Dog Days Classics: Robert Caro's Controversial Portrait of Robert Moses and New York

“Surely the greatest book ever written about a city.” - David Halberstam

Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, 1974

Since its initial 1974 publication, rarely has book dominated a subject the way Robert Caro’s The Power Broker has. Caro defined Moses as an overbearing, racist, once idealistic public servant who became an obsessed power mongering city planner single handedly undermining New York’s neighborhoods and communities through massive highway and public works projects. Under Caro’s watchful eye, Moses crafted cities much as Le Corbusier might have decades earlier, all flow and no people. Minority and low income communities found themselves at the mercy of the overly officious Moses who famously shrugged off criticism from Jane Jacobs and others in crafting the New York we know today.

Despite defining the discourse regarding New York’s urban renewal, Caro’s work has drawn a fair amount of criticism from academics. However, before one delves into its blindspots, the book’s strengths deserve some attention. First, Caro goes much further than simply providing a biography of the city’s most famous city planner. Instead, Caro produced a sprawling study of New York before and after World War II. In fact, one could argue the book succeeds in documenting the career of Al Smith and the political machine from whence he came equally as well as Moses. If one actually completes its 1000+ pages, he or she will know infinitely more about New York City than when they began. Second, Caro clearly illustrates how old New York, a city of neighborhoods and mass transit, became New New York, a debt ridden, seething cauldron of ethnic/racial tension that served as America’s urban boogeyman in the 1970s. Movies like Spike Lee’s solid (if 30 minutes too long) Son of Sam represent the state of the Big Apple circa the mid 1970s well. [Editors note: reader Suman Ganguli rightly points out that better representations of NYC in the 1970s would be the film Taxi Driver and the excellent book, The Bronx is Burning.]

Yet, no work gets everything right and after 36 years, it would be surprising if someone didn’t re-evaluate Caro’s work. In 2007, Three separate exhibits – “Remaking the Metropolis” at the Museum of New York, "The Road to Recreation” at the Queens Museum of Art, and “Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution,” hosted at Columbia University’s Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery – attempted to re-evaluate Moses’ career. Published in conjunction with the three exhibitions, the Kenneth Jackson and Hilary Ballon-edited Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York juxtaposed handsomely crafted photographic images of Moses’s work around the five boroughs and Long Island with short essays on the meaning of them. In particular, Martha Biondi’s essay “Robert Moses, Race, and the Limits of the Activist State” made a critical observation about Moses’s contributions. Biondi acknowledged that it remained “troubling that the man who built so much of the New York metropolitan area’s infrastructure was influenced by the long arm of Jim Crow” (121). However, Biondi pointed out “the built environment is not forever bound by Moses’s vision.” Today, after the demographic changes of post war New York recreated and reorganized communities several times over, those very pools and parks built for middle and upper class whites now serve non-white patrons. Despite his racism, Moses ended up building for the very people he disdained. A delicious irony not lost on the book’s essayists. New populations absorbed Moses’s legacy for their own uses, their own lives, their own lived experiences. At least, Robert Moses built things.

Others, like Kenneth Jackson note that blaming Moses for declining demographics, problematic public spaces, and detoriating rapid transit missed the mark. Speaking to the New York Observer in 2007, Jackson praised Caro’s work but also noted that New York had done well.

The fact is, New York is doing very well. Its public housing is all standing; it is not being blown up like in other cities. New York has far and away the best transit system than anywhere. The question is, again, consider the larger context: If Robert Moses was out to destroy the transit system, he didn’t do a very good job.

For Jackson, though Moses made mistakes, without him “Gotham would have lacked the wherewithal to adjust to the demands of the modern world.”

More recent observers have come to similar conclusions. Writing in a recent issue of the Journal of Urban History, Senior Editor of Planning Press, Timothy Mennel acknowledged academia’s wider reservations regarding Moses: “[E]minent scholars and critics called it 'clumsy' and shallow, with many noting Caro’s Manicheanism, naivete, weak grasp of psychology, provincialism, use of anonymous sources, and poor historiography.” In regard to Jackson, Mennel credits the Columbia Professor for being “one of the foremost and persistent critics of Caro’s work and lazy thinking about urban renewal generally …” (Timothy Mennel, “A Fight to Forget: Urban Renewal, Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs and the Stories of Our Cities,” in Journal of Urban History 37 (4): 627-634).

To be fair, I first read (well really no one reads it twice - I mean, its over 1000 pages) The Power Broker for Professor Jackson’s class in urban history at Columbia. At the time, I worked during the day as a public high school teacher, instructing the cities’ students in History and English. Needless to say, like many public school teachers nearing their 30s, I wasn’t sure where I was going in life. Jackson’s class and specifically Caro’s book completely reoriented my direction. The majesty of Caro’s vision, even if flawed, deepened my relationship to New York as I began to view subway stops, public pools, parks, roads, and bridges with a historical intensity that seemed to be previously lacking. I knew what I wanted to do; now I just had to do it. Certainly, there were other important books in that class that piqued my obsession including Jackson’s own Crabgrass Frontier, but none careened through my imagination like Caro’s. I argued with friends who worked in city planning on the merits of renewal and gentrification, I debated the importance of mass transit, I forced my high school students (well ok, the one AP U.S. History class I taught, since my regular history classes were forced to focus tightly on state exams) to produce a magazine on American urbanity. In short, I dove into urban history and policy in a way I had never before.

With that said, Caro’s work suffers from other weaknesses not already discussed. Joel Schwartz’s The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City (1993) pushed back against Caro’s depiction of Moses as an “Evil genius” (Professor Jackson’s words not mine). Instead, Schwartz presented a more complicated picture. For Schwartz, Moses did not rule by fiat, rather, his successes came through careful negotiation and compromise. Moreover, Moses' redevelopment only occurred because of the consent by the liberal establishment that Caro argues resisted Moses much of the way. Even worse, institutions like Columbia and NYU played critical roles in undermining the city’s geography. Caro paid scant attention to these actors or he positioned them much differently. Today, Schwartz’s work appears prophetic as NYU’s expansion seems to be one of the most inflammatory issues plaguing lower Manhattan. Mennel too points this out, lamenting that Schwartz’s work seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle do in great part to the fact that Schwartz rightly saw the complicity of the very liberal resistance that Caro mythologized.

