Today and Tomorrow

Last night, I had a long conversation with my friend P about a whole lotta things-- race, Obama, our respective upbringings, and all of the marvelously complex issues and values and anxieties and history that have come to this great moment. P and I go back at least two decades, and we can say stuff to each other that we don't necessarily share with anyone else. It's been a great friendship, and we share this stuff on at least two planes. Basically, our sense of humor is similar, we think about things in a similar way, and I think we understand each other on a good, basic level as well. 

One of the things we can talk about is when our own feelings, and opinions, don't exactly match the common wisdom. Or even the better nature that we'd like to present to the world. So we talked about what January 2009 means to us. 

I hate to say that I grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, but I did spend almost all of my pre-twenties there. And for most of that time, black people were pretty rare in my neighborhood. Cherry Hill was a place where a lot of people moved to get away from cities. And if you look at the immigrant paths as a kind of filtration system, you have huge ethnic enclaves in the cities, and the more succesful generations move out to the burbs... as a result, the only prominent ethnic group in Cherry Hill was Jewish. Other than that, it was a homogenized a mix of Christian Europeans. 

I don't know how this sounds to y'all-- after all, the above description is usually associated with xenophobic grated communities. But I don't remember any sense of ethnic rivalry or hatreds or tribalism. Most of the diversity was in last names, so there wasn't anything to develop a grudge over. There were occasions where I'd hear one of my parents drop a racial or religious epithet, but those were pretty rare (or, in the case of my mom, when she started getting more demented over the years). 

Now, let me take you back to a fascinating time in this country's cultural history, the early 1970s, when the people who made the culture took a big interest in incorporating black America in its content, and made confronting prejudice and bigotry a big priority. Sure, Cherry Hill was an affluent, off-white slurry, but we did have newspapers and television and radio and movies, and a pre-teenage kid like me could receive signals about what was going on in the world. It could be a show like _All in the Family_. A TV movie called _Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan_. The presence of Stevie Wonder on the radio playlists. Reverence for Jimi Hendrix. I was home sick when _Sesame Street_ went on the air, maybe six or seven years old, and the idea that a kids' show was populated mostly by black people was _pretty fuckin' interesting_: it gave the show a fascinating exoticism. On the low-end, there were those Norman Lear sitcoms like _The Jeffersons__, _Sanford and Son_, and _Good Times_, and even then I got an ugly sense that Jimme Walker as "J.J." was a bad joke in so many ways. And later on, there was _Roots_, which dovetailed with the stuff we were learning in school about slavery. (And later than _that_, my high school library got me access to books like _The Autobiography of Malcolm X_, _Letters from a Birmingham Jail_, _Soul on Ice_ and many others.) 

This period of liberal cultural improvement-- and yeah, it was a period when liberals really did run the culture-- ran on two very appealing tracks. The first, the stated reason, was the desire to create culture that was both relevant and improving the country by reducing prejudice and exposing bigotry. The second may not have been conscious; it was that association with being black with being hip, that desire of many whites to be in touch with something more real, more vital, more creative and even vaguely dangerous, which they saw in black culture. It's been a constant in American culture for more than a century, and everyone from Stanley Crouch to Norman Mailer has addressed it in some way or another. And part of this cultural constant is this: to be regarded as an intelligent person, you have to be hip in some way or another, and this means not merely being aware of black culture, but immersed in it.

(Okay, maybe this is a little too much in the distant past for y'all. But do you remember when gay rights caught on as a civil-rights issue in the mid-1980s? It wans't enough to simply support the rights of gay men and women and to want to see an end to anti-gay laws and violence. One was also expected to develop a sense of gays and lesbians in culture; to catch jokes once hidden, to know who was and who wasn't gay. In other words, to be demonstrably hip to certain things.) 

(This begs an interesting question. Does a particular civil rights cause gain support because the oppressed minority offers some degree of coolness?) 

Years later, I realized this created a catch-22 where the two tracks crossed. Look at this from the perspective of a white kid in a mostly liberal-white community. On the one hand, you're told that you really ought to know a lot about black America. You have to know what slavery was, what Jim Crow was, what poverty was, what prejudice was and how it creates poverty and misery and crime. You have to remember that black people's experience of America isn't like yours, and that you have to keep this in mind because otherwise you might fall into idiotic prejudice, or offend or insult someone. That's all fine and wonderful. But, you're also supposed to know that a person without prejudices would deal with people of different backgrounds in a relaxed and mutually appreciative manner. You wouldn't _care_ what a person's ethnic background was beyond the appreciation of interesting differences. That's what a really _together_ person would be like. 

So you can see the catch-22. It says black people are both _no_ different and _very_ different than we were. You must be sensitive and keep the differences in mind, but you must not give in to _prejudices_, i.e., thinking they're different. 

There's an added bit of damage that comes from matters of hipness and merely Looking Cool... if you have to make an effort to understand another culture, that just marks you as being terminally un-hip. So all the stuff I mentioned above, like reading Malcolm X and watching _Roots_... well, isn't that just another example of how terminally un-hip white people try to grasp things beyond their racial understanding? It really does discourage you from asking honest questions, because you risk looking like a doofus. 

When I was talking to P about this, I told him a story about one of my first trips to New York City. I'd saved up money to buy a movie camera, and conned my mom into taking me to one of their legendarily cheap camera stores to get it at a good price. The store was run by Hasidic Jews-- first time I've ever met any Hasids, actually-- and while I'm watching the guy behind the counter turn Nikon lenses over, I notice the numbers tattooed on his arm. It was one of those genuine _Holy Shit_ moments, followed by two other thoughts. The first was that I was _not_ going to ask about it. The second was a silent prayer that my Mom wouldn't say anything about it, either.

That's not a bad default setting for interactions with other subcultures, I guess: you just try to put all of that stuff out of your mind, and behave reasonably politely and be friendly. Which is probably why a kind of universalist humanism seems both desirable and terminally uncool; it's a set of rules for people who aren't instinctively cool. It's what you hope society could be, but since you have to _think_ your way to it, and establish rules and principles, it's not exactly an exciting world of thrills and adventure. Heck, you could have an encyclopedic knowledge of black America from Crispus Attucks on down, you could tell W.E.B. duBois from Marcus Garvey from Booker T. Washington, you might know who Cheney and Schwerner and Goodman were... but to most people, that's just academic shit that's got nothing to do with what's _real_.

I grew up with a fair amount of these low-level anxieties, but they were just part and parcel of the anxieties I have with people in general. It's mainly a severe self-consciousness, of continually worrying about whether one's continual worrying is putting others off. After a while, the anxieties slough off because they require just too much energy to maintain. 

But given the way I grew up, and the values I absorbed, it was frustrating to _not_ get past these anxieties... and to watch others be more at ease with most of these things. I have no idea if everyone else felt the need to _work_ at being a decent person. But it's clear that younger people are far more at ease with different cultures. No matter how much work I put into _myself_, it hasn't been as effective as, say, being born ten or fifteen years later. You feel like someone who got a _touch_ of polio, worked hard to get to where you could walk and run and maybe dance a little, and then Salk and Sabin come along and toss polio into the dustbin of history. 

Which isn't a horrible metaphor for tomorrow. I don't like those metaphors of big steps, marks of progress, crossing divides, and the like, because they all imply a distance that's clear and distinct. (And there's just too much self-congratulation there, too. I like people giving out head-pats to feel better about themselves.) But tomorrow, we start moving a _lot_ of awful, deforming bullshit into our past.