BOOK REVIEWS Michael K. Brown, Martin Carnoy, ElUott Currie, Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer, Marjorie M. Schultz, and David Wellman. Whitewashing Race: The Myth ofa Color-Blind Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). Pp xi + 338, bibliography, tables, notes. $17.95 paperback. ISBN 0-5202- 3706--4. Many white Americans, endorsed by neo-conservative writers of several racial and ethnic backgrounds, believe that racial discrimination is a thing of the past. Any remnant of racial inequality that persists in wages, family income, housing, or health care is the result of African Americans' cultural and individual failures. Whitewashing Race challenges this perspective argued by such authors as Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, John McWhorter, Tamara Jacoby, and Dinesh D'Souza. This book is an interdisciplinary work, compiled by a cadre of political scien- tists, sociologists, two lawyers, a criminologist, and an economist. They focused primarily on examples of discrimination against African Americans. This was due, in part, because the conservative consensus on race was, and continues to be, con- structed around the relationship between black and white. The authors found that when Asians and Latinos entered the conservative consensus, it was usually to marginalize the impact of racism on the life-chances of blacks. Asians, therefore, were presented as a "model minority" in relation to blacks, and married Latino mothers were used to prove that the reason so many black women are on welfare is because they are single. One of the strengths of this work is the statistical analysis it provides to high- light the consistent racial gaps, even when corrected for class, age, income, or any other variable. Fifty-three percent of mortgages in black Chicago's middle-class neighborhoods, for example, are from sub-prime lenders. In contrast, only 12% of mortgages in white neighborhoods originate from this source. African American women are 25% less likely to get a mammography screening, regardless of age or income. A 1985 Massachusetts study revealed that whites underwent substantially more coronary surgeries than blacks. A third wave of criminology scholarship found that only 26% of the gap between black and white drug offenses in Pennsylvania is the result of the higher arrest rate among blacks. Even after every conceivable allowance is made, Georgia blacks are five times more likely to get life sentences for drug offenses than whites. The book would have been stronger if the authors considered in more detail the ways in which the construction of race has been dramatically re-defined in the post-Civil Rights era. "Race" as it had been understood within US society is being rapidly redefined, in conjunction with the basic structure of the economy, with far- reaching political consequences for all sectors and classes. The influx of legal and undocumented workers from Third World countries seeking low-wage employment, has sharply transformed the ethnic, cultural, and social composition and character Journal of African American Studies, Winter 2005, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 54-55.
Transcript
BOOK REVIEWS
Michael K. Brown, Martin Carnoy, ElUott Currie, Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer, Marjorie M. Schultz, and David Wellman. Whitewashing Race: The Myth ofa Color-Blind Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). Pp xi + 338, bibliography, tables, notes. $17.95 paperback. ISBN 0-5202- 3706--4.
Many white Americans, endorsed by neo-conservative writers of several racial and ethnic backgrounds, believe that racial discrimination is a thing of the past. Any remnant of racial inequality that persists in wages, family income, housing, or health care is the result of African Americans' cultural and individual failures. Whitewashing Race challenges this perspective argued by such authors as Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, John McWhorter, Tamara Jacoby, and Dinesh D'Souza.
This book is an interdisciplinary work, compiled by a cadre of political scien- tists, sociologists, two lawyers, a criminologist, and an economist. They focused primarily on examples of discrimination against African Americans. This was due, in part, because the conservative consensus on race was, and continues to be, con- structed around the relationship between black and white. The authors found that when Asians and Latinos entered the conservative consensus, it was usually to marginalize the impact of racism on the life-chances of blacks. Asians, therefore, were presented as a "model minority" in relation to blacks, and married Latino mothers were used to prove that the reason so many black women are on welfare is because they are single.
