Culture Shock

On the first day of class, I went between the literal and the cynical. An American is someone who was born in the United States (or associated territories, military bases, whatever) or someone who has been naturalized through our racist, classist immigration system. But then, when one pictures a stereotypical American, racial and ethnic minorities tend to get left out, as well as poor people. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been here – if your skin isn’t light enough, you’re still going to get asked “So, where are you from? No, I mean, originally?” I was coming from a summer of working on immigration issues at an internship, but after a semester of American Studies, I still think my cynicism is someone justified. The difficulties negotiating racial tensions were a part of almost everything we read, both in popular culture, such as in Robin Kelley’s article about the zoot suit, and in formal government policy, such as in Mae Ngai’s article about the 1924 immigration law.

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I think that in mainstream American culture, the idea of being “American” is still at least in part linked to being white. However, I also think that’s changing, and not just demographically, though the latest census shows that demographics are a big part of it. One thing I noticed throughout our textbooks was a lot of names that didn’t sound European in origin. I’m making some assumptions about the writers, but from the textbook and from my own experience with activism it seems like a lot of the people who are invested in trying to figure out what being an American means and what it will mean in the future don’t fit the traditional white, middle-class image. Our formal system and cultural ideas of who counts as an American are still based on a long history of racism and classism (and sexism, too, though I don’t think that plays much of a part in national identity), but the trend is towards a more open idea.

In Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, playwright-performer Anna Deavere Smith takes interview transcripts from people who experienced the riots in L.A. and weaves them together into a one-woman play telling the story of what the event meant to those involved. In the original play, the one-woman monologue format serves to universalize the people involved and the events themselves, highlighting the complicated responses and beliefs people held about the riots and the ongoing tension surrounding racial issues. Placed into the context of the Stage on Screen film we watched in class, however, where the characters were interspersed with footage from the events themselves, breaking up the monologues and placing them in a concrete time, and thus changing the meaning of the play.

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In the original script, Smith has to alternate between costumes, sets and characters with far less transition than provided by the film. While in the film the viewer sees glimpses of her ability to transition quickly, between a Korean store owner’s wife and an L.A. official, most changes between characters are broken up by footage of the beating itself, the trial, or the riots. In the play, the meaning of her on-stage switching between characters seemed to be that one person – any given person – could hold, or at least understand, the many conflicting views and experiences of the various people involved in the riot, from the white people struggling with the implications of racism to the anger of the community activists and the killed store owner’s wife. While the specific year of the events is referenced in the play’s title and in the costumes, telling the entire story through one person could also extend the universality to time – if these tensions can exist in so many different characters, they can still exist now.

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By contrast, breaking the characters up with footage from the events helps them to remain separate identities in the eyes of the viewer. The bits of interviews with different people, and the images of the beating, trial, and riots, ground the monologues quite solidly in the three days over which they occurred. While the narrative told is the same, the meaning has changed: Rather than conveying ambiguity about the nature of the characters and their experiences, both then and now, the film emphasizes the historicity  of the events.

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Do the differences between the script and the movie alter the viewer’s understanding of it at all? Does it matter?

In the book Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, editor Robert Gooding-Williams collects a variety of articles exploring the causes and effects of the Rodney King beating and subsequent rioting in Los Angeles in 1992. The different circumstances which contributed to the events themselves and how Americans interpreted them were nearly endless. Rhonda M. Williams explores the economic recession experienced by LA in the 1980s and concludes that economic policies geared towards capital accumulation created larger income inequality, rising unemployment and declining wages helped fuel the 1992 riots.

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Michael Omi and Howard Winant look at politics, arguing that the rioting demonstrated a failure of policies which had dismantled the welfare state, underfunded education, and limited employment opportunities. They also look at political responses to the riots: While Democrats responded by calling for more socially activist policies, and Republicans instead argued for more individual responsibility and further cuts to welfare (to decrease “dependence,”) both parties chose to completely ignore the racial aspects of the riots to avoid offending their white, suburban bases, though the political conditions under which the riots happened were undoubtedly racialized.

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Robert Gooding-Williams’ essay focuses on the experience of daily racism for blacks and the way Americans are taught to understand race as a way of explaining the Rodney King trial; defendants projected a familiar, “wild” image of blackness onto the video of the beating, so that the jury came to understand the video as showing the common trope of white civilization defending itself against black aggressiveness. Because of this, he argues that commentators couldn’t see the subsequent riots as reactions to the trial; because blacks aren’t seen as citizens involved in the political commentary, their actions couldn’t be understood as a response to a political issue.