Schwartz and others explicitly assess a fair share of the blame for urban renewal’s failures on the very protagonists of the heroic resistance narratives. The community groups and activists who are so often pitched as the bulwarks against Robert Moses and his minions were themselves some of the leading champions of urban renewal, housing reform, and specific now reviled projects that were built throughout the mid twentieth century. (628)

Without a doubt, Mennel, Jackson, and others are correct, yet, Caro captured something in The Power Broker few others have. Even with its weaknesses, Caro shaped how we speak about cities and urban renewal in ways that at least brought attention to the inequalities created. Moreover, it is hard to imagine works like the excellent, American Pharoah: Mayor Richard J. Daley – His Battle for Chicago and the Nation without Caro’s example. When we read The Power Broker for Jackson’s class, the Professor clearly pointed out the book’s mistakes. No one was mislead and still the book reverberated. If it made me a better teacher, scholar, or urban planner, even with its errors, shouldn’t that be enough?
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Ryan Reft 

Past posts in this series include:

• Contested Truths
• Orientalism
• Discipline and Punish
• The American Political Tradition

Dog Days Classics: All About Utility, Freedom, Love, Valour, Compassion

 

Daniel T. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence

This book is one that I suspected might not hold up as well today as it did when I first read it as a History major in college. At the time, Rodgers’s study of how phrases like “natural rights,” “the people,” and “the interests” evolved in American discourse over time was truly eye-opening. The garden variety insight that “natural rights” might not mean the same thing to various people over time is not much to write home about, but Rodgers goes well beyond it to show how Americans wavered between Benthamite utilitarianism and Wilsonian idealism for much of their history, from belief in the greater good of the people as a whole to the idea of democracy as a marketplace for sorting out people's conflicting interests. The book is at its best when it charts the career of pluralism in twentieth century political culture: in the Progressive Era, “the Interests” represented the venal influence of big business, which sought to warp the playing field against workers, consumers, and smaller competitors. By the 1930s, the New Dealers began to imagine the state as a broker that negotiated compromises among the many different “interests” that made up society, but the existential crises of the Atomic Age and the Cold War soon led Americans to swap liberal pragmatism for a discourse that emphasized stark lines between freedom and Communism, good and evil. The Red Menace was not to be negotiated with or accommodated like, say, business and labor, or farmers and consumers. 

This is a story that Louis Menand has told in a book with a grander narrative sweep and finer grain of detail; The Metaphysical Club (2003) beautifully unfolded the evolution of American pragmatism from the generation that survived the Civil War to the aftermath of World War II, but Rodgers captures the essential problem of how we think about the competing ends, interests, and ideas that vie for supremacy in our own democracy. Questions about what constitutes “an interest” (or “the people” or “freedom,” for that matter) are about what we think of each other, and how we envision a good life working out. Are we better off setting aside the individual demands of ourselves and our groups, or should each constituency seek to fulfill its own objectives – with democracy producing an amalgam (the legislative “sausage”) everyone can live with? These questions are part of what motivated me to want to keep learning about history; with the help of healthy dose of Orientalism, I learned to scrutinize the way Christian missionaries wrote about their converts in China or the discourse that copyright interests used to persuade others of the importance of intellectual property to the US economy. 

Sure, but will it play in Sichuan?

Language isn’t everything, though (even if some postmodern thinkers say everything is a text). As important as it is to examine why people say what they say, it also matters what people do. Ronald Reagan’s particular idea of “freedom” (the freedom to bash in the heads of radical priests in Central America, for instance) did not find favor with the public just because of its rhetorical power, or even the particular legacy of Cold War “freedom talk” that gave rise to it. Similarly, liberals have long sought to find a new language that exemplifies their idea of the public good. The linguist George Lakoff has spent much of the last decade trying to persuade progressives to drop Republican “frames” about security, social welfare, and a host of other issues, and though some progressives (notably Barack Obama) appear to have succeeded through soaring rhetoric, the current debate about public spending and debt has been framed in depressingly Republican terms. Bill Clinton’s attempt to redefine the liberal vision of the social contract as a “New Covenant” in the early 1990s failed to resonate with the public, perhaps because it did not connect or comport with life as people were then experiencing it. 

So, yes, Virginia, there is a real world in which language operates, which language also helps to construct. Contested Truths does not treat political language as if it is a system unto itself, but it does struggle to locate talk of rights and freedoms in the material world where people actually go looking for new rights and new freedoms. Other books may do a better job of the latter -- Eric Foner's Story of American Freedom is able to accomplish more by looking at how one ideal was interpreted by Americans in a variety of different contexts, from the Puritans to the New Dealers to right-wing militias -- but Contested Truths still provides an engaging tour through US history, when battles over the meaning of natural rights or pluralism exposed the various and competing ways Americans envisioned their own society. Each such contest reveals something vital about the period when one word or another became the terrain of struggle.

Alex Sayf Cummings

Past posts in this series include:

• Orientalism
• Discipline and Punish
• The American Political Tradition

Dog Days Classics III: Said Said What? Orientalism and the Other

Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978  

Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism is without a doubt a massively influential work that grad students and others sometimes use far too carelessly. Along with later works such as 1993’s Culture and Imperialism, Said established a critical insight into how Western works, fictional and historical, created a discourse about the East that conflated it with femininity, emotionality, and sensuality that left Eastern culture submissive to the masculine, scientific, and rational West. The book exploded the idea of an objective history and raised questions about the efficacy of Western histories of the East. After all, the West’s imposition of the above traits on Eastern culture in many ways said far more about the West than it did the East.
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Orientalism was an important book for my own development. Though I read it at age 20 for an undergraduate course, it raised all kinds of red flags. I had never really considered the power of discourse or the problematic foundations upon which Western historians wrote histories of the East. Maybe even worse, as an American Catholic school educated student (twelve years of Popery if you will), the idea of Israel as a problematic state never ever really came up. Though Orientalism never discusses Israel, my classmates did. Needless to say, it forced me to reconsider the plight of both Palestinians and Israelis. In a strange way, I grew to understand the nuanced and tragic relationship between them far better than I ever could have without Said. If I remember correctly, we read Orientalism in tandem with Martin Bernal's controversial Black Athena, so one can understand what kind of effect this might have on a middle class kid from the South Suburbs of Chicago. Thankfully, I never viewed history the same again.

Yet, as with Foucault, Said’s conclusions can be carried to far. After all, discourse matters, it can shape actions and policies, but it is not the be all end all. Also like Foucault, sometimes Said's followers seem to carry his conclusions too far or position him in ways he himself opposed. Said certainly had his doubts about the kind of work he inspired. Even with all its flaws, Said loved Western literature. The late Tony’s Judt’s essay on Said engages this thorny issue:

Edward Said was the idolized hero of a generation of cultural relativists in universities from Berkeley to Bombay, for whom ‘orientalism’ underwrote everything from career building exercises in ‘postcolonial’ obscurantism (‘writing the other’) to denunciations of Western culture in academic curriculum. But Said himself had no time for such nonsense. Radical antifoundationalism, the notion that everything is just a linguistic effect, struck him as shallow and ‘facile’: Human rights, as he observed on more than one occasion, ‘are not cultural or grammatical things, and when violated they are as real as anything we can encounter. (Tony Judt, "Edward Said: The Rootless Cosmopolitan," in Reappraisals, 164)

