American Culture and the City: A Final Lecture

Cynthia Fong URBN1870A: Professor James Morone

Do what you please in the City, it is there to back and frame you no matter what you do + Toni Morrison in Jazz (p. 8-9)

Welcome to class today everybody. We dont have a lot of time so were just going to get started. In this last lecture, I want to go over the novels and movies weve completed together in this course so that I can draw together and expand some of the most important themes that run through this class: American culture, the city, race, and gender. In my very first lecture, I talked about how urban institutions are weak but they also deal with the biggest issues. Cities dont have the freedom (or money) to create institutions to deal with problems that are specific to urban spaces. The institutions that do exist havent been fixing urban problems. As Ive shared with you all, inequality is growing exponentially. Politicians promise to tackle issues like poverty and racial segregation if they are elected, but these issues continue to persist. After so many failed promises, it seems like the question we are left with is: why doesnt anyone care? Throughout this course, Ive proposed a possible answer: culture. In the beginning of this class, I defined culture as the stories that we tell about ourselves. The oppression that people face in our institutions is justified by the stories we tell ourselves about them. During slavery, there was a story about what black people were like and why they deserved such treatment. African Americans were immoral and they werent ready to govern themselves or African Americans needed people to push them to work, or else they wouldnt be productive. For those struggling with poverty, there is the classic Horatio Alger story. People who are poor deserve it because they dont work hard enough or because they are morally corrupt. Today, behind the prisonindustrial complex, there is a story about what criminals are like. Criminals are bad people who commit licentious crimes against the good people in our society. Criminals also just happen to be mostly black and Latino men. These are all examples of the stories that justify large and oppressive institutions. If we didnt believe these stories, it would be difficult to see institutions like slavery, poverty or the prison-industrial system expand like they have.

Institutions are important to study, but culture enables institutional change. For this reason, weve explored different stories. Our syllabus incorporates a few stories we usually hear when we talk about American culture. But our syllabus also includes some of the stories that arent often told about American culture. For our last class together, I will summarize what we did in class, but also push a little deeper into the idea of American culture. We will touch on some of the peripheral themes that impact American culture like greed, education, immigration and suburbanization, but the beef of this lecture will revolve around American culture, and specifically how identity influences life in the city. By the end of this lecture, I also hope to expand the material weve already covered in three ways. First, I will expand on a racial group that we didnt get a chance to talk about: Asian Americans. Asian Americans have made appearances in our readings and movies, but we have never had a focused discussion about Asian Americans or Pacific Islanders. Just some statistics about Asian Americans so we can contextualize this discussion: Asian Americans are a diverse group of people with widely differing cultures and political affiliations. As I mentioned in City Politics last year, the AsianAmerican voting block just does not exist. At the same time, Asian Americans are the fastest growing population in the United States. From the 2000 to 2010, the total population of Asian Americans grew by 46 percent. A discussion of race in American would not be complete without Asian Americans. By extending this discussion of race to Asian Americans, I hope I can leave you all with a fuller picture of race in the United States. Second, I will talk about how race and gender are intertwined in an overarching system of oppression. We talked about race and gender separately, but it would be a mistake to treat them as different systems of oppression. I talked a little bit about the intersectionalities between race and gender in City Politics last year too. As I said before, social movements have generally

focused on either race or gender, and on the most privileged of each respective group. Somehow, it became politically disadvantageous to focus on both race and gender, so people had to pick whether they would fight for race or gender. Abolition became the focus before the turn of the 20th century. This movement mainly focused on the liberation of black men. Then in the 1960s, the civil rights movement pivots towards women: white women begin to organize and lobby for their rights too. The tendency to treat race and gender as two separate issues runs deep in our stories about American culture. In this lecture, I want to help us zoom out. In this last lecture, I will talk more about intersectionality and how it relates to American culture and life in the city. The last thing I want to expand upon in this last lecture is capitalism. I would like to say that Ive tried to be relatively neutral this semester. Since this is the last lecture, Im going to talk a little more about capitalism, and how this framework drives American life. The idea of a free market has framed American politics since the very beginning. In fact, the three examples of broken institutions I mentioned above (slavery, poverty, and the prison-industrial complex) are justified by capitalism. It would be dishonest of me to abstain from such an important topic in a class about American culture and the city, so Im going to talk about in this lecture. Weve done a lot of work together this semester and this last lecture will summarize that work. Lets start off with Tocqueville. In the second week of class, we read Tocquevilles great statement about American culture. Much of what he writes in Democracy in America frames our discussion about American culture. As I mentioned in class that day, Tocqueville is a 19th century, French political thinker who wrote this book as a reflection of his visit to the United States. He starts off his book by talking about the equality of conditions and the permanent trend towards equality he observed in the United States. We spent a lot of time in class talking about this equality and it seemed like we reached a consensus: this was an equality of conditions,

