Ask not for whom the train waits

[muckefuck]

There's an old racist joke I remember from my childhood which goes:

Q: What has four arms, four legs, and goes, "Ho-dee-do! Ho-dee-do!"
A: Two black men running for the elevator.

I didn't hear this from anyone in my Mom's family--not that it would've been completely out of character for them. Rather I clearly recall reading it somewhere, though now I can't remember whether that was Maledicta or some old joke book. At the time, I was put off by the mean-spiritedness of the dialect humour. (We, of course, had always been taught that making fun of the way someone talks is one of the meanest things you can do and I was especially sensitive to this due to my stammering.) But that's not all that's being lampooned here.

I recalled this today on my way into work because the northbound train pulled into the station just as I reached the viaduct. I know from experience that even running full tilt at that point won't get you to the train in time; you'll just be sweaty, out-of-breath, agitated, and late. So I shrugged my shoulders and resigned myself to making it in five minutes after nine.

The woman behind me didn't share my fatalism. She broke into a run, her flip-flops clopping wildly, and when she hit the stairs she started screaming "HOLD THE TRAIN! HOLD THE TRAIN!" None of the passengers paid any heed. (Why should they? They've got places to go and holding the door only angers the driver and makes other passengers resentful.) By the time she made it to the top, the doors had snapped shut and the train was pulling away.

Perhaps I could comprehend this kind of carrying on if, say, it were midnight and this was the last train of the night. But this is rush hour on the el; there's another train only minutes behind this one. (In this case, four minutes. Even I was surprised; they even held the shuttle at Howard, so I made it to work with enough time to stop off for breakfast before sauntering in perfectly punctually.)

Given the confusing intersection of race, class, and culture in US society, I'm not sure how to deconstruct my associations. Certainly, being taught to accept missing a train or elevator with equanimity fits in with my identification of Restraint as the cardinal virtue of the petite-bourgeoisie: Don't lose your composure. Don't make a spectacle of yourself. Don't presume upon strangers. The most that's allowed is a moderate dash towards the door, a slightly amplified, "Hold, please!" as you draw near, and a mild expression of disgust if, after all that, you still miss your ride.

That doesn't mean I've never seen middle-class people run for the el, but in this case it's something I associate with adolescents (particularly naïve students) rather than adults. But am I filtering? Does having grown up with a stereotype of lower-class Blacks as excessively expressive lead to observational bias? Do I unconsciously rationalise away similar activity from non-Blacks? ("Oh, they must be tourists; they're used to the Metra and don't know how often the trains run." "Oh, she must have an interview this morning.") Almost certainly true on all counts, but when you strip out these effects, are you left with any valid observations and, if so, how to account for them?

(One theory I've subscribed to before is success: I used to be more ready to run for buses than el trains, because their schedules are often even more erratic and it may be as much as an hour before the next one. But over time I noticed a subtle bias on the part of the chiefly-African-American drivers that another friend of mine summarised as, "I don't run for the bus. Maybe if I were a Black woman, I'd have a chance, but the drivers won't wait for me."

However, the same generalisation doesn't seem to hold for el trains. The drivers on the Linden line in particular are very good about holding the train when they see people coming, whatever their race, particularly at my stop where the stairs are directly in front of their cabs. In fact, it can border on the annoying as the train make two or even three false starts out of the station. And it shouldn't make any difference at all for elevators.)

Comments

[kcatalyst.livejournal.com]

The expressivity issue reminded me of a great paper, basically about that and a bunch more.

Bailey, Benjamin. 2000. Communicative behavior and conflict between African-American customers and Korean immigrant retailers in Los Angeles. Discourse & Society, 11(1): 86-108.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Thanks. It's an interesting article overall (particularly the bit about lack of accommodation as a mechanism to reinforce social boundaries), but I do think it omits a extremely salient feature of the situation, and that is the inherently adversarial relationship between customers and vendors.

I never thought about this much until I read Margery Wolf's The house of Lim, an ethnographical study of a Taiwanese village. The small retailers in these villages are typically drawn from the local community, which embeds them in a complex web of social relationships. The customers are always foregrounding these relationships in order to claim benefits--chiefly the ability to purchase items on credit. Given the small margins these retailers operate on, it doesn't take many bad debts to pull them under. (IIRC, Wolf provides at least one example of this occurring during her period of study.)

This is, I think, a large part of the reason that retailing even at this level is often done by members of a different community. With fewer social obligations, the storekeeper is freer to refuse credit, which is a necessary strategy to preserve operating capital. The "friendliness" of the customers is easily interpreted by the shopkeeper as a an attempt to create social obligations that may compromise his business activities. How big a leap is it from remembering that a certain customer is on disability and smokes Winstons to being asked to give him a pack of Winstons on credit until his next check arrives?

It's really a shame there were no African-American store owners for this survey. One of the major reasons given for the lack of them in inner-city communities has always been racism. That's undoubtedly a factor, but I would be interested in seeing to what extant the pull of strong social obligations to the immediate community makes keeping such a business solvent more difficult that it would be for people from outside the community who maintain a clear social distance from it.