One of the strengths of this work is the statistical analysis it provides to high- light the consistent racial gaps, even when corrected for class, age, income, or any other variable. Fifty-three percent of mortgages in black Chicago's middle-class neighborhoods, for example, are from sub-prime lenders. In contrast, only 12% of mortgages in white neighborhoods originate from this source. African American women are 25% less likely to get a mammography screening, regardless of age or income. A 1985 Massachusetts study revealed that whites underwent substantially more coronary surgeries than blacks. A third wave of criminology scholarship found that only 26% of the gap between black and white drug offenses in Pennsylvania is the result of the higher arrest rate among blacks. Even after every conceivable allowance is made, Georgia blacks are five times more likely to get life sentences for drug offenses than whites.
The book would have been stronger if the authors considered in more detail the ways in which the construction of race has been dramatically re-defined in the post-Civil Rights era. "Race" as it had been understood within US society is being rapidly redefined, in conjunction with the basic structure of the economy, with far- reaching political consequences for all sectors and classes. The influx of legal and undocumented workers from Third World countries seeking low-wage employment, has sharply transformed the ethnic, cultural, and social composition and character
Journal of African American Studies, Winter 2005, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 54-55.
Book Reviews 55
of thousands of urban working class neighborhoods and communities. Against this changing social background, our notions of the social categories which convey the day-to-day meaning of "black" and "white" have also began to change, especially within the major cities of the US.
The labor force of Major League Baseball reflects these trends, for example. Scores of Latino and Hispanic ballplayers from Third World countries play in the major leagues today. By the 1950s, Cubans and Dominicans had made it into the major leagues. With the US blockade of Cuba in 1961, the steady Cuban supply of major league talent stopped, and Major League Baseball turned its attention to the Dominican Republic and other Latin American countries. What began as a trickle in the 1950s has become a torrent. In the 1991 season the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico had the lion's share of players in the major leagues, followed by Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, and the Honduras. In 2005, players of Latin and Hispanic descent constitute 33% of the major league labor force, whereas African Ameri- cans comprise only six percent.
Despite this drawback, Whitewashing Race makes a significant contribution to the discussion of race in contemporary US society. It provides a valid and reliable challenge to the racial realists and conservatives' views on race. The authors reveal how the problem of race still exists and present pragmatic solutions--however con- troversial--that are far more convincing than maintaining the status quo.
Michael E. Lomax University of Iowa
56 Journal of African American Studies / Winter 2005
Bernard W. Bell. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots andModern Literary Branches (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachu- setts Press, 2004). Pp. xxviii + 488, index. $40.00 hardback. $24.95 paperback. ISBN 1-55849-473-1.
The sequel by Bernard W. Bell to The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987) is a profound and informative work. Telling the story of how he came to be what he is and do what he does--he was a Marine, an airline chef, a taxi-driver, and other things--he makes it clear that his insights comes less from literary theory (which he knows well) than from his life. Discussing contemporary African Ameri- can novelists with the emphasis on 1983-2001, he tracks down the Du Bois double consciousness in the novels until it becomes multiple consciousnesses. The book is a map of the battle for freedom that began when Africans were kidnapped and sold. Bell's refrain, one might say his curve, is that the more things change, the more they remain the same. But he celebrates each victory, noticing the different ways novelists found the freedom to write as they wish.
"As a literary history that deploys the biologically and culturally mixed heritage of black folk in the United States, both Southern rural and Northern urban, as a dominant trope, and as a critical study that reaffirms the strategic essentialism of African American literature and hybrid identity formations, this book is more dia- lectic and cyclical than linear despite the designated time frames in the chapter headings," he says in the Memoir that precedes the Introduction (p. xiv). The book "is not only a diachronic but also a synchronic critical study that charts frequently concurrent and overlapping residual and emergent as well as dominant cultural, narrative, and aesthetic movements" (p. xiv). Beginning with a critique of "con- temporary cultural and literary theories and ideologies for representing and read- ing the authenticity, authority, and agency of African American culture and character" which illuminates why and how the African American aesthetic focuses on the nature and function of "the shifting grounds for discovering and constructing truth, ethics, and politics as well as beauty in art and literature primarily by, for and about black Americans," he seeks to identifiy and examine the relationship of class and cultural formations to the pattern of African American narrative and aesthetic move- ments. Bell calls for a new discourse on the liberating impact o f the work of the African American. He began the book, he says, as a response to the impact of Eurocentric postmodernism and post colonialism, focusing on a vernacular theory of contemporary African American novels. His generation "bore witness to the sounds of the big bands of Cab Calloway, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington as well as to the mass demonstrations by African Americans protesting Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935" (p. xv) so for him music and politics are interwoven with literary criticism.
