I’m Back
In the 1970’s, the university where I was teaching hosted a program for several summers that was designed to bring bright black students who would be seniors sand who were interested in graduate study to our campus. They would conduct research with faculty mentors for several weeks, make a final presentation to the entire group, and return to their schools having a better idea of what graduate work might entail. When Leroy Gardner, the man who ran this program, asked me if I would work with a young woman who was an English major, I agreed. Between doing that and meeting her, I fretted about what she’d make of my obvious Southern background since I am white and she was black. Leroy told me to remember what I’d recently learned about the paralytic nature of the guilt I felt as a white person growing up in Alabama in the 1940s and 50s.
At the appointed time, I welcomed to my office Preselfannie Whitfield, who had just completed her sophomore year at Jackson State College in Mississippi. I knew about Jackson State because that was where white police had maced protesting students, killing several, just days after a similar tragedy had taken place at Kent State University, a predominantly white school in Ohio. Of course, there was just one tiny mention of the atrocity at Jackson State and endless news reports about Kent State. Preselfannie recognized my geographical roots the moment I said hello, but seemed determined to stay focused on getting my help in choosing a writer on whom to work for the precious time she had in Minnesota. I no longer remember which white woman writer I suggested, but I remember clearly just how hard Preselfannie worked and what a solid final paper she wrote.
The next spring, Leroy called me again to say he had decided to bend the rule that stipulated that a student could enroll in his program only once: Preselfannie had reapplied as she was entering her senior year. She wanted to work with me on the African American author, Gloria Naylor. I knew Naylor’s novels and had even taught her powerful short story collection, The Women of Brewster Place. This time I jumped at the chance to watch the young scholar spread her wings. I was amazed by the maturity that had taken place in the year between my initial contact. The person in my office the second summer knew exactly what her thesis would be, which critics she already was familiar with, and what she wanted from me as her mentor. To my delight, she told me she intended to make telephone contact with Naylor so that she could include her own words in her essay. Persevering in this idea, she eventually had a long interview with the author. Her essay was chosen as one of the four outstanding research projects that would be shared at the concluding banquet. As Preselfannie stood before her audience composed primarily of people in the sciences or engineering, telling them why fiction by a black woman was worth their consideration, I felt as proud as I can remember ever feeling.
Since then, Preselfannie Whitfield has become Preselfannie Whitfield McDaniels, given birth to and helped rear two sons, gotten a Ph.D., been awarded tenure at her alma mater where she teaches a wide range of literature courses, and published her first book. Our contact these days comes in an exchange of holiday cards/letters in December. When I saw an envelope with Preselfannie’s address label, I eagerly opened it, sure I’d hear about her family and her own progress. Instead, I got her deep concerns about what the November election will mean over the next four very long years.
Like me, she had not been able to compose the usual message to friends and family members. In fact, in my case, I have not written a single sharable word since November 8th. Instead I’ve considered doing one of the following: baying at the moon, rending my garments, ululating, never cutting my hair until after he is gone from the White House. But one of Preselfannie’s sentences has galvanized me and here I am, determined not to let him silence me any longer. That sentence said she had been waiting to get my blog after the election because she figured I’d have some words that could be helpful to her as she coped with her own stunned reactions. So this blog is specially for Preselfannie.
My promise to myself for 2017 is to write words here at least once a month, and to stop giving the Orange Man so much of my energy, energy much better spent doing almost anything else. It is better spent remaining in solidarity with people organizing in their own neighborhoods to stop police violence against people of color or people whose religious or sexual expressions are considered “different”; it is better spent joining the inspiring individuals from so many walks of life who will keep vigilance at Standing Rock in North Dakota, no matter the weather; it is supporting artists in all media who realize it is time to make their art speak to the issues of the day; it is applauding the athletes who refuse to remain silent when they understand how to utilize their platforms to offer support to those who continue to be held back by virtue of who they are. Resistance and fierceness and a clear-eyed refusal to normalize the present political climate: those are my watchwords.
