. Una-mafia!» , , magma.” v”? 9. D e. m. mm... H. _. .. m.‘ «5. h... T‘ .22....39 \ “5.1:. ., #53:‘ “.921 .a . d a: ham. 5., In“: t “hi-Vd‘ _ kw“: "u .5}. 3:04,. . . .~ .. ($4.2: zu.‘ . Wafiwahy $49.24 . . ‘ Ir 13., 1r?! hm”. . fl. . . «we, , i but . . imam? . .Ltntfi. n x . a 32.x» 2.)... BBQ. . u. Jarviil. THEBlS LITA LIBRARY Michigan State University This is to certify that the dissertation entitled WELCOME TO WHITETOWN, USA: CONSTRUCTIONS OF WHITENESS IN THE MIDWEST TOWN presented by Marjorie Sue Johnson has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for Ph.D . degree in English J7' 4 I. , . ‘ L L mu, L ‘)W at, MIL—1's, L2 Major professor Dme A)~/¢’JU MSU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution . '~_. _- '— v-fl—‘r— ~‘ {33% in F . ~. -‘ I" It -. 1- t-.. .- m .. 14¢. wz‘ MATERML ln___ PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record. To AVOID FINES return on or before date due. MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested. DATE DUE DATE DUE , DATE DUE 13%;) 4072002 JUN @4862 1“ “AR 2 E 2003 121993 6/01 cJCIRCJDmoDmm-nts ’ ‘ . ‘. i in} h .. 8-1).” WAFE 'JOLL ——-.— -— C05 WELCOME TO WHITEI’OWN, USA: CONSTRUCTIONS OF WHITENESS IN THE MIDWEST TOWN by Marjorie Sue Johnson A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English 2000 “2' O.- CONSTRL'C This projec- nidttest towns lil offer up ways, pe society. The desir isluSt another to understand the s hhiteness can m( it [0 See that rac White Ski n. Perso White skin while family, the SChOC and “my. Mi u“mandings. 53100], with lam Small midil [htli inhabitamt {03111111an We: tmem.” In 101118 mifesmions. 31180113 and the ABSTRACT WELCOME TO WHITEI‘OWN, USA: CONSTRUCTIONS OF WHITENESS IN THE MIDWEST TOWN By Marjorie Sue Johnson This project looks at ways the Other is manifest in small midwest towns like Ionia, Michigan, and searches for insights that offer up ways, personal and collective, to move toward a more just society. The desire to understand the Other is inherently violent. it is just another form of arrogant ownership. But the desire to understand the self can be an act of peace. The critique of Whiteness can move us toward that understanding, because it helps us to see that racism is a learned behavior that benefits people with white skin. Personal and institutional racism arise from a system of white skin privilege, perpetuated through institutions such as the family, the school and the government, and manifest both covertly and overtly. White people learn racism through tacit understandings, in unconscious ways, by observation, at home, at school, with family and friends. Small midwest towns serve as cultures of containment for their inhabitants, who tacitly absorb lessons about race that the community offers them and that create a duality of "us " and "them." In Ionia, Michigan, that containment narrative can be applied to the town's hidden Other, and can be seen in many manifestations, including institutions such as the public schools, the Prisons and the Ionia Free Fair That the tov demands a certain reaching consequt toward and perm participating in th Cultur. representation thr white identity arts 1930's and 1960': dominant culture at students at tor ttnia in the same titted in socio/et “infill our race Photograph orlilitapositions ‘0 dlSCtLis ways I That the town contains and does violence to hidden Others demands a certain erasure of memory and of emotion that has far reaching consequences to those whom the violence is directed toward and perhaps more profoundly, those who are managing or participating in the perpetration of violent behavior. Cultural Studies has shown me that culture is a zone of representation that is highly conflictual. While the construction of white identity arises from primarily hidden ideologies, even in the 1950's and 1960's in small towns there were resistances to dominant culture. I include comments from some of my classmates, all students at Ionia High School in the 1960's, who experienced Ionia in the same moment, in common but also varied ways. We varied in socio/ economic class, and in gender, but most of us would identify our race as "white." Photographic texts are used in this project as starting points, or juxtapositions, with different voices, including personal narrative, to discuss ways that history was constructed. Varied discourses and voices are linked together in order to avoid centering any one text and creating binary oppositions, and varied texts are juxtaposed together that sometimes are fragmentary and without closure. I chose hypermedia as the form and the theoretical basis of my dissertation because it does the opposite of containment: it links with Others. Put another way, the medium is the message, and my project is a creative experiment in decentering whiteness through the inherent connectiveness of hypermedia. Copyright by Marjorie Sue Johnson 2000 Dedication For Fred, Molly, Sam, Silas and Annie ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Serving on the doctoral committee of a "bad student" can be difficult. Diane, you are the kindest and most "real" academic I know. I love it that you aren't afraid to take chances. Thanks for sticking with me. Dr. G, you introduced me to the study of Whiteness. Thank YOu for your tolerance in guiding a white woman who should have recognized earlier her responsibility to go into the white C0mmunity, where the racism exists. "The Negroes aren't the racists. Where the really sincere white people have to do their 'proving' of themselves is not among the black victims, but out on the battle 11lies of where America's racism really is - and that's in their own hOme comunities; America's racism is among their own fellow vi shits That's “hi i armpitsh some: Cultural stu for being a great Sf te University. whites. That's where the sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have to work." - Malcolm X Cultural studies is the most exciting thing going. Thanks Dean, for being a great teacher and one of the funniest people at Michigan State University. vii hitSDtTCiiON The ilediu The Probie The Booze About the lhe Study hillCttN Before Wh Alter \thit THE lVSITTL'TIO The Famil) The Public The Prison The Ionia T hunter Regaining EI‘WORDS BEUOGMPHY TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION The Medium is the Message The Problem The Booze Cruise About the Author The Study of Whiteness THE TOWN Before White Invasion After White Invasion THE INSTITUTIONS The Family The Public Schools The Prisons The Ionia Free Fair THE FUTURE Regaining the Imagination KEYWORDS BIBLIOGRAPHY viii things had turnt being take Things had turned around, and now it was the palefaces who were being taken in with beads and trinkets. -Charles Portis Introduction Mainpage Contents Why Whitetown? I believe that race has no biological basis. It is a culturally constructed perception used to easily identify and place people, according to skin color, into their "rightful" place in the socio/ economic hierarchy in which we live. If we define a certain race as being "inferior" or " lazy" or "depraved," we can rationalize taking their land, stealing their labor or taking away their freedom (Chomsky). We refuse to think of ourselves as a country divided by social classes, and generally people believe that there are no class boundaries in their towns, or they identify themselves as all " middle class." We want to deceive ourselves, declaring that all people are playing on a level playing field. But the truth is we have created a nation of haves and have-nots, and skin color is an easy way of delineating who wins the game. The question is, who benefits from racism? Racism is not a tool of the oppressed, but of the oppressor. The peOple who benefit from it are the people in power. If you are unsure of who is in 1 purer, look at bot and their running strut the color a 1950‘s and 1960' in: th‘ngs haven tritudes toward tan a wom Shrines of COlt him I have 1an mnSCiously b. Difpttuaung ra“l mermause 1 nl ”We Walls 9L, . ‘ “at“ 15 1101 83. power, look at both major political parties' presidential candidates and their running mates for the year 2000 . Their color and gender mirror the color and gender of the major political candidates in the 1950's and 1960's, when I was growing up in the midwest. It seems that things haven't changed much in our country when it comes to attitudes toward race, class and gender. I am a woman with "white" skin. I am a beneficiary of the privileges of colonialism in the United States, and I daily partake of them. I have learned the oppressors' ways, and I consciously and unconsciously benefit from racism every day. My desire to avoid perpetuating racism has prompted me to continually critique my life, because I have felt the alluring "comfort" offered within the protective walls of the dominant culture (the white club), and know that it is not easy to resist. It is easy to close my eyes. My search for answers to the problem of inequality in our society led me to explore again the community where I was raised. I began to see it as a replica of hundreds of small towns in the midwest in the ways that privilege is cloaked with "caring," in the ways that selfishness is hidden within " family values," in the ways that violence is masked with "love." I have been taught in subtle ways that I am superior, and need protection from "them," and I have also felt the emotional and physical abandonment that comes from questioning and disobeying the unwritten codes of imperialism. Why did I step out of that "comfort" of dominance and how do I maintain an awareness of stepping back in? This project looks at the ways some signs, discourses and institutions interacted in small midwest town cultures in the 1950's and 1960's to maintain 2 rospiicity in a sit :heyare “passed c uppressing Others complicity in a violent society. Our racist ideologies and the ways they are " passed down" serve to privilege "white" people through Oppressing Others, but our racism ultimately serves to oppress us. Introduction Contents The Medium is the Message The Problem Introduction to the Booze Cruise About the Author The Study of Whiteness he have to hell: we harence Thor As I attemr intten dissenar frat the reason l 'anas is the inte: mains white dSSEl'lathn 1 WE the Power SWC‘ Elite Pfiyilege. ”break into ju mlllSthe" (SIUC dOftoral Stladen th _ . . “EDD. “TIIIEn The "Medium is the Message“ Decentering Whiteness through Hypertext We have to believe in the power of the imagination because it's all we have, and ours is stronger than theirs. -Iawrence Thomhill, from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie As I attempted to trudge my way through a traditionally written dissertation to meet the requirements of a Ph.D., I realized that the reason it did not feel right was because it wasn't right. My focus is the interrogation of Whiteness, that aspect of racism that maintains white privilege, and I felt that by writing a traditional dissertation I was participating in a system that exists to maintain the power structure within the university, which in turn maintains white privilege. In Elspeth Stuckey's words, I realized I was trying to "...break into justice by acquiring the habits that have promoted injustice" (Stuckey 41). Dissertations, those rites of passage for the doctoral student into academia, are based on complex and dense theory, written in "academise" and unreadable for a general audience. And while theory is important because it helps us understand the ideologies behind everyday life, writing about theory usually means excluding all readers except academics. I am interested in the places that the intellect can take us, but language is political, and I am for inclusion. Diane Brunner suggests that forms of writing that are conceived in gendered terms - that is, public (masculine) and private (feminine) - create assumptions that privilege some and 4 marine othe tuhonhip by bit sane rein. Nancy sails the rec lat sis the question other to speak v iZICblographica ssh-narrative wt ithat and aut interstitial mate ”Presentation ; itils‘een MERLE itticuhte the p m 'WBOnal manure and a flame, Cultu marginalize others, and she suggests strategies for reclaiming authorship by blending personal and public writing (Brunner). In the same vein, Nancy Miller says that the case for personal writing entails the reclaiming of theory: turning theory back on itself. She asks the question, "Do you have to turn your back on theory in order to speak with a non-academic voice" (Miller 5)? She calls for autobiographical performance within the act of criticism, including self-narrative woven into critical argument, the interweaving of political and autobiographical argument, the insertion of framing or interstitial material, recontextualized self-productions, self- representation as political representativity, ongoing dialogics b8tween differenuncamamnsgfiheself, and head-on attempts to articulate the personal and theoretical together. Alan Nadel claims that, " personal narration is required for any form of historical narrative and also, necessarily, disrupts it. While the more Pervasive, cultural narratives are echoed and reiterated - in the .fOrmS of national narratives, religious dogma, class signifiers, courtship rituals - with a contagion that resembles viral epidemics, Personal narration oscillates, situationally, between identification With and alienation from a historical order" (Nadel 3-4). Therefore for DOlitical reasons and for reasons inherent in hypermedia, this prolect deviates from the traditional dissertation form in that W is deliberately woven in with theory, not to get at "the truth," but to demonstrate the ambivalent and shifting relationship of personal narrative with historical narrative. It is written in non-academic language (plain talk) as much as possible, not to oversimplify the complexities of the ideologies behind S 528113) life, DUI refect to be a sp immmr dreams allow pec correct with our new ways lmagir egress our discr it’s fun. i want [1 reproduce white 53“? a more acti Hilfifional disse thflege is an lr Ui'ETCOIne by ra' damn has alts: m SmTeallSm Haida)" life, ( inaural SubVer s in life‘ 511er md‘mt} aCrQ I ill ~ . he” fl‘G'Stel Ichose ,ll dissertallOn b truth Othfirg. i' we“ is a c the inhemm ut- :De ’medra , everyday life, but rather to approach theory (to look, to observe, to reflect, to be a spectator) in imaginative ways. I am all for imagination. Active imaginations and visions and dreams allow people to see in new ways. We use imagination to connect with our true selves and to envision ourselves and others in new ways. Imagination helps us seek out that which is hidden and express our discoveries in creative ways. It helps us to explore, and it's fun. I want this project, about how small midwest towns reproduce white privilege through containment of the Other, to have a more activist, surrealist, and imaginative form than a traditional dissertation can provide. Surrealists believe that white Privilege is an inherently irrational phenomenon and it cannot be ‘ overcome by rational means alone. "Surrealist intervention in this domain has always emphasized the active imagination, in keeping With surrealism's fundamental aim: the realization of poetry in everyday life. Of course it also involves revolutionary criticism, integral subversion, aggressive humor, and direct action. In poetry as in life, surrealism embodies the utmost fraternization and solidarity across the color-line as well as relentless struggle against the very existence of the color-.line, and against all those who enforce it or tolerate it" (Chicago Surrealist Group). I chose hypermedia as the form and the theoretical basis of my dissertation because it does the opposite of containment: it links Wtth Others. Put another way, the medium is the message, and my Prolect is a creative experiment in decentering whiteness through the inherent connectiveness of hypermedia. Mike Mosher describes hyDermedia as "...a rapid reading experience of image, caption, and 6 choice of nas'ig; narrath'e text a urteaching. a u question 'hhat aphorists. thinl Cnnfort, Wild ties. upon a scr We" (.‘sloshe Etta Ol h)perm issertauon. Tl iridifionaj (113j mmint: With numbered and 0T"n0nsequ8n. iii Uaditionai timbers. The r and iititres the If i’Ou a1- t'tilen of my ‘ $th at Mich dimmed, act Litters“), Gl‘d tourney). are cc choice of navigation. In designing hypertexts, the chunks of narrative text are at times a single idea on a page worth recounting or teaching, a unique discovery or rediscovery. Each answers the question 'What's the big idea?‘ This is a narrative form friendly to aphorists, thinking in terse, dense chunks in the tradition of Chamfort, Wilde, Cioran, or signage artist Jenny Holzer. A single idea upon a screen is often quite enough, packaged with a single image" (Mosher 1). It is obvious from Mosher's description that the idea of hypermedia is worlds away in theory from the traditional dissertation. This will demand that it also be worlds away in form. Traditional dissertation requirements demand a linear format beginning with a title page and ending with a bibliography, numbered and formatted according to strict guidelines. Hypertext, or "nonsequential onscreen writing" (Ted Nelson), inherently defies that traditional format, and has no linearity on which to connect numbers. The reader moves around the site at their own discretion, and weaves their own meaning from their meanderings. If you are reading this text, you are reading the hard copy version of my dissertation, printed as a requirement of the Graduate School at Michigan State University. This printed document is demanded, according to Associate Dean Tony Nunez, Michigan State University Graduate School, because Graduate Schools around the country are considering ways to make “...the transition from traditional to electronic production and storage of documents. As these issues are debated, 99% of the schools continue to see microfilming of the printed document as the most secure archival strategy even in the 2 lst century. No one has a good idea of what 7 trill become the W that reason 1 printed copy of ' tinfatuation essr presented in a In 'a‘ormation.” 3. aectronically, a allowing the tea Therefore, a bar because the p05 sebsite are not that my PtOlECt CD Which will a mantr- It (Om Mere that the pmleCI green“. of the hard co} Emulsion the e1l eki‘QrimEmal l will become the archival gold standard for electronic dissertations. For that reason the Graduate School at MSU continues to demand a printed copy of the dissertation and continues to insist that any information essential for the support of the text of the thesis is presented in a form suitable for microfilming without loss of information." My project, however, is intended to be experienced electronically, as a web site. It is meant to be nonsequential, allowing the reader to explore at their own pace and direction. Therefore, a hard copy will not make “sense" in the usual way, because the possibilities for making connections while exploring the website are not available in a hard copy, which demands a linearity that my project inherently denies. Included with this hard copy is a CD which will allow you to experience the project in the intended manner. It contains supplemental materials to the hard copy. I believe that the graduate school formatting demands effected my project greatly. As I felt pressure to conform to the linear demands of the hard copy, my web site became more linear also. However, I envision the electronic version as an ever-changing and experimental entity where I can continue to work toward new political visions. My decision to use plain talk and personal narrative in my project, as mentioned, sets it apart from the traditional dissertation format. I also use photographic texts as starting points, or luxtapositions, to discuss ways that history was constructed. "All photographs have the effect of making their subjects see at least momentarily strange, capable of meaning several things at once, or nothing at all...Estrangement allows us to see the subject in new and 8 unetpecied W3} mysterious becl inexplicable as t data upon whic the prerogative an image does 1 an image to rep smuggle for me he historian's l terresenttng u insisrstancr lISt tie Political t-is hi1). Cultural 5 “herniation while identity . unexpected ways. Photographs entice viewers by their silence, the mysterious beckoning of another world. It is as enigmas, opaque and inexplicable as the living world itself, that they most resemble the data upon which history is based. Just as the meaning of the past is the prerogative of the present to invent and choose, the meaning of an image does not come intact and whole. Indeed, what empowers an image to represent history is not just what it shows but the struggle for meaning we undergo before it, a struggle analogous to the historian's effort to shape an intelligible and usable past. Representing the past, photographs serve the present's need to understand itself and measure its future. Their history lies finally in the political visions they may help us realize (Trachtenberg xvi- xvii). Cultural Studies has shown me that culture is a zone of representation that is highly conflictual. While the construction of white identity arises from primarily hidden ideologies, even in the 1950's and 1960's in small towns there were resistances to dominant culture. I include comments from some of my classmates, all students at Ionia High School in the 1960's. We experienced Ionia in the same moment, in common but also varied ways. We varied in socio/economic class, and in gender, but most of us would identify our race as "white." I link varied discourses and voices together in order to avoid centering any one text and creating binary oppositions, and lUXtapose varied texts together that sometimes are fragmentary and Without closure. Roland Barthes, in 1967, declared " the death of the anthor," which means that readers construct their own meanings, no 9 matter what th project, I invite This proj searches for in more toward a Other is inhere Ownership. But Peace. While I . the white smai untouched_ 33' ”(alert 1 Oblefl to the r describe] ‘ Tony Morr- matter what the author intends. In this consciously postmodern project, I invite you, the reader, to make meaning with me. This project looks at ways the Other is manifest in Ionia and searches for insights that offer up ways, personal and collective, to move toward a more just society. The desire to understand the Other is inherently violent. It is just another form of arrogant ownership. But the desire to understand the self can be an act of peace. While I deconstruct, analyze, and generally mess with texts of the white small town, the juxtaposed texts of Others' voices remain untouched. My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served. - Tony Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the literary Imagination Link to The Electronic labyrinth, (http://jefferson.village.virginiaedu/elab/elab.html) a great study of hypertext technology For more on hypertext and other related and interesting subjects, link to Bad Subjects (http://eserver.org/bs/44/mosher.html) Link to You Say You Want a Revolution/ Hypertext and the laws of Media, (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/vOO1 / 1 .3 moult hrOp.html?) by Stuart Moulthrop *Marshall McLuhan 10 the pos betss'een the r “becoming" ti Sometin inequities in C eSSéiitialist an an angry, I an Bur thEn difference, an. others, and W2 Incarnations of the Self The postmodern "self" is fragmented, with no distinction between the represented and the real. I continually revise my life, " becoming" the different representations required of me. Sometimes I am such a bitch. I blame, and blame. The inequities in our society seem all to stem from the white man. I am essentialist and filled with hate. I am self-destructive. I am creative. I am angry. I am Mad White Woman. But then I see that each little thing I do in the world makes a difference, and I know that love is the answer. I feel compassion for others, and want to help. Why can't we all just get along? I am Madonna. I attend the university. I work toward my Ph.D., all the while in 11 fear of being res they find out? I it used to be! Mi else it they wan father. of cours fear of being revealed as an impostor. I am too dumb to do this. Will they find out? I am Barbie. Oh! And I don't think racism is as bad as it used to be! Minorities have just as much opportunity as anyone else if they want to work. Who is the person I respect the most? My father, of course! BACK to The Medium is the Message 12 Personal Narrative Whiteness In personal experience, as it is in culture, the fissure between event and history is broached by narrative. Individuals construct a 'self,‘ according to psychologist Jerome Bruner, out of disparate activity valorized by narratives that turn that activity into what he calls 'acts of meaning.‘ A life devoid of such acts, I think, can best be exemplified by the very advanced Alzheimer sufferer. Without narratives of the role actions perform in time, advanced Alzheimer sufferers lack knowledge of the roles they perform in their own lives. Alzheimer sufferers who cannot retain the actions of their immediate or derivative environment cannot organize the sequences or perceive the patterns that permit events to become recognizable qua events. This is the uneventful life taken to its logical limits, 13 writing degree : 3t. 'writing degree zero' or escape from the 'myth of presence"(Nadel 3). BACLto The Medium is the Message 14 CAUTION.) WorKSDe’Jt—h 7! ...I hate to say it, but it's true that I am not a really good academic. For me, intellectual work is related to what you could call "aestheticism," meaning transforming yourself...I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation. That's the reason also why, when people say, "Well, you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else," my answer is..."Well, do you think I have worked like that all those years to say the same thing and not to be changed?" This transformation of one's self by one's own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting? - Michel Foucault, an interview by Stephen Riggins I have to give up the thought of immersing myself in theory if I'm to be creative. To be truthful, when I was teaching university - I stOpped in 1984 - I felt it was impossible to go on teaching the kind of thing that was really exciting my students and to write novels. It was one or the other. Whether I immersed myself in theory or I went out and read some theory and wrote novels. I decided to get out. It's 15 not that I'm l incompatible lflaim" the "E Fpttsentatio ther in \'( not that I'm hostile to theory; it's just that they're somehow incompatible activities. - AS Byatt "I "am" the "academic" who hopes that the writing of this paper, this representation, will exceed the represented, and not reveal her as an intruder in your world." - Barbie BACK to Personal Narrative 16 Nobody, ct‘ lien.” tells Will men. put in ac time I am'yed i heir peeple tb new White peg Whole City of deititption oi Nttty the 33 “is about ho Particularly : “P in the 19 alter“): or ( Small mtd‘wr that Contain The Problem Nobody, an Indian man in Jim Jarmusch's 1996 film "Dead Man," tells William Blake a story about being taken captive by white men, put in a cage, and put on display in several cities. "And each time I arrived in another city somehow the white men had moved all their people there ahead of me. Each new city contained the same new white people as the last, and I could not understand how a whole city of people could be moved so quickly." Nobody's description of cities full of the exact same white people, all behaving exactly the same way, is what Welcome to Whitetown, USA is about. It is about how white communities reproduce their identity, and it is particularly about the small town of Ionia, Michigan, where I grew up in the 1950's and 1960's. It is about racism, and especially about alterity, or Otherness, and how, in many-faceted and hidden ways, small midwest towns reproduce white identity by creating a duality that contains that part of us which we fear the most. Settling the town of Ionia in the early eighteenth century included claiming ownership of land in the Grand River valley that was already occupied by Native Americans. A Grand River Valley historian wrote that "...the spring of 1833 is the era of civilized occupation...The 28th of May brought our pilgrims to Ionia. It was too late for putting in cr0ps by clearing the land, so they bought an Indian plantation, plowed and planted five acres with corn and potatoes. They paid the Indians $25 for their crops and improvements...The Indian settlement was where the city of Ionia now is. Some five hundred Indians, who were under the Flat River 17 chief. stopped some corn. As i mutual benefit had sold their the whites. Thr 80Vernment" t “hat mi insured in "0 apple? Perh. “WM the 1 essentially s UndErsmd ”moral high Our ( Spectrum r the New \\ Where We; chief, stopped there, for making sugar, fishing, etc. They also raised some corn. As friends, the Indians and settlers lived together, with mutual benefit. The first winter passed, the Indians knowing they had sold their rights, cheerfully gave up their cherished homes to the whites. They knew they occupied only by the sufferance of the government" (Everett 47). What mindset allowed the settlers to believe they were justified in "owning" land that was already occupied by other people? Perhaps if we can figure out the psychological trickery that allowed the settlers to maintain a facade of self respect while essentially scamming Indians out of their land, it will help us to understand the way small midwest towns continue to claim the "moral high ground." Our country was founded by Puritans, who imagined a spectrum of what Leo Marx called "ecological images." On one end, the New World was imagined as a lovely garden, an Edenic paradise where weary pilgrims would be free from the constraints of civilization and experience abundance and harmony through nature. At the other end of the ecological spectrum America was envisioned as a hideous wilderness with terrible forces of nature that required taming by aggressively disciplined and intelligent colonists (Marx 42). To fulfill their errand in the New World, it was supposed that certain characteristics must erdst in these settlers chosen by God (Gray). How have these characteristics continued to manifest themselves in small midwest towns? Small midwest towns serve as cultures of containment for their inhabitants, who tacidy absorb lessons about race that the 1 8 community of It midwest towns and "them" Th (them) by com resen'ations. Ir unconscious br Street corners maintain Whllt that developg ttSDOnsibility that is hetpru'J the World WE? DTOmofing Ihl community offers them. In many-faceted and hidden ways, small midwest towns construct white identity by creating a duality of " us " and "them." They attempt to separate themselves from the Other (them) by containing the Other, in cities, in prisons, on reservations. In turn, the residents of small towns are contained by unconscious belief systems, or ideologies, learned at home, on street comers and in institutions such as public schools, that maintain white privilege. Alan Nadel describes a national narrative that developed in the US after Hiroshima to control the fear and responsibility endemic to possessing atomic power, and it is one that is helpful to apply to small towns in the midwest. "The story of containment had derived its logic from the rigid major premise that the world was divided into two monolithic camps, one dedicated to promoting the inextricable combination of capitalism, democracy, and (J udeo-Christion) religion, and one seeking to destroy that ideological amalgamation by any means. By the mid-1960's, the problems with the logic of containment - its blindness, its contradictions, and its duplicities - had started to be manifest in a public discourse displaying many traits that would later be associated with 'postmodernism.