Looking Back

One very important thing which I will take away from this class is a sense of how insidious and yet unseen a white supremacist power structure can be. Throughout the course, I was constantly left gaping as my naivety regarding race relations was flattened by moment after historical moment where the most seemingly innocuous things were used to reaffirm white dominance in the hierarchy of race. The disappearance of street cars, viewed as dirty because of their potential as a public space, where all races could come together; the construction of freeways being used as an excuse to break up and destroy communities of color; the redlining practices of the FHA, enforcing segregation by denying people of color the ability to flee the emaciated city for the suburbs; more recently, the anti-gang ordinances used against minority youth and the brutality of the LAPD leveled against them; the over-incarceration of these same young men and women, aided by the Three Strikes rule—all of these things would have once seemed so innocent and unintentional to me. This course has taught me to look for intention—not to be overly suspicious, but to learn to connect the dots between a policy and the harm that it can do.

This has also affected my understanding of history as a process. While I certainly understood before taking this class that history builds on itself with each moment continuing into the next, I think before now I always read it through the lens of that fabled American dream, upward mobility. To some extent, I had previously failed to understand how fifty-year-old policies could still hobble a new generation, even after the policies themselves have been stricken. One thing that really drove this point home for me was doing research for a previous blog post, and learning that the majority of foreclosures in my home state’s capital were occurring in neighborhoods that had previously been redlined. This point was, of course, also addressed in the Avila readings and more recently in “Straight in to Compton”, but I think reading about redlining in a city that I closely identify with—instead of L.A., which I certainly know more about now, but is still a mystery to be explored and unraveled—really opened my eyes.

Finally, the single most important thing I have learned in this class came with the very first reading, and has been emphasized ever after. It is, simply, the idea that as scholars of American Studies, we have the power, and perhaps the obligation, to examine our topics from a moral perspective, to ascribe values of good and bad to the past and the present. And, somehow, we also earn the right to discuss the future, even to point in the direction that we would like to see that future go, as Gilmore does with her theses in Golden Gulag, and as Kun does less extensively in “What is an MC?” This idea, that a scholar does not only engage with material to understand it but also to enact positive change in the word, I found incredibly inspiring. More than anything else, the realization that this field gives me the opportunity to academically engage my hopes for America makes me want to continue my education in American studies.