Yes, critics unfairly labeled Said, the “Professor of Terror,” but even those who questioned Orientalism’s conclusions, like Judt, or writer/literary critic, Edmund White repeatedly commented on the decency of the man. White, whose negative review of Orientalism offended Said, acknowledged that though it took years to “repair the damage . . . I very much wanted to because upon reflection I came to admire him so much.” (City Boy, 16) Moreover, even if some took his conclusions too far, there is no doubt that subaltern studies and efforts to uncover the place of the “other” and other liminal peoples have greatly expanded our knowledge of the past and present.
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Nor was Said any kind of real nationalist (“I have no patience with the position that ‘we’ should only or mainly be concerned with what is ‘ours’.” (Judt, 166)). He viewed the solution to Palestine, not as a two state solution but rather as the transformation of Israel and Palestine into a secular nation shared by both peoples. As a “rootless cosmopolitan,” he surely felt the sting of Palestinian humiliation and suffering and he rightly saw the sham of the Oslo Peace process (for both sides, though admittedly Said would probably focus more on the Palestinian cause). For all Said’s contributions to postcolonial studies, he viewed nationalism, even when resistant toward imperial power, warily. Efforts to rightly resist imperialism sometimes hinged on an essentializing nationalism that too often morphed into nativism, negating politics and history. In his 1993 work Culture and Imperialism, Said warned “to accept nativism is to accept the consequences of imperialism, the racial, religious, and political divisions imposed by imperialism itself.”(228) Like Arjun Appadurai, Said raised concerns about the role of media in reifying and inscribing negative images about Asia and the Middle East while also marginalizing the experiences of such peoples by only giving historical context when geopolitical conflict erupts.

Said provided game changing contributions to numerous fields. Foucault and Said's collective influence created its own discourse, that as acknowledged, could be problematic in its own right but also established a new lexicon and way of thinking regarding history, sociology, anthropology, and other traditional disciplines. Newer fields like immigration and postcolonial studies depend mightily on many of the foundational tenets Said provided. However, as with anything in the world of academia and elsewhere, theories can be extended too far. Of course, once again, it can be argued that Said noted this flaw himself. According to Judt, nothing frustrated Said more than modern literary scholars' overattention to theory at the expense of close textual reading. (Judt, 164)

Critics have argued Said obscured the contributions Orientalists made in regard to building knowledge about the East and that he pointedly focused too much on French and English writers at the expense of other European interlopers. Others claim that Orientalists served as advocates for political causes of various Middle Eastern peoples. Perhaps they have a point, but it remains difficult to ignore the clear social constructions that continue to emerge regarding representations of the East. Inane examples like the musical, Miss Saigon, popular in the 1990s and re-staged this summer in Philadelphia, appear laughably guilty of the sins of Orientalism. The “mysterious, inscrutable Vietnamese” (one could argue when you don't speak the language anywhere people will be mysterious) and the overly sensualized peasant girl turned prostitute Kim provide two clear examples. If Said got some things wrong, he got many more right. For this writer, the book opened up whole new vistas that 12 years of dutiful but dogmatic Catholic Church education failed to do.

Ryan Reft

Dog Days Classics II: Foucault's Vision of Domination

Ahhh summer. If you are not melting on the East Coast or Southeast then hopefully you are relaxing on the left coast or surviving the brutal heat of the Midwest. As such, it seems a perfect time to reflect on how we got to where we are intellectually. Here at T of M, we are revisiting some old classics that shaped our thought in our younger years along with, as is true of any work, their flaws

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1975
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Foucault’s influential classic can be credited (blamed in some people’s eyes) for fueling a shift in how historians and others think about discourse and the creation of social norms. Along with works such as The History of Sexuality Vol. I (1976) and The Origin of Things: An Archeaology of the Human Sciences (1966), one could argue Foucault almost single handedly altered what we consider to be “fact” or “truth”, suggesting that often each operated much as a social/political construct rather than an innate reality. Some of his more ardent followers would even go so far as to argue that the idea of empirical fact itself is problematic.

My first encounter with Foucault occurred as a nineteen year old freshman in the mid-1990s (ahh the “salad days” of mid tempo grunge rock facsimiles - Bush anyone?) meeting my university’s three quarter sociology requirement. Having never encountered Foucault’s brand of history and logic, I remember not completely understanding much of his argument the first time around. Undoubtedly, Foucault’s opening scene, a public execution, serves as a striking introduction into the kind of systems of surveillance and control at the heart of his work. Still, though much of Foucault remained opaque in my initial reading, I remember also drawing out a very simple but valuable theme: the most powerful systems of surveillance and control were those we imposed on ourselves out of fear of an invisible (and possibly non existent) regulatory structure. As a high school and college jock, all I could think about was how I attempted to regulate my own behavior in the hopes of avoiding condemnation (and subsequent loss of playing time) from my coaches. In my mind, coach was always ruefully watching my each and every action.

Even with this understanding, Foucault’s writing style confused me. I remember asking the prof at the time, “Did Foucault write any of this, it just seems like block quotes?” Talk about naïve. To his credit, my professor answered my inquiry without a note of condescension, almost bemused by my idiocy. As I got older and had to reread Foucault for classes in grad school, the wider effect of his arguments began to sink in. In my early 30s, I even had the opportunity to visit Philadelphia’s Eastern State Prison, subject of part of the book, giving me a physical and spatial understanding of Foucault’s muse.

Undoubtedly, others found Foucault’s works inspiring much earlier. Writer Edmund White reflected on Foucault’s effect (one should note White is speaking of Foucault’s collection of works not just Discipline and Punish) on him in the 1970s:

His central idea had a liberating effect on me: that we are all – philosophers, children, and chemical engineers alike – constricted as to what we can think by prevailing discourses of our period. As he put it, "We cannot think no matter what no matter when…" (City Boy, 149)

Nonetheless, as White’s own reflection illustrates Foucault had flaws. First, the idea of agency seems almost non-existent. If one adheres too strictly to Discipline and Punish’s arguments, people seem less like people and more like vessels that dominant forces in society simply fill and shape or as the aforementioned White summarized, “no one was immune to the subduing power of discourse.” (City Boy, 149) What about those individuals and movements that oppose dominant forces? How do we explain such developments? Another issue regarding Foucault regards how he has been used over the past four decades. Is there any scholar who is referenced more than Foucault over the past 20 years and sometimes in ways that require far greater explanation? Anyone who has taken a grad school history course has undoubtedly been in class with someone who dropped a couple catch phrases from Foucault’s work (bio-politics anyone?) to make a profound point that in actuality lacked true profoundness.

Granted, Foucault himself resented such developments. Identity politics remained anathema to the French philosopher. The confessional society that oozes from reality TV and Oprah served as cautionary tales for him. As White notes, Foucault rejected "'the culture of avowal' by which he meant a culture that thought every individual had a secret, that that secret was sexual, and that by confessing it one had come to terms with one's essence." Moreover, even White disagreed with Foucault's intransigence on this issue: "Yes, it might be wrong to consider one's sexuality to be the key to one's identity -- and in the ultimate scheme of things perhaps gay identity politics have led to the easy packaging and commodification of our experience, a trivialization of the bacchic rites. Nevertheless what we desire is crucial to who we are." (City Boy, 186). However, whatever Foucault thought of identity politics, it failed to stop others from employing his arguments too widely. Of course punishing Foucault for the faults of his acolytes hardly seems fair, but no one ever said life was.

