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Dr. Eurie Dahn, The College of Saint Rose - Manners and Race

http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wamc/local-wamc-960716.mp3

Albany, NY – In today's Academic Minute, Dr. Eurie Dahn from The College of Saint Rose examines the historical link between conventional manners and race.

Dr. Eurie Dahn is an assistant professor of English at The College of Saint Rose where she teaches courses on the intersection of modernist literature and African-American literature. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She is currently working on a project titled Race and the Sociological Imagination: Jean Toomer and Robert E. Park, exploring the discourse of social change in terms of race relations, as found in Harlem Renaissance literature and American sociology of the 1920s.

About Dr. Dahn

Dr. Eurie Dahn - Manners and Race

Race relations are often grounded in unspoken rules, but sometimes those rules are spoken and formulated into a racial etiquette. In a 1929 letter published in the leading black newspaper of the time, reader Starnes S. Peak, Jr. writes, "Every thoughtless and ill-mannered Negro is nothing but a maker of friends for segregation." During a period of lynchings and legalized segregation, Peak and other African Americans saw the bad manners of individual African Americans as detrimental to perceptions of the race as a whole. Despite (or perhaps due to) the fact that the '20s with its flappers and Gatsbys are often seen as a period of social experimentation, manners were an intense source of interest for African Americans, as well as white Americans.

The arbiter of manners, Emily Post, made one explicit mention of African Americans in her massively popular 1922 Etiquette when she discusses what the correct butler wears: "Unless he is an old-time colored servant in the South a butler who wears a dress suit' in the daytime is either a hired waiter who has come in to serve a meal, or he has never been employed by persons of position " This mention of the "old-time colored servant" suggests that African Americans exist only as accompaniments to good manners, not as well-mannered ladies or gentlemen. Yet, as seen in the Defender letter, many African Americans insisted on seemingly conservative and trivial modes of behavior as a political strategy meant to lead to the transformation of the type of society depicted in Post's etiquette book.

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