The Warmth of Other Suns

 

Book type: U.S. History

Summary: In her book, Isabel Wilkerson follows three members of the Great Migration (the exodus of six million black Americans between the years of 1915 and 1970 from the bitter world of the Jim Crow South to the North and West of the country): Dr. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, and George Swanson Starling. Robert Foster left small-town Monroe, Louisiana for the glitz and glam of Los Angeles, Ida Mae left rural Mississippi with her husband and young children in the hopes of escaping sharecropping for a better life in Chicago, and George Starling left backwoods Florida with its endless citrus groves for a life in Harlem, although he spent little time there as he became a railway porter who traveled most of the time. These three individuals’ stories, like so many others, tell of the difficulty in leaving the only life they may have ever known, leaving much of their family, and making a long and difficult journey to places they’d mostly only heard of before. Her narrative of America’s Great Migration has a lot to offer in the way of lessons, both about [black] American history and about life for all people, regardless of their ethnicity. Here are just a few lessons from The Warmth of Other Suns.

 

Lessons:

1. Don’t be too proud. It’s one thing to be proud of one’s accomplishments, one’s children, one’s community; that pride is a propelling force in people’s lives which causes joy and happiness and can help people to become their best selves. It’s quite another to be proud of something that intentionally or unintentionally degrades other people. When we’re too proud of being “real” Americans, Chicagoans, New Yorkers, and so forth, we separate ourselves from other groups and fail to see them and their struggles for what they are. When we become too proud we gloss over the shortcomings in our past and attempt to create a world just for us so that we’ll be the most comfortable, unconcerned with the troubles of those around us. What we should do is to take a lesson from Ida Mae Brandon Gladney: “She had a way of looking past the outer layer of people and seemed to regard everyone she met with a kind of searching intensity, as if this were the first person she had ever seen” (21). Imagine how we would all be if we approached each new person from a perspective of genuine interest in who they are or what their story is, versus thinking that we can figure out who they are or what motivates them just based on how they dress, what type of accent they have, or the color of their skin. Humility helps with a lot of things and so does genuine interest in people as just that, people, not representatives of anything but themselves in that moment.
2. Caste systems keep everyone in prison (33). Jim Crow laws and de facto segregation whether in the South or the North after the Civil War hurt all Americans, black, white, or otherwise. Social rules that seek to keep certain groups at bay not only hurt the people who are ostracized, they hurt those within the main group as well by sheltering them from the realities of other people’s lives. One prime example that Wilkerson gives in The Warmth of Other Suns is about how people in white neighborhoods would fear that if black people moved in their property values would drop, and this fear caused them to invest less in their own community, which thereby lowered property values. So by the time all the white people left because their neighborhood was no longer worth as much as it had been, it was actually their own doing and not the result of the black families who moved in (376-377). When we separate ourselves from entire groups of people we are unable–and generally unwilling–to accept that they may not be the awful things that we think they are. Bars keep people on both sides in prison, whether they realize it or not, as we’ll see in lesson #4.
3. Leaving the South didn’t always mean leaving Jim Crow behind. There are several stories in Wilkerson’s book about people leaving the South only to find the North or West could be even more confusing than the Jim Crow laws they were used to. One story is of George Starling and a friend having a drink at a bar in Manhattan (obviously the fact that they could do this in the first place was a primary difference between North and South). When they finally got up to leave the bar–full of white patrons except for themselves–the bartender made it a point to break the glasses they’d used, rather than wash them and use them for the next customer. And for Dr. Robert Foster, he found that even after he’d made it past the dividing line of El Paso, Texas on his drive to Los Angeles in 1953, still no motels along his route through Arizona would rent him a room for the night, despite brightly lit vacancy signs out front along the road. Each time he inquired they would say that they’d just booked the last room. Yet they would never turn the sign off outside. In the South the people who were now leaving had known what to expect at a restaurant, gas station, or motel. On the borders of the North and West, they had no idea: “The border sentiments spilled over into a general protocol that colored people had to live by. It determined whether or how easily they might find a room or food. They could look silly asking for a colored restroom in a border town that felt more northern than southern and presumptuous in a town that felt the opposite (200). And in some places like California, the rules were practically unknowable. “‘In certain plants, Mexicans and whites worked together,’ the Works Progress Administration reported. ‘ In some others, white workers accepted Negroes and objected to Mexicans. In others, white workers accepted Mexicans and objected to Japanese. White women worked with Mexican and Italian women, but refused to work with Negroes….In the General Hospital, Negro nurses attended white patients, but were segregated from white nurses in dining halls: in a manufacturing plant white workers refused to work with Negroes, but worked under a Negro foreman'” (233-234). Being free still wasn’t easy.
4. The past isn’t really past. The choices that every generation makes have reverberating effects down through history. Our problems today are directly linked to our past failures and our unwillingness to accept responsibility for them. As Wilkerson notes,
   