‘ Those traits included not only the assertion that history depended on fictional representation but also that frames and roles were arbitrary, and that centered meaning and authority was a myth. The discourse was also characterized by a self-referential awareness of historicity and artificiality and a cognizance of the fissure between 'history' and 'event.‘ In that cold war containment narrative, insecurity was absorbed by internal security, internationalism by global strategy, apocalypse and utopia 1 9 by a Christian ti Other - by tom tummy supp iomal or illicit product of rorr {Nadel 14). In 3Pplied to the My manifes The Public 1“qu thro including W history text Sacatewea) Omen The PriSC “HOW" 1 SIOne “.au by a Christian theological mandate, and xenophobia - the fear of the Other - by courtship, the activity in which Otherness is the necessary supplement to seduction, whether that seduction is formal or illicit, voluntary or coerced, hetero- or homosexual, the product of romantic alliance, business transaction, or date rape" (Nadel 14). In Ionia, Michigan, that containment narrative can be applied to the town's own monstrous Other, and can be seen in many manifestations, including the following examples: The Public Schools: The public schools, prisons in their own right, insured through both intended and unintended curriculum, including practically a complete omission of people of color from history textbooks (except for token " helpers" of whites, like Sacajewea) that the children of the town would not become the Other. The Prisons: Part of the landscape of the town, unquestioned and " normal" because they had always been there, were the threatening stone walls and towering barbed wire fences of the prisons. Those fortresses of containment concealed a large population of people of color that "we" never conceived of as part of "our" town. The Ionia Free Fair: The Ionia Free Fair was a yearly event where desire for the Other could be satisfied by Freak Shows, Girlie Shows, and a crowded carnival midway where local townspeople of all classes, "carnies," and Others brushed shoulders and could satisfy their desire for an "exotic Other. " 20 The probh Our towns sep. most, but thE)+ thousands of sl m‘th "caring." values," by air "lose“ A psyc methods of cl‘| system, and 1' demand certs (0.1mm III a safe Place ( tO hidden Qtt emOtiOn that The problem for whites is that containment works both ways. Our towns separate us from the monstrous Other that we fear the most, but they also contain us. Ionia is a possible replica of thousands of small midwest towns in the way that it cloaks privilege with "caring," and in the ways that it hides selfishness with "family values," by almost unnoticed sleight of hand, masking hate with "love." A psychological network is created in small towns through methods of child-rearing, indoctrination through the public school system, and through communal rules of "common sense" that demand certain behavior and a " proper" state of mind so that community members have a sense of security and being cared for in a safe place (Hochschild). That the town contains and does violence to hidden Others demands a certain erasure of memory and of emotion that has far reaching consequences to those whom the violence is directed toward and perhaps more profoundly, those who are managing or participating in the perpetration of violent behavior. Small towns taught us to deny the violence of the present, forget our history and manage our own hearts (Hochschild). The irony is that the monstrous Other that we want to protect ourselves from is us. By projecting our own worst qualities onto Others we can remain innocent of history, we can deserve the future. But what price did we pay for forgetting history? W W 21 BACK to Introduction Mainpage FORWARD to Introduction to the Booze Cruise 22 Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don't have anything if you don't have the stories. Their evil is mighty but it can't stand up to our stories. So they try to destroy the stories let the stories be confused or forgotten. They would like that They would be happy Because we would be defenseless then. He rubbed his belly. I keep them here [he said] Here, put your hand on it See, it is moving. There is life here for the people. And in the belly of this story the rituals and the ceremony are still growing. -Frorn Ceremony BACK to The Problem 23 Roadblot the landscape cars with red 1 Earned to en} Earned how t« and there was the ones the}- scaetimes int ‘3 “15mg. ESpQ One tirr airmached t “MEG him troopers and her, fired med insram One in Imk Sire] around Ioni. sou, ”Slum Hoses throu' mack Onto ETEED plaCe Pullin, filmed to “II 1113 Last Running Roadblocks Roadblocks, like Christmas, are an occasional decoration on the landscape of a prison town. An escaped convict causes police cars with red lights flashing to quickly appear, and as teenagers we learned to enjoy the holiday from afar. We worked around it. We learned how to navigate around roadblocks with our contraband, and there was an immunity bestowed upon us as town kids. We were the ones they were protecting, after all. Roadblocks added a sometimes inconvenient, but exciting and dangerous element to our cruising, especially since drama always could occur at a roadblock. One time at a roadblock a car stopped and as the trooper approached the car his shotgun discharged accidentally, the kick knocked him off balance, and he fell to the ground. The other troopers and officers on the scene, thinking he'd been shot by the driver, fired together at the innocent victim in the car and he was killed instantly. One intoxicating mid-Michigan July night Ricki and Gidget and I drank Strohs beer, my father's brand, and traveled the dusty roads around Ionia. Ricki's haunt, she led us by rich green fields and black soil, pastures of horses, cows, with that rich manure smell filling our noses through the Open windows. We crunched down the gravel roads onto the two-tracks, into dark canopies of trees and dark green places. Pulling the car up to the tall weeds, we eagerly jumped out and moved to the pond's edge, breathing it in, surveying it all in an instant, as teenagers do. The dragon flies hovering above the snake 24 grass. the sun emptiness and grass, the sun reflected on the glassy moving water and on the emptiness and quiet of the day. Gidget was first. Pulling off her madras shorts and sleeveless shell, she ran headlong in, and soon was bobbing and disappearing out in the middle. Ricki and I leaned against the hot car with our beers, enjoying the sun on our bare arms and legs. The car doors were flung open, the car instantly transformed into a different space, a bedroom, a kitchen, a living room. The radio softly gave us a soundtrack. "Come here! You guys have gotta come and see this! Hurry up!" Ricki and I squinted out, not quite ready for the cold water. But we quickly stripped and paddled out to where Gidget had splashed and disappeared again. Ricki and I took a deep gulp of air and dove down, into the cold depths. I saw Gidget's feet, moving through the cloudy water, and felt goose bumps squeeze my cold white skin. Gidget's body came into focus as I quickly moved down, and other bodies appeared in my vision, against her whiteness. There were stiff arms holding angular lanterns and rigid red jackets set against blue trousers. Chipped heads and faces with vacant eyes stared at me, and at points beyond. Gliding closer, I moved my hand over the plaster, slimy and rigamortis hard. I saw a haystack of bodies resting rigidly, black smooth faces of proud stable boys with jaunty red hats, all in poses of perpetual servitude, on the bottom of the cold spring-fed pond. Rising fast, our eyes met. "Holy shit!" "Let's get out of here!" We gasped and splashed our way to shore, laughing but drawing our feet up from the cool depths, from the unknown. Our clothes stuck to our wet skin and our hair dripped onto 25 our shoulders us a soundtra into confiden‘ mddahund: "Th-ere weren There were at: That Ill; he might Tht' drugged with it'5 the Micht 533‘s. and hat! WM and up and Ionia them Sq prison pODu Climbs back Black ahappemm and the fad Sloppy, RIC] aughing. "a “We and . our shoulders, into the warm upholstery, and the radio softly gave us a soundtrack as the car crawled out of the two-track, onto gravel, into confident places. From then, the evening was enchanted. "How could a hundred stable boys end up on the bottom of the pond?" "There weren't a hundred, there were like, maybe twenty." "No. There were at least thirty." "Jesus Christ! Who put them there?" That night, in a house on Hackett Street: The phone rings in the night. The dad, an employee of the Ionia prison system, is drugged with sleep, but he puts on his professional voice, "Yallo." It's the Michigan Training Unit, a medium security prison. "OK," he says, and hangs up the phone in the kitchen. Another prisoner has escaped and he has been informed, or warned. Roadblocks are set up and Ionia's other self is on alert. The dad touches the door on his clothes cabinet, behind which rests, waiting and loaded, a .38 Smith 6: Wesson snubnose revolver. He's made enemies of some of the prison population - not intentionally, it just comes with the job. He climbs back in bed and eventually finds an unfit sleep. Black faces float in our heads as the beer goes down, an event, a happening, and the trees blur by as the sun sinks pink in the west and the radio softly giving us a soundtrack. later, slurring and sloppy, Ricki falls into a carload of boys, with much screaming and laughing. "You guys won't believe what happened!" Gidget and I, alone and sentimental, slowly squint our way toward her house, willing the two roads to become one. "Whoa! A little to the left! Okay, here's my driveway. Turn right!" Alone, 1 speed down M2 1 toward home, flying past the County Park, past the Michigan Training Unit, around the curve and into the 26 o'ty limits. Dr‘ of my eye, the and 8166. l he head down as Cit tomlhg 0 officer has hi} “Can i s Stitches the city limits. Driving at the speed of light, I notice, out of the corner of my eye, flashing red lights as I fly through the intersection of M21 and M66. I hear a loud CRACK (a gun?) and I instinctively jerk my head down as I glance out the rear view mirror and see the police car coming on fast. I pull over, rehearsing how to act sober. The officer has his gun drawn, and approaches my window. "Can I see your driver's license and registration?" His flashlight searches the backseat. "Where are you going so fast?" "Open your trunk, please." "You afraid your parent's might be mad you're out so late?" "You're Arnold's daughter?" "Come on back here to the parking lot." They left me sitting there in the empty parking lot next to the intersection for an hour as they communed near their cars. Walkie talkies, blinking lights, barricades, and deep masculine voices. Soft laughter. Finally the officer soberly approaches my window again. "You'd better get home," he says. "And be careful." BACK to The Problem 27 'p— When I was a teenager in Ionia, Michigan, one of our favorite pastimes was booze cruising. Tooling the gut (riding around town) and finding the grasser (locating the farm in the country where the keg was and where the kids were partying in the back 40) were absorbing activities during adolescence. When we went looking for answers to the greater questions of existence, we were usually chided for thinking too much, so the life of the mind was something we awkwardly attempted to explore among ourselves. We created our social life as a meaningful alternative to an existence controlled by adults. We explored where we could. Our parents weren't too concerned. Mine were partying too, perhaps at the Elks Club, and others were at the Knights of Columbus Hall, or playing cards with friends. Or at the bar. It was a social time. You are invited to climb into my Dodge Dart and joyrlde with my friends and me. Maybe we will get lost. Maybe getting lost will amuse us. If you get separated from us don't worry, just click on the car and we will be back to pick you up. Introduction to the Booze Cruise The 1950's and the 1960's spelled CONFORMITY in Ionia, Michigan. From the linear mainstreet to the neatly mowed lawns, from the church spires rising above the trees to the drab flat-roofed 28 school bulldlngs were "all the san lIlEll' rne, knew ' nstems as all of neighboring sm looked and beh. hthose towns, the books at In like Greem'ille, on double ext: succeed,» or th lineman "WP lhat nude 113 n lhdht'dual Cliff idem“! allow. allowed us an. .111 are all 91 Seen in pOlitit heme that . 3311136011. Ar lake! But jet. 1 dlfferences Cl school buildings, from common language to common clothing, we were "all the same." I was comfortable, for the most part. Everyone knew me, knew my parents, knew that we held the same silent belief systems as all of the families. I could drive into any of the neighboring small towns and feel perfectly at home, because I looked and behaved exactly in the same manner as the young people in those towns, and we all looked like the pictures of Jesus I saw in the books at the Episcopal Church. IfI went to small towns close by, like Greenville, Portland, or Grand Ledge, we mixed easily, because our double existed there, in the "class clown," or the "most likely to succeed," or the "prettiest," or the " most athletic." We were American "types," different but the same. We reproduced identities that made us "individuals" while reproducing an identity that denied individual differences. The practice of making identity/ taking away identity allowed us to have differences within our commonality. It allowed us another rhetorical tool of Whiteness, the argument that "we" are all ethnically different. In Ionia, these differences could be seen in political identification, religion, and nationality. I remember hearing that " the Catholics stick together," including their political affiliation. And they went to confession three times a day, for Christ sake! But let's get back downtown, with the youth culture, where differences could be tested, where identities could be practiced. Within the highly "civilized" spaces of the town, namely in institutions like the churches and the schools, and within the highly surveillance-prone public spaces such as the streets and the businesses, we were " normal." It was outside of this "civilized" space of the town, on the country roads and further toward nature, on the 29 dirt road fields ant presente mmtne of course spaces 0! mdfldu 'II' dirt roads and two-tracks, as well as in the less—controlled country fields and hidden remote gathering spots that youth culture drama presented itself. It was in those communal spaces that behaviors were tried out that helped us seek out meanings for ourselves. And, of course, what allowed us the freedom to move in and out of the spaces of the town with ease and panache, stamping us with individuality and at the same time commonality, were our cars. Just as John Fiske describes the beach as an anomalous category between land and sea that is neither one nor the other but has characteristics of both, the country spaces of our youth were neither the civilized spaces of the “town" or the uncivilized spaces of “wilderness," but contained both elements. Fiske described this "between" space as having "simply too much meaning, an excess of meaning potential, that derives from its status as anomalous. In tribal societies this overflow of meaning on the anomalous is 30 controlled by deF country roads \s he”normal" da organtzed Stages out or class hatt bEhaV'tors Expec “315196 or chall Fiske Uses mfonCEmed 1 Chlture in One 1 WWW? tr mute/Cultur- l‘Oung people meaning. “Yn Eiffel-encg b controlled by designating it as sacred or taboo" (Fiske 43). The country roads were spaces where we went on weekends, outside of the "normal" days designated for work and school, and were often organized stages, such as grassers, where gender roles were tried out or class battles were fought, often with fists, and the normalized behaviors expected of us by parents and by extension, society, were resisted or challenged. Fiske uses Levi-Strauss’ work, demonstrating " how all cultures are concerned to articulate this distinction between nature and culture in one way or another, and thus make meanings in and for the culture" (Fiske 44). I am interested in how this dichotomy of nature/ culture is articulated in small towns like Ionia, and how young people of the towns used the various spaces to make meaning. "But Levi-Strauss’ work also requires us to define the difference between nature and the natural. Nature is precultural reality. It is that external world before any cultural perception or sense-making process has been applied to it. But the natural is what culture makes of nature. In other words, the natural is a cultural product, and nature exists only as a conceptual opposition to culture" (Fiske 44). Perhaps Fiske's method of mapping out the nature/culture range of meanings at the beach can help us make some sense of the spaces of the booze cruise. Although the illegal and often sensuous activities of the booze cruise originated and often spilled over onto the streets of the town, usually an attempt was made by young people to confine those activities to areas outside of town. The town, being a space of high surveillance and control, was a preliminary place for making 3 1 contacts, obtaining contraband and moving information, such as where the grasser was located. These activities were carried on under the eyes of police and adult culture, which demanded a masking of intention. Of course these coded behaviors were followed to different degrees by different groups. For instance, women were forced to wear masks of innocence more than men because a double standard existed in regard to gender regarding behavior. Also, there was a macho image, which was also connected to car culture, which equated speed and reckless behavior with male sexuality. Some squealing mighty rubber tire tracks were left on city streets as well as county roads, acting to dissolve, momentarily, the civilized space of the town. Moving outward from the highly controlled city streets, city parks and fairgrounds were mediating places where "culture" has allowed "nature" a more dominant place in the landscape, but ones that are definitely on the "culture" side of the culture/ nature continuum. Instead of the highly manicured lawns of the town, where a battle with " weeds" (nature )is forever being fought, we find more tolerance toward "messiness," in that dirt, weeds and signs of nature's decay are more visible. Here we find spaces where children can yell and play without interfering with the composure of the city streets and where adults park and eat their lunches. Very much an intermediate space, it is neither culture or nature, but contains qualities of both, with park benches and picnic tables providing a "cultured" space in a "natural" setting. "The natural is a culture's production or reproduction of nature, and thus what is perceived as a rule of law of nature is only a displaced or misrecognized rule by 32 which to define ' rules for use of t and indicators 0 and public toilet Progressit' loads, blacktop which to define social normality" (Fiske 50-51). Therefore we see rules for use of the park, such as times when the parks are closed and indicators of expected behavior, such as receptacles for trash and public toilets. Progressively more into the realm of nature were the paved roads, blacktop roads, gravel, dirt and two-track roads of the booze cruise. These roads, most of which were what Fiske calls "public sites of transition," and functioned as neutral places where people moved toward a destination, became the destination for youth culture. These roads and the country fields and clearings where grassers took place, were the outer reaches of civilization, the anomalous space between the "civilized" town (culture) and uncivilized and untamed wilderness (nature) where young people could leave culture and test themselves against the untamed wilderness beyond, or at least as it existed in theory. Whatever wilderness existed in Michigan was pretty much annihilated by the late 1800's. The taming of the wilderness by disciplined colonists is still evident today in the way we hold nature at bay in our cities while creating social standards for the "nature" allowed within, such as diligently mown lawns and the setting apart of natural settings such as parks and recreation areas where we can enjoy "nature" at our leisure and within our comfort level (within the safe context of culture). 33 TEE TOWN STRE'T It'tl\TO\\.\' & P"'fi’fi oak .. ~ RE) SIDBN KH- THE TOWN STREETS CITY PARKS PAVED BLACKTOP GRAVEL DIRT ROADS DOWNTOWN 8: & ROADS ROADS ROADS & (CULTURE) SIDEWALKS FAIRGROU NDS 1W0 TRACKS COUNTRY FIELDS FOREST & (NATURE) CLEARINGS CULTURE NATURE CIVILIZATION WILDERNESS MIND BODY SAFEI'Y DANGER CONTROL FREEDOM ADULT CHILD The booze cruise was an anomalous category that wasn't fully nature or culture, but shared both categories. It provided a place where youth culture could push the rules of culture toward nature. The body, that part of the natural world that culture attempts to ignore and that reminds us that we too are animals, was explored. Where else can you see your male friends pissing in the bonfire, or crouch in the weeds with your girlfriends, creating canals of pee that turned your bare feet muddy? Where did we mix blood in fist fights and "try out" our bodies sexually? The booze cruise offered 34 the pleasure of t‘. controlled sociai mechanisms, inc hegemonic socic “docile, prod uct ridden, and 'no “as a subversto diSClDline and S affords the esc becomes an 3g domain beYOI Omlmtence denies 3‘“ (Pi larger SOC'lal that me pie {\mfience Oats," We 'g Childreng. “mamas the pleasure of the body to young people who lived in a highly controlled social space. Society's disciplining and surveillance mechanisms, including schools, churches and prisons, create a hegemonic society which seeks to transform young people into "docile, productive, hard-working, self-regulating, conscience- ridden, and 'normal' adults" (Foucault in Fiske 64). The booze cruise was a subversion of the power of society, which exerted continual discipline and surveillance on its young people. "Pleasure, which affords the escape from this power, the escape from the norm, becomes an agent of subversion because it creates a privatized domain beyond the scope of a power whose essence lies in its omnipotence, its omnipresence. Showing that life is livable outside it denies it" (Fiske 64). But it also mirrored the power hierarchy of the larger social sphere. It was allowed by adults with the confidence that the pleasure-seeking of the young would be outgrown, as experience had shown to be true. After all, we "sowed our wild oats," we grew up, and now many of us worry about our own childrens' pleasure-seeking. We have become part of the surveillance mechanism that maintains the status quo. BACK to Introduction Mainpage EQRIALARD to About the Author 35 “I“ This knowledg school. it' dQ‘an On Shiny Car then: Cor Watch t1“. sat as a “'Ork, W 311315 1 in "Urn! throllgi. In! Suds beer) 01 Tooling the Gut This is a long time ago. This goes way back, to a time before knowledge, a time before time. This goes all the way back to high school. It's a summer night, one of those nights when the sun slants down on the town oblique-like, and you can see the kids in their shiny cars, tooling up and down Dexter Street at 9:00 pm, some with their convertible tops down and their hair flying in the gold light. I watch them from my front window. The same front window where I sat as a four year old girl, waiting for my Dad to come home from work, waiting for the sure motion of his body into my world. But this is 1965, it's summer, and the sun calls us forth from our homes in numbers, to where it will. No waiting around. I leap the four back steps to the ground. Kids are riding as the sun goes down, up Dexter Street, through the A&W, take a right at Lincoln Avenue, through the Dog 'n' Suds, down to Main Street (past the cemetery where we hid beer), through town, and up Dexter Street again. Tooling the gut. On Main Street, tooling past the storefronts, the traffic moved 36 slow, like a gidd and out of open opening a door. bade laughing . slow, like a giddy funeral procession. You'd see us then, crawling in and out of open car windows, running backward and forward, opening a door, getting in. We are the girls with our heads tipped back, laughing at the setting sun. Waiting for the cool darkness. BACK to Introduction to the Booze Cruise 37 Mellow Yelloni side held exact] Barbie - We'vé stain on the up Betty - 01d For Social worker t the nth Betty Veronica - En With a blg den SUEEI at such Ricki- Seen 11 Open the (1001 Tiaralie - BOV [InprEdiCtablt Car Culture Cast of Characters Mellow Yellow - Yellow Dodge Dart. Convertible. Vent in passenger side held exactly two six packs. Knee-jerk rebellious. Barbie - We've got to keep Mom's car clean. She'll kill me if I get a stain on the upholstery. Insecure but fun. Betty - Old Ford pickup, handy for egg-throwing on Halloween. Social worker to the cruisers. "Every male in the class of 1969 is in love with Betty." Veronica - Enormous baby blue Buick (an early graduation gift) with a big dent in the hood from hitting the bumps on Washington Street at such high speeds we became airborne. Wild! Ricki - Seen mostly in her boyfriend's Chrysler with no brakes. Open the doors and drag your feet to stop. "Let's party!" Natalie - Boyfriend's Rambler, used mainly for the back seat. Unpredictable partier. lends a psycho edge to any occasion. Layla - Dad's Toronado gets up to 125 mph on the expressway. Crazy Mama. Archie - In love with Betty and Veronica. Cars are secondary. Smart and funny. Bud - Betty's older brother who introduced Betty and Mellow Yellow to grassers. Jughead - Little foreign car, but we can all fit in. Sincere friend. Elvis - An adult at 16 with work-worn hands. Teenage alcoholic. Knew what he wanted. " Let's make like alligators and drag tail to the swamp." BJ - Braniac. Nice. Headed somewhere else. Derf - Hitchin' rides, too cute to let walk. Cut his entire Junior year 38 of high school. school didn't e Gidget - Cute ; Teacher of sex when he blows Vince - Too 0 Vola - Attitud. finds a way on Derrick - Sh' Darcy ‘ Impis Janet - Never 9d how linda . Beam Cy. Has gone [he hOrrOrs. TOBY ‘ HQaI-II Wes fl‘iellcls the zel’hir s' of high school, hangin' with friends, playing his guitar. But the school didn't even miss him. Searching. Gidget - Cute and funny, she ran her household at an early age. Teacher of sex to the uninitiated: "You catch it in a handkerchief when he blows his wa ." Vince - Too old to booze cruise? Vola - Attitude-a-go-go. “Poor boy” tops. Destined to babysit till she finds a way out. Derrick - Sharp dresser. New metal on old chassis. Darcy - Impish. Smokey voice. Rockets to the student parking lot for a “butt” at lunch time. Janet - Never a dull moment. loved life and almost refused to leave. Learned how to disconnect odometer cable in parents’ car when sneaking out but left radio volume maxed - busted! Linda - Beautiful, sweet, and loyal. Cy - Has gone and returned and spares the community (he thinks) the horrors. Tony - Heart of gold and too dangerous for high school sports. Gives friends ride to school every morning that includes a stop at the Zephyr Station - cigarettes at $ .28 a pack. BACK to Introduction to the Booze Cruise 39 inhlin of dor intere ambit from i shit, 1 BSUII "I- I" "What matter who's speaking?"* Marjorie Sue Johnson grew up in Ionia, Michigan. She has an inkling that what kept her from buying totally into the white system of domination was experimental psychoactive drug use. She is interested in the concept of happiness and she has always had an ambivalent relationship with the written word. These pictures, torn from magazines and Christmas cards and hung over her kitchen sink, represent, in her mind, various identities that she sometimes assumes. The "Author" Foucault asks, * “What matter who's speaking?" (Foucault, “What is an Author?”). I am reminded of my father, who would always drill my sisters and me, if we happened to be reading a book, on who the author was. At the time, I didn't question his interrogation, as I had learned to tolerate a hundred million memorizations in the public school system "for my own good." Later, when I learned to question such requirements, I realized that 40 memorize tha let me introdt memorize that. I questioned other things, too, about my family. But let me introduce you to them. They are all here, as I remember them. The Rules of Memorization There's something mystical about a douche bag when you're eight years old. This one hung on the back wall of the dingy bathroom closet, dangling with the skeletons of old mops and yellowed rags petrified into erect musty tents. Was it a hot water bottle? It looked like a hot water bottle. But that long soft rubber tube snaking out of the bag and hanging over a neighboring hook confused and fascinated me. A hard weathered plastic sprinkler hung from the bottom of the tube like some strange specimen from a museum that I never understood. I didn't ask. ‘ Up on the shelf of their closet, to the far right, was a stack of frayed towels. Beside them were rags and washcloths, all clean and neatly folded, and to the far left were my father's towels. There, in that dark left corner, barely reachable on eight-year-old tiptoe, was the library. Here, quickly, I found magazine covers that were shiny, and images alarming and irresistible. Naked women. Men torturing and triumphant War and women. Women and war. Words like these! Words that I, at eight years old, was discovering in the bathroom library. 