Prometheus 6   

I think I'll just go ahead and piss people off

I've mentioned a couple of my heroes (HERO: someone who confronts the Great Fear of his people). Another, more recent one is Derrick Bell. His Faces at the Bottom of the Well, along with The Rage of a Privileged Class by Ellis Cose and Two Nations by Andrew Hacker tied together a lot of threads for me. Bell achieved hero status because he can write fiction that makes sharply delineated points about reality.

"Faces" is subtitled "The Permanence of Racism."

That's a concept that bothers the hell out of lot of people. However, it's also a concept I've come to accept. I've come to the conclusion thatt racism is so thoroughly embedded in us that it will take evolution - or at minimum the death of everyone born before 1970 - to eliminate it.

That doesn't mean you give up. It means you give up on an endless, useless struggle to change perceptions and morals on the grand scale. You figure out ways of adapting, neutralizing it. And because we are social animals we teach those methods to those we care about. The more of us that know how to get around it, the more that learn how to compensate for the hole being a minority in the USofA starts you out in, the less justification the haters have for their hate.

Not like they need any.

But you don't want your people avoiding confrontation. You want them to know they're justified in how they see things. Right now too damn many brothers and sisters are out there speculating, declaring themselves kings and I really got no beef with holding a position that enables you to hold on. I just prefer you hold one that helps you move on.

I once shared a chunk of "Rage" with an online discussion group, an excerpt from Time magazine lifted with my very first hand scanner. My homie Linda will probably remember it, and the reaction. Black folks fairly leapt at their keyboards, and all of them said pretty much the same thing: "I KNEW I wasn't crazy!" What I learned from "Rage" wasn't in the book. It was in that reaction… an immediate increase in the comfort level of Black participants. It taught me the value of shared knowledge and experience by showing me the immediate impact of that bond.

And "Two Nations" was a paradox. I learned what Prof. Hacker presented in the book, that the racial divide was so absolute that there might as well be two, interpenetrating countries ("learned" isn't quite the right term, "verified my experience" is closer). But I also learned that the changes in each run parallel to the same stimuli - that the same forces, exerted under different circumstances, create those separate nations. I became convinced on a higher, less specific level than events, we're actually one nation after all. Which is not to say that all is good. It's to say that this is mine, too.

posted by Prometheus 6 at 5/20/2003 12:11:24 AM |