As noted previously, when I was typing my post on Plato's Dilemma, I got to the two words "be humble" and was suddenly struck by the idea of my religious faith being a metaphor for the issues surrounding Plato's Dilemma. The parallel runs something like this:

God exists. God is truth. God is knowable, but only as something unknowable; what we ultimately come to know of God is God's ultimate un-knowable-ness. So, we acknowledge that there is Truth, we acknowledge that somehow it can/should/does guide our lives, but we also acknowledge we cannot fully ascertain nor articulate it. We must address the idea of God, of relationship with God. We must decide notions of faith for ourselves. But doing so involves making claims. It involves abiding in an ideology. We cannot/should not/must not make absolute claims. We cannot say our faith is superior to another person's faith without claiming to be God ourselves, which we most certainly are not. We must not judge another. In the face of this, we form a faith of our own (as Paul said, we work our salvation "with fear and trembling") and we hold it in the utmost of humility. We know it is frail because we have worked it out. We know it is precious because God has made it so. The key comes down to holding our faith in deep, profound humility before God and other human beings.

In other words, faith involves living according to a personal ideology concerning Truth, one that we must value, therefore live by, and therefore in some way espouse for it to be a faith worth having. Yet, we cannot universally verify or validate a given faith in human terms. And, since we cannot verify or validate it, we understand that each person's humble faith is just as valid as our own. Yet from a particular point of view, to say that every faith is valid is to negate the idea of Truth, and therefore the value of faith. Plato's Dilemma.

However, after years of wrestling with this issue in terms of faiths, I have resolved it to my satisfaction with this idea of humility; with this idea that it is not the intellectual particulars of faith which make it faith. Rather, it is the heart, the spirit, the humility of the faithful which is the key. The view needs to be elaborated upon to explain well, but it is a workable solution. I like to say in metaphorical terms that we religious folks spend a lot of time arguing over what kind of clothes (causal, dress, business) we are supposed to wear in the sight of God, but God only cares about the fabric; not the style or cut of the garments. Likewise, God cares about our heart, our humility, our submission and devotion to him at a deeply personal level. I don't think God is interested in doctrine and dogma.

And so. Reading Gee's work on Plato's Dilemma, when I understood Gee's point intuitively, as if it were a long lost friend suddenly formally introduced, and when I recognized that (contrary to Gee's claim) a solution exists, and it rests in intellectual humility, I was thunderstruck by the parallel to my personal view of faith. And I had to ask myself, which is the chicken, and which is the egg? As a born existentialist, have I worked out my faith as a response to a pre-existing intuition of Plato's Dilemma, or is my intuitive grasp of Plato's Dilemma, and the solution to it that I see as perfectly natural, born of my pre-work performed in working out my faith?

An interesting question, and one that could be asked more directly by asking if my view of God, Man and faith is based largely (merely?) in my existentialist mind. At present, I would wager that both my faith, and my grasp of Plato's Dilemma, are based in my existentialist nature. Which gets back to my posts of this year regarding belief, reality, and faith. We truly believe only what are minds of capable of truly believing; we can do nothing else.

A closing point? A takeaway? I left it sitting on a doorstep in my previous post: be humble. To read, to hear, to interpret, to speak is to take a stand. Our stand may not be superior to any other. Or perhaps it may be. We may never know. This doesn't make our stand unimportant. But it does mean that we should stand humbly in a humility that recognizes it may be wrong, and in an even greater humility that recognizes it may be right.

AH HAH! So now I understand my hand-wringing and vacillation about posting my opinions on debatable matters. Now I understand in a simply-stated way what for years I've been fussing with and dancing around. Now I know that this middle ground has a name. Now I've seen it in print. In an academic work. And everybody knows that makes it official: Plato's Dilemma. Yep. Plato's Dilemma.