41 Being a bathroom library-goer, I was smart. I learned early that people look up to you when you read. Not as much as they do if you learn to play the piano and are the life of the party, but they respect you maybe the same as if you were a Sunday school teacher, or maybe the wife of a jeweler. Respectable, and somber, and serious. Even if you didn't read much, but you memorized the titles of books and their authors it was almost as good! The purchaser of books for the bathroom library, my father, made sure his daughters were destined for respect and admiration in this way: "Who wrote it?" "Um, I forgot." "You don't know? There's no reason to read a book if you can't remember who wrote it. Find out." The smart sister (I had two of them) read all the time. Seeing as my mother used to proclaim, "I never read a whole book in my life," and my father's readings were usually confined to selections from the bathroom library or the chaplain's manual for the Elks Lodge, (with those mysterious initials BPOE that were never to be deciphered), it was a mystery where she found a love for books. But perhaps it wasn't love at all, and maybe for some people books can be a burden. She read in the back seat of the car until she vomited, and then switched to the front seat and read some more. She read in corners of rooms and at tables, and she would squint at the pages through thick glasses, sober and red-eyed and sleepy, and impenetrable. The man that she married took her to the library for their first date, and she fell down the steps. As for me, I read mostly comic books, like Nancy and Sluggo, or Baby Huey, or Donald Duck, or Archie and Friends. But only for a minute, and then I'd run outside to play, swinging wildly on the 42 trapeze, or bale possums in the suspiciously at bed in her darl distant and fas of the Umberlc My granc‘ those a than n; harmonica, ant grandmother v lthen I Was te . gTOknups D13) trapeze, or balancing 'precariously on a back fence, or finding dead possums in the creek out back. On my way out, though, I would look suspiciously at her books, wings outstretched on the table, on the bed in her dark room, on the living room floor. Their titles seemed distant and fascinating, like The House of the Seven Gables, and Girl of the Limberlost, and Little Women, and Moby Dick. My grandmother lived at a lake, and for her third husband chose a man named Lou. He had a big nose, and played the harmonica, and liked us kids! I loved him. He was in contrast to a grandmother who was stern and overworked-acting and possessive. When I was ten we went to the lake for a Sunday visit, and while the grownups played cards, I explored the old magazines lying in the corner. I remember a story about an abandoned car, with a dead body inside. The words were haunting and alluring, but the thing that remained in my mind forever was the photograph alongside the story. It was a car exactly like the one grown up with weeds next to the path where we walked to the lake. The car door was open, and inside was a partially decomposed body, staring out, empty and eerie. I never walked to the lake again, and my grandmother lived there for several more years, without seeing that man's decomposed body staring out, filling that childhood spot with fear and mystery. My other sister, the shy one, wrote poetry and got sent to her room by my father, the chaplain of the BPOE. Sometimes I would sneak into her room and invade her dresser drawers and read this poetry. It was sweet, and anguished, and yearning, and thoughtful. She would catch me and come after me, and then she would be blamed, and sent to her room. She spent eons of time in her room, 43 Using, writing because no one mother wasn't li‘ My father'l bottles of Strohs mother when sh chunk on hot Fr front door Oper the Str0115 trucl house_ There w crying, writing poetry, yearning for princes and white horses, because no one told us that fairy tales weren't real and that our mother wasn't living one. My father's beer was bottled in Detroit. It was longneck brown bottles of Strohs beer, and I would go to the grocery store with my mother when she bought it. A hard cardboard case of Strohs beer, drunk on hot Friday nights while watching the prize fights with the front door open to let in nonexistent fresh air. I remember watching the Strohs truck go crashing by on the highway that passed our house. There was a picture of a man in a hat, maybe a cowboy hat, smiling at me from the enormous side of the truck. He was young, and smiling, and the word Strohs traveled beside him. I watched him until he rumbled out of sight. When autumn came, in the 1950's, us Girl Scouts would turn to long walks in search of dried weeds. Never questioning, steadfast, sillier than shit, we walked for miles carrying bushels of nettles and dried milkweed and field flowers. It was sunny and chilly and our cheeks were red. We ran for miles and climbed fences and trespassed shamelessly, because we were Girl Scouts. We spray- painted those weeds gold, did marvels with discarded detergent bottles, crosstitched our fingers to the bone and loyally learned our creed: I promise to do my duty, to God and my country, to help other people at all times, especially those at home. At home, at a time when I was less interested in trapezes and more interested in bleaching my hair blonde, I learned that Lou had died. The details were a grownup matter, but my father was still pissed off at his youngest daughter because I wasn't acting properly 44 sornbe friend the tn only r Many librari trance rumb Word: that \ hOusg Mich; and I Sat er pTufr liked SEVe (Om whe] 111111 and somber. I didn't want to go to the funeral. I wanted to be with my friends. later, when I am 16, my father, my mother's prince, tells me the truth about people. They are selfish. When someone dies the only reason they feel bad is because they will miss that person. Many truths of life my sisters and I learned from the father- librarian-prince-philosopher, and many induced while under the trance of the contents of that truck with the smiling face that rumbled out of sight on the highway next to our house. Mrs. Mancuso taught 9th grade English. She was excited about words that famous people wrote, and she was excited about words that we wrote. We had a Literary Club, and took ukuleles to her house and read literature that was way over our heads and sang Michael Row the Boat Ashore and Where Have All the Flowers Gone and fancied ourselves a bit radical and literary and really smart. We sat entranced while Mrs. Mancuso read The love Song ofJ Alfred Prufrock aloud, in an altered state, with goosebumps on her arms. I liked it. When I was older, and out of college, I took a train to Portland, Maine. I lived alone, and walked the streets and explored the public library. I checked out mountains of books, like The House of the Seven Gables, Girl of the Limberlost, and Moby Dick. I took books to the bath, and books to bed. I read outdoors in the graveyard and in corners of rooms and at tables. The father-llbrarian-prince—philosopher died not knowing where he was. My mother and I changed his diapers and fed him until he couldn't swallow anymore. My mother misses her prince, and stays busy working on the Library Board. 45 hertt andt DQSL there StOp] IOIIIE on U 100k Outs refit The smart sister still reads, has ditched the husband that took her to the library, and wonders if her memories of my father are real or imagined. She and her men, who live far away, read books and talk about them. She wonders what genes we carry from the past, and joins clubs, and finds long-lost Indian ancestors. The sister that spent her early years in her bedroom, sent there by our father, the chaplain of the BPOE, married a lawyer, stopped writing poetry, and rides an exercise bike while reading romance novels. As for me, I'd still rather run outside to play and swing wildly on the trapeze. I'm still balancing precariously on a backyard fence, looking suspiciously at books overturned at libraries, wings outstretched on a table, noticing the title and the author, and remembering both. BACK to Introduction Mainpage FORWARD toThe Study of Whiteness 46 Family Secrets Searching for My Father "Send the Goddamn Apes Back to Africa" My father, watching TV sometime in the 1950's I was a child, not yet in school, and our house was right next door to the barber shop. I remember standing watch at the window to see if he was coming home yet while my mother busied herself making his lunch in the kitchen. "Is he coming?" "No, not yet. He must be busy. There are four cars in the parking lot." But I would persist, quietly anticipating, lying in wait for a first glimpse of his white barber jacket rounding the corner into my view. Then, suddenly, I'd tear through the kitchen, make a bee-line through the back hall and porch, fling the screen door ahead of me, and leap the 47 fou UP Olll IOSS alw; shit me 1 say. four steps to the back yard below. As I sped around the comer and up the corridor between the house and shop, I saw his arms outstretched, I felt his smiling face. Without hesitation I was airborne, and knew his hands firm on my waist, lifting me high, tossing me into the clouds. His arms, outstretched, not far away, always sure, always safe. Then he would walk the rest of the way, me in his arms, down the lawn, around the corner and up the steps, striding through porch, back ball, into a warm kitchen, and tumble me onto the linoleum, happy and ready. "What's for lunch?" he'd say. BACK to About the Author 48 Whiteness You cannot defame your family by acting white. -Scott Kayla Morrison “An Apokni by Any Other Name is Still a Kakoo“ On Acting White 1 rhn knew that white men did not know how to tell the truth. They led constantly about women, money, monsters. White men made promises and did not keep them. -Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer ing White 2 t't trust white people. And I should know. I grew up acting 2, and I can tell you of its seductions, of all it offers. If you want "rich," be white. If you want "power," be white. If you want to ttractive," be white. But be aware, all of these pleasures are and provide no lasting happiness. - Mad White Woman 49 Acting V The econ saving Mt Poisoning military t terrorism the world governmt happenec we Native internmt the LIS, g Police roe their ban homeless -leslie M Acting White 3 The etc-warriors have been accused of terrorism in the cause of saving Mother Earth. So I want to talk a little about terrorism first. Poisoning our water with radioactive wastes, poisoning our air with military weapons' wastes - those are acts of terrorism. Acts of terrorism committed by governments against their citizens all over the world. Capital punishment is terrorism practiced by the government against its citizens. United States of America, what has happened to you? What have you done to the Bill of Rights? All along we Native Americans tried to warn the rest of you; if the US. government kills us and robs us, what makes the rest of you think :he US, government won't rob and kill you too? Look around you. ’olice roadblocks. Police searches without warrants. Politicians and heir banker pals empty the US. Treasury while police lock up the omeless and poor who beg for food. Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead BACK to Whiteness SO l we racist per am a raci anjthing power hi llclntosh colored s taught at disadran asPeas, V Si“hooling an unfai r Culture. I We dEp taught at Slaleholc‘ at risk of Which Eu I'm White Because I Can Be Iwas a teenager when it occurred to me that my father was a racist person, but I was a middle-aged adult before I realized that I am a racist person. I wasn't encouraged to critique much of mything, especially my family. I certainly wasn't taught to analyze rower hierarchies, especially in relation to race. Like Peggy IcIntosh, I wasn't aware that I HAD a race. Other people, with olored skin, had "race." "As a white person, I realized I had been tught about racism as something which puts others at a lsadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary pects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage...My hooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged lture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral te depended on her individual moral will. At school, we were not .ght about slavery in any depth; we were not taught to see zeholders as damaged people. Slaves were seen as the only group isk of being dehumanized. My schooling followed the pattern ch Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think heir lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also I, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work :h will allow 'them' to be more like 'us" (McIntosh 1-4). Why did it take so long for me to discover my family's racism? t structures allowed our guilt to be so hidden? What masks do ide behind when we try to forget and deny our responsibility 1e effects of racism? Why didn't I see that the " Negro problem" 51 was real for year Stokely to “blaci saying: ' There at things a that the; Where tl from Ber instead; them pr. leach mg flt’edOm Th order to Maliolm “'35 in ii a" net 1 [0 their! abtlut th “egroes. hate to c ”films, I 18‘8an ti among th really me; was really the "white problem?" Blacks have been telling whites this for years, but white America hasn't listened. In What We Want, Stokely Carmichael said, "I have said that most liberal whites react to "black power" with the question, What about me?, rather than saying: Tell me what you want me to do and I'll see if I can do it. There are answers to the right question. One of the most disturbing things about almost all white supporters of the movement has been that they are afraid to go into their own communities - which is where the racism exists - and work to get rid of it. They want to run ’rom Berkeley to tell us what to do in Mississippi; let them look nstead at Berkeley. They admonish blacks to be nonviolent; let rem preach nonviolence in the white community. They come to ach me Negro history; let them go to the suburbs and open up aedom schools for whites " (Carmichael 5 16). The suggestion that whites go into their own communities in ler to eradicate racism was also made by Floyd McKissick and lcolm X. McKissick, when asked what the role of the white man ; in the black man's struggle, answered, " If there are whites who not racists, and I believe there are a few, a very few, let them go ieir own communities and teach; teach white people the truth it the black man." Malcolm X wrote in his autobiography: 'The oes aren't the racists. Where the really sincere white people to do their 'proving' of themselves is not among the black as, but out on the battle lines of where America's racism really rd that's in their own home communities; America's racism is ; their own fellow whites. That's where the sincere whites who mean to accomplish something have to wor " (Bosmajian 5 2 264). lih own" in ‘ li' as he against i rememh Rumors 1 the stree 'our tow 264). When Stokely Carmichael was exhorting whites to "teach their own" in the 1960's, I was sitting at my father's feet in front of the Was he watched the Friday Night Prizefights, listening to him rail against the "goddamn apes," listening to his anger and hatred. I remember the panic in Ionia during the Detroit Riots of 1967. Rumors were in the wind, and white men, our fathers, were out in ' :he streets with guns, preparing for roving bands of blacks to invade it, our town." Violence Has Spread to Saginaw Uneasy Calm Exists In Grand Rapids By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS bu med asnd niplnge ru.pied hea avy whites sauppori and tar rm: da llz ed. rutISo 01 Side neighborhood Ailca tvefi epcr sseonw shot Fifty-four Flinrt sidentswerehiseamlf ncaerllmod act The Band. MW'I'I'P ”will” 'hmha‘ MUM” andwnrsnduiincau ammonM-a- ands of Negroes roamed the city, not confining themselves to the heavily Negro Northeast Side. " Ionia Sentinel Standard, July 26, 1967 My grandmother, Weltha, was a John Bircher at heart. Our ids, relatives and neighbors worked at local prisons, and the .tion of black skin to feared and loathed criminal was something bonded "us," the white community, together. I learned in both :it and implicit ways that "blacks" were inferior. Of course, so people of Polish, Jewish, Italian (and just about every "other") at, as well as Catholics, the obese, the developmentally ed, the poor, and the rich. I learned through trial and error. I :1 when to be quiet because my father thought most things I 53 said were stt the "3 Iabo and SIX 1 a! something r raised on, o in my poter inferiority a contributes existence. It teaches den authority a] Conflicting : Idiom and l U'\ l “p in a raci After all, lh li'lllte Com r “5' arrOgar. mm] “he the Wider 1 hhmhh can keep it individuals Wider 30cm min. i— ll. ' ,‘ said were stupid, and I learned what "good families" never spoke of the "3 Taboos": How much money you made, who you voted for, and SEX. Ialso learned that I "could do anything I set my mind to," something my parents told me frequently. This dichotomy that I was raised on, of self-confidence and self-loathing, filling me with pride in my potential while at the same time teaching me compliance, inferiority and submission, is part of the home knowledge that rontrlbutes to racism, and prevented me from recognizing its' xistence. It is part of the dysfunction of white family culture that aaches denial, holds secrets, and teaches both compliance to rthority and dominance over others that pave the way for the inflicting mindset of the racist, who is submissive to the beast of :ism and also dominant over the Other. I try to locate my personal history as a white woman growing in a racist environment within our collective past as a nation. er all, the white family unit is simply a microcosm of the wider te community in its distortion of "social facts," in its' violence, arrogance. The notion of the family as a private sphere is clearly Vth when we recognize that the family is surely a reflection of vider violent culture, and that the violence shown in the public re is hidden within the family, within the town. The idea that we :eep the private and public separate is a myth. Just as iduals, families, and communities influence and respond to ’ society, larger political and economic factors influence the 54 is C0( tinc ignore it" hia refuse the mos me[fiber 10). on GO tots The private really is political, and the ways we construct our social identity by excluding Others serves to hold our space in the social and economic hierarchy. We become part of the White Club. As Coco Fusco has written, "Racial identities are not only Black, latino, Asian, Native American and so on; they are also white. To ignore white ethnicity is to redouble its hegemony by naturalizing it." Many people believe that racial inequality does not exist and refuse to listen to the racial debate. On the other extreme, there are people who believe that whites must forsake the white race so that all people can achieve equality. These " new abolitionists" believe that " the white race is a club that enrolls certain people at birth, without their consent, and brings them up according to its rules. For the most part the members go through life accepting the benefits of membership, without thinking about the costs" (Ignatiev & Garvey 10). What do you believe? Go toihlhitenesslfll BACK to Introduction Mainpage BACK to Table of Contents Mainpage SS iihat t ThEI‘t huh I Family Secrets Fake Love What do you think about the hostility toward children in the Federal Republic? There is a larger problem, that of people who have been showered with too much fake love, and thereby help to preserve society in its present form. - Rainier Werner Fassbinder BACK to "I'm White Because I Can Be" 56 Pe that she made It atonsci thitinto to shin . wmkn conditit think it Dili'ileg bFOUIt Theda; Ican if most 01 I“ 51101 wOlldd \ thEn I mngho tOlefilte rate. Whiteness 101 PeggyMcIntosh lists " special circumstances and conditions that she experiences which she didn't earn but which she has been made to feel are hers by birth, by citizenship, and by virtue of being a conscientious law-abiding "normal" person of good will" (McIntosh 5-9). She attributes these circumstances and conditions to skin color privilege. She believes that her African-American co- workers, friends, and acquaintances cannot count on most of these conditions. I include a few examples from her long list because I think it Is important for us to realize just how completely our privilege is entwined with everyday life. Our privilege is often hidden by our own self pity. The ways she experiences skin-color privilege include: I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time. i“! should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or turchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I ould want to live. hen I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I shown that people of my color make it what it is. not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism heir own daily physical protection. be pretty sure that my children's teachers and employers will ate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief ies about them do not concern others' attitudes toward their 57 I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world's majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven't been singled out because of my race. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more or less match my skin. BACK to Whiteness 58 How to Read a Roadmap When it Doesn't Matter Where You Are Veronica was wild. Not in a random way, but in a calculated, logical, skimming-abovethe—surface way, not even touching the ground and getting dirty like the rest of us. We reveled in grassers, kissed the boy-next-door, mixed our blood through fists, through love, but not Veronica. She held out for guys from bigger towns, she grew bored and tasted forbidden waters. She hustled high school teachers, and had visions of Italian men in her future. Veronica was beautiful and rich and wild. On one of those Michigan summer evenings, cool and full of anticipation, she picked me up in her big blue Eldorado convertible. 59 Approaching the City Fruit Market, a hovering cloud of fruit flies dimmed the light above a steaming mountain of soft black bananas. To enter was to pass through a veil of their deep sweet odor, and the Junebugs crunched under our feet and stuck to the screen door as it slammed behind us. Back in the car, we poured rum into our glasses, added coke, took a deep warm gulp and headed north, to the Palladium. leaving town was like crossing the border, entering a new climate. Once the lights of town were behind us, and the sun setting at our left, the cool night bit at our necks as we squealed and yelled at the darkening sky and tipped our glasses high to let the sweetness run down our throats. We were in strange land. No map, no navigator, just the memory of dirt roads, a familiar-looking house here, we stopped to pee there once, I think. Do we turn there? No let's try this road. Headed north on the backroads, we pass a familiar car, we stop to talk with other pilgrims, all of us headed north, to the Palladium. The Palladium was an enormous rustic wooden three-level dance hall that sat on Crystal lake, surrounded by pine trees and cottages. Roads wound around the lake and snaked around the houses and into the countryside. These were dirt roads, the kinds kids know best, the remote ones where you meet and talk at 3 am, or the ones where some friends have to die in a car in the middle of the night But this is part of our life in this land, isn't it? The death in cars, the wondering if they were lying out there in the dark, smelling the weeds so close to their face, thrown from their car, listening to a car speed by out of sight, or if they heard the thoughts 60 tithe andit netlh unnpi mpsu audit more, drive i the bit Shunt We 1g} Sidew; Windo Slow a thn audit agfins “OD t1 of their friends in the air before the sun rose. The Palladium is lit up like a huge firefly above the dark earth, and its' reflection laps on the surface of the lake. We want to get wet. We want the cold water to close over our skin, deep and complete. We want to go under. Leaving the dance hall, Veronica and I stagger to the car, the top still down, stale drinks waiting on the floor. The coke tastes flat, and we feel numb. The liquor has no effect, and we drink some more, trying to keep tomorrow away. "God, Veronica. You can't drive for shit!" Veronica is laughing, and she is driving fast, down the black dirt road, into the soft dirt at the side of the road, then swerving back, gripping the road again, and laughing, driving faster. We ignore the 90-degree turn in the road, and we are traveling sideways, fast, on the grass, the car sliding, spinning. I glance out my window and the corner of a white farmhouse is moving next to me. Slow and easy, I can touch it with an outstretched finger, but then it is gone. I am relaxed, enjoying the movement, the graceful spinning and the force that pushes me back against my seat, pushes me tight against the car door. My head is tipped back, and I close my eyes to stop the spinning. I am laughing too, as the tires spin in soft lawn, as we jerk back across the ditch, onto the road, and head south, toward home. BACK to Whiteness 61 h'atun W01 The Town Nature has provided the beautiful, rolling countryside with plenty of woods, rivers and lakes, and the citizens of Ionia represent the traditional values of hometown America. -Ionia Chamber of Commerce Brochure an Ionian in an Elks Minstrel Show, from the Ionia, Michigan Centennial Booklet (1873-1973) 62 ithe Contents Before White Invasion When the Indians Cheerfully Gave Up Their Cherished Homes: The Power of language After White Invasion The Niggers are Coming! The Detroit Riots of 1967 A Walk Downtown 63 W gQVe When the Indians Cheerftu Gave Up Their Cherished Homes The Power of language One instrument we use to perpetuate Whiteness is language. We can't trust our language when the ideology of racism is woven into the very thread of the English language itself. "Simon Podair...examines the connotations of such words as 'blackmail,’ 'blacklist,‘ 'blackbook.‘ 'blacksheep,‘ and blackball.‘ The assertion made by Podair that it has been white civilization which has attributed to the word 'black' things undesirable and evil warrants brief examination. He is correct when he asserts that 'language as a potent force in our society goes beyond being merely a communicative device. language not only expresses ideas and concepts but it may actually shape them. Often the process is completely unconscious with the individual concerned unaware of the influence of the spoken or written expressions upon his thought processes. language can thus become an instrument of both propaganda and indoctrination for a given idea" (Bosmajian 265). The language of racism is both covert and overt. It ranges from hate speech, including derogatory ethnic label use, to highly hidden narratives in institutions such as church and state, to the omission of facts, such as leaving out all but eurocentric accounts in educational textbooks. Teun Dijk has pointed out that "...blatant and very subtle racism permeates all social and personal levels of our societies: from the decisions, actions, and discourses of the government or the legislative bodies, through those of the various institutions, such as education, research, the media, health, the 64 polite. interac U used to has pia; probier Oxford membe and cor and the was fOu totem miSht e the Art police, the courts, and social agencies, all the way down to everyday interaction, thought, and talk" (Dijk 15). Let's talk about some of the language that has been and still is used to excuse racism, beginning with the word "savage." This word has played an important role in the "discovery" (another problematic word) of North America. A savage, defined in The Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1992), is a: -n. 1. derog. member of a primitive tribe. 2. cruel or barbarous person. Invading and conquering a country has always demanded creative rationales, and the invasion of North America is no exception. North America was founded by Puritans, who imagined they,"...were entering into covenant with God, as into a marriage bond - and therefore...they might expect swift and harsh affliction" (Bercovitch 3). "On board the Arbella, on the Atlantic Ocean, John Winthrop set forth the prospects of the infant theocracy in a provisional but sweeping prophecy of doom...lnvoking the ominous precedent of Israel, he explained that henceforth the Lord would survey them with a strict ant jealous eye. They had pledged themselves to God, and He to them, to protect, assist, and favor them above any other community on earth. But at their slightest shortcoming, for neglecting the "least" of their duties, He would turn in wrath against them and be revenged" (Bercovitch 3). They imagined a spectrum of what Leo Marx called "ecological images." On one end, the New World was imagined as a lovely garden, an Edenic paradise where weary pilgrims would be free from the constraints of civilization and experience abundance and harmony through nature. At the other end of the ecological spectrum America was envisioned as a hideous 6S ts'iidern aggress. such "tt North A ii beginni Riser fr Permian those a “amp: was a i." hostile 13nd bu mi8hr t Settiem for the United Church wilderness with terrible forces of nature that required taming by aggressively disciplined and intelligent colonists (Marx 42-43). One such "terrible force of nature," in the minds of the invaders, was the North American Indian. The colonists perceived the inhabitants as a threat from the beginning. "In May of 1607, three small ships sailed up the James River from Chesapeake Bay in search of a site for the first permanent English colony in North America. The prospective settlers chose a peninsula that had the clear disadvantage of being low and swampy. But it did provide a good anchorage, and the fact that it was a virtual island made it defensible against possible attacks by hostile colonizers showed an awareness that this was not an empty land but one that was already occupied by another people who might well resist their incursion. Unlike earlier attempted settlements, Jamestown was not so much an outpost as a beachhead for the English invasion and conquest of what was to become the United States of America" (Frederickson, “White Supremacy,” in Churchill 20). The " settlers" needed a vocabulary to promote their collective determination, and "...when the intellectual pleasure and relief at finding a usable generalization connects with the emotional solace of becoming a member of a larger group (us together, us against them), the power of the categorization to mold attitudes and affect behavior is truly awesome and often terrifying. Once the categories of we and they are, legitimately or not, firmly in place, minds can be manipulated readily in two directions: the creation and bonding of the w and the expulsion of the they" (lakoff 181). 