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

[Kendall Grant Clark]

[resent; this didn't go through the first time, for some reason...]

  t> more specifically, your explanation of white 'flight' is couched
  t> mainly in negative terms, as whites escaping from a perceived
  t> inundation of non- whites in cities. but the cultural evaluations of
  t> the urban and rural poles of america have a much more complex
  t> history; and central to that history is a much more *positive*
  t> evaluation of ex-urban areas. one need only think of the
  t> glorification of america's 'west,' of thoreau, etc, etc, to realize
  t> that the idealization of non-urban areas pre-dates the enfran-
  t> chisement of blacks in the 60s.

T,

Your comments are interesting and I agree with them (well, I think I do,
I'm not entirely sure I get their full import, but still)...At least, I
find more of use in them than your earlier claim about idiots and
ideologues.

The city-country dialectic is part of the American imagination (and it
goes back to at least Plato's _Phaedrus_, by the way, so it's not just an
American antipodes) -- however, white flight didn't rush from the city to
the country by and large. It rushed to the border of the city, just
outside the municipal and tax-assessment boundaries of the city, close
enough to continue to consume the city's charms (and jobs), but far enough
away that alternative (i.e., *white*) institutions could be established,
including most importantly schools, churches, social clubs, and so on.

The peculiar hell of suburban life is that it's neither fully city nor
country, neither fully urban nor rural, lacking the most distinct charms
of each, possessing most of the ills of both. While the country lacks the
urban jazz of American cities, you can grow and then pluck from the ground
just before dinner your own new potatoes -- that is, you can have a fairly
organic relationship to nature, which isn't really possible in suburbia or
the city. And while the city lacks (despite the wondrous beauty of rooftop
gardens and other greenspaces) the freedom and expansiveness of nature in
the country, it has all the frenetic energy, the cultural richness, the
lovely density of people living closely together. The suburbs have...the
mall.

Further, as white people are only know really discovering, fleeing to the
suburbs is no guarantee that their kids won't smoke crack, shoot junk,
listen to rap music, play at gang-banging, and the like.

I tend to hate Dallas, where I live, and I'd love to move to a real city
(Dallas feels like one big suburb now...), but Dallas is an interesting
place to live if you're interested in these questions; one of the original
"edge cities", Plano, sits about 20 miles north of where I live. Even
further north of downtown Dallas, Frisco (apparently one of the fastest
growing places in the US) is amazingly white, full of new corporate
investment, chain restaurants, shopping malls. Both Frisco and Plano were
rural or near-rural areas before the hordes of white people, desperate to
flee the nonwhite encroachment, changed the nature and character of those
semiwild spaces forever.

Part of the American imagination has always been a kind of valorization of
wildspaces -- one which has been deeply political insofar as it served the
ideological function of making Indians and other indigenous peoples
invisible to the white, acquisitive gaze. The romanticism of the wildspace
is inseparable from its character as an *empty*, unpossessed
space. Americans were fond of saying that Indians "roamed" the land but
did not "possess" it, that this valorized West was an *empty* land, ripe
for the taking.

As for the romantic West being physically beautiful, I couldn't agree
more, but apparently it took Ansel Adams to teach us to see it that
way. Mike Davis's new book includes an essay which is entirely on point in
this regard, and if I remember it correctly, some early white visitors to
the American West found its starkness alienating and (at times) alien.

Thanks for your comments. Mine were largely meant to counter your claim
that only an "idiot or ideologue or both" would suggest that white people
might want to avoid living with African Americans, which I obviously found
rather coarse and unhelpful, at best.

Kendall Clark
-- 
Jazz is only what you are. -- Louis Armstrong