Literacy scholar Dr. James Paul Gee briefly describes what he terms Plato's Dilemma, and my summary of his brief description follows presently. Plato's argument against the written word was that it could not answer back to a questioning reader. A reader could not ask the text itself, "What do you mean?" and receive a newly phrased answer, as could be done in oral dialogue. Furthermore, a text could make no decision as to whom it presented itself; crudely meaning, somebody too ignorant to have any business reading it. On the other hand, if one simply presented texts with an official interpretation that was unquestionably authoritative, this was no better than the history of oral myth (which is to say, Homeric myth) which blindly guided the society of Plato's time and place. The dilemma in short is this: (1) To force an interpretation upon a text is to exercise mind control, authority, etc. over the people and dupe them as fits your needs rather than theirs, but (2) to allow every reading of a text to be considered legitimate is to at once say no reading of the text is legitimate, and therefore have no need of the text.

I realized immediately as I read Gee's presentation that this paradox plagues us on many levels. Consider that "text" is not necessarily a written sheet of paper, but can be any discourse. One can see that if we look at religion, the same point arises. If "anything goes" as far as views of Man and God, then there is not much point in talking about Man and God, for there is no Truth. On the other hand, to claim a view as "correct" or "incorrect" or more or less one or the other is to align oneself with an ideology and claim its supremacy over others. It is to privilege oneself implicitly; and who has this right, to claim to know the Truth?

And so we must do what we should not do. In my terms, this is the dilemma restated. Where does a person place her or himself vis-à-vis this situation? Is there no truth to be rightly claimed anywhere, or do we risk the arrogance to claim that we, few or one among many, possess it? Gee states there is no way out of this dilemma; to "read" a "text" is to instantly form an opinion and align with an ideology. Certainly, as Gee points out, Plato was not innocent. His solution, offered in The Republic, was that texts should be limited in distribution and always "correctly" interpreted by philosopher-kings; people like… Plato, of course. The issue comes down to how we deal with this; what do we do in facing the fact that our choice is either nihilism or privileging ourselves above others?

In two words: Be humble.

… … …

[*cough.* It just struck me that my faith-based, existentialist thinking views (uses?) religion as a giant metaphor built upon this basic problem of human existence. *cough. * ]

In this season (unfortunately, more like year) of political campaigning, this general subject seems timely. The other day one of my classmates brought up the realm of a writer's voice as related to a writer's identity. Noting right from the start that voice and identity are both subjects that a person could spend a lifetime studying and theorizing about, I'd still like to cover some points about them.

There is a tension within me that results from various concerns and forces tugging and pulling at some nebulous, ill-defined center called 'my identity.' A few of them are involved with the subject of this post. Several years back, I worried a great deal about finding my writing voice, which in my thinking concerned style and content. "Oh if I could just figure out my innate style" I would lament. I sort of got over that, realizing that a writer doesn't have to have a single style. This alleviated some issues with style, but didn't do much for identity. So then I thought of identity in terms of confession and subject matter, until I wrote the essay "Deconstruction, Truth, Meaning." It was then I admitted to myself that neither writing, nor anything else, will ever result in a full presentation of one's identity. "This I confess," is possible; "Now you know me," is not.

These are part of the tension. An additional part is the ages-old spiritual quest for contact with one's singular, "true" identity, which nominally is expressed, with no façade or fiction, in every moment of life—versus the theoretical view that we each have multiple identities. We are different, in some ways, depending upon the context of the moment. Are we talking to children, our own children, coworkers, fellow students, folks at church, etc.? On the one hand, it seems each of us should "just be me" in all of life's varied circumstances. But on the other, are we really the same? Do we, can we, should we, must we show the same self to everyone in all cases? In theory I have an ultimate true identity in God. In theory identity is merely a malleable social construct.

Reiterating, voice and identity are subjects we could spend a lifetime analyzing and theorizing about. Likewise with our social interactions. None of these are simple. But just to try to place something onto somewhat firm footing, it's pretty safe to say that nearly all of us act a bit differently depending upon social context. We say different things, and we say things differently. And this is the small point of the moment, in this post. Do we each reveal a fundamentally different identity in each case, are we revealing different voices of the same identity, both, or neither? What determines what? Can we answer this, at all?

