Customer Reviews

American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America)

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I read American Babylon after hearing about it on the radio, and came away impressed with the author's ability to make a remarkably complex process - the interplay of surburban development, urban decline, racial politics, and civil rights - accessible to an amateur such as myself. The book lays out a persuasive explanation of why things are they way they are in Oakland, and by (my) extension in many urban areas around the country, including my own hometown of Brooklyn. In doing so it seems to me to be the best sort of historical analysis: rigorous, remarkably detailed, and carefully documented, but useful to the public at large. Highly recommended.

Oakland is frequently in the news. Our school board passes a resolution asserting the language rights of African-Americans, and the country explodes in controversy. Our citizens elect a celebrity mayor, and the Wall Street Journal speculates on the reasons. None of these events are understandable without understanding Oakland's history, and Robert Self has done a terrific job of capturing its contours. He lays waste to the common myth that the Civil Rights movement was exclusively a Southern phenomenon, and reports in fascinating detail on Oakland's own Civil Rights movement. Although he reports on its most famous organization, the Black Panthers, he also describes in detail the tenacity and success of other organizations, like the Oakland Black Caucus and the East Bay Democratic Club, which produced changes in the employment and electoral rights of American-Americans.

People who want to change cities should read this book.

An Oakland College Professor

Robert Self's "American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland" deserves the attention of grassroots political activists as much as academics. It is a brilliant analysis of the post-World War Two business strategy for Oakland, California and the boom (and boomerang to Oakland) in housing and jobs elsewhere in Alameda County that resulted. Self shows how the decline of Oakland was the other side of the coin in the creation of new communities in the open spaces nearby. He lays out the class and race contexts of the suburbanization process and shows the consequences for and responses by the labor movement and African Americans to the changes that were wrought. "American Babylon" thus provides, for example, an interesting account of the Black Panther Party. Finally, using this region in northern California as a case study, the book examines the origins of the anti-property tax movement, when the suburbs regime went sour. Since California is still embroiled over the same issues this book addresses -- taxes, urban revitalization, de-industrialization, racial equality, and the political and environmental impacts of suburban growth -- Robert Self's "American Babylon" could not be more timely.

Robert Self's book should interest readers interested in understanding the aftermath of urban renewal and development in US cities and the politics of race and class in the post-WWII to 1975 period. Self's work makes a contribution to studies of urban poltiics and the histories of cities and of the Civil Rights era by pointing to what has often been ignored or left invisible: that the so-called problems of people living in cities are often directly related to the overdevelopment of their surrounding suburbs (the noose), and that the problems of people of color in this country are directly related to the privileges of white people, structurally and historically. Thus, Self's book shows intimately and concretely how one might explore the dynamics of structural, institutionalized racism, in the post-Civil Rights era, when we all thought that the problem of blatant individualized racism had been solved.

In addition, the book will be useful for those of us living and working or traveling through the Bay Area: It adds another part of the story, and links the decline of Oakland with the rise of Silicon Valley, and with shifting terrains of race and class politics. It also provides important historical perspective on the forces that started the long trajectory that we now live, the decisions that sowed the seeds for the so-called ghettos, but also for the gentrification and displacement that threatens to displace our communities today.

In American Babylon, Robert Self attempts to synthesize consistently isolated renderings of urban, suburban, white black, economic and sociocultural histories in postwar metropolitan development. He seeks to join the histories of "modernist city planning" with "politics and social struggle (9)." In doing so, he centers his study around three primary transitions, each roughly beginning in the New Deal era and reaching completion around the advent of Johnson's Great Society. First, the remaking the white labor movement into what he terms "conservative populism." Second, the remaking of progressive black labor and urban activism into black militarism, nationalism, and Maoism. Finally, the remaking of liberal state aid from infrastructure development to human development, from direct financial subsidy for low-income whites to mobilization against pathology for low-income blacks.

The study concludes with a clash between the liberal state and suburban prosperity, newly estranged by the racialized nature of poverty.