   People like Ida Mae had few options, and the landlords knew it. New arrivals often paid twice the rent charged the whites they had just replaced for worn-out and ill-kept housing. “The rents in the South Side Negro district [of Chicago] were conspicuously the highest of all districts visited,” [University of Chicago researcher] Abbott wrote. Dwellings that went for eight to twenty dollars a month to white families were bringing twelve to forty-five dollars a month from black families, those earning the least income and thus least able to afford a flat at any rent, in the early stages of the Migration. Thus began a pattern of overcharging and underinvestment in black neighborhoods that would lay the foundation for decades of economic disparities in the urban North. […] The story played out in virtually every northern city–migrants sealed off in overcrowded colonies that would become the foundation for ghettos that would persist into the next century (270).

   Additionally, if your ancestors were white and had wealth or assets, these could be passed down and multiplied over generations. If your great-grandparents and grandparents were black southern sharecroppers in the 1940s and ’50s and each year had to content themselves to “break even” with, or worse, be indebted to the white property owner for whom they worked, they could never amass any wealth or assets to pass down to their heirs (85). But regardless of your race, if your ancestors were advantaged or disadvantaged by the economic or social system they lived in, your wealth today may be directly linked to theirs fifty or a hundred years ago. And don’t even get me started on debt peonage. Lastly, the way northern communities are structured now, and the interactions people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds have on a day-to-day basis, is directly related to the choices made primarily by white people during the Great Migration. Sociologist Gunnar Myrdal wrote that in the North, “‘[A]lmost everybody is against discrimination in general, but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs’–that is, by not allowing blacks into unions or clubhouses, certain jobs, and white neighborhoods, indeed, avoiding social interaction overall. ‘It is the culmination of all these personal discriminations,’ he continued, ‘which creates the color bar in the North, and, for the Negro causes unusually severe unemployment, crowded housing conditions, crime and vice. About this social process, the ordinary white Northerner keeps sublimely ignorant and unconcerned'” (387). These cold and shortsighted actions half a century ago still mean that today blacks and whites in the North are just as segregated, if not more so, than they were in the South in 1910: “By the end of the twentieth century, blacks would make up more than eighty percent of the population of Detroit. Just across the Ford Expressway, the black population of the suburb of Dearborn, the 2000 census found, was one percent” (378). When we refuse to live with people and see them for who they are, we separate ourselves to both our detriment, sometimes resulting in the worst things imaginable, like the deaths of our community’s youth, as was the case with nineteen-year-old Renisha McBride who was shot in the face on the porch of a Dearborn Heights man’s home just outside of Detroit last year (see the Detroit Free Press’ coverage here).