but only for some people. Still, the equality of conditions in the United States was relatively progressive in that day. Tocqueville came from France where universal suffrage and democracy didnt exist for most people. However, he also critiques the United States by arguing that American democracy has gone wild: The prestige of royal power has vanished but has not been replaced by the majesty of law (Tocqueville, pg. 9). We didnt talk too much about the critiques he had about democracy, which include the fact that democracies are easily swayed by passions, democracies might not be good at governing long-term goals and democracies really serve the majority. In addition to these possible flaws, the lack of a clear social order seems to create status anxiety. Americans dont know where they stand in society, and therefore, always feel the need to prove themselves. Status anxiety is discussed at length in the tenth chapter in the second volume where Tocqueville discusses race. While he relegates this discussion to a single chapter, it is also the longest chapter in the book. Slavery was becoming a hot topic in the United States. His visit precedes the Civil War by 30 years, but he suggests that the union would fall at the question of slavery. In this chapter, he observed that slavery may have institutionalized the degradation of black people, but race relations seemed to be more volatile in the north. We talked a little bit about this during class, but this is an important point that recurs throughout our semester. Because black men could be considered equals in the north, status anxiety drove white people to use more nuanced forms of racism to keep black people in place. He makes a very progressive argument: The farther they went, the clearer it became that slavery, so cruel to the slave was fatal to the master (Tocqueville, p.317). Even before this progressive proclamation, he makes a prediction that white people and black people will never mingle together. Tocqueville sees that it is culture and not law that dictates the legitimacy of ones legal status. Even if African

Americans were granted equality, prejudice, driven by the stories that Americans told themselves about slaves, would prevent them from truly becoming equals. We move away from the time period that Tocqueville wrote about for the majority of the course, but we always come back to the idea of equality of conditions and democracy. In the week after Tocqueville, we read Huckleberry Finn, a classic American story and it dives right into race and ethnicity in 19th century America. In class, we talked about how Mark Twain really plucks at some heartstrings with the arc of this novel. He builds up a racial consciousness in Huck, but then completely disassembles it upon the arrival of Tom Sawyer in the last third of the novel. Twain demonstrates how rooted the ideas of slavery and white supremacy were in American society. Huck spends chapters questioning the morality of helping Jim because his status as a runaway slave superseded his humanity. It takes a lot of courage before Huck decides that he should do the right thing for Jim as a person. But even after all of the effort that Huck puts into keeping Jim safe, Tom Sawyer arrives and they end up antagonizing Jim anyway. Instead of sneaking him out to his freedom, Huck is persuaded to participate in an elaborate plan for Toms entertainment. I was shocked by how easily Huck betrayed Jim but I suppose we were warned of this in Twains opening notice: Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. We didnt get to talk about The Gangs of New York as much in class, so I want to spend some time on it now. This movie is important because it gives us a different story about race. Instead of exploring the relationship between black people and white people, The Gangs of New York tells us a story about European immigration into the city. Irish Catholics, in the mid-19th century, faced discrimination. There are similarities and differences between the way America