Key to the suburban backlash of the seventies is a political disposition that formed much earlier in the late forties called "conservative populism." Self defines "conservative populism" as a postwar coalition of white blue collar workers, skilled workers, and small business interests that were pro-union, pro-private property, pro private-rights, anti-tax and anti-big-business. He defines "industrial garden" as a sort of ecosystem of commercial, industrial, and residential infrastructure in close proximity that delivers abundance and utopian living. Upon the failure of the inner city industrial garden to deliver utopian prosperity, suburbs became the actualized vision of the garden city and the staging grounds for an evacuation of prosperity.

Self portrays 1960s urban spaces as a conflict between business elites who wish to mechanize and deindustrialize infrastructure toward the end of capital accumulation, and blacks who want infrastructure investment in neighborhoods. Sometimes I found myself asking if Self was too adherent to municipal boundaries in drawing the border between city and suburb. It seems to me that large parts of American cities became and remained suburban-like in the postwar era. To use my own city as an example, there are places where Minneapolis and its suburbs seem to be very much of the same yoke. I wonder to what degree this is the case with Oakland?

There are times when the text seemed aggressive in reducing the city playing field to a contest between business infrastructure and poor blacks when a significant number of prosperous white residents remained in the city. I wonder if "post-municipalism" would be a useful younger sibling to "post-nationalism" in conceptualizing urban spaces. It might be rhetorically useful if "suburb" was reduced to an adjective in a study like this.

American Babylon hits its stride as it explores and lucidly articulates the reasons behind the conservative backlash and the death of the welfare state. While there is a tremendous body of scholarship that presents cultural explanations for the conservative backlash, it is rare that one finds an economic explanation, especially one that centers prosperity rather than exploitation and false consciousness (a la Thomas Frank) as its driving phenomenon. Self takes the same statistics that others (like George Lipsitz) have used to document the structural invention of black poverty and animates them as a call to action for white tax activists.

In affirming that both disempowerment and empowerment can be the precursors of fervent activism, Self avoids reinscribing social action as an exotic and racialized mystique of nature. Undisturbed by the proscribed boundaries of most scholarship, such mystique holds that liberal activism is essentially black, essentially urban, and essentially anti-capital or that conservative activism is essentially white, essentially rural, and essentially theological. Self disturbs and hybridizes this binary by locating the most demonstrably effective social action within suburbs.

Self also uses the suburbs to disrupt what he sees as an inadequate north/south binary in Afro-American history. It is not just business that opposes the welfare state for being anti-market or whites that oppose it out of racism, as one might gather from prevailing readings of the southern movement. Suburban whites had a vested economic interest in the elimination of civil rights gains and their adjunct, the liberal welfare state. Self also advocates retelling the civil rights movement as a national black confrontation with the exclusionary policies of the New Deal.

In perhaps his most radical departure from existing scholarship, Self talks about political economy without talking about liberal capital or economic determinism. He does not see lopsided urban development as the problem or manifest destiny of a free market, nor does he see policy as a reliable proscription on the lives of people. For Self, capital success is always prefixed by organized social action. The invisible hand is neither anonymous nor autonomous and Self is on a mission to name names.

Yet American Babylon is not without shortcomings. The introduction seems to be seeping with rich and critical contradictions. But the text-and perhaps it is just an artifact of the massive amount of information that is represented-the prose engages most of its terms with a very declarative nonchalance. A writer of similar style would be Nell Irvin Painter. Self's prose has a disarming factuality that marginalizes the ambiguity and contested meaning which seems central in cultural history. For all of its insights, it is difficult to read American Babylon as a cultural history because it is so linear. Because it does not raise problematics or invoke dialectic to resolve unclear and confounding juxtapositions, its engagement with its data is more encyclopedic than exegetical.

Ironically, while the Self does not talk about hegemony, intersectional theory, Foucault, Marx, modernity, or subjectivity, his work offers a framework for dissent that could not be built within the cultural studies lexicon.

An interesting presentation. Unfortunately, for me, the author's acceptance and presentation sour the overall power of his text. That there was institutional racism I do not argue, but that the Unions and communist/marxist groups were portrayed as 'supporting' the black causes without criticism or context leaves me less comfortable. Oakland is home and includes the majority of the period of the book. Recommended for reading, but with a fore-warning on perspective.

