Travelling a “blog”: Here Comes the Black Middle Class
Travelling abroad can be the dream of the young adults throughout the world. However one particular group may or may not be particularly drawn to it. African American youth most certainly experience the world through a different mindset and travelling abroad can do different things to different African American people. In the experiences I have seen in the book Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee and the play Passing Strange it seems to me like it creates a bond with their culture at home while at the same time it separates them from everything that they once knew. In Passing Strange, Stew takes an extravagant journey abroad to discover “the real”, a part of him that he could not find in himself in Los Angeles. While he travels abroad he finds acceptance and freedom that he did not know of in Los Angeles. However I think that he pushes himself away from his African American culture and away from his family. In the process of discovering what’s real he realizes that it’s not Europe or Amsterdam or Berlin that’s real but its home and family. I think that it really hits him around Christmas when his mother is attempting to get him to come home for Christmas but he wants to stay with his friends. Then he realizes that all his friends are going home to their families for Christmas because that is what is really real. I think this was a changing point in the story because for me this is when he discovered what was real. I do not believe that the experiences that Stew experienced tied him any more to the black community but I do believe that it tied him closer to his mother, although she did pass. Although it can be argued that an African American mother is an important part of community I am not so sure that this was the case. I really like the way that the actual stew and not the character analyzes George W Bushes activity because I think that he very accurately describes what is wrong with American and therefore now the world. Mary Patillo’s Black on the Block describes a type of person called the Black Middleman. This type of person is the kind of African American that uses their knowledge and power and influence to help their lower class black brethren. I believe that Stew is a good example of this Black Middleman because he is taking his experiences abroad and the culture that he has gained from world travel and sharing it with the masses of littlemen.
Sarah Phillips experiences abroad form a similar opinion for me. Although I think that Sarah really identifies herself as an African American more than Stew. I would even go so far as to say that a lot of the time Stew is a human trying to find himself whereas Sarah is an African American girl attempting to identify herself. I think that in this small different way Sarah manages to identify with the African American community abroad more than Stew. While Stew separates himself from the African American community by travelling abroad, Sarah immerses herself when she travels abroad. Where Stew forces himself to be a part of the group, never really identifying with the situation, Sarah is herself and is very much so a representative of her culture. She is able to take her intelligence and creativity and apply it to Europe in a way that I do not think that Stew was able, he seemed to struggle or to take advantage of eccentric strangers. This quote from Sarah Phillips is one good example from the book, “The previous June I had graduated from Harvard, having just turned twenty-one. I was tall and lanky and light-sknned, quite pretty in a nervous sort of way; I came out of college equipped with an unfocused snobbery, vague literary aspirations, and a lively appetite for white boys. When before commencement my father died of a stroke, I found that my lifelong impulse to discard Philadelphia had turned into a loathing of everything that made up my past. And so, with a certain amazement at the ruthless ingenuity that replaced my grief, I left to study French literature in Lausanne, intending never to comeback”. The reason I picked this quote is because it sets Sarah as someone who clearly identifies herself with the African American race. It also sets up the fact that she is not your average African American; she went and graduated from Harvard. This makes her middle’wo’man. She is certainly not one of the littlemen, and I am not sure she necessarily fits in with Mary Patillo’s version of the middleman but she certainly was one. I think that Sarah and Stew went to similar places for different reasons and discovered themselves in different ways.