has responded to European diaspora and the African diaspora. Certainly, the Irish were not enslaved, and eventually, they were able to claim whiteness and assimilate into American culture. However, this seemed implausible in the mid-19th century. In that day, the Irish were antithetical to being American. The Irish were poor because they were lazy. They were unapologetic drunkards and they were violent. And with families so big, think of how licentious they all must be (does this all sound familiar yet?). The Gangs of New York gives us a glimpse of the culture wars that all ethnic groups face, but at the same time, it shows us how Irish immigrants were able to cope with discrimination: they entered politics. The Dead Rabbits, the Irish Catholic immigrant gang, battled the Natives, the folks born in the United States over power and influence in the city. The Gangs of New York gives us a historical context for discussing the city politics. In fact, as we see in this movie, city politics were all over the place. There were hardly any signs of the official government. It was all machine politics. If the gangs do not approve of something, there was violence. We see this with Monk McGinn: he won the local election for sheriff, but Bill Cutting (or the Butcher) suspected voter fraud and so he murdered Monk publically. In another example, we see fire fighters arrive at the scene of a fire but they end up fighting each other. These gangs became the government in many ways and Irish Catholic immigrants asserted their way into these politics to counteract the discrimination they were facing. We continued our discussion of race the next week with Native Son. This was a heartbreaking text for me, but it provides us with a valuable perspective. We tell a story about African-American males in the United States to separate us from them. Native Son is primarily a story about what its like from the other side. Bigger Thomas is open about it too. I would say, out of all the characters in the books and movies we look at in this class, Bigger is the

most explicit about race. He constantly speculates on how others might be perceiving him. The first book is named Fear and Bigger is fearful because he is very aware of his blackness: in one of the first scenes, Bigger and his friends play white, and very soon after, they discuss the dangers of robbing a business owner because he is white. In this book, we see how people can live completely different lives in the same city. Bigger, a black male, living on the south side of Chicago, has a completely different experience than the white business owner, who might also live on the south side of Chicago. In the same vein, the first scene described how Bigger woke up to the task of killing a rat. The Dalton family, who also lived in Chicago, would never have to do that. Who you are and where you live determines your life in the city. This is a theme we see throughout our readings. One last note about Native Son: Wright gives us an interesting opportunity to compare the way society treats black women and white women. As I said before, race and gender are intertwined in many ways, and it is important that we are cognizant of intersectionalities. The way Bigger relates to these two characters is revealing. Mary is portrayed as a desirable, angelic white character. Bigger did not dare hurt Mary, and when he accidentally kills her, he is wrecked. He runs and he lies because he felt like he was going to die otherwise. In comparison, Bigger treats Bessie like nothing. Bigger rapes and internationally kills Bessie without remorse. Unlike Mary, the book did not focus on the death of Bessie, and there were no repercussions for this crime. Only Bessies identity as an African-American woman could have given her this fate. Well talk about this more when we get to Jazz. Up next, we have The Bonfire of the Vanities and Wall Street. This is the week that we got into greed. In The Bonfire of the Vanities, Sherman McCoy, or Master of the Universe, is a wealthy man who accidentally finds himself in the Bronx. His mistress runs over a black male

and from there, the story revolves around McCoys gradual destruction. This novel gives us a glimpse of the raw wealth of New Yorks social elites. Even people who didnt have money felt pressured to pretend. In many ways, this attitude of Bud Fox in Wall Street, played by Charlie Sheen. The lavish show of wealth in The Bonfire of Vanities and the struggle of Bud Fox to succeed reflect the status anxiety that Toqueville discusses in his writing. People who had money needed other people to recognize their social status. Bud Fox, a young stockbroker that didnt come from wealth, wanted social status too. This led him to become involved with Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas. In class that week, we talked about how it is socially unacceptable to be racist, but it is okay to be oppressive. In the materials for this week, it is also clear that capitalism is a driving force in American society. A simplistic definition of capitalism would be an economic system where the free market is the centerpiece. I want to talk more about greed and capitalism in this lecture because it is a pivotal aspect of American culture. Capitalism is a powerful idea because it provides the motivation for society to exploit and dehumanize laborers. As I mentioned before, capitalism justifies horrific systems in the name of profitability. We see how this has the potential to happen in Wall Street. Gekko planned to dissolve the company for profit at the expense of its employees. Bud is then forced to make a moral decision between achieving wealth and sustaining the livelihood of Bluestar employees. I say this is a moral decision because capitalism that focuses on the bottomline without considering the possibility of social externalities. In this context, the stories we tell ourselves about people of color and women can justify economic exploitation. After talking a little bit about greed, we read Venkateshs book, Gang Leader For A Day. This read is a little jarring in comparison to movies like Wall Street and The Social Network. The