Clearly, Foucault deserves far more praise than condemnation. Discipline and Punish, along with his other works, shaped my own approach to history and writing. Discourse does have power. It does shape us, just maybe not quite as much as Foucault argued. Still, it goes without saying that Foucault’s discourse certainly influenced me.

Ryan Reft

Dog Days Classics: The American Political Tradition

As the combined impact of climate change and the sweltering plague known as Atlanta in August settles upon us, we decided to take advantage of the slow-thinking stupor to go on a walk down memory lane.  This nostalgia trip takes us to the books that we found most influential in undergrad and graduate school -- the texts that were inspiring, that made us want to learn more, or that shaped the way we write about or conceptualize the past.  Each post will look at one book, generally an academic text (if we were writing about fiction or poetry, it would be a very different list), and consider why it was so powerful in its impact.  It would be a pretty dull discussion if each post consisted of "This was a great book!" and "It was very well-written!" so we will also be revisiting these books with an eye to their shortcomings, and how our own take on them has changed in the intervening years.  The earlier books will come first, and generally the ones we read as a doe-eyed college kids, before moving on to more recent works that are classics in the making.  But the first book will be one dear to my heart, that I read in the first year of grad school:

Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It

Hofstadter’s 1948 epic continues to find new readers among undergrads and grad students, as well as the oft-mentioned-but-rarely-observed “educated general interest reader of history.” Trends in historiography may have left Hofstadter far behind, but that may be all to the good in the case of The American Political Tradition. The book’s twelve chapters offer largely psychological insight into major political figures such as the Founding Fathers and the pro-slavery aristocrat John Calhoun, setting them against the social context of their time and probing the deeper casts of mind that led them to craft the Constitution, preserve the union, or oversee the corruption of the Gilded Age in their own particular way. Hofstadter portrays the giants of US political history as men of their time and place, who were nonetheless caught up in circumstances they could dimly understand and scarcely control. Grover Cleveland was an honest but simple-minded public servant, a committed believer in bourgeois virtues of thrift and propriety – in other words, the perfect cipher for an age when moneyed interests were robbing the public blind. Hofstadter cast FDR as “the patrician as opportunist,” who never set out to become a figurehead of radical discontent but who still managed to employ his personal charms and charisma to take advantage of the moment. Lincoln’s “little engine” of ambition brought him to the pinnacle of power, but it also left him with a burden of wartime leadership that he shouldered with a tragic, vaguely Christian sense of responsibility. (If Lincoln was auditioning to be Christ, he was all too aware how the story would end – and that the outcome was out of his hands.)

For me, the finest contribution of The American Political Tradition is its humane approach to people in the past. The book has often been described as “literary,” which is a way of saying it is not as stilted and dry as most academic history (or this blog post). Yet it is literary in another way: like fiction, it goes beyond examining the significance of events to introduce us to recognizable human beings, people with hang-ups, anxieties, and mixed motivations who grope for the right path, as they understand it. Not a lot of historians do this very well, even when they try. Hofstadter’s approach is marked by both irony and empathy for his historical subjects, including the vain and the powerful.

Victoria Woodhull: Non-traditional

The book may benefit from lissome prose and keen insight, but it remains vulnerable to criticism. While not quite qualifying as "psychohistory," the book does examine the past by attempting to deduce the inner mental workings of long-dead historical figures, a reflection of the vogue for Freudian psychoanalysis after World War II. It focuces almost exclusively on men, but that fact is not surprising for a study written in 1948 that deals in large part with presidents (a largely male group in the US). Although it is often classified with the work of “consensus” historians who celebrated America’s liberal democratic heritage in the 1940s and 1950s, the book’s larger insight was simply that basic assumptions about property rights and capitalism seemed to endure throughout US history, regardless of how many divergent personalities passed through the scene:

The sanctity of private property, the right of the individual to dispose of and invest it, the value of opportunity, and the natural evolution of self-interest and self-assertion, within broad legal limits, into a beneficent social order have been staple tenets of the central faith in American political ideologies; these conceptions have been shared in large part by men as diverse as Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Bryan, Wilson, and Hoover.

Hofstadter may have believed in the sturdiness of this creed, but he did not celebrate it. A recovering Marxist in 1948, he still viewed the grasping avariciousness and blind obedience to property that defined American history with bittersweet resignation. It may be that Hofstadter marked the boundaries of American discourse accurately; certainly, today’s political universe in the US seems pinched and impoverished, with even a Progressive president like Barack Obama unwilling to commit to policies that smack of socialism and “big government.” Yet he also may have overlooked the hints of native radicalism that other historians have found among the American revolutionaries, the populist farmers of the South, and the many Americans who made socialism a vital movement in the early twentieth century. Only the abolitionist Wendell Phillips comes across in Hofstadter’s study as a principled radical above the demands of self-interest and retail politics. If The American Political Tradition had been subtitled And the People Who Made It, we might have seen a chapter on Victoria Woodhull, the radical proponent of women’s rights and free love who ran for president in 1872. How did she fit into the tradition? A book like that -- which married Hofstadter’s keen eye for character with a contemporary view of the past -- might reveal a more capacious political tradition than the one found in this (still very good) book.

Alex Sayf Cummings

Not Your Parent's Gentrification: Clybourne Park's Uncomfortable Take on Neighborhood Change

Few developments in the 21st century conjure up as many economic and racial ghosts as gentrification. For urban denizens of all persuasions, debates regarding gentrification unfold like a typical over the top episode of HBO’s True Blood, complete with bloodletting and sacrifice. The problems and issues raised by this process remain complex and contradictory. While race certainly continues to be a factor, reducing the issue to black vs. white oversimplifies what has become a truly mind bending dialogue. For example, in Chicago, as public housing projects were razed, resentments toward whites moving into new “affordable” housing provided only one source of tension. Working class Blacks in historically African American Bronzeville and elsewhere viewed the influx of upper middle class Blacks (derisively described as Buppies by some local residents) with an equally wary eye.


Moreover, the influx of Mexican immigrants to Chicago and South Asian and East Asian counterparts in Queens and Brooklyn have complicated the usual black white binary. As T of M has noted continuously, authors like Saskia Sassen and Mike Davis argue that these immigrant communities in their own way bring with them a low level gentrification that may or may not threaten long established working class communities. Still, others like Josh Sides (another T of M favorite) have noted that sexuality has played a role as well, pointing out that in places like San Francisco’s Castro district, upwardly mobile and affluent gays refurbished a once working class community. While this undoubtedly raised property values and made the Castro a more economically desirable neighborhood, it came in large part at the expense of the long standing lower income residents.

All this is too say, debates about gentrification too often result in a confused jumble of explanations that, as the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle rightly notes, mix “normative and . . . positive arguments.” In other words, the debate confuses what is with what should be, which are rarely the same thing.

