We've reached the Restoration in my British literature class, and instead of having my students read the long and inarticulate prose introducing the period, I've summed it up for them by saying it's a time in British history when the passing of crowns from one white man to another was even more of a clusterfuck than it had been previously. Catholics were scary, Protestants were militant, and here came the Parliament with its new play for power. Really is sort of interesting stuff, but the Longman introduction is so unreadable I couldn't force my students (my babies!) to read it. They prefer my profanity-laden summary anyway.
So I'm only about six pages into our first text, Oroonoko by Aphra Behn (the first woman to write and sell in English!), and I'm already a bit disgusted. The subtitle of the text is A Royal Slave, which is intended to just enchant you with its irony. The narrative takes place early 17th century at the height of the slave trade, and the gist is that the titular royal slave will do anything to save his beloved Imoinda (who is beautiful, we are told, despite her dark color), and must pay the slave's price for it.
Very romantic...and very racist.
Some people balk at throwing up the R word, even in terms of 17th century British literature (which, let's face it, couldn't help but be racist), because it's a conversation stopper. The assumption is that if one is racist, there nothing more to say on the matter. I think racism should be a conversation starter. Virtually all of us are bigotted in one way or another, and hopefully by identifying we were really are and what we really aren't, we'll self-actualize for the betterment of society and not just ourselves.
So Aphra Behn serves as the narrator of this text, and she goes on and on about how beautiful "these people" are (using the term in the exact way Bush did when referring to Katrina victims), despite their inauspicious beginnings. They are like Adam and Eve before the Fall, she says, so glorious in their ignorance that they don't care if their dicks and tits flop around everywhere. It's so cute, she says. Such a culture worth saving.
I know liberals like this and suspect sometimes that I am one of them. Oh, I want to teach disadvantaged youths! I want to door-knock in the poor black neighborhoods of Pensacola and drive them to the polling stations! We become enchanted with the poetry of underprivileged salvation but demur at the prose of going through with it. I knocked on poor black doors last fall, yes, but don't expect me to do anything about voting rights this year: I'm privileged and pooped. (Poor me, with essays to grade and a department to assist in running!)
When I say we, of course, I mean I.
Last year Brock and I were carjacked two weeks after we were married and two months before we moved to Tuscaloosa. Here's what I remember: I had a hellacious flu and didn't even want to be at our friend Ben's Cinco de Moustache party, but there we were. It was two in the morning and after having zero beers I'd passed out on the couch--Brock roused me then and said let's get outta here. Downstairs I got in the car and Brock talked just outside the passenger door to our friend Rich. Two black guys approached slowly in a green car.
What I remember thinking: I'm not afraid at all. People who are racist might be scared at the advance of two black guys in the middle of the night, but nope!, not me! My CD player was cranking Mos Def, and I thought about the Obama bumper sticker on the back of my black Toyota Echo, and congratulated myself on how natural and cool I felt about this entire situation. Just two black guys talking to my white husband, that's all. Even when I heard voices get a bit louder outside the car I forced myself to think, boy, I'm getting bored with waiting around and hope Brock gets in the car soon.
Brock didn't, but a black guy did, and told me to drive off, then changed his mind, then pulled me out, the other guy telling him to pop me (pop her man, just pop her!), the guy who pulled me looked me down and up, considering it, and all at once they pealed away in my Echo. Mos Def was still singing Umi said shine a light on the wo-oorld, and the last I saw of my car was my Obama sticker, peeling a little at the edges.
I wonder if my reaction somehow better than that of an acquaintance of mine who told me the story of his home invasion: two black guys with guns broke in during the night and threatened this acquaintance and his wife, talked of shooting him and raping her, and the guy managed to wrestle away the weapon and save his family. The kicker, though: he'd always suspected black people were up to no good, and this incident confirmed it.
When I asked how he'd feel about black people if the robbers had been white, he responded, "But they weren't."
Was my insistence that the black men weren't out to harm me as blindly prejudiced as the white guy who always suspected black men, and now feels he has good reason to remain as racist as his forebears?
I'm not sure--that's what I suppose I'll write a longer essay on someday--but I'll leave you (leave myself, really) with this last anecdote: when I was a little kid Lala fed me about half a box of cereal per day, either Cheerios or Cocoa Puffs. I was a spoiled fatty. This one morning I watched The Price is Right with my mixing bowl of cereal in my lap and was engrossed in both when I saw a shadow glide across the window.
I told Lala I thought I saw something, and she said not to be a scaredy-cat (I forget the Spanish version of this term). Then I heard something, knew I heard it, and insisted she check outside. Ahortia.
