Scan barcode
A review by lpm100
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
challenging
informative
reflective
sad
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review
"The Warmth of Other Suns"
Isabel Wilkerson
5+/5 stars
Unputdownable
******
For starters: There were just a couple of minor problems here.
The first is that there were no pictures here. Not a single one of all of these interesting characters through the many printings. (Although with net searches some of the pictures could be found.)
The second is the book was a little bit wordier than it probably needed to be (although the prose was extremely light and fast reading).
*******
Sometimes books that discuss historical events are made much more believable by a well-chosen narrative arc -- which this author has provided. (Although this creates a tighter restriction of range than a history book has.)
Most blacks who grew up in the North (such as the present writer of this review) are also ancestrally from the South --in my case about 3.75 generations ago.
There were three main tributaries:
1. Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia up the Eastern seaboard to Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Boston.
2. From Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Arkansas to the industrial cities of Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh.
3. Louisiana and Texas to the entire West Coast.
What are some of the other things that we learned? (Selected listing, because the book was jam-packed with information):
1. Segregation is something that happened in the 1890s and after the Reconstruction (that is the conclusion of this author, although that point has been controversial). And the Civil Rights Act was signed a full century--5 generations --after the Emancipation Proclamation.
2. We learned a lot of details of the daily humiliations of specific people under the Jim Crow system. The people who grew up under that system (my grandmother, for the first 16 years of her life -- who is now 98) actually have very little to say about it. Movies dramatize this, but they are not written by people who are actually there, nor do we know how much artistic license they may have taken.
3. This is a specific case of something that happens, and has happened countless times throughout history: Some people from one place migrate to another, and in the process of migration stabilize and create a different culture. In this case, it is Southern Blacks transplanting their uncomfortable Southern, hickish behaviors to Northern cities (Thomas Sowell has mentioned that these blacks lived around uncouth white Southerners for centuries in his book "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" and acted EXACTLY like them).
A similar process happened 1,000 years ago in the transplant of Han Chinese from around Henan to stabilize as "Hakka People" ("guest people") locked in mutual hatred against the Cantonese/Yue people for virtually the entire time.
French farmers and Dutch sailors became, respectively, Quebecois and Afrikaners--with all the corresponding, centuries long conflicts.
Of the six main characters in The Book, I count that three were sent back to the South to be buried. (George Starling; Alice Foster; Inez Starling)
4. The scale of the migration: the Dust Bowl moved about 300K people in the 1930s, the California Gold Rush moved about 100K in the 1850s. But, the black migration went over six decades and moved 6,000K people(!).
5. The lynchings that Wilkerson describes are graphic, but they need to be put into their proper perspective. From 1889 to 1929, there were about 3,600 lynchings. One every 4 days (p.39).
-2740 Jewish people killed PER DAY in the Holocaust
-Black on black murders last year were 2,574. (That's about one year and 5 months to kill more black people than were lynched in the entire South over a 40-year period.)
6. "Ships at a distance carry every man's wish on board." The Paradise that the migrants thought would be on leaving the South was not.
Some of the Southern whites came along and continued the dislike.
Some Irish already didn't like black people.
Some other white people that were there and got put out of a job by black strike breakers liked them even less.
Some of the local whites just could not deal with such a huge influx of people with unfamiliar customs.
7. The most isolated black cities (the ones that the white people ran out of most quickly) were all receiving stations of the Great Migration. In increasing-segregation order: Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Newark, Gary, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Baltimore, St Louis.
Second order thoughts:
1. The author mentioned many cities here that became majority black as a result of the Great Migration, and every single one of them has had reduced quality of governance / other urban decay.
Detroit was a city that functioned on the river for 3 centuries---until they had enough black people there, and it just did not function anymore.
And Chicago. And Baltimore. And New Orleans. And Gary, Indiana. And so on and so on.
As much as the author wants us to believe that black people were innocent victims of this exclusion, it seems very uncomfortable that these problems did, in fact, come after they arrived.
2. What is the truth? The Thomas Sowell version of events (2005, "Black Rednecks.....") Or the Isabel Wilkerson version that talks about self-selection creating a better population of people (p.261)? Or could it be that the southern transplants were the best of a group of people that are even sorrier? (And therefore nothing to write home about.)
3. (p.290). Someone is always looking for another person that is beneath them. Northern blacks over Southern blacks. Earlier arrivals over late arrivals. Even in current times, Eastern Europeans and Arabs over black people. These other ethnic groups (which may be non-White) need not be assumed to be an automatic source of allies for black problems.