I think we should try. When at the Abbey of Gethsemani, I talked to an aged monk who was long ago a friend of Thomas Merton. Naturally, we talked about Merton. So this monk's voice was the voice of a friend and historian. When this same monk talked to my daughter, his voice was more like that of a loving father. I would assume that his voice when speaking to his superiors in confession would be different. Yet, I tend to think that in this man's discipline and age and wisdom, all of these voices are from a singular, integrated identity. There is no contradiction; no false implications. No pretending. No self deception. On the other hand, consider a political candidate who travels from venue to venue. There is a speech in the northwest about gun-toting rednecks, perhaps. There is a speech in the south about the right to bear arms. There is a speech in the Midwest about the working man and woman struggling to make ends meet while the rich get richer. There are talks behind closed doors, about making the rich richer. And in each venue, not just the vocabulary, but the literal physical accent, inflection and cadence of speech, and the stories, change. What does this person believe? Who and what are they? What is false, pretend, real, genuine? What, if anything, do the answers tell us about identities? That the politician has many identities, or actually only one, which has nothing to do with being genuine and everything to do with wanting to be elected? This example is more personal than we might think, if we ask ourselves the same questions, only substitute "liked," "admired" or "loved" for "elected."

I am somewhat aware that there is code-switching in discourse, such as I might say, "I view this as a very positive development" to a group of professionals, and just plain "Sweeeeet!" to my pre-teen child. I can say to my younger coworkers, "Owned!" and they understand that which with an older audience requires, "Wow, the other party clearly attained the upper hand in this situation, and at your expense." This is natural in the sense that almost all of us do it every day, to some greater or lesser extent. There are people I know who don't, but they typically come across to others as boring, stuck-up, out of touch, or just plain frightening. A bit of code-switching is necessary, and is a positive aspect of discourse. To me, code-switching means I want to communicate with somebody at whatever level they communicate. And I think here is the crux of the issue. Why do I want to communicate, and what do I want to communicate? Are my motives selfish or no? Is my communication for good or ill? It is for the benefit of the other, or for me? And I can ask myself, should ask myself, if the communication is true to "who I am" regardless of the code.

And this leads me to a few concluding thoughts. When we communicate, we make statements explicitly and implicitly. We are also aware (I hope) that inferences will be made. True enough, inferences are largely the responsibility of the audience and cannot be controlled by us. But this is not entirely the case. We perceive at least the possibility of particular inferences. Sometimes we encourage them. Certain rhetorical forms depend upon them. In such cases, do we manipulate the inferences, and to what end? In all of these cases (explicit claims, implicit claims, and cajoled inferences), are we speaking from a single identity that controls our speech keeping it consistent to our "true self" no matter what the voice, no matter what the code? I have no firm conclusions. But one thing that seems promisingly useful is to remember that our actions are valuable in that they reflect our state of being. If our speech acts, properly translated from various voices and codes, are contradictory, we are not speaking from a single identity—or, our single identity is behaving dishonestly. It doesn't take a genius to realize that there are cases where we are genuinely, and for the good, being all things to all people—and cases which cross the line to where we are simply being false.

I was sitting around tonight thinking of music, and this idea I have once in a while of including music videos in this blog. Usually I stop short of doing so, because I find that sort of thing distracting when I read other blogs that are concerned primarily with the arena of spiritual discussion. Admittedly, I face the same thing when I put posts in here about Spadefoots, complete with photos, but hopefully I've written enough explanations as to how the Spadefoots fit into my discussions of faith.

At any rate, I was thinking of music and also of my desire to present something a little less rambling and thrown-together than my recent posting trend. And then along came to my mind a short, informal assignment from my first class in grad school. It covers both of the bases I was looking for tonight, so here it is. (I'm making my first attempt at embedding video in the blog, so let's hope it works. And I will mention, as a reminder to myself, that this song is intriguing in its own right for its appeal to Heaven in the wake of a friend's suicide. It deserves a post of its very own, some day.)

And, uh, I recognize that the claim I'm making, to place this song into anywhere near the same realm as Nietzsche and Greek tragedy may seem absurd, but—I dunno; think about it. Here's the paper:

The professor asserts:

I see [Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy] as an argument about culture and the role language plays in the shaping of culture. I include literature and rhetoric within the broad category of language. The relics of language including literature and recorded oratory map the progress or degeneration of culture. This assertion, however, comes close to being a tautology. (If only a tautology, would Nietzsche have spent so much time writing, rewriting, and qualifying The Birth of Tragedy?) There must be a greater purpose.

