Sprinting down the hallway I jumped into my sister’s waiting arms just as General M.D. Shirinda’s jangly guitar riff melts into the kick drum on track three. Much to our parent’s varied amusement we performed this courtship ritual with gleeful aplomb. We were privy, after all, to what New Yorkers were up to a cinematographer’s party. No big deal. What we didn’t know was how much our spongey little brains were soaking up the otherworldly rhythms of Soweto street music. As a welcome respite from the overplayed Dino-Rock of Santa Barbara’s 99.9 and Teen-Beat of Oxnard’s 104.7 – Push It being the exception – Graceland was one of the few records my parents would spin with any frequency.
Like a lot of boomers trapped in stagnant marriages fueled by coke and Judeo-Catholic guilt, it offered a chance to revisit a powerful liberal wave that crested and fell back in 1969. As part of the silent majority so central to the mainstreaming of leftist values but now intoxicated by the spoils of white flight, they finally had their chance to sit back and relax to the blue filtered light of Dallas. But even as their kids danced around to this happiest of cricket music hoping to spark at least a few laughs from mom and dad, the immediate decency of Simon’s creation was only the beginning of a larger hope. A hope that the roots of this rhythm would extend beyond the correctional facility of multiculturalism and grow instead into a real deal post-racial treehouse.
Thirty years later, living off The Avenue on the west side of Ventura, my neighbor’s outside only Chihuahuas bark like speed addled versions of Danny from the Shining – “Redruff, Redruff!” – not to mention the two-minute bouts of howling every morning from eight to eleven. Right on schedule boys. It’s everything I can do to keep my internal monologue from exploding and dressing down my neighbors for their willful dismissal of canine assimilation. What if I just trotted out a little tirade for a test spin? You know, something like, “For Christ sake, keep your lil’ pinches diablos inside holmes! Can’t you see they’re suffering because they’re alone all day! I mean how would you feel if you had a swollen ashy ballsac dragging on the ground because it hadn’t been emptied in years! For heaven’s sake, your dogs are scared and cold! They need a big mouthy kiss! Am I right neighborhood!? Who’s with me!?”
Everything is outside with these people: dogs, music, familia, spicy corn carts, used Q-Tips, losing lotto scratchers – the last two being the most common items found in my gutter. If they didn’t have ten people living in nine hundred square feet maybe they would have the flexibility to stay inside occasionally and to pump down the volume on the Banda. And then there’s The Mouth. The ringleader eight-year-old who swears like a sailor – drops more n-bombs than Mark Fuhrman – but smiles like Shirley Temple when he knocks on our door to lie about not being able to hear his T.V. because of our dog!
Note: If you write a polite letter to your Mexican neighbors that you so magnanimously google translate, expect it to be used against you in a most surprisingly hostile counter attack.
No tengo pelos en la lengua.
Together at last we have the 6-year-old boy and the 36-year old man, one vibrating with African poly rhythms and the other seething with white fragility. Who’s to say which one’s joy or discomfort is more intense? Or who’s to ask what went wrong or how to fix it? Or why are we to believe that one has anything to do with the other? Come, consider these questions and more as we explore a future of interchangeable customs buoyed by a sense of infinite possibilities. Watch how they stand on the shoulders of giants but also the little people who make them possible.
Slap Back Pedal Steels from Los Lobos under Apartheid’s African Skies
The “making of Graceland” can be told from many viewpoints other than Simon’s of course: Ray Phiri, Bakithi Kumalo, the Gaza sisters, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo are just a few of the contributing artists who might have a strong take. We should listen to the contrarians out there – of which there are few – including famed trombonist Jonas Gwangwa who argue that, “so, it has taken another white man to discover my people.” There’s evidence and testimony to suggest that collaboration isn’t the best word for how it went down, but Simon would argue that instead of discovering them, they discovered him. He describes the secret of world music as, “people are able to listen to each other and make associations and play their own music that sounds like it fits into another culture. That’s how it works. That’s how it worked then.”
This seems fairly self-evident, but the opposition he encountered for breaking the western cultural boycott against Apartheid was loud and sustained. He largely overcame the animus by paying the musicians three times their union wages, inviting them to tour internationally, giving them proper royalty credit, and acting like an all-around lovable guy. However, six months after its release, huge commercial success saw Los Lobos come a knockin’ for their piece o’ the pie, accusing Simon of taking all the credit for a song they improvised without dishing out any cash. To this day nobody can prove Los Lobos wrong, and my hunch is that Simon, being of poor moral judgment after months under cultural duress, either forgot how the improvised session played out or decided to put the screws to em’ anyway. Regardless, even if Simon is a prick in lamb’s clothing, he deserves more credit than blame for providing a platform to African musicians who were legally prohibited from performing internationally – not to mention tortured in their own land – rather than prohibitively faulting him for fucking over a couple of Angelinos. As the benefactors of one of the best albums of all time I think we can forgive the inevitable toe stepping that stemmed from a hyper-complex political climate as long as it spawned something so timeless. I’m biased of course. Flying through the air to that stuff was pure bliss baby. My, she was yar.
The title track is arguably the best on the album, and you can hear Simon talk about it on the extended re-release. But the story is rather keen so I want to paraphrase. By paraphrase I mean look at my chicken scratch notes and fill in the rest with however I remember and see fit. When you read the next passage do yourself a favor and read it in Simon’s dulcet voice.
