culture

In February 2016 I posted a note about a forthcoming website called “Blackasotan,” which highlights stories about the intersection of race and place. Blackasotan was launched today (June 15, 2016)!  The inaugural edition includes my submission, 30 Years a Minnesotan. As with many publications, some edits were made for the piece to conform to their standards. Below is my original submission, in case anyone wants to compare the two versions.

30 Years a Minnesotan

“There are White kids working at McDonalds!” That was my initial race-tinged observation during my first trip to Minnesota, in the summer of 1986 between graduation from high school in Atlanta, GA, and the start of college, also in Atlanta. I lived in St. Paul that summer while working as an engineering intern at 3M in Maplewood. Well, I didn’t really do much “engineering” work since I had not yet taken any engineering classes, but that’s a story for another day…

After growing up in all-Black neighborhoods in the South, spending three months in mostly White surroundings for the first time as an 18-year old was quite the adjustment. In addition to marveling at White workers serving me at fast food restaurants, I was shocked to see White and Asian American folks in public housing complexes, and was stunned when my count of Cadillacs seen around the Twin Cities did not reach double digits. Of course, this was probably due more to rear-wheel drive Cadillacs of the 1980s not being practical choices for Minnesota winters, but they were everywhere back home on the Black side of town.

The first summer in Minnesota also featured the third time I was called nigger to my face. The first two times were at Boy Scout camps (!); the third time was while sitting in a car at a stoplight on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul. I was the passenger with the window down, and an elderly woman started screaming it at me. She also gave me the finger…and might have mooned me too. I’m fuzzy on whether or not the mooning happened as an exclamation to her tantrum, but the verbal taunting and finger pointing were traumatizing enough. The White driver (an intern from California) might have been even more shocked, though, as he went out of his way to do nice things for me over the next few weeks.

Aside from that Snelling Avenue encounter my racialized experiences in Minnesota have been mostly positive. For instance, I had my first significant discussions about race with White folks that summer. In high school there were 1600 students, and all but four were Black. Of the four, three were White boys, and the fourth was a recent Vietnamese immigrant, Tuan Le [I wonder what ever happened to him?]. One of the White guys was in my clique of five, but we never overtly discussed race. While working at 3M and living in a residence hall in Hamline University I made friends with more than one White person for the first time, and began to explore questions that eventually led me to abandon engineering for a career as a sociology professor. One person from that initial summer has been a friend ever since, and several folks from my second year as an intern at 3M during the summer of 1987 are life-long comrades to this day.

I saw my Minnesota friends at least once a year between 1986 and 1998. In 1999 I moved to Minneapolis when I became a professor at the University of Minnesota. One of the difficulties many transplants report is adjusting to “Minnesota Nice,” how everyone is very polite on the surface, but it’s hard to break into friendship circles, and get folks to open up about deep topics. I loved Minnesota from the start since my experience was the opposite: I made lasting friendships seemingly immediately, and was able to quickly establish enough trust to talk about difficult topics, such as race. My new friends also helped me overcome my homophobia.

One would think that moving from an all-Black environment to a mostly-White one would be the opposite of my experience, in that conversations in the former would be much easier than those of the latter. That is indeed the case for many, but I have found that in Minnesota I was able to inhabit a more expansive place regarding racial identity. “Say what, professor?” Let me give you an example.

One summer in my second or third year at The U I was walking behind Appleby Hall on the East Bank when a car pulled over and the driver (a Black man) asked me for directions to Chicago Avenue. The passenger (a Black woman) started laughing when I prefaced my answer with “Let’s see.” “Did he just say ‘let’s see’?!” she chuckled as she winked at the driver. He nodded; he knew, and she knew, and I knew that her implication was “does this guy really know how to get to the section of Chicago Ave. where Black people live? He sounds like a White guy.” In the South my Blackness was questioned more times than I count, whereas this encounter is the only memory of overt identity boundary work in Minnesota I can recall.

Now I’m not saying that Minnesota exists in some sort of post-racial utopia where everyone gets along. On the contrary, there is way too much work ahead of us, as evidenced by recent reports about Black-White achievement gaps, and attacks on Black Lives Matter activists in North Minneapolis, for example. I am suggesting that there is a willingness by progressive Minnesotans to think about race in new ways, so the path forward is not as steep as in other places.

