Email to My Daughter

Trying to keep regularly keeping up this blog. I’m multi-tasking here in pasting an email I just sent to my daughter in Dallas that contains a review of sorts of a book I just read on racism in Dallas. She is home today with my 1 y.o. granddaughter, as Dallas has pretty much shut down due to the cold, icy weather they are experiencing.

Hey!

I finished reading The Accommodation last weekend. Took me forever to sit down and finish reading the last few chapters. I liked the book and I enjoyed reading it. Figured I'd share some thoughts on it.

I’m not surprised that it took 40 years for the city to embrace this book and make it a “Big D Reads” book. It would have been unthinkable to have this be a communal city read when the book came out, but what is both remarkable and depressing about it is how well it holds up, how much of the underlying race dynamics still resonate so that, although this book is now a piece of history, I imagine it is still a difficult book for Dallas to come to terms with. But I’m sure that the book is doubtlessly leading to some conversations (and more) that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.

The book came out in the mid-80s, and we lived in Arlington in the early and mid-90s. I always gravitated much more to Fort Worth while your mother leaned more to Dallas, and I’ve never liked Dallas and certainly never felt a part of it. Even with that, I’m impressed by how attuned Jim Schutze was to race and marvel at how relatively oblivious I was to these kind of dynamics back then. I had some stirrings of an awakening from my mentor in the Masters program I did at UT Arlington, Paul Geisel, who was very uninhibited about bringing up the salience of race to situations where it wasn’t apparent, and to pointing how easy it was to be oblivious to it when you are white. Even with that, it took living in Philadelphia for a few years to get to where I got much more of an awareness for how race is part of the atmosphere, mostly invisible but very present. Much of it is likely still invisible to me.

Every US city has got an Accommodation-like book in it, one that shows how racial dynamics blend in with the character of a city to create unique circumstances and narrative around a depressingly common set of outcomes. To pull off such a book, you need to both deal with race frankly and insightfully, and you need to understand (and still love) your city. Schutze pulls this off. I poked around online to see if there are any books that may meet this criteria in Philadelphia. The news site “Billy Penn” has an article “The Philly Black History Syllabus,” but most of the books are on specific aspects of race in Philly, not more generally on the symbiosis of race and city identity specific to Philly.

Two promising titles in that article are Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love, by James Wolfinger, and Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia by Matthew J. Countryman. In looking at these titles, I also see a third criterion for the book that I’m looking for, it can’t be pointy-headed – it needs to engage and it needs to make people squirm.

I just received a book I ordered that I hope meets my criteria, but from a different angle. I’ve been listening to the music of Slim Harpo, a blues guy whom the Rolling Stones (among others) covered and whose sound was pretty much appropriated wholesale by the Fabulous Thunderbirds. I know both of those groups well, and wonder why it's taken me so long to get to Harpo. The book in question is a biography of him that is set in Baton Rouge, where Harpo lived and made his music. If the biography is done right I’ll learn as much about Baton Rouge as I will about Harpo.

I’ll let you know. It’s been fun to write this, thanks for the Christmas gift. I could write a lot more but need to start my day.

Love,

Dad