Response:

MY ANSWER begins with an image of war. Nietzsche mentions briefly in—but significantly, at the beginning of—An Attempt at Self Criticism that The Birth of Tragedy was conceived during the Franco-Prussian War. What Nietzsche does not note is that he was serving in that war, in the Prussian army, as a medical orderly. At the time he placed pen to paper, a young Nietzsche was witnessing first-hand the horrors of war. This is far from trivial, and in attempting to wager what The Birth of Tragedy's greater purpose may be, we must consider Nietzsche's immediate situation as a possible causal element in his thought process. If we attempt to place the imagery of warfare, the dead and the dying, the blood on Nietzsche's hands and garments into our minds, it begins to make perfect sense that, as he further notes in An Attempt at Self Criticism, he finds himself pondering science, life, religion, art and morality(3). In the middle of man's greatest horrors, horrors often intensified by the genius of science, legitimized by morality and sanctioned by religion, his staggering intellect is brooding with a depth few of us will ever fathom. It is brooding over some thing he considers to be "of utmost importance and… deeply personal." And the nagging question haunting his classical mind is, "What is the Dionysian?" The greater purpose of The Birth of Tragedy (and let us pretend there is only one) is an idea born from a synthesis of all these constituents; an amalgam formed in a crucible heated by the fires of war. In what proportions it is mixed we cannot say, but we can make some sense as to the type of product the synthesis produces.

NIETZSCHE'S PRESENTATION and analysis of Greek tragedy demonstrates Dionysian art as an art that transports the artist beyond himself, to "become art itself" and into the eternal nature of the world. This alone, according to Nietzsche, is man's escape from illusion and mask. Art is the greatest expression of humanity; Man's only pure expression and experience of what it means to contact existence itself(4). But against this salvation stands a modern science, which in gestation destroyed Nietzsche's beloved tragedy and in middle age is advancing the horrors wrought by an ever more modernized warfare. Allied in effect with this science is a sterile morality that seeks to destroy art and thereby nullify Man. Both science and morality appear as anti-life, and therefore as young Nietzsche's enemies. In a calculated response born of his romantic mind, Nietzsche creates and chooses for himself a discipline of life that is anti-moral and pure art. He names it The Dionysian.

It would be an obvious mistake to take this summary and label Nietzsche's presentation as simple, uncomplicated or straightforward. But it is not unfair to say that The Birth of Tragedy is verbose enough to obscure the fact that Nietzsche is being very human in the face of a timeless and very human dilemma. For all its riches, The Birth of Tragedy remains, in large part, a scene taken from a perennial play; the struggle of the individual to find its relationship to, and place within, the Universal. It is typical that this struggle is born of or greatly intensified by the worst of conditions, and wartime strongly qualifies as one. We see Nietzsche traveling, as each of us do, his own unique path to a resolution. Nietzsche's path was simply, but not merely, more intellectually stellar than that of the average person, and held Greek tragedy as one of its annotated waypoints. What we have in The Birth of Tragedy is Nietzsche's working out for himself a view of self vis-à-vis God; at least, a god-like spiritual reality that Nietzsche can acquiesce to consider God. For Nietzsche, it is The Dionysian that delivers one to such a place(4). This, I contend, is the greater purpose of The Birth of Tragedy. And can there be any greater?

WITH A NOD to [the professor], this analysis may well be tautological in its own right, and in a related sense I note that The Birth of Tragedy remains fully relevant for us today.

Contemporary culture in America abounds with analogs to the Dionysian concept, bringing to mind the words "extreme" and "edgy," especially in relation to trends such as body modification and radicalized performance art. Videos of alternative rock band members throwing themselves into crowds of frenzied fans come to mind, and it is difficult to deny that the very heavily tattooed and pierced person is not attempting to go beyond the performance of art to become art itself. Such practices can
be attempts to take humanity beyond humanity, into the realm that lies beyond (or under) humanity; to loose one's self of self. Not surprisingly, they are often intellectually unrecognized as such, and placed under the labels of trend and fashion.