[kcatalyst.livejournal.com]

I'm sure that's a factor, although I'm dubious on it being a stronger factor than Black merchants having trouble getting loans and other forms of institutional support. I recently finished Sudhir Venkatesh's "Off the books" and he talks a lot about this kind of interdependence in ways that I think would support your idea of it mattering. But he also seems to think that the lack of governmental and bank support is the more critical factor.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I never meant to suggest it was necessarily a stronger factor. But there's got to be more to the discrepancy than a lack of institutional support because immigrant merchants have been finding ways around that for years now (generally by pooling resources within the ethnic community, for example by means of the Korean gye).

[kcatalyst.livejournal.com]

Ah, I misunderstood. I agree, I think it would be interesting to find out the degree to which such social obligations are relevant. Particularly since the pooling resources idea is essentially the same thing--- what makes it a positive economic factor in one case and negative in the other?

[lhn.livejournal.com]

The above discussion suggests that it's a negative factor if you're trying to do retail within your own community, a positive factor if you're pooling money in the community to do business elsewhere. As to why you don't get African-American shopowners in white or Latino neighborhoods, I'd guess the answer is complex. (Racism is doubtless a factor, but "despised minority" is practically in the job description for small merchants and shopowners, over and over in history, so that alone can't be dispositive.)

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

there's a literature, focused on SE Asia, that talks about a tradition of mercantile diasporas, where members of an ethnic group will form a far-flung network to act as conduits for the products of their own culture among neighbouring groups. This tradition leads in turn to a tradition of shopkeepers always being "foreign," having a special status as merchants, but most of all having no other, pre-existing local status that might conflict with their shopkeeperliness. It's always dangerous to try to export anthropological findings from one place to another, but maybe African-American shopowners aren't 'foreign' enough: they already have a societal place and it's therefore difficult for them to recast themselves as strangers.

All that said, I'm not sure whites like me have 'communities' that would matter in this case, for forming in- and out-group relations. I've certainly never belonged to one.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

It's always dangerous to try to export anthropological findings from one place to another, but maybe African-American shopowners aren't 'foreign' enough: they already have a societal place and it's therefore difficult for them to recast themselves as strangers.

The extent to which they've had a place has varied. (I remember an African-American newspaper columnist writing about the time he lived in, IIRC, North Dakota, and found that he encountered little-to-no visible prejudice. He thought he'd entered some sort of promised land... till he heard his neighbors talk about American Indians.) Prior to the Great Migration, there were plenty of northern and western cities with relatively little in the way of African-American population, and in which racial dynamics could and did change (relative to both their previous conditions and the old South) as a result of the influx.

I'm also not sure to what extent acting as conduits for the products of their own culture is central for small merchants. In the Western cases I can think of, it's not as obviously a factor, whether looking historically at Jewish merchants or currently at Indians and Koreans in the US.

Some of this may be a selection effect: most cultures don't produce mechanisms for this kind of capital formation, but the ones who aren't already present aren't going to result in large immigrant populations in a given foreign country. (Unless there's some other driver of immigration-- e.g., the labor market for Latin American immigration in the US.) So there are Korean or Indian merchants in the US, whereas the lack of (e.g.) Mongolians pooling their resources in this way just means there isn't a big Mongolian immigrant population. Conversely, if a population already exists in a country it's going to be there, whether or not it devises such a mechanism. So the question may not be "Why doesn't group X develop this cultural characteristic?", but "Why do a small number of groups do so?"

[mawombat.livejournal.com]

my time is precious to me, so I yell in a barrel-chested voice (not a scream for help, but a kind of booming) "WAITTTTTTT@!!!!"

For your survey purposes, I am white, female, 32, middle to upper middle class depending on whether you look at my origins or me now, and from Chicago. Irish-German.
:)

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

I've run for the El and made it. But I don't always run, since my knees don't like me to run downstairs.

[bwillsouth.livejournal.com]

Huh! I remember that joke as well. I'm trying to think of other cases where black people are stereotyped as being overemotional and panicky. I know there are a lot, but my mind is blanking at the moment. That said, and you may have seen this, but someting to brighten your day (http://youtube.com/watch?v=Iqb85Krkrrs) with love and tolerance.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I was wondering today if that "joke" had originally been targeted at Pullman operators, who would have professional reasons for wanting to be sure they were on the train on time.

Then I reread it just now and saw it refers to elevators. (Elevator operators, perhaps? But they'd be the ones holding the door for other people.)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I don't see any reason to suspect it targeted a particular occupational group rather than a certain ethnic one. What I'm unsure about is the socioeconomic dimension. In general, the lower orders are stereotyped as more emotive and expressive, but I can't think of any jokes that stereotype, say, poor Appalachians in the same way that this one does Blacks.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Pullman porters were almost always African-American, and it was one of the higher-profile "black" jobs to white middle-class Americans. That's why I wondered. I have no way of knowing, of course (and perhaps am happier not knowing).

[wwidsith.livejournal.com]

As you say so neatly, the intersections between class and race obscure much. But my instinct with this is that it's mainly a class thing – only because over here, when I think of stereotyped over-expressiveness, I am most likely to think of a good-ol' chav. But here colour does not have the class associations it does in the States (which is why we have to rely on accents and other shibboleths for our casual discrimination).