Lessons from American Arcadia: White Spaces, Black Athletes, and Insulated Professors
In a recent conversation with a prominent Americanist, I recalled how a professor of modern architectural history from my graduate school years “really loved Los Angeles.”
“No,” the Americanist responded. “He really loved white Los Angeles.”
The distinction is spot-on. The outrageously expensive, academically nurtured creativity in the office buildings, museums, libraries, homes, and sports venues of the ultra-rich up and down the coast of Southern California is the progeny of European tradition, begetting a veritable “American Arcadia” from San Francisco to San Diego (Figures 1-4). Still, in that present moment of conversation, there remained in me a disconnect between personal memories and current interests in critical reflections on the cultural and institutional dynamics of lived space.
Figure 1. The H.F. Ahmanson Company’s “Wilshire Colonnade” completed in 1970 by architect Edward Durell Stone, imitating Bernini’s Piazza San Pietro in Rome and bringing corporate and suburban high modernism to central Los Angeles. Photograph by Redbobsled. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Figure 2. Main peristyle garden of the Getty Villa, Malibu, California, completed in the 1970s by R.E. Langdon and E.C. Wilson, modeled on the ancient Roman Villa of the Papyri near Herculaneum. Photograph by Jeremy Thompson. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Figure 3. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, completed in 1921 by Myron Hunt for the book and art collections of Henry E. and Mary de Jesus Huntington, set in lavish gardens modeled on early Modern Italian examples. Photograph by Prayitno Hadinata. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Figure 4. The Forum sports arena in Inglewood, California, completed in 1967 by Charles Luckman Associates, and the former home of the NBA Los Angeles Lakers from its opening through 1999. Its external circuit of arches and columns frame walls painted in Pompeian red, connecting its racially diverse urban setting in Inglewood with environs familiar to its white spectators. Today, the overwhelming majority of in-person spectators holding prohibitively expensive tickets remain white, despite whites forming a discrete minority of television viewers of NBA games. Photograph by Fido. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Not everyone in our classrooms may welcome the recognition of a “white Los Angeles.” Yet those who bristle at such perceived “wokeness” may not always be inclined to say so. According to a recent survey calling out the levels of threat to “free speech” at various universities, many right-wing students report self-censoring in response to a perceived discouragement of views that dissent from liberal or progressive sentiments held by instructors and peers.
Among a broad expanse of potential concerns about universities and society, some faculty members choose to decry the frustrations of these conservative and far right students who don’t feel free to express themselves. Lest we overlook efforts to protect right-wing principles and ideologies on college campuses, this focus should not surprise. The fruits of donations to universities on the part of the Koch Family Foundations and other conservative sources include the Freedom Center on my campus at the University of Arizona. And beginning in 2014, Arizona’s Republican legislators started appropriating $2.5 million of taxpayer money annually for the center. This support spawned a new Department of Political Economy and Moral Sciences, wherein high revenues have garnered leverage in negotiating policies, procedures, and faculty hiring decisions.
Those harboring visions of universities as bastions of left-wing ideology far removed from right-wing values might reflect on such centers and departments. According to the concept of “principled conservatism,” what liberals perceive as conservatives’ racism is simply resentment toward programs that foster practices aiming to support diversity, but which are functionally divisive and discriminatory toward whites, and therefore racist themselves. The same outlook justifies abhorrence of critical race theory and Black Lives Matter. Along the same lines, do right-wing students and instructors self-censor antagonism toward conservative institutions aiming at “intellectual diversity”? Or are they viewed as justifiable corrections of perceived imbalances?
Minoritized students must contend with peers and instructors who don’t recognize systemic racism while subjecting themselves to “inclusive” treatments of traditionally white-oriented subjects on the part of white instructors who claim that they do. But what cause do minoritized students really have for trusting the latter? Beyond a professor’s signaling of desired virtues and notions of self, do students experience an appreciable practical difference between those professors who voice support for diversity, equity, and belonging, and those who don’t? Considering the narrowness of many white professors’ own experiences with actual diversity, is decolonizing a syllabus sufficient if they don’t also openly share their awareness of their limited grasp of issues and their contexts?