Social Network, focuses on white men, students at Harvard, as they battle over intellectual property and the creation of Facebook. Two of the main characters, the Winklevoss twins, are the stereotypical, WASP students at Harvard. We might assume that one of the other main characters, Eduardo, also comes from wealth because he was able to fund Mark Zuckerberg. The characters in Gang Leader For A Day seem to be living in an alternative reality, completely opposite from the main characters in The Social Network. The people who live in the Robert Taylor Homes are worried about things like whether the utilities in their house will be functioning in the winter or whether they will be able to relocate smoothly. People like Mark Zuckerberg are worried about things like his server going down and whether he can protect the work he has done against two lawsuits. These two stories are not really surprising or unexpected when taken individually. However, these accounts of the American experience differ drastically. While these people are suppose to be considered equals by law because of their citizenship, citizenship is obviously not enough to command equal treatment or opportunity. I want to take a second and talk about what this suggests about American culture. Like I said, these stories do not seem strange when you read them. Students at Ivy League schools create good things. People who live in the projects do bad things. Gang Leader For A Day was a New York Times best seller. The Social Network won three Oscars and four Golden Globes. These were popular stories, even if they were hugely different. Personally, I think that these stories are popular because they resonate deeply with what we already accept to be true. This means that even when we put Gang Leader For A Day and The Social Network into conversation, and even though it is clear that these stories are disparate in disturbing ways, there is no outcry. My hope is that one day, we will be able to change this. We should not be tolerant

of the poor conditions that the tenants of the Robert Taylor Homes live in, while also knowing that it does not have to be this way. Some other comments about Gang Leader For A Day, of course we have to talk about the role of the gangs in relation to the city in this context. An interesting question here is: what kind of city do the tenants of the Robert Taylor Homes live in? Is it the same Chicago that we might normally expect to read about? I think the answer here is no. Afterall, the institutions! Venkatesh suggests that because of the lack of structural support, gangs and other people are forced fill this vacuum. Institutions just dont seem to be interested in the people that live in the Robert Taylor Homes. This is a sad truth about cities: cities are different for so many different people, and most times, people dont have control over what face of the city they experience. On a completely different note, I think it is important to note that that the author is the first significant Asian-American character in this course. The authors positionality, specifically his race, strongly impacts the way gang members interact with him. The shorties in the gang openly discuss how confused they are about his racial or ethnic identity. The confusion about Venkateshs identity is a recurring theme in this book: his race visually marks him as an outsider in this world. His protection from the Black Kings allows him a pass, but anybody that is unfamiliar with J.T.s authority can see that Venkatesh does not belong. Venkatesh makes a decision to give us a window into these experiences, and that is whats unique about this book. Venkatesh does not pretend to hide this. He acknowledges that the entire narrative is hinged on his interaction with an unfamiliar environment. I only want to add one last thing, and that is, we didnt get to talk much about the power dynamics behind this piece. Venkatesh openly struggles with the morality of studying or consuming poverty in the way that scholars often do. When poverty is discussed in the news or in classes, the audience is composed of people who arent

being affected by structural oppression and the subject of study is poverty, but not just poverty: people who are poor. We profit from stories like this. Our research helps us gain prestige. Is this okay? This is a thought that I want you all to hold and mull over after this semester, and throughout your time at Brown. Anyway, the next week we read Middlesex, a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. This is one of my favorite novels and it is definitely one of the most beautiful stories Ive had the opportunity to read. We change gears here a little bit. Gang Leader For A Day was primarily a story about poverty and race, but Middlesex is about primarily about immigration and gender. Stories about immigration today revolve around experiences of Latino families, and sometimes Asian American families. In that way, Middlesex is not one of the common stories we hear today about immigration. I want to start with a broad statement about tradition, starting with Lefty and Desdemona. I think we can say that the first generation of this family history adhered to their Greek roots. However, we see this tradition fading throughout the generations. In return, this family was accepted into this countrys racial hierarchy. The relationship between assimilation and acceptance makes sense: Cal and Chapter Eleven were seen as white, not Greek and therefore, Cal and Chapter Eleven assimilated. Desdemona spent hours in the kitchen, food and language were important components earlier in the novel. Sourmelina spends more time in America and she starts to abandon her traditions. Finally, Tessie was fully Americanized. Milton may have carried some appreciation for the tradition, but Cal and Chapter Eleven were farther removed. In a way, this story provides a stark comparison for the immigration stories we normally hear today. We might see this more clearly if we had time to put this read in conversation with Strength In What Remains, one of our later reads, but not all families are able to claim whiteness like the

