The primary focus of this discussion concerning racial geography (how is racial difference literally mapped) has shifted in the last fifty years from a concern for physical segregation to attention to the ways in which blacks and whites reside in different places in the popular culture. Further, the ways in which black and whites "travel" to and through different racial locales have similarly changed. In recent years, the physical separation of the races is still very real and there is still discussion about this, but the integrationist ideas that were widely advocated in the 1950s and 60s are much less in vogue. Indeed, many black leaders today are advocating segregation. In the arena of popular culture, however, whites and blacks are visiting other "racial places" in much the same way that people did by traveling between uptown and downtown Manhattan in the past. In music, television, and fashion, a new racial geography is being constructed. A white person no long has to travel to Harlem to go to a jazz club, he can click to BET on his television. Cultural critics are less concerned with the human cost of separating whites and blacks from each other in our cities and suburbs than they are with the extent of crossing-over that is taking place between the races in the popular culture. While affirmative action and busing are being eliminated, a new racial geographyon the cultural landscapeis taking hold. This geography can be compared to the physical separation that marked the immediate postwar period and is manifest in the writings of James Baldwin. In some of his earlier fiction ("Previous Condition" and Another Country), James Baldwin constructs a map of Manhattan in terms of racial geography, and this map is the generating terrain of the narrative elements of his stories. His black and white characters visit "other" places. At times, the purpose of these visits is, for Baldwin, to reveal racial difference. But Baldwin is also interested in offering the possibility of overcoming racial difference through integration or a change in the physical geography. The separation of racial spaces and the "travel" between them has been newly configured. But the possibility for bridging the distance exists within the new racial geography, as well.

In a recent appearance on The Charlie Rose Show, rap star LL Cool J explained that fifty-five percent of sales of rap music are to white buyers. Charlie Rose asked, Why do you think that is? and yet the discussion that ensued was primarily focused on the results of the phenomenon -- rap sales are huge -- rather than its causes or consequences. LL Cool J argued that the most important feature of this cultural crossing-over is not that suburban white youths are getting a taste of black culture, but rather that black artists are able to participate in capitalist (white) culture because white kids are buying the albums. Beyond the interesting reversal in the direction of crossing-over that is part of the specific content of this TV exchange, though, lies an even more important development in what might be called racial geography. There is nothing new about whites being interested in and experiencing black culture (or, for that matter, in the valuation of black participation in American capitalism), but the nature of that experience has changed dramatically in the past fifty years. And further, as the Charlie Rose example demonstrates, the issue of racial geography now exists primarily on a level of cultural discourse that is distinctly removed from the direct examination of the physical location of blacks and whites that dominated this issue in the immediate postwar period.

Todays cultural critics tend to focus more on the crossing-over that takes place between whites and blacks on a level of cultural discourse instead of the possibility and ramifications of actual physical interaction. This is not to say that writers in the past did not engage in discussions of the cultural implications of black/white interaction. Indeed, there is a rich history of such discourse, but it arises from the observed effects on people who actually went to other places and were changed as a result. These discussions, for example, are about whites going into black neighborhoods and hearing the blues and jazz live. They are also about black exclusion from the benefits of white appropriation of their culture. In the immediate postwar period, racial integration was a significant national issue, and it was widely viewed as an important remedy for discrimination, as in the Brown decision. And further, in northern cities, whites were venturing into black neighborhoods (to an even greater extent than they had in the 1920s and 30s) for a range of stimulation. In the early 1950s, Jack Kerouac (1957) wrote in On The Road, At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night (p. 148). And in Howl, Allen Ginsberg (1980) wrote, I saw the best minds of my generation...dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix (p. 9). Imanu Amiri Baraka (1963) explained the Beats interest in jazz: But the music was a feast to the rhythm-starved young white intellectuals as well as to those young Negroes uncommitted to the dubious virtues of the white middle class, who were still capable of accepting emotion that came from outside the shoddy cornucopia of popular American culture (p. 200).

But the Beats were not representative of mainstream culture. They were a vanguard, stretching the limits of what was not only acceptable, but even printable and speakable, to the bulk of the white population. These limits involved sex and sexual orientation, drug use, the repudiation of consumerism, militarism and the stable family unit, and, most importantly for this discussion, white interaction with blacks. Their urge was to experience black culture, and that meant traveling to black neighborhoods and knowing it in person. These journeys highlighted the reality that these neighborhoods were separated from the white world. For the Beats, the only way to sate their desire for things black was to physically go to a black place.