“I was listening to some Boyoyo Boys tapes at the time, and the drums were like a fast Johnny Cash Sun records thing. When I went to Africa to play with Ray Phiri, I heard him play a minor chord when we were jamming, which was weird because the Soweto music he played usually didn’t have minors. I asked him about it and he said he was imitating the way I would play. It had this beautiful emptiness to it with its slap back echo on pedal steel guitar. Pedal steel of course being American country, but also used heavily in West Africa. So then Ray Bighiti comes in with this great straightforward West African bass and it starts to click. On my way back to New York with these recordings it sounded like the perfect Everly Brothers song, so I called up the brothers and had them lay down the backing vocals. A few months later I was driving up through Tennessee from Louisiana after doing the Zydeco thing and the lyrics came to me, you know, “the Mississippi delta was shining like a national guitar” and all that. It became this thing about one sound evoking a response instead of a subject. Instead of a subject about Africa or its politics it became a travel song having to do with the original sound – Drums, Sun records, and Graceland.”
Johnny Cash used to live just north of here in Casitas Springs, attending the Sacred Life of Apostolic Church every Sunday in between bouts of barbiturate benders. JC on my little Avenue. Far out.
Gentrificacion Pura Petroleo de Infiernos Angeles Con Chique Boys en Holy Cutoffs
Ventura Avenue runs north in a narrow valley with steeply sloped mountains on both sides. On hot days if you make it to 5pm you can open your pulley-roped kitchen window, pop the screen out, and let the sea breeze hit your face. On August 14th, 1769 Fray Juan Crespi of Spain came upon the Chumash Village of Shisholop and declared, “we saw a regular town.” Franciscans are known for among other things – cough, smallpox binkies – being rather pithy but the first written history of this place just about sums it up. In 1782 the mission was founded and the area thrived in proximity to the once mighty Ventura River, now reduced to less than a trickle in the shadow of our public works miracles of Matilija Reservoir and Lake Casitas. The mission era gave way to Mexican colonization in 1822, lasting about 100 years, in what was an extremely rural and quiet time.
Preceding the 1920’s oil boom, railroad magnate Thomas A. Scott bought up vast holdings of land from the Mexicans. His protégé Thomas R. Bard, hero of deliverable railed goods to Union troops during the war, went about setting up the local office of Union Oil Company in nearby Santa Paula. Kicking things off in 1919 with the discovery of Ventura Oil Field, we created a boom town which at its peak produced 90,000 barrels a day. The oil fields are still wet but now they exist in a fenced in ruin-like atmosphere with only the occasional lonely truck entering to do god knows what. Tweak some knobs perhaps. Maybe jimmy some dials. Many of the original Spanish style art deco oil bungalows still stand, including my own. Sometimes I’d like to put a red velvet rope around the rooms and charge a little price for admission. Maybe on its 100th birthday in 2028.
The Ventura Film Festival recently awarded their lifetime achievement award to Russ Tamblyn (Riff Jet) and George Chakiris (Bernard Shark) of Westside Story. Even though the classics Chinatown, The Rock and The Bet were all filmed in Ventura, the revelation that the stars of one of my favorite movies have a connection here totally blows the others away. Add that to the fact that Tamblyn is reprising his role as Dr. Jacoby in Twin Peaks due out in 2017 and Chakiris was a big player on the daytime soap Santa Barbara, the connections to my interests and history just won’t quit. A Spanish gal I used to work with found out that I lived in Santa Barbara at the time and totally freaked out, performing the theme to Santa Barbara over and over like I knew what the heck she was talking about. Who knew an average American soap opera was such a big hit to Gen-X Spaniard biologists? I do now, but at the time I did not. For all I knew she might’ve had a big crush on me.
Aparthood on The Avenue is statistically different than the whole of the city, with 66% identifying as Latino compared to 32% of the outsiders. Most of The Avenue white folk work at Patagucci, Vons, or Community Memorial Hospital. Most of The Avenue brown folk work in the fields, hair salons, or Black Angus kitchens. Outsiders have a mostly negative reaction when they hear where I live, remembering the grim gang wars of the 80’s and 90’s. These days The Avenue homies keep a low profile, mostly to avoid getting stomped by the reigning Southside Chiques of Oxnard. The Chique boys don the Chicago White Sox hat, as the SOX works perfectly as a stand in for south Oxnard.
Hey, just like Dr. Dre!
Sometimes the Chiques come around, but we have a neighbor, let’s call him “Juan” who despite getting out the game still has some pull with anybody looking to bring the ruckus. “Those are our white people!,” he’ll yell when they start ripping up our succulents after we refuse to pay their protection tax. Oh wait, that was Mykelti Williamson from The Purge: Election Year. Nope, sorry to disappoint, that one was filmed in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.
Besides xeriscapian terrorism, the primary crimes on The Avenue stem from a combination of mental illness or homeless inebriation. Yes, we have the occasional USA gas station robbery, meth bust at Magnolia Trailer Park, or hatchet assault up on the native American named streets, but life here is pretty safe. Those VPD cruisers are everywhere and they do keep themselves very shiny, Ventura’s automotive equivalent of the architecture of authority.