The author Touré begins the book Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What it Means to be Black Now with an anecdote about an encounter with Black men in a diner. After learning that he was in town to do a story about skydiving, they tell him, “Brother, Black people don’t do that.” Touré notes that if he had listened to such internal community admonishment in the past he would have missed out on what he describes as a spiritual and life-changing experience. I very much appreciate Minnesota because in my experience there involved less policing of boundaries about what it means to be Black, from both Black and non-Black friends.

Later in Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? Touré discusses how there are countless ways to be Black, and argues that we should celebrate them all. I think that I unofficially began to think of myself as a Minnesotan in the summer of 1986 after learning that the land of 10,000 lakes also helped me see that there were 10,000 ways to be Black there. I was officially a Minnesotan while I lived there from 1999 through 2013. It was then very easy to maintain an identity as a Minnesotan while living in Wisconsin for two years from 2013 to 2015. [Oh, there are so many ways!] In 2015 I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, but now in 2016 I have changed my Facebook hometown status form Atlanta to Minneapolis. In a way, then, June will mark the end of my 30^th year as a Minnesotan. I might not ever reside in the state again, but I hope to call myself a Minnesotan for at least 30 more years…

***

Walt Jacobs is the Dean of the College of Social Sciences at San José State University. He physically resided in Minnesota for 14 years as a professor at the University of Minnesota from 1999-2013, but has loved it for 30 years, starting as a college student intern in the summer of 1986.

Today is International Workers’ Day (also known as May Day). I’m en route to the office to work for several hours — so I’m not really honoring the day — and an old Pizza Hut commercial from the mid-1990s popped into mind. In it workers are on strike while management frets about the latest set of demands. One manager gets an idea to order pizza for the workers as a tactic to bring the two sides closer together, and it works (!). At the end of the spot the workers and management are all laughing while enjoying hot pizza. I can’t find this spot online, but it appears that a similar commercial is available. This one doesn’t have the same happy ending, as only one worker realizes that the pizza is from management; also, the workers are outside on the picket lines in the cold, while management is in a warm office. I wonder if this version of the commercial was made after reaction to the unrealistic original?

The Pacific Standard website has an interesting article on how non-profits help close the digital divide, the gap between those who have access to high-speed internet services, and those who don’t. The author notes:

[T]he digital divide isn’t just about potential adopters. There are also barriers on the supply side that non-profits try to bust through, and most of them are mental. One problem is that businesses aren’t entirely aware of the financial incentives that come with getting more people online.

This is an important reminder, as most of the strategies I’m familiar focus on consumers.

One of the TV shows I’m following this year is the dystopian drama The 100. Recently the death of a queer character on the show prompted members of the LGBTQ+ community to launch a campaign to influence TV producers to create better representations of LGBTQ+ folks. Today I discovered a great article about why media portrayals of members of minority communities matter. Among other things, the author argues:

The natural antidote to ignorance is travel; it’s meeting new people and staying open-minded to new experiences. However, not everyone has the luxury of doing that. A lot of people are stuck in their physical environments, surrounded by people who are similar to themselves. This is where the media comes in. It is a form of mental traveling, full of experiences we are unlikely to have in our real lives. However, how likely are we to stay open-minded if the media constantly tells us that the world is violent, evil, and full of people who want to do us harm? What kind of expectation will that create in meeting new people? If the media continues to perpetuate fear, anxiety, and xenophobia it will be minorities who will continue to pay the price.

Many thanks to Tania Hew for telling me about this article!

Since February my daily commute to campus has usually included an hour and 10 minute train ride from Oakland to San José. Normally the train operates within 5 minutes of scheduled departure and arrival times. Today, however, the train was 30 minutes late, which popped the short story “The 5:22” into mind. This short story is an interesting exploration of a disruption to a regular train rider’s schedule, especially as one of his regular co-riders also undergoes a significant transformation. I recognize other regulars on my train so I’d have a similar reaction, I think!

I’m kicking myself since I no longer have a copy of a University of Minnesota class assignment based on this short story. The class was on social and cultural expression through the medium of film. I think that I asked students to discuss how and why they would film the short story if they were directors. I’ll have to start thinking about some way to revive that assignment for use here at SJSU.

