Verso kindly sent me Professor Reed's latest book, which is a very good read and illuminating. (He discusses some of its themes in this podcast with his son, an historian.) Reed, born in 1947, grew up in New Orleans during the final years of the Jim Crow era. One of his aims is to record for posterity the lived experience of that time for one black person, but another is to demonstrate both the class politics of Jim Crow and how class differences among African-Americans affected their experience of the racism of the era. Here's how Reed sums it up near the end of the book (these excerpts are from pp. 139-140):
The Jim Crow racial order has been vanquished. That is clearest at the level that defines daily life and aspirations. Removal of the strictures of official apartheid has radically altered opportunity structures and patterns of work, quality of life, and social relations in small and large ways that aren't readily apparent to those who didn't know the old order. Working together as equals encourages socializing together, which is also enabled by elimination of the petty apartheid of Jim Crow in public accomodations. Occasionally, when I notice an interracial group of co-workers or friends out in a restaurant, bar, or the like, I recall how utterly impossible that would have been as late as 1960....
But passage of the old order's segregationist trappings throws into relief the deeper reality that what appeared and was experienced as racial hierarchy was also class hierarchy. Now blacks occupy positions in the socioeconomic order previously available only to whites, and whites occupy those previously identified with blacks. And the dynamics of superordination and subordination, patterns of appropriation and distribution, and dominant understandings of which material interests should drive policy remain much as they were.
This underscores the point that the core of the Jim Crow order was a class system rooted in employment and production relations that were imposed, stabilized, regulated, and naturalized through a regime of white supremacist law, practice, custom, rhetoric, and ideology. Defeating the white supremacist regime was a tremendous victory for social justice and egalitarian interests. At the same time, that victory left the undergirding class system untouched and in practical terms affirmed it....
The book is also full of memorable anecdotes and observations. Here's one:
The Gaglianos [owner of a store in New Orleans] were generally regarded as decent and fair, though most black patrons maintained the cautious skepticism that would mediate any commercial relationship in an environment in which legal recourse couldn't be assumed as a deterrent. "Mr. Tony"--the appellation was mutual; my grandparents were Mr. and Mrs. Mac to them--and his wife seemed almost always to chat freely and unguardedly with adult patrons, white and black, sharing neighborhood gossip, making solicitous inquiries about health and family plans and the like, and comparing notes on their own daily and family concerns....
As it happened, the Gaglianos' son, Tony Jr.--about five or six years my elder, as I recall--was a model plane buff. Probably as the result of a casual conversation with some adult in my family, he came over to help me prepare [my model] plane for flight. We spetn much of an afternooon in my backyard with him instructing me and helping me overcome my anxiety. It was an entirely unstrained interaction. He was empathetic and reassuring and encouraging in a manner that I expect a supportive black teenager would have been....
Black New Orleanians' views of Jews and Italians under Jim Crow were complicated. Both populations were certainly considered white in all meaningful senses of that classification; yet black people commonly characterized them as at the same time lying somewhere between blacks and whites, typically with the implication that they were, or should be, more sympathetic (or at least less bigoted) because other whites discriminated against them as well. (pp 23-25)
And another:
[T]he changing conditions generating and attendant to the defeat of the Jim Crow order provided incentives for changed behavior. (Illustratively, and comically, the day after Lyndon Johnson signed thee 1964 Civil Rights Act, the white barber in tiny Eudora walked down the street to my Great-Uncle Clarence's funeral home to annuonce "Mr. Bethune, now that the law has changed, I'd certainly appreciate your business.").....[A]nalyses of the past (or present for that matter) that hinge on uncovering deep commitments to racism or white supremacy don't help us understand anything. (p. 85)
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