In the 1950s, Norman Mailer (1957) entitled his essay on the Beat generation The White Negro, and in it he predicted that one possible outcome of the hipster movement would be desegregation and miscegenation. Here, on the level of cultural criticism, the discussion is about blacks and whites occupying, not only the same cultural space, but the same physical space as well.

The Beats were aware of and even relished the idea that the black spaces they entered were marginal, alienated and separated from the white mainstream. In his discussion of white hipsters in the 1940s and 50s, Baraka explained:

                Certainly a white man wearing a zoot suit or talking bop talk cannot enter into the
                mainstream of American society....His behavior is indicative on most levels of a
                conscious nonconformity to important requirements of the society (though the poor
                white boy in a really integrated neighborhood might pick up these elements of
                Negro culture as social graces within his immediate group)....the white musicians
                and other young whites who associated themselves with this Negro music
                identified the Negro with this separation, this nonconformity, though, of course,
                the Negro himself had no choice. (p. 187)

White interest and participation in black culture, then, in the immediate postwar era, incorporated a sensibility concerning the physical separation of the races. The beat or hipster who went to the jazz club or moved to a black neighborhood was affirming the reality and significance of the prevailing racial geography by choosing to attempt to make black marginalization his own. Of course, the issue will have to be addressed concerning what has happened to the cost incurred by the white person for these cross-cultural excursions. Surely, the white suburbanite who wears over-sized jeans, a baggy Tommy jacket and untied Nikes, and who listens to Rap music and makes gang signals with his hands, is not risking as much as Mailers and Barakas hipster. Could this be because crossing-over in the popular culture today has very little to do with the threatening prospect of actual, physical cross-overs? (Later, bro).

In some of his fiction written in the 1940s, 50s and early 60s, James Baldwin provides graphic representations of both the prevailing racial geography and its cultural implications. He is directly concerned with the challenges and costs of black/white interaction and deeply aware of the racial map that existed in New York City at that time. In "Previous Condition," a short story written in 1948, the protagonist, Peter, a young, struggling, black actor, is thrown out of the all-white apartment building he has been living in in mostly white Greenwich Village and finds he does not fit in anywhere, even uptown in mostly black Harlem. Peter, like Baldwin himself, has physically lived in both white and black spaces and participated in their respective cultures, and the result of this experience is his feeling of being in a state of exile. Peter's (and Baldwins) sense of dislocation or homelessness arises, from the segregated society he lives in and his vivid consciousness of the way that culture affects himself and others. Peters girlfriend, Ida, is white, and his friend Jules is a white jew. As an actor, Peter finds himself cast in racially stereotyped roles. Before coming to New York, Peter had been in a show in Chicago in which he "played a kind of intellectual Uncle Tom, a young college student working for his race" (Baldwin 1948, p. 334). When Ida and Peter are having dinner in an Italian restaurant, they joke about Peter's acting prospects: "Metro offered me a fortune to come to the coast and do the lead in Native Son but I turned it down. Type casting, you know. It's so difficult to find a decent part" (p.339). Peter also tells Jules, "I'm not Booker T. Washington. I've got no vision of emancipating anybody. I want to emancipate myself" (p. 339).

Peter is a frequent traveler through both the black and white worlds, and as such he is able to discover that the stereotypes and identity categories that result from this separation exclude Baldwins vision of a more humanistic society. For Baldwin, the experience of actually occupying both black and white spaces results first in an understanding of the cost of that separation:

                I longed for some opening, some sign, something to make me a part of the life around me.
                But there was nothing except my color. A white outsider coming in would have seen a
                young Negro drinking in a Negro bar, perfectly in his element, in his place, as the
                saying goes. But the people here knew differently, as I did. I didn't seem to have a
                place (Baldwin 19488, p. 342).

