Dear White People: Yesterday I Told You We Are White - Guess What - Another Day and Still White. Deal with It.

What I forgot to mention when chatting myself up yesterday* on the topic of whiteness was that a particular white person, Frank Bruni, who pens Op-Eds, has moments of pain in the ass-ness.

He's also a writing prompt. His NYT op-ed this weekend, I'm a White Man. Hear Me Out, prompted me to barf. Or almost. He begins with this whine. (A whine should be an orchestral instruction.) 

I’m a white man, so you should listen to absolutely nothing I say, at least on matters of social justice. I have no standing. No way to relate. My color and gender nullify me, and it gets worse: I grew up in the suburbs. 

Waaaaaaaah! What a coy maiden he is. But wait! He's gay! And from ye olden times, when it was tougher to be queer. I'm older than he is, from when it was tougher to be a dyke. And? You know who was from oldener times? Oscar Wilde. Imprisoned. Shamed. Despised. But so eternally loved.

So I wanted to reference one of Bruni's idiocies parading as insight and argumentation. He quotes black writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who wrote, Losing My Cool.

“My black father, born in 1937 in segregated Texas, is an exponentially more worldly man than my maternal white Protestant grandfather, whose racism always struck me more as a sad function of his provincialism or powerlessness than anything else. I don’t mean to excuse the corrosive effects of his view; I simply wish to note that when I compare these two men, I do not recognize my father as the victim.”

A quotation which Bruni uses as EXHIBIT A, if the court please! He maintains that because a black man, Williams exalts his father and because black people who do not have the limiting disease of racism, everyone should pity Bruni who does have that limiting disease. 

Of course white people know suffering and learn to transmute it in fire, in which souls are purified. But so what. Bruni states, "My gayness no more redeems me than my whiteness disqualifies me." Ahhh. He's a walking embrace of all mankind, that Frank. I wonder what a logician would say about his reasoning which goes like this: That person has welts because he was beaten. But I hurt too, Ma, and much of MY hurt bubbles in the shallow hole of my not having been beaten. Am I not a man?

Odd and distasteful, Bruni's argument is EXHIBIT B. 

I suggest that  when we accept who we are under the pretty big umbrella of being human, we won't hate difference because we'll see connecting threads
and the beauty and accept our limitations. It's not easy, I agree. One of the wisest bits of advice I ever heard was from a lover: Learn to take your lumps, Sarah. BRUNI!!! Learn to take your lumps, you poor sodden fool with your meagre NYT op-eds.

*Yesterday's post. Click.

Dear White People: We're White. Deal with It.

I've been seeing op-eds and postings by white people about our whiteness. White-like-me people are holding forth that our skin color doesn't define us. That they are the other kind of white person, not the frustrated, angry, slow-thinking KKK member, but the enlightened type of white person, who has known sufferings and tribulations. And loves Aretha. I have thought the same thing at times, about my whiteness, that because I have had a hard time because I'm not a stereotypical, Vogue model-worthy white woman, or even a reasonably competent and attractive woman who navigates life any too well. I'm not white white, am I? Hello, me?!? Swedish and Russian and white all over.

I won't bother with white-people pleas of having suffered as much as black people, because that is plain old dumb ass. The dyke-iest dyke and the queenliest queen, if white, has an easier time of it -- riding the subway, working, renting an apartment -- than a black counterpart.

Is it possible for white people to suffer? Do we have to prove our humanity? Yes, to the former. Yes, to the latter, although that yes is a bit wry. We BETTER demonstrate empathy and kindness. As for pain and suffering, jeeze, watch an opera, read some great literature. Sorrow and suffering, suffering and sorrow. Anna K. didn't throw herself under a train because she was looking forward to a picnic at the dacha the next day. History, the kind with nonfictional characters, is nothing more but the record of the ruling class ruling, screwing, cheating, enslaving the majority of people. Rapes, betrayals, jealousies, theft, murder, war. Feudal it was and feudal it still is. Do billions love religions because of ice cream socials in the basement after services? That would suffice for me, but, no. It's because religion at its best offers comfort. Why do we need comfort? Because we suffer. White or black, yeah, we all suffer.

