This week’s readings explored the variety of ways the built landscape affects everyday lives. From the gendered corporate landscape to eating inside the body of a racist caricature of a black woman, it is clear that the materiality of our environments has deep implications for societal response to change. The corporate world’s materiality emphasized control. Control over their employee populations, as well as control over nature. Kwolek-Folland’s article about the gendered environments of workplaces analyzes specifically insurance companies, but is broadly applicable. It was nice to see another bathroom story- again connected to who belongs in which spaces, and who must scurry down a dark hallway to find a restroom. Women’s newfound presence in the workplace was a major social shift, and workplaces responded accordingly. The new landscapes and material culture of such environments betrays an anxiety about the new problems women could bring, and the solution is separation.
The corporate campus and the office park are also a separation solution; in this case, white flight and segregation in Northern cities completes the growth of the suburban office park. As Kwolek-Folland argued in her article, the ultimate mark of standing in the turn-of-the-century office was privacy: executives and middle management had their own office, while secretaries worked in the pool. I see in Louise Mozingo’s article a similar ethos. The corporation separates itself from the cities and the urban skyscraper, connected to the rest of the world. Instead, it exists in an exclusive and publicly inaccessible landscape. Though there was some overlap in our readings, I appreciated the variety of landscapes we looked at this week. The articles with the most connection were the two about corporate landscapes, but I also saw connections between the corporate campus and the natural cemeteries. Both represent an attempt to shift the natural landscape into an ideal, though of course the respective ideals have very different aims.
Burgers in Blackface was an easy read; Naa Oyo Kwate is an excellent writer who skillfully unpacks the racist restaurants that litter the country and what it means that they persist. I was struck by the willful ignorance that both owners and patrons displayed (the attempt to suggest that ‘Sambo’ was not a racist name goes beyond the pale). In pretending that such displays are not “racial,” restaurants emphasize the connection between black labor and food service. These fantasy worlds, this racism zone, as Kwate calls it, exist outside of gains made in the Civil Rights Movement. That fantasy is reflected in the menus, in the chairs, and, in the case of restaurants like Mammy’s Cupboard and the Coon Chicken Inn, in the buildings.
I am thinking as well of the restaurants who persist because of black labor, and who traffic in perhaps less obvious but equally degrading labor practices. I was reminded of an article I read last year about a restaurant in Mississippi whose legacy is entangled with its discriminatory history, and the owner’s refusal to grapple with that history. A waiter who worked at the restaurant in the 1960s spoke out about his experiences with racist customers and the predominant reaction from the town was betrayal. In their server, Booker Wright, they saw someone amiable, “content with racial status quo.” It was his rejection of that fantasy world, his assertion of his real experiences with racist customers, which shattered the “racism zone” that white customers lived in. After he shared his experiences in a documentary, he was assaulted by a police officer. How many servers and other restaurant professionals tolerate racism or dehumanization from customers because their lives, and their livelihood is dependent on it?
Bonus article recommendation: an NYTimes article about the growing popularity of composting burials. The Sloane mentions “natural burials” briefly but if anyone is interested there is a movement to legalize composting, which is a slightly different process than just burying someone in a pine box.