66 Ti maintai by God the lan. antithe onour was on and the Puritan Superk This "we" and "they" dichotomy allowed the colonizers to maintain their self-justification in the belief that they were chosen by God, and therefore were superior people. The Indians, inhabiting the land that they believed God had given them, became their antithesis. It is always easier to kill other human beings if "God" is on our side and He wants us to do it to carry out His plans. If God was on their side, the Puritans could believe that they were superior, and the Indians were inferior. The dichotomy continues: Puritan Indian Superior Inferior Human Iess-than-human, animal-like Christian Heathen C1v11(Setuer) Savage When it became clear that we wanted to exterminate the Indians and occupy all of their land, it became necessary, for our own righteousness, to make the we and they dichotomy even Stronger. "The dichotomies of wartime encourage scapegoating: all that we suspect to be bad in our own character is attributed to the enemy, whom therefore we find it all the more essential to extirpate. The more ruthless we are, the better we will become. Propaganda movies made in times of war depict the other side as being as different from us as possible, both physically and mentally: they cann0t and should not be understood. And not only are they different, their differences necessarily make them worse than we are. Their ways of working, their family relationships, their 67 goyerr oppos and p pittur i or Wilt indian the set sounds 28th of in (Hip plowed indian Stitier indigo maid the i Whit the the; Q 1i. the It Dig/m ham; ”{4de governmental organization are depicted as not only diametrically opposite to ours, but worse in every way, denials of human rights and possibilities...[and] in order to kill them we must have that picture in our minds" (lakoff 195). How does this apply to us, who live in Ionia in the year 2000, or who were raised here? We had nothing to do with exterminating Indians, (didn't that happen out West?) and there was no violence in the settling of this town. The description of the occupation of Ionia sounds almost bucolic: "...the spring of 1833 is the era of civilized occupation. ..The 28th of May brought our pilgrims to Ionia. It was too late for putting in creps by clearing the land, so they bought an Indian plantation, Plowed and planted five acres with corn and potatoes. They paid the InChains $25 for their crops and improvements...The Indian settlement was where the city of Ionia now is. Some five hundred Indians, who were under the Flat River chief, stopped there, for making sugar, fishing, etc. They also raised some corn. As friends, the Indians and settlers lived together, with mutual benefit. The first winter passed, the Indians knowing they had sold their rights, Cheerfully gave up their cherished homes to the whites. They knew they occupied only by the sufferance of the government" (Everett 47 ) . If we examine the words that are used to color the meaning of the Sentence in favor of the "settlers," such as "civilized," "our pilgrims," " bought," "friends," "lived together," "mutual benefit," "knowmg," and "cheerfully," we might begin to understand the way language works to privilege some people and oppress Others. Let's 68 try to get closer to the actual meaning: Settling the town of Ionia in the early eighteenth century included claiming ownership of land in the Grand River valley that was already occupied by Native Americans, but this theft, called "civilized occupation" in the first sentence, was made righteous in the implication that the Anglos were the first "civilized" people to live there. By describing the Indians as "'cheerfully giving up their Cherished homes" the author makes it seem like the Indians approve Of white occupation, even that they realize their inferiority, and Can't argue with the wisdom of the American government. But of course, these writings about the Indians tell us no truth about Indians, but reveal the language of Whiteness. Where are the descendants of the Flat River Indians now? Do you know? Do you care? 69 “abbnibo7s .. zm‘rA A N’meN (ENE: Y ‘ ‘A‘gRSPE RKfifi. USE-g Iii/.ERABA AT AN EARLYa' 'P’Eruo 1" REVOLUTION‘IMYQEATO; THE EsPousED THEtcAusmorN LIBERTY. mm mm AMERIC AND REMAINED FIRM Torus END 51,3} DICTATED BY.E COB- MOO- SA TD WA. RICHMOND tNDiAN'i’COMR AT GRA JD RAPIDS OCT 15 1858 TA BLET PLACED FOR STEVENS TiOhiSON ‘iASON CHAPTER 'L° iOF THE AhifiRiCAN 'ONIA viiCHlGAN. ~‘ Cii‘i‘f ‘ .irr Plaque in Oceana County, Michigan near Cub-Baa—Moo-Sa's burial site Cub-Baa—Moo-Sa, Chief of the Flat River Indians, according to white accounts, was in good standing with both white people and Indians and was one of the reasons that the two races were able to get along for as long as they did. According to a white account, his name was shortened to Cobmoosa by the white people, but I am not sure that the spelling of his Indian name in white history is right, either. For more white perspective about Cub-Baa-Moo—Sa (again, 70 i’E\ Go iii his revealing more about Whiteness than about the person about whom the account is written), click on the monument above. Go toEamilscAlmimLLEeneamgnhemadem Who were the Indians that lived along the Grand River? For more history from white perspective, link to W Society. (http://www.mrwcreative.com/Historical/) Link toiteamhodnctionsflomepage http://www.russellmeans.com/ Link to EirsLNationstsuesnfConseqnence http:/ / www.dickshovel.com/ index. html link to W http://www.indiancountrynews.com/index.html BACKto The Town Mainpage FORWARD to The Niggers are Coming 71 at ssh purci Ojibst artist the 5] (Dill. This 1 of by for ti the 0 has a Was 2 their that Site ( lOCai a tu: Cobmoosa and The Dexter Colony In the year 1833, the Dexter colony arrived on the 28th of May at what is now the City of Ionia. Samuel Dexter, the leader of the party, had scouted the Grand River Valley the year before and had purchased land both at Ionia and Grand Rapids. A small group of Ojibway Indians were living on the Dexter property. The Indians had planned to leave as soon as the colony arrived, but as the people from New York did not come until late in the spring, the Indians had already planted the cleared fields to corn, melons and squash, and did not want to leave at that time. This problem was solved when Mr. Dexter paid the Indians the sum of twenty-five dollars for the crops. It was a fortunate opportunity for the settlers as the produce from them was a big help in getting the colony through the first hard winter. The head man of the Ionia Indians was Cub-Baa-Moo—Sa. The name was shortened to Cobmoosa by the white people. Cobmoosa was also a sub-chief of the Flat River Indians whose main settlement was at Lowell The old histories of Ionia County are at variance in their accounts about Cobmoosa's ancestry. One of them claiming that a French voyageur named Antoine Campau came to the future site of Grand Rapids in the year 1765, married the daughter of a local chief, and that Cobmoosa was a son born to them in 1768. Another history says that he was a Negro, captured as a baby in an Indian raid on a Virginia plantation and brought to Michigan as a curiosity. In any event, he was raised as an Indian, and when he reached the age for his initiation to manhood ceremonies, he spent many days fasting in order to induce a vision that would give him a name and some indication of the type of man that he would become. When the time came for him to tell of his vision he said that he had seen himself walking from his home to the headwaters of the Muskegon River, then down the river to lake Michigan, then south to the mouth of the Grand River, then back to his home at Lowell, all in a single day and night. He was then given the name Cub-Baa-Moo- Sa, which in the Ojibway language meant great walker. Cobmoosa was one of the Ojibway chiefs who went to Washington with Rix Robinson (the Ada trader) and signed the treaty that gave the United States title to all of the Indian lands north of the Grand River. In exchange for the removal of the Ojibways to Indian Territory, they were to be given $620,000 in cash, 6,500 72 pount heap toinc 1855. indhx theni ares hear white dona Indhi iDOVE thed hhch. andi 34). IO pounds of tobacco, 100 barrels of salt and 100 barrels of fish. This treaty was never honored because the Indians did not want to move to Indian Territory, many miles from their woodland homes. In 1855, a treaty was signed in Detroit between G.A. Pennypacker, Indian Agent, and fifty-four chiefs and headmen, Cobmoosa among them, that gave the Indians land in Oceana County to amount to 80 acres for each family, 40 acres for each single person, and $530,400 in cash. Each chief was to receive $500, each headman $100. Several white men, supposedly friends of the Indians, were to receive a large donation and the rest was to be divided among the tribes. Sadly, the Indian traders had all the cash within one year. In all, about 1,400 Indians were removed to their new homes in Oceana County over a period of several years. Cobmoosa did not move until 1862; by this time he was old and failing in mind. He died in 1865, and was buried in the old pagan cemetery at Elbridge, Michigan. One old history states that he remained a pagan all his life and had six wives by whom he had eleven sons and daughters (Gibbs 34). BACK to When the Indians Cheerquy Gave Up Their Cherished Homes 73 Family Album pages 1-9 What do white people desire to find when we trace our genealogy? The people had been taught to despise themselves because they were left with barren land and dry rivers. But they were wrong. It was the white people who had nothing; it was the white people who were suffering as thieves do, never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen, something that had never been, and could never be, theirs. The destroyers had tricked the white people as completely as they had fooled the Indians, and now only a few people understood how the filthy deception worked; only a few people knew that the lie was destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people. But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the 74 vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure. And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead. - Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony Booze Cruise Camaraderie BACK to When the Indians Cheerfully Gave Up Their Cherished Homes 75 2 Reasons? 76 t' 2.; s Virtue? 77 7 Are you afraid to look back and find 78 Murder? 9 Complicity? 79 Booze Cruise Camaraderie Booze cruise camaraderie? Being minors involved in the illegal world of cigarettes and drinking whatever booze we find gives us a kinship, a sense of brotherhood, family loyalty. It isn't just the drinking. I have a strong sense of loyalty to my friends. We offer secrecy and protection to one another. An unwritten code. One time we were out cruising and some of the guys got some cherry vodka. They were totally blitzed, and one of my favorite friends, BJ, was drunker than a skunk, got sick, and barfed all over himself and the car. He was a slobbering, stinking, pink mess, and we made sure his Mom wouldn't find out he had been drinking. WE commandeered the car the guys were driving, with BJ zonked out in the back seat. WE took him over to the Washington Street laundra- mat and stripped him of all but his underwear, left him in the back seat of the car with a jacket over him and washed his clothes. After enough time he sobered up enough so we let him go home. As far as we knew his Mom never found out. BACK to Family Album 80 The Niggers are Coming! Precautions Are Taken In Area Ionia Sentinel-Standard Ionia, Michigan, Wednesday, July 26, 1967 Part I: The News Detroit Violence Has Cost $1 Billion and Lives of 33 List of Dead May Be Record DETROIT (AP) National Guardsmen and police battled furiously with elusive snipers on Detroit's war-torn West Side today as this riot-ravaged city ended its third night of terror with mounting dead. Dwindling rifle fire replaced the clatter of automatic weapons as calm returned with dawn. The death toll stood at 33 with 10 new deaths, two short of making this the costliest riot in terms of human life in recent U.S. history. Thirty-four died at Watts in 1965. It already was the costliest in all other respects. Injuries climbed to more than 1,000 with 280 hospitalized. City officials said property damage and business losses in the two days and three nights of Negro rebellion could reach $1 billion. New fires set by arsonists and looters boosted the total to 1,145. Arrests mounted to 2,623 with ball as high as $200,000 set for suspected snipers. As bullets whined in the streets, the city faced another problem, potentially as costly as the near anarchy of the present - hundreds, possibly thousands, burned from homes or jobs had become refugees. Food lines formed in one area. Flash fires of racial upheaval leaped across the state with curfews and emergency conditions slapped on Grand Rapids, Saginaw, Flint and Pontiac... 81 PRESIDENT TALKS TO THE NATION - President Johnson used television and radio to explain that Federal troops had been ordered into riot- tom Detroit to restore law and order. He spoke from the White House. From left are: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover; Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor; Attorney General Ramsey Clark; Johnson; Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General Harold Johnson, Army Chief of Staff. (AP Photo) CB AND HAM OPERATORS - Sheriff 0. Gary Newton was giving the Citizen band and ham operators a workout Tuesday night. Headquarters was set up in the county jail with 12 stations out- COllnty. From the left, Maynard Sutton, deputy sheriff; Don Gillett, partially hidden; Ken Collins, Floyd Rogers, Sheriff O. Gary Newton an Chuck Allen. Seated at the mike is Ralph Fuhrman. (Daily Sentinel-Standard Photo.) ' t§h0p-|“ng In leniglirifiqv 7am 82 Detroit Men Brought to Reformatory Arrests in connection with the violence in Detroit have exceeded accommodations in the city jail there and they are being transferred to Southern Michigan prison in Jackson and Ionia reformatory. Warden Edward Colbert said 100 men who had been arrested in Detroit would be moved from Jackson to Ionia Wednesday morning. A floor of one of the cell blocks was cleared Tuesday night in readiness for the transfer. Over 200 arrests have been made in connection with the Detroit violence and individual ball has been set in some instances as high as $200,000. Many of those taken into custody would be under probate court jurisdiction and bond has been set at $5000. The state corrections commission started accepting the overflow cases Monday from Detroit. Tuesday night it was decided to move 100 to Ionia Reformatory. m Taverns ;Closed at ' '9._0’019¢_1_<_ . ..—L.._ i...“ .———g Precautionary measures were invoked by Ionia city and county Officials Tuesday night as mob violence spread to Western Michigan. Word reached Ionia early in the evening of large crowds gathering at Fallasburg Park north of Lowell. 83 Officials feared that if the group was dispersed it might regather somewhere in Ionia county. The information led to a hasty meeting of Ionia city and county officials who agreed to seek cooperation of tavern and bar owners for a 9 o'clock closing Tuesday night. Okey Peterson, chief of police, and Mayor Foster I. Huber, personally called on all taverns and bars in Ionia city. Sheriff 0. Gary Newton, after conferring with Walter Marks, prosecuting attorney, called on all taverns and bars in the immediate vicinity. Also joining in the voluntary closing movement were the club and lodge bars. City and county officials reported excellent cooperation from owners in the area in a move which also included Lowell and Saranac. The closing also later extended to Belding and Greenville. Prison Gate Opensto Men Of Detroit JACKSON (AP) Two of Detroit's city buses rolled through Southern Michigan Prison's south gate at 12:55 a.m. Tuesday. One still displayed the Linwood route designation; the other a "chartered" sign. Each bristled with armed guards. Assorted rifles and shotguns re held at the ready by six Detroit policemen and nine National Guardsmen from a Grand Rapids unit. They sat shoulder to shoulder in the front of each bus. The remaining seats were occupied by 78 prisoners to each bus. The prisoners were rounded up by Detroit police on charges of looting in riot-tom Detroit. later, five more buses rolled in, bringing to 288 the total number of prisoners brought from Detroit to the prison, which was bemg utilized to handle the overflow of prisoners... 84 Big City Rioting Blame Is Sought WASHINGTON (AP) Leaders are haggling over the political blame for big-city rioting as Congress moved ponderously to set up the machinery to investigate violence in the streets. While committees discussed hearings and action on antirioting and inquiry measures, Democrats and Republicans accused each other of trying to reap political advantage out of the bloody destruction in Detroit and other urban areas. Controversy boiled up Tuesday over whether President Johnson acted quickly enough in sending federal troops into Detroit's stricken areas and whether Republicans were playing politics in accusing Johnson of failing to deal adequately with racial disorders. Sen. Robert P. Griffin, R—Mich., told the Senate there had been an " unfortunate delay" between the time federal troops arrived in Michigan and when they were ordered into the streets. He said in that period additional lives were lost and property destroyed... —_ Black Market Flourishing in _ Detroit DETROIT (AP) Black marketing of looted goods was an underground hubbub 11'! riot-tom Detroit’s surface calm Tuesday. If you showed up at the right place at the rlght time, you could Walk away with a $500 television set for $100 - maybe less. "Talk me down, maybe I'll cut the price," temporary 8S entrepreneurs urged prospective but reluctant buyers... Violence Hus Spread lo Saginaw d Uneasy Calm Exists In Grand Rapids by THE ASSOCIATED mass At least five persons were shot and wounded in Saginaw after the city's Negro mayor spurned a federation of civil rights groups. It marked new racial violence Tuesday night in outstate Michigan - where outbreaks now have struck Grand Rapids, Pontiac, Flint, Muskegon and Benton Harbor. Pontiac, where two Negroes were killed a day earlier by gunfire, cooled off. But Saginaw officers arrested 54 persons and engaged in a gunbattle with snipers, during which the five persons were wounded slightly. The situation in Grand Rapids tapered off to an uneasy cairn at midnight after three Negroes were shot and slightly wounded while trying to urge nonviolence to an angry crowd. Houses were burned and sniping erupted. Fifty-four Flint residents were arrested Tuesday night, but a campaign by Negroes to keep would-be rioters off the streets appeared successful. The Saginaw situation began brewing in the afternoon. Delegates from United Power, a coalition of civil rights groups, tried to attend what they thought was a public meeting to air Negro grievances with Mayor Henry G. Marsh. They were told at the door that the meeting was by invitation only. "The only way black people can get heard is to march," one angry United Power member cried and stomped out of the meeting. SOon, 50 marchers were heading for downtown Saginaw. They sat down in the main intersection, Washington and Genesee, and demanded to see Marsh, who was elected with heavy White support and terms himself a racial moderate. The mayor YEfused. The sit-in grew to an estimated 500 persons. Downtown traffic was snarled. Finally the mayor came to a downtown hotel. There was a 20 - 86 minute grievance meeting. "He got emotional," said one Negro. "He told us that he didn't want to listen to any more of our garbage." The Negroes walked out stoney-faced, disregarded newsmen and sent the sit-ins home. The mayor went home. Then the violence began. Bands of Negroes roamed the city, not confining themselves to the heavily Negro Northeast Side. Fires were set, ruining at least three homes and a garage. Stores were smashed in, although little looting was reported, and six public schools on the Northeast Side were vandalized. Bands of white and Mexican-American vandals were also reported. Negroes account for 24 percent of the 98,000 persons who live in Saginaw, an industrial center 100 miles northwest of Detroit. Merdcan-Americans comprise about 5 percent of the population. A heckling crowd gathered as police and snipers exchanged shots in the West Michigan city of 200,000, the state's second largest. Dr. Jack E. Taylor, superintendent of Saginaw schools, ordered classes called off today "in view of the unsettled conditions." Classes were to resume Thursday. Grand Rapids police called frantically for reinforcements Tuesday afternoon when fire after fire blossomed in houses throughout the heavily Negro South Side Neighborhood. In all, more than 40 fires raged before order was restored. Fire Chief Adrian Meyers estimated damage at $250,000. Police raided two homes, arresting three juveniles and confiscating 50 fire bombs in one and confiscating 30 fire bombs in the other. A group of Negro teen-agers commandeered an auto, beat up the occupants and used the car as a battering ram to smash into a liquor store. They were chased off by police, who loaded the store's inventory into a county truck. During this time, Lt. GOV. William Mllllken was meeting with City officials. He later reported to Gov. George Romney... 87 Part II: The Classmates How My Classmates Remember the 1967 Detroit Riot How did the Detroit Riot of 1967 affect your life? Bobby: At the time, I don't recall any dramatic affect It seemed too far away and removed from my frame of reference. It was scary to think of people beating and shooting one another, breaking into places and looting them, damaging and burning buildings, and fighting with the police and National Guard. But it was like watching the news reports about revolutions and wars in small countries overseas somewhere. Yes, it was happening but not here so it didn't have a major impact. I guess I didn't have any friends or relatives in the Detroit area to worry about and make it real for me. Iayla: I had gone to the Crystal Palladium the night the riots began. I remember coming home and seeing a family sitting on their front porch with a shot gun - ready for those niggers as they were predicted to spread out from Detroit to terrorize small towns. I remember passing a tour bus down near the fairgrounds on M66. I saw a guard standing in the aisle holding a gun on the prisoners as they were brought to Ionia prisons. Veronica: It didn't. The Detroit riot was barely discussed amongst our friends. It might as well have been a million miles away. The fact that Ionia had little or no people of color made it a non-issue. Archie: Not a bit. I honestly don't even remember it happening (hard t0 believe but true). I was 17 so you'd think I would remember it. Detroit was like a foreign country. I had never been there and don't think I even went there when I was at U. of M. (there was nothing there I wanted to see, not being a baseball fan). Betty: I don't think it did in any profound way. I remember the fear it stirred up in some people. And I remember being amazed at the scenes on television. I think at that point in my life I just couldn't relate. It seemed awful and scary but I didn't know what it meant. 88 The way people were acting and talking didn't make any sense to me. I think from that time I had a sense of fear of what a group of blacks might do. But I somehow took the attitude I would judge people as individuals. Frankie: Very, very little. I was in the USMC in 1968. Dobie: I guess the riot brought home a lot of things that my parents' had taught me and talked to me about. That people sometimes hated each other because of the color of their skin or because their cultural ways were different. In what ways did the Detroit Riot of 1967 affect Ionia? Bobby: I'm not sure. I suppose people talked about it and probably roused up some prejudices and fears against blacks. I must have been apathetic or ignorant because I don't remember much about it. layla: Everyone was nervous about city problems reaching town. I remember a classmate being outwardly racist in government class. "Kill the damn niggers" - or something - obviously parrotlng the feelings of his parents. Veronica: I don't think it did. People sitting around over coffee in the local shop, clucking their tongues, shaking their heads and then moving on to the weather and crops. Archie: None that I'm aware of. Betty: All I remember was the fear that the blacks from Detroit might come there and cause problems because of the fairly large black population in the prisons. Frankie: Iwas not in Ionia in 1967. Dobie: I don't recall any specific ways in which the riot affected Ionia. At that time Detroit seemed like another world away. How did the townspeople react to the Detroit Riot of 1967? 89 Bobby: I think I already answered this one. layla: I think people were more vocal about their attitudes about race. Veronica: Did they react? Archie: No idea! I don't remember anyone saying anything about it! Betty: The fear is what I remember most. And that attitude I heard some express, "Those SOB's better not show up here or we'll shoot em. " I think there were those who actually armed themselves. If a carload of blacks showed up in town to visit a family member in the prisons I sincerely believe they would have been at risk of some yahoo drawing a gun on them or even shooting them. It seems people took up an offense and reaction to a situation they really had no personal involvement or relationship to. Mass hysteria effect. Frankie: I was not in Ionia in 1968. Dobie: Again, I don't recall how the people of Ionia reacted. I am sure we must have talked about it in school, but I don't have any strong recollections. Describe an incident or tell a story that reveals how Ionia reacted to the Detroit Riot of 1967. Bobby: I am like really duh regarding this one. I hate to keep pleading ignorance so I'll substitute naiveté this time. layla: I can't really remember - except for the alert feeling that something big was happening. We didn't know then that something big was happening. We didn't know then that it would end there. With the assassination and everything else - we didn't know for sure if life as we knew it would continue. We didn't know if unrest would spread. That combined with the very real nuclear threat and the horrible war in Vietnam made it a very uncertain time to come of age and to plan for my future - life for today - because there was a very real possibility that it would be your last. 90 Veronica: I really can't say I can think of one except what was said above. Archie: ? Betty: I don't remember any particular incidents that took place in Ionia itself but a friend and classmate's sister was killed in Lansing, an accidental shooting that took place as a result of that fear and hysteria that seemed to grip people during that time. That seemed to bring the insanity and power of influence that kind of fear and hostility people can have home to many of us. Frankie: I was not in Ionia in 1967. Dobie: I can't really think of any incidents. 91 t Ionia Girl Hurt As Gun Discharges An 18-year old Ionia girl is presently in critical condition in Lansing’s Sparrow hospital af- ter she became the victim of a shotgun accident in Lansing on Tuesday night. ' Hospital authorities said Jan- et Johnson, daughter of Mr and Mrs Frederick Johnson of 615 Hackett street, is in the inten‘ sive care unit in the hospital. She suffered a serious head wound after being struck by a . See IONIA GIRL—Page 2 Blood Shed Ionia Girl (Continued: from Pate. l) bullet from a 41 Magnum re. volver, according to detectives of Lansing city police. The wound was the result of an ac- cident, said police. , ‘ Police said Miss Johnson, who was living in Lansing on Has- lett road, was visiting the apart- ment of three young men on East Michigan avenue at the time of the accident. ' Her brother, Frederick, 17-, and'a friend of his, Barry Trier- woiler, had accompanied Miss ‘ Johnson to the apartment. They were visiting Dennis Little, 25; Dwain Hilliard, 24, and Harry Helman, 23, all of whom lived at the address, said police. ‘ Police reported the group had been talking about the possi- bility of riots breaking out in Lansing, when one of the men "said he had a gun to use' if nec-' ‘essary. ‘The report said Miss Johnson asked to see the gun, She exam.- 1 ed the weapon, and passed it to Hilliard, who then passed it to Helman. The gun, as it was being passed between the two young men, dropped, and as it hit the floor, discharged, said city police. The bullet reported- ly hit Miss Johnson in the right cheek. Police said the accident oc- curred in the apartment living room at 7:34 pm Tuesday. Ionia state police notified the girl's parents later Tuesday night. Johnson was working at Michigan Training unit at the time. BACK to The Town Mainpage EQRINABD to A Walk Downtown 92 Derf's Story 11 Blood Shed. Two summers later, Bennie and I cruise to lansing, and before the day is through my new shirt is covered with Janet's blood. Only two weeks old and in tatters, scissor—slit and hurriedly cast aside by the Emergency Room nurse, the shirt was a present from her on my seventeenth birthday. The pain is unbearable and soars. So this is desperation. I try to gather myself but everything is blurred and muddled: Negroes and Whites and rioters and National Guard. Our Father who art in Heaven. Rumors of snipers and sniping with rumors. Corvettes and handguns. Shit. Govenor Romney and Mayor Cavanagh and LB]. Hallowed be thy name. Myself. The old pharmacist in the door of his store. He loudly chastised the teen for making all the commotion which poured from the upstairs ‘ apartment to the sidewalk--but the teen was only screaming for the police or an ambulance, anything. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done. The teen unleashed his anger and exploded Shut the FUCK up old manll Bennie, who'd been upstairs when it happened, was nearby and said There's no fault, sir, see, a gun just went off and it struck his sister. Then the old man said Oh, 1...] see, I was )ust...l heard... His old face untwisted and went soft and his eyes poured regret. As if cops or an ambulance would've helped at that point. So this is desperation: change the trajectory of the bullet, stem the flow of blood. You're going to be alright. WHO DID THIS! It was an 93 accident...it just...! I hate them all. Down went the gun. Down went the hammer. Down went the whiskey in the sink and the dropped gun to the bedroom, under the bedspread, still smoking. Smell that gunpowder in your sleep tonight--I hope you dream in color you clumsy fuck! Down goes the gavel. On earth as it is in Heaven. 