Unlike what he calls the "the white American trinity ofvalues"--radical Protes- tantism, constitutional democracy and global industrial capitalism--black Ameri- can values emanate from a cyclical, primarily Judeo-Christian vision of history and of African Americans as a disinherited, colonized people, a vision that sanc- tions their resilience of spirit and pursuit of social justice (p. 77). Whereas an oral
Journal of African American Studies, Winter 2005, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 56-58.
Book Reviews 57
culture relies primarily on sound--the spoken word--and a literate culture prima- rily on sight--the written word--what he calls "residually oral cultures" rely on the interplay or dialectic between the two, but like oral cultures, they stress perfor- mance, mnemonics, and improvisational skills, and their tendency is "to focus on the here and now, to employ some kind of formulaic mode of expression, and to subordinate the individual to the group or type" (p. 78). So, for example, black American novelists who are considered postmodern such as Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major not only reject Western forms and conventions but also reaffirm the power and wisdom of their own folk tradition.
And I came to the US from Uganda in 1973 thinking Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin were the only African American novelists! Although a literary theoretician, Bell tells a fascinating story of over thirty major novelists such as David Bradley. His- tory is "his story"--Bell does not apologize for his neomasculinism, that is, his focus on the way African American novels represent and interrogate the violent and non-violent external and internal impulses central to the identity formation of black males, and he dialogues with the womanist writing of Alice Walker.
However, I did find some gaps in areas where I have done some literary criti- cism. For example, although he mentions it, Bell does not analyze Paule Marshall's magnum opus, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People. I have written about it as one of the greatest presentations ofneo-colonialism in fiction, in journals such as New Letters and in my book, The Third World Writer." His Social Responsibility, [apologies to Alice Walker: "his" was inserted by the publisher]. He says of Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada:
his fifth novel is an intriguing parody of the slave narrative and Uncle Tom's Cabin, as well as demythicizing, irreverent satire on Abraham Lincoln, Southern Culture and Canada. Interweaving fact with fiction to illustrate that historical truth is as bizarre as imaginative truth, Reed traces the journey of Raven Quicksill [sic]--the fugitive slave, narrator-writer--from slavery in Virginia to freedom in Canada: "whether Canada was exile, death, art, liberation or a woman. Each man to his own Canada (pp. 242-43).
Bell makes no reference to the flying Uncle Tom figure, Uncle Robin, who ends up owning the estate of the slave owner/multinational Massa Swille by doctoring Massa's will, or to the fact that Robin and Lincoln areplayers against more power- ful forces.
The novel also parodies Gone V~th the V~nd (novel and movie), Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven and The Fall of the House of Usher), Mad Magazine (The Raven) .... The novel has a spiral and clustered form, as I demonstrate in my In the Trickster Tradi- tion: The Novels of Andrew Salkey, Francis Ebejer and Ishmael Reed, (1994). Bell says that in Reckless Eyeballing--which he calls "a fiercely sardonic allegory o f the actual lynching o f Emmett T i l l "~Reed "bitterly satirizes the complicity of many blacks, especially Tremonisha, a thinly veiled representation of Alice Walker, in perpetuating the stereotypes and scapegoating of black men in the United States as potential sexual predators and violent criminals" (p. 243). True, but my book notes that by the end, the Walker figure changes while Ian Ball, the Ishmael Reed figure, turns out to be the real literary prostitute (Reed wants us to read the novel, which can be a Trickster, not the novelist or the ideology).
