Racial Asymmetries. Stephen Hong Sohn
to Levittown, one of the model housing communities that induced the white-flight phenomenon.15 According to the urban studies scholar Paul Knox, “Without doubt the most famous was the original Levittown on Long Island, begun in 1947 by Abraham Levitt and his sons William and Alfred. They were the first large-scale developers to apply a highly rationalized, assembly-line approach to residential development” (26).16 With the support of both the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Veterans’ Administration (VA), the construction and success of Levittown was predicated on racial segregation.17 As the sociologists Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro note, “the most basic sentiment underlying the FHA’s concern was its fear that property values would decline if a rigid black and white segregation was not maintained” (18), thus paving the way for suburban homogeneity constructed around racial divides.18 The cultural critic Robert Sickels explains that preferential treatment to white veterans also compounded the problems of suburban racial integration in the post–World War II period: “The government instituted the G.I. Bill of Rights, which offered ‘qualified’ veterans job training, money for schooling, and, perhaps most importantly, money to buy their own homes. While this was a wonderful opportunity for white soldiers, many minority veterans were excluded from the process” (68). Not only did suburbanization create “white” havens, but the impulse to exclude racial minorities in Long Island also functioned through systematic removal of such populations already living in areas desired for more development (Wiese, “Racial Cleansing” 61, 63). Although great numbers of racial minorities have always resided in Long Island, the centralization of racial populations in distinct areas raises major questions concerning the racial-steering and fair-housing laws.
Racial minorities who did attempt to integrate were often met with incredible obstacles and overt racism. As one scholar explains, “Look magazine ran an article in August 1958 of the first black couple, William and Daisy Myers, to move into Dogwood Hollow (a section of Levittown, Pennsylvania); they were subject to vandalism, physical threats, a flaming cross on the lawn, and ‘KKK’ painted on their friendly neighbour’s house before state authorities could intervene” (Halliwell 34). The class studies scholar Robert E. Weir adds that “as late as 2000 Levittown, New York, was over 94 percent white, and fewer than 1 percent of its residents were African Americans” (454). Major New York City publications have reported on the racial tensions within the area.19 Bruce Lambert writes, for example, that “the federal census shows that Long Island continues to be among the most segregated areas in America”: “eighty-four percent of whites on Long Island live in white neighborhoods, it said, while nonwhites are concentrated in other neighborhoods” (“Long Island Has Failed”). Another report summarily calls Long Island “the nation’s most segregated suburb” (Lambert, “Study Calls L.I.”).20 The autoethnographer Lorraine Delia Kenny asserts that despite the growing heterogeneity of places like suburban Long Island, “many communities are still, for the most part, the lily-white enclaves that the post–World War II generation settled and consolidated in the decades after the war” (6). In light of these contexts, one can reconsider Jerry’s gaze, flying above the suburban communities, as glossing over the complicated milieu of Long Island’s local race relations. As he views the houses as repetitive geometric shapes below him, the question of who gets to reside within those homes is conveniently ignored. His viewpoint is timeless, enabling him to leave social issues behind.
These social contexts allow us also to revisit and reconsider Jerry’s interactions with Hal and how his thoughts do not explicitly engage racial prejudice as it has long affected the area. Hal connotes an anomalous presence that, when cast in the historical trajectory of racist housing policies, suburban segregation, and the potential bodily harm that integration could incite, suggests that Long Island’s structural perfection comes at a price. Jerry’s concern for his children also implies that he is aware that his mixed-race children are not the norm, but he does not make an unequivocal connection between their racial status and Long Island’s spatial politics. As such, when racism appears as a masked tension in the conversation between Hal and Jerry, readers understand how white exclusivity functions through coded language. Before Jerry purchases the plane, Hal asks him whether he is serious: “because sometimes guys realize at the last second they don’t want to buy a used plane. You know what I’m talking about, Jerry?” (12, emphasis in original). Prior to responding, Jerry grants the readers this perspective, concerning a couple trying to sell their “mansion in Old Westbury”: “They had lots of lookers, but no offers, so they lowered the price, twice in fact. So the listing agent suggested they consider ‘depersonalizing’ the house, by which she meant taking down the family pictures, and anything else like it, as the owners were black” (12–13). At no point does either character mention race in direct conversation, but Jerry implies that the homebuyers are prejudiced. At the same time, this event is narrated in isolation and thus obscures the larger issue of suburban housing policies and cultural practices that function to exclude minority sellers and buyers. Jerry’s awareness of how race can be encrypted in daily conversation demonstrates the veil that covers racial discourses in this suburban area. In some sense, Jerry is uniquely attuned to such coded language precisely because he is in the business of facades. Though he and his construction company are hired to help make homes look attractive to homebuyers, this veneer is only one component of the way that capital changes hands within an exclusive suburban area. Doublespeak surfaces everywhere, as racial difference is transformed into words such as “depersonalizing,” and homeowners desire more than a stunning property. Jerry’s thoughts ultimately reveal no clear sense that African American residents of Long Island have faced systematic racism through property issues. Jerry thus fails to contextualize Long Island as a center of continuing racial division. While the readers can potentially make this larger correlation, the way in which Jerry presents such information individualizes it. Hal and these black homeowners exist as but two examples of what Jerry would perceive as blips on the racial minority radar. This moment also recalls the earlier definitions offered by scholars such as Ian F. Haney-López, Cheryl I. Harris, and George Lipsitz, in which property ownership was used to shore up whiteness and white identity. Even in the context of a post–civil rights moment, this novel demonstrates how white identity still emerges through, in this case, the ability to buy or sell a home.
Consequently, Jerry’s supposed multicultural ethos has its limits, revealed especially at points where his daughter Theresa is concerned. Jerry uses the term “Asian American” to describe both his daughter and her fiancé, Paul Pyun; as he admits, “I’m to say, ‘Asian-American,’ partly because they always do, and not only because my usage of the old standby ‘Oriental’ offends them on many personal and theoretical levels, but also because I should begin to reenvision myself as a multicultural being” (29). This passage hinges on the word “should,” in that Jerry understands that there is pressure for him to develop a kind of race consciousness, especially in his approach to politically sanctioned terminology. Here, Jerry reveals that “he doesn’t quite appreciate what all the fuss is about” (29), a statement illustrating he has much further to go in terms of becoming the “multicultural being” he feels others expect him to be. His willingness to go along with calling Paul or Theresa “Asian-American” stems not from a concerned sense of race consciousness but from what appears to be more socially acceptable. In other words, this moment reveals how much Jerry’s actions and spoken words are a performance masking a racialized ideology. Jerry, who as a white, heterosexual, upwardly mobile male living in an affluent suburb of New York has never been outside the norm, does not concede how damaging the word “Oriental” has been to Asian Americans as a racial group. Further, the term “Asian-American” is notated with the hyphen in Jerry’s narration, which recalls the long debates about how to designate the relationship between Asia and America. The more commonly employed usage is “Asian American,” where the hyphen is absent. However, the inclusion of the hyphenated punctuation serves as a reminder of the quite minute ways that Jerry fails to exist as a “multicultural being.” Perhaps there is a larger gap between Asian Americans and European Americans than Jerry would like to admit. Jerry’s rhetoric in this passage is of color-blindness, in which race should not necessarily be a factor in how one views another.
As such, why should it matter what he calls his daughter or future son-in-law anyway, since he loves them? But such a question fails to frame his daughter or son-in-law (or wife and son)