5. Do not do spite. Both Robert Foster and George Starling believed in this lesson. In Foster’s opinion, “…Spite never settled anything. It only gave your detractors more ammunition and, as it had back when the colored people in Monroe had urinated in the colored section of the Paramount Theater, only ended up hurting the people themselves” (409). For Starling, the effect of spite was a lifelong one. He had married his wife Inez to spite his father when his father told him he wouldn’t pay for his college anymore. Their marriage was an unhappy one, ill-prepared as they were to be together for the rest of their lives. He always regretted it: “He took every chance he got to warn young people not to make his mistakes, not knowing if they heard him but feeling he had to get it out. ‘That’s why I preach today, do not do spite,’ he said. ‘Spite does not pay. It goes around and misses the object that you aim and comes back and zaps you. And you’re the one who pays for it'” (421).

 

A final review/recommendation:

The Warmth of Other Suns is a compelling history of the black people who left the South over several decades in the hopes of finding greater freedom and opportunity elsewhere in the country. Wilkerson notes that these people didn’t see themselves as being part of a movement the way civil rights protestors saw themselves; they just knew they needed to get out. Regardless of their reasons for leaving, it took great courage and determination to make new lives for themselves in places like New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. The newly-arrived immigrants faced high housing costs, shrinking job markets, and environments they could never have imagined before arriving. And they survived. I highly recommend Wilkerson’s book to anyone who doesn’t know the reality of who really migrated to the North and West, why they did it, and what they faced in doing so. For anyone who thinks our current social and economic problems in major cities like Detroit, Cincinnati, and St. Louis are simply because of the failings of the southern people who came in droves during the Migration, read this book and learn how our problems’ origins aren’t so simple after all.

Wilkerson’s book is interesting, keeps a good pace, and has real-life characters that are endearing and heartbreaking at the same time. Although the book skips around a lot, once you know the three main characters well enough, it’s easy to follow. The only thing that I found slightly irritating in the book is that Wilkerson often repeats small stories as though you haven’t already read them thirty pages before. I don’t know if this was intentional because she expected readers would forget the story quickly, or if she wrote the sections out of order and didn’t realize she’d already covered something (and then her editor missed these as well), but having the same story explained more than once seemed like a waste of space in the book. Luckily this wasn’t an overwhelming issue and I thoroughly enjoyed the book, as you may too if you’re interested in learning about American history or black history–whether it’s Black History Month anymore or not.

 

Photo credit: http://robinsafblibraryblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/the-great-migration.jpg?w=610

Whistling Vivaldi

Book type: Sociology / Social Psychology

Summary: Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do is an explanation of social-psychological research into the field of “identity contingencies” and “stereotype threat.” Identity contingencies are characteristics of one’s identity that can result in reward or punishment depending upon the circumstance (68). These can be any characteristic about an individual: race, sexual orientation, gender, religion, mental health status, and so on. In some situations we may be rewarded for a characteristic and yet in others be punished for the same trait, and the knowledge we have about particular traits of ours that may be stereotyped can cause us to experience what Steele calls stereotype threat. In study after study mentioned in the book, one group would be subconsciously made aware of the negative stereotype about them before taking some sort of test and another, comparable group would be told that the test was not a measure of whatever the negative stereotype was about them. The results were consistent. They found that for women being told the upcoming math test was about math intelligence, for black students being told their verbal exam was a reflection of general intelligence, and so on and so on, those groups performed below their skill level, whereas the groups who were told the math test and verbal exams were not a reflection of intelligence, but simply a puzzle (or something similar) performed equally as well as their white male counterparts who felt no such threat. The primary finding of Whistling Vivaldi is that

Stereotype and identity threats–these contingencies of identity–increase vigilance toward possible threat and bad consequences in the social environment, which diverts attention and mental capacity away from the task at hand, which worsens performance and general functioning, all of which further exacerbates anxiety, which further intensifies the vigilance for threat and the diversion of attention. A full-scale vicious cycle ensues, with great cost to performance and general functioning (125-126).

And the worst part is that when this happens to you, you likely won’t even realize it’s going on. But it’s happening nonetheless, confirmed by studies of heart rate, blood pressure, and fMRI scans. There is hope, however, as Steele confirms in each example. We may not always be able to adjust these realities for ourselves at the time, but we may be able to help others, or at the very least perhaps we’ll be able to cut ourselves some slack here and there.

