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Oct. 2nd, 2009 05:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaThe selection was ample: "Couples in Coats," "Ice Skaters," for a northern scene, "Bee Keepers." Farmer's Market" for a rural scene, etc. And of course figures suitable to railroad dioramas--workers laying ties and so forth.
Among the dozens of sets of figures, the only ones withAfrican American figures were:
Chain Gang (2 out of 4 prisoners black, 2 guards white)
Urban Workers
Basketball players (2 out of 6 figures)
Crowd watching a (white) corner preacher (2 out of 6)
Park bums (1 out of 4, + the whitecop)
Housepainters (1 our of 4)
Shoe shiners (5 figures, of which 1 person getting shoes shined was black and one shoeshiner was black)
Mechanics (1 out of 5)
Factory workers (1 out of 5)
No one else. The football team was all white. The ice skaters were all white. The people on benches were white. The senior citizens were white. The men in uniform were all white. The miners were white. The picnicking family was white. The smoke jumpers and canoers were white. The summertime jobs set (selling lemonade, delivering the newspaper) was all white. The kids flying kites and playing and rollerskating were white (girl with blond ponytail). The backyard birthday family was white. The wedding party was white. The old-timey family was white. So was the family having a backyard BBQ. Despite all the racist jokes about Obama having barbecues on the South Lawn, a backyard barbecue is apparently still an American, and therefore white, activity. The largest set of miscellaneous figures, 17, had one black person. And don't even ask about the fishermen, rabbit hunters, jug band, the rail workers (not counting the Chain Gang, of course), baseball players (2 full sets all white), bystanders, surveyors, farmers, people at a funeral, policemen, dock workers...
...and my favorite: a set called "Ordinary People," all of whom are white.
I'm not trying to slam the little company that makes and sells these figures (which, BTW, are manufactured in China and yet include no Chinese railroad workers in the historical sets). It's selling to the demographic that is passionate about model railroads--however that demographic is imagined.
The reason I was fascinated enough to write this entry (and buy a little box of Chain Gain figures) is that I think this is what's called a Lagging Indicator in social science research.
Whatever the composition of our daily lives may be today, the *image* of America is persistently rooted in a whitebread image. The hobbyists who create elaborate model railroad scenes presumably have a taste for nostalgia--both for old-fashioned childhood toys and for a bygone age, perceived to be gentler and sweeter--the age of rail before the jet age. (But don't forget that chain gang.) To some extent, the taste for false nostalgia strikes all of us who are white. (I myself am from a family of European Jews, but that doesn't prevent me from buying a slice of mythic 19th century white America--and once I buy it, I own it.)
There's a lot of talk, periodically, on my flist about black protagonists in fiction. People of color in scifi. The bottomless debate (to me tiresome) about whether white authors should/should not or can/cannot write characters of color (or men write women characters, or whatever).
Personally, I get irritated by the way characters of color are so often identified as such in fiction ("her warm cafe au lait skin," "his hair, twisted into fine dreds," etc.), while any character whose skin color is not described is presumed to be white.
It seems to me that what's called for is consciousness about what we think and do--perhaps even a kind of
On the Interwebs and in the MSM there's been a lot of chatter lately about whether the extraordinarily venomous, crazed hatred of Obama is coded racism or just plain old normal rightwing extremist dingbattery. Of course it's some of both. But Obama, in fulfilling all the symbolic hopes of four generations of post-Civil War Americans, has also, inescapably, embodied Du Bois's double consciousness.
Du Bois saw double consciousness as an unavoidable fact for African Americans, however burdensome and pernicious, to be seen, understood, coped with, and if possible commanded--if possible, unified into a single consciousness. Du Bois was one of America's great geniuses, profoundly perceptive. But what he did not fully address (because it wasn't his topic) was the double consciousness of white people. White people, in the concept of double consciousness, have the hegemonic power to assert themselves as having a single consciousness: a consciousness of power and authority. White identity is unified because it has the power to claim that identity is *always* white, the baseline, the default.
But white people, in imposing this rule of consciousness on America, also take on a double role. We are not only unhyphenated Americans; we are also those who in addition to asserting our identity also assert the lack of identity of people of color. We are not only ourselves; we are also those who force the others, the nonwhites, into a split and defensive role. So all the while that we are living our lives, we are also doing something to the lives of others, defining white wholeness by asserting black fragmentation. As long as we aren't conscious of this mechanism, we perpetuate it. (And even then...)
This is the thing conservative whites hate most: the implication that innocent, decent white people, who have never done harm to anyone, who have black friends, who vote for pluralism, etc., still are expected to feel guilty.
I don't think Du Bois was talking about guilt, though, or blame, or the harm we do to one another. He was talking, above all, about the harm one may do to oneself by not recognizing the mechanisms of fragmentation inherent in race consciousness.
Some years ago a black friend told me this anecdote: she was talking about the American ideal of feminine beauty, which invariably includes long flowing hair, usually light-colored. She described her intense irritation at a young woman with long blond hair who got into an elevator with her and kept running her fingers through her hair, tossing it and shaking it out--"flaunting it at me," my friend said.
I recall thinking at the time, "I doubt it." I too have long hair (not blond), and when I forget my brush and am in an elevator going to a meeting, I also comb my hair with my fingers. I do it when my hair is still damp from the shower, too. I also have been known to do it when I'm nervous--say, on the way to a doctor's appointment. I recall thinking at the time, "OK, this is hypersensitivity, provoked by an underlying painful truth."
It doesn't matter whether my friend was right to be upset or not--that's for her to decide. What matters, I think, is that the blond woman can't be expected to see combing her hair as a political act. She could only do so if she were to assume a double consciousness voluntarily and intentionally. Which is impossible. Expecting that blond woman to step outside her blondness and understand what it means to those who view her is an exercise in frustration. If double consciousness is, as Du Bois says, "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity" so that "one ever feels his twoness," then the problem of single consciousness is an inability ever to see one's self through the eyes of others, or measure one's soul by the tape of the world.
That failure of imagination (not guilt!) is the thing that wrecks us as a people. It works both ways: it's a failure to see ourselves from outside our own experience, and it's a failure to shake free of the compulsion to measure ourselves by the standards of others.
At the beginning of
"Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
"And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else . . . [snip]
" After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
And then he expands from the experience of the individual to the experience of a whole people:
" The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten."
Du Bois isn't just describing the condition of black people--black citizens--in America; he is describing America itself: always split, always seeking to merge its dual self into a single identity, but without losing its manyness, its uniqueness, its otherness; at once coveting and resenting its isolation, both rejecting its own strange history and nursing the memory of it.
"It dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. "
There you have a century and a half of American foreign policy in a nutshell.
If you want to view the scenic figurines, they are here:
http://www.cchobbies.com/hoscale/figures/figures7.htm
