On the radio… January 27, 2008

I’m a fan of This American Life, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, I’m a devoted fan of stories. And This American Life often features very powerful stories. Big oomph in small packages… Like last week’s episode, “The Matchmakers“… Here’s the summary of the third section, from the website:

Act Three. Babies Buying Babies.

Elna Baker reads her story about the time she worked at the giant toy store, FAO Schwartz. Her job was to sell these lifelike “newborns” which were displayed in a “nursery” inside the store. When the toys become the hot new present, they begin to fly off the shelves. When the white babies sell out, white parents are faced with a choice: will they go for an Asian, Latino, or African-American baby instead? What happens is so disturbing that Elna has a hard time even telling it. (16 minutes)

 Oh, c’mon. Like anyone who studies race in these here United States would even be surprised by what happens. The echoes of Clark and Clark’s doll study–used to help make the case against segregation in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case–live on except for one important difference. It’s not the white children who reject these baby dolls of different colors. It’s the parents.

Elna describes how she and some of the other FAO Schwartz toy sellers (dressed up as “nurses” for an “adoption agency”) began working against these white mothers, placing babies of color in the children’s arms and telling them how lovely they looked as mommies, and what good mothers they were to these babies. The mothers resist these adoptions.  But in the absence of white baby dolls, the Asian babies go, the Latino babies sell… until all that are left are the black babies.

The story is not new, yet it is heartbreaking in its familiarity. This happened recently. Not ten, twenty, thirty, forty years ago. So, go. Listen to it. Because there’s more that I haven’t written down. That I can’t tell. That will make you want to cry.

I did.

Minnesota “race” politics –of the 1920s January 27, 2008

I recently watched the movie Sweet Land, the tale of a girl, Inge, who arrives in rural Minnesota in the 20s to marry a Norwegian-American farmer, Olaf. Only problem is, nobody in the town expected her to be German, and her nationality sticks in the craw of the townspeople and postpones the marriage for a time.

At one point, the minister comes over to Olaf’s house. Inge makes the coffee. Olaf, already smitten, praises Inge’s coffee. The minister, enraged by her difference and by the perceived immorality of the situation, goes off on a rant about her unassimilable Germanness that includes this line: “your Germanness–it makes coffee that is too black!”

This line captures perfectly the slippery logic that assumes a natural (inherent) relationship between national identities and character as the minister accuses Inge of so much more than bad cooking. Blackness stands in for absolute Otherness. (Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark provides an insightful critical examination of the operations of whiteness and blackness in U.S. American literatures. Sweet Land, in my opinion, merely picks up on what would have been a set of discursive options in the time period for assessing and diagnosing Otherness and gradations of belonging.) The blackness of the coffee, beyond racializing Inge’s alien status, also signals her as profligate and spendy. The minister announces that black coffee means that she has used too many beans. The scene suggests that for a rural Minnesota Norwegian community a lack of frugality would be a damning instance of bad character.

(And if you think that I chose to write about coffee deliberately for my first post, well… you’d be correct!)