At a recent Westside Community Council meeting they kicked things off with let’s call him, “officer Johnson” giving an update on the implementation of body cameras on all the officers. He seemed like a very nice man, well-spoken too. Other updates included progress on Kellogg Park – breaking ground in a few months – curb extensions on select streets, Maricopa Hwy onramp congestion, and the unusual length of diagonal parking spaces on Kellogg street. “Man, them spaces is long”, we all said in unison, only to hear the rebuttal of, “well, that’s actually the standard length for this municipal district.” Replying in kind we yelled back, “Kiss off then, jerkass,” storming off in quite the huff if I do say so myself. Rapping afterwards about the issues with city council candidate Jeanette Palacios over our merienda at Lalas Panaderia, she said she was, “not in favor of the curb extensions. No way Jose.”
Satan’s Slaves, Bearded Fairies, and the Powerless Xicana Trailer Sluts in the City
Down the block we have an invite only biker bar. Nobody is ever in there but I’d only like an invite anyway. Do I have to ride a bike? Do I have to go to meetings? When I walk by I can see the television on sometimes, usually sports. On the other hand, keep your invite – “you Jocks in leather camo, you weekenders of artificial lust” – I’ll drink at home or cruise on over to the Benchwarmer where at least somebody will listen to me bitch about not having Time Warner. The Chicano power movement doesn’t have much of a foothold here, as most of the adults are fresh off the border cheerfully toiling away in the fields. Today’s songs of La Raza Unida can only be heard from the echoes of their children’s voices bouncing off the concrete at E.P. Foster middle school. At sundown, they worship the virgin of Guadalupe by candlelight, angering the local Seventh Day Adventists who frown on hagiography but consider fried gluten nutritious. Sequestered inside their trucks on Sundays, Machismos drink tallboy after tallboy. I try to tell them, the “answer ain’t at the bottom of that Montejo bro” but all they can do is laugh at my hypocrisy as I slump in my little red hatchback sipping on a growler of – do I dare say – craft beer. Guhhhhhhhh. It seems like Queers have all the best houses around here but if they want to celebrate with a drink they’re relegated all the way down to Paddy’s. Hell’s Angels have their barbed wire lot somewhere around Ramona. I haven’t checked it out yet. Maybe one day I’ll go on a date with the sleazy white whore who lives down the street in the slum lord apartments. We can get a beer with Chainy McPunches as I unconvincingly ignore her thighs while skillfully explaining the perils of earthly delights. How many tricks has she turned in those cutoffs with the hole in the right ass pocket? If I started counting, how poorly would that reflect on me as a man? Can’t we get at least one non-niche bar on The Avenue? Thirsty folks is thirsty folks. There’s enough goddamn fuzz up here to stop a small riot. Instead of always beating down the ten winos and two corner boys, why not pick on some local barflies for a change?
Mi bebe es como la mantequilla caliente en un rincon de desayuno.
Just as there is renewed debate over the correct taxonomic speciation of coyotes, wolves, and dogs even though all three successfully interbreed, are we to blindly accept that white folk and brown folk are subspecies of Homo Sapiens? We are one species of course; even indigenous pygmies aren’t considered a subspecies. Just like canids we have extremely slight genetic variation compared to people with different skin colors and shoe gazes. It seems like we know this, but if this is the case why do we persist with this daily deluge of incorrect usage? Just by saying “race” we at best subconsciously imply a drastically different sub-species, and at worst imply a completely different creature, leading to hierarchy. Henceforth, I propose the removal of “race” from our sociological lexicon to hasten global assimilation into whatever wretched creature crawls forth from the mutations of biology. As dictated by the laws of physics of course. “Racist” and “Racism” will also have to go. “Prejudice” stays. “Ethnicity” stays. Instead of racist we will say placecist. Say it with me now. “Play-cist”. We will continue to teach our children that you treat someone badly because of what they do, not because of where they’re from or how they look, and only sometimes and on a rotating basis for what they say. This is what we’ve been trying to accomplish all along, but apparently those old coywolves die hard. With a few tweaks we will burn them until they lie stone dead upon the hearth of obeisance.
If we go back a few centuries, we can take Radiolab’s recent podcast devoted to color theory and re-visit the question of why we attribute incorrect colors to skin. After all, even the supposedly jet black Sudanese fella – burnt umber with a tad of Prussian blue – is still only brown, and even the most alabaster Swedish gal – yellow ocher with permanent rose – is still only pink.
Link to Radiolab Colors Podcast – Best Parts Summarized Below
As Newton was preparing his prism experiment to filter the rainbow already created by his other prism, he was doing so in a society that believed that white light was given by god. The 23-year-old preferred to think of the rainbow as, “a colored image of the sun,” but scholars at the time thought that Newton’s experiment was a pollution of god’s perfection. Colors were thought to exist as a separate entity inside the glass, having nothing to do with the light itself. What Newton discovered by placing a second prism in the blue area of light – hypothesizing at first that more colors would be created – was that nothing happened. From there he postulated that the first prism was dividing light into its constituent parts, realizing that white light contains all the colors. History ran with it, discovering X-rays, ultra-violets, and the age of the universe. But before the universe was given its first smash cake, John Keats reacted harshly by declaring, “sir, you have removed all the poetry of the rainbow.” Lucky for Keats, Goethe was taking a stroll one day crushing on some yellow flowers when he turned away rather abruptly. In an instant, he saw a dash of violet across his eyes in the shape of the previously yellow buds. It seemed so real, and he hadn’t jammed a knife in his eye like Newton had to manipulate the goods. This experience led Goethe to believe that our perception of colors, “is finished inside the mind,” claiming first prize for poetic signature regarding color, saving us from the dreaded Keats.