Stephanides were able to. I talked about this a little bit in City Politics, but this is a big deal. Irish immigrants were able to overcome negative stereotypes by claiming whiteness. In fact, in this book, race seemed to appear as an issue only when the main characters encountered black people or black communities. Lefty and Desdemona were sheltered from the maltreatment that immigrant communities often face because of their ability to claim whiteness. This privilege stabilized their immigrant experience and allows future generations to assimilate easily, and this is very different from the experiences of Deo in Strength In What Remains. White people and black people did not interact much in this novel, but we see how different groups of people had different methods of encountering and coping with the same dominant structure of oppression. And I said this book wasnt really a story about race. Anyway, Eugenidies obviously explores gender identity. Eugenides uses half of the book to poke fun at the gender roles that the audience already expects, while dropping hints to the audience about what theyre about to read. Jimmy Zizmo discusses the ways in which Sourmelina resigned her role as the wife, in the traditional Greek sense, by comparing her to Desdemona. Desdemona was the good wife. She was not expected to go to work. In return, she is expected to provide in two places: the kitchen and the bedroom. As they were growing up, Tessie and Milton adhered to these gender roles. Tessie paints her nails as Milton serenaded her. Milton is in the Boys Scouts, he uses Tessies body (for his music), he joins the Navy. When Milton was in the Navy, Tessie cries. The stories of the people around Cal (or Callie) seem familiar, which accentuates the strangeness of Cals story. The author explains the pressures of a teenage girl with such perfect detail: Callie was not physically developing so she hid, Callie did not start menstruating so she pretended, Callie was not actually attracted to Jerome but she played along. Callie understood what it meant to be female (or feminine) so she did her best. When Cals real gender identity is revealed, Cal feels as

though his existence has disturbed a fundamental pillar of society. Therefore, he must hide. Cal understands what it means to be male (or masculine), and so he leaves to a place where he is allowed to continue pretending or he ends relationships when he realizes that he cannot pretend anymore. Isnt that a tragedy? I think Eugenides leaves the audience with hope here. Gender roles are constructed, and he does a great job of showing the audience how gender roles have changed over time, slowly but surely with each generation of this family. Eugenides shows how younger generations in this book balk at the restrictions that older generations treated as sacred, and I personally think we will move in this direction. After reading complex stories about race and then complex stories about gender, these two themes finally converge and become the centerpiece in Jazz by Toni Morrison, which describes African American life in the city. The intersectionalities of race and gender have always been peripheral in our discussions of race and our discussions of gender. For example, in the movie Crash, which was assigned for the same week as Middlesex, was about race, but there were quite a few complex interactions that we didnt get a chance to talk about. The most dramatic one would be the relationship between John Ryan, played by Matt Dillon, and Christine Thayer, played by Thandie Newton. It started when John, the officer, sexually harassed Christine after pulling her over. John was a pretty sickening character. He was rude to the black woman, Shaniqua, who refused to extend his fathers government benefits. I think rude might be an understatement: he made explicit comments about race in a couple scenes. Despite how awful his character was, the directors or the writers, whoever was making the decisions, put in a lot of work into developing this character. The audience learns that John had a hard life. His father lost everything by trying to help people of color. In the end, he redeems himself by saving Christine from a dangerous car crash. Even in this lecture, Im talking about the white male character,