The Dangers of Difference
What is it about difference that can turn otherwise sane, even kindly, individuals into mean-spirited, foul-mouthed hysterics? As a white person growing up in the South of the 1940s and 50s, I certainly had many occasions to ponder this question. Neighbor ladies who gave me cookies and milk after school could suddenly change their easy smiles into thin-lipped sneers when speaking about some “negro” who’d not stepped aside to let them pass without coming into contact with the fearful Other. Schoolmates mimicked what they’d heard at home, assuring me that “they” smelled bad and probably didn’t even use knives and forks.
When I was a junior in college, three intelligent classmates in my Romantic Poetry course stopped having coffee with me the day I told the class that a contemporary person who seemed to me to fit the definition of a romantic hero was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I deduced this must be their reason for shunning me though they never spoke to me again to inform me of why they wouldn’t sit with me in the cafeteria. When I accepted my first teaching job at an Episcopal girls’ school in Vicksburg, MS, I had to puzzle out the answer to another mystery that turned out to be racial in nature. The school was located in the Civil War Memorial Park, a lovely area with low, rolling hills, and very few houses. The road through the park, however, was a patchwork of well-kept, evenly-paved sections and rutted dirt road sections. Over time, a pattern emerged: Paving and upkeep went along with one’s car being in a section honoring a Confederate state, while the bumpy, dust-ridden portions were in tiny parts forced to recognize a Union state since the park received federal dollars. A colleague confirmed my hunch by saying, “Yep, you’ve figured it out, the state won’t get money if we didn’t put up a little sign saying a Yankee state is marked.”
Recently I was asked by a high school English teacher with whom I had worked for almost ten years to drive out to his school. It was located in an overwhelmingly white, middle-class, largely Christian suburb. The teacher assigned his high ability seniors James Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room and then watch the HBO presentation of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. A couple of sets of parents had confronted the principal, charging that the teacher was “teaching pornography.” After unsuccessful attempts to resolve the problem informal, a panel of three parents and three teachers reviewed the two texts before hearing from the teacher and his principal. Before the teacher spoke, my boss and I were given half an hour to speak about the purposes of the course and the process by which curriculum is determined. The panel responded positively to what I said and sent a recommendation in favor of including the works to the school board which ended up supporting the teacher. But in the audience were the complaining parents. When the teacher spoke to the school board, this group yelled from the back of the room “You’re a WACKO!” and “You’re going to Hell!” The three women in this group belonged to an organization called “Mothers in Touch,” a branch of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. It seems these mothers meet regularly to pray for the school as part of their Christian mission, yet they easily harassed a splendid English teacher, using language quite inconsistent with the fundamental teachings of Jesus as I read them in the Gospels.
All these anecdotal moments confirm the premise that for some people differences of any kind are simply too scary to be tolerated. Given the fact that cultures are almost never stagnant these days, feeling this way must be genuinely frightening. I know that I can respond badly when I’m frightened, saying and at least thinking of doing things that do not reflect that “me” that I like or admire. So I step back from my automatic fear response and do something that lets me come to understand that the problem resides in my consciousness and not in whoever or whatever has pushed me out of some comfort zone. Eventually I can grasp that the difference that is causing me anxiety actually can enliven and broaden my own understanding. I may even come to embrace and celebrate it.
The Banality of Racism
In her writings about Adolph Eichmann, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt spoke about the “banality of evil.” This was a new concept to me when first I read her work; I thought of people like Eichmann as the most extreme examples of white supremacy–hardly banal. But Arendt made clear to me just how “ordinary” the prejudices against Jewish people had become, and she forced me to begin considering ways in which my deepest seated prejudices evidenced themselves in small and seemingly insignificant ways. As I’ve watched America move through many decades of racist behaviors toward black Americans, I have often returned to Arendt’s thesis. Quite recently, I found the amazing collection of prose poems by Claudia Rankine entitled Citizen: An American Lyric. Poem after poem caught my breath as Rankine showed me scenes and language that illustrated how “every day” or banal can be white people’s inherent thoughts and practices that remain racist at their core. I am a white Southerner who grew up in the very bad old days in Alabama when white men like George Wallace and “Bull” Connor proclaimed from the rooftops how dangerous “Negroes” were to the established customs and beliefs of the South. But I like to think of myself as having done loads of hard anti-racist work to free me from such embedded prejudices. And on all the obvious scales of measurement, I have left such irrational and destructive attitudes behind.
