black & white

A few nights ago my roommate and I were having a conversation. My roommate is “Asian” and I am “White, ” and this in itself is not a very interesting fact except that the conversation somehow came back to race.

A friend of C’s – a white male who attends the same prestigious university that we do – was trying to describe an event he had gone to recently. When the subject came to who was at this event, he mentioned that there were a lot of “ethnic” people there. Ethnic? Outraged, my roommate exclaimed: “Ethnic! Who does this guy think he is?” Startled by the strangely racist terminology she asked him if he meant by ethnic, to which he answered, “You know… “ghetto”… errr… hip-hop?”

Did he mean “Black” people?

My roommate, angry at his failed attempt to smooth over the existence of a race other than white informed him that he could have just said African-American or Black or if he was really so concerned about it, he could have said “Urban.”

But wouldn’t you say that I’m urban? I replied innocently. I live in an urban area – and after all, we live in Harlem.

She smiled – good point!

I could understand her feeling of indignation at the racial guffaw of this white friend of hers – after all, she has to suffer people calling her their “panda” – but regardless of her friend’s stupid comment, I did feel a little bit sorry for him. What was probably just an instance of ignorance got written off as racist because he is a white male. This is the problem with being white in a heterogeneous society: you constantly walk on egg shells around the issue of race.

Being female, I have a little bit more leeway than white guys when it comes to talking about minorities and marginalized people, but as a white girl who is interested in African-American studies and who has always had a diverse group of friends, insider-outside language is a problem. You can laugh (carefully) when your friends make “ethnic” jokes, but you cannot make them yourself because you will be considered racist just because your skin is white.

I tried to explain to C that she shouldn’t be too hard on the guy who is probably not a racist, but just a bit ignorant, and she agreed. After all, I added, just recently I was having a conversation with a classmate of mine, who happens to be Afro-Caribbean, and as we were talking about the city of Atlanta, she mentioned that she liked it because it has a big “ethnic” community. That’s right folks – a bona fide black person used the term “ethnic” to describe other black people. And that’s another funny thing – a white person and a black person trying to talk about Atlanta. It’s like talking about two different cities. How do I look her in the face and say: yeah, there are a lot of affluent black people who live in Atlanta and there is an amazing hip-hop scene – without coming across as just a little bit racist? It’s the same reason that my brother who lives there can’t go to a hip-hop club even though he likes the music: you just can’t.

Over the last week I’ve been reading a book called “Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa,” by Antije Krog. Krog is a white journalist who writes about the Truth Finding Commission in South Africa following the horrors of Apartheid rule, and her struggle with white guilt strikes me as characteristic of how many white people in U.S. (especially educated, metropolitan ones) often feel. Even for those like Krog who never participated in the racist hate crimes, they walk the road “with their own fears and shame and guilt. And some say it; most just live it. We are so utterly sorry. We are deeply ashamed and gripped with remorse. But hear us, we are from here. We will live it right – here – with you, for you.”

Perhaps one cannot quite compare the situation of white people in South Africa with those in the U.S., but I imagine that this sentiment of guilt will not die out with the closing of the truth commission. 100 years or even 1000 years may not be enough time to heal crimes against a race. And yet, like Krog, I wish we could get past the black and white and truly “make space for ambiguity.”

green

I believe in the power of people to change small things about their lives that have the potential for enormous impact.

This evening I read an article by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times that said if you want to save the planet, it doesn’t matter if you change your light bulbs or buy a hybrid car – what really matters is that you get out there and vote for leaders who embrace “green” ideals. While usually I agree with Friedman and do believe that electing the right leaders is important, I cannot fathom that he actually believes that the small changes individuals make are irrelevant. What Friedman fails to acknowledge is that these seemingly small changes made by individuals are the result of a change in consciousness. It is the recognition that our lifestyle choices affect our environment. It is an expression of ethical intent. Electing so-called green leaders is senseless if people do not care enough about their beliefs to let it affect their individual choices.

Moreover, Friedman seems to underestimate the power of trend-setters and peer pressure to change people’s actions. Personally, I don’t know that I would have had the motivation to become a vegetarian if so many of my friends had not already forged the way. Their example showed me that it was not an impossible task. They taught me of the environmental and economic reasons for vegetarianism. And I raise awareness of vegetarianism as an option each time I go out to dinner with someone. Indeed, even my most ardent meat-eating roommate has come to agree with the rational of reducing or eliminating one’s meat-intake.

