American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)
by Robert O. Self
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Book Summary Information
Author: Robert O. SelfEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2005-08-08
ISBN: 0691124868
Number of pages: 408
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Book Reviews of American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)
Book Review: Beating Cultural Studies At Its Own Game And Laughing All The Way Up The Ivory Tower With Meticulous History
Summary: 5 Stars
In American Babylon, Robert Self attempts to synthesize consistently isolated renderings of urban, suburban, white black, economic and sociocultural histories in postwar metropolitan development. He seeks to join the histories of "modernist city planning" with "politics and social struggle (9)." In doing so, he centers his study around three primary transitions, each roughly beginning in the New Deal era and reaching completion around the advent of Johnson's Great Society. First, the remaking the white labor movement into what he terms "conservative populism." Second, the remaking of progressive black labor and urban activism into black militarism, nationalism, and Maoism. Finally, the remaking of liberal state aid from infrastructure development to human development, from direct financial subsidy for low-income whites to mobilization against pathology for low-income blacks.
The study concludes with a clash between the liberal state and suburban prosperity, newly estranged by the racialized nature of poverty.
Key to the suburban backlash of the seventies is a political disposition that formed much earlier in the late forties called "conservative populism." Self defines "conservative populism" as a postwar coalition of white blue collar workers, skilled workers, and small business interests that were pro-union, pro-private property, pro private-rights, anti-tax and anti-big-business. He defines "industrial garden" as a sort of ecosystem of commercial, industrial, and residential infrastructure in close proximity that delivers abundance and utopian living. Upon the failure of the inner city industrial garden to deliver utopian prosperity, suburbs became the actualized vision of the garden city and the staging grounds for an evacuation of prosperity.
Self portrays 1960s urban spaces as a conflict between business elites who wish to mechanize and deindustrialize infrastructure toward the end of capital accumulation, and blacks who want infrastructure investment in neighborhoods. Sometimes I found myself asking if Self was too adherent to municipal boundaries in drawing the border between city and suburb. It seems to me that large parts of American cities became and remained suburban-like in the postwar era. To use my own city as an example, there are places where Minneapolis and its suburbs seem to be very much of the same yoke. I wonder to what degree this is the case with Oakland?
There are times when the text seemed aggressive in reducing the city playing field to a contest between business infrastructure and poor blacks when a significant number of prosperous white residents remained in the city. I wonder if "post-municipalism" would be a useful younger sibling to "post-nationalism" in conceptualizing urban spaces. It might be rhetorically useful if "suburb" was reduced to an adjective in a study like this.
American Babylon hits its stride as it explores and lucidly articulates the reasons behind the conservative backlash and the death of the welfare state. While there is a tremendous body of scholarship that presents cultural explanations for the conservative backlash, it is rare that one finds an economic explanation, especially one that centers prosperity rather than exploitation and false consciousness (a la Thomas Frank) as its driving phenomenon. Self takes the same statistics that others (like George Lipsitz) have used to document the structural invention of black poverty and animates them as a call to action for white tax activists.
In affirming that both disempowerment and empowerment can be the precursors of fervent activism, Self avoids reinscribing social action as an exotic and racialized mystique of nature. Undisturbed by the proscribed boundaries of most scholarship, such mystique holds that liberal activism is essentially black, essentially urban, and essentially anti-capital or that conservative activism is essentially white, essentially rural, and essentially theological. Self disturbs and hybridizes this binary by locating the most demonstrably effective social action within suburbs.
Self also uses the suburbs to disrupt what he sees as an inadequate north/south binary in Afro-American history. It is not just business that opposes the welfare state for being anti-market or whites that oppose it out of racism, as one might gather from prevailing readings of the southern movement. Suburban whites had a vested economic interest in the elimination of civil rights gains and their adjunct, the liberal welfare state. Self also advocates retelling the civil rights movement as a national black confrontation with the exclusionary policies of the New Deal.
In perhaps his most radical departure from existing scholarship, Self talks about political economy without talking about liberal capital or economic determinism. He does not see lopsided urban development as the problem or manifest destiny of a free market, nor does he see policy as a reliable proscription on the lives of people. For Self, capital success is always prefixed by organized social action. The invisible hand is neither anonymous nor autonomous and Self is on a mission to name names.
Yet American Babylon is not without shortcomings. The introduction seems to be seeping with rich and critical contradictions. But the text-and perhaps it is just an artifact of the massive amount of information that is represented-the prose engages most of its terms with a very declarative nonchalance. A writer of similar style would be Nell Irvin Painter. Self's prose has a disarming factuality that marginalizes the ambiguity and contested meaning which seems central in cultural history. For all of its insights, it is difficult to read American Babylon as a cultural history because it is so linear. Because it does not raise problematics or invoke dialectic to resolve unclear and confounding juxtapositions, its engagement with its data is more encyclopedic than exegetical.
Ironically, while the Self does not talk about hegemony, intersectional theory, Foucault, Marx, modernity, or subjectivity, his work offers a framework for dissent that could not be built within the cultural studies lexicon.
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Summary of American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)
As the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a nationwide tax revolt, California embodied a crucial motif of the postwar United States: the rise of suburbs and the decline of cities, a process in which black and white histories inextricably joined. American Babylon tells this story through Oakland and its nearby suburbs, tracing both the history of civil rights and black power politics as well as the history of suburbanization and home-owner politics. Robert Self shows that racial inequities in both New Deal and Great Society liberalism precipitated local struggles over land, jobs, taxes, and race within postwar metropolitan development. Black power and the tax revolt evolved together, in tension.
American Babylon demonstrates that the history of civil rights and black liberation politics in California did not follow a southern model, but represented a long-term struggle for economic rights that began during the World War II years and continued through the rise of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. This struggle yielded a wide-ranging and profound critique of postwar metropolitan development and its foundation of class and racial segregation. Self traces the roots of the 1978 tax revolt to the 1940s, when home owners, real estate brokers, and the federal government used racial segregation and industrial property taxes to forge a middle-class lifestyle centered on property ownership.
Using the East Bay as a starting point, Robert Self gives us a richly detailed, engaging narrative that uniquely integrates the most important racial liberation struggles and class politics of postwar America.
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