I have been really eager to read Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns for a while now. A few weeks ago, when Ta-Nehisi Coates was locked in a very public and very entertaining debate with Jonathan Chait, Coates celebrated Wilkerson's text as, "dismantling the liberal theory of cultural degradation."The Coates v. Chait debate was about Chait's defense of President Obama's arguments regarding Black families and Black communities, arguments that posit that Black families are responsible in some way for the marginalization they now experience. Chait deemed that it was reasonable to believe that after such an era of oppression, that Black families would carry a cultural residue that now impedes success. Coates challenged Chait on this point and responded, "I think it's bizarre that he doesn't bother to see if his argument is actually true. Oppression might well produce a culture of failure. It might also produce a warrior spirit and a deep commitment to attaining the very things which had been so often withheld from you. There is no need for theorizing. The answers are knowable."
When Coates said that the answers were knowable, he specifically meant by reading texts like Wilkerson's.
As I began Wilkerson's text, I found myself thinking deeply about the ways in which we, as Teach for America and as a society (especially those who identify as "liberals"), speak about communities of color, about the marginalized. I think that we often fall into the same pitfall as Jonathan Chait and fail to do the work that Coates suggests.
I remember many conversations that were centered around the deficiencies of the students we serve, conversations about grit and the like. I have always been irked by the lack of empirical research brought into these discussions, as well as the lack of qualitative experience. With respect to the establishment of Black families in urban areas, Wilkerson very quickly disarmed some of our commonly-held assumptions about the folks who migrated North.
She writes:
Over time, the story of the Great Migration has suffered distortions that have miscast an entire population. From the moment the emigrants set foot in the North and West, they were blamed for the troubles of the cities they fled to. They were said to have brought family dysfunction with them, to more likely be out-of-work, unwed parents, and on welfare, than the people already there.
In the past twenty years, however, an altogether different picture has emerged from ongoing research by scholars of the Great Migration. Closer analysis of newly available census records has found that, contrary to conventional thought, black migrants were actually more likely to be married and to raise their children in two-parent households, and less likely to bear children out of wedlock. 'Compared with northern-born black," writes the sociologist Stewart E. Tolnay, a leading expert on the Migration, 'southern migrants had higher rates of participation in the labor force, lower levels of unemployment, higher incomes, lower levels of poverty and welfare dependency.' The lives of the people in this book bear out this more complex understanding of the Great Migration and, based on the new data, represent the more common migrant experience than many previous accounts.
It's exciting to start a book that is so widely celebrated and also one that portrays my own family's history. And, beyond that, I'm especially thrilled to have historical research to base my own analyses as I continue to move forward in my own development.