John, and not the black female characters. The audience is filled with disdained sympathy for John, and the women of color he interacts with only build his character. This is problematic, and a perfect transition into a discussion about why Jazz is so important to our course. I may have understated how important Morrisons piece is in my initial lecture. If you look back at the books weve read, the authors have all been men. If you look at the books well read after Jazz, the authors are all men, except for Julia Alvarez. This is one of the significant and unfortunate flaws of this class. The books I have chosen are all important books and they were incorporated into the syllabus because they delve into themes significant to any discussion about American culture and the city. However, if I had more time in our class, I would have chosen more stories written by women of color. It is important that we allow women (specifically, women of color) to tell their own stories because the intersectional framework inherent in their perspective reveals a larger story about oppression in the United States. In this last lecture, I want to point out that weve been discussing race and gender as if these axes of oppression exist unilaterally. After laying out a framework for this class with Toqueville, we talk about the experiences of Huckleberry Finn and Jim. This was a story about race that primarily centered on Jims story. When we talked about gender, we talked about the white women that Huckleberry Finn encountered. The week after that, we talked about race and gender again, except this time, Bigger Thomas, a black male and Mary Dalton, a white female, were the main characters. We talked about greed the week after Native Son, but then we came back to race with Gang Leader for a Day. Gang Leader for a Day is the first novel we could have used to broaden our discussion of race. This is the first week we talked somewhat extensively about a woman of color. Ms. Bailey had a significant role in upholding the social infrastructure for the tenants of the Robert Taylor Homes. We didnt talk about her character as

much as we talked about J.T., but Ms. Bailey also protected the community while accumulating power and control. The difference was that Ms. Bailey didnt use hard power or violence to maintain her influence. Instead, she uses soft power: she often had access to resources that community members did not, which she leveraged in return for money and power. Money mattered for all the characters in this book, but J.T. and Ms. Bailey sold completely different things to different people. Despite the possibilities, J.T. is still the main character of this book, and our discussion around race revolved around him. We probably limit our discussions of race and gender this way for two reasons. One, its a lot easier. When we talk about the struggles of white, heterosexual, cis-gendered women, the privileges that exist for these women affords familiarity to our analysis. We dont have to discuss the ways that race and sexuality might complicate our analysis. Not only is it easier, but the second reason is that weve been taught to talk about race and gender this way. In keeping with our current example, when the feminist movement or mass media talk about women, they are usually referring to the experiences of white women. The idea of womanhood has been constructed by white women. For example, the feminist movement has championed abortion without an analysis of why non-white women might not want to sign onto this cause. The bodies of black and Latina women are still scarred by a history of forced sterilization. Many times, Ive caught myself making the same mistake: Ive used the noun woman but Im really referring to the specific experiences of white women. In our class, it was useful to isolate something as big as gender to gain a deeper understanding of gender and American culture. Unfortunately, we didnt have time to draw this discussion back to a bigger discussion of oppression and privilege. We didnt get to talk about Jazz in full because of the Ray Kelly fiasco. But for the small amount of time we had, I would argue that we took Morrisons story and interpreted it in our

single axis framework. So in this last lecture, I want to draw our attention to the experiences of Violet and Dorcas as women of color because we dont focus on this group of people enough. The plot of the novel is strange enough. Joe and Violet Trace move into Harlem from the country. Joe falls in love with another girl, Dorcas, but shoots her at a party after she loses interest in him. At the funeral, Violet attacks Dorcas corpse. After the funeral, Violet becomes friends with Dorcas aunt, Alice Manfred, and eventually resumes a normal relationship with Joe. This is a strange story, right? I remember thinking this plot is unimaginable. Is it possible for us to believe that a character like Violet would act the way she does in this novel? More importantly, is it possible for us to imagine ourselves acting the way these characters do? The stories that we tell ourselves about others attempt to separate us from them so being able to appreciate the humanity of others, no matter how different they are from ourselves, is important. Near the end of the novel, Dorcas says: Acton, now, he tells me when he doesnt like the way I fix my hair. Then I do it how he likes it. I never wear glasses when he is with me and I changed my laugh for him to one he likes better. I think he does. I know he didnt like it before. And I play with my food more now. Joe liked for me to eat it all up and want more. Acton gives me a quiet look when I ask for seconds. He worries about me that way. Joe never did. Joe didnt care what kind of woman I was. He should have. I cared (Morrison 190). The voice that Morrison gives to the characters in Jazz is brilliant because the audience is constantly aware of the emotions of the characters. These are emotions that are not understandable from any framework that is not intersectional. A white woman with these emotions would be deemed a failure to the feminist cause. A black man with these emotions would be betraying his masculinity. Yet Morrison allow her characters to have these feelings, and she presents them in an understandable way. Morrison forces the audience to ask hard questions: why would Dorcas