In the last year I have gotten rid of my car and replaced it with public transportation. I’ve replaced my light bulbs with energy efficient ones. I’ve started buying most of my produce at local farmers markets. And I continue to not eat meat with the exception of fish on occasion. While I cannot claim to be a perfect environmental citizen, I’ve taken intentional steps as an individual to change my lifestyle, not so much because I believe that they are going to drastically change the environment, but because it is an expression of my belief in being an environmentally responsible individual. If Mr. Friedman wants people to vote green, they’re going to have to believe in it first.

Yesterday's Yesterday on Special Today

Today is the way I like to begin things, because today is when most things begin. Today I got up in the morning and it was about to rain. And in today there is always all of yesterday and all of yesterday’s yesterday. All of my yesterdays and all of my parents yesterdays here today. Then again none of them. Today is the way I like to begin things because it’s always today when you start out to do anything. Today I got up and I walked to the subway station at 137th street and I took the number 1 train to work where I didn’t really feel like working at all and where the work I did do was denigrated by a tired old man who ought to go take a nap every once in a while.

In the middle of work I got up and walked to class in an oddly shaped room in a building that is not really a building, but an extension. And in this extension is where they house all the marginal studies having to do with race and gender and memory. In this class led by two people who are married but have different last names we tried to get our minds around what it means to be living in the post-memory of the Vietnam War, and I found myself telling the story I’ve told before about having two uncles. One uncle who was a fighter pilot in the Vietnam War and one who was a Conscientious Objector and had long hair. I told them how the one uncle, the one who went to fight, wrote a Conscientious Objector letter for the other. And I told them how my mother protested the war. And I told them about our family email list where the emails fly right and left and how no matter what the email is about it’s always a little bit about Vietnam.

Today in my mind were all the images and all the words of all the films I had been watching all week. All about The Fog of War and about Vietnam on tv. And then suddenly it hit me that when the one uncle – the one who fought – continuously sends out angry emails about why we should be outraged that someone would call General Petraeus, General Betray-us, and when he accuses the rest of the family over and over again of not supporting the troops, this is really about his feelings that we have not supported him. His family did not support him and the war he risked his life in.

Despite the startling realization this week that I actually knew very little of what the Vietnam War was about and why we were fighting it, it permeates my everyday life and my relationship with my family in very real and sometimes emotionally-trying ways. So, today I get up and go to work and I go to class and I get drenched by the cold October rain and I think about Vietnam and realize that I think about Vietnam every day in real ways as I stand in the shower and try to breathe out the frustration that I’ll never be understood by one of my uncles and that trying to talk to him about anything that matters is fruitless and that I should just settle for pictures of his grandkids.

I should settle for the pictures of the grandkids and hope that by the time they’re old enough to really realize what’s going on in the world around them that the country they live in will have put an end to petty wars that bring up all the other wars in which people who are still living have fought. Because truly, it’s not fair to anyone and we ought to know better by now.

flesh wound

Apparently a gunshot rang out, but I was not around to hear it. Instead I came home to police tape all the way around the corner of the building. At least 5 police cars. An emergency police armored vehicle, an investigator in a broad-shouldered gray blazer and a woman in a pink mumu half shrieking at me that a person on the first floor of our building was shot in the face.

It was a Sunday afternoon.

They let me in through the front door ("do you live here?") and warily I walked into the building whose air seemed too exposed to sunlight. Strange. Hollow. And exposed. "There's no reason to worry." The investigator said to no one in particular as I walked past in disbelief. "A contained incident." But was it? A man walks right out the side door that I walk out each and every day and gets shot in the face in broad daylight on a Sunday afternoon... He's going to "make it" they say. They haven't caught the shooter, and earlier that day I'm approached by the same strange anorexic girl I encountered a few days previous. A white woman about my age claiming, demurely, that she is a model thrown out by her boyfriend and she needs money for a cab to an audition. All of this here in my neighborhood where I'm never panhandled by anyone, black white male female or otherwise.

Even though I know there is nothing I can do about the situation and that worrying does not help the matter, I've spent most of the day in silent dread of walking through that side door, and my only small comfort is that the police and investigators have remained here all day. I imagine the many ways a bullet might graze a man's face such that he would still live. His flesh hanging off his face like raw meat. The meat-like nature of my own leg that would incite a dog to lunge out and bite it. The decay that a bruise conveys on that same leg - and on the peach I ate at lunch in Riverside Park.

