|
|
|
BOOK REVIEWS
| BITTERS IN THE HONEY: TALES OF HOPE AND DISAPPOINTMENT ACROSS DIVIDES OF RACE AND TIME. By Beth Roy. Lafayette, AR: The University of Arkansas Press, 1999. 400 pp. Softbound $21.95.
|
|
Bitters in the Honey is based on a series of oral histories with white and black participants in the historic 1957 desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The book is also an example of how the practice of oral history can be an intervention as well as a research tool. The participants in the study include people who were students, parents, teachers, school administrators, and politicians in Little Rock in 1957. As oral history, the study contains much material about growing up, family experience, and developing values and beliefs. Little Rock itself is a character in this story—or perhaps two separate and unequal characters. |
1
|
|
Bitters in the Honey is about the persistence of racism and white supremacy in the United States; it is not just about Arkansas or the recalcitrant South. It is an eye-opening look at the painful details of how white supremacist assumptions and habits are instilled and performed and how denial is supported and maintained in white communities. |
2
|
|
The interviews with black former students, teachers, and administrators serve as a backdrop, a reality check. It is ironic that the black activists interviewed see themselves as having agency, while the whites—even those who were not against desegregation—view themselves as passive victims. The book has important lessons for white people and, I expect, corroborates what most people of color already know. |
3
|
|
Beth Roy is a psychotherapist and a sociologist. She is also a white woman, a long-time social justice activist, and a conflict resolution theorist and practitioner. Using oral history allows her to ground her social analysis firmly in the actual lives of participants in the historical-social and psychological phenomenon she is investigating. What is distinctive about her work is her ability to treat her white participants with respect and sympathy and understanding, even as they reveal their white supremacist worldviews. This ability seems at moments almost heroic, but I think more to the point is that it is therapeutic. She asserts, "The challenge I took on in beginning this study was to listen to the life histories of white people from Little Rock who, passively or actively, resisted desegregation in Arkansas" [my emphasis] (11). |
4
|
|
In order to "come to terms with racism," which Roy sees as "the crucial point" that will allow us to get beyond it, she believes, "[W]e must stop demonizing those who stand against social change and instead understand the perspective from which they speak" (11). Because Roy believes that people's experience of reality is real, when she heard these white Southerners say they were "the true sufferers" in the desegregation story, she set out to understand what they suffered. Her idea is that to defeat racism, we must address the suffering of white people who feel powerless in a social system that stratifies and humiliates on the basis of gender and class as well as race. |
5
|
|
This sympathy is central to two other aspects of the book that are distinctive. First, the author insists on the inter-relation between psyche and social structures: "The beliefs and attitudes we learn in the course of social interaction, at home and in the world, so fundamentally shape the direction of individual lives and the feelings we have along the way" (10). She continues, "If one posits (as I do) that individual emotions and attitudes are linked to social life and they reflect something real in lived experience, then it becomes a reasonable premise that white racism is linked to something problematic in white lives" (11). Second, Roy insists that we other whites see ourselves in the Southerners. That is, for example, that progressive white people, even anti-racists, put aside our moral superiority and see how everyday white supremacy works in all of us. This is an important and, unfortunately, cutting edge element of Bitters in the Honey. |
6
|
|
In discussing Beth Roy's sympathy with the white people she interviews, I was going to say that she does not let the sufferers be the victims they see themselves as, but that's not quite it. "Unawareness is our responsibility" (381), she writes, and she shows in living detail how passivity or silence acts to enhance the power of the unjust status quo. But it's not simply that she holds these white narrators responsible, as individuals, it's that she insists that we "good" whites hold up the lives of these frustrated, sometimes sad, and sometimes angry, often bewildered Southerners as mirrors to our own lives. And I strongly suspect that she left her narrators more actively analytical about their lives than she found them. |
7
|
|
Beth Roy challenges us to inspect our own white supremacist habits, without guilt or blame, but with an active commitment to understand how these habits fit in the social structure and within the "normal" patterns of social power. "On a cultural level, normalcy is the problem" (383). With this understanding, this acknowledgement of the social context of racism, we can, as individuals and as communities, more actively and effectively strategize together to change the world. |
8
|
| |
|
| Norma Smith |
Community Scholar
Oakland, CA |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|