Week 3

It's been a hectic week, and I haven't had much time to read anything at all. What little free time I've had has been spent on errands and naps. So since I haven't read many digital things, I thought now might be a good time to highlight the books I'm reading:

First and most significantly: The Great Uprising, by Peter Levy. In his book, Levy takes a three-pronged approach to understanding US American history of the 1960s. He spotlights a trio of cities as case studies through which to understand race-related "riots": Cambridge, MD; Baltimore, MD; and York, PA. 

The first of these is a small city I don't know and have never visited, located somewhere out on Maryland's jagged Eastern Shore. Levy wrote a book on the city's history previously, so he is able to tease historical significance out of personal familiarity. I've just finished reading this section of the book, and it ably accomplishes what Levy intends: the de-familiarization of "riot" history and imagery, replaced with a fuller understanding of structural racism's role in segregated poverty. In Cambridge's civil unrest, Levy sees the beginnings of a rhetorical/political shift away from civil rights toward "law and order."

(This is, not incidentally, a subject explored with great depth and dexterity in another book I read recently: Elizabeth Hinton's From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime).

I'll admit: for the first 80 or so pages, I wasn't sure I needed this much information. But once Levy starts examining the mass media coverage of Cambridge, it's impossible to ignore the misdirection employed by commentators. The gap of several hours between a Black Power speech and a nearby fire is elided; a Fire Department entering a majority-black Ward "fear[ing] for their lives," when in fact black residents helped them put out a fire; the persistent underdevelopment of Cambridge's Second Ward obfuscated under claims of "new public housing" and other minor investments. Levy arrives at a rare and powerful rhetorical stance, one where the truth is so obvious that lies begin to reveal themselves unprompted.

Now that I've finished the Cambridge section, I look forward to Levy tackling Baltimore (where I currently live) and York (a half-hour from my hometown, spiritual sister city Lancaster). It was these latter sections that caught my attention in the first place, but now I better understand both his scholarly background and this book's project. It's my good fortune that the rest of the book will speak to my own position, a subjectivity not omniscient but situated, not universal but helpfully particular.

Some other books I'm working through right now: Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which he wrote just blocks away from my current apartment; Platform Capitalism, by Nick Srnicek, a personal favorite I've been reading aloud to my girlfriend during long car rides; and The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, which she's been reading to me at night before bed. Our selection of that last one came from her interest in horror fiction, but also from the news that Mike Flanagan would be adapting it for a Netflix TV series (premiering in just two weeks now!). Most likely, we'll wrap the book up before the show's debut so we have something horror-related to savor during October.