Mantis Shrimps have 16 color receptive cones, ranking them above the next best competitor by a factor of 2. Even though humans have only one more cone than dogs for a total of 3, we see 98 more color combos than Fido. As small as a finger but sometimes the size of a forearm, these frightening shrimps will break through your aquarium and strangle your children in their beds. Their blues, violets, and super ultra-violets are incredibly intense, and their reds glisten like the lipstick of a red red rose. Built for violence in tune with our brethren crustaceans, we are fortunate to have dodged this bullet of overabundant ocular mutations, for we have so many weapons already.
Many an Englishmen have declared themselves self-appointed experts on both of Homer’s seminal works. One of these 19th century scholars took particular interest in his incorrect descriptions of color. In some passages, Homer would write about the “wine dark sea” and “violet sheep” and in others he would applaud the mystery of “honey green faces pale with fear.” Thinking it strange that such an articulate writer would use such defective colors, the Englishman took to the tedious task of counting the occurrences of color from both works. In The Odyssey and The Iliad combined, Homer uses black 170 times and white 100 times, rounding them out with very sparse reds (13), yellows (<10), and greens (<10). The universal crowd favorite blue doesn’t even get a single mention. Not even in his poems. Limey Gladstone, limey that he was, concluded that Homer and all Greeks for that matter were colorblind. As 3000 years ticked by, Gladstone argued that each generations color sight got a little better, bit by bit, bringing us up to current day. Ruthlessly mocked by his peers for this argument, Gladstone would only seek a modest revenge. Philologists – scholars of ancient texts – took the reins by diving into thick volumes in search of blues. What they found with few exceptions was a pattern of color introduction led by black and white, followed by red, yellow, and green, with blue always at the end.
One explanation is that blue is rare in nature, hard pressed to reveal itself in plants or animals. Greeks didn’t get around much back then, accounting for the lack of blue eyes. But if we catch up quickly, we remember the sky. You know, that big expanse mentioned in countless ancient descriptions of the heavens? How did we miss that one? People really didn’t know the sky was blue back then! Can you believe it? Blue isn’t even mentioned in the original Hebrew bible. But another pinhead posited that perhaps people don’t need a word for color until we can manufacture that color reliably, hence the Egyptians with their first blue pigment and first recorded utterance. To this day some isolated indigenous tribes don’t even have a word for it. Maybe having a word for blue allowed us to finally notice it, even though our three cones have been up to the task for a super long time.
To all the new parents out there, I challenge you to use your newish child as a guinea pig for a blue experiment. As a reminder, this is all from Radiolab, so check out the colors episode if you want the finer details. Okay, so take your 18-month-old child and teach them all the colors until they seem like an expert. Test them on anything you please with one exception. Never tell your child what color the sky is. Just get them all trained up and when they’re finally pros, pop the question. The Radiolab scientist’s daughter gave it a shot, but it took 2 months for her to finally nail it, even though she knew her colors. I imagine that for this to work – meaning that your kid is not special – you would have to bring your child up in one of those houses where they don’t have televisions. Guhhhhhhhh.
Skin color, right? Where did that come from and why are the colors wrong? No idea. Maybe because ancient people thought white light was everything good about god, and black darkness was equated with the dark lord? I guess brown is pretty close to black. I’ll have to ask my wife.
Identity Politics and Cultural Appropriation in American Society and Global Fiction
The meat of this next section demands a preface. I hope to form honest opinions about our ever-evolving identity politics as well as the place of cultural appropriation in fiction. I am not a writer, journalist, anthropologist, or sociologist. I am however a peer reviewed wildlife biologist who happens to see literature as a primal force to reckon with the potential of our species. Having only written a tiny amount of fiction myself, I was curious about the approach of writers to the concepts mentioned above. Juxtaposed with the authoritarian master-slave imperatives imposed on us by religion, culture, and identity, I think fiction provides a nice counterbalance as a microscope focused on our banal, abbreviated lives. My opinions will try to stay within the context of my life experience thus far, my thoughts on the cited articles, and making sense of our democracy. I don’t intend to hurt anything beyond feelings but I do hold dear my right to do so. Even though manners still matter and empathy is vital – hypothetical threats of violence, sexual mania, insult comedy, and all manner of necessary adult entertainment need not be taken so dang literally. As long as we remember that this stuff belongs within the realm of art and performance, we can all go back to work on Monday with only a few scabs. I welcome your feedback. With the feelings thing, I get it. Being another amiable expressive in my crowded liberal echo chamber, I’ve learned after 6 months of cognitive therapy – since abandoned 2 years ago – that feelings ain’t facts. Compared to the deep cruelty out there – think South Sudan – my hurt feelings experienced while living in comparable bliss don’t amount to a hill of beans. With that I will continue my solipsistic navel gazing into one aspect of writing fiction. Enjoy what is sure to be another life splaining screed along the already saturated spectrum of choices.