As a case in point, like many of my own students and millions of other whites, I long ago internalized the norms of coastal California. Going back to 1992, I lived semi-permanently at the family home of a close friend in the upscale district of Brentwood. By the ultra-rich standards of those environs, it was a relatively unremarkable California ranch-style home. I didn’t have a Black friend anywhere from Pacific Palisades to Bel Air. In fact, I recall only a single Black resident in all of Brentwood: O.J. Simpson, whose fame as a former running back at USC and in the NFL had forged his path from San Francisco’s Tenderloin (Figure 5) to white Los Angeles.
Figure 5. Intersection of Turk Street and Taylor Street in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, California, where O.J. Simpson was raised prior to attending USC on an athletic scholarship in 1967-1969. Image captured on May 16, 2014. Photograph by Mobilus in Mobili. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Many whites know the pattern. Simpson represented a familiar and discouragingly inaccessible path for Blacks who come to reside in white-majority spaces. For example, my Phoenix-area high school in the 1980s boasted an enrollment over 2,000, but there was a total of only four Black students, one of whom was the child of an MLB pitcher, and another of an NBA guard.
Unlike the case of my relationship with my high school peers, I didn’t know Simpson personally. Back before the infamous double murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman next to the sidewalk on the way to our local Ralph’s supermarket, he didn’t even look at me the one time he obliged a flat smile and raised a hand in my direction while driving past. But he and I shared a connection in Brentwood: We both belonged. The difference is that he belonged because he was unfathomably accomplished, famous, rich, charming, and Praxitelian, whereas I was an unmoneyed semi-drifter possessing literally no requisite attribute other than whiteness, a kind of Kato Keilin without a B movie credit.
On the one hand, Simpson’s situatedness in Brentwood paralleled my limited understanding of the only Black man who lived in the middle-class subdivision where I had grown up in the 1970s: Jesse Owens, one of the most famous individuals of the twentieth century, who had humiliated Adolph Hitler by shattering both track-and-field records and myths of white supremacy in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin (Figure 6). To this day, I remain largely oblivious to any difficulties Owens faced in our otherwise exclusively white neighborhood (though I am aware of worrisome difficulties endured by the single Black family in the entirety of my current neighborhood). I knew Owens only as a friendly chain-smoking neighbor whom our chain-smoking neighborhood parents seemed to revere, who took a genuine interest in us, visited our classrooms, and was the only adult generous enough to drop full-sized chocolate bars into our baskets on Halloween.
“Considering the narrowness of many white professors’ own experiences with actual diversity, is decolonizing a syllabus sufficient if they don’t also openly share their awareness of their limited grasp of issues and their contexts?”
Figure 6. Jesse Owens competing in the long jump at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany. Bundesarchiv Bild 183-R96374. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-3.0 DE.
On the other hand – and as compellingly depicted in Ezra Edelman’s documentary, O.J.: Made in America – the enthusiastic acceptance of Simpson in the far more exclusive domains of Brentwood entailed not Owens’s perceived triumph over white supremacist sentiments, but rather a contrived and ultimately disastrous blindness toward them. This blindness was held on the part of both Simpson and whites who created him as a palatable illusion of their own openness. He presented as a living ideal composed of qualities possessed by nobody from any demographic.
By contrast, Draymond Green, a Black NBA player on the Golden State Warriors who earns an annual salary of well over $25 million, recently purchased the very same Brentwood property where I had spent time over so many years, and which had since been sold, razed, and rebuilt into a contemporary mansion fitted with every conceivable trapping of generic nouveau riche luxury. Though he’s one of the most intelligent players and best defenders in the world, Green’s on-court impact in no way approaches the record-breaking, on-field prowess of Simpson. His widely observed propensity for flying elbows, kicking, taunting, complaining, and numerous ejections (Figure 7) presents an antithesis of the graceful, non-threatening image of a (somehow) racially transcendent Black superstar cultivated by and for Simpson. Whatever welcome he experiences in Brentwood, Green’s challenges are signaled by the NFL’s enduring racism as well as the NBA’s own racial asymmetries, in which as many as eight in ten players are Black, compared to fewer than three in ten head coaches, two in ten general managers, and just one Black principal owner among 30 who enjoy privileges of effective impunity for racist and misogynistic behavior. Seen another way, Green’s opportunities for professional growth approximate what minoritized students may observe in the still overwhelmingly white demographic among university administrators and faculty.
Figure 7. Draymond Green (center) creating space to secure a defensive rebound by kicking and swinging an elbow during an NBA playoff game between the Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets in Oakland, California, April 28, 2019. Photograph by Mark Gunn. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-4.0.
