The seminar Saturday 4/27/19 on becoming men, the second on this theme here I have attended, left me very thoughtful and created what Dr. King loved which is creative tension.  Even though my arm aches from carpal tunnel syndrome and it endangers my academic survival to bang on, I feel compelled to assemble my thoughts and offer them as a prospect of sharing (if anyone feels too bothered just put it aside it’s far from required reading but nothing I write is very leisurely).

      My first realization when I saw the picture of “the smoke king” Willem Dubois and related pictures of persons of color graduating was about something I’ve been studying because of the riots back when Kennedy was done in (the more I learn about it, the more alarmed I am) being that graduation caps and gowns of college for a long time were one of the hoods worn by white power in the South.  On his deathbed my dad wanted to tell me something no opportune time had ever arisen to relate. He’d been offered the Presidency of the University of Georgia and turned it down over their refusal to accept his condition they desegregate. He wanted me to understand his life through that anecdote because he knew he was an educator, not a Civil Rights Movement leader. If I am guilty of using that story for self-promotion he was not.

      The worst image of black exclusion from my formative years by direct experience was symbolic.  An exemplary, clean cut, older student in my elementary school was being forced to prove himself by fist against a really hateful Italian kid and got the better of his antagonist.  The aggressor, losing the fight, saw the black student’s notebook and gave it a savage kick, the pages flying everywhere, then tore off at high speed, his victim (now in tears) in hot pursuit.  My stomach sank. I guess it was third grade for me. Even now it is terrible.

       Soon I had my own problems as a battered weakling.

       Misunderstandings are interesting sources of creative tension, in part because their nuances can take forever to straighten out.   Today in my group we had an exercise with two cards. I thought my interpreter said, “Write your impression of people who are big.”  It didn’t help matters in reflection that I tried to explain what I wrote as misunderstanding my interpreter as asking for “impressions of important people under pressure,” because what I wrote is:  “Some are responsive and some are not.” You see the dangling nuance between what I thought was being asked and how I explained my mistake? They wanted (I think) what we thought people were under pressure about.   It’s sort of a twist, almost the opposite of a situation like where a computer doesn’t recognize what you are saying and underlines your text where a person might know what you meant. For example, once when I talked about collegiates my computer objected, but anyone else would probably know I meant college students.   But in the meaning of the phrase, “My impression of important people,” being “either responsive or not responsive” is very different from their responding to pressure or not, which is to say that in the latter case something might be arguable for not responding, whereas in the former case it means being a little too detached from responsibility towards others with less power, and has far less to argue for it.  Ironically, the misunderstanding was a completely innocent one.

        The antagonist in my life’s tragedy was a language specialist who experiments maliciously in deliberate creation of misunderstanding.  It’s his professional angle on computer intelligence. Jaime Carbonell of Carnegie Mellon, a complete stranger, with no business violating my Civil Rights, destroyed my life.  I will die prematurely from his crime’s outcome. Well, that’s not necessarily imminent but of course I was ruined, I used to want to be who I am and I don’t anymore, but I do work on what they were getting at to prove it’s real.  The experiment angled at me for having a liberal conscience, what Tolkien would call being a Dunedain or one of the Rangers. CMU banned me without my consent or knowledge from a traditional role, neither professional work nor family was allowed in a longitudinal process they admit is lifelong research, supposedly to illustrate wider, more necessary, illustrious truths.  Since the crowd they assembled had shunned my explanation which was already getting steamed even before the double buzzsaw to the head from the effect of the nerve agent they used on me, which is now obvious and unsightly when shown in public but for decades was known only to them, not even to me, so deeply did they implant it for purposes known only to them. Violence of that sort is not anywhere nearly as easy and direct to understand as a brawl under the Union Shield would be.  Behind it is sadism and creepy thinking (research comes in now showing Spin Magazine was involved and all the rest). It didn’t come up today but cruelty to me is almost a definition of unmanly behavior, making clear that when someone divorces from the human race it has nothing to do with skin color.

        But to end this, someone else wrote, “don’t be a burden to others.”   And like you I’d rather make a contribution than be a drag. What really struck me today is that we still don’t know how to talk about race precisely because we don’t have a word for what we mean.  Even acknowledging intellectually the disharmony between the existence of a race problem and scientific shortcomings to the whole idea of it, we still simplify. They are the same word and for two different things, only one of which is white or black.   The other is our greatest pride, to have mind, soul, be human and the other our greatest shame and folly, to be racist, how mindless. Meditating on this, I was reminded of a passage from Pale Fire by Nabokov about an old woman looking to say something with profound Alzheimer’s to her family:  “She paused and groped for what seemed at first a serviceable sound/but from adjacent cells imposters took the place of words she needed/and her look spelt imploration/as she sought in vain/to reason with the monsters in her brain.” And the word is nuts. I don’t mean Maude Shade. I mean the racists and their man on top who so adroitly all these years read the shadow of our fears.

Peace,
Mac