But, fellow white folk. It's been different for us and that is a hard pill to swallow, an uncoated pill requiring a full glass of water to get down.  I understand why it may feel unfair and even why it may be unfair, a little, a bit. What else is unfair? Racism. Institutionalized mean-ass racism. Being the black guy delivering mail in a corporate office and getting hate looks from the Partners. Being the only black person in the drug store or business or small town. Being afraid day in and and day out that some asshole white person will choose to not feel their sorrow, but take out their frustration on a random black person or simply model their horrid shallowness by causing damage.

Yes, women know some of that fear. We do. We know institutionalized privations. And, yes, gay people, too. But that's how we now define ourselves? As victims? Uh. Have we white folk lived through over four hundred years of unrepentant cruelty and good old American meanness? We really have to bite the bullet and stop whining that we do participate in the very thing that has been despised for over 400 years in this country -- blackness and ethnicity. Do we envy black people? If we have any sense, we do. But envy is such an invalidating emotion. In this so important issue we have to acknowledge that we are different, an idea that runs contrary to good will-thinking of we're all the same and God loves us all the same. God does, God doesn't. In this minute, white people are different from black people. Like the rich are different from the most of us. Deal with it.

White People Are on my Mind These Days {a poem}

From the Spring/Summer 2011 issue of Mary, A Literary Quarterly {Publisher and Editor, William Johnson}. Thanks again to Wm. for inviting me participate, earlier this year, in a benefit reading at the Montauk House in Brooklyn. THAT was an evening.

{Note that when I read this poem to an audience, I preface it thusly: I know a mixed/interracial couple, both parties are named Robert.

Plus, the poem was conceived on a street corner in Soho, where my great-nephew and I discussed the demise of the Caucasian peoples.} I'm already exhausted. Poems shouldn't be introduced, right?

White People Are on my Mind These Days

We are going to disappear.
I say good riddance though
I'll miss myself.
Robert said Well what culture do they have.
The next day my answer.
Uh, the novels of Thomas Hardy,
farmers bent by winds off the Channel?

Do the dying move on with grace,
knowing there's new life and they're part of it
no matter?
Some hit the dirt oblivious to
lights strung up in the tunnel.
This is personal but what isn't.

Explorers were curious gold.
Conquistadors filed teeth for blood.
I can't figure out history.

I said we were on the way out and Robert's
Robert said Don't worry, we'll cause more damage
before we're gone.

My great-nephew promised to be kind,
as he looked into my eyes and
spotted the loving goddess, clawing to get out.

____
Sarah Sarai, Spring/Summer 2011 Mary, A Literary Quarterly {Publisher and Editor, William Johnson}

A Teaching Moment on Racism? I wish. The word. Flannery. N.

It was a comic (weird comic) (dark comic) sight. Good liberal New York Episcopalians using the n-word.

It transpired when author Brad Gooch lectured on Flannery O'Connor, some months before publication of his biography, Flannery, A Life of Flannery O'Connor. This was at the same church  I wrote about in my post on R.S. Thomas. Enough about me.

I am not sure how it came up but quite reasonably Gooch was called on to explain Flannery's use of a word we find repugnant and were trained to find repugnant. The solid folk were appalled and Gooch suggested Flannery O'Connor, a southerner, was mirroring the south of her time. There was talk back and forth, nothing surprising or new. And suddenly some line was crossed.

No. Not a line. Not crossed. A taboo was obliterated. People felt free, liberated, to use the n-word, not about anyone specifically, mind you, but in discussing the stories of O'Connor we'd read, I heard sweet ladies with skin fair enough to have a lifetime of fine SPF-rich cream preserve its ivory hue spouting the n-word. And with gusto.

And getting off on it like kids who say fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck. (This was not a crowd to say fuck.) Perhaps if we were discussing Henry Miller, these same ladies and gents might in a final session start sputtering the legion terms kind and abrasive describing genitalia and male and female and female and male and male joinings.

In that scenario we'd end up giggling because cunt and cock and such, said by nicely clothed white people in a meeting room of a progressive NYC church would be funny, ludicrous, a displacement and therefore silly. 

But it was the n-word.

I still wonder what was really happening. Not one of those people would use the n-word in proximity of a person of color, nor would they teach hate. I'm sure of that. But implicit conditioning of race, class and gender are among the best teachers around.  And we hear the word as booming lyric in rap and hip hop. And white people (I'm one) are our own version of a boy in a bubble. Some black people might say it's white privilege though I believe use of "privilege" gives away power. It s what it is?