The cover story for the March 2016 issue of The Atlantic magazine is “How America Is Putting Itself Back Together.”  The online subhead reads, “Most people in the U.S. believe their country is going to hell. But they’re wrong. What a three-year journey by single-engine plane reveals about reinvention and renewal.” Today I read the article during my train commute to work. It’s a refreshing departure from more negative and depressing analyses in the news, especially surrounding the U.S. Presidential primaries. I wonder, however, why the print version differs from the online version. The print magazine’s table of contents has the same title, but the cover reads “Can America Put Itself Back Together?” [Emphasis added.] The subhead: “A three-year 54,000-mile journey reveals surprising sources of strength.” Hhhmmm.

In recognition of International Women’s Day (March 8) StoryCenter is inviting people to view a powerful new collection of narratives from their Silence Speaks initiative, The Right To Her Story. These stories are available free of charge until Friday, March 11 by entering the code WOMENSDAY to view the collection. The proceeds from online streaming and DVD sales after March 11 support StoryCenter’s ongoing efforts on behalf of women’s rights globally.

Blackasotan is a soon-to-be launched website about the experiences of Black Minnesotans. From its “Share Your Story!” section:

Every creative venture has an origin story. Ours? A lot of shared meals and amazing conversations about our individual and collective experiences of blackness in the frozen tundra, AKA Minnesota.

At some point, we became determined to make this idea a reality. We aren’t the first to try to capture stories through the lens of a place: shout-out to sites like 1839 and Stuck in DC. We also know for sure that we didn’t invent the idea of featuring stories of Minnesotans from communities of color / with underrepresented identities (hello, Opine Season).

But, we’re doing it anyway. An idea doesn’t have to be new to be impactful. And we know these stories that we tell to each other, our friends, families, and co-workers at happy hours and house parties and in the hallways are powerful.

Indeed! Sharing our stories can be useful in so many ways. I came up with a possible story, and sent a note to the editors:

I have an idea for a short non-fiction submission: “30 years a Minnesotan.” I first visited Minnesota in the summer of 1986 after graduating from an all-Black Atlanta high school. Today in 2016 I’m the Dean of the College of Social Sciences at San José State University, but in between I spent four summers in Minnesota as an engineering intern at 3M, lived there for 14 years as a professor (including five years as Chair of African American & African Studies at the University of Minnesota), and visited at least once a year in the other 12 years. I now consider myself a Minnesotan: I pined for home during my first two years away while at the U of Wisconsin-Parkside, and recently changed my hometown listing on Facebook from Atlanta to Minneapolis. I’d talk about how many think that an existence in a state with a relatively small number of Blacks is extremely limiting, but I found it full of possibilities for Black identity after living in a more regulated all-Black environment.

Blackasotan will launch in April, so they’ll need stories by the end of March. On one hand I hope that I’m not selected to develop the idea into a submission, as I have several deadlines and tasks due in March. On the other hand, it will be fun to write this piece!

One of my favorite books of all time is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I used an analysis of it as my first published article. I enjoy speaking about it with students (the book, that is; I can barely remember an article written 22 years on the past!). Usually these students are enrolled in college, but three years ago a high school teacher in Iowa asked me to interact with her students while she discussed the book with them during Black History Month. After some brainstorming, we decided that she would set up a blog for us to interact: in groups students would post questions to me, and I would answer them. At the end of each response I posed a question to each group, which generated additional discussion. It was a lot of fun, and the students learned a lot, I hope. This year Kris asked me if I would repeat the project with her current group of students in AP Literature, and I readily agreed. Check out our discussions by visiting the course blog!

Two years ago I posted a note about the commercials in Super Bowl 48 (or, I should say, Super Bowl XLVIII). In that year a 20-year tradition came to an end, as I did not generate notes about Super Bowl commercials during the game. I also didn’t take notes last year during Super Bowl XLIX, or this year in Super Bowl 50. [It appears that next year’s edition of the big game will be accompanied by a return to Roman numerals after a one-year departure.] A change for this year was that I missed a few commercials, including the top-rated spot in the USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter. As always, I never got up to leave the room during a commercial, but once I left while the commentators where discussing an instant reply deliberation and found that a commercial was in progress, and I mistimed the start of the second half after the Halftime Show (which I never watch) so may have missed a commercial break. I know, you can watch all of the commercials online — and many before the game itself! — but it’s not the same as seeing them live. Next year I’ll need to sit glued to the tube!