On a final note, the title Whistling Vivaldi comes from a story about a black male college student who frequently walked through Hyde Park in Chicago on his way to and from class and noticed that white people would cross the street when they saw him coming, or avert their eyes from him, ostensibly out of fear because of these features of his identity. Then one day while he walked he whistled classical music–Vivaldi, Bach, and others–and found that the white people who probably would’ve crossed the street otherwise, now smiled at him and said hello. He had disarmed a stereotype about young black men in that neighborhood being dangerous by doing something unexpected, showing knowledge of classical music. This example in the book is not meant to say that if people are stereotyping you, you should change yourself in some way, but it does illustrate that identity contingencies can be flexible, which is some good news.

Lessons:

1. Everyone is stereotyped, and pretty much all the time. “There exists no group on earth that is not negatively stereotyped in some way–the old, the young, northerners, southerners, WASPs, computer whiz kids, Californians, and so forth. And when people with these identities are doing something, or are in a situation for which a negative stereotype about their group is relevant, they can feel stereotype threat; they can feel under pressure not to confirm the stereotype for fear that they will be judged or treated in terms of it. Identity threats like this–contingencies of identity–are part of everyone’s life” (88). This means that if you’re a woman doing a math test, a black man doing an IQ test, a white man running a 100-meter dash, and so on, you’re experiencing stereotype threat. Stereotype threat is not restricted by gender or minority status, it applies to everyone, albeit in different contexts. This unifying factor of stereotypes should serve to make us more aware of the fact that we should be more understanding of all groups and not assume that certain groups are never stereotyped; they may just not be negatively stereotyped in the same ways we are, or perhaps not as often as we are, but they are stereotyped nonetheless.
2. We as humans really like separating ourselves from one another. In the book, Steele provides an example of a study with young boys from Oxford in England. A bunch of these young chaps were put in a classroom and told to estimate the number of dots pictured on the board. They were then randomly told whether they were an “over estimator” or an “under estimator” of how many dots there were. They found that after this minor–and arbitrary–distinction was made, the boys favored other boys who were over or under estimators like they were, and punished boys from the other group in subsequent activities within the study. As Steele notes, “How easy it is to ignite human bias. Nothing special about either the perpetrator or the victim is required. Ordinary human functioning–maintaining one’s self-esteem–is enough. This was a revelation about the human psyche” (78-79). Think back to when you were in school. Were you ever put in groups for a classroom game and found yourself calling other kids cheaters and feeling like the people on your team were so much better than those on the other team (with whom you’d been gleefully passing notes not ten minutes before)? I have, especially in language classes where we played lots of games. My friends turned into enemies as soon as we were put on separate teams. I was like Brick from Anchorman, except my IQ isn’t comparable to a toaster.
   