Over the past few years there have been a number of valuable monographs discussing the crisis of American cities from the fifties to the seventies. The hallmark of these ways is Thomas Sugrue's Bancroft prize winning The Origins of the Urban Crisis, but there have been many other important works, such as Lisa McGirr's book on Orange County and Lizabeth Cohen's New Jersey focused work on consumerism. Robert Self's book on the transformation of modern Oakland is, in many ways, a mirror image of Kenneth Durr's recent book on Baltimore. Whereas Durr was extremely sympathetic to the white working class, he tended to ignore the black population. Self's book suffers from the opposite problem. Both books, despite a scattering of archival sources, relied to a noticeable extent on newspapers, many stridently partisan. Most important, both works are suffused with a tendentious political bias that hampers their effectiveness.

To be fair to Self, this is not to say that the story he tells is not a plausible one (It is certainly more accurate than Durr's). Self relates the familiar narrative of how federal initiatives encouraged the move to the suburbs, while at the same time urban renewal dispossessed the poor and made things worse for a growing African-American population. Suburbs were constructed in such a way that they got the benefits of increased industry while paying lower property tax rates well into the sixties. Meanwhile, systematic discrimination by both federal agencies and private lenders ensured that blacks would be strictly segregated into the poorest parts of Oakland. At the same time, of course, many professions were virtually closed to blacks. Major plans to revive Oakland did little to change this. The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) allowed commuters to zip right through West Oakland to other cities without stopping, while it divided West Oakland neighbourhoods and harmed its commercial districts. The Oakland Port increased its business tenfold from 1965 to 1969, but although it became the second largest port in the world, it employed few African-Americans and was structured in such a way that city finances received little direct benefit. During the sixties the War on Poverty did little to change these problems. Fair employment laws were difficult to enforce, the Office of Economic Opportunity emphasized the acquiring of skills, rather than face the problems of regional disparity, while other agencies trained for blue-collar jobs instead of the white collar ones that were arising. In response to these problems more radical movements arose, led, of course, by the Black Panthers. As the sixties moved into the seventies they slowly worked with other groups to increase their power until they finally won the 1977 elections. Unfortunately, they had little chance to enjoy this power as Proposition 13 was passed the next year, cutting off resources from municipal government state-wide.

As I said, this is plausible. It resembles the fate of many other cities. Indeed, to a large extent Self's book is a reflection of those other narratives, using them to back up his narrative. We do not get the same sort of detail that we see in Sugrue about segregation, the patterns of employment discrimination or about the politics of the city. Indeed, the book is more than half over before we learn what percentage of Oakland was black. Much of the discussion of politics, whether of the city council, the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers or the Proposition 13 movement has a top-down feel as it concentrates on the leaders. We do not get the same amount of detail as we did in Sugrue about white opposition to black demands. At times it seems the Republican party is nothing more that a coterie around William Knowland's "Tribune." There are a few useful specific points. During this period Oakland elected its city councillors at large, which meant that neighbourhoods could not easily mobilize to defend their own interests. This gave the well funded Republicans an advantage while at the same it depressed voter turnout. Self also gives some useful facts about the aftermath of Proposition 13, such as how from 1967 to 1979 the business share of property taxes fell from 46% to 28%. Indeed, two-thirds of the Proposition 13 tax relief went to business and landlords. But there are not enough of these points in the book. Self goes out of his way to emphasize the importance of geography, but aside from making the obvious point that Oakland's fate was bound up with the surrounding municipalities and suburbs surrounding it, much of what he says is wrapped in tedious academic jargon ("Definitions and public discussions of urban decline, in Oakland as in the nation, were embedded in the history of racial segregation and in class-driven conceptions of urban space." True, but there has to be an easier way to say this). One must also object to the way the Black Panthers are euphemized. Self partially admits their violence, their intellectual crudity and their tendency to posture. But he does not give these vices the emphasis they deserve, while their misogyny and their demagogic attitudes towards Jews, whites and other political forces goes unmentioned (trade unions virtually disappear after the Black Panthers appear). Moreover, it is by no means clear what difference they made. After all, the acquiring of municipal power after it became a prize of questionable value was a common experience in the seventies for African-Americans. It is hard to see how the Black Panthers were different or more successful than their rivals in African-American politics. The transformation of Oakland awaits its definitive historian.