The Education of Harry Angstrom: Rabbit Redux and the Charge of the Kerner Commission

“But your flag decal won’t get you into Heaven anymore.”

—John Prine¹

In Rabbit Redux, John Updike’s first sequel to Rabbit, Run, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s wife, Janice, leaves him for a car salesman from her father’s dealership. Besides going some way toward providing Harry with a much-deserved comeuppance for his extemporaneous abandonment of Janice in the first novel, this plot point sets in motion a series of events: Harry, now a stodgy member of the Silent Majority unnerved by the unrelenting social unrest of the late sixties, will share his home with Jill, a young hippie from an affluent family, and Skeeter, a well-read black militant with a messiah complex. Weary after three days of Harry and Skeeter’s racially charged wrangling, Jill convinces Harry to sit with her, his liberal-leaning adolescent son, Nelson, and Skeeter for “a structured discussion” that will enable him to better understand both his African American guest and the era’s racial turmoil.² She explains that “[t]hings that threaten you like riots and welfare have jumped into the newspapers out of nowhere for you. So for tonight we thought we would just talk a little, have a kind of seminar, about Afro-American history” (199–200). Jill’s articulation of Harry’s need for such a seminar recalls passages from the 1968 report issued by the Kerner Commission, which President Lyndon Johnson established to study and explicate the causes of the era’s urban race riots. Not only does Jill’s preamble to the novel’s initial “teach-in” scene call to mind specific sections of the Kerner report; Harry’s resistance to what he learns reflects many of the counterarguments that the commission anticipated.

To be clear, in linking Updike to the Kerner report, I am not claiming that he necessarily read it, but it is likely he at least heard about it given its extensive media coverage. However, my argument does not hinge on whether or not Updike did read the report; the Kerner study is important because it epitomizes the liberal consensus on the sociological causes of the era’s racial unrest, an issue that Updike overtly addresses in Rabbit Redux. Kerner’s pithy articulation of prominent liberal values stands in stark and obvious contrast to the perspectives illustrated via position papers and speeches by such preeminent conservatives as Richard Nixon. Updike dramatizes this clash of liberal and conservative worldviews throughout the novel, and most conspicuously during these “teach-in” scenes, which model the very work that the Kerner report advocated when it called for the creation of new attitudes and a new understanding about the history of race in America. The author illustrates for his readers what the education of a skeptical white Middle American male, who believes steadfastly in the infallibility of his country, could look like. This skepticism and resistance reflects the conflict in Updike’s own psyche between the socially conservative Shillington boy of modest means and the affluent Harvard-educated Northeastern liberal into whom he evolved. In this essay, I argue that despite his apparent effort to raise consciousness, the unflattering caricatures and sexualized racism in which Updike indulges combine to reinforce Middle American prejudices and discredit liberal arguments that stress such root causes as ingrained institutional racism and the cycle of poverty in consideration of the problem of crime and lawlessness.

The Kerner Commission Report and the Conservative Response

On July 29, 1967, in the midst of a hellacious summer of urban riots, President Johnson introduced the Commission on Civil Disorders, assigning its eleven members with investigating three principal questions concerning the uprisings: What happened? Why did it happen? What could be done to prevent it from happening again?³ The Kerner Commission, as it came to be known, issued its report on February 29 of the following year, two days after “crime and lawlessness” – riots fell under the category of “lawlessness” – topped the Gallup poll as America’s top domestic issue.⁴ Gallup’s results combined with the press’s framing of the Kerner report...