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Sumi K. Cho’s article focuses on the conflict between the black and Korean communities in Los Angeles, and concludes that a white-black dichotomy view of racism makes it difficult to understand the multicultural nature of the riots, which occurred in part as a result of animosities fueled by stereotypes of blacks and Koreans from both groups.

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Though not part of the anthology, Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s article also could be viewed as a possible contributor to the environment that caused the riots. It describes the expansion of the California prison system, which focused on the creating of beds, at great expense, thus requiring a reliable stream of people to fill these beds. This resulted in stricter sentencing, especially for non-violent drug-related offenses, and harsher probation policies. While Gilmore doesn’t explicitly cover any racial components to the California prison system, prison populations tend to be composed mainly of minorities, so blacks and Latinos were likely most impacted by the policy changes.

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No one factor can be pointed at to understand the Rodney King trial and riots. Racist stereotypes and de-facto policies, economic trends and conditions in specific communities such as South Central, and policy at a local, state, and federal level all played a role.

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Did city policy change at all as a result of the riots?

In “The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and the Reconstruction of Race in Immigration Law,” Mae Ngai argues that the immigration quota system established in 1924 separated race and nationality such that non-white people were imagined as having no nation of origin. In Born in East L.A., the same disconnect between race and nationality is seen in a different way: all non-whites are imagined as having the same nationality, Mexican. Undocumented Asian immigrants are deported to Mexico along with Hispanic immigrants, working on the assumption that all non-white people are “other.” In The Bronze Screen, Rosa Linda Fergoso argues that this scene critiques American racism, particularly the binary between whites perceived as natives and non-whites perceived as foreign.

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For immigrants after the 1924 law, such a codification wasn’t just a perception, it was written into the law; non-whites from European countries had different rules, their race taking priority over their country of origin despite the emphasis placed on nationality in the system. Non-whites were therefore excluded from citizenship altogether. In Born in East L.A., the ICE officers find it inconceivable that Rudy could be a United States citizen, despite the fact that his family has lived in the country for generations, because he’s Chicano.

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Meanwhile, for the Asians, learning how to act Chicano allows them to enter the United States. The same false idea of “nativeness” based around race that allowed native-born Rudy to be deported allows the non-native Asians to pass as citizens. If all people of color look alike, then who can say which people in the Cinco de Mayo parade are actually native born? Fergoso interprets this as a criticism of American racism: The viewer knows that the color-based idea of nativeness is inaccurate.

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This idea follows the idea of race, nationalism and citizenship that’s prevailed in the United States since the 1924 immigration quota system was established, and is increasingly inaccurate as American demographics shift away from an overwhelming white majority. If our system of immigration deports non-whites indiscriminately, as Born in East L.A. shows, how will it deal with an increasingly diverse country?

The novel If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes demonstrates vividly the psychological effects of racism. Narrator Bob Jones describes racism that permeates every element of his life, in the form of small, daily discrimination. While such discrimination is depicted as existing everywhere, Bob indicates that the Los Angeles racism is uniquely woven into the fabric of the city.

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Many of the characters – both black and white workers at the shipyard – originally come from the segregated South. The book is peppered with references to Jim Crow and Uncle Tom, and one Texas woman describes segregation as the best situation for both races, as though racial tension could be solved by blacks and whites leaving each other alone. In California, the lines are not so clear. Both black and white characters claim to be working against racism, if only the black people were worthy or worked hard enough within the limits of the informal segregation of California.

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For Bob Jones, this informal system is just as stressful, if not more so, than a strictly segregated society, because he has to navigate the many different forms of control which white people hold over him in day-to-day situations. He moved to California to escape such blatant racism, and his girlfriend, union leader and employers both argue that that they want to help eliminate racism, but only if he agrees to operate within the limitations inherent to being black, which are significant but also occasionally informal. Bob argues that he shouldn’t have to stand for them – indeed, can’t – but Alice, his girlfriend, argues that other things are more important and that racism must be to some extent accepted before it can be overcome, even while listing all the many forms of discrimination they face: “Almost all public facilities, welfare, health, hospitalization, transportation, in the location of our dwellings, in all the component parts of our existence that stem directly or indirectly from economy” (169). Despite such systematic racism, she maintains a belief in the fairness of the California legal system compared to other states.

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Is the racism in California more or less harmful than Jim Crow racism? Whose approach seems a better coping mechanism, Alice’s or Bob’s?

In their special issue of American Quarterly, Raúl Homero Villa and George J. Sánchez argue that Los Angeles is exemplary of “world cities,” like a petri dish to see the forces of identity formation and globalization at work. In particular, authors Josh Sides and George J. Sánchez looked at the Compton and Boyle Hills neighborhoods, which both changed dramatically as a result of racial and ethnic demographic shifts throughout the 20th century.