Totally frustrated, she peered out the window and then yelled "Negro maldito!" over and over again. Apparently the black guy trying to break in was now scared of her foreign words and crouched down under the window. Lala swatted a broom at him and you would've thought it was a .22. Bastard busted away from our house at warp speed and I never saw him again. Later Lala told me she'd hired him to cut the grass and that it was the worst five dollars she'd ever spent.
Aside from calling the guy a black bastard, she didn't utter any other racial epithets. The mantra for the rest of the day and weeks afterward was, "damn, some people," as if every member of the world has equal opportunities to be a total prick. This is an ideology I can stand by, and I thank Lala for allowing me to realize that.
Finished Oroonoko and it is fascinating and horrifying and way too complex to talk about in a blog-a-day blog. But I'll say that one thing that hasn't changed in 300 years is that whites are fucking SCARED of blacks. I mean, it's just true. You should read how this poor narrator keeps reminding us how those white colonists like herself were outnumbered, and were sincerely worried their throats would be slit every night. Yeah, I bet, you bee-otch. I'll be smarter about this text and everything else once the month of November is over. I promise!
ReplyDeleteOh, also. When I tried to talk about this text in class yesterday, I quickly realized nobody had read. So I tried to summarize it for everyone (I *refused* to reward them with leaving early after that hadn't done their fucking homework) and sadly failed because, well, it's a text that defies summary.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, because I was nervous, and because it's impossible to lecture students about something they've had no contact with, I started asking them hypothetical questions about our history of slavery and racism, and then...oops. I pointed to a section of the text and said, "Ah, and at this moment, when the narrator reminds us for the fourth time how scared she and the other colonists were of all the slaves, is the first instance in recorded history of a fact we live with but ignore every day: white women are scared of black men."
There are four black students in the class, all women. The other thirty students are white. Those thirty faces turned even whiter, and one of my favorite students, Brian, said, "You might consider rephrasing that." I felt guilty, of course, for being so simplistic and honest, but...it's true, isn't it? My own justification for being NOT scared right before the car-jacking was just proof that deep down I was, but I couldn't admit it, because that would mean I was a racist conservative prick, which I live in fear of being nearly every day. So back to class: I flubbed my next forty or so lines and let them go with a minute left in the class. It was self immolation to the very end.
After class, though, two students I've had for three semesters now, and who happen to be in the black minority of the class, told me why when I said the thing about white people being scared of black people they had to struggle not to choke with laughter.
"Because it's true!" Latoya said. Then she and Melissa began to pantomime what it's like to walk around campus, and how sometimes, when they're walking down a sidewalk and a white girl is coming towards them, the white girl will nearly jump off the sidewalk to give them room. If they're in the Ferg and someone barely brushes one of them when she walks past, and if that someone is white, they'll apologize profusely, exclaim "I didn't mean it!" and the poor white thing will clutch her little heart.
"She's probably trying to apologize for the past 300 or so years," I told my girls. They laughed, and I laughed, and I thought about how when Brock and I get down about something, we say, "Ha Ha, Holocaust!" and laugh, because sometimes perversity is required among people you trust in order to get through this absurd life.
So in short I'm not apologizing for saying white people (not all, but many) are afraid of black people, though I will concede that probably most folks in general are scared of what they don't know, whatever lies outside of their community, though I'd simultaneously add that the darker that unknown is, perhaps the greater the fear.
And I won't apologize for saying the word Holocaust and laughing. I've cried over that tragedy and the death of Ted Kennedy and the death of the moth--I've cried over so much that sometimes laughter just serves as a great equalizer. Maybe later I'll laugh at the fallacies of my conservative students' arguments. And I'll cry about how much Brock loves me.
Good entry, and I think you're right, at least as far as the unknown goes. On a personal note, I don't know if I've been scared every time I've seen a black person- I hope not- but I know I have been on occasion, and on those occasions I have first told myself that I was in a bad area, that the person(s) in question looked suspicious and that it wasn't because of who they were, and so on. And then wanted to slit my wrists for being a bigot and hated myself the rest of the day or week. I don't jump off the freaking side walk or act like a complete moron, but that doesn't mean I haven't acted in a less than understanding manner and loathed myself just the same.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, as racism is a social phenonemon, EVERYONE on the planet is a racist. White people are racist. Black people are racist. The Chinese are racist. Everyone is. It's built into identity (i.e., you partly know who you are or who you think you are based on differences between you and "the other.") Hopefully, however, we can realize our shortcomings and try not to let these perceptions color how we treat others.