The 2011 Pulitzer Prize winning play Clybourne Park (currently on display at Washington D.C.’s Wooly Mammoth Theatre) wades deeply into process of gentrification. Taking place in Chicago’s well known Clyborne Park, the play consists of two acts, separated by 50 years of neighborhood change. Its first act refracts Lorraine Hansberry’s famous play, A Raisin in the Sun so that the story unfolds from the perspective of the white family selling the home. Not wanting to reveal one of the central undercurrents of the plot, the family (consisting of Russ and Bev) has chosen to move largely as result of a family tragedy that altered their relationship to the surrounding community. Indeed, the term community itself morphs into a term of derision when uttered by family patriarch Russ toward his intrusive neighbors who fear the sale of the home to a working class black family will ultimately result in neighborhood decline. The play’s first half exhibits equal parts mourning, racism, classicism, and anger. Needless to say, Russ cares little for the future of the neighborhood nor those residing in it. Though it starts slowly and at times seems cryptic, the first act moves swiftly, setting up the play’s second act well. The first act consists of six characters including Black housekeeper Francine and her dutiful husband Albert along with local minister Jim and neighborhood couple Karl Linder and wife Betsy. Yes, this is the same Karl Linder that attempted to bribe the Younger family (from Raisin in the Sun) from buying the house on Clybourne Street that Russ so willingly hopes to vacate. Having failed in his efforts with the Youngers, Karl turns his attention to convincing Russ to reconsider the sale. Ultimately, the first act operates much like, what one critic perceptively described as “a combustible mix of race, territory and property prices that it is like a hand grenade lobbed into the stalls, primed to explode in the second act.”
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And what a second act it is. Undoubtedly, Norris refuses to provide any kind of sanitized politically correct outcome or comfort for the play’s characters and audience. New York Times critic Ben Bentley summarized the effect as the “equivalent of [Norris pouring] itching powder on his characters and on us.” Guardian theater critic Lyn Gardner agreed, “It's like watching a boil being lanced. Along with the rest of the audience, I squirmed like a worm on a hook.” Moreover, Norris undermines any sense of moral superiority or cosmopolitanism that a 2011 audience might feel watching their 1959 counterparts as the second act reveals the messiness and sometimes eviscerating conflicts that seem all too familiar in today’s urban areas. For all we have learned, we seem to have also apparently forgotten.

As the second act begins, a white couple, Steve and Lindsey, has purchased the house but has run into some resistance from a predominantly black local homeowners association that wishes to preserve the historic nature of Clybourne Park’s unique bungalow style. Steve and Lindsey want to alter the height of the home while also putting a “koi pond” in back. Needless to say, the local homeowner’s group disapproves.

In the years following the 1959 sale, the neighborhood’s demography changed from all white to all black. Economic decline followed as did some levels of struggle, but so too did the sense of community which the second act’s black characters, married couple Kevin and Lena, wish to emphasize to the new tenants. (the play basically uses eight actors total, seven of whom appear in both the first and second acts). What emerges from this constellation of personalities is a cacophony of rhetoric that obscures the real meanings that lay beneath it.

Norris cleverly allows characters to hang themselves while drawing the audience in through a rather innovative means: racial jokes. Though each joke serves as a sort of hinge around which conflict emerges they also propel hostilities. The play builds as each joke surfaces revealing as much about those hearing the joke as those telling it. When Lena tells a particularly offensive yet admittedly entertaining joke about white women, Lena’s own prejudices come into full view, as do those of pregnant new homeowner Lindsey. Still, the dialogue of the second act also provides a means to blow up the very discourse we have come to employ in discussions of gentrification and race. The Guardian’s Garner gets at this most clearly, describing it as the “most offensively delicious skewerings of the resentments and real feelings that lurk behind the euphemisms and politically correct rhetoric of racial discourse ever to erupt on a stage.” From a purely artistic perspective, if there is a criticism of the play it might be that the characters, notably its white homeowners, could be seen as caricatures (or “cartoonish” as Brantley notes), while its black characters seem almost guileless, though admittedly, Lena’s actions suggest differently.

Without question, Clybourne Park, a comedy, is worth seeing. Its dialogue spins out to address issues relating to gentrification, race, class, and military conflict abroad in postwar America. However, while Norris has consistently noted he never intended the play to encompass all of Chicago’s racial history, urbanists will see holes. For example, the black white binary upon which the play is set ignores the increasing numbers of Asian and Latin American immigrants to urban communities. Moreover, the idea that gentrification remains a process driven strictly by white interlopers (who newspapers continue to describe as “pioneers” which remains one of the more unfortunate aspects of this kind of discourse) persists. The increased presence of South Asian and East Asian American professionals in transitional neighborhoods, Black upper class couples moving into gentrifying working class white and black communities, and other examples complicate our understanding of such developments.

Undoubtedly, local demographics play a role. If a city lacks a large South Asian/East Asian or Latino population, the language of gentrification will reflect this. Take Atlanta for example. While the city has recorded gradually increasing numbers of Latino and South Asians, many hail from lower income populations so they in all likeliehood simply haven’t been able to accrue the necessary capital to participate in the process, at least not yet. Then again, the area around Atlanta referred to as “outside the perimeter” (think Buford Highway and Chamblee), has increasingly reported South Asian and East Asian homeownership. The Economist has documented this development most extensively in its March 11, 2004 issue ("Into the Suburbs"). Within Atlanta’s city limits, however, the Black white dynamic retains great resonance. Atlanta’s own identity rests deeply on its history as the “city to busy to hate”; the idea that its black and white business leaders blunted racial conflict for pragmatic entrepreneurial policies. Of course, like any other constructed identity, Atlanta’s probably oversimplifies its complex history of race relations.

In White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005), Kevin Kruse questions this identity. Kruse illustrates that the “city to busy to hate” moniker disguised a troubling racial logic that eventually led to neighborhood and school segregation, even if no one described it that way. White Flight, like predecessors such as Thomas Sugrue’s seminal Origins of the Urban Crisis, explores the role class played in neighborhood transitions of the 1940s and 1950s. Working and lower middle class whites could not flee to suburban areas, so the various “coalitions” established across racial lines that allegedly made Atlanta the “city that was too busy to hate”, favored black and white elites. In Atlanta, upper class and middle class whites displayed an open attitude toward integration as they sent their children to private schools and buffered community desegregation through working class white populations. Much like the noxious Karl Linder of Clybourne Park, working class whites feared their investment would decline once African Americans moved into the community. While racism played a central role, so too did HOLC and FHA lending policies that heavily influenced private lending practices. This meant working class whites sold low out of fear of losing all their investment, while upwardly mobile Blacks paid high as they found fewer neighborhood available to them. While Clybourne Park’s Russ sold the house low out of grief, one wonders if the Youngers benefited from this discount or if the broker found a way to pocket the difference.

Patriarch Russ’s derisive use of the term "community" illustrates a similar function that Kruse points out perverted its meaning. For local Atlanta white communities, the language of community, community protection, and freedom of association became buzzwords for resistance. Initial resistance focused on constructing an “established white community” then using the language of community protection to prevent integration. However, these constructed communities often lacked the kind of social capital, institutions and connections that normally define such. As result, the encroachment of black homeowners into white areas met with predictable responses. Those closest to the transition sold their homes turning a profit as blacks often paid higher prices than whites. This of course drew the rage of fellow white homeowners who lived further away from area of transition; they viewed the actions of whites selling their homes as traitorous. Such developments exhibited the role class played in fracturing opposition to racial succession.