Unanswerable questions:
1. The State was unaware that these Jim Crow and various abuses were happening for almost 3/4 of a century, and it took them that long to figure out a game plan. Why would anybody rely on the state? Why are black people so married to the concept of an active state?
2. I don't know if learning history makes the problem better or worse?
Keep talking about these past events and keep revanchism alive?
Or to not remember them, but then not formally create some sense of closure and forgiveness in order to move on? (Very few foundational black Americans pick up books and read about their history; the concept of feeling aggrieved is there, but concrete reasons for feeling aggrieved are nebulous. Everybody has heard about Jim Crow, and maybe a few people know about Rosewood.)
3. What is the appropriate role of the state in population management? (With smarter government, it didn't need to be this way.)
Is it a problem of limited federalism?
Subsidiarity?
Places like Japan and China have a cultural meat grinder to make it such that everyone comes out the same (people in China have been mixing freely for many thousands of years), and they don't have this type of ethnic conflict. India and the Middle East do not, and they DO have this type of conflict. (In fact, the Chinese government freely relocates the Han ethnic majority to far out places in order to facilitate the mixing--and has been doing so for a LONG TIME.)
4. Where to draw the line between human beings that are shaped by their environment as opposed to those who really do have some agency and can make choices? People use the glib catch all explanation of "racism" to explain every disparity.
But, in reality, people do get shaped by their environment (and some historical cases have demonstrated that the first 2 decades can be the same as the next 2 millennia).
5. Is this part of bringing closure? Jews have suffered a lot more murders/pogroms over the past 20 centuries or so, and they are all consolidated into one commemorative day (Tisha b'av) so that the sense of victimhood does not bleed into everyday life. In fact, 70% of Jews marry Gentiles stateside.
Verdict: Strongly recommended.
Vocabulary:
peplum hat
bergamot wave
Stingy brim hat
portico
balustrades
Claude Neal/Lola Cannidy
Willie James Howard
Arrington High
Willis V. McCall (investigated 49 times with no convictions!)
Northern Paradox (Gunnar Myrdal)
root doctor
Quotes:
(p. 285): "I was a Southerner, and I had the map of Dixie on my tongue." (Quotable Zora Neale Hurston.)
(p.339): "Win had been blowing on the bulb until he was almost out of breath. 'Win, you can't blow it out. You got to turn it off.'"
(p.528, black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier): "Masses of ignorant, uncouth, and impoverished migrants flooded the city and change the whole structure of the n/Negro community."
"The Warmth of Other Suns"
Isabel Wilkerson
5+/5 stars
Unputdownable
******
For starters: There were just a couple of minor problems here.
The first is that there were no pictures here. Not a single one of all of these interesting characters through the many printings. (Although with net searches some of the pictures could be found.)
The second is the book was a little bit wordier than it probably needed to be (although the prose was extremely light and fast reading).
*******
Sometimes books that discuss historical events are made much more believable by a well-chosen narrative arc -- which this author has provided. (Although this creates a tighter restriction of range than a history book has.)
Most blacks who grew up in the North (such as the present writer of this review) are also ancestrally from the South --in my case about 3.75 generations ago.
There were three main tributaries:
1. Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia up the Eastern seaboard to Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Boston.
2. From Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Arkansas to the industrial cities of Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh.
3. Louisiana and Texas to the entire West Coast.
What are some of the other things that we learned? (Selected listing, because the book was jam-packed with information):
1. Segregation is something that happened in the 1890s and after the Reconstruction (that is the conclusion of this author, although that point has been controversial). And the Civil Rights Act was signed a full century--5 generations --after the Emancipation Proclamation.
2. We learned a lot of details of the daily humiliations of specific people under the Jim Crow system. The people who grew up under that system (my grandmother, for the first 16 years of her life -- who is now 98) actually have very little to say about it. Movies dramatize this, but they are not written by people who are actually there, nor do we know how much artistic license they may have taken.
3. This is a specific case of something that happens, and has happened countless times throughout history: Some people from one place migrate to another, and in the process of migration stabilize and create a different culture. In this case, it is Southern Blacks transplanting their uncomfortable Southern, hickish behaviors to Northern cities (Thomas Sowell has mentioned that these blacks lived around uncouth white Southerners for centuries in his book "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" and acted EXACTLY like them).
A similar process happened 1,000 years ago in the transplant of Han Chinese from around Henan to stabilize as "Hakka People" ("guest people") locked in mutual hatred against the Cantonese/Yue people for virtually the entire time.
French farmers and Dutch sailors became, respectively, Quebecois and Afrikaners--with all the corresponding, centuries long conflicts.