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Villa and Sánchez described Los Angeles as a “sixty suburbs in search of a city,” which was reflected in the essays included; rather than describing well-known neighborhoods such as downtown or Hollywood, the writers focused on relatively autonomous suburbs. Compton even described itself as a city, rather than a suburb or area of Los Angeles, complete with a city council.

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The independent nature of these neighborhoods allowed for drastically different approaches to race. Compton violently resisted integration, and eventually changed from a primarily white, middle-class area to a predominantly black, gang-ridden area as a result of city policy and homeowner and realtor efforts against integration. On the other hand, the Jewish community of Boyle Hills openly encouraged multiculturalism and collaboration between ethnic groups; while the Jewish community eventually left the area as more Mexicans and other minorities moved to the area, the community emphasis on cooperation remained.

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If such drastically different cultures can exist in such autonomous areas of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, how are the boundaries of the city to be defined? The popular image of LA seems to focus primarily on downtown and wealthier neighborhoods such as Hollywood, but the essays about Compton and Boyle Hills seem to require a broader view of what constitutes the city.

In the 1974 film Chinatown, a detective solves a mystery at the Water Department against the background of glamorous 1930s Los Angeles. The story is based on the real-life efforts of Los Angeles to increase its water supply and expand, particularly in the beginning of the 20th century, described by Norris Hundley in his book The Great Thirst. Both the film and the book illustrate the important political maneuvering required to supply water to the growing metropolis.

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The setting of Chinatown is full of the glamor of old Hollywood: The characters walk around in immaculate suits, visit richly decorated restaurants and rest homes, and have homes with lush green yards (the ultimate water waster, a sure sign of wealth in the desert.) The wealth of the female lead, Evelyn Mulwray, comes from her father’s and husband’s involvement in supplying water to Los Angeles, first as a private company and later through her husband’s job as chief engineer for the Department of Water and Power. Mr. Mulwray’s real-life counterpart, William Mulholland, was the highest-paid public official in the state; “perhaps the surest measure of water’s importance in Los Angeles,” Hundley points out. Offhand comments in the film also indicate the centrality of water to Los Angeles life: “Middle of a drought and the Water Commissioner drowns. Only in LA,” one police officer jokes upon Mulwray’s death.

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In the film and in the book, water in Los Angeles isn’t found in rivers or streams, but brought to the city through expensive projects and political wrangling, including lawsuits, purchases of other areas’ water rights, and (in the film), the murder of the Chief Engineer. In Chinatown, the river is dry: The city water supply is only ever seen in concrete reservoirs or leaking from pipes. Similarly, Hundley points out the huge aquaducts and other projects needed to bring water to a city which also owned the entire river.

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In sharp contrast, Richard White describes a different river: The Columbia. He explains the natural power of the river, and how Native Americans and later American explorers learned to use it to their advantage, both as a resource for food and transportation and to facilitate social interactions between the two groups. The power of the river he describes – its tendency to take the path of least resistance, for example, and alter the landscape to gradually overcome barriers – stands in sharp contrast to the political power needed to control water in Los Angeles, and the unnatural waterworks necessary to move the city’s water supply. White’s writing seems to suggest that rivers function best if left alone; applied to the situation in Los Angeles, perhaps the city’s efforts to expand are doomed to complications and even failure, as in the failing of the dam depicted in both the movie and the book, for having so disrupted an already efficient natural system.

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How should water access be determined? Who should own it? Is it acceptable to take water from one area to supply another that seems to need it more for whatever reason?

How do we decide what’s “normal”? The line between somewhat offbeat and mentally ill, for example, if a difficult one to tread, and even more straightforward issues of the body and health can be problematic. Fortunately, science has given us an answer: DNA, that magical little double helix that you made out of marshmallows and toothpicks in 6th grade, which once decoded will allow us to see what genes are normal and which are mutated or diseased and respond accordingly. Thus is the story Sarah Chinn tells in “DNA and the Meanings of Identity,” which explores the cultural meanings given to DNA since its discovery. She explains the mission of the Human Genome Project, which aims to “decode” human DNA by finding the purpose of each gene.

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Chinn finds this story – that DNA can, properly decoded, tell us about ourselves in nice clean lines of normal and abnormal – problematic, because it takes the biological task of understanding genes outside of their cultural context, and the cultural context makes all the difference. She gives the example of DNA evidence used in criminal trials, which has been categorized by race (“this allele is more likely to appear in blacks than whites,” for example) despite the fact that there’s more genetic variation within races than between them. Given our still enormously lacking knowledge of the human genome and the serious sway culture holds over how we interpret the information we have, can the story that DNA science has solved the mysteries of human functioning be taken seriously?

