Seeing Race in Modern America

Acknowledgments

ix Acknowledgments Good ideas come from everywhere. I could trace the conception of this book back to an academic idyll, to an ideal classroom exchange with a student, or to some high-minded kaffeeklatsch with a generous colleague. Its emergence could be rooted in the rich soil of interlocking interdisciplinary fields, as if it were the hybrid by-product of a comingling of American Studies, History, and Ethnic Studies, to name just three. Seeing Race in Modern America could have its origins in a story of abuse at the hands of a policeman or a TSA agent, or a micro-aggressive joke told at the office. It could flow downhill from a childhood memory of some acutely recalled encounter. But the catalytic, generative truth is more commonplace, more everyday, and perhaps, as a consequence, it creates a stronger foundation for the consideration of “discrimination” as a visual practice with astonishing, awesome reach. I went to Kroger one day with my son and daughter, then about three years and one year old, roughly, and the cashier, a kindly old woman, asked me if they were “Hispanic .” Her words registered at a deeper level, as an eerily too familiar reminder that I’d heard many other people ask that question, or some version of it. In that instant of recognition, it didn’t matter whether my kids were or weren’t Mexican, or Latino, or Hispanic; what mattered was that they were being interpreted—or read, like a text—routinely, regularly, and everywhere. And so, on the short, quotidian drive home from the banal surrounds of my local grocery store, I began to think about how the world was reading my children, and through them my wife, my family, my friends and colleagues, and all of us. At a basic level, the idea for this book emerged from that short trip to Kroger. The book might have died right at the Kroger exit, though, were it not for five people. Matthew Frye Jacobson, the genius who has fathered a thousand dissertations, made an offhand remark during a long-ago breakfast at EJ’s on the Upper West Side about race and sight, a remark that stuck with me as a great idea for a book. “How would you tell the story,” he asked, “of what people saw?” Editor x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Sian Hunter took a casual, “thinking-out-loud” phone call, and during a conversation about John Singleton Copley’s painting Watson and the Shark laid out the idea for a picture-rich book with UNC Press. From the very start, Sian was an indefatigable advocate for this book. Caroline Field Levander, my boon compañera, gave me a semester at Rice, and shared beer, ribs, and ambiance with me as I composed the most emotionally challenging part of this book. CFL is the very soul of disco cool. Before and after she left Bloomington, Katie Lofton was game for anything—even if that meant watching Rambo at a nearmidnight showing at the local multiplex. Her passion for the broadest conception of intellectual life—and her refusal to fear the popular —is infectious and inspiring. She is, in many ways, my teacher. And, finally, Rosanne Currarino patiently read every word of this book a hundred times, and wrote detailed replies about everything. If the prose is at all conversational, it is a consequence of our endless back and forth. She remains my ideal, and much beloved, reader. Without this gang of five, there is no book. Bloomington, Indiana, was fertile ground for the bulk of the writing and thinking. Deborah Cohn and Vivian Halloran pressed me to keep writing when I should have been filling out e-docs or handling administrative paperwork. Carol Glaze and Paula Cotner and Sean McGuire kept that paperwork—and the unscheduled visitors to our office—away when they knew I was writing. Jason McGraw and Kevin O’Neill and Stephen Selka entertained conversations about Predator that went on for way too long. With just twenty-four-hour’s notice, Denise Cruz read the first draft of an introduction, and the second, and the third, and so on. Michael McGerr, my guide to absolutely everything, reminded me over lunch one day that while good writing was important, no one reads the prose if the book doesn’t get finished . There is no way, finally, that this book could have been written without the generous institutional support of IU’s College Arts and Humanities Institute, then directed by Andrea Ciccarelli...