Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels Chelsea Handler, My Horizontal Life Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning Dave Cullen, Columbine
I'm delving into books I've gotten from the library. They arrived all at once. I'd been hoping they'd arrive at different times. So, I've been skimming to see which one wins as first book. It's a toughie. But Carrol's comments about how politics are shaped in the family, as well as inquiry about how social movement emerge and why have kind of nailed it. Robin D. G. Kelley's Race Rebels addresses both those issues.
In the Intro, Kelley opens by talking about working at McD's in 1978. He talks about the small acts of rebellion against management: violations of dress code, styling the cash register, the burger line or the frier, switching the radio station, cooking too much food, liberating fries and boxes of cookies. Then he writes:
"No matter what we might think about the 'grins and lies,' the evasion tactics, the tiny acts of rebellion and survival, the reality is that most black working-class resistance has remained unorganized , clandestine, and evasive. The driving questions that run through this book include: how do African American working people struggle and survive outside of established organizations or organized social movements? What impact do these daily conflicts and hidden concerns have on movements that purport to speak for the dispossessed? Can we call this politics?"
He introduces the concept of infrapolitics from James Scott: "the circumspect struggle waged daily by subordinate groups is, like infrared rays, beyond the visible end of the spectrum. That it should be invisible ... is in part by design -- a tactical choice born of a prudent awareness of the balance of power."
Kelley uses the concept to "describe the confrontations, evasive actions, and stifled thoughts that often inform organized political movements. I am not suggesting that the realm of infrapolitics is any more or less effective than what we understand by politics. Instead, I want to suggest that the political history of oppressed people cannot be understood *without* reference to infrapolitics, for these daily actions have a cumulative effect on power relations."
Later on Kelley says something I *really* like: "The approach I am proposing will help illuminate how power operates, and how seemingly innocuous, individualistic acts of survival and resistance shape politics, workplace struggles, and the social order generally. I take the lead from ethnographer Lila Abu-Lughod who argues that everyday forms of resistance ought to be "diagnostic" of power. Instead of seeing these practices merely as examples of the 'dignity and heroism of resisters," she argues that they could "teach us about the complex interworkings of historically changing structures of power."
He goes on to address an issue Eric Beck frequently raises: getting away from a focus on the manly man form of "real" politics. But then it will also appeal to Carrol who has recently asked about how social movements work. His answer is that it's a mistake to look at traditional conceptions of what constitute a materialist politics. For Reed, that's taking the manly man approach. As an example, he wants to examine the joys and burdens of racial, class, and gender expressions of identity as they play out in "secular nights" at the dance hall, juke joints, house parties, and blues clubs. How did the solidarity and struggles among people engaging in segregated leisure activities shape what happened when blacks turned to a more public and organized struggle for social change?
'I am rejecting the tendency to dichotomize people's lives, to assume a clear cut "political" motivations exist separately from issues of economic well-being, safety, pleasure, cultural expression, sexuality, freedom of mobility, and other facets of daily life. Politics is not separate from lived experience or the imaginary world of what is possible; to the contrary, politics is about these things. Politics comprises the many battles to roll back constraints some power over, or create some space within, the institutions and social relationships that dominate our lives.
When people decide that they want to devote their life or part of their life to rolling back those constraints, then many choose to support movements or institutions that speak to their concerns. But given the multiplicity of constraints and the wide range of issues black working people have dealt with .. what kinds of organizations were they drawn to and why? How have they reshaped those movements to incorporate more of their concerns and how have they been changed in the process?"
He writes about feminists Carolyn Steedman and Elizabeth Faue who argue that "class identities and ideologies are not simply made at work or in collectivie struggles against capital." Steedman, critiquing the more manly man approach of E.P. Thomspson argues that such an approach is too invested 'in a materialist, work-place centered understanding of class" leaving little room "to discuss the *development* of class consciousness (as opposed to its expression), nor for an understanding of it as a learned position" -- and not always learned in the ways we might think. For example, Elsa Barkeley Browns examination of voting during Reconstruction shows how citizenship was seen as a collective enterprises and the vote was seen as something shared by the entire family. Thus, when black men vvoted, they voted for the entire family and when they deviated, they were shunned by the family and community for letting down "the race." As such, blacks have a history of seeing citizenship and voting as "representing" and it is through their family and churches that they learn to see the franchise as collective property.
