Note: Some of these essays will be old… I’ve added an image from early 2019, because that’s when I wrote this, during a time of ‘morning pages’ practice.
Two strands of thought, from Toni Morrison (A Knowing so Deep, quoted in Leticia Nieto’s Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment) and James Baldwin (I am Not Your Negro, film) are running through my mind with force.
He was out of the country and came back, and always emphasized the American-ness of the problem. A problem of American society, not a problem of race or race relations. He said it’s not a question of what will happen to the Negro, it’s a question of what will happen to this country.
And this deep knowing, the deep knowing of the wrongness of defining American life as white society, of equality on white terms (as long as black people behave properly) - this constant qualifying of all black Americans as a monolithic, generic entity and as a thing about which white people can make judgements and blanket statements - the deep knowing of the depth of this ignorance, this willful ignore-ance has live in me like a growing, ravenous worm for ages. For my life.
The removal of me from public school at age 8, when I had black and latina friends, when I wanted to invite black girls to my birthday party & didn’t understand why they couldn’t come, when I sat behind Lavada and admired her puffy, spiraled pigtails that ended in a narrow tip with a bright plastic barrette. When I admired double-dutch jumprope as a cultural and physical triumph that was beyond my reach. The removal of the 8-year-old from this environment (ostensibly due to the threat of ‘bussing’ - we would be put in buses and driven to another part of town to go to school, whereas I could walk a few blocks from home to my current school) and placing her in a costly private school (which required taking a bus, 20 minutes’ drive from the bus stop several blocks from home) was the strongest early message to me that a good life, a good education, meant a place of white people.
The message was you belong here, not there. And the definition of that belonging was that others didn’t belong, like the girls who couldn’t come to my party. My good life was dependent on the exclusion of others from my daily experience. People of color, people who were poor, were going to degrade my education and that’s why my parents had to pull me out. The KCMO school district was always to blame.
Morrison: “In your silence lay not only eloquence but a discourse so devastating that ‘civilization’ could not risk engaging in it…”
The subversive discourse has been bubbling in me, but it rarely finds eloquence, it rarely finds words that can speak it - partly because the discourse of “civilization” is so fortress-like and repellant: the ideas, the attempts to change the paradigm bounce off like arrows. The defensive force field has been built up at the expense of all moral inkling or human compassion, leading to the “emotional poverty” and “terror of human life” Baldwin sees in (white) America.
The fortifications, the notion of protection, justify everything (as with the NRA, the militarization of police, the unprovoked and unpunished killing of young black men) because on the inside of the fortress is one’s own “family”, purely defined as one’s own flesh & blood. Family is not a human concept, it’s a self-defining, self-sustaining, defensive concept - defined by who is not family, so that the very idea of “protecting one’s family” becomes an agenda of racial purity, of creating a color-free zone, because color is a threat to whiteness, and whiteness is the essential definition of the “family” that needs protection. Black children don’t need protecting - they are fair game for attack when venturing into areas of white dominance, or for arrest and bullets when simply existing in their own neighborhoods.
All the vocabulary used to justify the laws & systems that continue to segregate us are about protecting the idea of whiteness.
The short version is, I have always felt that my life is enriched by those who are culturally different from me, and that human connection is worth the risk of the unfamiliar.
In this respect, white America is hell-bent on impoverishment.
Feb. 8, 2019