The working class whites who lived in transition areas assumed that they and their neighbors shared not only the common traits of race and class but also common interests in preserving segregation in their neighborhood and the status quo in local politics. During the course of residential desegregation, however, they discovered that their supposed common ground on these issues and identities was ultimately less important for them and their neighbors than each one’s self interest. (80)

Russ’s self interest lay not in economics, but his own disappointment in the alleged community to which he thought his family had belonged. Clearly, race did not amount to any sense of community for Russ and Bev.

What about third forces, like realtors, who engaged in block busting in the past and now rebrand neighborhoods, essentially obscuring their history? Over the past 15 years New York’s Brooklyn and Manhattan neighborhoods have endured an endless stream of such rebrandings. New York State assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries has attempted to legislate against realtors engaging in such practices. According to Jeffries, “neighborhoods have a history, culture and character that should not be tossed overboard whenever a Realtor decides it would be easier to market under another name,” he told the NY Times. Jeffries resented in particular, recent attempts to rename the Prospect and Crown Heights area of Brooklyn as ProCro. To be fair however, this is a process that has been unfolding for much of New York City’s twentieth century. After all, Tribeca was never Tribeca until labeled such in the 1970s.
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So how does one contextualize Norris’ second act? A recent trip to Prospect Heights reveals a neighborhood that remains a mix of urban professionals, working class West Indian American residents, bodegas, and boutique restaurants such as Dutch Boy Burger. Wandering around with Indian American professional Suman Ganguli, a Minnesota born Prospect Heights homeowner, one can clearly see that gentrification as “white driven evil process” fails to really capture its complexities. Ganguli represents your stereotypical South Asian American striver. A University of Chicago, Cornell, and Berkeley graduate (Tea Party members might consider him of the “liberal Ivy jet set crowd” they so abhor), Ganguli and his wife recently purchased a condo in Prospect Heights. He admits that when one uses the word gentrification his “knee jerk politically correct response” is to oppose it, however, this obscures some realities Ganguli acknowledges benefit the community. For example security, infrastructure, and nice restaurants/bars not only fit nicely into his family’s lifestyle choices they also benefit many local homeowners by raising property values. While this may penalize renters, one imagines numerous minority homeowners regard rising property values as a boon.

With that said, he also worries about too much change, “I'd like to see some of the accompanying benefits of gentrification …. but I don't want to see it fully tip over, so that this becomes Park Slope,” he noted in a recent email. “It's a fine balance, perhaps an unstable equilibrium, as they say in applied mathematics/dynamical systems … I don't want to see the people on our block--which is remarkably diverse, racially and socioeconomically--that have been here priced out as a result.” This is the crux of the problem. While certainly, many homeowners benefit, there are those who will simply not be able to afford the increasingly high property taxes that accrue, thus, some working class homeowners may have to move from the very community they helped to establish.

What about race? As a South Asian in a primarily Black and West Indian neighborhood, Ganguli fits in better than say your average white guy (one might also note that West Indians in particular, because of a history of contract labor within the West Indies itself in which South Asian migrants were not uncommon, might be acclimated better toward homeowners of such persuasions). Adding even greater complexity, he has found a local Bangladeshi community within Prospect Heights that has established a foothold that no doubt has contributed to the community’s new growth. This development he suggests, upsets the usual story. “So the standard gentrification narrative gets complicated a bit, as it's not just white yuppies moving in forcing out longtime black/Hispanic residents.”
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Ganguli's not your typical evil white man

Obviously, as both Kruse and Ganguli suggest, class matters especially in regard to consumerism. When the characters from Clybourne Park’s second act recount the travails of the local grocery store beginning as a locally owned business collapsing into a supersaver outlet (think 99 cents store) then transformed into it’s latest incarnation, a Whole Foods, the audience laughed uproariously. Yet, this laughter stems from a knowingness about our current existence: consumption. While race plays a role, gentrification represents as much about how we choose to consume and what it says about us. Writing for the Atlantic, Benjamin Schwartz noted that recent attempts by authors to address the issue of gentrification foundered on their inability to recognize this fact.

Indeed, what has changed since [Jane] Jacobs’s day—and the reason, as these books attest, that gentrification has become so intense an issue—is the speed of the transition of districts from quasi dereliction to artsy to urban shopping mall. This acceleration results from the ways consumption has become the dominant means of self-expression . . . and from—relatedly, ultimately—the acceleration of the global economy.

In several ways, Clybourne Park cleverly hints at this manifestation. Following a spiky uncomfortable dialogue in which race repeatedly surface, Lindsey turns to Lena and Kevin pointing out she resents the questioning of their ethics to which Lena responds, “It’s not your ethics I’m questioning, it’s your taste.”

Moreover, the use of the Korean War as a central plot device, the first US led war that featured an integrated military, announced America’s new foreign policy of internationalism and lacked a clear cut American victory, symbolizes more than at first seems apparent. The war ushered in numerous racial, demographic, and yes, militaristic changes in US culture. Norris embeds the war’s meaning into the play in a way that obscures this reality but upon further reflection becomes a glaring fact. After Korea, suburbanization exploded, cities declined, civil rights emerged, and America, arguably, peering back from the distance of 2011, began a slow descent from superpower to global power, all while US consumerism rampaged forward, damn the torpedoes.

In the early 1970s, sociologist Thomas Schelling put forth the now ubiquitous term “tipping point” to describe the kind of rapid neighborhood transition that unfolded in Clybourne Park. Schelling famously assigned whites “tolerance levels” for the numbers of new black residents in a neighborhood. Blacks too had their own set of expectations regarding white residents but that it allowed for far greater flexibility. However, while in no way diminishing his racial analysis, Schelling also noted that factors other than race played a role as well.

Neighborhoods will be differently defined by families with and without children, by people who work in them and people who commute, by transients, and longer term residents, and by people sensitive to particular ethnic groups and income or social classes. (176)

Ironically, Schelling argued that “well defined neighborhoods” or as Clybourne Park’s Russ may suggest “communities” illustrate faster tipping points as residents’ own definition of the community changes as result of new inhabitants while “ill defined” communities absorbed new arrivals better since their attachment to a neighborhood identity remained more diffuse. Of course, one might argue this contradicts Kruse’s earlier point about Atlanta, but it provides food for thought. Clybourne Park drops observers into central debates around gentrification encompassing race, class, and consumerism. How one views these developments hinges on these very factors, making Bruce Norris’ play a valuable reminder that gentrification, much like life itself, is pretty messy.

Ryan Reft

American Arab Kitsch: From Ahab to Abed and Back Again

When I was a kid, I thought Pinkard & Bowden were pretty funny. The comedy duo’s parodies of famous country songs were often promoted on TV for just $19.95 plus shipping and handling, and I got a kick out of them. “Blue hairs driving in my lane.” “Won’t you help me make it through the yard?” I never heard their song “Arab, Alabama” back then, and I wonder what I would have thought of it when I was 9 or 10. I might have thought it was funny just because they were referring to Middle Eastern stuff (the PLO!), and I was generally interested in anything that had to do with my Arab background. After six long years of grad school, though, I can’t not see some of the bizarre ethnocentrism underlying the song, which proudly declares, “There ain’t no PLO in Arab, Alabama!”