Mark Lilla’s piece in the New York Times, The End of Identity Liberalism begins by stating that it is a “truism that America has become a more diverse country.” Even though this reality of “multiculturalism” is not up for debate, to me it still reeks of a word begging to be pushed around. Like when we say “plant” 100 times in a row until we are perplexed at how such a strange sound can be responsible for identifying the obvious. The m-word has been so politicized as a cudgel for both sides that it has lost its literal meaning and now exists as the perfect non-word for what has been dubbed our post-fact news media. But no matter if you find the word silly or empowering, it’s just a normal day at the park. Lilla says “visitors are amazed that we still pull it off better than any European or Asian nation today.” Something to remember as we struggle to grasp the fundamental decency of our country. Miles away from the deplorable theocracies of the world, we try our best to separate church and state, expecting religious folk – for the most part – to keep it in their pants and places of worship. The part that scares me most when looking at the left’s promotion of the m-word is the religious aspect. As social groups become larger they tend to exert moral agendas, and religious poison from Christians, Jews, and Muslims deserves our fullest rebuke if it seeks influence in our secular paradise. As I read the sweet public interest stories on religion in the Times, it seems like the faith component of the m-word skates by on a cloud of good will, just because we are afraid of the punishment of causing offense. Do you remember Billy from that episode of Twilight Zone where he turns everybody in the town into monsters for not catering to his every whim? Slippery slopes make dopes but the worst part of the m-word would be having to tell Billy that, “it was a good thing you did today Billy. It was a good thing you turned assemblyman Hikind into a jack-in-the-box because he didn’t vote in favor of a separate Jew’s only pool hour.”
Segregated Swimming Anyone? – Click Here!
Professor Lilla goes on to ask the class. How should this inevitable diversity shape our politics? Well, we should, uh, celebrate our differences!”
This answer suggests however that liberalism has “slipped into a moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalisms message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” The maestro’s crescendo peaks with, “Identity Liberalism must be brought to an end.”
A question does occur to me, regardless of identity liberalism. Will the outside world look back on this four-year period as, “their troubles,” and will they politely look down in shame as they describe it to their children like a mother outing her alcoholic neighbors?
Okay, so whitey, or pinky as we will call him moving forward, wasn’t sufficiently catered to by the Dems as an aggrieved group, costing them the title. 2/3s of pinkies without college degrees voted for Big Pinky. 80% of evangelicals voted for him too. Burnt umbers more than matter, they deserve to live. Queer is not only normal, it’s correct.
“But fixation on diversity in schools and the press has produced a generation of liberals narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.”
I don’t agree with folks who say they won’t talk to Big Pinky supporters or swear them off entirely, even if they’re friends. Get over it, lest you be labeled an aggrieved bubble yuppie. Let’s move on dot organize and protest when the time is right. Sky ain’t falling yet. To quote Bernie regarding his take on religion, “we are all in this together.”
My wife is a professor, so the next quote from Lilla’s piece was especially delightful as I compared his text to the stories I’ve heard about the lovely people she teaches. They will be in charge in 30 years.
“At college, they are encouraged to keep this focus of diversity on themselves by student groups and full time “diversity issues” staff. It’s no wonder Fox News mocks “campus crazies.” They are “right to” but this pandering falls “right into the hands of demagogues who want to delegitimize learning in the eyes of those who have never set foot on campus.” He continues, “How do you explain the moral urgency of giving students the right to choose the designated gender pronouns to be used when addressing them?”
So far, my wife has been lucky, but I long for the day when she tells me that a student demanded to be called “His majesty,” as one young man from Emory University did this year.
The “Whitewash Thesis” so accepted by lefties states, “Big Pinky won in large part because he managed to transform economic advantage into racial rage.” Sounds good to me, but it’s “convenient because it sanctions a conviction of moral superiority and allows liberals to ignore what those voters said were their overriding concerns. It also allows them to believe the fantasy that the right is doomed to extinction.”
What about very real bigotry? Due to intense saturation of the identity conversation and the very real adoption of these labels by millennials and the pink working class, are we crying identity wolf when the real beast is hiding in the woods? Perhaps the beast just snaked by us…
It is however very impolite to call a group of females “you guys,” when they are so obviously not defined by their gender. This I believe.
As it stands…
Identity politics at its worst is about self-segregating into aggrieved groups so ambitious pols and demagogues can pander to our overly sensitive lizard brains with lies parading as soothing emotional candy. As Obi Wan used to say about Mos Eisley spaceport, “you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.” I submit that in the land of Big Pinky, we must be vigilant as well.
Link to Mark Lilla’s – The End of Identity Liberalism
Which brings us to the Identity Politics of Whiteness, by Laila Lalami, a novelist and finalist for the Pulitzer prize. This is the part where I pick apart my own pink identity and pink fragility and take some ownership for the innumerable benefits of my pinkness. Stay tuned for some hardy self-immolation Scanners fans.
Ms. Lalami was reading Huck Finn to her daughter three years ago. Even though she found Huck’s hijinks entertaining, her daughter was most intrigued by his relationship with the runaway slave Jim. As Jim seeks his freedom, Huck wrestles with his decision to help. In the end, Tom Sawyer saves the day after concocting an elaborate scheme for Jim’s release. But the rub of the matter troubled her daughter. Why didn’t Tom just tell Jim the truth? Why didn’t he tell him that Miss Watson had already freed him in her Will? Lalami argues that “one answer lies in the idea of white identity, which needs black identity in order to define itself, and therefore cannot exist without it.”
