Michael Newman has recently blogged about nostalgia online. There is a sense in which the newness of the internet actually has the effect of regenerating and re-representing a longing for the past. Of course, such longing is not always utopic. For example, on the popular website “YouTube,” where individuals can post and respond to various film, there is a brief 46 second home-made video of a group of African-Americans socializing on Belle Isle Park, in the Detroit River, on the edges of the Michigan city. One day, caught up in a bit of procrastination-motivated nostalgia, I looked up Belle Isle material online.
I stumbled upon this footage, and was immediately captivated by the simplicity and immediacy, the everydayness, of the images. Nothing remarkable happens in those 46 seconds—the group is just talking and relaxing. Then the clip ends. Even more captivating to me were the three comments posted to the video. The earliest comment perpetuates the worst kind of nostalgia-based racism—“Belle Isle used to be a good place to go party,” the poster hatefully proclaims, until African-Americans ruined it. The next comment then responds to the first, calling them a racist who would get beaten and dumped into the Detroit river, if he or she has the courage to come down to Belle Isle and say those words aloud. The third person, meanwhile, attempts to deflect the debate, and over-defensively suggests that he/she had never seen anything like that on Belle Isle—instead, “I usually see families and joggers.”
Of course, in its own covert way, that comment is every bit as racist, implying that these African-Americans cannot be a family. Whether conscious of it or not, he/she is defining “families and joggers” as meaning white people. In all, I was particularly struck by how the historical irony of that virtual racial clash would probably be lost on most people—even people from Detroit and the Southeastern Michigan area. And, in two of those comments, I found myself confronted with a very different conception of nostalgia, and of whiteness, then what had motivated me to seek out the website to begin with.
Belle Isle is a park, and an island, in the middle of the Detroit River, halfway between Windsor, Canada and the city of Detroit. It is not easy to drive to. One has to meander through local roads in the city, and then cross the Douglas MacArthur bridge into the island. In this park, surrounded by water, there are, among other features: a large fountain (“Scott Fountain”), a conservatory, an aquarium, a zoo, a casino, and the Detroit Yacht Club. In The Way It Was (2004), a wistful picture book of Detroit’s past, George Bulanda nostalgically notes in a caption to a photograph from Belle Isle (taken in 1916) that even today, this setting is “one of the few places left where it doesn’t cost a penny to unwind on a languorous afternoon” (32). And yet, for those with this particular view of Detroit’s history, the present needn’t intrude on the past (or is it rather that the present has intruded on the past?), because he doesn’t bother to mention that almost all of those attractions are unused and/or abandoned now.
Who could see there that Belle Isle was once the site for the beginning of one of the worst US race riots in the 20th Century? On a hot day in June of 1943, fights broke out between blacks and whites that—literally and figuratively—spilled across the bridge and into the city. But no one talks of that today. Even Yesterday’s Detroit (1974), which is supposed to show the history of Detroit, doesn’t show anything from the Belle Isle riot, but mentions something about it in a caption (140). “The mention of race,” writes Uday Mehta, “is conspicuous in its absence” (15). Some things are very difficult to see in the present indeed. This event is central to my discussion, but it is hidden. Most whites, maybe even quite a few self-described liberals, refuse to see it—and it is this evasive whiteness which I seek to contest on its own turf.
The youtube discussion above is interesting to me in part because it replays the 1943 riot and its aftermath. One (white) person takes offense that African-Americans have chosen to spend their leisure time on Belle Isle and picks a fight over it. Someone else, then, escalates the situation--even to the point of suggesting violence. And then someone else tries to gloss over the issue entirely with a, at best, misguided attempt at superficial misdirection.
An otherwise uneventful coffee table book, The Way It Was is remarkable to me precisely because of its otherwise ordinary triviality. Racism does not operate through declarations and public demonstrations—it embeds itself in the everyday, so as to become unquestioned, even often unnoticed. This artifact of popular culture— and its representations, its unquestioned ubiquity—is symptomatic of an everyday, reactionary, whiteness, one which does worry what personal and public nostalgias do to history, and which does not undergo close scrutiny exactly because no self-respecting intellectual takes its generic sentimentalism seriously. But these sorts of products are the most visible traces of a populist Detroit nostalgia, and of a White yearning for anything other than the present Detroit. Hence, what The Way It Was sees in Belle Isle isn’t there anymore, if it ever was.
In Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (2003), Tara McPherson reflects on her own memories of growing up in the American South, thinking very carefully about the racial tensions which plague the region and continue to do so. She is frustrated that Southern racists and other angry white males have tried to reclaim whiteness as a source of strength and pride, under the misguided assumption that civil rights activists and other progressives have attacked them for so long that they now feel compelled to be ashamed of themselves.
Such becomes a petty ploy to justify the deployment of a conservative, reactionary, whiteness. On the other hand, she is equally underwhelmed by more leftist depictions of whiteness, which do not move beyond a reactive position of “liberal guilt.”
Almost as an aside, McPherson then proclaims that progressives need to put forth an “oppositional whiteness”—a whiteness, she argues, which “moves beyond liberal guilt or reactionary anger.” Otherwise, she suggests, there will continue to be only more conservative notions of the concept instead. It is difficult to imagine dismantling or deconstructing whiteness, at least any time soon—but that should not preclude us from proposing variations on whiteness, alternatives which challenge the norms.
Hence, I would like in earnest to take up McPherson’s call for a progressive, oppositional whiteness, but nothing spectacular, nothing which could survive only in theory. Rather, by looking back into the past and remember and re-examining one uneventful year in Detroit, Michigan, I wish to propose something more indiscriminate, but also more potentially resilient—an everyday, oppositional whiteness, one predicated on a thoughtful randomness, and which embraces the strange and unfamiliar.
2 comments:
Not to turn this into a political blog, but I couldn't help but find this post timely this week - with the Rev. Wright youtube controversy and the speech today where Sen. Obama discussed, in many ways, the submerged dialogues on race in black and white communities. (Not to let my political biases shine, but it was a brave speech in my view). Also, much the Philadelphia speech talked about a history - narratives of the past in black community that challenge the nostalgic narratives you write about here. I supposed the centrality of youtube (as a facilitator of dialogues on race that, in Obama's words, don't appear in "polite company") in this whole controversy made me think some about your post.
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