Of the six main characters in The Book, I count that three were sent back to the South to be buried. (George Starling; Alice Foster; Inez Starling)
4. The scale of the migration: the Dust Bowl moved about 300K people in the 1930s, the California Gold Rush moved about 100K in the 1850s. But, the black migration went over six decades and moved 6,000K people(!).
5. The lynchings that Wilkerson describes are graphic, but they need to be put into their proper perspective. From 1889 to 1929, there were about 3,600 lynchings. One every 4 days (p.39).
-2740 Jewish people killed PER DAY in the Holocaust
-Black on black murders last year were 2,574. (That's about one year and 5 months to kill more black people than were lynched in the entire South over a 40-year period.)
6. "Ships at a distance carry every man's wish on board." The Paradise that the migrants thought would be on leaving the South was not.
Some of the Southern whites came along and continued the dislike.
Some Irish already didn't like black people.
Some other white people that were there and got put out of a job by black strike breakers liked them even less.
Some of the local whites just could not deal with such a huge influx of people with unfamiliar customs.
7. The most isolated black cities (the ones that the white people ran out of most quickly) were all receiving stations of the Great Migration. In increasing-segregation order: Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Newark, Gary, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Baltimore, St Louis.
Second order thoughts:
1. The author mentioned many cities here that became majority black as a result of the Great Migration, and every single one of them has had reduced quality of governance / other urban decay.
Detroit was a city that functioned on the river for 3 centuries---until they had enough black people there, and it just did not function anymore.
And Chicago. And Baltimore. And New Orleans. And Gary, Indiana. And so on and so on.
As much as the author wants us to believe that black people were innocent victims of this exclusion, it seems very uncomfortable that these problems did, in fact, come after they arrived.
2. What is the truth? The Thomas Sowell version of events (2005, "Black Rednecks.....") Or the Isabel Wilkerson version that talks about self-selection creating a better population of people (p.261)? Or could it be that the southern transplants were the best of a group of people that are even sorrier? (And therefore nothing to write home about.)
3. (p.290). Someone is always looking for another person that is beneath them. Northern blacks over Southern blacks. Earlier arrivals over late arrivals. Even in current times, Eastern Europeans and Arabs over black people. These other ethnic groups (which may be non-White) need not be assumed to be an automatic source of allies for black problems.
Unanswerable questions:
1. The State was unaware that these Jim Crow and various abuses were happening for almost 3/4 of a century, and it took them that long to figure out a game plan. Why would anybody rely on the state? Why are black people so married to the concept of an active state?
2. I don't know if learning history makes the problem better or worse?
Keep talking about these past events and keep revanchism alive?
Or to not remember them, but then not formally create some sense of closure and forgiveness in order to move on? (Very few foundational black Americans pick up books and read about their history; the concept of feeling aggrieved is there, but concrete reasons for feeling aggrieved are nebulous. Everybody has heard about Jim Crow, and maybe a few people know about Rosewood.)
3. What is the appropriate role of the state in population management? (With smarter government, it didn't need to be this way.)
Is it a problem of limited federalism?
Subsidiarity?
Places like Japan and China have a cultural meat grinder to make it such that everyone comes out the same (people in China have been mixing freely for many thousands of years), and they don't have this type of ethnic conflict. India and the Middle East do not, and they DO have this type of conflict. (In fact, the Chinese government freely relocates the Han ethnic majority to far out places in order to facilitate the mixing--and has been doing so for a LONG TIME.)
4. Where to draw the line between human beings that are shaped by their environment as opposed to those who really do have some agency and can make choices? People use the glib catch all explanation of "racism" to explain every disparity.
But, in reality, people do get shaped by their environment (and some historical cases have demonstrated that the first 2 decades can be the same as the next 2 millennia).
5. Is this part of bringing closure? Jews have suffered a lot more murders/pogroms over the past 20 centuries or so, and they are all consolidated into one commemorative day (Tisha b'av) so that the sense of victimhood does not bleed into everyday life. In fact, 70% of Jews marry Gentiles stateside.
Verdict: Strongly recommended.
Vocabulary:
peplum hat
bergamot wave
Stingy brim hat
portico
balustrades
Claude Neal/Lola Cannidy
Willie James Howard
Arrington High
Willis V. McCall (investigated 49 times with no convictions!)
Northern Paradox (Gunnar Myrdal)
root doctor
Quotes:
(p. 285): "I was a Southerner, and I had the map of Dixie on my tongue." (Quotable Zora Neale Hurston.)
(p.339): "Win had been blowing on the bulb until he was almost out of breath. 'Win, you can't blow it out. You got to turn it off.'"
(p.528, black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier): "Masses of ignorant, uncouth, and impoverished migrants flooded the city and change the whole structure of the n/Negro community."