3. Americans are serious segregators. This doesn’t always mean we’re segregators in a racial sense (although census data bears this out as well), but it does mean that we like to be around people like ourselves. One example given in the book comes from another source by David Brooks called On Paradise Drive in which Brooks describes how we increasingly live in “cultural zones” that contain people who are like us. Further, Steele paraphrases that because Americans move a lot (more than people in other societies), this “gives us lots of chances to choose where we live, which gives us lots of chances to seek our own cultural zone, which, over time, makes these zones even more like themselves, and ever more isolated from each other. In these ways, we’re a nation of segregators” (194). Even when we don’t do this along racial lines, we do it along political lines among other things and end up living in places where we aren’t confronted with people who are different from us.
4. Teach your kids to trust. Steele makes note that there is an obvious concern one can raise after hearing the results of these various studies, namely, what do we tell our kids? Should we tell our kids about the discrimination they may face due to their identity so they can look out for it and try to ward off its effects? Or should we keep them in the dark and possibly set them up for a big letdown if they’re discriminated against? Well, the author’s argument is that because their research has shown that people aware of the potential stereotype threat regarding their group tend to underperform in those situations where their identity is a factor (women and math tests, for example), then, “If one has to err, in light of our research over the years, I would thus err in the direction of urging greater trust, rather than greater vigilance” (164). Better to be unaware that people might judge you, and thus feel free to perform as best as you can, than to believe someone will likely judge you and thus get nervous and mess up.
5. We can shape other people’s expectations and performance, for good or ill. There are numerous examples in Whistling Vivaldi where a group is exposed to a stereotype before completing the test and then perform poorly. In one study, two groups of women were shown six commercials as part of a “media study” and then taken across the hall to help with a seemingly unrelated study where they were allowed to choose math or word problems to solve. For group 1, two of the commercials contained female gender stereotypes like a “coed extolling the party life at her university” whereas group 2 viewed all gender-neutral commercials. “The results were clear. The women who had seen the stereotypical images of women in the earlier commercials chose fewer math problems to work on, performed worse on the ones they did choose, and reported being less interested in math-related college majors and careers than women who had not seen these commercials” (144). And if you think that’s bad, try this one: a similar study was done with two groups of girls, age five to seven, in which group 1 colored in a picture of a girl holding a doll before they took their math test, whereas group 2 colored in a picture of a landscape or kids eating rice with chopsticks. Guess which group didn’t do that well on the math test. The doll group. This means that already by the age of five, six, and seven, girls, when reminded of the fact that they’re girls before they take a math test, feel like they’re not expected to do that well, and then end up underperforming because they can’t focus all their energy just on answering the questions.
   

   “You think my doll is sick? I’m the one who’s sick! I’m damn good at math and if it weren’t for all you bastards making me think I can’t be that good, I’d have aced that test last week!”

6. Sometimes when white people avoid black people it’s because they’re afraid of being seen as racist, not because they are racist. Now, I know this doesn’t seem like it makes any sense, but according to Steele this is exactly what happened in a study he and his colleagues conducted. They told white male Stanford students they’d be talking to some peers about either a) love and relationships, or b) racial profiling and gave them pictures of the students they’d be chatting with (two black students) and before the researcher left the room to go get the other two participants, the white student was asked to gather the chairs together for the conversation. They found that the white male students who were going to be talking about love and relationships positioned the chairs fairly close to one another, but when the white male students expected to discuss racial profiling with two black participants, they gave much more distance between the chairs. And this happened regardless of their level of prejudice, which the researchers tested before conducting the study (see my previous entry on Blink regarding the Harvard IAT, which was used for this study). “It wasn’t prejudice that caused them to sit farther from their black partners conversation. It was fear of being seen as racist–pure and simple. It was stereotype threat, a contingency of their white identities in that situation” (205). If however, the researcher made a short remark before leaving the room that the conversation was to be a “learning experience for all parties,” the white male students no longer positioned the chairs at a distance from one another (209). Just that simple assurance from the researcher was enough to remove the stereotype threat the white males felt in the study and thus open up a more fluid dialogue, even about a difficult topic.

A final review/recommendation:

This is an excellent book if you’re like I am and love reading about one social psych study after another. It reads pretty quickly, but the studies are definitely repetitive, as they’re formulated to really drive the point home that these findings have been replicated 158,293,648 times, so if you don’t like repetition, you might just read the first couple chapters and then the last few, though you’ll be missing out on a lot of good data. I highly recommend this to anyone who is considering becoming an educator (or who already is), and to anyone who’s interested in real-life applications of stereotypes and how they can affect us. Steele does a great job at making his points and at leaving the reader with hope that we can reduce the effects of stereotype threat, and the lesson that we can start by recognizing that not all of our actions or thoughts are completely known or understood by us at any given moment, so we should judge ourselves and other people less harshly than we probably do.

 

Photo/video credits:
Book cover: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41GM%2BSknvjL.jpg
Anchorman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHpMJJP7v_s
Girls & Dolls: https://ccriderwrites.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/a053c-nurse2520taking2520temperature2520of2520girl2527s2520doll.jpg