But Rankine’s poems drove me deeper into responses to certain “cues” that are still lodged in my psyche. For instance, when I hear a black person speaking eloquently, I think before I can catch myself “S/he’s really articulate.” It’s the seemingly harmless adverb that belies the depth of my racist stereotyping–“really” gives me away as someone who finds such behavior unusual or surprising. Or, though I genuinely engage black people I know when I meet them in public settings, I almost never have those same people in my house for a cup of herb tea or a shared bowl of soup for lunch. I depend on our finding ourselves in the same physical space rather than taking the initiative to allow social contact. As more and more black writers are pointing out to self-styled “liberals” like me, it is in our “cultural practices” that we reveal our remaining racist attitudes. It is in the everyday choices like who is on our Facebook lists or whose phone numbers are included in our speed dial lists or what ancient pigeonholes we keep blacks in even as we vote correctly and contribute correctly and look askance on our fellow citizens who make overt racist statements .
The work Hannah Arendt or Claudia Rankine, separated by many decades as well as by race and cultural background, would ask of me is simple and extremely difficult: They would ask me to dig below all the surfaces until I find the gnarled roots that keep surfacing unbidden and that must not remain unexamined. If I can ferret out these remnants and admit that I have them, I stand some chance of removing them. If I refuse this last deprogramming exercise, I’ll continue being haunted by my Southern white ghosts. And I’ll continue to miss out on genuinely deep connections with the black people in my life.
Combating Obscenity
In 1984, Audre Lorde, black lesbian feminist writer, published an essay entitled “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Though was speaking about ways feminist women might find to begin to “dismantle” the patriarchy that has afflicted us for so long, I’ve applied her thesis to many other situations. Just now, I am recalling Lorde’s challenge to find radically different “tools” rather than adopting those used by the very people/institutions we were trying to change. A friend alerted me to the recent appearance of statues of a nude Donald Trump positioned in several US cities. I found them on Google.com and then found them very disturbing to me. While I deeply lament what this obscene man has done to the English language and to any idea of civility, I could not embrace the manifestation of outrage and disgust that I assume lies behind this gesture.
I do not think of myself as a prude, nor do I shy away from political satire as an outlet for moral and political outrage. I even found the statement put out by the New York City Park Board clever. (The statement said in essence “Erections are forbidden in the park, no matter how small.”) Maybe I can respond with a guffaw to the statement while finding the statues outside my framework because the printed word is different from the visual image. Certainly we know the last assertion is true in many instances, especially in this technological era in which the visual is so omnipresent. Perhaps I also understand the moral outrage being felt and expressed by many serious Mormons in Utah, Republicans who say they can’t vote for Mr. Trump because of his obscene language on television and at his rallies. These people do not think it is a good thing to curse and make reference to women’s and men’s sexual anatomy in so public a forum.
If I try to analyze what it is about the statues that pushes them beyond my limits of what is culturally positive for me, I discover several specific objections. The sculptor has made the “flesh” of the naked figure laced with cellulosis, something women certainly have been made to feel ashamed about having as we age. Such imperfections of our skin is seen as unappealing to the male gaze. Similarly, the sculptor has given the statues a large, sagging stomach that falls over the sex organs. Once again, women are encouraged to experiment with dangerous diets or procedures to lose such flab, to have it “tucked” or removed/reshaped. So I arrive at what I did not grasp at all in my initial negative reactions: These statues make the big tall MAN look like an aged and no longer sexually appealing WOMAN. So my responses relate to my very old and very strong resistance to stereotypical depictions of women’s bodies for the comic pleasure of male viewers.
So we arrive back at Audre Lorde’s essay written 40 years ago: It will NOT make any serious or permanent change or even dent in patriarchal abuse of females if we define “liberation” as allowing for a similar abuse of males, even one as unworthy, dangerous, and offensive as the Republican nominee for President of the United States.