Dennis Claxton ought to especially enjoy (if you haven't already) Kelley's section on youth in L.A.
"(Young people) are creating new cultures, strategies of resistance, identities, sexualities, and in the process generating a wider range of problems for authorities whose job it is to keep them in check. Nevertheless, because the young black men who strolled down Harlem's 125th Street in the 1940s or "gangsta limped" along L.A.'s Crenshaw Boulevard in the 1990s, were partly products of dramatic economic transformations, they are central to telling the story of the black working class. .. The transformation of South Central Los Angeles as a result of deindustrialization and recent developments in policing is important for understanding the prevalence of gangsta rap in L.A.
This last section of Race Rebels brings us closer to the present but further away from the world we traditionally think of as the "working class." We travel to the darkest recesses of "history from below," to the cultural world beneath the bottom. Both chapters engage aspects of culture regarded by some on the Left ... as nihilistic, apolitical, or simply worthless. (HI Wojtek!) These are people ... whose behavior has been regarded by many critics within African American communities as well outside the mainstream. They are race rebels very much like Richard Wright's "Bigger Thomas," products of capitalist transformation, urban decay, persistent racism, male pathos, and nihilistic imaginations, struggling to create a collective identity that reflects their race, gender, class, and location in the city."
"Race Rebels is less concerned with giving readers heroic role models or romantic stories of triumph than with chronicling and rethinking black working-class politics, culture, and resistance. More than anything, these chapters try to make sense of people where they are rather than where we would like them to be."
In the first chapter, Shiftless of the World Unite, Kelley points out often overlooked forms of antiracist struggle among whites. We know about antiracism in the labor movement, but we don't learn much about antiracist struggles of those who, for whatever reasons, weren't organized. He considers a few incidents and from considering them we might have a better understanding of what antiracism might mean today:
"Interracial conflicts between workers were not simply diversions from some idealized definition of class struggle; white working-class racism was sometimes as much a barrier to African American's struggle for dignity and autonomy at the workplace as the corporate-defined racial division of labor. Thus, episodes of interracial solidarity among working people, and the fairly consistent opposition by most black leaders to Jim Crow locals, are all the more remarkable. More importantly, for our purposes at least, the normative character of interracial conflict opens up another way to think about the function of public and hidden transcripts for white workers. For Southern white workers to openly express solidarity with African Americans was a direct challenge to the public transcript of racial difference and domination. ... (E)ven the hint of intimate, close relations between workers across the color line had consequences that cut both ways. Except for radicals and other bold individuals willing to accept ostracism, ridicule, and even violence, expressions of friendship and respect for African Americans had to remain part of the "hidden transcript" of white workers. This is an important observation, for it means that acts and gestures of *antiracism* (Kelley's emphasis) on the part of white workers had to be disguised and choked back; when white workers were exposed as "n-word lovers" or when they took public stands on behalf of African Americans, the consequences could be fatal."
I will write more about the book which promises to be more than useful to conversations here.
I also started reading the work of Andy Hunt: _Pragmatic Thinking and Learning_. I have some problems with the guy,, I'm about 1/3 in. Like, I don't feel especially confident that he's fully on top of the latest on brain research. I find the left brain, right brain stuff... problematic. He's better than most popularizers, but it's just hard to feel as if he has any expertise in the topic at all. He's not reassuring.
And you have to wonder how self-reflective he or his editors are. He insists in the intro that, while he's a programmer and all his examples will be mostly from programming, anyone can read the book. Oh please! When he started talking about everything through unexplained examples that used computer geekery like setter and getter routines and the like, I couldn't take him seriously on that issue. He should have just written the book *for* programmers. Or, if he wanted a wider audience, then he needed to have written for a wide audience.
This inability to signal expertise in cognitive and neuroscience was weird for a book that purports to understand what experts are and how you can spot them. His whole theory of who experts are also turns out to be problematic to me anyway. He says they have that special "something", that special ability to get things done that experts can't really describe or break the process down into a set of procedures that could help them teach others how to do thing.