I admit the first time I read this I didn’t really get what Lalami was saying about racial identity. I felt confused, hurt, and guilty. The confusion sprang from Lalami’s wordplay, almost literally taking the idea of white as something that has a symmetrical or complementary black partner. I understood the literal color spectrum part of this argument, but I didn’t understand the negation of white social identity – and still might not – but I think she probably means that white identity exists because of the recorded history (by and for whites) of racial hierarchy and subjugation.
The hurt comes from the surprise that I thought I already knew why I was supposed to feel bad about being pink – realizing the part of me that hurts doesn’t even exist – makes it hurt even more.
Finally, the guilt came from just automatically taking the word of a burnt umber scholar at face value but secretly wanting to dissect it for truth just as hard as I would from a pink scholar, reinforcing a separate guilt at having too much prohibitive pink fragility to truthfully dissect my prejudice or skillfully challenge her argument.
Lalami concludes, “perhaps it might be a good time for white people to start considering the disadvantages of being a race.”
Noted Dawg.
The Identity Politics of Whiteness – Laila Lalami – Click Here
I’ve heard many a pink man use the n-word. Ignorant pinks using it for cruelty. Jocular pinks using it to rap along to hip hop. Libertarian pinks using it because they think they’re not allowed. All users – except burnt umbers – of the slur I find abhorrent, especially the Libertarians. I think it’s the only word – followed by other ethnic slurs – I try my hardest never to use, even in my mind. I might sound precious or obvious, but as Americans we have slavery and native genocide to contend with. We should always acquiesce to the memory of these abominations and respect the identity that demands us to remember the horror. It isn’t really my place to dissect anything “incorrect” about the struggle for equality by ethnic minorities, but I will say that I support the efforts to emphasize the American and deemphasize the race.
Getting my Jersey Mike’s sandwich the other day, I was sporting a classic black bandana. It seemed like it took much longer than usual for the sandwich guy to take my order. No knock on Jersey Mikes – fine sandwiches – but what if instead of a pink I was a burnt umber wearing my harmless bandana. Besides looking like an extra from Scanners, Scarface, or Colors that bandana would likely create a rush of fear in the veins of many a sandwich maker. What a burden not to be confident that people don’t expect you to commit violence based on an article of clothing you wrap around your associated skin color. No big revelation, but I hadn’t thought about that one in a while. It made me shut up for a second. Which was nice. But then I remembered that many people dress accordingly to evoke…
Maybe next time I’ll wear an ascot.
Some other advantages I have received or will likely receive for being pink:
Better mortgage rate, better seats at restaurants, more attention from my grammar school teachers, faster service at Chick-Fil-A, neutral reactions from old pink ladies at the mall, neutral reactions from my neighbors when we moved in, a non-identity fraught with a history of guilt but seldom fraught with a history of prolonged injustice, neutral assumptions from my peers and institutions about my perceived athletic and intellectual abilities, better job opportunities, not being shot at despite my many traffic crimes, more slack for being an underperforming student, passing pink privilege on to my kin, and finally a neutral to positive reaction from society judging my range of constantly evolving choices concerning speech, dress, music, behavior, politics and chosen profession.
How cool is it to culturally appropriate in fiction? Very, I would argue, but how appropriate is it?
A summer dust up between novelist Lionel Shriver and memoirist Yasmin Abdiel-Magied at the Brisbane writer’s convention captures a nice snapshot of the strong feelings on both sides.
As Shriver took the stage in a sombrero having already received approval from the organizers for the thrust of her speech, she declared that fiction writers should be allowed to write fiction. They should not let concerns about cultural appropriation constrain our creation of characters from different backgrounds of our own. Hearing Ms. Shriver’s words, 25-year-old Ms. Abdiel-Magied began fuming in the audience. Twenty minutes in, she couldn’t take it in anymore and turned to her mother and said, “Mama, I cannot sit here. I cannot legitimize this.” Shriver defended fiction as a vehicle for empathy, but Abdiel-Magied called it a “poison package wrapped in arrogance delivered with condescension.” After Abdiel-Magied stormed out and the festival disavowed her speech, rewarding Shriver with accusations of racism, identity aggression eventually won the day. However groundless, calling someone a racist always tends to stick. Bravo Austrailia. You’ve ripped us off incorrectly yet again.
Link to Lionel Shriver’s Speech
Link to Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s Reaction
At this point I think I need to stop with the excessive quotes and just kind of freewheel. I urge the kind reader to read both Shriver’s speech and Abdel-Magied’s response. But look, it’s clear that I’m on Shriver’s side based on my tone and my desire to write fiction without limits. Shriver’s speech is pretty right on and Magied’s rebuttal is strident at best. Regardless and god willing I’ll eliminate my tone deafness and dig deep.
You deserve your identity Ms. Abdiel-Magied.