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Some scientists have argued that there is a cluster of genes linked to religious faith or belief in God. Whether these are supposed to be the norm – belief in God is natural! – or abnormal – it’s unhealthy for the brain to inherently believe that which can’t be proven! – will depend largely on the cultural context in which it happens. As more and more aspects of human life are looked at through the realm of genetics, how to deal with differences  – not only among the typical fault lines of race and gender, but among a whole range of characteristics – could well come up for discussion. Can the HGP’s narrative that cleanly explains the influence of genes on human life withstand such questioning, or might it be replaced with a different way of understanding what DNA means?

(and there’s someone willing to write every one of them).

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It’s easy to think of media as a static thing; from the time it comes into the mainstream, everyone understands what a book is, or a photo, or a music, and differences in interpretation come only from content. However, cultural studies scholars argue that this isn’t the case – that the meaning of print (Michael Warner, The Cultural Mediation of the Print Medium), photos (Alan Trachtenberg, Reflections on the Deguerrean Mystique), and music (Philip Deloria, I Want to Ride in Geronimo’s Cadillac) change over time, not only for the content, but for how the medium itself is understood. Trachtenberg describes the many, changing meanings for a particular early form of photography, the Deguerrotype, where the form of the picture itself is instrumental to how the image is interpreted.

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Trachenberg explains the confusing nature of deguerrotypes – having the potential to capture the identity or essence of a person, but also erasing movement, and largely dependent on how the viewer looks at it, because from the wrong angle she might see her reflection, or a negative image. Furthermore, as the industry surrounding deguerrotypes changed, perspectives of the images themselves did – photographers wished to be seen as artists, who did more than simply work the machine, replacing an earlier idea that the images had some sort of magical life of their own. The way people view these images now includes neither of these views which so colored how they were understood. For example, someone seeking pictures of people from the 1830s or 40s are more likely to come across an image of a deguerrotype on a website than the actual thing. Divorced from the experience of positioning the image to see it instead of a reflection or shadow, the “magic” and ghostly nature described by people at the time the photos were taken is lost, and the image appears to be a more static entity. Similarly, being without the experience of holding perfectly still, because any small movement could erase a hand or eye from the photo, a modern viewer will interpret the expressions and posture of the subjects of the image differently. Trachenberg documents so much change in how the images in the mere decades after the development of the technology; now, centuries later, the original meaning found in the medium is perhaps entirely replaced by changing understandings of what photography is.

In “Silencing the Past,” Michel-Rolph Trouillot looks at the Haitian Revolution as a “silenced” part of history, left out of a narrative that doesn’t have any room for colonial slaves rebelling and establishing their own country. He identifies silencing as occurring in four different places in the process of history: In the making of sources, archives, narratives, and history. While at first this idea was confusing, his examples of “silencing” in discussions about the Holocaust and American slavery were familiar to me; they sounded like arguments I’ve heard used in ongoing discussions about rape. Looking at “silencing” from that perspective, as something happening as part of an ongoing conversation and not just in how big historic events get depicted in textbooks, made it easier to understand – “Silencing” things in history isn’t so much an active exclusion, but a worldview which prevents certain voices from being heard and events from being seen.

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Trouillot describes two sorts of silencing: “erasure” and “banalization.” Taking American slavery as an example, he says that erasure is saying “Slavery also happened to non-blacks,” whereas banalization is saying things like “Some US slaves were fed better than British workers.” (563) Both statements take importance away from the very real issues of American slavery, and make it seem less terrible. And it makes sense to want to think about it in such terms; who wants to think about something terrible? Similar approaches are used in discussing rape as a modern issue in America. Saying that “men are raped also” or “some reports of rape are false” isn’t untrue, but it’s used primarily to trivialize the enormous number of women who really are raped. It’s tricky to equate a social issue such as rape to a historical event such as slavery or the Haitian Revolution, but in trying to imagine how sources, archives, narratives and history are made, it’s easy to see how the voices of victims nowadays and slaves then could simply be left out of the pages of history, as much by happenstance of the attitudes of the people telling the story than by conscious decision.

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So then the question becomes, whose job is it to bring silenced history back into the public eye? Trouillot doesn’t hesitate to list names of people he believes ought to be writing about the Haitian Revolution, but I imagine it’s more complicated than pointing to some writers who SHOULD be telling the story, especially since he argues that history-making happens well beyond the reach of academia.