But like the largely Black rosters of college basketball teams that our students cheer on, Green’s situatedness at least carries the promise of widespread belief that sports facilitate racial inclusion in American society. As the thinking goes, Jackie Robinson’s breaking of racial barriers to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 (Figure 8) began a process by which whites grow up idolizing Black athletes, introducing an effective counter to racism. Then again, a Black NBA player of no less stature than Bill Russell in the 1960s (Figure 9) was frequently barred from staying in the same hotel as his Boston Celtics teammates. And back home in Boston, no sellers in the white-majority suburb of Wilmington would accept Russell’s offers to buy their houses. When instead he finally moved to nearby Reading, vandals thoroughly ransacked his home, spray-painted racial epithets on the walls, and “shit in our bed.”
Still, there is a common defense at hand for the “Robinson effect.” In refusing to acknowledge systemic inequities, many whites locate their understanding of racism with the kind of violence endured by Russell. As with the torture and murder of Emmett Till in 1955, Russell’s plight supposedly belongs to an increasingly remote past prior to the conclusion of the Civil Rights Movement.
Figure 8. Jackie Robinson, the first Black player to transition from the Negro leagues to Major League Baseball 1947, shown here in batting pose while a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers (now Los Angeles Dodgers). Photograph by Bob Sandberg. Public domain.
“In line with the increasing emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion in general education requirements, we must emphasize the necessity of students confronting and overcoming their discomfort with these issues, rather than encouraging and safeguarding them.”
Figure 9. Bill Russell (left) absorbing contact on defense during the 1962 NBA Finals between the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers in Los Angeles, California. Photograph not attributed. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-3.0.
Simpson would therefore belong to a later context. Before Simpson’s NFL career, even the most famous white NBA players had to supplement their salaries with blue-collar jobs in the off-season. By contrast, Simpson secured of the sponsorship of the Hertz Car Rental Company. Yet that opportunity introduced a problematically unfamiliar image for living rooms across America: a television commercial modeling the patently unlikely scenario of white people cheering on a Black man running through a crowded airport. Although Simpson’s welcome in white Los Angeles displayed such a marked contrast with Russell’s reception in Reading, we may question whether Brentwood’s residents had been equally conditioned to accept any Black man financially able to purchase a home there.
Similarly, and despite personal willingness, white professors without sufficient personal familiarity with the challenges facing racially diverse students in white-majority spaces may not be fully prepared to appreciate the diverse assets they bring to our classroom environments. We must openly acknowledge and work on this limitation through the long, hard work of anti-bias training, but we can start immediately with something in addition to inclusive, equitable approaches to course material: We can orient our teaching toward an explicit awareness of why the facts of the following graduation rates matter: 74% for Asians (who according to the Pew Research Center self-report their highest intergroup affinity with whites), 64% for whites, 54% for Hispanics, and only 40% and 39.5% for Blacks and Indigenous Americans, respectively.
A chief obstacle to addressing this inequity is “principled” conservatism’s own concerns about racial divisiveness and issues of fairness, along with scientifically legitimized insulation from charges of racism that this outlook entails. However, newer research now to undermines those earlier claims, which common sense should recognize as shallow to begin with. Regardless of individual professors, organizations, programs and the legislators who appropriate public funding for them, our institutional policies and commitments to public service should be understood as preventing us from correlating both 1) “free speech” with intellectually unsustainable views and claims, and 2) “intellectual diversity” with actual diversity.
Our classrooms must reflect our awareness that such painfully obvious sleights of hand serve to silence and exclude minoritized students to the benefit of right-wing students who express their own frustrations at being silenced. In line with the increasing emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion in general education requirements, we must emphasize the necessity of students confronting and overcoming their discomfort with these issues, rather than encouraging and safeguarding them. And we must affirm our stance that students who would evade those opportunities to challenge themselves should not be the ones graduating with a degree validating them as educated citizens. Although earning trust on the part of our minoritized students justifiably calls for far more, the path toward getting there begins by upholding these commitments and inviting our students to hold us accountable when we don’t. For the sake of those students who overcame the higher odds even just to be in college, we must cease normalizing the experience of American Arcadia that carries such troubling familiarity for those privileged enough to have lived and left it.
Citation
John R. Senseney, “Lessons from American Arcadia: White Spaces, Black Athletes, and Insulated Professors,” PLATFORM, October 3, 2022.