That must sound rich coming from a white guy who defined you for centuries but now wants to strip you of your race. But as a new minority, I’m considering the disadvantages, and I realize nobody can steal your pain. Or your love of self. It lives inside you and awaits your leverage. It lives in your memories and your speech. I want your identity to be special, just as I do for myself. But when you say that fiction writers, “will never truly know another person’s experience,” I worry for you. How can you say a fiction writer doesn’t have the same eyes, bones, brain, and pulse between their legs that you do? How can you say that about anybody for that matter? I would argue that the human experience is almost identical from person to person but without fiction – among other things – we remain blind to this reality.
What do we have left when we remove race, culture, religion, and sex? Quite a bit I hope. Strip me down. Strand right next to me. Tell me what you see. I want to know. I see you. Sorry Joy Luck Club fans. I will inhabit your body, your creation. I understand the vibration that shoots up your leg when your boots hit concrete. I am the nerve ending that ricochets off your spine. You can’t hide in there. I know you. You wait for me. We will find each other and dissolve into one set of arms.
Strange to think we might be headed there too fast with the rapid progress of virtual reality and artificial intelligence.
How would you propose we provide the opportunity for poor people of color all over the world to write about white people for money? Isn’t this what you’re asking when you ask, “How is it that a straight white woman will profit from an experience that is not hers, and those with the actual experience never be provided the opportunity?”
Yes, it sucks dick that disadvantaged fiction writers of color have a harder time making money from writing, let alone making money writing about shitty white trash. But nobody is stopping them from trying. They should pick up a pencil or chalk or piece of coal. Whatever sad instrument they use is fine.
Go hog wild you creative third worlders, you co-opters of authenticity.
Maybe the least of their worries?
We are forever trying to become what we’ve always perceived at a great distance. Sorry Carole King fans.
We do this to escape the isolation of one soul eternally screaming for company inside the painful flesh bot we call the human body.
Sexual identity is fluid not because of a well-meaning pseudo concept or a buzzword used to fend off homophobia but because of the poetic idea that even a straight white male is only half of the sexual w(hole). When people fuck, they merge as one – The Androgyn – equal parts man, equal parts woman, with no real differentiation or hierarchy. As long as they do it right.
In protest of intimacy we continue to horde away our identity caches and guard them with all our might. Like a squirrel in fear of losing what he mistakenly thought was his only nut, it turns out he had a cashew in the other tree all along.
Shriver does seem kind of mean though. Kind of like a classic man mean where she gets pouty unless she feels right all the time. Wearing the sombrero during the speech and the ferocity of her ridicule was approaching bad form. Don’t rub things in your opponent’s faces, especially in the identity argument where they are likely to have endured real bigotry. Perhaps you could have avoided that groundless racist label if you were a little kinder. Little league helps with that sort of thing too.
Mis Vecinos – My Neighbors – Ama a tu projimo como a ti mismo
After my folks split, me, sis, and mom roamed around Thousand Oaks for a while until landing on the north side of town at Mount Clef Apartments. Near the intersection of Moorpark and Olsen, Pedersen Road is ideal for tripping on mushrooms down pine addled lanes. Like The Avenue of today, the Mount Clef of yesterday was mostly Hispanic, much to the eventual chagrin of my mom. It kinda snuck up on her. Full immersion into a Mexican American community was rough on this Midwest doctor’s daughter. Occasionally, I would hear the classic refrain, “goddamn Mexicans.” You gotta admit it does have a punchy turn of phrase going on but however many times I called her on it, the repetition sank in. Though to Mom’s credit, she never uttered slurs. At the time, I was really into black power and hoping OJ got off. “Don’t squeeze the juice ese” was a common theme around the pool. Besides loving N.W.A – still lighting me up – I finally got a chance to hang with white trash and foreigners. It was exciting. They were my friends. But my favorite neighbors were the college exchange students living in the apartment above us. They would party all night and constantly blast their Norwegian death metal, driving us crazy despite being so polite when we asked them to turn it down. They never did. Me and sis had at least our share of partial revenge though. One day before school we put on our Daft Punk CD, skipped to track seven, turned it up to eleven, opened all the windows, hit repeat, and peaced out. Around the world around the world around the world around the world around the world around the world ad infinitum for hours and hours. Gosh I woulda liked to have seen their pink Weegie faces grow crimson with shame, finally realizing the error of their ways.
El Otro Lado – The Other Side
“Twenty years later my neighbors inside only maltipoo howls like a banshee whenever they deem themselves worthy to see the sun. How can they torture that poor thing by only letting it out every six hours to do its business, and then not even stopping it from pissing in the faces of my poor chihuaitas. Shameful shit. Tal vez una manana instead of trying to start my truck for 20 minutes I were to finally let them have it. Por ejemplo, “Tu vendejos gringos con 1400 square feet with nothing to show for it. At least put a goddamn trailer or camper in that driveway! It’s fucking 200 feet long and all you have to show for it are dead leaves! And instead of blasting that indecipherable satanic noise at 9am, scaring mi pobrecita abuela la mitad a la muerte, why not try working for a living!? Maybe then you wouldn’t care so much about our harmless little dogs! We need them for security man! You should be thanking us instead of writing condescending letters in terrible Spanish! Our dogs provide an early warning system for the thousand-yard staring gringos who linger too long in your yard after hallucinating about ditching their back pack! And that skinny gringa wife of yours. A woman should be shaped like a perfect brown bowling ball – don’t you know that!?”
