No Offense, But... It's the Least We Can Do

(Loud frustrated sigh). I can't decide if it's a good thing or a bad thing that my students seem out to offer fodder for this discussion.

In a Basic Writing class, we read part of Gloria Anzaldua's "How To Tame a Wild Tongue" last week, and the assignment was to blog and respond on it. Seldom does a student take such an assignment seriously - they usually do a brief (and I'm not going to lie - usually lame) summary paragraph themselves and then add some one-liners in response to their peers (like "I really agree with what you said..." or "I think you did a great job summarizing the article..."). This time, however, Anzaldua's ideas seemed to strike a nerve in at least one student.

I don't feel comfortable offering direct quotes from her blog, but, apparently, having grown up here in Pueblo's multicultural environment, she actually felt like a part of a minority as a white person, and she stated that she believed the Mexican culture here precluded any expression of culture for her family. But, more importantly, she was feeling the weight of whiteness on her back. I understand - being called names and constantly feeling as though you have to justify yourself in the face of the choices of your ancestors can be like wearing a heavy chain attached to something you can't see or free yourself from. And, we cannot. As Paulo Freire said in Pedagogy of the Oppressed:


"As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized...It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors" (56) - who don't even know who or what they are.

We become so caught up in the white experience of being dominant, "any other situation...seems like oppression" (57) - or, at the very least, like "reverse discrimination." It is frightening and frustrating - and, yes, oppressive - confronting the sins of our fathers. My husband grew up in a poor area of Houston; he went to a middle school that was "mostly Hispanic," and a high school that was "mostly black." He got beat up - a lot - because he was white, and when confronted by issues of anti-racism, he gets angry. "I didn't do anything - it wasn't my fault - why were they beating up on me? How does that make them any better than the white people who discriminated against them?"

He doesn't want to deal with questions of history and habitus and the fact that the very reason those children beat on him was, ironically, the same reason he feels the way he does now - anger at injustice, injustice perpetrated by his own ancestors (both literal and figurative - his Texas family is unapologetically racist).

I understand, more than I maybe want to admit, my husband's - and my student's - fear and frustration. I grew up in Pueblo too, and I too have felt my white skin like a badge of shame, but I am coming to see it is the least we can do. We cannot give back the lives, or even the dignity lost to so many years of genocidal discrimination - we may, someday, be able to give back land, offer real opportunity for education, but not now. Now, we have nothing of value to offer by way of even smallest compensation but our shame and anger at those who came before us, and our solidarity with those who struggle today.

"thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world" (77)

Stevie Ray Vaughan Life By the Drop

Vaughan, Clapton, & Bourdieu

In Language & Symbolic Power, Pierre Bourdieu asks:

"When the dominated pursuit of distinction leads dominated speakers to assert what distinguishes them - that is, the very thing in the name of which they are dominated and constituted as vulgar - according to logic analogous to the kind which leads stigmatized groups to claim the stigma as the basis for identity, should one talk of resistance? And when, conversely, they strive to shed that which marks them as vulgar, and to appropriate what would allow them to become assimilated, should one talk of submission?" (95).

I'm pretty new to the theory game, but is this the flip-side of a question asking whether or not Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Clapton appropriated Blues music as a dominant gesture? To be fair, both are probably more likely classified as Blues-Rock, but Bourdieu, at any rate, speaks of the generation of "popular speech" which may otherwise be considered vulgar except for "The vague feeling [among dominant subjects] that linguistic conformity implies a form of recognition and submission which raises doubts about he virility of men who abide by it" (94) - the chafing of the very kind of submission they impose on marginalized groups - so maybe the appropriation of artifacts of dominant culture, not just speech, but other cultural artifacts such as music, are a way for dominant subjects to assert difference, hence, virility?

But, what if it's not about virility at all, but about a lack of self-definition: what if part of the apparently bottomless need to appropriate ethnic culture by the white race is a sad attempt to make up for a lack of our own culture?

Let's face it, white people, especially white Americans, have more in the way of "tradition" than culture. We have Christmas - founded, historically, in pagan religions and carried on the backs of malls around the country; we have Thanksgiving - a tradition built on a mythological "friendship" between the pilgrims and the indigenous people whose knowledge and stores of food they pillaged, and which gives us an excuse to gorge ourselves indecently one day a year (longer if leftovers are involved);  the only holiday we might truly call our own is the Fourth of July - another holiday founded on a mythology of "founding fathers" who knew what was best for us all - and now an excuse to drink heavily, this time cleverly couched as a patriotic meeting of American minds. Of course, there's Halloween - possibly the most honest holiday as it purports to be about nothing other than having fun by hiding behind outrageous costumes in order to pretend in the morning to not be the person who got sloshed the night before and had sex in a car with someone wearing a Bill Clinton mask.