Later Baldwin asserted that it is only through physical interaction between blacks and whites (including, and almost especially, sexual interaction) in his novel, Another Country, written throughout the 1950s and published in 1962, that the sense of alienation experienced by Peter and the characters in Another Country could be overcome. In Another Country, Baldwin uses the term "place" to refer to both Manhattan geography and racial identity categories just as he does in Previous Condition. The association of downtown with the white world and uptown with the black, and Peter's travels between the two worlds on the subway, mimics Baldwin's New York experience, as well as Rufus's in Another Country. The separateness of the two worlds and the confusion of traveling between them is also experienced by the other characters in the novel. Other issues -- gender, sex and sexuality -- are mapped onto the segregated landscape. The characters also experience the sense of disconnectedness and homelessness that Peter does, but they also struggle, with varying degree of success, to resolve these issues through forays into other spaces.

In Another Country, the racial geography is represented both literally and metaphorically through the subway that transports the characters back and forth between uptown and downtown. Rufus rides the A train on the last night of his life. The train is moving from downtown (white) to uptown (black), but the passengers are not able to bridge this division because they exist in "isolation cells." Rufus stays on the train, past thirty-fourth street which is described as "his stop." At the beginning of the novel, which is also the beginning of Rufus's last night, Rufus is in midtown allowing a white man who wants to have sex with him to buy him a meal. The linking of Rufus with midtown is meant to position him in a void-space, not only physically between Harlem and the Village, but between the race, gender and sexuality categories that dominate Baldwins New York cultural landscape. The subway train takes him under and past this place and is the conveyance taking Rufus to his death. The figurative expression of racial division and its attending interpersonal alienation, the train, is also the literal means by which Rufus travels to the George Washington Bridge so that he can jump off. The subway ride is used to symbolize the relationship between New York's racial divide and its sexual culture:

                Many white people and many black people, chained together in time and in space,
                and by history, and all of them in a hurry. In a hurry to get away from each other, he
                thought, but we ain't never going to make it. We been fucked for fair...The train, as
                though protesting its heavier burden, as though protesting the proximity of white
                buttock to black knee, groaned, lurched, the wheels seemed to scrape the track, making
                a tearing sound...The train rushed into the blackness with a phallic abandon, into the
                blackness which opened to receive it, opened, opened, the world shook with their
                coupling...The train gasped and moaned to a halt. (Baldwin 1962, p. 86)

Over the course of Rufuss fateful ride, Baldwin graphically represents the physical location of blacks and whites. The white riders get off at 59th Street in order to change to local trains which will take them to their Upper West Side neighborhoods. The black passengers stay on the express train to 125th Street, Harlem, their stop. This physical racial orientation is the source of trouble for Rufus and the other characters in the novel. Their attempts to overcome their sense of alienation and isolation are manifest in their travels to and through these different places in Manhattan.

Before becoming involved with Ida, Rufuss sister, Vivaldo, a white struggling writer, takes the subway to Harlem to sleep with black prostitutes. Baldwin (1962) describes his actions as taking refuge in the outward adventure in order to avoid the clash and tension of the adventure proceeding inexorably within (p. 133). And the blacks in Harlem understand his plight:He was just a poor white boy in trouble and it was not in the least original of him to come running to the niggers (p. 133). Inversely, Idas past is similarly colored. She explains to Vivaldo in the novels closing pages the way that the society's racial and sexual configurations have damaged her and prevented her from loving:

                There was only one thing for me to do, as Rufus used to say, and that was to hit the
                A train. So I hit it. Nothing was clear in my mind at first. I used to see the way
                white men watched me, like dogs. And I thought about what I could do to them. How
                I hated them, the way they looked, and the things they'd say, all dressed up in their
                damn white skin, and their clothes just so, and their little weak, white pricks jumping
                in their drawers. You could do any damn thing with them if you just led them along,
                because they wanted to do something dirty and they knew that you knew how.
                All black people knew that. Only, the polite ones didn't say dirty. They said real.
                I used to wonder what in the world they did in bed, white people I mean, between
                themselves, to get them so sick. Because they are sick, and I'm telling something
                that I know. (p. 419)

Idas "hitting of the A train" is as it was for Rufus and Vivaldo just another attempt to negotiate the distance between black and white through sex. But it also enables her to know white people, despite the horror of the knowledge she attains.