Tomorrow is my 25th birthday and I wonder half-heartedly if this means that I am getting old. I look at my face in the mirror and wonder what it will look like when I am old, just as I used to wonder as a girl what I would look like as a teenager... knowing that at least my eyes will stay familiar to me if nothing else does.

A Typical Day In Harlem

As I'm walking up Broadway with my ice cream cone, enjoying the blossoms and the tulips and my new shoes...

Man on the street: "Hey mama! That ice cream sure looks good! Can I taste?"

Me: "I'm not your mama."

Man: "Well, you could be."

On Religion

Although I usually detest seeing theater by myself, out of a sense of duty to a fellow producer, I went to see a play – or rather, a theater essay – called On Religion. I’ll admit that was immediately wooed by the notion of a “theater essay,” being particularly fond of the essay form in general, and I wondered how a play would perform such a thing. I was reminded of the traveling religious plays that were popular during the middle-ages and Renaissance. These plays were meant to both instruct and inspire religious feeling, and as I understand, they were quite entertaining. So, if we think about the play as a modern re-imagining of something like the passion play, On Religion did not disappoint.

I could tell you about the basic plot, I suppose, but plot takes a secondary role here. There are four players: a mother who is professor and a naturalist (not an atheist, she says), a father whom we can only call a post-modernist and a secular jew, a son who has decided that he is Christian and wants to become a priest (but whom I’d prefer to call a pragmatist), and a young woman who is going to have his child but has not agreed to marry him. The son dies, or has died. The mother grieves and does not grieve. But mostly, they talk around the kitchen table or conversely lecture and preach from the same podium. And by setting the audience on all four sides of the stage, one immediately feels as though she has pulled a chair up to the table. And in this way, it does engage you on that personal, intimate level of discussion like an essay does, slipping you in and out of different perspectives. Here we are. All together. Having a discussion on religion.

While pragmatism has certainly been on my mind a lot these days, I felt its presence most intensely in this “essay,” which is rightfully a piece of criticism that is also a performance. Although I initially felt most at home with the professor-mother’s arguments against religion and its divisiveness, I very soon understood how her son could react against his mother’s radical empiricism in favor of something else – especially when he sides with the atheists and makes the argument that there is no such “thing” as God, because God is not a thing… and also when he makes the very Rorty-esque argument that religions are like languages. We would never say that one language is more right than another language – they just offer different and unique ways to say the same thing. The son (Tom) is a pluralist. To him, religions are merely languages. In a turn that reminded me very much of William James, religions have value in that individual people are able to make use of them.

Indeed, in a modern world where “love” is deified and embraced, how can we deny religious feeling? Or are both defunct and empty – is kindness (an action, and not a feeling) the only thing we can count on? The play unfolds these questions subtly over the course of 2 hours, and I cannot get them off my brain… Not because they are fundamentally new questions, or ones I have not heard before, but because the way the play asked them without forcing answers. Leading the audience through the thought process of them, suggestively. I would compare the play toI Heart Huckabees, except that I feel like that might be an insult. Huckabees does an admirable job of leading the viewer through a series of existential exercises, but in the end forces an answer that feels like a non answer. It’s jokey and ironic and almost trivializes the investigation you’ve just been through. But On Religion does not do that.

Likewise, it does not take itself so seriously that one spends two hours contemplating the hopelessness of asking such questions. The father, for example, whose experience taking ecstasy is about the closest he has come to a religious experience, has a post-modernist sensibility that everything is ok as long as it makes you happy. And even the mother, superbly played by ex-punk rocker Marguerite Van Cook, conjures up a few blissful moments of neurotic hilarity. And in this sense, the secondary “family drama” allows for the play to act like a play instead of series of lectures and debates, which it more or less is.

And now, as is usual when I try to write about a piece of art that has moved me, I find that there is no replacement for having experienced it first-hand. Reminding me, as they play did, that cultural criticism is perhaps most effective when performed and not written in the dry tomes of a blogger/critic.

an earth day thought

I don't really drink soda all that often, and when I do I rarely pay attention to that strange almost undetectable scribble on the top of the can where it tells you the CRV value in particular states. For a moment, I was bitter thinking that this can is worth twice as much in California as it is in New York, until I realized that I could not remember the last time I took anything to the recycling center, if I'd ever done such a thing at all.

