Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

I’m just heading into Wray’s chapter on the eugenics movement aimed at whites in the u.s. It’s not often discussed, I guess, but there was a concerted effort to either place what were considered biologically degenerate whites into segregated communities or, more popularly, to sterilize them and prevent them from contaminating the good society.

It’s weird, I was around for the ‘white trash’ debates on Bad Subjects. I knew of the author of this book, Matt Wray, from that time. It was the height of the white studies movement in academia, and the Bad Subjects gang was publishing a book, White Trash. There was a good deal of acrimony and a lot of discussion of the term, white trash, as well as redneck, cracker, hick, and so forth.

What never came out of those debates is that the term white trash was initially used by black slaves and free blacks in the colonial and antebellum South. Wray plumbs the annals of history to understand its initial usage and how it got picked up and popularized by the white gentry in the south and the white bourgeoisie in the North. He also goes over, albeit briefly, various explanations for why blacks, whether slaves or free came up with the terms. Wray thinks of it as a form of micro-political resistance to white supremacy — what a more conventional Marxist might call intra-class warfare.

Speaking of, at work, we might be reading a book someone in the book group mentioned, but the name of which she’d forgotten. It’s a book about black women’s body image — the messages they receive about their bodies and how they respond. I haven’t had time to look it up on Amazon, but it sounds interesting and there’s a lot of excitement about reading it.

I don’t know if anyone remembers, but I mentioned once that I’d been reading Michael Eric Dyson’s Is Bill Cosby Right?. While waiting for the microwave at lunch one day, a woman strained to see the spine and title and asked me if it was good. That started a conversation and led to a book reading group. I’ve been really laid back about it, which is not my normal style. I usually take charge, lead, organize, write lists, etc. In this case, I thought that not such a good idea, and that I should try not to influence the book choices and just see what percolated. Part of this is because I’m the only one of two white people in the group and I figured it’d be better to (and more interesting) to see what ‘naturally’ percolated. And yet, this seems kind of dumb in so far as, well, I don’t know how much our presence makes these other folks feel they should opt for certain kinds of books and not others. (This is the kind of thing you’re trained to do as an ethnographer: second guess, second guess, second guess.) I was interested to see whether folks would gravitate toward more political books and, if so, what kinds.

But that’s always an interesting issue, too, since there’s the role of the bookstore. In this town, you sometimes have to *look* for, say, someone who does “white hair”. That’s kind of a bad joke, but what I mean is: because 60% of the population is people of color (with, I think, 40% black) when you go into a bookstore, the center aisle’s first table is generally dedicated to books targeted to blacks, especially black women since, in general, women read more than men. (Relatedly, I remember going into a dollar store to blow some time before an appointment. I usually look to see if they have any decent shampoo — overruns or castoffs that somehow landed in their inventory. That day, in this hyoooooooge dollar store complete with coolers selling cheap cold cuts, eggs, and milk, I looked to see that the good brands of shampoo were all labeled for women of color. I stood there thinking, how true is that? Like when I see shampoo for straight hair, curly hair, dry hair, permed hair, colored hair, blond hair, black hair. Does it really matter. Is the shampoo inside really different?

Anyway, gotta stop here and head to work. Later.