I'm not judging so much as "just saying" and part of what I'm just saying is it was not the most comfortable moment of my life.  I did not use the n-word, but my life has not been all-white. (I enjoy not-all-white privilege.) And that staying conscious of such moments is one way forward to the true promises of a decent religion, those rewards being compassion, kindness, redemption.

Change the Game: Thomas Sayers Ellis tellin' it (new rules for poets, publishing, living)




The Vedic Trimurti

 So I got permission for this posting, this cut 'n paste of truth, of all that and the shining light of we don't have to buy into their rules. (My words, so far, my italics. If you know anything of Thomas Sayers Ellis, you understand I am staring in the face of stark relentless loving hipiocity, coooooooolnez, unplugged boppin' and I'm not up to the task but am taskin' anyway.) 

TSE posted these rules in the other order, you know, the countdown order. Hey, stand on your head and read and it'll all work out. Thing is, things gotta change.

Thing is, being angry is static. Change comes from movement.  The change here is in the publishing, poetry, fictionizing scene which need to be dragged on the dance floor and showed new moves. As Thomas Sayers Ellis says, believe all of it and nothing.

Change the Games Rules
as dictated by merciful angels of the great beyond which is here and now 

to
Thomas Sayers Ellis

Change the Game Rule #1. Poetry is unique. A book of poetry is not a novel, so please resist the current trend of making books of poetry about one subject, Series writing. A book-length poem is different but most (not all) Series depend heavily on fiction with line breaks, as well as the enemy of the line, the sentence, so get thee beneath the wreckage, Story, and be thee drowned.



Change the Game Rule #2. No former student of a judge of a literary contest will be eligible for the prize. Judges must either remove themselves or the manuscript. Young poets should practice integrity when acquiring blurbs, requesting them from writers who are new to their work. Say, "I cannot accept this prize because the judge was my teacher." Interrupt the lit-inbreeding, the first step toward verse diversity!


Change the Game Rule #3. I am not telling writers what to write but I am telling them to write Now, about Today, to engage Society, all of the designs of Nature. We take too long, crafting our cries for permanence when nothing is meant to last. We've allowed the immediacy of ignorance to out advertise us and advertiser...s to out cinema us. Cinema owes poetry. Our lines don't have enough current mouths in them.


Change the Game Rule #4. Susan Sontag told me, "There are Only Two Places to Publish Poetry, the New Yorker and the Paris Review." O, the Traceable Hierarchy of Literary Publishing and the Predictable Schema of Most Rewarded Work: Witness, Experience, Simile, Fade-out with a Metaphor. How to Land at FSG, Get Noticed by... Knopf? Don't Start, Be Already Started, Pre-Page, in the Hand, in the Approach, in the Worry.


Change the Game Rule #5. Choose to Continue Language and Culture not to Leave it as You Have Inherited it. Every Time Writing Tries to Write You, Re-write It or Revise You. This Also Applies to Lines and Stanzas which are Governed by Breathing More so than Music or Meaning. I Take that Back. Music plus Meaning are Flowers in the pot of Dirt Known as Breathing!


Change the Game Rule #6. The Workshop Model Must Become Mobile. Time for the Literary Socratic Table to Spin. The (Living) Creative Process not the (Dead) Poem Must be Present. Time to Back to the Future to Iowa 1936 and add some moonwalking. The Workshop Model is Broke and Does Not Serve Wholeness.


Change the Game Rule #7. Share Your Resources. Journals and Anthologies Need Writers More than Writers Need Them. For Black Writers this Means Share Your White Folks. For White Folks this Means Syllabi More Black Writers. An Editor is not A Tastemaker––the Writing Is!


Change the Game Rule #8. Younger Writers With One, Two, Three Books (Flavors of the Month), Write Notes to the Editors Who Love You Suggesting That They Also Publish the Writers Who Have Made A Path for You. Too Often (As a Short-sighted Control Move), Older Editors Will Replace the Cultural Foundation with Young Writers Who are Simply Reinventing the 'Fro-Wheel. Beware, Inkslingers, of Such Advancement-Standstill.


Change the Game Rule #9: Don't Publish for Publication's Sake. Only Send to Journals You Really Like. A Table of Contents is a Community, A Conversation. If You Can't Find A Decent Place for Exchange or to Change the Exchange, Start Your Own. Don't Over Publish Or You Will End Up Like...


Change the Game Rule #10: Let the work Network.