And then I remembered the recycling machines that used to be out in front of the PW Supermarket near my house in San Jose. I had completely forgotten them, but suddenly I could hear that distinctive, shimmering noise the machines made as they shredded cans and 2 liter bottles. I could hear the change pile up in the coin return, and my mom taking us for ice cream afterwards. In this memory, it is always summer. Blindingly summer.

As a kid, I felt very strongly about the importance of recycling and wrote poems about how we needed to save the earth. I also felt very strongly that things such as leprechauns and fairies were in danger of becoming extinct, but now I can't remember if their extinction was a product of our destruction of the earth, or my own growing awareness that they might never have existed in the first place. But that's another story.

I wonder now who is getting the money from my cans when I stick them in the recycling bag down in the basement, and I think of all the ice cream these cans could buy if only I could shred them in those machines out in front of PW. If those machines were still there...

Anxiety

Anxiety is one of those things I never will quite comprehend. It comes upon one suddenly. It grabs you and it pulls you down toward the center of your body. Toward your beating heart and suddenly you can hear your breathing in your ears. The blood courses through your veins with impatient vibration (I can feel it in the balls of my feet). It hums. And today I felt it as the phone rang and rang and rang at my parents house in Atlanta. No one picked up. Not even the answering machine. And when my mother picked up her cell phone, it was "hi sweetie... oh well... i'm in the hospital..." long pause "oh well, you know, i thought i was having a heart attack, but i didn't want to call and worry you because everything's alright... we don't really know. i think it was just a bad panic attack, that's all..."

But now what's making my heart beat in my ears is a sort of dread that I'm not being told the whole story. She sounds too cheerful like the time my parents told me weeks after the fact that our dog had died. They didn't want to spoil my vacation, they had said. But it was dreadful being left out that way. And I remember how I could feel the inside of my skull tingling as though it were hollowed out when they told me.

After we said our goodbyes I tried to go on with my day, but it's so cold outside and the rain makes it so dreadfully dark. A thousand terrible possibilties flooded my brain. I just wanted to be near someone and there was no one to be near to. My apartment empty and filled with the dull light of a lamp half burnt out. T asked me recently if I ever get lonely here, and I do. But today was unbearable, and all it did was rain and rain.

Everything is Complicated

At least, that's the name of the song by my good friend Scott Alexander. If you didn't see my cameo performance with Scott at the Sidewalk Cafe back in March, you can check us out on YouTube or at Scott's new website: http://www.scottalexandermusic.com/

The Coincidence

I cannot think of anything that I love more than a good coincidence. There’s something about the chance occurrence or accidental personal connection that fills me with immeasurable joy and the sense that all is right with the universe. I want to believe in coincidences more than I want to believe in reason or logic, because I think there is a part of me that believes that the random is more precise and more perfect than anything I could pre-divine.

These coincidences usually occur only when circumstances don’t seem to be going my way. Two weeks ago I stood outside the doors of a small club where my friend was already inside and the music was already playing and I was told that there was no chance that I would get in. Instead, five minutes later I followed Natalie Portman inside. Then, as I shimmied my way into the unfortunate corner where T was standing, and sipped my beer and swayed ever so gently to this girl-trio’s subtle melodies, I realized that I was watching Nora Jones since back up vocals for a singer-songwriter I had never even heard of before this night. A beautiful young woman named Sasha Dobson, who wore a gold bird around her neck, and a guitar over her shoulder.

This would have been enough. A night of almost-perfect music that I wasn’t planning on and almost didn’t see. And two celebrity sightings. But the next day as I googled this girl, Sasha Dobson, in hopes of prolonging those melodies in my ears, I learned that she grew up in Santa Cruz and is the daughter of Smith Dobson – the man who taught my brother jazz piano lessons as a child, and just a few years ago was killed in a terrible car crash. I spent at least one afternoon drinking tea in their living room with her mom and mine. This musician who I almost didn’t see play with Norah Jones in New York!

This discovery kept me mesmerized for days. I couldn’t help telling everyone I ran into, even though I knew that scenario could hardly be as entertaining to anyone but me. It was exasperating. I told it too fast. And people said: “That’s great Jess.” It’s an empty, if considerate response. After all, it’s my coincidence and not theirs.

All I can say, I guess, is that you ought to listen to Sasha Dobson, even if not by chance