When applied to our culture, Nietzsche's view of morality is most clearly represented in fundamental religion of monotheistic faiths, and in the less radical yet conservative evangelical Christian faith. These continue to exert the same art-nullifying influences against which Nietzsche rails. Nietzsche is correct in saying these influences are anti-art; which is to say, they are intent on stifling the creative urge in humanity. This remains today one of the great ironies of such religions; that ostensibly in the name of a Creator, they seek to attenuate the inherited Creative Urge gracefully breathed into the soul of the created. This nullifying element is represented by media in iconic form as America's religious right.

While both "Dionysian" and "moral" elements flourish in our culture, the Apollonian seems to be suffering. Fine art in "plastic" forms is relegated to museums, visual arts are limited to moving imagery and are often only in tertiary support of other mediums, and the higher ideals inspired by Apollo are mistakenly equated to morality per se. The resulting vacuum remains a tremendous weakness in our society: pundits incite the populace to reduce everything into binary quantities of the Dionysian versus the moral. Missing are Nietzsche's Apollonian, and a second form of mysticism Nietzsche himself had likely encountered yet happens to ignore completely(5). We are left in a state far less than ideal, for when the Apollonian does not exist to temper Dionysian, and other forms of mysticism are ignored, it remains far too easy to believe that everything capable of loosing us from ourselves is unquestionably expedient. This tendency is exacerbated by the intuitive realization that our society's only advertised alternative is an arid, life-limiting morality few find appealing.

The Creative, Artful Urge within us is telling us to run from that which stifles it and into the arms of its eternal source, and indeed we are often quick to run. But I am afraid our running is frequently blind, and not always to God.

Notes and points of discussion:

1. An example of contemporary Dionysian art?

Say Hello 2 Heaven, by Temple of the Dog. Seriously open to debate (and even more so to musical taste), but listen to the ending chorus, as the singer begins to loose himself of any concern of being a singer. The art is overtaking the artist. In the spirit of this paper, listen to the song while imagining a battlefield. I think one can begin to get an idea of art transporting us to a place that science and morality cannot:

2. Sources

Quotations below are from The Birth of Tragedy translated by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC, last revised June 2003. An etext is available at:

http://www.mala.bc.ca/%7Ejohnstoi/Nietzsche/tragedy_all.htm

3. Excerpts noting the constituents of Nietzsche's dilemma

"Whatever might have been be the basis for this dubious book, it must have been a question of the utmost importance… a deeply personal one… Testimony to that effect is the time in which it arose… that disturbing era of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71… The issue which that bold book dared to approach for the first time… to look at scientific enquiry from the perspective of the artist, but to look at art from the perspective of life…"

"…above all the issue that there is a problem right here and that the Greeks will continue remains, as before, entirely unknown and unknowable as long as we have no answer to the question, 'What is the Dionysian?' Indeed, what is the Dionysian? This book offers an answer to that question…"

"We see that this book was burdened with an entire bundle of difficult questions. Let us add its most difficult question: What, from the point of view of living, does morality mean?"

"… art, and not morality, was the essential metaphysical human activity, and in the book itself there appears many times over the suggestive statement that the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon… the entire book recognizes only an aesthetic sense and a deeper meaning under everything that happens..."

"And what about morality itself? Isn't morality… the greatest of all dangers? And so, my instinct at that time turned itself against morality in this questionable book, as an instinctual affirmation of life, and a fundamentally different doctrine, a totally opposite way of evaluating life, was invented, something purely artistic and anti-Christian. What should it be called? As a philologist and man of words…I called it the Dionysian."

4. Excerpts supporting the idea of Dionysian art as contact with the ground of being

"…it is possible for us to imagine how he sinks down in the Dionysian drunkenness and mystical obliteration of the self… his own state now reveals itself to him, that is, his unity with the innermost basis of the world…"

"Only this 'I' is not the same as the 'I' of the awake, empirically real man, but the single 'I' of true and eternal being in general, the 'I' resting on the foundation of things. Through its portrayal the lyrical genius sees right into the very basis of things."