80 this is hate. I hate them. I hate them all. It's so complicated and amazing. Nothing sticks. They're all naked and helpless and confused and naive and ignorant and innocent. How have they become so pure after all of this? Time indefinite passes and a veil lifts and I seem to see how parents abandoned them, priests defiled them, uncles raped them, neighbors hated them, communities ignored them, government betrayed them. Let the children be. Please excuse me, I just want get home now and sit in my room and play guitar. It's over. It's over. Just need to pick out the casket in the dimly lit basement of the Boynton Leddick Funeral Home, the golden yellow metal one will do, and tend to a jumble of other mind-numbing details demanded by this culture of death. Dad takes the funeral director, a former co-worker of his at the prison, aside with a whisper. Yes. Provision can be made for this ..... situation. Janet had taken to wearing my clothes to accommodate the child forming in her belly. She wouldn't have been caught dead in what passed for trendy maternity fashions that summer. later, standing with my dad at the incinerator in our backyard, we burn what remains of my new 94 shirt. Together we breathe the burning blood of kin. Together we merge in simple ceremony with countless kindred spirits. With terrible consideration and pain in his voice dad had asked if] wanted to keep the shirt. I appreciated that, but I said No and didn't want to think. He placed the shirt in the burn-barrel on the burning wads of crumpled up Detroit News with the burning headlines of the last few days. The End. Janet would never be counted among the casualties of the Detroit Riots of July 1967--or her unborn son. But there it is. Epilogue: Fear Throws the First Punch Joe and I skipped school one day and walked down Union Street to the apartment he shared with his mom. To most, Joe was the quintessential river-rat: broken home, always fighting, standofflsh, alcohol abuse, truancy. Everyone knew he was only marking time till he could drop out of school. He sat on the edge of his bed and held class there in the living room. Math: It's impossible to drink a shot of beer a minute for an hour. Music: No one knows that I can play guitar, says Joe. He leaned back against the wall and strummed a C chord, then F and a G and then all their relative minors. Psychology: Fear. Everyone thinks I'm full of hate and they're afraid of me, but the only reason I throw the first punch is because I'm scared. He smiled and then it disappeared and then he said again without the smile, I get so scared.I left Ionia a few years later but returned once to hear that Joe had shot himself in the ‘ 9S head. Joe had been thinking about eternity and once again thrown the first punch. Janet Johnson died on July 27,1967 from a gunshot wound to the face. It was during the week of the Detroit Riots and the gun belonged to a young man she hardly knew who was afraid the riots would spread to iansing. Rumors flew. He didn't want anything to happen to his Vette that was parked outside on Michigan Avenue and he was "ready for the niggers if they started trouble. " The gun was dropped carelessly and landed on the hammer and... fuckin'eh. I was lying on the floor reading just a few feet away from where Janet sat. The tables turned. The firestation burned. Even the dumbest-assed cowboy had sense enough to keep the hammer of his six-shooter on an empty chamber. Legend has it that he kept his "burying money" rolled up and shoved in there. Eugen. .-..... -. .-.-....-1 ...-...-. eventually got around to correcting the defect. Link to Ruger at http://www.ruger-firearms.com/offer.html W BACK to The Niggers are Coming! 96 A Walk Downtown It seems like every time I go back to Ionia for a visit, something else has changed. Driving into town I see that the commercial strip south of town has sprouted a new Arby's, and where the long brick Ypsilanti-Reed Furniture Company once stood on the corner of Dexter and Main Street, creating a sort of "Liverpool-industrial feel in the town, there are pole buildings housing Sears lawn and garden merchandise and an Auto Zone. This place that people like, apparently, to call "A Home in the Heartland," has gone through some changes. How has Ionia changed, and what do these modifications reflect? A Chamber of Commerce brochure declares that "all the traditions of small city living continue in Ionia. This is no sleepy, small town but an active, growing community dedicated to adding the best of the 90's to the already rich mix of family values and strong work ethic. The 6000-plus residents treasure this lifestyle - the quiet, family-oriented atmosphere that has @dStEd from the city's founding in 1833. Today Ionia improves and adapts as new residents and new businesses contribute to the strong foundation of honesty and faith that will continue to make IONIA - A HOME IN THE HEARTLAND." As it says in the brochure, Ionia's citizens "represent the traditional values of hometown America," and the photo (below) reveals clearly who those citizens are and of what their values consist. The photo features, in a nice triangle, two happy "typical" children, the top of the "historic" courthouse, and a "faux historic" lamp. If you were to go to Ionia, or many midwestern towns, you 97 would see these lamps illuminating the dark spaces and making safe towns where "typical" children (caucasian, of course), can play. They ride their bikes on a neatly trimmed lawn with a backdrop of mature trees. Beyond the trees and above the eagle sitting atop the courthouse roof, looms a huge billowy cloud in the shape of Michigan, with a heart placed just where Ionia would be on the map. the children are alone, but we know they are safe, smiling at the surveillance of the camera's gaze and bordered on one side by that enormous phallic Streetlight that appears lit even on this sunny day. We can assume that most days are sunny here, because when we look up at the sky, all is clear except for that light-giving cloud that almost screams, "God watches over this town!" The "traditional values of hometown America," somehow felt to be captured in this photograph, are a mask for the values of white capitalist patriarchal society. The face of a white racist town, revealed in the families, the schools and the businesses, is mirrored by the many ways that the town contains its fears. There are no minorities in this fantasy "home in the heartland" picture. Neither is there poverty, violence or deceit. These qualities have all been transferred to the town's Other. 98 Link to ioniaLhamhenoLCammercewebsite http://www.ioniachamber.com/ Obviously, Ionia is proud of it's historical foundation. How has the town accommodated the past to the present? let's explore Ionia together, keeping in mind the rhetoric that the town uses to "sell itself“: "traditions, community, family values, strong work ethic, family-oriented, honesty, and faith.” Let’s begin at the east end of 99 town, on Main Street, where we approach one of Ionia's historic homes, the John C. Blanchard House and Ionia County Museum. In the mid-1970's the house, in disrepair, was bought by the Ionia County Historical Society, which organized specifically to purchase, restore and preserve the house. Of Italianate styling, the house is one of some 200 homes in what an Ionia Chamber of Commerce Membership Directory calls the "Italianate Capital" of the state. It now stands as a treasured artifact of Ionia's collective past. A historical society brochure describes the house: "Constructed of two course brick, locally fired, then veneered with pink variegated Ionia sandstone, it well deserves its affectionate Spanish name, '12 Palistina' - Delightful Home. On approach, one will appreciate the full acre "through" city lot on which the house stands, with a running creek on the west and a carriage house on the east. Notable architectural features are the tall hooded windows, the overhanging eaves with roof brackets, the ironwork of the fences and the iron-railed 'widow's walk' which tops the slate roof. Upon entering through the double front doors of carved walnut, one is met by the sweep of the curving three-story staircase flanked by large, airy rooms. Many of the original features have survived more than a century of use. Carpets throughout the house are original Victorian sewn carpets. From the walnut louvered shutters covering the windows to the kitchen cabinets of five-quarter pine, the woodwork still bears its original finish. The house's bronze chandeliers were once piped for gas, and the false marble fireplaces still shine. From the second floor sitting room to the newest bedroom and 100 the other 1 1 high-ceilinged rooms, you will enjoy the simple elegance of a Victorian home that is one of many in Ionia's extensive historic districts. This carefully preserved home gives the visitor a glimpse into the lifestyles of our ancestors, and is appropriately listed in both the National Register of Historic Places and the Michigan State Register of Historic Sites." One pamphlet declares that the house cost about $40,000 to build, and would cost $400,000 to replace today, with the same furnishings. This statement alone reveals a longing for a connection to the social status that acquisition of elaborate houses and furnishings can provide. It is a symbol of Victorian refinement, wealth and tradition, and its rhetorical transformation into a museum lends it a certain educated authority that allows its keepers to name, sort, and preserve artifacts that are deemed significant to Ionia's history. The town's values and beliefs are captured and contained in museum form. The house/ museum's connotation of wealth, tradition, and ownership is bestowed upon all of the town's inhabitants, and so is the European ideal of property ownership. Because the house has become a historical site, and not owned privately, all inhabitants of Ionia can claim it as part of their past simply by their association with the town. However, by claiming ownership of the house, the community also must internalize imperialist ideas regarding patriarchal notions of power, property, and colonization, including desires hidden within these ideas, namely the quest for wealth, power, and sensual experience. We can see patriarchal narratives "between the lines" of 101 another pamphlet about John C. Blanchard, the owner of the house. Phrases such as, "he ran away from home," he went into the " profession of law," he was "co-owner of many acres of timber land," his wife was of " Mayflower fame," his house was a "Showplace," and stood on " over one acre of ground" reveal the masculine ideology of rugged individualism, Protestant work ethic, patrimony, and genealogy, all contained in the subtext of what is on the surface simply neutral historical information: "John C. Blanchard was born in New York State in 1822 and came to Michigan while a young teenager. He was 14 when he ran away from home and came first to Indiana. His parents did not know of his plans and did not know for some months just where he was. He disembarked at Detroit and for the next two years worked at various jobs in the Lyons area, about five miles east of here on the Grand River, and a year later he entered the law offices of Roof and Bell as a student. He was admitted to the bar two years later in 1842 when he was twenty years old. Besides the profession of law, Mr. Blanchard was the co-owner of many acres of timber land, as well as the sandstone quarry east of Ionia along the Grand River, where the stone came from for his home. In 1845, Mr. Blanchard married Harriett Brewster, a descendant of the Brewsters of Mayflower fame. Four children were born to them: John Jr., Hannah (married to Thomas Stevenson, and who lived in the house after her parent's deaths), Lucia or Lucy as she became known locally (married to Benjamin Vosper and lived in the home next door to the east), and Ellen (Nettie) wife of A.I. Todd of Carson City, Michigan. 102 Mr Blanchard moved to Ionia in 1850 after being elected prosecuting attorney and became very active in business and community affairs. He had the house built in 1880 and moved into the house in 1881. Only one daughter, Ellen, remained unmarried at that time. The house was built as a Showplace, not particularly built to accommodate children. It is said that it was built because his wife's father said that John would never amount to anything and this was his way of refuting that idea." Female roles are described in this history in their lack of description. The Blanchard's had female domestic keepers, who did the cooking, laundry and housework. One brochure, giving us some insight into this matter, says that " Mrs. Blanchard was said to entertain with tables set for only four. Several tables could be used depending on the number of guests. She thought that with larger tables guests had to talk too loud to make the other guests hear. " Mrs. Blanchard apparently doesn't warrant the quantity or quality of description as does the house, or her husband John, but then, it is understood implicitly and explicitly that we are reading his story, "A History of the Blanchard House and John C. Blanchard." Mrs. Blanchard, in her anonymity represents the Victorian cult of domesticity, which still relates to modern Ionians. Let's leave the Blanchard House now, with its construction of patriarchal narratives through what could be called "historic home ideology," and head west on Main Street toward the business district, where we walk alongside another artifact of the town's rich heritage, the brick-lined street that stretches before us. As the elements of the original town decay and crumble, new "old" objects 103 replace them. The original brick street was replaced in the 1990's, maintaining the "authentic" and "historical" feel of this part of town. Even if people don't have genuine power and wealth or connection to the historic families in Ionia who had them, they can still partake in the illusion by acquiring copies of the items they perceive as status-giving. Thus, the town has installed new "antique" lampposts. Like the similar interiors of theme restaurant chains such as TGI Friday's, or Findlays, the "faux historical" theme of many midwest towns creates a nostalgic common space where inhabitants can live out their longing for the "good old days” and their pride in ownership in any town they enter. As we enter the "business" district ("business," in the heyday of the downtown, referred to retail stores. Now, however, the downtown is dominated by offices space) we approach, on our left, another Ionia landmark, the Ionia Theatre. The ornate 900-seat art deco theatre was built in the 1930's and, when threatened with demolition in the 1980's, bought by the city to be used for movies and live entertainment, The theatre was originally patterned after a vaudeville show house, and provides entertainment geared toward an idyllic past, such as a Charlie Chaplin silent film showing accompanied by a live orchestra, or a concert by Skitch Henderson in 1991. Keeping with the "family values" theme, one brochure shows the lighted theatre with two "PG" movies listed on the marquee, "Lassie" and "North." And of course, framing the photo are the ever-present lampposts. Continuing on, we see a few retail stores, an antique mail, a 104 r-l dollar store (the depressing modern equivalent of the dimestore), a pawn shop, some empty storefronts, and what look to be the two most affluent and flourishing businesses on Main Street, the banks. Along with the banks, some building fronts have been restored to their original condition, but they are mixed with others that still display the simple metal false fronts which swept the town in its' modernization attempt in the 1960's. As we glance down at the sidewalk, we can see that what are intended to look like brick walkways on Main Street are actually poured tinted concrete imprinted with brick-sized lines. Pedestrians have worn down the concrete in the middle of the sidewalk, revealing the truth about Ionia's constructed historic environment. It is false. Ionia has attempted, as have other midwest towns, to transform itself into a copy of an original ideal that never existed. It has attempted to change its class and transform itself from a working class town which houses a large population of indigents in a county which has an extremely high rate of incest, to a place of refinement and wealth. Ionians have constructed an environment full of symbols that imply a history of rugged individualism, hard work, and also wealth and ownership. The artifacts chosen as symbols of Ionia, and other midwest towns as well, reveal a value system, as do all items that peOple acquire. Citizens of Ionia have linked themselves with the history of Ionia, just as the population of the country linked itself to national history through the trope of democracy. We can see ways in which the town's values have been displayed, but how are these values reconciled with the past? 105 Certamly the contradictions are obvious. The empty storefronts lit by "antique" streetlamps, the restored bank buildings that the many indigents of the town never enter, the historic churches, courthouse, stately library, juxtaposed with strip malls, toxic waste sites and perhaps most obvious, the prisons. What price was paid for ownership of this "history?" Love Offering BACK to The Town Mainpage BACK to Table of Contents Mainpage 106 Family Secrets The Bad Luck of Picking Up Pennies When my sisters and I were little, my mother spent much of her life worrying that we might meet untimely deaths at any moment. One thing which provided temporary comfort from the constant fear was superstition. My mother had learned the power of a good superstition from her mother, who died young because "the good die young." Sassiness toward my mother always brought cries of, "I never would have talked to my mother that way! I was glad to have a mother. You'll be sorry when I'm gone." My mother utilized her many persuasive qualities to the fullest. I learned early on not only that the good die young, but that death comes in threes, that black cats, or rather, cats in general, are to be feared and avoided, and that knocking on wood is a necessity if you want to keep evil and disease from overtaking your proud pronouncements of good fortune. One particularly insidious belief that served a variety of purposes, was that we must pick up fallen pennies if we came upon 107 them on the sidewalk. As children, my sisters and I learned that we must seize the fallen penny and deposit it into our left shoe without delay in order to receive the good luck. Not to pick up the coin would be unthinkable, and would reveal a hideous disregard for the value of money as well as an unthinkable disrespect for hard work. The cry, "I see a penny!" would send us all racing for the coin, pushing each other out of the way, falling, pretty dresses flying, skinning our hands and knees, and one triumphant girl would rise up with the spoils. Of course, no greed or hate rose up in us. Our mother kept that from happening. "Good heavens! I never would have talked to my sister that way! I was thankful to have a sister, and someday you will be, too!" BACK to A Walk Downtown The dollar has replaced all the bullshit morals they [whites] say they have—--give 'em enough, they'll kill their parents. -Ice Cube, the GenX Reader BACK to The Bad Luck of Picking Up Pennies 108 Love Offering Continuing our walk through the more out-of-the—way treasures of Ionia, we come to the end of East Washington Street, where we have the pleasure of strolling through the historic Catholic Cemetery. Hidden ever so craftily within the lovely foliage and ornate tombstones we may be lucky enough to glimpse a case of BEER! OHMYGOD!!! You gotta come see! layla dragged me out my backdoor and into her car, driving with lightening speed toward a surprise gift from the gods that would surely make our evening more fun, and another poor cruiser's less fun. No doubt. We did have a silent moment for the ones who hid the alcohol for their later consumption, and we then proceeded to heft it into Layla's trunk and drive suspiciously away, trying to think up ways to get it cold while scanning the surroundings to make sure we weren't seen by someone. "Let's put it in the creek." "No, it will just get stolen by somebody else!" Can you sneak it into your basement refrigerator?" " No way." "What are you wearing tonight?" later we speed down the dirt roads in the Dodge Dart, leaving a cloud of dust and drinking warm beer. Our arms out the windows, we feel the cool evening air whip at us, air us out.” Well east coast girls are hip I really dig those styles they wear and the southern girls with the way they talk they knock you out when you're down there. The midwest farmer's daughters really make you feel all right, and the northern girls with the way they kiss they keep their boyfriends 109 warm at night. bum bum. bum bum. Yahooooo!" Are we midwest or northern? We are northern, damn it! I've gotta pee! We stop in the road and Rick! crawls out the back window. The doors open and Betty and layla jump out, too. All crouched in back of the car, we watch the pee form rivers and tributaries toward our feet. We shift out weight, wipe with leaves and pull up our white jeans. Barbie is flying around the car, singing. She wants to drive. And I can see a car approaching. We head for the car, rehearsing our alibis. It's Jughead! A carload of guys begin to pour out and we are an immediate mixed crowd. Betty and J ughead continue a deep conversation started earlier, and the rest of us show our wares, offer beer. "You have vodka? All right!" Barbie is leaning against Archie, and he is watching Betty out of the corner of his eye. He swigs some more out of the bottle and passes it on. Layla and I walk into the woods to pee again, and make plans to head into town. Back at the car, we gather the girls. " let's go to the movie!" "Where's Betty?" Barbie wants us all to stick together tonight, she's paranoid. "She rode with the guys." Barbie is driving, and I can feel us weaving slightly to the right and then pulling back. She wants to stop by Veronica's house and ask her to come with us. "Jesus, watch where you're going, Barb!" We all scream in unison. "Where in the hell are we?" Ricki knows these roads, she has lived out this way all her life, but even she is confused. "Let's finish the beer and get rid of it before we get to town." Tipping our heads back, we force the warm liquid into our mouths and down our throats. Uggggghhhhhhh. We half vomit it up, but swallow it back down. 1 1 0 Iayla's drink doesn't make it to her stomach. She leans out the window and sprays vomit at the passing weeds. "This tastes like shit!" "Hey! I know where we are! Turn left!" Outside the Ionia theatre, the marquee lights up our faces, and the girl working the ticket booth lets us in free. Sliding through the door, I glance back and see Elvis laughing with some friends. I hurry into the theatre, and we sit in the back row, laughing and heading often for the bathroom. The toilet's being used and Layla pees in the sink, she can't wait, and I am thinking we'd better get out of here. In the dark, cinnamon candies bounce down the hard floor, and I can hear someone retching on the other side of the theatre. Splashes and loud talking, somebody raises their voice. "Let's get out of here." Back in front, we watch Elvis, propped up and led through the lobby by his friends. He heads straight for me, and grabs my arm. "You are going to come with me!" "No, I'm not," and I can feel inside that this time I mean it, although there is still that draw, that desire to go with him. He's too drunk to take care of me. I am ashamed, and walk away. Even his friends are uncomfortable. As we walk coolly across the street toward the pool hall, I glance back and see Elvis, doubled over. His friends coax him, and I notice that he has wet his pants. BACK to A Walk Downtown 111 The Institutions After I left home, I began to be conscious of the oppression I felt as I drove into town from college for a visit. I began to question the normalized behavior of the town. I began to be a stranger. Things that I had never questioned before became huge issues in my life. Why was my family, and probably all of the members of the town where I grew up racist? Was the racism in this town standardized in towns across the midwest and across the country, along with city planning, Christianity, and the common public schools? How is the submerged discourse of racial identity manifest in the everyday workings and institutions of the town, as well as in the space and time set aside for leisure and festival, such as the fair? In what ways were young people shaped by the dominant social order of the midwest town? In what ways was the dominant social order resisted? Who left? Who stayed? I asked some of my former classmates to answer some questions about growing up in Ionia. The voices of young people were not silent, but were not often recorded, 1 1 2 and often not even heard. look for recent reflections on aspects of the town by former classmates of mine. (EoLatLintmdnctinnmlhe. W) Contents The Family iniheflamenfitheiathet The Schools W The Prisons W The Free Fair 113 The Classmates Midwestern small towns have been eulogized by the media (small town values vs impersonal city life) and romanticized in television (The Wonder Years) and films such as Pleasantville. The virtue of growing up in small towns is paid tribute to by Michigan musicians such as John Cougar Mellencamp (I was Born in a Small Town) and Bob Seger (Mainstreet). But this history of thel950's also began to be rewritten with contempt, revealing hypocricy, sexism, a facade of progress and selfish self-contentment contrasted with secrets, isolation, fear and guilt that lay underneath. All was not well in a place that was supposed to be perfect. Many young people in the 1960's recognized the contradictions all around them in their families and communities and began to behave in ways that challenged the status quo. Who are my classmates, how did they view the Ionia of the 1950's and 1960's, and how do they view it now, after the passage of time? It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city. All the guiding principles that might flow from a center of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, one or another kind of pornography. This is how it is with towns. - Don Delillo, White Noise How do you identify yourself ethnically? Bobby: White. Although in college I always identified myself as black on any kind of questionnaire or survey because I don't believe in 114 promoting racial discrimination. I think my family is of northern European extraction. layla: Mostly Irish. My father's family is nearly all Irish. My mother's family is Irish and English. Veronica: My father was 100% German descent. My mother was 50% English and 50% Scottish. So I guess I would consider myself 50% German, 25% English and 25% Scottish. Archie: White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) All ancestors have been (for at least two generations before me) from the Ionia area (probably all in Ionia County). Before that: England, Ireland, Scotland and Holland. Betty: U.S. Midwestern White Anglo Saxon Christian (-: It's funny, I never really thought about my ethnicity until I dated a Jewish kid from long Island, NY. He had never met a real midwestern WASP and it began to dawn on me that perhaps my background was truly different from some others. Most of my family roots are based in the British Isles. We have traced our ancestors back to 1 700's New York State. Frankie: White. My heritage is English. Dobie: I identify more with the Mexican/ Italian side than I do with my German side. I have had more contact with my mother's family than with my Dad's family, therefore I feel closer to my Mom's side. Are you glad that you grew up in a small town? How did growing up in a small town influence your life? Bobby: Yes. In all ways possible. Large cities have more people, more competition, more crime, more restrictions, less room, less freedom, less community spirit or support, less social interaction...The small town felt safe, supportive and friendly. layla: Yes, I'm glad that I grew up in a small town and had a lifetime of stability. It is nice that Ionia has remained as it was - so that I can return - road weary - and walk back into my childhood; walk the 115 same streets - see the same sights. Because I grew up making "friends for life": it has been difficult to move - because each place I made friend "friends for life" then had to suffer the sadness of death as I had to move. Six states later I am emotionally exhausted and find it hard to start over, to love my friends again without restraint. Veronica: I sincerely don't have feelings one way or another. Maybe because I "escaped" yearly to a different sort of life in Florida. To me it was the friends I had that were important. As long as I would have had good friends and good experiences it wouldn't matter if the town was large or small. Archie: Yes. It probably kept me from getting into drugs (much more prevalent, I think, in bigger towns). I felt like a big fish in a small pond so I had the chance to play a bigger role than I might have in a bigger town. I'm very glad I grew up in Ionia. I only wish the school had offered more advanced classes in such things as Science. Betty: Yes. There was a degree of innocence and simplicity about a small town I'm glad I experienced. Growing up without fear of robbery, shootings etc. Having friendly trustworthy neighbors, we never locked our doors or car. There was a basic trust in the honesty of people. I think that's given me an unbiased more open approach to people that has enabled me to develop friendships with peeple of different race and culture. Frankie: Yes. I still hold many "small town" values. I like the slower pace of life and for the most part, knowing the people who live in my area. Dobie: I feel glad that I grew up in a small town where I got to know people very well. I feel that growing up in a larger community for me would have been OK, but not as rewarding. If you no longer live in Ionia, please explain why you decided to leave. Bobby: Opportunities that I chose to pursue led elsewhere. (College, teaching at a college, music, computers, Other stuff, like, you 116 know.) Layla: I was anxious to leave Ionia so I could "see where the river goes." I guess I've always had a wanderlust. I love to travel and meet new people. I was drawn to the Rockies. Veronica: Ionia was not diversified