Race

by Studs Terkel

It was on election day last year that I learned Studs Terkel had died . . . I was a few days behind when it came to following along with the news. I’d never read a book by Terkel, I’d only ever heard a couple of interviews with him on the radio and seen a glimpse of him in Michael Moore’s film The Big One. But he’d achieved a sort of legendary status in my mind already as a figurehead of the Left, a man who’s always stood up for the underdog, a man who always lived by humbly and treated himself humbly, a man who’d been involved in the New Deal and had suffered from blacklisting, a man perennially enchanted by the profundity of who had prospered by learning to listen to the voices of ordinary people. I imagined him as our current version of the sage of the middle ages, of Spinoza toiling away in a garret by candlelight, getting his hand dirty with the ink from a quill pen as he jotted down ideas that came not from contemplation of abstract principles, but simply from listening to what people have to say, recording it on tape, and then writing it down.
In the introduction to Race, Terkel describes a scene from his everyday life in Chicago. Hampered by poor eyesight, he would give himself an extra layer of safety when he walked across the street by holding out his palms to oncoming cars as though he were directing traffic. I love the image of this little old man in thick-rimmed glasses signaling, “Stop!” to a whole river of cars.
The stories in Race are like a pocketful of pebbles, each one with it’s own details worth attending to, none of them towering over the rest. One interesting section focuses on a the conflict between a white man(C.P. Ellis) and a black woman (Ann Atwater) in the Durham, NC . . . Ellis had a history with the KKK, Atwater was a civil rights activist, but as time went on the Ellis began to understand things differently, began to see the divide between white and black as something imposed on the south in order to distract from the real issue of oppression of the poor. He and his Atwater collaborate on various local government campaigns, and eventually he becomes an important activist in the community, champion of all races.
As a sideline, we learn that while Ellis has remained vigorous and engaged, Atwater has suffered from declining health and fallen on hard times financially. In another writer’s work, this detail might be drawn out to support some other thesis. Terkel lets it stand as it is. There’s a sense that along with being interested in the issues of race and politics, he also has a great deal of sympathy for the human beings who are involved in the social and politics clashes that define history. There’s a sense that he understands the world as a stage on which we are only players, and that many of the players have these roles thrust upon us. Throughout race, there’s the sense that there’s a tangle of prefabricated narrative we’ve all been provided with to help us think about what’s going on in the world. In the multitude of interviews, you hear the same ideas come up again and again, people positioning themselves on predictable sides of the battle lines, but the artfulness of the book is in seeing how each individual untangles the narrative in a slightly different way.
On the day I learned Studs Terkel had died, I also learned that Barack Obama had been elected president. Since then there’s been an ongoing cycle of news waves, peaks and valleys of excitement based on health care and the war in Afghanistan, stimulus money and torture memos, racial profiling and beer summits, Israeli settlements and Iranian elections, racially insulting cartoons and the call for a renewed dialogue on race. I suppose I count myself among those liberals who feel disappointed at the lack of bold moves for change. I don’t like seeing drone attacks kill Pakistani civilians; I don’t like seeing the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered community put on hold in their struggle for equal rights; I don’t like hearing about Blue Dog Democrats fouling up the public option of the health care plan; I don’t like Timothy Geithner and his coterie of financial insiders cutting deals to give Wall Street an easy ride. But I also do have the sense that most of what I’ve been witnessing is a show, that we’re all being called on to take stands and argue for ourselves, to lobby and make donations and chit chat around the water cooler and pass on internet links and parrot talking points and kick up dust. As a writer, it’s always important to aware that when the dust settles and you see what the battlefield really looked like, you’ll probably meet with bigger surprises than any you might encounter in the heat of conflict.