"But insofar as the subject is an artist, he is already released from his individual willing and has become, so to speak, a medium through which a subject of true being celebrates its redemption… We should really look upon ourselves as beautiful pictures and artistic projections of the true creator, and in that significance as works of art we have our highest value…"

"This is the most direct effect of Dionysian tragedy… the gap between man and man give way to an invincible feeling of unity which leads back to the heart of nature."

"The ecstasy of the Dionysian state, with its destruction of the customary manacles and boundaries of existence, contains, of course, for as long as it lasts a lethargic element, in which everything personally experienced in the past is immersed. Through this gulf of oblivion, the world of everyday reality and the Dionysian reality separate from each other."

"The sphere of poetry does not lie beyond this world as the fantastic impossibility of a poet's brain. It wants to be exactly the opposite, the unadorned expression of the truth, and it must therefore cast off the false costume of that truth thought up by the man of culture. The contrast of this real truth of nature and the cultural lie which behaves as if it is the only reality is similar to the contrast between the eternal core of things, the thing-in-itself, and the total world of appearances."

"Hence our entire knowledge of art is basically completely illusory, because, as knowing people, we are not one with or identical to that being who, as the single creator and spectator of that comedy of art, prepares for itself an eternal enjoyment. Only to the extent that the genius in the act of artistic creation is fused with that primordial artist of the world, does he know anything about the eternal nature of art, only in that state in which (as in the weird picture of fairy tales) he can miraculously turn his eyes and contemplate himself. Now he is simultaneously subject and object, all at once poet, actor, and spectator."

It seems reasonable to view these types of images as analogs to concepts of God we find in systems of spiritual and religious thought: non-duality in select Eastern religions, and God as "the ground of being" in Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology.

These lead me to believe that Nietzsche's concern is really one of (his) humanity in experience of and/or relation to true deity (i.e., God).

5. The mysticism that Nietzsche neglects

It's interesting that Nietzsche comments on Christianity yet limits his observation, apparently, to Orthodox and/or reformed orthopraxis. Nowhere is there mention of Christian mysticism, although can't we assume that Nietzsche would have been familiar with Meister Eckhart? Perhaps not, though, in his twenties?

Christian mysticism, and the spirituality it represents, are a missing element in Nietzsche's thought. Perennially, there are two basic approaches to mysticism in Man's spiritual traditions. There is the inward, meditative, emptying tradition (e.g., Christian mysticism, Zen Buddhism) and there is the super-man, beyond man, I have become God approach. This latter approach is foreign to me except for having read about it. I wonder if the Dionysian is an example of this. At any rate, both approaches have the same end: dissolution of the individual into the eternal; not Man as God, but Man in God.

If I had to claim at present an area of research for my degree, I'd say that ostensibly it's about "Building bridges and spanning spaces." Supposedly I concern myself with internarrative spaces and the breakdown of communication between discourse communities. And, of course, magical ways of forming connections across these gaps: a little something I impressively label "memetic bridging." Yeah. Thumthin like that.

I truly do find internarrative spaces fascinating. But I have to admit that sometimes they're just plain disheartening. When you study the differences of frameworks in ardent opponents, sometimes it's simply frustrating and you just wonder why the groups can't see what each other is saying. But what's really unsettling is when you try to grasp the supporting structures of each framework in certain cases, and also examine, on each side, the critiques of the respective opponent's framework. This is not so much frustrating as it is simply mind-numbing. It becomes obvious why, in certain meetings of certain communities, the end result is that each group decides the best thing is to just do their own "thing" and leave one another alone.

I've been reading a present debate on the internet between two guys who belong to one Protestant tradition, one guy in the Bible Belt and one guy way out west. The former is, in my point of view, a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying fundamentalist, while the latter is… well, more conservative than I am but a flaming, hell-bound liberal in the eyes of the former. Same religious tradition, same Bible, and about 170 degrees off from one another. This could be considered the intriguing, even frustrating, part. But, the reading of the interpretations that each has of the other's words, and the comments of people who are reading the debates, is the mind-numbing part. Beyond the fact that everybody is writing in English, there is almost no framework which exists to support effective dialogue.

Yet both these groups fit into a big bucket the secular world hears say, "Come unto us in the name of Christ, and find the Truth."

