{"id":3412,"date":"2016-06-30T07:23:21","date_gmt":"2016-06-30T12:23:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=3412"},"modified":"2016-06-30T07:23:21","modified_gmt":"2016-06-30T12:23:21","slug":"blogger-electrified-by-updikes-comments-on-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2016\/06\/30\/blogger-electrified-by-updikes-comments-on-race\/","title":{"rendered":"Blogger electrified by Updike&#8217;s comments on race"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>James Howden, Sports, Culture &amp; Other Obsessions<\/em><\/strong> posted an entry this past week on <a href=\"http:\/\/jameshowden.com\/2016\/06\/john-updike-on-race-and-being-american\/\">&#8220;John Updike: On Race and Being American&#8221;<\/a> that quotes large sections from an essay in Self-Consciousness and reacts to Updike&#8217;s remarks about race in America.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/files\/2016\/06\/Updike.Grandpa.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-3413\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/files\/2016\/06\/Updike.Grandpa.jpg\" alt=\"Updike.Grandpa\" width=\"275\" height=\"183\" \/><\/a>One line that particularly stands out in a letter to his half-Ghanian grandchildren: &#8220;When Anoff was born . . . my instinctive thought was that he would do better if his parents settled in Ghana; that is, I trusted an African country to treat a half-white person better than my own country would treat a half-black. Now I wonder. Ours is a changing, merging, exogamous world, and while racial prejudice operates in the United States against blacks in many ways overt and oblique . . . at least our laws now formally insist upon equal rights. . . .&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;An ideal colorblind society flickers at the forward edge of a sluggishly evolving one . . . America is slowly becoming yours, I want to think,&#8221; Updike wrote many years before the current state of racism in America, fueled by politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>James Howden, Sports, Culture &amp; Other Obsessions posted an entry this past week on &#8220;John Updike: On Race and Being American&#8221; that quotes large sections from an essay in Self-Consciousness and reacts to Updike&#8217;s remarks about race in America. One &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2016\/06\/30\/blogger-electrified-by-updikes-comments-on-race\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-updike-quoted"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3412"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3414,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3412\/revisions\/3414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}