His insistence on describing experts as a kind of black box where magical things happened -- I found annoying. He doesn't want to do this, but he ends up doing it anyway.
But the point of all that discussion of expertise is that he wants to show you how to get to the point of being an expert. And you can do that reading his book -- duh!
Basically, his point is that you will be an expert if, as a programmer, you stop thinking in terms of logic, reason, rationality. You think too much with that side of the brain; need to exercise the other in order to become an expert.
What caught my attention most though was his interest in elevating the importance of aesthetics and good design in the engineering process. He thinks that experts are people who work both sides of their brain. So, naturally our built environment needs to stroke both sides of the brain. Design matters. Ahhhhhhhhhhh. Something great to read that might get the assholes to pipe down about how the backend is all that matters. WEll, not for Andy Hunt. And my focus is the frontend of course I'm going to find it very interesting too, at long lost, since a software engineer give a rat's about design and UI and UX... well, got my attention -- and quick like.
I'd ordered _MY Horizontal Life_ quite some time ago for the feminist book reading group -- a suggestion from someone in the group who wants to read about sex. I guess its in such high demand it took the library 10 weeks to get it to me.
Handler is funny -- if a little, hmmm, self-absorbed about how fucking funny she is. You can see how hard she's worked at flicking off a line she is sure will slay readers. She's offensive, like most stand up comedians. You cringe at times because you know she is trying to be offensive. You shouldn't have to see someone trying hard to be offensive when it comes to comedy. It just doesn't come off as well in a book as it does in stand up. An interesting thing to explore: why does comedic offensiveness work in stand up and not when you try to pitch that same approach at the written word? There's something different there. Like: the difference between a stand up who is used to having a direct audience, an attitude that the stand up tries to import to book form but it doesn't work. Thinking about this a lot because one of the guys I work with does stand up on the side.
It's hard to maintain a suspension of disbelief; for that the book fails miserably. While she says funny things, for me, I can't help but notice little weird details. She starts out telling a story of being dared (for money) to take a photo of her parents having sex. She was six. Magically, she is also seven in that chapter. Her supposed dialogue with an older sister, the one who dared her to take the photo: far too sophisticated for a six year old. It's funny enough, but she should have lied differently. Sure, maybe she took the photo when she was six, but she should have said she was 12, so the dialogue would seem less contrived.
She also undermines herself in weird ways. She wants to come off all hard-girl and slutty about one night stands. Except her "shocking" chapter on one night sstands was all about relationships with men that lasted weeks, sometimes months. Not really much one-night standing going on there. It was as if she wanted to protect her reputation or something: I'll talk a good talk, but then reveal myself to be a relationship gal after all. And her obsession with big cocks. of course, it wasn't because she could deal with big cocks -- her vagina clams up in their presence! Which makes you think that she wants to have it both ways: be all proud of her vagina dentata ways but recoil in horror at the sight of a large cock -- and both encounters with a big one happen to be with a black man and a midget. Shocking.
I'll probably finish the book, but read it when I am completely fried from work, when brain cells don't want to function. At this point, I'm mostly reading out of obligation.
Columbine is pretty good. I guess I just wish people would write books and quit working so hard to be SuperWriter! This occasionally happens with Cullen's book. To me, it's disconcerting to read a book that essentially purports to be journalism, but that sort of occasionally tries to break out of the boundaries of the genre with some over the top descriptive language or use of rhetoric that the journalist, reporting style doesn't typically accomodate.
It's like going to a documentary that occasionally breaks out into song and dance. Cullen's section on the history of school shootings is an example. Until then, he'd been doing the typical reporter does book thing. But in this section, he decides to try to persuade the reader of a connection between school shooting and u.s. imperialist violence. there's nothing especially objectionable about the hypothesis. but it is weird to be in the midst of a book that would normally make the argument by typical means: citing studies and stats, interviewing experts, etc.
Instead, he moves back and forth: a sentence about the Columbine shooters and stats on shootings; then a sentence about u.s. violence abraod; Columbine shooters/school shootings; u.s. violence abroad; back and forth he goes. It's supposed to be persuasive, I guess. it was lost on me because the technique is more appropriate to film I suspect.
As for the other three, I will probably finish Kelley's book first, but it's hard not to want to read all three at once!
shag