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, is a pain in
the ass.
He's also a writing prompt. His NYT op-ed this weekend, I'm a White Man. Hear Me Out prompted
me to barf. I didn't, only because I'm almost out of clean towels. 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 a
memoir, 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 black people who do not have the limiting disease of
racism, everyone should pity Bruni who does have that limiting disease.
Read what I wrote yesterday, to wit, 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." Ahhhhh. 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 the connecting threads
of the universe 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.