want a man that wants to dictate who she is and how she acts? Why would Violet want to stay with a man that cheated on her and killed another woman? Morrison doesnt allow the audience an easy way out, and in many ways, Jazz feels unfinished. Like jazz, the music style, this novel is erratic and improvised, yet it falls into a perfect rhythm and follows quiet, but strict rules. The institutions are almost absent in this novel, but the city is still a prominent character. As Morrison writes in the beginning of the novel, the city frames the characters. Right after we talked about Jazz, the events of October 29th happened, to use the universitys language. We got sidetracked in our curriculum, but I believe that we had some productive and important conversations. I want to take some time now to relate this demonstration back to our class. In discussing Ray Kelly, we were stuck between prioritizing academic freedom or student safety. As some of you argued, students felt threatened by Ray Kelly and the implicit endorsement he received from Brown, or the Taubmen Center. Others of you discussed the importance of being able to openly and freely discuss ideas, especially in an academic setting. This makes for a tricky situation because you are all correct. Student safety should be one of the highest priorities of this institution, but Brown must also uphold a commitment to academic freedom. As a class, we seemed to veer on the side of upholding academic freedom, so I want to give room to the arguments in favor of the demonstration. President Paxson writes that Ray Kelly should have been allowed to speak because Brown must be a place that supports the free exchange of ideas. In order to make this argument, we must ask who is allowed to participate in this free exchange of ideas. Members of the audience composed of community members and students exchanged ideas in the demonstration. Why werent their ideas legitimate? This reveals that there is a power dynamic in play, and this is a power dynamic that we observe in a lot of the readings and movies we have discussed in this

class. There are the people who have the power to tell the stories, and there are the people who do not have this power. In the university, the same power dynamics exist: professors, deans and presidents are allowed to silence students and members of the community in the name of academic freedom without having to consider that students are also exercising their academic freedom. I know I might be beating the dead horse, but this is just food for thought. In light of the demonstration, we didnt get a chance to talk about the Garcia girls as much in class. However, you might say that this story represented the convergence of two major themes in this course: immigration and intersectionality. This is a story that also focuses on women of color, the four Garcia sisters. This is a story of assimilation. The Garcia family left the Dominican Republic during the reign of Trujillo. Even though they had achieved an upper-class life in the Dominican Republic, they were confronted with the issues that immigrant families often face in a new setting. The Garcia girls might represent Tessie and Milton in Middlesex, but their story of immigration is more familiar, in my opinion: they hated going back to their home country, but they didnt feel comfortable in America. They struggled with poverty and institutional barriers to success, and they experienced sexism and racism. While we didnt read this book in class, Native Speaker is another story about immigration, assimilation and race. The struggle of Asian American immigrants match both stories presented to us in Middlesex and How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, but it is a unique story too. The orientalism that Asian Americans face has historical roots. In the United States, this can be separated into four eras of prejudice for Chinese immigrants: Americans thought the Chinese were depraved and ignorant, then brilliant but cruel, then friendly because Japanese people were bad, and now, the model minority. Asian Americans show the multifaceted nature of white supremacy in the United States. While the dominant narrative of racial