These works by Baldwin reveal the centrality of physical, racial segregation to his and others understandings of the American racial conversation of the immediate postwar era. He identifies the reality of, and reasons for, both black and white travel to and from the different racial locales. But most importantly, he advocates black/white interaction as necessary for the healing and maturation of American culture. As he wrote in the Fire Next Time, In short, we, the black and the white, deeply need each other if we are really to become a nation (Baldwin 1963, p. 78).

As the 1960s wore on through war, assassinations and rioting, and as the Civil Rights Movement won great victories in the areas of legal segregation and discrimination and voting rights, the integrationist ideals of Baldwin, and of course, Dr. King, were replaced by black nationalist and separatist ideology and a white backlash against the hard-fought black gains. These political developments contributed to the shift in focus concerning racial geography away from the physical to the discursive. Eldridge Cleaver denounced the advocacy of integration as a pathology of black self-hatred, a racial death-wish (1991, p. 91). Conservative whites subverted the language of the Civil Rights Movement and called for a color-blind society in their attacks on affirmative action. And within the arena of popular culture, the music and styles of black culture that had seduced the Beats and others were appropriated and watered-down by mainstream, white, consumer culture.

The Beats interest in jazz did not propel any black artists to the top of the charts, but eventually mainstream white culture did, in a sense, follow the Beats onto the negro streets. This journey, though, was undertaken vicariously through rock and roll and, principally, Elvis. Early Elvis embodied several features of the racial geography that existed in the 1950s, and as a cultural phenomenon, he generated discussions that were colored by the reality of the physical separation of blacks and whites. The fact that Elvis took an age-old black musical form and was able to bring it to a white audience because he was white himself is a long understood fact. But he was able to do this, in part, because, like the Beats, he experienced black culture first-hand. As a poor southern white boy growing up, he lived in close proximity to similarly poor blacks and saw their churches and heard their music in person (Marcus 1990). But ultimately, the Elvis phenomenon is most significant for its effect of diminishing the direct experience of black culture by whites. Young, white rock and roll fans were able to enjoy the black musical form without having to cross the tracks or travel uptown to Harlem. Initially, the negative response to Elvis and rock and roll generally was because of its cultural proximity to blacks and the attending sexual threat which historically lay behind much of American racism. Yet, as unseemly as Elvis appeared to white parents as the object of their childrens sexual fantasies (and maybe theirs, too), he was still white, and therefore, eventually softened the threat of black sexuality invading white homes. Elvis took the rush of excitement the Beats and others had known through their sojourns into the black neighborhoods and made it into a risky, but nonetheless consumable, commodity for white, mainstream culture. This phenomenon was repeated continuously in the popular culture throughout the postwar years (Travolta, the Bee Gees and disco; the white, yuppie rediscovery of Motown in the 1980s after The Big Chill) and served to further aid the shift in discussions of race away from actual physical interaction and toward a concept of racial geography that exists on a level of discourse alone.

The net effect of this shift is that it is now possible for whites, particularly the young, to buy LL Cool Js and others music, to wear black fashions and to imitate black speech without triggering an outpouring of fear that this will lead to wholesale integration and miscegenation. Michael Eric Dyson (1947) argued that the public outcry over gangsta rap is based on the old, white fears of a black sexual invasion: And now that white girls are driven crazy by Snoop Doggy Doggs canine comeliness, especially when theres no doubt about what he wants to do in his dog pound, rap and the culture that produces it are found wanting (p. 116). But while there might be discussion about gangsta rap being offensive or wanting, there is no realistic fear that Snoop and his pound are on their way to white suburbia. That battle, that argument was abandoned some time ago. The scary black culture is safely confined to Compton or East New York, and no one is really talking about changing that. The music that comes out of that culture may get some negative attention, but ultimately that attention is overwhelmed by the enormous amount of revenue generated by the entertainment and fashion industries. MTV learned this lesson in the mid-1980s when they changed their programming from mostly heavy metal and bland English pop to an emphasis on rap. In the end, the discussion ends with the slicing of the pie and the distribution of the slices, as LL Cool J demonstrated with Charlie Rose.

