Problem,” which we might call today racial disparity and identity or, in using more of Du Bois’ words, “self conscious-manhood.”
ReplyDeleteDu Bois is straightforward with his emotional response to racism, not in an angry or rash sense, but by striving to understand, himself, the bifurcated loyalties of being both American and black. At first, he is much less political than starkly philosophical. He mentions the freed men’s plight and their journey to suffrage and education, but these seem to be secondary to the fact that for blacks in the United States to be truly free, they would need to form their own identity, while conforming to the “greater ideals of the American Republic.”
This focus on the black race’s own identity (rather than in relation to any other race) is an important way to look at the rights Du Bois demands in other essays. He asserts that the black Americans must identify themselves as a people with a unique cultural perspective on American life and thus be awarded the rights that belong to every person. This was (and arguably remains today) an important way to look at race relations that still baffles many in the political arena. The orientalism that Du Bois spoke against at the turn of the century still pervades the political agenda of leaders of all races.
He writes: “But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate.” In other words, to blame one race for repressing another, pitting them against each other, is to give them the power to do so, to which Du Bois would reply that the black people must look inward and reflect on what it means to be black before any headway can be made in the political arena.
--Michael Gibney (I posted this earlier, but I couldn't find it when I checked back ... Sorry if this makes two of them.)
Reading the excerpt from John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers was like putting on a comfortable sweater, not for the subject matter, which rarely reaches into the comfortable for me, but for Wideman’s use of language, so familiar and real. Style, more so than subject matter, determines whether I struggle through prose or flow with it, somewhat contradictory for me, because like Angela, I usually tend to race through stories and focus on function over form. The formality of the English of a century-plus ago in Riis’s and DuBois’s work (the second chapter of Souls of Black Folk over the first) sent my mind wandering; but the vernacular of Wideman’s letter to his brother felt concrete and rooted in personal experience, and elicited genuine interest. In the other readings, I periodically checked how many pages I had to finish, but with Wideman I was surprised when I did.
ReplyDeleteWideman’s language isn’t static or rooted in one tradition. We read “the Chinook wind that had melted Sunday’s snow no longer warmed and softened the air,” and an explanation follows that makes me suspect the definition I am now learning from Wideman he only learned when he moved west to Wyoming. Similarly, in describing the meaning of his daughter’s name “Jamila,” we learn what Wideman learned only after he and his wife named her. This approach to language puts me at ease so I learn alongside the writer, rather than from him. He wants to share what he has learned, rather than what he knows, like when he, a man not brought up in Hinduism, sings the deity Venpadigedera’s song to “Rejoice in the bounty of the light.”
What Wideman knows, though, is the spoken language of his “people in Pittsburgh.” Alterating between the second person conversations with his brother written in the style of Wideman’s spoken English and the first person prose that guides the first part of the chapter, Wideman sprinkles in the language of his upbringing: “mize well let it all hang out” (p. 12); “Jamila would holler as if she’d received the final insult” (p. 17); “Lookit those big, pretty brown eyes” (p. 18). In describing the arrival of 50,000 blacks in Pittsburgh between 1910 and 1930, Wideman’s language goes back in time along with what he tells of: “If you ain’t got no woman to send for than maybe them few quarters buy you a new shirt and a bottle of whiskey so you can find some trifling body give all your money to.”
Wideman’s relationship with his brother Robby is his relationship with his own identity. Wideman has left the blackness and poverty of his childhood in Pittsburgh, and “if I ever doubted how good I had it away at school … youall were back home in the ghetto to remind me how lucky I was.? (p. 27) In order to be the person Wideman wanted to be, he has constructed a wall between himself and his brother. “[Robby’s] words and gestures belonged to a language I was teaching myself to unlearn.” (p. 26) By 1984, when Wideman writes Brothers and Keepers, it seems he has found more comfort in what had been a chasm to him before –– his reconciliation of where he has come from, what he has wanted to be and what he has become –– and he uses language deftly to convey that.
Liz Lance
These readings remind me of something a good writer once said about a great writer. A magazine article asked modern writers of fiction and non-fiction to enumerate great books to read during various summer pursuits: being on a sailboat, laying on a beach, and so forth. Augusten Burroughs recommended Edith Wharton for a long weekend as follows: "The only thing more delicious than spending a weekend reading The House of Mirth is reading it in the grass or on the sand. Mosquitoes will leave you alone. It will not rain. This is Edith Wharton. Nature bends."
ReplyDeleteDuBois and Rodriguez strike me the same way. They are what might be termed, according to popular cliche, writers' writers. Note Rodriguez from page 46: "The shop teacher was Mr. Stone, who acted exactly as if he were carved out of a thick piece of gray granite." Great sentence. Evocative, weird, precise, and masterful at getting the right words in the right order.
Or DuBois, on page 9: "...a second sight in this American world -- a world which yields him no true self-conciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world... looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity... two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
That's the kind of writing that makes you need to read it aloud to hear how the words sound in your mouth -- that even makes you forget you are reading prose at all. "Unreconciled strivings." Like a shot between the eyeballs. I forget how powerful two words can be until I see them being used in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, with both the precision of a surgeon and the recklessness of a street painter.
The eyewitness accounts relied on by Rodriguez, and less heavily by DuBois, strengthen the narrative because they impart the reader with a very strong sense of place. Rodriguez's anecdotes about his early life dabbling in crime, sex and depravity in Los Angeles slums are extremely gripping because he's not interviewing or relying on someone else's memory or impressions. There's no disconnect, because he himself was there, and this has the effect of making the reader feel very close to the story too. In particular Rodriguez's detailing of the boy who fell through the skylight is very well-handled and sticks with the reader.
DuBois, although his language use tends to be a little more ethereal and less straightforward, is good at this too: his description of Abraham Lincoln on page 18, "the long-headed man with the care-chiselled face," made me Google DuBois to find out when he was born, because the description seemed so specific that I thought DuBois was working from a firsthand encounter with the president.