prejudice revolves around the negative caricatures of black and Latino people, positive stereotypes are equally as insidious. The prejudice against Asian Americans reinforces the superiority of whiteness because it still creates a story about us and them. In Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee demonstrates the way Asian Americans are the permanent oriental, functioning as aliens on the American cultural landscape. Lee forces the audience to recognize that there is diversity within the Asian American community, while giving the audience a glimpse into the life of an Asian American politician. Its a great story and I wish we had the time to read it in class. In the last two weeks of this class, we talked about big policies: education and the evolution of the suburbs. We covered the debate between Savage Inequalities and Waiting for Superman pretty well in class: Waiting for Superman is a movie that explores the role that charter schools could play in aiding the public education system while Savage Inequalities explores what it would take to fix the flaws that currently exist in the public school system. We also spent a good amount of time talking about the suburbanization of America, which was discussed at length in The Road to Hell. Jackson makes the argument that contemporary economic and social problems are rooted in the American residential experience. Since we did such a good job in class, I want to zoom out and take this opportunity to discuss how these two weeks related to the bigger themes that we explored in this class. I started this lecture by saying that I wanted to accomplish three things: I wanted to expand our discussion of race in America to include Asian Americans, I wanted to explore the intersectionalities between race and gender, and I wanted to expand our discussion of capitalism and greed. The last two weeks of class, we talked about some policies that relate to these three expansions of our syllabus.

When we talk about capitalism in American culture, it is important to think about this framework as a driving force. When Jackson talks about suburbanization, these causes are mostly economic: inexpensive land, cheap transportation, balloon-frame construction, government subsidies and weak land use controls. The importance of economic incentives in urging suburbanization poses a question: is individual economic expedience worth more to us than environmental or social good? Jackson argues that suburbanization is actually destructive to the environment, to cities and to people. In light of Jacksons logic, we still find ourselves easily swayed by economic incentives. Even in arguing that suburbanization is bad, Jackson has to argue that this trend actually poses a cost to the economy. Again, we see how the bottom line is a priority in discussions of American culture. The only factor Jackson discusses that isnt economic is racial prejudice. Jackson talks about how race and ethnicity have overriding significance. This brings us back to a major theme in our class: race. Racial segregation still exists in practice, as we see in Savage Inequalities and Waiting for Superman, and that is one of the problems that our education system faces. Asian Americans are excluded from this story but it would be a mistake to assume that Asian Americans do not face discrimination, even in the education system. As I discussed before, Asian American is a diverse term. It would be a mistake to say that Hmong Americans, as a demographic group, are as successful as Chinese Americans. It would also be a mistake to say that Asian Americans that have achieved higher education do not face discrimination: the bamboo ceiling was a term coined in the early 2000s. Like the glass ceiling, Asian Americans are excluded from executive positions, regardless of their academic qualifications, on the basis of the story that is told about Asian Americans in American culture. Asian Americans face a different

type of discrimination. By including Asian Americans in our study of the way race operates, we can gain a fuller picture of race in America. Lastly, when we talk about how education policies and suburbanization impact minorities, it is important to remember that we are operating under the assumption that we can talk about racial minorities as a whole. In reality, it would be unfair to talk about any group without also acknowledging the power dynamics behind whose story gets told on behalf of that group. As I discussed before as examples, white women are often allowed to speak for women while black men get to talk on behalf of black people. This poses a challenge to women of color: the issues that women of color face are often placed on the back burner while movements focus on issues that are not relevant to them. We talked more in depth about women of color in this last lecture, but we must be consistently mindful of how we talk about issues that women or people of color face. Otherwise, we might find that we are conflating experiences unfairly. Culture is constantly contested. In many ways, the equality that was discussed by Toqueville is still only made for certain people and culture gives us insight into who is given access to the American dream. The umbrella has certainly expanded to include more people than it did in the 1830s. On one hand, there has certainly been a trend towards increasing social (but not economic) equality. On the other, weve created different stories to explain why there are people who still cannot access the privileges of equality. I wonder what these communities would look like if structural support existed, if the police actually cared about crime in these communities, if schools and teachers cared about children and the situations that impact their learning environment, or if jobs were available for black men and women. These are all questions that I encourage you guys to think more about. In this last lecture, I hope I summarized and expanded some of the key points that we hit in this class. I think our syllabus gave you all a

broad overview of the stories that people tell of themselves, and I hope that these stories have challenged the stories that you are used to hearing. This semester has been a blast.