Race

Rating:
Summary: Interesting
Review: Growing up in Detroit in the 40's and 50's I remember the respect we were taught to adults be they black or white. If you were on a street car and a lady got on and you were the youngest you would surrender your seat. it didn't matter if the lady was black or white. Then came the riots in the 60's and the flight to the suburbs, which we all made. It has remained. Whites and blacks have gone further and further out, some driving up to forty miles to work in Detroit. It is not as much a race thing as disrespect from black and whites in the city. There is not respect for the law, elderly or even themselves. In turn this is where all our large citys are failing.The drug dealers run the citys and it is in plain view. Ask anyone that lives in the City. Drugs are big money and it works its way up the line to the politicians. Without law and order no one will return no matter what race they are. That is my opinion to the problem with the only answer I can see.

Rating:
Summary: A revealing look at the 'American obsession.'
Review: rst a few parahprases from the interviews in this book which was published in 1993:"

Professor Douglas Massey points out that relatively stable jobs such as in factories, steel mills and auto plants have dissapeared in black communities. These jobs have largely dissapeared for this generation. Blacks cannot move to where decent jobs might be because of their difficulty in entering the housing market. A person working in the service economy, say at Macdonalds, full time at minimum wage, can't stay above the poverty line.

Alex Berteau, a partner in a law firm, says that it's tough for him to talk to young successful whites who say that they have nothing to do with the injustices done to African Americans in the past. Berteau says, no, it's not them, it's their fathers, who profited while paying black people subsistence wages so their children to go to Harvard. This young individual says "Don't lay it on my doorstep" yet he is getting all the fruits of it. Berteau, says that this youngster has a college degree but the black man who slaved so his father could get everything cheap is illiterate and can barely speak English. To get rid of Affirmative Action, is to ignore history, he says.

Maggie Holmes, retired domestic worker, refers to a painting at the Chicago art musem in the mid-80's of Chicago's black progressive mayor Harold Washington in a bra and panties and apparently an exhibit consisting of an American flag on the floor which people were invited to walk on. To judge by her comments, it appears the white population ridiculed the anger of blacks at the first, but raised an uproar at the second. She also says that the American flag is just an old rag that dosen't mean anything to her, because white people burned things and wrapped themselves around that flag when Dr. King was marching.

Mike Wrobleski, former police captain in Chicago is interviewed. He got a lot of viscious harrassment from his fellow officers during the 80's because he would not tolerate racist posters and other expressions, many about Mayor Washington, in police stations under his watch. He got one letter which contained a picture of a naked black man and a white woman with her mouth open that said "You nigger-lover. This is what my wife is doing when I'm not at home." Terkel notes that this lout actually meant to say "your wife" instead of "my wife" and Wrobleski comments that there is probably some deep Freudian stuff in that case, the fear of the alleged sexual prowess of black men on which he based his racism.

Fred Hampton, is only refered to once in this book, in the very last interview. Terkel says in a footnote that in 1990 the Chicago city council voted to have a Fred Hampton day but after that sixteen white alderman objected on the grounds that they thought they had voted to honor Dan Hampton the Chicago Bears football player.

Most of these interviews take place with people from Chicago, Terkel's hometown, which has always been pretty volatie racially. Marquette Park is refered to several times early in the book. This was where Dr. King tried to have a march in 1966 but instead got assaulted with rocks several times by rampaging white mobs, whose hatred terrified him. He said that it had surpassed anything he had seen in the South.

Then there are a few like C.P. Ellis and Ann Atwater from Durham North Carolina. Ellis was a poor white klansman who battled the black activist Atwater in the racial strife of Durham in the 60's. Ellis started to lose his enthusisasm for the KKK when he realized that the big politicians and economic elite of Durham who provided funds and expressions of racial solidarity to him and his chapter of the KKK during the nightime were embarassed to associate with a poor white like him during the daytime. He realized that poor whites had a heck of a lot in common with poor blacks. He became close to Atwater and speaks about her in his interviews (one in 1978, the other in 1989) with great emotion. He became a multi-racial union organizer. C.P. Ellis is an example of what Dr. Kenneth Clark of Brown Vs. Board of education fame refers to, in his interiview, about poor whites trying to get feelings of self-worth in this society by stomping on poor blacks below them in the class system.W

ill Campbell, a White Southern preacher says in his interview regarding the origins of the term "redneck. It was from a Edwin Markham poem which refered to the poor white farmer taking a break from his slavery, putting his hands on his hoe and looking on the ground. All the while the scorching sun beats down on the back of his neck. Thus he gets a redneck. Unfortunately, says the reverand, we've equated that with racism.

Rating:
Summary: My review
Review: Studs Terkel has done some very good things with this book and he clearly is a talented interviewer with a strong grasp of the state of race relations in the US. I don't know that this book was particularly well written as he really did little more than aggregate a lot of (often, not always) interesting interviews. I'm not sure the book is still contemporary and I do feel that race relations have come a good ways along since this book was written. That being said, I do think this book is very worthwhile for most anyone, even today. While it was very interesting to gain insight into minority views on the Reagan administration, Farrakhan, etc., I think I honestly gained more from the every day stories and perspectives that were related. It will certainly get you to think about race relations from an entirely new perspective and that is far and away its most valuable aspect.