enough. I had been exposed to larger cities through travel growing up and I preferred not necessarily a large town but a larger town than Ionia. I really don't identify with a sleEpy, rural attitude. Archie: Went to college in 1969 and got a job in another city in 1979. Betty: At first I left to go to college, then having discovered there were more interesting places to live, and more to life than small town living I began to roam around to different places. Frankie: I live four miles south of Ionia. There is low crime, low taxes, clean air, good hunting and good roads. Dobie: After my father died, my mother decided to move to Lansing to be close to her family. Also I had planned on going to MSU. Describe Ionia as it was in the 1950's and 1960's. Bobby: Leave It to Beaver City. Safe, friendly, helpful, all of the stores were on Main St, beautiful (I have always loved the hills and trees throughout the city. I don't feel good in flat towns. It just feels weird.) supportive, hard working people, honest, trustworthy people, etc. layla: Ionia contained the hopes and dreams of the youthful USA. We had the hamburger stands, the dances and Homecomings during the 50's. I was very much aware of HS life as a child as my older brother was on the teams, in the plays - out and about in a convertible. The girl's big skirts and ponytails impressed me. The 50's continued into the 60's, I feel. We were isolated from the hippie movement. When I graduated in 1969 I was in the dark about street drugs and knew very little about " the revolution" - for Pete's sake, girls still had to wear skirts in June 1969. It was still cool to be 117 "involved" in school, to do well and to aspire to a degree and career. Veronica: Naive but sweet. Small town fun - picnics. The Free Fair. Fresh watermelon and sweet corn. Summers by the pool - making angels in the snow. High school: A&W, football games, "cruisin the gut," grassers... Archie: Typical small town mid-America; farm community; sports were a big thing. Alcohol was about the only thing kids got in trouble about except maybe pregnancy out of wedlock once in a while. A prison town but nobody thought much of that. Betty: From my memories Ionia seemed peaceful, simple, basically a rural community. The Free Fair was the major event of the year. Frankie: It was a basic midwestern small town. Farming, industry, and corrections was how most people made a living. Dobie: Ionia seemed to me to be a very secure and safe place to be growing up. My overall memories are of being fairly happy and content. Ionia depended very heavily on the prison system and manufacturing for employment. Tell a story about something that happened in Ionia that you feel gets to the "heart' of the town. Bobby: Tough question. This isn't really a story. It just happened so many times that it was taken for granted. I remember my parents and myself (when I got a little older) doing this. When we would drive downtown, or walk around downtown, or go to the grocery store, we would smile at people, wave at people, stop and talk with people. We never locked the car or even rolled up the windows. It was kind of a social thing to acknowledge people and/or visit with them when we went to town. Layla: When I think of the "heart of Ionia" I have this flashback memory complete with the rich cloud of bonfire smoke - of walking up Rich Street on a fall Friday night to go to one of the football games played at the HS on Union Street in the 50's. Rene' Hawkins would twirl flaming batons and young adults filled the stands. I knew my grandmoflrer was waiting for me to spend the night afterwards - 118 that meant popcorn with melted butter and warm chocolate chip cookies. My brother was playing football and my folks would be in the stands. Security. Life was as it should be - like it was every home game. I think it is the Ionia in me that makes me who I am, that other people seem to appreciate. It is the honesty, the being down to earth, the acceptance, the warmth that peOple comment on. I think that is from growing up as secure as possible in Ionia (Even if we did have the Cold War hanging over our heads). Veronica: Hmmm, that's a tough one. I guess something comes to mind about the Free Fair Parade. land four other girls were "asked" to ride on the Chamber of Commerce float. What guidelines were used as to how we were picked were never explained - when we all got there wearing long gowns (from past proms) we were quickly assessed (long glance) and it was decided I'd be "Miss Chamber of Commerce" and sit at the top of the float wearing some crown and carrying flowers. I thought this was absurd! Five girls show up and it's "announced" this one is suddenly "Miss Chamber of Commerce." Like there was some big pageant and one lucky winner! But that's how small towns handle things like that. A lot of fanfare over nothing. Archie: This is hard to do! I remember as a young kid, after my Dad had died (so I was probably 6-8 years old) and lots of guys in town would play the father role with me. Take notice of me in track (later, obviously), take me fishing, etc. I don't think in a larger town that the "town" people would have looked out for me like I think they did in Ionia. Since the town was small, I think most of the people knew my Dad and knew he died. 80 it's not really an " incident," just a way of being looked out for that I feel happened! Betty: As an elementary age kid, I joined the Brownie Scouts. I remember one spring our troop marched in the Memorial Day Parade. That was exciting and gave me a sense of honor. The parade ended at the Fair Grounds near a memorial by the Floral Building. There was a memorial service for our men and women who died in action during military service. Several of us scouts threw bouquets of flowers into the river in honor of those soldiers. It seemed so deeply patriotic and serious. Another time I was an honor guard and got to raise and lower and fold our flag. Those experiences planted a 119 deep sense of patriotism and honor for our country and the people who have fought and died for our principles of freedom. I think that's something found in small midwestern towns you might not find in other areas of the country. Those roots still run deeply in my life today. It still thrills my heart to hear our national anthem and see our flag flying. It hurts my heart when I see people showing disrespect for the flag and the liberty and freedom it represents. Both of my parents and my older brother are veterans and I think that has also affected my sense of patriotism and loyalty to the principles our country was founded upon. Frankie: When a murder took place in Ionia a few years ago people were upset. People killing each other is NOT "just the way it is." Dobie: As a small child I wandered away from my mother while at the Free Fair. When I couldn't find her I began to walk home. As I got to the downtown area a friend of the family recognized me and took me home. In a larger town I don't think this would have happened. I guess to me there was a sense of "family" about growing up in a small town. Describe the decades of the 70's, 80's, and 90's in Ionia. Bobby: Drugs arrived. More incidences, more crime, more people, more stores spread out allover the place, expansion, demise of the downtown area, revival of the downtown area, more apathy, more 'distance' between people. Layla: I left town the day after I graduated and have never really returned. During the 70's, 80's, and 90's it has appeared to change little. After adapting to life in six geographic locations around the country, I long for that boring stability where everyone knows who you are - and as my Grandmother used to say, "Who your people were." Veronica: To me during the late 60's Ionia became dismal. Maybe it was just my attitude toward it but people seemed tired of being so sheltered not having some of the conveniences of bigger cities - Having to drive to Grand Rapids to go shopping, etc. 120 Archie: Still a very nice community; still small, upgrading itself with historical projects such as the refurbishing of downtown; old streetlights and redoing of the brick street on Main Street. Betty: I moved away from Ionia in the 70's. Most of the comments I've heard about Ionia is that it's basically the same. The increase in the number of prisons in the area has increased the concerns of some for community safety. Frankie: The city of Ionia has not changed that much. Most of the change has taken place in the townships. Dobie: I left Ionia in 1969 and have been back only sporadically, but basically I don't think Ionia has changed very much at all during the 70's-90's. Describe Ionia as it is now. Bobby: I guess it's OK. It's growing with more people, more businesses, more opportunities maybe. I don't really know if I know, really I don't...lt is still beautiful. layla: Ionia has undergone more change physically in the last 5 years than it has in the past 50 or so, it seems. Extending the old fashioned street lamm seems to "lengthen the embrace" of the town - to include more homes and businesses. In this way Ionia is growing. Hopefully some business will return to Main Street - which has all but died Veronica: I view Ionia as repressed community. Industry has never taken hold - it's still very rural and though I'm sure there have been changes it appears small-minded to me. Archie: Quaint little country town that looks very pretty. Betty: Same 01' same 01'. A few new businesses have come to town a few old ones are no more. Frankie: A fairly stable small town. Dobie: Ionia is Still basically dependent on manufacturing and the 121 prisons for its' employment. Again, I don't feel it has changed much at all. BACK to The Institutions Mainpage The Family 122 In the Name of the Father l have a confession to make. I have been looking for my "self" in my father. I search his face in pictures, looking for revelation. Cathy Davidson, in her article, "Photographs of the Dead: Sherman, Daguerre, Hawthorne," says, "Just as the daguerreotype was seen as opening onto a larger, preternatural world, it was also believed to reveal the inner life and even the concealed soul of a person..." (Davidson 682). Is that what I search for when making pilgrimages to my mother's attic, sorting through dusty boxes of old photographs and letters? A glimpse of that concealed soul, passed on to me? I look for the moment, the year, that my father became a bitter man. I search my sisters' childhood faces, looking for the origins of our discontent. i' Why didn't our parents tell us the stories of their parents? Why don't I know my family's history? Why did my father, in his middle age, respond to an advertisement in a popular magazine, sending 123 away for "Your Family's Authentic Coat of Arms?" In his mind, did that mass-marketed design represent his family? Was that his way of creating a past? Speaking of the African American relationship with photography in Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, Bell Hooks says, "The word remember (re-member) evokes the coming together of severed parts, fragments becoming a whole. Photography has been and is central to that aspect of decolonization that calls us back to the past and offers a way to reclaim and renew life-affirming bonds. Using images, we connect ourselves to a recuperative, redemptive memory that enables us to construct radical identities, images of ourselves that transcend the limits of the colonizing eye" (Hooks, Wind 64). As descendants of the colonizers, what does remembering mean for us? What will we find to claim, and to carry us wisely into the future? My own conflicting memories of my father demanded resolution. I began asking people who knew him to write about him, believing that the "true" person would eventually appear. 124 Recollections of my Father If he was angry or confused, he probably had a right to be - wondering why he was so unfortunate having had to endure such rough going in the war. He didn't talk about those experiences very much. Probably just as well. Most people can't envision that kind of trauma. Maybe he felt the world owed him something better than life as a barber. I liked his Dad, Cal, as well and thought that they both chose an honorable and respectable, even enviable, pursuit. From what I could observe, he raised a darn fine family and developed a goodly circle of friends. I might add, for good measure, we were all jealous of the fact that your Mother chose him to marry! — a high school friend 125 We started dating and had such good times. We both liked music and sang while riding always. Such harmony. We also liked to dance and always had the reputation of dancing wherever we went. If we were outside we had the car radio. Danced on tennis courts, roads, porches, not like Ginger and Fred. We had our own style. Especially liked fast dancing. We would go to Crystal lake Ballroom and that was a huge ballroom, and dance most of the night. Our dancing continued, even at home, until Arnold got too ill. We would dance at home and after we had children they would tell us they could hear the bones creak. He was so strong. I have always liked tall men. We were married in Jan. 1942 and in April, 1942 he was inducted into the Army. Went to Fort Custer at Battle Creek, then to Camp Crowder, M0, and then to Camp Gordon, Augusta, GA. From there he was sent overseas to Casablanca and was there before 126 Christmas. We didn't hear from him until Christmas morning and the mailman came with a pkg. from Arnold with a gift for his Mom, Dad, and me. We were so glad to hear that he was alive and ok. We also got a telegram. Arnold was in the Signal Corps and he went on ahead of his group. He went from Africa to Italy and was involved in the landing at Salerno. We didn't know it at the time or we would have been basket cases. In May, 1944 he returned to the States. We lived in Atlanta, GA. until he was discharged. I had quit my job at Consumers Power Co. when i heard he was back in the States and went by train to GA. Part of the time we lived on the Fort MacPherson base. With rationing, etc, we didn't have too much but we had a nice life and were glad to be together again. - his wife Things may have gotten worse over time. Perhaps they did, or perhaps it just got harder for us both - things crack or, more likely, just wear away with time and the insides ooze out and dry out and 1 2 7 tire out. I think I was happy to be with him once upon a time. I sat by his chair on the floor. He chose a boxer (black trunks, white trunks); the other one was mine. One of us won a quarter. I think we laughed. It was Friday night and I stayed up late, falling asleep on the rug in the living room and waking up cold. I believe we smiled. I believe we never touched even when walking close together in a crowd. We went in the car, he and I and the dog; the old car with the scratchy seats. I threw poorly and never got better a it - I believe he always hoped someday I could throw better. He didn't drink so much - only on weekends maybe. I can't remember a single conversation between us but perhaps we talked as we bounced along on the pricky seats and threw and shot. He gave me a gun. A shotgun that had been his. He took it and had someone cut the barrel short to make it lighter (and to widen the spray of pellets). I must have practiced. Maybe he threw clay discs for me to shoot at. I don't remember. I know he would have thrown the discs very well, even bravely. My father. Sitting low in a red chair, his arms on it's arms, fingers twist, twist, twist, twist the red hair around and around, the coke bottle (you remember those easy-to-hold green bottles) in his left hand - the arm hangs over the gray carpet and I am lying on the gray place under the green bottle that used to be full of coke but was filled and filled and filled, how many times? from a bottle of whiskey taken from the cupboard shelf by the sink. "It's a pretty bad day" adult—daughter whispers into child-daughter's ear..., "be quiet, be still, be quiet, don't look, be quiet, don't talk...stay." He smelled 128 a certain way that I can't describe but if I smelled that again I know that I would feel unhappy. I have no memory of what my father's face looks like - at least not as a whole piece of work. I know his hair would stand up almost straight in front where he had worried away at it. I know his hands were long and thin and I saw their bones and veins. I know a large dark freckle on the second finger of his left hand. I have that same freckle - sometimes that hand is my hand - but careful now, girl. I know what the dent under his right elbow looked like; the texture of the red vinyl chair. Light red and black shadow. But of course it was a safe place to look. I believe now that he was depressed: maybe not all the time at first, but with a deep and black fullness, and that our mother guarded him, watching for those times, fixing him with positive attitude. Hell, it might have even worked for a while. Maybe I guarded, too. later it didn't matter. - his oldest daughter 129 He always called me "Baby." We had a cabin at Diamond lake. The water was rusty and we had an outhouse, but that didn't bother me. I caught frogs, and went out on the pontoon, and dove down to the weeds, and took the rowboat along the thick shore to find fairy haunts. He loved it too, and it was Alex, our dog, and me and him that knew the place. We knew the musty smell of the cabin when we'd open the door after not being there for the winter. We liked the cold, and getting wet, and then coming in and smelling scorched socks as we stood warming up at the stove. We liked the concrete of the floor and the mucky lake bottom. We knew the smell of wet dog and army blankets and rotting tree trunks. We were the ones that loved this. We would drive around the lake to the bathing beach, because there was sand there. At least there was some sand mixed with the clay of the lake bottom. We would get out of the car, dropping our bathroom towels, and run into the rusty water. I would swim quickly 130 to him, to his strong arms again, and he would lift me up high onto his slippery shoulders. Screaming, I'd spring off into a splashy dive, going deep between his legs among the cool flowing weeds. He'd stay there, out where it's deep, until I grew tired, and wandered shoreward, to the others. - the youngest daughter Through omission, I was taught not to remember, and that's why I struggle always between the past and the future. By not telling us about our past, we were taught that we had no history. That everything about us is a clean slate, that we deserve the future. . W- FM Grandma's Party BACK to The Institutions Mainpage FORWARD to The Schools 131 Family Secrets Some Dates with Dad When I was a little girl, my Dad would eat a whole bag of circus peanuts while sitting in front of the TV at night (after standing to cut hair all day long). While shopping with my mother, I would walk slow, down the candy aisle at Meijers, letting my eyes slide in arcs over bags full of colors and shapes. Sometimes we'd get him Seafoam. He liked Seafoam. After supper he asked for crackers and milk. Not graham crackers, but white soda crackers, soaked soft with milk, in a drinking glass. He'd eat them with a spoon, his eyes on the TV, his body muscular and at rest beneath him (after standing to cut hair all daylong). He liked sweet things. Once when my Dad was dying, I fed him dates. He couldn't speak, and the cancer was all through him, in his brain. Iwanted to make a connection with him, be the one to give him something he liked. So I fed him some dates in the dining room. He was lying on his back in the hospital bed, and I fed them to him fast, because he was eating them fast. I liked giving him the dates, I was the only one who knew what he wanted, and his eyes moved in his head, so I fed them to him faster, and then faster. He choked, and his eyes moved in his head, and he wanted more of the sweet dates, so I fed him lots more dates, faster and faster. He couldn't talk, because the cancer was all through him, and he squirmed on the bed, his eyes moving quick in his head, and he liked the sweet dates. BACK to In the Name of the Father 132 What to do when you're 16 When you're 16, the proper thing to do is get loaded on your grandmother's booze, and it should be different kinds all mixed together. How you do this is: You first invite your girlfriends over for a slumber party when your grandmother is gone overnight visiting her sister. Make sure you plan for days and days the booze and cigarettes you will steal from your parents. Next you ask an older guy to buy beer for you and deliver it to your grandmother's house. All the while you must offer to do the dishes and help out at home for days ahead in order to collect and store up trust. Then you go to your grandmother's house after she leaves on her trip, hang out there, and weigh the guilt and the longing. After that the doorbell rings. Later, Ricki is in the back seat of your car and you are driving, and you try to see the road but you feel dizzy, and you try to turn around to see Ricki because she can't breathe, but the car keeps scraping the curb, and you feel that longing again. Optional: "Fat mashed potatoes. You'll be able to drink more." - Betty's brother, Bud If Ricki keeps gasping in the back seat and you can't yell at her and make her breathe again, perhaps while you drink the parent's amber liquor from the canning jar you shouldn't take the red pills that Layla brings. And maybe if you go to Betty's house, Ricki will listen to Betty's grounded voice and she will breathe again. 133 If Ricki won't listen, and she won't breathe again, do the dishes and help out at home and weigh the guilt and the longing. BACK to In the Name of the Father 134 The Schools The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. -Aldous Huxley Social Development + Indicates Commendeble Improvement \/ Indicates Need for Improvement , l leh | Hit-hi: ..‘1 leaks IWMCDMYVIILL .mumm "m. am!” i Y" Yo I! ooumous _ a 1 - sea: ii :i e1 1 I work neatly. I work quietly. I finish my work. I follow directions. I listen to others. I obey cheerfully. I work and play well with others. I try to be courteous. I try to keep my school clean. I come neat and clean. I practice cleanliness. I know how to use my handkerchief. 135 I passed Kindergarten with flying colors, a point which worries me, especially considering that school is all about disciplining students into submission to the status quo. After all, I am not so naive to think that schools are there to promote radical new thinking. It started early. Common schools were needed to make common people as our country formed. People who knew the same things, who believed the same things, who had the same values. And it is still that way. Paulo Friere says that schools are based on a banking concept, where students go from room to room and have deposits of knowledge placed in their heads by teachers. This kind of teacher-centered back-to-basics approach doesn't foster critical thinking. People acquire subjective opinions that are so buried that they don't consciously know they have them. These mindsets are socialized into us through institutions such as family, peer group, and cultural community. Perhaps the socializing agency with the most influence on the shaping of our predisposed mindsets is the school. Conditioned views (or beliefs about the "nature of things" or "common sense") are important because they provide a framework against which all of our opinions are tested. I am interested in how schools, through prescribed curriculum, act as a huge propaganda machine which inculcates students with views as to "the nature of things." One way that schools implement belief systems that benefit those in power is by lying to students through omission and distortion of facts. The traditional treatment of Christopher Columbus in school textbooks, which has received some attention in 1 36 the past few years, illustrates this point because the truth has blatantly been left out of the accounts. Bill Bigelow, in "Discovering Columbus: Re—reading the Past," calls information in traditional textbooks "propaganda of the winner," because it perpetuates social/ economic class difference. Bigelow describes the textbook use of the word "discovery," as it refers to Columbus as loaded, and carrying a bias. He says it is the conquerors, masking their theft. The atrocities that Columbus committed in his invasions were omitted from our textbooks, and he was celebrated as "the man who discovered America," the one who made our life in America possible. Accounts were always from Columbus' (Spanish) perspective. looking at it through the "Indians" eyes would be counter-productive to the covert goal of "...legitimizing and making OK the conquest, enslavement, and exploitation of people of color..." (Sleeter & Grant 144). And of course, Columbus was often connected with God in the textbooks. A connection with God is also often made in speaking of the superiority of the United States of America, especially in times of war. The public school delivery of Christopher Columbus is an important example of the miseducation we received in the public school system and illustrates the schools' enormous propagandiz ing influence on our subjective mindsets. The way the story is presented causes students at an early age to begin to unconsciously subscribe to, "...a philosophical conception of reality which holds that life forms exist on a hierarchy with humans at the top. As superior life forms, humans are viewed as having the right to use and even 1 37 destroy other life forms for their own benefit, based on the rationale that the " superior" human brain knows what is best. Acceptance of this hierarchy has led to a conception of human groups as also existing on the hierarchy. Gould has described and critiqued a history of craniometric and psychometric research that has attempted to document the genetic superiority of caucasians in the evolutionary chain. This hierarchy, which is almost always expounded by the group that sees itself on top, suggests the same rationale for human exploitation of nature: those with "superior" brains or "superior" culture know what is best, and therefore have a right to exploit and assume authority over people they view as lower on the hierarchy. Thus, racism has legitimized and made psychologically okay the conquest, enslavement, and exploitation of people of color, and is an integral part of the self-definition and feeling of self-esteem of most whites in western societies, regardless of class " (Sleeter & Grant 144). Once we believe that it was OK for Columbus to claim country that was already inhabited, it follows that it was OK for the Puritans to take Indian land, and by extension, for the Dexter colonizers to take the land where Ionia now stands. It somehow follows that it is okay for us to live on the land that was stolen from the Indians in Ionia and that it is OK for their descendants to live in poverty on reservations. It is also OK for us to dig up their bones along the Grand River and take them to our universities to be studied. It is okay, somehow, that the descendants of the slaves upon whose backs we grew wealthy live in poverty in inner cities or spend their days incarcerated in one of the Ionia prisons. 1 3 8 Thomas Greenfield pointed out that black achievements and black people themselves have been hidden in " the linguistic ghetto of the passive voice, the subordinate clause, and the "understood" subject. The seemingly innocuous distinction (between active/ passive voice) holds enormous implications for writers and speakers. When it is effectively applied, the rhetorical impact of the passive voice - the art of making the creator or instigator of action totally disappear from a reader's perception - can be devastating" (Moore 321 ). An example of how our perspective is shaped by the language in history texts is how they "...discuss how European immigrants came to the United States seeking a better life and expanded opportunities, but will note that 'slaves were brought to America.‘ Not only does this omit the destruction of African societies and families, but it ignores the role of northern merchants and southern slaveholders in the profitable trade in human beings...Another example. 'while touring Monticello Greenfield noted that the tour guide, '...made all the black people of Monticello disappear through her use of the passive voice. While speaking of the architectural achievements of Jefferson in the active voice, she unfailingly shifted to passive when speaking of the work performed by Negro slaves and skilled servants. (And finally), noting a type of door that after 166 years continued to operate without need for repair, Greenfield remarks that the design aspect of the door was much simpler than the actual skill and work involved in building and installing it. Yet his guide stated: 'Mr. Jefferson designed these doors...‘ while 'the doors were installed in 1809.' The workers who installed those doors were African people whom Jefferson held in 1 39 bondage. The guide's use of the passive tense enabled her to dismiss the reality of Jefferson's slaveholding. It also meant that she did not have to make any mention of the skills of those people held in bondage (Moore 321-322). Racism is easy to detect in bigots whose language is direct and unsophisticated, but less able to be detected in more hidden forms, such as school textbooks. It seems to me that school should be a place where we address the inequality that persists in our country, but this would mean dissecting, analyzing and challenging the different and unequal experiences of people. This would mean revealing white privilege. Do we dare examine how we are manipulated by socializing agents in our lives that privilege us and hurt Others? Dare we disturb the white club? " Racism is not an aberration; it has persisted in the United States precisely because racial oppression is consistent with the logic of class divisions under capitalism and reinforces the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. By contributing to divisions and antagonisms among the population, thereby weakening hostility to the capitalist class, for social and economic oppression that is generated by capitalism itself, racism plays an important role in stabilizing a capitalist society...Racism is useful to capitalism; moreover, the hierarchical, materialistic, competitive and individualistic environment of capitalism is not conducive to the elimination of racism. It is therefore unlikely that racism can be eradicated within the framework of a capitalist society" (Edwards, Reich, & Weisskopf 288). 