Everything is inside with these people: dogs, food, compost bins, birth control, music, and walls unadorned without even a hint of my gal Guadalupe.
Note: When you respond to your white neighbor’s inconsiderate letter letting them know that your last dog was killed by the Pitbull of a psychotic white neighbor who barely served any time in jail, expect to be repaid with a response basically saying, “I don’t give a shit, leash them shits in back.” If they say boo about my roosters I’m gonna snap. I’ll sick one of my prize fighters on that nutless albino bitch of a dog. On Christmas Eve, they can either come on over and join our badass karaoke party or sulk in peace with Bing Crosby.
The Right Side – El Lado Correcto
I don’t have hairs in the language.
But they probably don’t feel that way. They’re probably average sweet just like us. If we could only level with them like adults. Have we tried? Strange because we’ve met 14 of our other neighbors – brown, white, black – we have a list – I know, weird – but we have it on good authority that the fellas who own the house have been here for 15 years. But in their letters back to us they say they don’t speak English. We can’t knock on the front door because of their goddamn gate. How can you be here for 15 years without learning conversational English? Did you come through the back door? I’m all for coming through the back door – prefer the front door – and being allowed to stay regardless of said usage of back door. But if I’m to be empathetic can I really see myself using the back door into Mexico and insulating myself in my tiny English world once I arrive? Not really apples to apples I guess. Mexicans do deserve more slack for fleeing their impoverished violence. That said, all immigrants have the golden rule to follow regardless of societal pain or religious delusions absolving them from assimilating into their adopted brand.
So occasionally we wave hello and try to talk to their kids. They stare right through us like all kids do, hastening their escape with nods, further isolating the situation.
Is it ever right to consider the accepted norms of a socio-economic culture and compare them against humanist ideals? Say, to pit a yo-yo white hipster against a poor-ass immigrant and dig into what’s good and bad about their habits and moral code?
Can a deeply flawed person of either color do this without getting flayed as a racist? Let’s see what we can agree upon. Like, say, middle class white folk tend to do better than their impoverished brown counterparts at providing dogs with humane lives. Even though the French kissing of canines is rather vile, the tendency of Mexicans to keep their dogs outside in freezing conditions with unpurged testicles is even worse.
Side note: Sometimes I’d like to sneak up behind them real ninja like, taper my fingers into a sock puppet, reach down, and give them pert sacs just a right quick squeeze. Fellas, after all, need satisfaction.
And perhaps, say, poor Mexicans are way better than middle class whites at forming familial bonds capable of nurturing a collaborative effort of communal living – taking the burden off liberal education.
In this period of potentially great decline, I’d like to ask myself two questions every night.
How do you react when you hear that an Afghani woman was beaten, stoned, killed, run over, paraded, and burned after being wrongfully accused by her male charlatan accusers for burning a Koran?
Can we consider the possibility that all these identities – mostly religious – although helpful for our ancestors in their infancy, now pale in comparison to the moral compass emanating from a compassionate human heart guided by logic and the golden rule…
Are overdue for retirement?
If I were to take a Graceland approach to fostering diversity not only within my neighborhood but the whole world, first I would listen to some Boyoyo Boys tapes. Learn the language. Get the sound into my blood. I’ll need to keep practicing with Juan, take that semester of Spanish over at Ventura college, and practice practice practice. Don’t let yourself off the hook when you order your shrimp burrito over at Lalo’s. Spanish every time homey. Then, in 5 years or so when I get it down, go ahead and take up the Rosetta stone against the Mandarins.
Next up, talk to Harry Belafonte and Lionel Ritchie about their personal experience with Apartheid and their opinions about me going to Africa. Ok, that means I need some Mexican authority figures. Let’s see, around here we got the Chique boys. Check. What about the Ventura city council? Nope, all seven of them are white. Shit. My neighbors? Nope, that won’t do. Ok, I’ll think of someone else eventually. Is Lionel Ritchie Mexican? No just the stash. Goddamn Lionel Ritchie.
Now fly to Africa at the invite of the union musicians but do it in secret to avoid the cultural boycott. Going to Mexico for at least a year or so after I get my Spanish down is easy enough, but I think the symbolic equivalent of breaking the boycott is not accepting the insulated identity of the Other. I will respect the privacy of cultural practitioners – no doy – but I will push back the tide of identity conformity like Jupiter blowing the sands of the hourglass back up its tiny hole.
Once you’re in Africa – aka the Valhalla of post-racial Orgydom – do it up real horror show. Listen to each other. Do your own thing but make associations. And for Pete’s sake let the warmth of another culture fill the corners of your body that haven’t been explored since you were a child.
A couple of months ago, me and the wife were out back ripping up clumps of crab grass. Hot day per the usual of an Indian summer but things were quiet for once. No Punk rock. No Banda. No dogs. My wife noticed some movement through the small spaces in our shredded bamboo fence. She stopped her weeding, tied the front of her t-shirt into a knot, and approached the barrier. Innocently observing the strangeness of 10 people not making a sound except for the slice of blades through pulp, she told me they were shucking cacti. These cacti were to be shorn of all their needles, expertly prepared, then consumed as food.
We don’t have our wooden mid-century modern fence installed just yet, but I tell my wife, “one day darlin’, one day.”
King Hell Highway 