These developments in the popular culture have coincided with the de-racialization process that has taken place in the political and legal arenas in the discursive form of the color-blind society. Kimberle Williams Crenshaw (1997) calls this the e-racing of the dynamics of racial power: E-racing neither forestalls the redeployment of racist discourses nor buries the color line beyond discovery....Race, suspended in the buffer zone, remains ready to reappear as an interpretive frame to justify racial disparities in American life and to legitimize, when necessary, the marginalization and the circumvention of African Americans (p. 103). In other words, the verbal word-play engaged in by conservatives, together with a popular culture that champions a chimeric brand of crossing-over, both negates the prospect of real black/white interaction and allows for the invocation of negative racial discourse when it seems to be politically expedient.

Of course, in the post-modern era with its re-presented, re-cycled cultural forms, the possibility of a racial geography that takes into account the physical positioning of blacks and whites and thereby affords the prospect of interracial travel becomes even more remote. As Dyson (1997) wrote, In the 60s and before, acts of hatred had symbolic clarity because blacks and whites shared an ecology of race....But in our more racially murky era -- an era in which the ecology of race is much more complex and choked with half-discarded symbols and muddied signs -- our skills of interpretation have to be more keen, our readings more nuanced (p. 215). Once again, Dysons point about racism and racial politics has its corollary in the popular culture. The use of sampling in rap music has the effect of detaching the music from its creative source. It can become so vaguely referential that the results are often bizarre. Consider Janet Jacksons recent use of Joni Mitchells Big Yellow Taxi Cab. Dont it always seem to go... is reduced to a bland hook, ensnaring the nostalgic impulses of aging baby-boomers and seeming pretty nifty to younger audiences, but completely detached from its origins in environmental mournfulness. Sure, its a form of crossing-over, but one wholly stripped of substance.

President Clinton is both mindful and perplexed about the new racial geography when he calls for a national dialogue on race. Once again, town meetings and forums will be mere talk if the participants return to their insular, segregated communities. The Presidents push for greater communication will not result in any kind of real exchange unless it is accompanied by the kinds of structural changes -- economic, political and social -- that offer the prospect of really bringing blacks and whites together. Bill Bradley (1997) blamed the media for this pessimism about dialogue: Unfortunately, I think that the medias focus on the sensational and the personal peccadillo does not create the space for high quality public dialogue....It stunts our capacity for racial reconciliation, healing, and progress...Its focused on three African American males: O.J. Simpson, Louis Farrakhan, and Colin Powell. One was ridiculed, one was demonized, and the other was idealized (p. 55). This problem with the media can also be associated with the change in racial geography. First, the media is not reporting from black places: in the Bradley example, it is focused on black figures who already dwell in highly mediated, largely white, mainstream culture. Second, the medias presentations give the media consumer a false sense of having knowledge about other racial places which thereby displays the possibility of attaining real knowledge through actual physical interaction.

In the immediate postwar era, there existed a tangible racial geography that was nothing to be nostalgic about today, but that was vivid enough to constitute a map that travelers could use to truly cross over and leaders could attempt to re-draw. In todays more racially murky era, conservative politics, the media, and especially the popular culture have clouded over the racial geography with levels of discourse completely detached from any intimate knowledge which might serve as a map. This, of course, could change. Dyson (1997) asserted that the nagging question of what route black folk should take into the next century -- one of separation, or one of solidarity with other Americans -- has renewed itself with foreboding intensity (p. 149). But things can only change if black and white America rediscover an ideology of humanism and a belief in substantive interaction that Baldwin and others offered years ago. As Bradley (1997) summarized: And I think, in a way, that mystery in terms of human interaction has got to be the hole card of hope (p. 60).

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Baldwin, J. (1963). The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial.

Baldwin, J. (1948, October). Previous condition. Commentary. 334-342.

Baraka, I.A. (1963). Blues people. New York: Morrow.

Bradley, B. (1997). Interview. In C. West & K.S. Sealey (ed.), Restoring Hope: Conversations on the Future of Black America. Boston: Beacon.

Cleaver, E. (1991). Soul on ice. New York: Dell.

Crenshaw, K.W. (1997). Color-blind dreams and racial nightmares: Reconfiguring racism in the post-civil rights era. In T. Morrison (ed.), Birth of a Nation`hood. New York: Pantheon.

Dyson, M. E. (1997). Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line. New York: Vintage.

Ginsberg, A. (1980). Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights.

Kerouac, J. (1957). On the Road. New York: Signet.

Mailer, N. (1957). Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam.

Marcus, G. (1990). Mystery Train. New York: Plume.