Week 7 Reading Response

This week, we read Chapters 13 and 14 in Takaki’s A Different Mirror.

Chapter 13 outlined the migration of Southern blacks to the “Promised Land” of Northern Urban cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and New York. One of the funniest moments that I can recall reading about in Takaki’s book takes place in the beginning on Chapter 13. I decided to include the entire excerpt because merely summarizing it would not do the gentle humor justice.

“On one Georgia plantation, a landlord was surprised to find all of his tenants gone, except two old men. Uncle Ben and Uncle Joe were too poor to purchase train tickets. They sorrowfully told their landlord that everyone else had abandoned him, but that they had loyally remained behind on the plantation. The landlord gave the two men some money because they promised to stay and work the crops. Immediately after he left, the old-timers took the money and boarded the train to join their companions in the North.”

Those two old men certainly pulled the wool over their landlord’s eyes! Chapter 13 is especially ripe with inspiring quotes and passages despite the place in history that Takaki writes about. The early 20th century seemed like a time ripe for inspiration and hope. Southern blacks were fed up with living in poverty as sharecroppers and tenant farmers and many fled their farms and plantations without so much as a warning. The North promised a new life for these men and women, a life outside of poverty and within mainstream America. Their wanderlust was aided by geographical bonuses: the Illinois Central Railroad ended in Chicago, “The Black Metropolis” and connected to rural cities in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Autonomous travel was within the grasp of adventurous Southern blacks longing to escape increasing violence from Southern whites.

Of course, all was not as it seemed in the North. Many blacks faced discrimination trying to find jobs and housing. The explosion of the black population in Chicago was met with resistance from white landowners and realtors. In order to keep their property values, realtors and landlords joined forces to bar blacks from moving into predominantly white neighborhoods. This changed with The Depression when many landlords were desperate for tenants and reluctantly allowed blacks to apply for apartments.

The “divide and conquer” strategy of pitting two races against one another remained a valuable asset to labor managers. Two divided unions based on race were doomed to fail due to a lack of unity. I found it particularly heartbreaking that the Stockyards Labor Council attempted to recruit black workers and failed, particularly because black workers didn’t understand the need for unions. They didn’t fail because of their race, but because they didn’t convey the importance of unions for all workers. Who knows what could have happened if they were able to bridge the communication gap and educate the black workers for the need of a union to represent the needs and interests of the workers?

I loved reading about the New Harlem Renaissance and the rise of the black artist and writer. What has been sorely lacking in Takaki’s assessment of black history were the crucial development of black artists, writers, and poets. This, of course, can be due to the lack of education available for blacks prior to the early 20th century. I think education is essential in the rise of the arts in any community. If you were struggling to eat, you wouldn’t give much credence to the thoughts of the arts. In survival mode, the arts fall to the wayside and I’m sure can be seen as a “bourgeoisie” hobby, something available only to the leisure class. Of course, this is a valid argument and not one that I am interested in participating in, especially since I think that the sorrowful songs of slaves and of their African ancestors already proves a strong artistic history and tradition. W.E.B. Du Bois touches upon this point briefly in The Souls of Black Folk. I am interested in the tradition of black writers, especially those of Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston. These two writers were both biracial and struggled to define themselves outside of their “black” designation. Toomer wanted to be recognized as “American” and Hurston navigated the similarities and disparities between race and gender.

Particularly resonant in Chapter 13 was a quote from Langston Hughes regarding a black poet ashamed of his race: “No great poet has ever been afraid of being himself.” This quote can be applied to any aspect of self-hatred to due race, gender, ability, or sexual orientation.

Chapter 14 compared the disparate experience of different races during WWII. Obviously the Japanese, the Native Americans, and the European and German Jews were hit the worst. For all the liberal acclaim that FDR receives due to the New Deal (if you count liberal acclaim by the covers of The Nation that the former president has landed on. Seriously. That magazine loves FDR.), Takaki weaves an interesting tale of the balancing act the president conducted with the different races. Although I cannot fault the man for living in times of escalating racial conflict, I can still find it unconceivable that the fight for freedom was fought on the backs of subjugated races. This point was mentioned by many different historical accounts throughout the chapter. Japanese-Americans, African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Native-Americans, all willing to join their fellow Americans in the war, continually lamented unfavorable treatment in both the civilian and the military world.

Segregation within the army, fighting against a dictator in the throes of exerting racial superiority is so bitterly ironic. The hypocrisy was not only blinding for those Americans that felt the consistent sting of segregation and mistreatment, but also to the rest of the world looking to America as a beacon of liberty for ALL its citizens.

I’m at a loss for what else to comment on in Chapter 14 besides the necessity of the Navajo “code talkers.” How cool is that? For one shining moment, these Navajo men (I think they were all men?) played the hero to the American people and lead their troops to victory in the battle of Iwo Jima. Of course, these men were forced to go back to the reservation with extreme post-traumatic stress disorder and subsist below the poverty line. But, for one moment the white man hailed the Native-Americans as heroes. (This kind of makes me empathize with the Native-American men that chose not to fight the “white man’s war.”).