Book Review: Searching for Whitopia by Rich Benjamin

I stumbled across Searching for Whitopia while browsing the 300s section of the library a few weeks ago (yes, I seriously do this, and will continue to until the library's database starts using Amazon.com's recommendation algorithm). I thought it would be a really interesting companion to Loewen's Sundown Towns, which I read a few months ago and reviewed here. While Loewen focused on the history and development of sundown towns and their evolution into monoethnic enclaves, Benjamin decided to live in these enclaves (along with visiting several others) and write about his experiences and treatments. Benjamin, you see, is black, and a big part of his project involved gauging the reactions of the denizens of these towns to his presence in their lives.

While living in Whitopias, Benjamin experiences a number of rituals associated with all-white, small town living, including numerous games of golf along with the attendance of occasional xenophobic city council meetings (in which locals decry the presence of Mexicans anywhere north of the border) and a memorable visit to the local white supremacist compound (seriously). Interspersing his narrative of his experiences in Whitopias with research he's conducted on them, Benjamin deftly explores the dimensions of modern racism intrinsic to housing and educational segregation. Ultimately, he makes a compelling argument that all-white towns and exurbs are not a good idea, agreeing with Loewen on a number of points (which I discussed in the other review). Unlike Loewen, though, who tends to be a tad over simplistic, Benjamin successfully captures the nuances of modern race relations-- apparently, white supremacists are nice. Who knew?

An excellent, thought-provoking read. 5 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Sundown Towns by James Loewen

I've been meaning to read Sundown Towns for a while now. It's come highly recommended by a number of people whose opinions on race relations and sociology I greatly value. Believe it or not, I had no idea what a sundown town was until about a year and a half ago, when my boyfriend at the time mentioned that the town he was working in (somewhere in Oregon) used to have a sign at the outskirts telling black people to not let the sun set on them there. I was dumbfounded. Having lived in a number of cities, I knew all about housing segregation, but I had no idea that there were (and are!) hundreds, if not thousands, of cities which refuse to allow black people to even live there-- and drive them out with violence or threats of it if they try. Ironically, that's probably because I'm from the South. With the exception of parts of Appalachia, sundown towns are rare here. They're most common in the Midwest (that's where the bulk of the lingering ones are), though they originally existed across the West and Northeast as well (most of these have since been integrated). Given that many people erroneously believe that all racism in the US is located in the South, the reality of sundown towns and their effects on society had never been acknowledges, much less studied, until James Loewen decided to take a crack at it. 

Sundown Towns is, in a lot of ways, the only book of its kind. While other works have mentioned their existence (often falsely situating them in the South), only Loewen has compiled an extensive list of towns, documenting their histories and cultures so as to explain why they went sundown in the first place and explore whether or not they continue to be to this day. It was a very challenging endeavor; as we all know, nobody wants to 'fess up to being a racist, especially not to a pencil-necked academic outsider. Loewen had to rely on a mix of oral histories (from those willing to talk to him), census figures, old newspaper articles about racial violence in small towns (the ones he could find that hadn't been expunged by historians attempting to whitewash their towns' history), and, of course, digging trough town histories themselves, looking for inconsistencies in the story. He was able to confirm the existence of over a thousand towns, though he estimates that there were anywhere from three to fifteen thousand during their heyday. 

Beyond identifying sundown towns and describing their history and ongoing existence, Loewen does an excellent job in delineating precisely why sundown towns, and housing segregation as a whole, is bad for society. All-white suburbs, the descendants of sundown towns, Loewen argues, both provide shelters and breeding grounds for racists. Racists move into an area, ensure that other, undesirable races stay out, and then start to influence the community as a whole, even members who may not have previously held negative attitudes towards other races, especially children and young adults. By grounding exclusion in the language of money and social class, those who inhabit the suburbs minimize the true nature of racism in housing segregation, effectively blaming the victims. 

Meanwhile, suburbs are often leeches on the cities they surround: they don't pay taxes to contribute to the city, yet their inhabitants use the infrastructure of the city (roads, bridges, sidewalks, buildings), the city's cultural attractions, and they also unload their "undesirables" into the city's public health system by refusing to allow homeless shelters, low-income housing, and any kind of medical treatment facility for the poor to be built in their environs. Since they're not paying for much by way of infrastructure or public services, they can funnel their money into their school systems, a luxury that cities simply don't have. I'll spare you my feelings on the way that American school systems are organized, but suffice it to say: the way public school systems are organized and funded reinforces unequal socioeconomic statuses, and since black children are more likely to be in poorly-funded schools, they're less likely to succeed later. 

Sundown Towns isn't all doom and gloom, though. Loewen provides a series of potential solutions to desegregate holdout sundown towns as well as affluent, all-white suburbs and to ameliorate the problems they've caused. In the years since 2001, when Sundown Towns was published, some things have gotten better. Others, clearly, have not, but I remain optimistic.

Illuminating. 5 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington

I decided to read Medical Apartheid after finishing The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks last year. I'd seen several reviews of the latter that recommended Medical Apartheid to those who were interested in learning about the entire history of unethical medical treatments imposed on ethnic minorities (specifically, Black people, though individuals of Hispanic descent are also discussed) in the United States. In the interest of expanding my knowledge on this subject past Henrietta Lacks and the Tuskegee experiments, I decided to give Medical Apartheid a shot.

I wound up enjoying it quite a bit, but it was very different from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Since Washington's scope is far broader than Rebecca Skloot's, the book is organized very differently. The tone is also quite a bit more serious and technical, and the work revolves around a set thesis rather than relating the narrative of the (immortal) life of an individual person. Washington's thesis is that one of the reasons that Black people have such poor health outcomes relative to those of white people is that their long history of being exploited by white doctors and researchers has led to a state of culturally ingrained iatrophobia, or fear of doctors and medicine. Having read a number of books tangential to the subject (mainly involving the tense relations between white women and women of color over the reproductive rights movement), I was familiar with the concept but largely ignorant of the history behind it. In this way, I found Medical Apartheid to be quite enlightening.

Washington does a wonderful job distilling three centuries of often convoluted histories into a cohesive narrative. The first part of the book, which moves mostly in chronological order, details the experiences of Black individuals from colonization to emancipation, delineating the ways in which the institution of slavery procured numerous bodies for medical practitioners to experiment on as well as detailing the appalling ways in which slaves were treated by doctors (many of them so dreaded the treatments they were forced to endure that they would work even when deathly ill). Post-emancipation, Washington switches organizational gears and moves towards a topical treatment of specific incidents (or clusters of incidents) which have taken place since the end of the Civil War. Washington hits the commonly-known issues surrounding the Tuskegee experiments and what happened to Henrietta Lacks, but she also probes deeper into a number of other, lesser-known practices such as:

• Medical schools and hospitals stealing bodies from black graves to be used as cadavers, a watered-down version of which persists today).
• Black people, but especially Black children, being disproportionately represented in the potentially dangerous phases of clinical trials.
• Black prisoners being coerced into participating in clinical trials.
• "Mississippi Appendectomies," or hysterectomies performed without the knowledge or consent of the woman, and the racially fraught nature of birth control campaigns.

All in all, very enlightening. 4 out of 5 stars.

New Books!

I've received a few Barnes and Noble gift cards this year, and purchased a few new ebooks:

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington

I generally to buy non-fiction and check fiction out of the library because I tend to use my non-fiction books as references, but I usually only read novels once. There are some that I read over and over, but they tend to be the exception rather than the rule.

One exciting thing about next year's Victorian Literature challenge: all of the works are in the public domain and I won't have to pay for any of them!