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Bell discusses Alice Walker and Gayl Jones, but despite his passion for music, does not mention that both make favorable reference to Elvis Presley in their fic- tion. In The Healing, the seer Cayenne is very angry at the widespread rumor about Elvis. "They'll tell you the lie that he said that the only thing black people can do for him is shine his shoes," she says, "but that's just a lie." Most critics assume that Gracie Mac Still in Walker's much-anthologized "Nineteen Fifty-Five" is Willie Mac Thornton and Traynor is Elvis, and that Walker is accusing Elvis of ripping off Thornton's "Hound Dog" (1953)---to which Elvis defenders say the song was written by two white men, Leiber and Stoller, and Elvis took it from the version by Freddie Bell (1955). But the story uses three dashes instead of naming the song title, so it could not be "Hound Dog." In a not-yet-published essay, I say that in my class "Elvis as Anthology," we discover that Walker's story presents the black woman as matrix to the white boy, who sings her song and gives the her credit, to prove which I play call and response between LaVern Baker and Elvis--listen to her "Jim Dandy," his "Little Sister," and her "Hey, Memphis." ("He said, just after that first record, 'I give it all to LaVern,'" she said after Elvis's death.) True, Walker's story is not a novel, but Bell mentions the volume of stories which it opens and The Temple of My Familiar, a sequel to The Color Purple, in which the explicit praise of Elvis can only be appreciated after one has read the story.
Bell says that Larry Duplechan's novels have a black gay protagonist named Johnnie Ray Rousseau after the (bisexual) singer Johnnie Ray, the first white man to have a record at No. 1 on the R&B charts, "Cry" (1952)--Bell names not this title but the flipside, which was No. 1 on the pop charts. Johnnie Ray performed with LaVern Baker at Detroit's Flame Show Bar; she gave him tips, advising him to study A1 Jolson, whom he had not noticed (he loved Billie Holiday). Elvis ac- knowledged the impact of Johnnie on his singing. (The "crying and crying" of the fans in the Walker story seems to come from "Hound Dog" and "Cry.")
Despite occasional clich6s (for example, he several times labels a novel "gothic"), Bell's writing is textured, to move us down the long and winding road--a road from which one must sometimes take detours. "I remain committed to and con- vinced of two ancestral legacies," he concludes. "'The first is that a systematic, rigorous inquiry into the use of African American vernacular forms by novelists offers readers the most illuminating, challenging, and effective method of assess- ing the complex relationship of language, power, and knowledge in their interroga- tions of the distinctive correlations of literature to life, fiction to fact, and myth to reality in the tradition of the contemporary African American novel. The second is that despite the liberating advances of the Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Arts, and the Black Feminist movements, anti-Black racism and our struggle against it continue as we remember to keep faith with our ancestors and our God: 'We ain't what we wanna be. We ain't what we gonna be. But thank God Almighty, we ain't what we was!" (p. 388).
I hear him. The more things can change, the more things change.
Peter Nazareth University of Iowa
Book Reviews 59
Tiya Miles. Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Pp. xix + 306, 18 illustrations, index. $34.95. ISBN 0-520-24132-0.
This book explores the complex and sometimes painful relationship between African Americans and Cherokees through the Shoeboot family. Descended from a famed Cherokee warrior named Shoe Boots, the mixed-race black-Cherokee family was a microcosm of larger social forces at work during early nineteenth century American history. Historian Tiya Miles uses the Shoeboots as a prism through which to explore the social construction of race and racial ideology in the midst of a changing Cherokee Nation heavily influenced by the growth of slavery.
