[Reader-list] American Builds A Dream World -- And Moves Into It

[t byfield]

kendall at monkeyfist.com (Tue 01/07/03 at 05:13 PM -0600):

> > the US has almost 300 million people in it, and is famously -- and 
> > truly -- fantastically diverse. anyone who makes a blanket general-
> > ization like 'blacks and whites don't want to live together' about 
> > this population is either an idiot or an ideologue, and maybe even
> > *both*. 
> 
> Since roughly the point at American apartheid *formally* ended for African
> Americans, with passage of the Civil Rights and Voting acts of the early and
> mid-60s, followed by spasms of civil unrest in successive summers in big
 <...>

i agree very much with your analysis, but i don't think it's an adequate
explanation -- by which i mean that it's the truth, just not (as they say
the courts say here) the *whole* truth. nor is what follows.

more specifically, your explanation of white 'flight' is couched mainly
in negative terms, as whites escaping from a perceived inundation of non-
whites in cities. but the cultural evaluations of the urban and rural 
poles of america have a much more complex history; and central to that
history is a much more *positive* evaluation of ex-urban areas. one need
only think of the glorification of america's 'west,' of thoreau, etc, etc,
to realize that the idealization of non-urban areas pre-dates the enfran-
chisement of blacks in the 60s. 

i don't mean to present or accept these 'positive' or 'negative' evalu-
ations as simplistic, because they're not -- at all. in fact (or at least
imo), much of american cultural history is informed, even defined in part,
by anti-cosmopolitanism, anti-urbanism, anti-intellectualism, and so on
(when was the last time you met an american who'd admit to being an 'in-
tellectual' in, say, the way a french person might?). of course, these 
values don't merely express themselves as negations of the things they
condemn; instead, they vaunt 'positive' objects and ideals as what ani-
mates them.

so, while it's patently true that an awful lot of whites did everything
within their power to avoid -- gasp! -- actually having to peaceably co-
exist with non-whites in cities, that trend had a very well-established
cultural vocabulary with which to express itself.

and the fact that we can find precursors and non-obvious aspects in some
of these phenomena shouldn't be taken as proving that there wasn't at 
least a bit of honesty in the naive explanations that were proferred.
america's west is a myth, to be sure, but it's also stunningly beautiful.

cheers,
t