140 Founder's Day Photograph, May 28, 1913, from the Ionia Michigan Centennial Booklet (1873-1973) When I asked my former classmates to tell me everything they know about the history of the Ionia area before white settlers arrived, they all gave similar answers: Bobby: How much of Mr. Oliver's 7th grade geography class do you want me to recall? Indians lived in the area. Maybe they had a settlement of sorts near the falrground. They were Chippewas or Algonquins I think. Maybe I should replay those old reel-to—reel tapes in my mind, YOU ARE THERE! Do you remember those? layla: Very little. I guess that was a shortcoming of the educational system in Ionia - or my attention. I do know Indians camped along the Grand River at the Fairgrounds. Veronica: Very little - there were Indians living there or near there until Dexter founded the settlement. Archie: Indians lived in the area, probably because of the Grand 141 River. Betty: Apparently there was an Indian settlement south of Ionia and west of M66 out in the area where the state park is now. I understand there was some fur trading in that area. Frankie: Depending on the time period, the area contained different tribes of Indian hunter-gatherers. Dobie: I remember very little history of Ionia. Handwriting Lessons Link to W http://www.dickshovel.com/study.html Linkto 0.0 .0' II. .LOKIn I‘ ‘. o 3‘ Ah ‘lf. antimuhdiscmtetedAmetindiansxisiLtheiNest http://www.artswire.org/cocofusco/yearofthewhitebear.htrnl BACK to The Institutions Mainpage FORWARD to The Prisons 142 Indian Maiden When I was ten years old, my mother made me an "Indian Maiden" Halloween costume. It was a sleeveless brown cotton shift, sewn on my mother's Singer sewing machine and had four inches of fringe cut all around the bottom that swayed gracefully around my knees, or so I imagined. I went downtown to the dime store and bought some "greasepaint," a cheap black wig with two long braids, and an "Indian headband" with one feather sticking up at the back. On the evening of Halloween, Veronica and I quickly applied our makeup. I had a dark brown jar of creamy paint that l rubbed all over my face, arms and legs. Then I pressed my finger in circles on the sticky bright red paint, and, looking at myself soberly in the mirror, boldly pressed diagonal slashes of crimson on each cheek. I smeared my finger over the black paste and again stroked bold diagonal marks on each cheek. Ready, I stood in front of the full length mirror, staring at my barefooted and transformed image, and was pleased. It was not always a good sign when someone invited you into their home on Halloween. Of course it was okay if it was Mrs. Travis, who loved the neighborhood kids, and laughed easily. Or Mrs. Hedrick, who always took you into her kitchen for fresh popcorn balls and candy all neatly packed into decorated paper bags. But although they were few, there were some houses whose people we didn't know, and as we approached the screen door of this one, I instinctively began to turn on my bare heel, but we were being beckoned to come in, and in the confusion of beer smell, cigarette 143 smoke and stuffed chairs containing laughing men, we performed for our treats. "What ARE you?! HUH? An INDIAN SQUAW? So what do INDIANS SAY?! If you're an Indian, show us what they say!" I raised my stiff brown palm and with my fingers fanning my mouth, softly began a high shriek, "oooooooooooo." "Come on, if you want a treat you gotta do better than that!" So I took a deep breath and raised my face to the partiers, "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" Their laughter followed us as we ran down the dark street, feet slapping on cold grainy concrete, fists crushing soft candy. BACK to The Schools 144 Handwriting Lessons School gets progressively worse, and today layla and I found ourselves taking our own little booze cruise around the fairgrounds at 7:30 am. Forcing hard liquor from a canning jar into your stomach before school seems harsh, even to us. What is this? I was so obedient in grade school. I remember shutting myself in the bathroom to practice cursive, it was so pleasurable. I wanted it so badly. Middle school began to be intolerable. Maybe it was grammar class. The teacher was a hundred years old, and to get through her class we did miles and miles of handwriting exercises like this, '17-” '.“"v' \ r7” 7:33:15?" “)_\é.";3 is to train our hands to move "properly" so we would have "correct handwriting." I can see that "correct handwriting" appear as I write a letter, or a note left on the kitchen table. Resist as I might, I can't change the obedience, the conformity. It always appears. We try to find ways out of school. Sometimes a distraction at the far end of the room, sometimes a student asking for individual help gives us the moment we need to slip out the door. We are OUTA HERE! Remember seventh grade, when friends and parties and a note passed in the hallways between classes were the only places blood was pumping? Just to gasp a little life-giving air between the stifled hours spent at desks. Quiet. Bent. Obedient. So, as a survivor I'd say that middle school was the initiation 145 to a kind of schooling that only the strong and cooperative or the rebellious survive. I managed to endure two mundane stupid years of boring hellish classroom torture without learning one profound thing. Now I am a sophomore, and I can scrape by without studying, with cramming and the sheer force of personality, but how can I tolerate the monotony? Monday Tuesday WednesdaYl‘hursdayFriday Monday'l‘uesdayWednesdayThursdayFridayMondaYTuesdayWednesda yrhursdayfrldaymondaytuesdaywednesdaythursdayfrldaymondaytue sdaywednesdaythursdayfridaymondaytuesdaywednesdayth ursda My days are spent plotting escapes. I must be patient, and find the right moment to slip out the door. Don't they smell my breath? Can't they smell my need for meaning? BACK to The Schools 146 The Prisons Panopticism: A Short History of Surveillance Culture Michel Foucault outlines four great historical forms of punitive tactics as follows: “1. exile, cast out, banish, expel beyond the borders, forbid certain places, destroy the home, obliterate the birthplace, confiscate the possessions and properties (Greek society); 2. arrange a compensation, impose a redemption, convert the damage caused into a debt to repay, turn the offense into a financial obligation (Germanic societies); 3. expose, mark, wound, amputate, make a scar, stamp a sign on the face or shoulder, impose an artificial and visible handicap, torture - in short, seize hold of the body and inscribe upon it the marks of power (Western societies at the end of the Middle Ages); 4. confine (Europe, since the end of the eighteenth century)” (Foucault, “The Punitive Society” 24) He goes on to state that what transformed punitive tactics at the turn of the century was the adjustment of the judicial system to a mechanism of oversight and control. "A general system of oversight and confinement penetrates all layers of society, taking forms that go from the great prisons built on the panopticon model to the charitable societies, and that find their points of application not only among the delinquents, but among abandoned children, orphans, apprentices, high school students, workers, and so on" (Foucault 32). He then describes Julius' comparison of "civilizations of the spectacle civilizations of sacrifice and ritual, where it is a 147 matter of giving everyone the spectacle of a unique event and the major architectural form is the theater) with civilizations of supervision (where it is a matter of ensuring an uninterrupted control by a few over the greatest number; its privileged architectural form - the prison)” (Foucault, “The Punitive Society” 3 2). Prisons are characterized by a clear separation of those who have power and those who do not. They are agencies of social control, and reflect the wider civilization of supervision in their use of surveillance as a way to exercise control of peoples' bodies. Foucault isn't speaking of bodies in a moral sense, but of the coercion, control and subjectivation of bodies, meaning the way they are used. For instance, at the turn of the century in Europe the concern was how the body of the worker was applied to the apparatuses of production. "inadequate wages, disqualification of labor by the machine, excessive labor hours, multiple regional or local crises, prohibition of associations, mechanism of indebtment - all leads workers into behaviors such as absenteeism, breaking of the 'hiring contract,’ migration, and 'irregular' living. The problem is then to attach workers firmly to the production apparatus, to settle them or move them where it needs them to be, to subject them to its rhythm, to impose the constancy or regularity on them that it requires - in short, to constitute them as a labor force. Hence a set of laws creating new offenses (the passbook order, the law concerning drinking establishments, the lottery prohibition); hence, a whole series of measures that, without being absolutely binding, bring about a division between the good and the bad worker, and 148 seek to ensure a behavioral rectification (the savings bank, the encouragement of marriage,...); hence the appearance of organizations exercising control or pressure (philanthropic societies, rehabilitation associations); hence, finally, a whole immense worker moralization campaign. This campaign defines what it wants to exorcise as 'dissipation' and what it wants to establish as 'regularity': a working body that is concentrated, diligent, adjusted to the time of production, supplying exactly the force required. It gives the marginalization effect that is due to the control mechanisms a psychological and moral status of importance" (Foucault, “The Punitive Society” 33-34). Another important point that Foucault makes is that our conception of the prisoner as a "delinquent," or some kind of " psychological and social mutant" is a misunderstanding. " Delinquency should be understood, rather, as the coupled penality- delinquent system. The penal institution, with prison at its center, manufactures a category of individuals who form a circuit with it: prison does not correct - it endlessly calls the same ones back; little by little, it constitutes a marginalized population that is used to exert pressure on the 'irregularities' or 'illegalities' that cannot be tolerated. And it exerts this pressure on illegalities via delinquency in three ways: by gradually leading the irregularity or illegality toward the infraction, with the help of a whole process of exclusions and parapenal sanctions (a mechanism that we may call 'indiscipline leads to the gallows'); by incorporating delinquents into its own instruments for supervising illegality (recruitment of provocateurs, informers, detectives;...); by channeling the infractions of 149 delinquents toward populations that need watching the most (the principle here: 'a poor person is always easier to rob than a rich one” (Foucault, “The Punitive Society” 35-36). So,"...prison has the advantage of producing delinquency, an interment of control over and pressure on illegality, a substantial component in the exercise of power over bodies" (Foucault, “The Punitive Society” 35-36). v .. ' ‘. z .‘ Our society, much like Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, needed to keep the work force productive and ensure a system of control by the few over the greatest number. This was accomplished when the nineteenth century founded the age of panopticism, which Foucault describes as "an organ of generalized and constant oversight [in which] everything must be observed, seen, [and] transmitted: [there must be] organization of a police force [and] instituting of a system of records (with individual files)" (Foucault, “The Punitive Society” 35). How do the areas of delinquency and surveillance relate to the inhabitants of Ionia? Let's transfer these concepts, both literally and figuratively, to the town in the 1960's, when I was a teenager. As teenagers growing up in a highly conformist environment, we devised secret lives on country roads and city streets. Car culture was at it's height, and cars were our second homes, safe places for illegal activities like drinking and drug use, and also for social interaction, for sex, for life. And the familiar labyrinth of county roads that we frequently entered were a liminal space where no adults existed. Our behavior, when " leaks" got out, or there was a 150 casualty of the lifestyle, such as a car wreck, was chastised, but ultimately forgiven. There was a certain "give and take" with adults. We were the delinquent sons and daughters of the town, and in constant contention with authority that would take away our freedom. And occasionally we would be infiltrated by another unfortunate "delinquent" forced to work for the police department as a nark. Sometimes the nark would be African American, which leads me to the connection with delinquency that I really want to make. As teenagers growing up in a prison town, we never thought about the fact that a great number of our residents were people of color, specifically black males, as they make up the great majority of the prison population not only in Ionia, but in the United States as a whole. The marginalized population that prisons create and call back again and again to exert pressure on illegalities that Foucault describes is, in this case, the black male population. Thus, racism serves a valuable purpose for social control. Noam Chomsky said that, "There has always been racism. But it developed as a leading principle of thought and perception very much in the context of colonialism. It's not that it wasn't there before. It obviously was. But it gained entirely new dimensions and new significance in the imperialist context. That's understandable. When you have your boot on someone's neck, you have to have a justification for it. The justification has to be their depravity. If you can find anything to hang their depravity on, like the color of their eyes, it's that...if you're robbing somebody, oppressing them, controlling them, dictating their lives, it's a very rare person who can say, Look, I'm a 1 S 1 monster. I'm doing this for my own good. Even Himmler didn't say that. There's a standard technique of belief formation that goes along with oppression, whether it's throwing them in the gas chambers or charging them too much at a corner store or anything between those. There's a standard mode of reaction, and that is to say that it's their depravity. That's why I'm doing it. Maybe I'm even doing them good. If it's their depravity, there's got to be something about them that makes them different from me. What's different about them will be whatever you can find" (Chomsky 93-94). Color, in the US, is synonymous with depravity and delinquency. The irony of black males, targeted to be delinquents by the criminal justice system, being forced to work surveillance of the delinquent white teenagers of the town escaped us at the time, but the reality of surveillance, and the conformity that it demanded, was felt by us all. 152 Prison Town The Michigan Reformatory, 1973 from Ionia, Michigan Centennial Booklet (1873-1973) Ionia, Michigan is a "prison town." Three of them existed there when I was a child. The House of Correction and Reformatory, with building begun by Jackson Prison inmates in 1877, opened in 1878. The Michigan Asylum for Insane Criminals, housing insane felons, criminal sexual psychopaths, insane convicts from other prisons, and patients transferred from other state institutions who had developed dangerous or homicidal tendencies, was opened in 1885. lastly, the Michigan Training Unit, a medium security facility, opened in 1955 to serve the academic and vocational needs of "more educable inmates" sentenced to the Department of Corrections. At present, there are five prisons in Ionia. They are the Richard A. Handlon Michigan Training Unit, the Ionia Maximum Correctional Facility, the Ionia Temporary Correctional Facility, the 153 Michigan Reformatory, and the Riverside Correctional Facility, and there is a sixth prison, another maximum facility, under construction. The ethical dimensions of the containment of pe0ple within the walls of the prisons was not something that I ever remember discussed or questioned by anyone in Ionia. Not at home, not at school, not anywhere. The only "news," other than escapes, came from friends who had some connection with the prison - a parent, an uncle, a friend - who told tales of the violent and barbaric "monsters" who were housed within the walls. The general feeling among the townspeople was that the prison was a necessary evil. When the occasional escape occurred, I can remember townspeople comforting themselves with the rhetoric of "safe ground," the belief being that the escapee's strategy would be to get out of the area quickly. "We are in the safest place when an inmate escapes, because they know the police will be looking for them here. They will head back to wherever their home is as fast as they can, so they can hide." I asked former classmates about living in a prison town: Were you conscious of the prisons being in our midst while growing up? Bobby: Not really. I didn't know anyone who worked in any of the facilities until I was in upper grade school. We used to play ”exhibition" baseball games in these places. It was kind of creepy going through the check points, locked barred doors and tunnels. That was when it dawned on me that these guys were locked up and being held in prisons. 154 Layla: Yes. We used to get ice cream cones when I was very young (4— 6) and drive to the Riverside Criminally Insane Asylum and watch the crazies climb the fences. I would see inmates on work details at the free fair. We would drive by the Maximum Security and marvel at the guards in their towers with guns drawn. Every so often there would be a report in the paper of someone being shot as they tried to escape. Veronica: Certainly. Everyone knew someone who had a job at one of the prisons. I was always embarrassed of them, truthfully. If you met someone from out of town they were usually aware of the prisons and would comment on them. Also, one inmate escaped and stole a car from our driveway. It was later found in Detroit with bullet holes in it. That made me aware. Archie: Yes. The admonition not to ride with strangers because they could be from the local prisons/ hospital. But no panic or worry. We always figured an escapee would get the hell out of town and not hang around and bother us. Betty: Yes. We lived one block from the entrance to the Ionia State Hospital. My father was employed by the State Hospital. Frankie: Yes. I could see them and knew people who worked in them. Dobie: Yes. My father was employed at the power plant for the prison system. How did the prison system affect daily life in Ionia? Bobby: I wasn't aware of the prison systems affecting my daily life. However, I do remember a few times when there was an escapee or a walk-away alert. layla: My parents always told us not to worry about having inmates so close by, that if they were going to escape they wouldn't come in town to hurt us - that they would try to get as far away as possible. My Dad, being a businessman, said the prisons gave a more stable work force than the factories - because the factories had lay-offs. I 155 think my Mom's Dad even worked at a prison for a while during the Depression when his clothing store suffered from a lack of business. Veronicaz: It didn't until the car was stolen. Then we suddenly took the keys out of our cars at night and locked our doors to the house. We had never really done that before. Archie: Not much except that it was a large employer for the city/ county. Betty: Overall I think it had very little effect on daily life. A lot of local peOple were employed by the system. Except for an occasional prison break I think most pe0ple gave it little thought. Frankie: A lot of Ionia people had jobs in correctional facilities. People did not worry about the prisons being in Ionia. They were glad to have the steady, good paying jobs in Ionia. Dobie: I don't feel that the prison system affected my daily life very much at all. I was aware of them because of my father, but I don't recall ever feeling threatened in any way. The positive was that my father had a job because of the prisons. As you can see, there was not a lot of thought given to the hundreds of men who were imprisoned in Ionia. We never considered them as being a part of our town, but they certainly were. We had a large minority population hidden in our town that we had no concern or feeling for. I can remember cars of African Americans passing through town on their way to the prisons, and it was like seeing a "foreigner" riding by. We had no contact, just eyes meeting for a moment. They represented something bad. They weren't 'us." Even now, we can imprison people and have no concern or feeling for them. Especially when their color makes them 156 O I I‘ llll' . 0 «lo... 0.13. lo I"I’-..‘ A. I v a .‘O .‘I .0 .nI.|‘I I‘llao 0 .nuuco.ll‘!o Link tolheintemanonamfficeoflheleonmneltiennefense. Committee. http://www.freepeltier.org/ BACK to The Institutions Mainpage EQRWARD. to The Free Fair 157 Family Secrets Christmas is for Giving Everybody was loaded at Christmas. For my mother, it was all- out war on the plodding nature of everyday life. This woman loved to party. It was Christmas punch, Manhattans, Martinis, Champagne, Beer, Kahlua, anything that packed a punch. This made the family Christmas Eve very interesting. Sixteen years old. I clung to the stairwell, dragging my new Christmas clothes up to my room to try on for size. A relative suddenly appeared and threw himself on top of me on the bed, panting. We were a close family. BACK to The Prisons 158 Derf‘s Story I In the summer of 1965 a black kid showed up at the grasser, which pissed Derrick off and when Vince tried to calm him down he got punched for it. That's all. Vince's perfect Corvette Stingray lurks on the edge of the bonfire heat, more closely resembling a shark than a stingray actually. It settles in the long orchard grass. The shark has eaten Vola, the dark and lovely river-rat, who more closely resembles an ocelot. She's long and thin but shapely and strong and she carries herself within a feminine I'll-kick- your-ass contradiction. She raises the volume of the radio as the big engine unrumbles. Vola sits low in the seat and doesn't check out the scene, like maybe she's bored. But maybe she's just uncomfortable. Grassers are essentially a male thing. I think girls can be put off by the shadows, the outside, the uneven terrain, the fire, the face sucking fruit-bats, who knows. But risking the indelicacies of being busted for MIP, they're here, and there's car-loads of them. Derrick's shirt is crisp and white and each sleeve cuff is turned under twice. The bonfire crosslights the distended veins that lift from his hands and forearms and draw on the cooling night air. They seem to hydraulically raise the longneck or Lucky Strike to his lips. He lives with his dad now. He once told Derrick to keep those hands out of his pockets. The Army taught him this long ago. Offenders were ordered to fill their pockets with sand and sew them shut for a whole week. Derrick's sister Darcy is my friend and she lives with her mom in a small upstairs apartment a few blocks from my house. Her mom is never there. I go over and we talk and eat 159 potato chips, she going for the ones folded completely over or the big bubbly ones. She takes a stylish drag from my cigarette and quietly exhales Motown, "Don't mess with Bill..." pronouncing the 1's like w's. She breaks me up. Because of the family split, I know little about Derrick. Maybe Vola doesn't want to share Vince right now. She's moody. Vola once made Vince wait an extra forty-five minutes at the Dog'N Suds drive-in while she slowly nibbled a measly little hamburger, no catsup or mustard, nothing. Nibbled, nibbling around the nibbly goddamn edge... christ, must have driven Vince absolutely 100% pure Ionia-State-Hospital-For-The-Criminally—lnsane mad. She's lovely. Vince slides from the Vette and heads for the firecircle where The Hard have gathered, longnecks in hand. The Tribe. The Warriors. The Roundtable. The Inner Circle. The Council. The Alcoholics. And Janet, my older sister. She's fearless and funny and fits right in. Her good looks and charm have their affect. She tamed Burt, our gruff old neighbor who works at the prison and keeps a billy-club under the front seat of his convertible. He's tough as nails and runs a tight ship, four boys of his own and all. He swears and yells and Janet laughs and kisses him on top of his shiny bald head. ***** Location, location, Iocation--a business tenet not lost on a young negro. Sales are brisk, inventory stable and overhead low. Risk was based on the ability to distinguish between young men arriving at the Greyhound bus station for pre-induction physicals and Detroit 160 undercover drug cops. It'd been a good run. The next step was off the business plan but simple: 1) reduce the sentence by working undercover as a narc in conjunction with Ionia area law enforcement to stem the trickle of drugs into America's Heartland or, 2) do hard-time in prison. Either way, he's going to Ionia. That's all. ***'k* Linda sits next to me on the flickering chrome bumper and she smells great. She looks like a Swedish movie star. Her hair is long and blond and her eyes are green. She likes me even though I'm two years younger. I'm tall and play guitar and have a crappy band. It was Linda who finally found me, walking, muddy and tired, in the dark along a farm lane after the cops raided the grasser at the Riverbanks last summer. I was drunk and inexperienced and got separated from my older sister Janet when the patrol cars came rolling in, bubble-gum machines flashing. A hundred kids disappeared in moments but the guys that were twenty-one were cool and acted like they owned the place. Linda made sure I got home ok. That was before I'd had drivers training. Another time Janet had a party at our house when the folks were out of town. All night we drank and smoked and laughed. I woke on the couch with Linda asleep by my side, her arms around me. More cars arrive. Some park in an orderly family reunion fashion, and others arrive, glasspacks roaring over a hill, tires spinning divot-ladened donuts. "WlS...in Chicago!" Dusty Springfield. Brut, Charlie, Jade East, British Sterling. The time is 1 1:20. H.I.S 161 a J .. ' l 'l .l .5. ". ' -. ,i J ' . d ' ’4 I i ‘.(I I ’ ~ . , . jeans and shirts and back to school or the factory or maybe Vietnam. But tonight we party. Strings of Rastus and Liza jokes. Brill Cream, Radar, ducktails to GI haircuts. PBR. The Big Thing. Zippos. Mohair sweaters. Like A Rolling Stone. A break for Weather and News. Marines dying by the dozen now. Civil Rights... station change. The Supremes. Janet's the first to see the black kid at the grasser. last year Janet went down South with the church youth group to help poor negroes. She loved the experience despite the ambivalence of the whites in the community. They had to drive over fifty miles to find a grocer who would sell them food. They'd be awakened in the night by noises outside their sleeping area. A local white resident said he thought negroes were just fine and that everyone should own at least one. Janet played the piano for the church services and said they went on for over two hours. She loved the black kids and wanted to bring them home. Janet The grasser gets loud and sincere and things power-shift into 162 fourth gear. The fire circle is impressive. Cy stands like a Greek statue, strong and confident and quiet, back from Vietnam. Tony is wound tight-~his homemade tattoos could go off any second. I saw Tony leap over the roof of his car earlier this summer. After throwing kegs at his dad's bar, he came over to visit Janet. He took a few steps and jumped, planting one hand in the middle of the car roof as he pulled his legs up to his chest, he seemed to float right over. Tony carries a "church-key" with him now after the wedding reception incident when he broke the end off his longneck and swallowed shards of glass. He spit blood the rest of that night. Vince is bull-like and anchors the group. He gestures carefully with his empty hand as he talks. Riley is in the circle, not by virtue of his toughness, but his easy-going personality and a very serious Olds 442. The car's his life. He's big and happy and takes the insults of those few who are near and unkind after a couple of drinks. His fiery red hair is short and curly and his voice booms. Randy and Tim are drunk. Derrick is very aware of himself. He stands as if waiting for the photo to be taken. I've never seen him smile. He keeps shifting his weight from one foot to the other, each time sneaking a peek down his length. He's hard to read. I step off the edge of the bonfire light and piss one-handed, aiming at the Universe just beyond the orchard. A jazillion stars but I recognize the Big Dipper. Apple pies in town will taste like Pabst Blue Ribbon come Thanksgiving. I return to the light and I see that the black kid is standing by the fire. ***** There aren't many negroes in Ionia, other than in prison. 