Not long ago, Tropics of Meta discussed the pop cultural portrayal of Asians and Asian-Americans, whose coming-out party in the US might well be considered Harold and Kumar. After years of being confined to subservient side roles (Sulu) or one-dimensional running gags (Apu), Asians could headline a major Hollywood movie. They could also be perfectly normal Americans, in a certain understanding of the term: pot-smoking college kids with a crippling lust for tiny cheeseburgers.

Arab and Muslim characters have enjoyed a similar kind of enhanced visibility in the early twenty-first century, albeit in a series of still-stereotypical roles. There was Whoopi Goldberg’s Iranian sidekick in her ill-fated 2003 sitcom, played by comedian Omid Djalili, who appeared as a similar character in Paul Reiser’s miserably failed NBC show: a paunchy businessman who always “knows a guy” who can get you what you need. In contrast to this stereotype—the stocky supporting character (mustache-optional) who provides comic relief—there was, of course, Sayid on Lost. The show could be accused of practicing mild Orientalism, given how Sayid was a soulful, mysterious lover with near-superhuman skills for fighting and fixing stuff, but it also deserves points for introducing American TV viewers to a diverse range of characters of different ethnicities, nationalities and languages.

Middle Eastern peoples have long occupied a liminal and confused place in American culture: the oil-gouging sheikh (think of Ned Beatty’s speech in Network: “The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back!”); the amusing shopkeeper or small businessman (a role shared with South Asians and, to a lesser extent, East Asians); the mortal enemy of Western civilization and cartoonish film villain (Osama/True Lies); as well as the technical Caucasian and honorary white person. As America shifts from a white-black racial binary to a more complex understanding of diversity, Arabs and Arab-Americans still find themselves “othered” more often than not. Yet a look at the recent past shows how American pop culture has constructed the Arab Other in much more awkward and problematic ways. Tony Shalhoub’s journey from vaguely ethnic foreigner/sidekick in Wings to essentially not-nonwhite Adrian Monk might symbolize the slipperiness of the Arabic place in pop culture; the actor has played Italian, Cuban, Arab and many other characters in film and television, serving as a sort of all-purpose off-white.

Why There's No Gorbachev in Moscow, Idaho

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Pinkard & Bowden’s 1980s anthem “Arab, Alabama” is both a celebration of American exceptionalism and a way of identifying that uniqueness with the pride of the white working class. Like so many country songs, it hangs on a jokey hook - there are lots of places in America that are named after rather different places, such as Palestine, Paris and Moscow. America is both unoriginal and thoroughly authentic, because New Madrid is full of proud, peaceable folk, poor in style but rich in pride. Pinkard & Bowden can’t resist a few throwaway jabs at hoity-toity Europeans, especially given the largely European origins of the settlers who named many of these towns: “In Paris, Tennessee they don’t eat escargot.” Most of the song, though, is dedicated to contrasting American wholesomeness with foreign dysfunction and violence. Gorbachev, Castro, and the PLO come in for ridicule. Notably, the singers suggest that we take Fidel to Kentucky, “put a coal shovel in his hand, marry him off to one of Loretta’s sisters, and we’ll never hear from him again.” To my ear, they seem to be saying that Loretta Lynn, the icon of coal country womanhood, would have no trouble muzzling the obstreperous dictator, the man the CIA could not shut up despite numerous ridiculous assassination attempts. Communist despotism is nothing next to the ferocity of a coal miner’s daughter.

 

It would be easy to say Pinkard & Bowden are racializing the foreign nemesis, and perhaps they are. But a few stray references complicate the picture. The dig at Gorbachev contrasts the Kremlin capital of godless Communism with a town in famously white and conservative Idaho. The Russians may be honorary nonwhites – more red, in a sense, than white despite their skin tone. They also throw in a line about Dublin, Georgia, noting that “Irish people don’t shoot each other” there. At first I thought this was a general reference to bar-brawling Irish drunkenness and criminality, but it actually fits well into the no-PLO theme. We don’t have such terrorist organizations in the USA, although we do have right-wing extremists who blow up government buildings and Irish-American politicians who like to contribute to the IRA while inveighing against Islamic terrorism. (See King, Rep. Peter [R-NY].) Overall, the message seems to be “We don’t have that here”—“that” being the problems of dictatorship, terrorism, and war that plague the rest of the world. The theme is an old one, stretching back to the Founders’ disdain for the corruption and poverty of Europe, as well as the isolationist impulse of later Americans who saw their nation as a happy island far from the endless wars overseas.

Nationalism and exceptionalism may be the core of Pinkard & Bowden’s message, but they still cannot escape race. They suggest we take the “sheetheads” up to Alaska and “make them be Eskimooooooesssss…” as if white Americans can swap one troublesome race out for an apparently less threatening one. The music video for the song shows a cartoonish Castro and Arab sheikh jamming on a Kalashnikov, while lots of modest white people grill out, wave flags, and generally act goofy. This is America: a big, funny, all-white cook-out where caricatures of the nation’s deranged enemies are the hired clowns. The specific thrust of the song is ridiculing the Other, but the general mood of the video is simply one of exultation in the virtues of old-fashioned, homespun American whiteness.

Chubby Checker and the Crimson Jihad

Comedian-musician Ray Stevens has dipped his toe more than once into the Sea of Galilee, so to speak. I remember hearing his song “Ahab the Arab” many times when I was a kid, as I had relatives who loved screwball songs like “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival.” “Ahab” seemed like a fairly innocuous ditty about “the swingin’ sheikh of the burnin’ sands”—lacking the somewhat nasty edge of Pinkard & Bowden’s song, if also missing the progressive self-awareness of 1953’s “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” Here is the rich Arab, “with rubies and emeralds just dripping off a him, and a ring on every finger.” But the lyrics also turn on a familiar tale of foreigners embracing American culture:

He brought that camel to a screeching halt
At the rear of Fatima's tent jumped off Clyde,
Snuck around the corner and into the tent he went
There he saw Fatima laying on a Zebra skin rug
Wearing rings on her fingers and bells on her toes
And a bone in her nose ho, ho.
There she was friends lying there in all her radiant beauty.
Eating on a raisin, grape, apricot, pomegranate,
bowl of chitterlings, two bananas, three Hershey bars,
sipping on an ice cold Coca Cola listening to her transistor,
watching the Grand Ole Opry on the tube
reading the Mad magazine while she sung,
"Does your chewing gum lose its flavor?"
and Ahab walked up to her and he said,
(imitates Arabic speech)
which is Arabic for, "Let's twist again like we did last summer, baby."
You know what I mean! Whew!