Chapter One, "Captivity," introduces Shoe Boots and focuses on his prior mar- riage with a kidnapped white girl from Kentucky named Clarinda. By the mid- 1820s, Cherokees were sanctioning marriages between white women and Cherokee men, thereby ensuring that their children (Shoe Boots and Clarinda had three) would be treated equally within the Cherokee Nation. At the same time, American ideals of marriage and white womanhood were beginning to influence the thinking of Cherokees. Chapter Two, "Slavery," further explores these concepts and what they meant for Doll (or Dolly as she was known in legal documents), a young slave girl acquired by Shoe Boots in the 1790s to work as Clarinda's servant. It is not clear whether Doll was native-born or from Africa or the Caribbean, but her acquisition represented the beginnings of Cherokee acceptance and adoption of Euro-Ameri- can institutions including slavery.
In 1804, Clarinda left with her children. Chapter Three, "Motherhood," high- lights Doll's enhanced status as the primary caretaker of Shoe Boots' farm in what is now northern Georgia. In addition to her household duties, at some point she became her owner's intimate partner. It is not clear whether the relationship oc- curred before Clarinda left; in any case, Shoe Boots and Doll had two daughters and a son. Miles analyzes Cherokee notions of marriage and kinship while focus- ing on Doll's problematic relationship with other Cherokees. Chapter Four, "Prop- erty," looks at the fraudulent attempt by two white men to obtain Doll and her daughter Elizabeth. The author uses the episode to focus on changing ideas of property ownership among Cherokees including that of owning slaves.
The next two chapters, "Christianity" and "Nationhood," center on Cherokee intertribal tensions. Miles reveals that African slaves occupied a unique relation- ship among the Cherokees: frequently they acted as translators to whites. This po- tentially elevated slaves into positions of authority over their masters, as may have been the case with Shoe Boots. Nevertheless, their reliance on slaves did not pre- vent the Cherokee Nation from excluding almost all African-descended people from citizenship, a process that occurred at the same time among white Georgians as slavery entrenched itself during the antebellum years. Although some Chero- kees resisted this process, progress and civilization for the Cherokees went hand in hand with slavery and racist ideology. Miles also delves into the heart-wrenching ordeal of Shoe Boots as he attempted to have Doll and their children declared citizens of the Cherokee Nation.
Journal of African American Studies, Winter 2005, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 59-60.
60 Journal of African American Studies / Winter 2005
Shoe Boots died five years after making his appeal in 1829. That same year, gold was discovered in Cherokee territory. The last four chapters of the book detail the rapid breakup and dispersal of the Cherokee Nation and Doll's efforts to resist enslavement for herself and her children as white Georgians invaded the territory. Shoe Boots' family members came to their aid, but by the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal policy had gained full steam. In 1838, Doll and her fam- ily embarked on the "Trail of Tears" and settled in Oklahoma. Miles convincingly argues that Indian Removal actually made it easier for Cherokees to adopt Euro- American values since they had suffered a traumatic break with their past. No longer unable to see enslaved blacks in a different light because of traditional Chero- kee values, the removal made it more difficult for interracial relationships to sur- vive. Doll continued to resist enslavement for her and her children, including an effort by unscrupulous white men who kidnapped her and her free granddaughters in 1847. Nevertheless, the family struggled and managed to rebuild what little they had in the West during the 1850s and in the Civil War's aftermath. Despite these setbacks and a clear historical record of suffering from racial oppression, the Shoe Boots continued to have a complex and fascinating legacy. In an ironic twist, Doll and Shoe Boots' grandson, Morrison, joined the Army of the Confederacy as an eighteen-year-old in 1861.
Tiya Miles has produced a worthy book. However, there are a few minor prob- lems. At times the text could have used more efficient language. There is also some redundancy in regards to describing the historical context, particularly in the be- ginning of chapters. Perhaps this could have resulted from editorial decisions, but this in no way detracts from the overall benefit of the book. Ties That Bind is an excellent work that will be useful to students in African American studies, Native American studies, and early nineteenth century United States history.