163 There's one family that is very light-skinned. The kids are good students and achievers. I don't know them very well. I wonder what the dad does for a living. We see cars full of negroes passing through once in awhile but I think they're on their way to the prisons to visit. A young negro hung out with us kids for awhile. He was real friendly and outgoing. I think he stayed at the Ionia Hotel which seemed pretty strange. We asked him questions about his family but I don't know if we ever really understood his situation. He'd show up at the coke shop after school and sit at our booth and would eat a regular meal while we had cokes and shared french-fries. When leaving, we'd pay our bill but would never see him pay with cash. He said he had a tab there, paying a week or two in advance, insuring that he wouldn't run out of money and get in a bind. That's the first I'd ever heard of someone doing something like that. ***** Derrick loudly menaces the black kid with Get the FUCK out of here! The crowd goes quiet. Vince strides up behind Derrick and speaks his name. Derrick spins around and faces Vince. The black kid is gone. Vince calmly gestures and begins to say something but Derrick slams a long lightening-quick overhand fist into Vince's throat and his words die there. The force of the blow sends Vince's head down and his shoulders forward and his big body back a step or two. Vince keeps his legs and his head. Derrick steps forward for more and Vince raises his opened hands in an unthreatening way. This keeps distance between them, readies Vince for whatever happens next, and buys some time while Vince tries to work words around the terrible choking pain in his throat. Linda has seen all of this and stands up and says something I can't hear. She takes a few steps but can't seem to decide where to go. She's very pissed along with Janet who suddenly appears and says we're going now. I ride shotgun back to town in the Delta 88. The scene plays 164 over and over in our minds. Vince kept his cool and the whole thing diffused. Vince could have crippled Derrick with a counter-punch. I never saw the black kid again and have wondered how that can be. By this time next summer my band still sucks, but Vola is mine. Go toDerflthorle BACK to The Prisons 165 Janet’s Letter The Presbyterian Church in Ionia, Michigan sponsored Youth Fellowship field trips to various US states in the 1960's for the purpose of serving impoverished communities in different capacities. Janet traveled with other young church members to Tennessee in the summer of 1964. This is her letter home. June 9, 1964 Dear Mom and Dad, I really don't know where to start. There's so much that has happened so I'll start from the beginning. Friday nite we slept in the Presbyterian Church In Bowling Green Ken. Saturday morning three girls and I went Shopping. I got a pair of black heels for $4.00, a white ruffly blouse for $2.00 and a Scot[c]hgard vest for $1.00. We left for Keeling only to find about a population of about 200. They sell firecrackers, 800 for $2.00. When we arrived here, a negro lady fixed us fried chicken and mashed pot's. On our way down here we stopped at a Dairy Queen, with signs painted "Whites Only" & for "Negroes, Please!" Real nice of them, hugh? Sun. nite went to Memphis Airport. It's so beautiful. Our sleeping facilities are quite nice. There's four rooms 2 bedrooms, a backporch & a bath. 166 Please forgive me if I skip around but I keep thinking of different things to write about. Sun. we gave the church service. I played the piano. There is no time schedule here. People come to church when they want to. It's sort of one great big discussion group, We were in church from 9-1. Monday mooring we got quite a jolt. The negro Superintendent of the school that we were supposed to teach in was closed down to us. He didn't want us to integrate. Isn't that something! So we went to the church here to teach. The negro children are just darling and they really want to learn. I'd like to take a couple of them home with me. We are really stirring up the trouble with the "white trash." The post office in the closest town to us reads our postcards and mail. They censor it if there's anything in it they don't like. It's against the law but they are doing it. The whites really want us to move out of here. I'm not kidding the people are really prejudiced down here. They don't want anything to do with us. The general store here won't sell us anything so we have to go to Dyersburg 5 5 miles away. We really had a scare last nite. We found out that there's cottonmouths & water moccasins behind the house that we are staying. Wow if that doesn't shake you up nothing does. On top of that, there's someone trying to get us out of here. Cause we had someone out in the bushes last night. I didn't sleep all night long. I've got so much more to tell you and my arm is giving out. I'll wait till I get home so you better have your ears cleaned out. I'm being good! love ya, Jan P.S. Remember the book "Black Like Me?" I guess he's right when he says that you can't experience it by reading it. You have to see the looks & the feelings of all the people to know what it's really like. I feel like crying. BACK to Derf's Story I 167 If only I could have long straight hair - blond, strawberry blond, red, light brown, any kind of dead, white-girl hair will do. If only. No doubt about it: in the marketplace of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the yellow brick road leading to black power in the mainstream can only be traveled by those who are throwing shade and shedding skin all the way - by those who are ready to be, as the novel put it, "black no more." - bell hooks, Outlaw Culture BACK to Janet's Letter 168 an The Ionia Free Fair Click here for '.Adu I' a. I .I "' .II‘ I.‘ .‘. ‘I w- 7 Girls! Girls! Girls! In the 1950's, our summers were measured by the arrival and departure of the Ionia Free Fair. We looked forward to its coming as the high point of summer freedom, and its departure brought that abrupt and unsettling realization that school would be starting in three weeks. Now the slow days took on a nervous impatience. Summer was, for all good purposes, over. The fair came in by train, screeching and halting, while whole families waited to meet it, leaning on their cars, listening for the whistle, imagining elephants, and midgets, and magic. In the decades before I was born, the carnies, they called them, used to rent rooms in homes in town. My grandmother would "put up" fair folks, who would bring money and a certain bawdy glamour into town for ten hot August days every summer. Especially the Showgirls. The wives welcomed them, the men ogled them, and there was a huge parade to welcome them. The floats were enormous shifting islands of puffiness, and lounging relaxed on top, one hand waving at the men whistling from the sidewalks of Main Street and the other casually steadying themselves, were the Showgirls. BACK to The Institutions Mainpage BACK to Table of Contents Mainpage 169 .1;- ._ _ The Ionia Free Fair She Walks, She Talks, She Wriggles on her Belly Like a Reptile! The Exotic Other I equate the decline of this nation with the number of citizens willing to spend money on T-shirts reading "I'm with Stupi ," "Retired Prostitute," and "I won't go down in history but I will go down on your little sister." -David Sedaris, Barrel Fever A couple of summers ago, while visiting the Ionia Free Fair, I was mesmerized by a preponderance of T-shirts, sold under the tents and worn proudly by fairgoers that displayed bold statements like "I'm Not a Bitch, My Husband's Girlfriend Is," or "Leave the Bitch at Home, Let's Go Fishing." I was especially reminded of free fair fashion while sitting at an annual Ladies Day program a few years ago and listening to Kaye Lani Rae Raflco give an uplifting speech about her life after her reign as Miss America. As near as I can figure she lives in a suburb of Detroit and is a stay-at-home mom, but she obviously has many inspiring moments, and still finds time to share them with other women at these special events. The moment really took me back to another year at the Ionia Free Fair when Kaye lani Rae was Miss Michigan and soon to be a Miss America contestant. That year at ladies Day she hula danced in the animal barn to the awe of local women. It was the same dance, I believe, that she performed the night she made us all proud and won the Miss America title. Also on the program was a plump 60-ish farm wife who gave a humorous 170 motivational speech while demonstrating cooking, canning and kitchen storage tips. "I'm getting the fuck out of here." My 17 year-old daughter Molly, having had enough at that point, headed out toward the midway, a place which offered much more normalcy to her, apparently, than a barn full of women who were now staring appraisingly at local mothers and wives who were runway-modeling fashions from downtown clothing stores. Of course, that broke the spell of the moment, so I hauled my complimentary bag of recipes, advertisements, pens, pencils and maps, and headed after her. Naughty unappreciative girl. I bet lani Kaye Raflto would never have treated her mother that way. I'll have to remember to tell Molly that. She should be glad to have a mother. She'll be sorry when I'm gone. Molly says the Free Fair is all based on nostalgia, and that it is just another material culture event capitalizing on what used to be an event which brought people together for a real reason, to share animal husbandry tips, or something. She says eating bad food and mingling with inbred people just doesn't make it for her like it used to. Ha. I tell her she needn't revile those who may have had less opportunity in life than her. She says they have freedom of choice, who prevents them from buying Vogue magazine? And soap is cheap. While strolling the midway and quietly contemplating how my daughter could have grown into such an uppity HUSSY, my mind wanders back to the days of yore, back when the fair was a fair, back in the days of freak shows and girlie shows. 171 Molly, I say in a 'teaching moment' voice, "country and small town fairs are an English tradition. (I ignore the slight rolling of eyes) We need to put our little fair in perspective with history. The Russian literary critic Bakhtin talks about carnival being a great festival of abundance in early modern Europe. 'The whole point of these festivals was leisure and consumption. Poor people stopped work, put on red stockings or any other finery saved for the occasion, then proceeded to eat and drink with abandon, and spend whatever they had on hand....Camival was about food, and about sex... [Molly suddenly seems more interested] Carne was flesh, and Carnival celebrated its abundance...Yet more than simply an outpouring of animal spirits was taking place. The elevation of wives over husbands and servants over masters involved a ritual role reversal through theatrical representation. Comic shows, mummeries, vulgar farces, and open-air amusements of all kinds could turn the whole town into a theater, every actor a spectator, every spectator an actor. Masks conveyed rather than concealed meaning. Surfaces and depths, representation and reality merged in the exuberance of Carnival laughter...Bakhtin identified what he called " grotesque realism" in Carnival laughter. Grotesque realism, in Bakhtin's view, was a subversive discourse of abundance that celebrated a corpulent human body with yawning orifices and protuberant lower regions.‘ ["Yuck!"] (Lears 22-23). So, Molly, you could say that the Ionia Free Fair is the descendant of the Carnival and that it is a time when Ionians put off class divisions and rub elbows with the exotic Other - the carnies, the freaks, the sideshow vendors and the Other fair-goers who are "foreign" - from cities like 172 ,‘I‘ .0 Detroit or Lansing. It is a time when we thumb our noses at class divisions and mingle. It is a challenge to established hierarchies! She doesn't buy it. It is hard to reason with this girl. "Mom, you always read too much into things. The Ionia Free Fair is a market fair, descended from the market fairs of Europe. It is nothing more than a place for market transactions. And what is being bought and sold here is stupid. I mean, look at the T-shirts and the thirteen- year-old white trash girls who wear them while pushing a baby cart carrying her two other kids while her new boyfriend checks out every girl who walks by. Furthermore, she, also, has free choice, and can choose another life. And all of your "white racism study of whiteness" stuff is bullshit. You make too much of it. It's just not that big a deal. People are people and you're just singling out races where it would be better to leave it alone. What you're doing is the same old thing, putting the focus on blacks, or Indians, or whatever, and making more of a mockery of their situation. Get over it." Well. I silently admit that the "Bakhtin connection" (I can feel this phrase taking hold in my mind) may be stretching it a little. The Ionia Free Fair isn't the magical and religious and subversive event that Carnival was in Europe. But, I reassure myself, I do think that it is a time when Ionians rub elbows with Others. I mean, look at the African Americans who come to the fair. The only other time we see African Americans is when they are being transported through town to the prisons! And maybe there aren't girlie shows any more, but there is Ladies Day! And the freak shows are long gone, (those really allowed us to ogle at the monster within) but we still have all classes mixing down here. 1 7 3 Mom, don't get wacky on me. It's a copy of what the fair committee thinks an old agrarian fair would be like. It's about pretending to be all rural and good and small- town family-oriented. It's just nostalgia. We're none of that. We never were. Let's go get an elephant ear. MisiLBohtheClomn BACK to The Ionia Free Fair 174 Bobo the Clown "Nice haircut," said Bobo the Clown from his perch above the tank of water. The soldier threw the first ball and it missed. He smiled at his buddies. "Your mother sure dresses you funny," said Bobo, and the second ball slapped hard against the canvas backstop. I, being the ball-seller, had three more balls in my fist ready for him. "They let YOU into the service? No wonder we're losing the war," and with that, the soldier jumped the ball rack and marched toward the clown cage. When he came into range, Bobo jumped into the tank and splashed armfuls of water through the bars and completely drenched the soldier. The soldier turned and made his way to the front of the concession, where he would mount an assault from the flank. There, his buddies grabbed him and managed to move the rage down the midway. Bobo scampered to his platform seat again, lit a dry cigarette, leaned into the microphone and said casually, "I hope that uniform's drip—dry." Hours later, an eight foot board came flying through the back opening where Bobo sat. It missed his head by inches. No one saw who did it. 11. The intellectual has been described as the fool in society, who always acts out of character. His power lies in his freedom with respect to the hierarchy of the social order, because he speaks from outside as well as inside it. "Who exercises this criticism in a society of submissive courtiers? Who can afford to tell the monarchs the uncomfortable truths without endangering their own position?...As the court jesters of modern society, all intellectuals have the duty to 175 doubt everything that is obvious, to make relative all authority, to ask all those questions that no one else dares to ask...The truth of the fool is never quite serious, for it lacks the important mooring of responsibility (and also, of course, of power). This does not lessen its value; it makes it, however, all the more unreasonable to meet it with the heavy artillery of public suspicion and aspersions. Whether a society includes intellectual court jesters who critically question its institutions, and how it tolerates them, are a measure of its maturity and inner solidity" (Dahrendorf 49-52). BACK to The Exotic Other 176 The Future I have forsaken My house, I have abandoned My inheritance; I have given the beloved of My soul Into the land of her enemies. My inheritance has become to Me Like a lion in the forest; She has roared against me; Therefore I have come to hate her. Jeremiah 12:7-9 Regaining the Imagination My father was a barber and my mother was a secretary and a housewife. My mother was June Cleaver. Even when my father was his most alcoholic, self-destructive and abusive self, my mother would " put on a happy face" and forge on like nothing was wrong, as if we really were a perfect family. I don't remember having any conception that we were of any "class" at all. I do remember my father's hatred of Jewish people. He used to say that my friend's father was Jewish, and the underlying resentment he felt because of her family's wealth was obvious to me, although I don't think I connected his bias to class conflict. I felt the contrast in our lives, though, in her spacious and thickly carpeted country home and in her expansive yard. It was quiet and comfortable there, and smelled of perfume. My house, located on a busy highway in town, was exposed to heavy pollution from the noise and fumes from cars and trucks rolling by. The house fronts 177 '3 yum-'57“ D ‘l on our street were discolored by years of traffic thundering past. If anything, there was an unspoken feeling that we were middle class, among all those other families like "us" who were of the "great middle class." I learned early on that to be like "us" was important. People who were of another religion, color or had any kind of physical or mental challenge were either reviled or pitied by my parents. I didn't question my place in the world and I had everything I wanted. It was as if I were under water, completely submerged in the collective mindset of the town, and I didn't see that what I thought was " the nature of things," or "common sense," was really ideology that promoted white privilege. To use Maxine Greene's expression, I was "embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool." The educational experience in Ionia was flat. We did no critical thinking, no analyzing, certainly no questioning of the status quo. If there was any complaining at home, the parents forged blindly ahead in a common belief that the teachers knew what was best for their child. Everything was rote and unimaginative. The dull monotony of droning teachers, fill-in-the-blanks, regurgitation of answers, and military-like changing of classes was punctuated by moments of excitement — a panic to copy a friend's paper in time for class, a quick escape from a hall monitor, into a parked car to cop a smoke, or better yet to gleefully speed away. This was the good part. Getting away. A friend recently told me that I did the same thing as the Indians. I gave up my land because I couldn't stay there with the white people. While I would never compare my situation with that of 178 American Indians, his comment struck me as having a kernel of truth. I don't want to be susceptible to anyone else’s' version of my history anymore. I want to speak up. I want to keep questioning. I want to help create a future where our self-image is not based on the consumption of things or of people. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was 'legal' and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was 'illegal.‘ It was 'illegal' to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. But I am sure that if] had lived in Germany during that time I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal. If I lived in a Communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying these anti-religious laws. I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action'; who patemalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advised the Negro to wait until a 'more convenient season.‘ Shallow understanding from 179 people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection" (King 177). If you had lived in Hitler's Germany would you have aided and comforted the Jewish people even though it was illegal? I confess that I cannot say yes to that question without a shadow of doubt. This troubles me, and in order to move in a direction where I can trust myself, I chose to leave the white culture that raised me. "The white race is a club that enrolls certain people at birth, without their consent, and brings them up according to its rules. For the most part the members go through life accepting the benefits of membership, without thinking about the costs. When individuals question the rules, the officers are quick to remind them of all they owe to the club, and warn them of the dangers they will face if they leave it" (Ignatiev & Garvey 10-1 1). We are shortsighted people. We have soiled our nest. We want more. And yet we are nostalgic and sentimental about a glorified past, an Ozzie and Harriet dream that has long ago been revealed as corrupt underneath. And now, in the year 2000, American mainstream culture seems to be tightening again, to be demanding more limits, more controls on the violence in movies and video games, stricter punishments in schools, more prisons, more restrictions. But mainstream white culture doesn't look at itself as the cause of the problem. It always looks out, at the Other, who contains all of our worst qualities because we have said so. Nostalgia and sentimentality are powerful amnesia-causing drugs. They keep people looking back at an idealized past instead of looking critically 180 at their lives and creating a new future. I don't know if I can trust myself to do the right thing, as I have been raised to believe I am superior. I read somewhere that as white people we have to vigilantly look for racism as it arises in us. We have to ask ourselves questions like; Do I live in a mixed-race neighborhood? Do I own my own home? As a teacher, do I integrate issues of race/ class/ gender into my classroom? Am I concerned on a daily basis with inequality? (You can be sure that people of color grow up concerned with inequality on a daily basis.) As a white person I can remain alert for the presence of inequality. I can speak up. I can keep questioning. I can dream. For instance, what if: 1. We transformed the town into a testament of love and change. We turned the dead churches into soup kitchens. We created a community. 2. We gave the fairgrounds to the descendants of the Indians that once lived on the land that we invaded, and we didn't interfere in its use, and we watched what happened. 3. As long as there were people suffering in the world we were not content with our own good fortune and we worked to make change. We realized the violence in words. We never said " soap is cheap" again, or forced people to act like "us" to gain acceptance. 4. We rewrote history and then we destroyed history, because it prevented us from moving into the future. 5. We regained our imagination. We had something to live for. 181 " In your old lives you had nothing to live for. Now you do. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Go clear the land for a new culture - bring your axes, scythes, and guns. I know you have the necessary skills - explosives, medicine, engineering, media knowledge, and the ability to camouflage yourselves. If you're not spending every waking moment of your life radically rethinking the nature of the world - if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order - then you're wasting your day. " -Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma II Do not say, "Why is it that the former days were better than these?" For it is not from wisdom that you ask about this. Ecclesiastes 7:10 Link to BaceIraitm: http://www.postfun.com/racetraitor/welcome.html 182 Keywords Alterity: see Other Anomalous: An in-between category between two opposing categories that is neither one nor he other but has characteristics of both. (Fiske) Not in conformity with what is usual or expected, often involving an apparent contradiction or paradox. Civilized: problematic word: savage vs civilized, etc. " The civilized European subject defined himself specifically through the exclusion of what is marked out as dirty and low." (Young) Colonization: Colonialism is the attempt of the self to take over the other and own the others' land. Cultural Studies: Discipline that reads cultural signs and questions the "everyday" Cultural Studies has seven basic components, according to Dean Rehberger, and has no real discipline that controls it. The seven basic components are: 1. There is always a focus on the relations of power. 2. There is always a focus on semiotics (representation). 3. It focuses on the ordinary (the everyday). 4. There is a focus on conflict and subversion. 5. It focuses on the local and strategic. 6. It continually is involved in self-critique (self study). 7. It attempts to avoid the grand narratives. Containment: "Containment was the name of a privileged American narrative during the cold war. Although technically referring to US. foreign policy from 1948 until at least the mid-1960's, it also describes American life in numerous venues and under sundry rubrics during that period: to the extent that corporate production and biological reproduction, military deployment and industrial technology, televised hearings and filmed teleplays, the cult of domesticin and the fetishizing of domestic security, the arms race and atoms for peace all contributed to the containment of communism, the disparate acts performed in the name of these practices joined the legible agenda of American history as aspects of containment culture." (Nadel) 183 Eurocentric: Historical accounting and world view that sees Europeans as the civilized subject and all Others as the objects to help define the self. Hegemony: From the early 1970's, culture was analyzed through the concept 'hegemony' - a word associated with Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist of the 1920's and 1930's. 'Hegemony' is a term to describe relations of domination which are not visible as such. It involves not coercion but consent on the part of the dominated...Gramsci himself elaborated the concept to explain why Mussolini's fascism was so popular even though fascism curtailed the liberty of most Italians." (During) Ideology: "The set of ideas which arise from a given set of material interests or, more broadly, from a definite class or group." (Williams) Not content, but form is the most important thing about ideology. Imperialism: A political system in which colonies are governed from an imperial center, for economic but also for other reasons held to be important. (Williams) Other: All the racial discourse comes with the rise of colonialism. The self is defined by being in opposition to the Other, and understands self as separate from Other. The other always has the qualities that self doesn't have, and the self defines the self and also who the Other is. Colonialism is the attempt of the self to take over the other and own the others' land. Self ------- Other Master-«Slave Man-—-—--Woman Panopticon: The glass room in the middle of a prison where you can see all people at the same time but you may also be watched at any time. Postmodern: A rejection of the sovereign autonomous individual with an emphasis upon anarchic collective, anonymous experience. Collage, diversity, the mystically unrepresentable, Dionysian passion are the foci of attention. Most importantly we see the dissolution of 184 distinctions, the merging of subject and object, self and other. This is a sarcastic playful parody of western modernity and the "John Wayne" individual and a radical, anarchist rejection of all attempts to define, reify or re-present the human subject. (The Electronic labyrinth) Race: A socially constructed category that has its roots in ..."a philosophical conception of reality which holds that life forms exist on a hierarchy with humans at the top. As superior life forms, humans are viewed as having the right to use and even destroy other life forms for their own benefit, based on the rationale the 'superior' human brain knows what is best. Acceptance of this hierarchy has led to a conception of human groups as also existing on the hierarchy. Gould has described and critiqued a history of craniometric and psychometric research that has attempted to document the genetic superiority of Caucasians in the evolutionary chain. This hierarchy, which is almost always expounded by the group that sees itself on top, suggests the same rationale for human exploitation of nature: those with 'superior' brains or 'superior' culture know what is best, and therefore have a right to exploit and assume authority over people they view as lower on the hierarchy. Thus, racism has legitimized and made psychologically okay the conquest, enslavement, and exploitation of people of color, and is an integral part of the self-definition and feeling of self-esteem of most whites in western societies, regardless of class” (Sleeter and Grant). Racism: 1. "Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks [or Others], and acts by the total white community against the black community [or Others]. We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals, which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property. This type can be recorded by television cameras; it can frequently be observed in the process of commission. The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life. The second type originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far 185 less public condemnation than the first type. When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same city - Birmingham, Alabama - five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism. When a black family moves into a home in a white neighborhood and is stoned, burned or routed out, they are victims of an overt act of individual racism which many people will condemn - at least in words. But it is institutional racism that keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation, or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it. We shall examine the reasons for this in a moment. Institutional racism relies on the active and pervasive operation of anti-black attitudes and practices. A sense of superior group position prevalent is whites are 'better' than blacks; therefore blacks should be subordinated to whites. This is a racist attitude and it permeates the society, on both the individual and institutional level, covertly and overtly. 'Respectable' individuals can absolve themselves from individual blame: they would never plant a bomb in a church; they would never stone a black family. But they continue to support political officials and institutions that would and do perpetuate institutionally racist policies. Thus acts of overt, individual racism may not typify the society, but institutional racism does - with the support of covert, individual attitudes of racism" (Carmichael & Hamilton). 2. Charles lawrence discusses psychoanalytic theory as an explanation of racism's irrationality (the Id follows its own desires and the Ego respects ethical and moral laws; the Id (instinctive part) must pass through the zone of the Ego (rational part) to be acted on). He believes that, " Increasingly, as our culture has rejected racism as immoral and unproductive, hidden prejudice has become the more prevalent form of racism. The individual's Ego must adapt to a cultural order that views overtly racist attitudes and behavior as unsophisticated, uninformed, and immoral. It must repress or disguise racist ideas when they seek expression. Joel Kovel refers to 186 the resulting personality type as the 'aversive racist' and contrasts this type with the 'dominative racist,‘ the true bigot who openly seeks to keep blacks in a subordinate position and will resort to force to do so" (Lawrence). Surrealism: a movement in literature and art that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter. "For many Europeans and Americans of European descent, being surrealist has been one way of not being white - indeed, a way of actively undermining the white mystique and of sabotaging the repressive machinery that props it up...Surrealist intervention in this domain has always emphasized the active imagination, in keeping with surrealism's fundamental aim: the realization of poetry in everyday life. Of course it also involves revolutionary criticism, integral subversion, aggressive humor and direct action. In poetry as in life, surrealism embodies the utmost fratemization and solidarity across the color- line as well as relentless struggle against the very existence of the color-line, and against all those who enforce it or tolerate it." 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