Race Is An Accessory

It had always troubled me that when I would introduce a friend who is not white, one of the main identifying characteristics are their race, for example, "Joe, my asian friend..."  By identifying Joe solely by his race, every other aspect about him is overshadowed.

I'm interested in understanding race, and after looking at the world from Bob's perspective I've come to see race differently than I did coming into this class.  As an Asian American, I had always tried to suppress my "Asian-ness," an inherent and unchangeable part of who I am.  Younger me would have identified most with the Harrison's.  However, Bob seems to view race as an accessory, a separate object, you can either proudly wear, leave at home, or try to erase completely: "Race was a handicap, sure, I reasoned.  But hell, I didn't have to marry it."  and also on page 15: "The white folks had sure brought their white to work with them  that morning."

Bob has a few encounters where he feels as if race was left at home.  One of which he sat at dinner and shared a normal conversation with a white man.  The other instance was when he gave the two white sailors a ride.  After, he wondered "how it was you could take two white guys from the same place - one would carry his whiteness like a loaded stick... and the other would just simply be white as if he didn't have anything to do with it and let it go at that" (41).

In her introduction, Smith said, "we must first break the silence about race and encourage more people to participate in the dialogue."  Bob's conversation halted with the those two sailors when they fell silent because they were uncomfortable with talking about race.  In Bob's situation here, how could the silence have been broken and the dialogue been able to continue?  Smith also stated that "few people speak a language about race that is not their own."  What could have been different if the boys had tried to speak Bob's language?

How does Bob wear his race throughout the book, and does his perception of what race is change overtime?
Does the weight of the responsibility to break this silence about race fall more heavily on some groups than others?

City of Angels?

In “Twilight,” Mike Davis discusses how the Los Angeles experience has changed. He states that “the only permitted legal activity anymore [is] being in a mall shopping,” that “cruising has been totally eliminated” because of its presumed links to gang violence, and that “it’s illegal to sleep on the beach.” Davis is essentially arguing that the L.A. riots both exposed this city’s virulent racism and stripped away the “Southern California culture” that has been historically used to market the idea of living here. In If He Hollers, Bob’s experience is radically different from Davis’s working-class adolescence. Bob’s a member of the working class, but the fact of his race means that he isn’t privy to the white Angeleno ideal of sun and sand, as well as the other “incredibly important” pleasures and freedoms that Davis describes. It seems like the realities of racial and socioeconomic inequity poked a whole lot of holes in the Boosters’ manufactured image of Los Angeles. But somehow -- despite the various movements that have sprung up in attempts to redefine the Angeleno identity/experience -- their fantasy still persists to some degree in many people’s minds. So I ask: is there a way to reconcile our (and by our, I mean our city’s) diametrically opposed perspectives into one shared narrative? Are our experiences really diametrically opposed or, like the figures in Bob’s dream, are we all victims of the same power structures? Is intellectual/philosophical commonality even something we want to strive for? And, after a history bursting with injustices that have been left to fester in ignorance and erupt in tragedy, is anything about Los Angeles remotely angelic?