The “zebra skin rug” and “the bone in her nose” are a more than a little cringe-inducing, but overall the song is more ignorant than racist. It could be trumpeting the superior appeal of US consumerism, or it could be simply saying we’re all the same, even the sheikh of the burning sand: everyone loves Coca Cola, Chubby Checker, and Hershey bars. The song was first released in 1962, years before the oil embargo helped begin Arabs’ long career as go-to villains in pop culture.
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Of course, Ray Stevens has always gone with the times. His goofy song “The Streak” was one of the finest meditations on 70s exhibitionism; he touched on Middle Eastern kitsch again in his 1980 country hit “Shriner’s Convention,” which described the shenanigans of an “Illustrious Potentate” named Bubba at a Holiday Inn where a lot of redneck Shriners with Harley Davidsons and big-haired girlfriends come to meet. The video for the song features at least one African American character – not a common sight in country music videos or the traditionally white, middle class Shriner membership – who gets to join in the fun of wearing fez hats and driving tiny cars. The Shriners themselves were founded in the nineteenth century by a Mason who had attended a party thrown by an Arab diplomat and decided to start a men’s fraternity that aped Middle Eastern styles, traditions, and architecture. Playing Arab dress-up has a long history in the US, but the practice has clearly taken a more mean-spirited turn in recent years.

Indeed, the more recent work of Ray Stevens makes Shriner shenanigans look like good clean fun. Stevens may once have been a harmless spinner of novelty songs, yet his career in the early twenty first century speaks to an increasingly bitter tone in the way his mostly white, conservative audience imagines the ethnic Other. Ironically, the author of the syrupy Gospel ballad “Everything Is Beautiful” panders to racial resentment and lust for revenge nowadays, making his bread by catering to the Walker, Texas Ranger demographic with songs like “Obama Nation” and “Caribou Barbie.” His 2010 single “Come to the USA” offers an appalling portrayal of the persecution suffered by native English speakers at the hands of immigrants and big government. Such leanings were suggested by his 2002 “Osama Yo Mama,” a minor country hit that exploited the reaction to the September 11th terrorist attacks. Opportunistic and undoubtedly conservative, the song is more about revenge than race. “Osama, yo mama didn’t raise you right, she musta wrapped your turban too tight,” Stevens sings, as he dances around in a pink costume. A tiny cartoon Osama darts across the screen while, randomly enough, Stevens fires at him as an ersatz Rambo. We’ve come a long way from Ahab eating Oreos on the burning sands.

Muslims in a Liberal Mirror

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If YouTube videos by Ray Stevens were all there were to American pop culture, of course, we would be in serious trouble. Meanwhile, liberal Hollywood has tried to portray Arabs and Muslims in a favorable light, in an awkward quest to build intercultural bridges through the time-tested means of TV. The networks once sought to build sympathy for urban people of color by placing them under benevolent white tutelage (The White Shadow, Webster, Diff’rent Strokes), and the 2007 sitcom Aliens in America seems to fit into this history. The show, which only lasted a season on the CW, tells the story of a Wisconsin family that takes in a foreign exchange student from Pakistan named – wait for it – Raja Musharraf. For some reason, Raja is always wearing a shalwar kameez, presumably because that’s what all people from Pakistan wear. The family tries to adjust to this Muslim “alien” in their home, and everybody does their best to overcome the cultural misunderstandings that provide much of the grist for the plot. The show did not quite work; even though the Pakistani character was overdone, the dynamic between him and his hosts never created enough real dramatic frisson or humor. Tip-toeing around cultural sensitivities may be the problem – how do you make a Muslim-Christian conflict funny without offending someone? The show’s writers made Raja into a sweet, innocent soul who almost always tried to do the right thing, like a smarter version of Balki, the Perfect Stranger. If the producers wanted to cast a Muslim character in a favorable light, they likely went too far. The  problem with humanizing the inhuman is that you run the risk of coming up with something in between.

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Which brings us to Abed, the star of NBC’s well-loved but still-struggling postmodern sitcom Community. The show depicts its Palestinian character as a robotic sponge for pop culture, who quickly identifies the film and TV tropes that each episode parodies. It plays with the idea that Abed is “different” while he is “just like us” in his love for everything American. In one episode, the cranky boomer played by Chevy Chase is surprised to find out that Abed loves Christmas: “Don’t your people spend this season writing angry letters to TV Guide?” Yet the Muslim character still loves the holiday for its TV specials, colorful gifts, and general (secular) spirit of camaraderie. Community tries hard to situate Abed in the show without pandering to Muslim or Arab stereotypes or going the opposite direction by making him completely “normal” – say, a dumb jock who loves Ed Hardy, Katy Perry and disc golf. This is part of the reason why Abed is so appealing, and works as a sitcom character better than the pious Raja. He is different, and that difference may derive in part from the conditions of his origin as an immigrant – he seems to possess a detached, outside view of American pop culture, like Chance the Gardener in Being There – yet the writers have not constructed his difference in direct response to some set of expectations about race or religion.

Arab as they wanna be

I would count that as progress – getting out of the straightjacket of the Crimson Jihad and writing a unique character on his own terms. What does not work so well is casting. Danny Pudi plays Abed, yet he is half-Indian and half-Polish. Sayid, the Iraqi character from Lost, was played by the Indian-British actor Naveen Andrews. Even the evil terrorist Salim Abu Aziz in True Lies was played by a Pakistani-British actor. Tony Shalhoub, who is Lebanese, is one of the only Arab actors in Hollywood and he gets cast as almost everything but Arab. Shalhoub has, of course, made a conscious effort not to play stereotypical terrorist characters and has worked to promote different kinds of roles for Arab actors. Yet Arab and Muslim identities continue to be fraught with tension in the US; even as shows like Lost, Aliens in America, and Community attempt to present characters who are more varied and three-dimensional, we still see political abortions like the preposterous election year campaign against the “Ground Zero Mosque.” Such events not only gin up fear and hostility toward Muslims. They cast doubt on whether certain groups will ever be fully admitted into the privileges and the imagination of American citizenship.

Also known as Masih ad-Dajjal

This blog does not accept the pessimistic premise that Arabs and Muslims, from the Barbary Pirates down to Pamela Geller, are doomed to be a permanent out-group in America, forever barred from possessing full citizenship. (For a compelling overview of the argument, see this piece by Steven Salaita.) Dearborn is as much America as Arab, Alabama. So are Edison, New Jersey and what we like to call “Little Edison” in Decatur, Georgia. People on the Right may bloviate about our Judeo-Christian heritage, as if Islam were not an inheritor of the exact same tradition; a novelty country singer may whip out the word “sheethead” in a general screed against the outside world; and no doubt, the receptiveness of country music and talk radio listeners to racist name-calling is troubling; but such mischief is not equal to the reality of American culture, and certainly not its potential. Why Americans have fixated on the Arab Other from the Shriners down to Barack Obama (our “Arab American” president, according to some theorists) is a question for another day. Perhaps their indeterminate place in the US spectrum of race makes people from the Middle East an ideal screen on which Americans can project our jumbled hopes, desires, anxieties, and fears about the politics of identity. If that’s the case, Abed may represent a turning point: a mirror, not a screen, that reflects us back at ourselves.

Alex Sayf Cummings