Red, White, Black, and Blue: A Dual Memoir of Race and Class in Appalachia

Red, White, Black, and Blue: A Dual Memoir of Race and Class in Appalachia

Red, White, Black, and Blue: A Dual Memoir of Race and Class in Appalachia

Red, White, Black, and Blue: A Dual Memoir of Race and Class in Appalachia

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Overview

Red, White, Black, and Blue began as a collaborative memoir by William M. “Bill” Drennen, a European American, and Kojo (William T.) Jones, an African American. These Appalachian men grew up in the South Hills section of Charleston, West Virginia. As boys they played on the same Little League baseball team and experienced just one year together as schoolmates after the all-white Thomas Jefferson Junior High School was desegregated in 1955. After that, class, race, and choice separated their life experiences for forty-five years. In 1992 both had returned to Charleston from lives mostly lived elsewhere. They decided to work together on a memoir of growing up through the trauma of desegregation. Their aim was to foster understanding between their distinct cultures for themselves and for their own and future generations. Dolores Johnson, in editing the two texts, observed two very different modes of expression: Bill Drennen’s narrative is threaded with references that connote wealth, status, and personal privilege; Kojo Jones’s memoir is interwoven with African American signification, protest, and moral outrage. The stories of their Appalachian upbringing in homes less than a mile apart are anecdotal in nature, but their diverse uses of the English language as they endeavor to communicate shared memories and common meanings reveal significant cultural connotations that transform standard American English into two different languages, rendering interracial communication problematic. Dr. Johnson’s analysis is to the point. Red, White, Black, and Blue is a groundbreaking approach to studying not only cultural linguistics but also the cultural heritage of a historic time and place in America. It gives witness to the issues of race and class inherent in the way we write, speak, and think.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780821415351
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Publication date: 01/15/2004
Series: Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia
Edition description: 1
Pages: 248
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

A professor of English at Marshall University, Dolores Johnson is the author of Not a Story to Be Told: Discourse, Race, and Myth in Huntington, West Virginia Newspapers, 1872 and 1972 and articles on teaching strategies for the multicultural classroom.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrationsvii
Series Editor's Prefaceix
Authors' Prefacexiii
Acknowledgmentsxv
Introductionxvii
Part 1.Where We Are Today
Chapter 1."Who the Hell Is Kojo?"3
Chapter 2."I Am Probably a Typical White Man"5
Part 2.Whence We Have Come
Chapter 3.Growing Up White9
Chapter 4.Growing Up Black43
Part 3.Where We Have Been
Chapter 5.Living Class73
Chapter 6.Living Race117
Part 4.How We See It Now
Chapter 7.A Reflection147
Chapter 8.Two Letters151
Part 5.Analysis
Chapter 9.The Language of Red, White, Black, and Blue157
Chapter 10.Mastering the Mix197
Appendix201
Bibliography207
Index211
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