We appear, at first glance anyway, to have little in the way of unifying culture - maybe football (which can actually be equated with alcohol and violence); possibly heavy metal music - but even our rock and roll is linked inextricably with violence, drugs, and a childish relationship with sexuality. So, our white "culture" consists of: mood-altering chemicals and violent displays all played out through the shadowy lens of half-hidden, half-denied sexuality and backed by the only thing we all really have in common - an addiction to consumerism.

For better or worse, though, none of this changes the fact of my particular habitus, which has encompassed a love of rock and roll since I was old enough to hear - and way long before I was old enough to understand words like assimilation and appropriation - and has always included the music of Chuck Berry and Fats Domino, as well as Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley.

My habitus, which Bourdieu assures me is "the product of the whole history of its relations with markets...is, indeed, linked to the market no less through its conditions of acquisition than through its conditions of use" (81) - ultimately, the rock and roll I have always associated myself with was informed and infused with the Blues, imprinted on me - admittedly from a "white" perspective which, by its nature, must alter the original meaning; still, I cannot deny it now as a part of my life and identity, nor do I want to - it may be the only link I have to a true culture.

My Favorite (Insidious) Childhood Story

When I was little, my favorite story did not come in the form of a book - at least, I didn't know it did; I found out much later, when I was grown and already questioning my childhood and the racist tendencies of my family. The name of the story as I heard it was "Pamenondas," and it was just a silly story about a funny little boy who couldn't seem to get anything right. And, I can't honestly say that had we not moved away from Texas before I started school, I ever would have discovered the stereotypes growing through this tale like creeping weeds.

Even having moved, and long after I began to think of myself as a "colorblind," non-racist liberal, it did not occur to me to examine the story until someone else pointed out the hypocrisy of not doing so, but I still hadn't seen the book, so it was easy to determine that this someone must be "overreacting." Still, being a good "White Liberal," I decided never to tell the story to my children or talk about it at all (still not to examine it, or myself).

Then I was assigned a literacy narrative in a graduate class, and, given the prominence of the story in my childhood (I asked my grandmother for the story nearly every time I saw her when I was small), I couldn't avoid looking at it any longer.

I searched the internet and found, not Pamenondas, but Epamninondas and His Auntie - a 1907 story by Sara Cone Bryant. I found a copy online and was appalled - this is not at all what I had pictured in my head as my grandmother told the story:


Epaminondas and His Auntie

But, what did I imagine? That's the question.

One of the things I always thought - even having learned through an intensely painful teenage encounter with my grandmother (which I will address another time) how racist she could be- was that there was nothing specifically "racial" about this story. The protagonist was just an absentminded child who did funny things; the child could have come from any ethnic background. Of course my grandmother told it with using an exaggeration of her own Southern accent, but that could be explained away as her attempt to amuse her grandchild. But, no matter how I turned it over in my head, the fact remained that - even without having seen Bryant's book - I always knew 'Pamenondas was black. And, after seeing the book cover, I know without a doubt this is what my grandmother pictured in her mind's eye when she was telling the story. I now wonder how long I've really known.

Just to be clear...Just being - Us

I do want to be clear that I am starting this project as part of a study for a graduate thesis, but also for my students: because I want to be clear about what I am teaching them (consciously or subconsciously); finally, I am doing this because I think it is time. There simply should not exist in the 21st Century the kind of poverty, homelessness, and need we see everyday around the world. The only way such atrocities can possibly continue is through an equally atrocious ambivalence on the part of those who have the power - that would be - us.

The only way to keep ignoring the obvious is to pretend it isn't there or to pretend there's nothing we can do about it. Either paradigm is criminal. We can only pretend the problem doesn't exist if we make those marginalized by it "Other" - other than human - other than someone, anyone, we need to be concerned with. Or, we can blame them for their own problems - "how can we help them, when they won't help themselves!?!" 

We can also turn them into a product or a mask to be put on and taken off as if they weren't quite real (I refer here back to the idea of the hip hop genre - of music, dress, etc - and the white penchant for appropriation); better yet, we can turn people into a cause to be contibuted to, in order allow ourselves to feel good about just being - us.

EXAMINED LIFE

Cornell West/ Peter Singer from Astra Taylor's documentary Examined Life