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Title: Red, White, Black, & Blue: A Dual Memoir of Race and Class in Appalachia (Ohio University Press Series in Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia) by William M., Jr. Drennen, Dolores M. Johnson, Kojo, Jr. Jones ISBN: 0-8214-1536-0 Publisher: Ohio Univ Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: January, 2004 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Entering a relationship
Comment: Some years ago in the course of a study of school desegregation in Little Rock, I interviewed an African-American man who'd been of high-school age at the time. He recounted story after story of losses and wounds to himself, his children, and his community as a result of desegregating the schools. At last he commented sadly, "My frustration centers around how much effort and how many people we've put through that process, only to sit in a room rather than really to enter into a relationship."
Kojo Jones, a black man, and Bill Drennan, a white man, were ninth-grade classmates in the first year of desegregation, in their case in Charleston, W. Virginia. Red, White, Black & Blue is their attempt to "enter into a relationship" many years later through the medium of a shared memoir. What I found most striking about their book, beyond the courage and respectful engagement of the authors, is an eloquence of form that emerges from the pages. The story of class and race is told far more vividly through contrasts in the way the two men write than through what they write. The stark honesty of their differing versions offers to American readers a rare and valuable window into enduring and largely ignored dynamics of privilege and protest, of ease and struggle, of unawareness and urgent perception.
Mr. Drennan, for instance, writes that his earliest contacts with black people were with servants in his home, people who cared for him with warmth and humanity. He writes nostalgically, noting little awareness of the privilege expressed by so cushioned an experience of race. Mr. Jones, however, tells of a series of encounters, ranging from unpleasant to violent, winding through his life from childhood on. His earliest contact with white people happened in public spaces, in stores and playgrounds, away from the safety of home. This contrast between places where people discover race - at home through warm dealings with employees or in public through hostile confrontations with (usually older) strangers - is one I've found typical in my own work on racial dynamics. Also typically, Mr. Drennan tells his tale and moves on to other life experiences, while Mr. Jones organizes his entire narrative around defining racial encounters. To the white man, race is as incidental in his memoir as he experiences it in his life; to the black man, it is central in both.
The memoirs are accompanied by an analysis written by Dolores Johnson, a scholar of communication styles. She gives us an erudite essay that illuminates many of the dynamics I've mentioned. Unfortunately, Ms. Johnson's tool is discourse analysis, an academic approach rich in yield and interest but limited in scope. When the eye is drawn to communication between individuals, there is a tendency to miss the surrounding context. And in the case of racial inequities in America, context is key. Mr. Jones' and Mr. Drennan's accounts beg for linkages with those systems of domination that underlie relations of class and race in our society. It is certainly interesting to note contrasts in the lengths of each man's contribution and to connect wordiness with privilege. But I regretted the missed opportunity to go deeper, to echo the memoir authors' honesty and earnestness by speaking that unjustly discredited word, racism, in the analysis.
Despite its shortcomings (neither primary author is a writer by trade, so their stories lack elegance and polish), Red, White, Black & Blue is an enormously useful contribution to an understanding of racial inequities fifty years ago, and still today.
Rating: 3
Summary: A pretty good book, but it strays from its subject
Comment: This book contains the accounts of two southern men, one white and one African American, whose lives have coincided with the tumult toward racial equality in America. Mr. Jones and Mr. Drennen deserve much praise for starting a dialogue. It contains honest feelings and raw memories.
The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision ruled that segregated schools were inherently unequal and thus violated the 14th Amendment's tenet of equal protection under the laws. The ensuing desegregation of (mostly) southern school systems had a deep impact on millions of students, teachers and administrators, and formalized a broader movement toward racial equality in our society. It was a disturbance to all, though, as have been the succeeding steps toward racial equality. I was hoping the book would provide much more about the early years of desegregation, based on its billing as "a memoir of growing up through the turmoil and anguish of desegregation." But the book actually offers relatively little about that aspect of the 1950s. The authors bare a lot of feelings and anecdotes, but they don't always seem to be part of any particular message to learn from.
Jones stays more on point with racial issues in his narrative, establishing that desegregation - also called "integration" at the time - did not integrate the races to any significant degree. It simply put them in coexistence, but not as America's melting pot. He is less clear in justifying his final point that reparations are the kick start needed to provide African Americans a stimulus to economic success. There is no evidence or precedent anywhere that gives weight to this argument. Jones also leaves the impression that he would just as soon the schools had not been desegregated, which is forthright but also suggests resignation on the prospect of racial harmony.
Drennen points out that West Virginia promptly and unequivocally complied with the Supreme Court ruling. Otherwise his reminiscences, while interesting, aren't very relevant to race and class in Appalachia. It addresses the racial chasm only obliquely, in what he isn't able to say. African Americans are bit players in his narrative, which essentially is about himself. His life has not been that of the typical white man he suggests he is. He experienced the first year of desegregation, and then departed to a life he describes of exclusiveness, license and privilege. It would have been more interesting to hear about his parents' discussions of why he should leave public schools than some of his other material in the book. Far more typical of whites - and blacks - were those who remained in public schools and lived the changes desegregation brought.
The editor, Delores Johnson provides a concluding "socio-linguistic rhetorical analysis" that may be of interest and use to scholars but was of limited use in evaluating the authors' messages. Language obscures racial differences and likenesses rather than illuminating them. You can analyze it for a thousand years and you'll never get to the bottom of it. The chasm and the answer exist at a level below language. That level is experience. Rent American History X for an evening, and you'll learn more about racial chasms, experience, despair and hope than syntax will ever reveal.
I attended the same junior high and high schools as Jones, two years behind him. I remember Mrs. Gregory, my African American 10th grade English teacher, who was tough as nails and left an indelible mark on every student she had; I recall more about her course than any other. I remember sitting in a luncheonette on Hale Street on a school day in 1958 and seeing a black man refused service; and the look on his face and feeling the blank in mine. I, like Jones, remember the First Baptist basketball teams; and the level they played was so far beyond my First Presby team that it wasn't even the same game. I, like Jones, remember Moses Newsome and Coach Jarrett, agents of change with entirely different styles. Wealthier white students who addressed the mothers and grandmothers of their black peers by their first names; these women were maids and cooks in the homes of white students who by day sat beside their black children in school. I remember black girls fighting in junior high school and reinforcing every prejudice the whites had to just stay in a different world. And a hundred others. It may or may not be of solace to Jones to know that whites' attitudes towards blacks in general were even worse then than he portrays them, and today are much more enlightened than he seems willing to grant.
For different reasons, each author of RWB&B has essentially led a life with his own race. Based on their narratives, it appears that neither has experienced the trials and successes of working closely with the other race, and learning through experience that they're not different at the core. What Jones and Drennen say is true and honest, yet there is much more that can lead us out of the woods. Many others have, through fate or determination, hung in there with the other race and gotten beyond the words. And it has taken decades.
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Title: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right by Al Franken ISBN: 0525947647 Publisher: E P Dutton Pub. Date: 29 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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