IVIV: Let's race

[alice wellintown]

Scooby Dooby Doo!

Yeah, like there seems to be some male gaze irony in this haunted house, Scoob.

Yugh ...Rrrrrooright, Shrraggy.   Like VL.

And like that Aunt Reet's screed about Real Estate villians and ethnic
cleansing and that Tariq's screed about the Japs are ironic too cause
like it's not about race but work (i.e. Class).

Reading his own SL works P noted that what interested him was the
class issues in the tales. Of course, the model story for VL and IV is
"The Secret Integration" a tale about Race and the Loss of Innocense &
the Violence of young revolutionaries.
African Americans and Jewish Americans worked together, not because
they were equals, or the same, but because they needed each other.
Their alliance proved a positive for Jewish Americans and African
Americans. By the 1960s, however, their situations had been radically
modified. The Jewish American community had become almost totally
absorbed and assimilated into American society. Remarkably, the Jewish
American community managed to retain its own distinctive Jewish
consciousness. African Americans improved their social economic
standing as well. In recent decades we have  witnessed the expansion
of a robust, African American middle class across the United States.
Unprecedented access to higher education and employment has been
gained by African Americans in the post-civil rights era, however, due
in part to the legacy of slavery, racism and discrimination, African
Americans as a group remain at a pronounced economic, educational and
social disadvantage in many areas relative to whites.
In Race Matter (1994), Cornell West claims,
Presently, this inspiring period of Black-Jewish cooperation if often
downplayed by blacks and romanticized by Jews. It is downplayed by
blacks because they focus on the astonishingly rapid entrée of most
Jews into the middle and upper middle classes during this brief period
(1910-1967)—an entrée that has spawned both an intense conflict with
the more slowly growing black middle class and a social resentment
from the quickly growing black impoverished class. Jews, on the other
hand, tend to romanticize the period because their present status as
upper middle dogs and some top dogs in American society unsettles
their historic self-image as progressives with a compassion for the
underdog (West,  106-107).



On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 7:28 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> L.A. then, when multi-culturalism was not a goal and label, but was real, is the first level at which I read some of these obs of John's. Obvious, I guess, but it does not explain some words of description re the women, as John says.
>
> I, too, was taken with the mysteriousness of Tariq's ethnicity and I'll repeat my specualtion that some of the notions of Mailer's The White Negro
> may be in play here?....Doc's afro, why, if not as homage via borrowing, assimilation?