Time for me to go sit and rock in a corner, hugging myself, trying to find a happy place.

This past week the master leather worker and saddle maker Slim Green passed away at the age of ninety-one. I had the honor to once sit for a couple of hours while Slim shared with me some of his personal history. How often do you get to meet a person who has crafted for presidents, cowboys and movie stars since the 1940's, who knew almost everybody who was anybody in the history of Western saddle making, and whose work is the subject of museums from coast to coast? Not very often. Just once, I figure.

So Slim has ridden off to far greener pastures, and America has lost no small bit of her living history.

My sincere condolences to Slim's family, and my thanks to Slim for the time he took to tell me some of his fascinating tales.

Vaya con Dios, Slim. We'll see you on the flip side.

I received a couple of requests to make this essay available, so here it is. I've placed it over on the writings & projects pages, but you can grab a pdf here.

I would like to speak for a moment, to speak in very loose and non-technical terms, about a clash of races. Less generally, I would like to speak of the black race—of what have been called black identity and the fact of blackness. More specifically, I would like to speak of these things in the contexts of culture, of my self as a member of the white race, and of a confluence of personal histories, identity and blackness. I would like to speak, in truth, of my own arrogance and ignorance.

I WILL call him John: a man who was once a security officer at my place of employment. On occasion he and I would talk about jobs, cars, the weather or whatever else might come to mind. We always smiled and waved at one another and were, for all practical purposes, good-natured acquaintances. All of this changed, though, on a day we were talking about careers, efforts to progress and succeed in one’s own field, and the associated attention to appropriate dress and physical appearance. John mentioned something about being annoyed by having to shave regularly, and (unfortunately) I had recently read a news article concerning discussions in the United States military about requirements for the shaving of facial hair. At issue in the article was that the facial hair of African-American men, when submitted to close and repeated shaving, in a majority of cases leads to a medical condition whose symptoms include painful and sometimes disfiguring inflammation of the skin. My reply to John’s simple statement was, approximately, “Yeah you know I’ve heard that black people have a hard time with shaving because their hair curls under the skin…” Somewhere near the completion of my thought, John’s demeanor changed drastically and the conversation abruptly ended. Our association remained strictly “professional” for the rest of the time we worked together. Undoubtedly and yet with the best of intentions, I had committed an act I abhor: I had deeply insulted a fellow human being.

IN THE shadow—for the word seems much more appropriate than “light”—of this story, I would first like to consider the word Black to be “a historical category, a political category, a cultural category” as presented by Jamaican writer Stuart Hall when he refers to hearing the word “for the first time in the wake of the Civil Rights movement (149).” This recollection of Hall’s is important at several levels, of which I will mention two. It is most importantly seen as what Hall claims it was: a performative use of language wherein Black was taken out of its tragic and horrendous history and rearticulated in a new and positive way (149). But it is also important presently and to me personally, albeit in a very ironic way, because it was this re-articulation in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s which became an articulation that framed and solidified what “Black” meant to me in my history—a history that for some thirty-five years has remained naively unrevised.

As a student in a fully integrated primary school outside of Washington, D.C. in 1970, I was daily exposed to the phrase “Black Power” by my classroom peers. I knew what the colors black, red and green appearing together on a shirt, bumper sticker or notebook represented. I knew that a plastic or steel pick carried about in one’s hair was “bad,” which is to say, “cool.” It was not uncommon for the good-bye gesture between friends at the end of the day to be an outstretched hand clenched—with the thumb held just so—as a symbol of black power. It was a gesture shared even between friends of mixed races, and I used it myself. The overall impression upon my childhood sensibilities, as I recall it today, was that some of us are white, some of us are black, and there is no difference between us.

But time changes things. It fades photographs and it effaces the monuments of children. I am beginning to learn that within myself the remaining, potent remnant of the history I have just recounted is simply and no more than this: Some of us are white, and some of us are black. So what? So I must now painfully consider the present result of my personal history in terms of what Frantz Fanon articulates powerfully in his essay “The Fact of Blackness:”

Nausea… for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slavery, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin.”

On that day, completely dislocated… I took myself far off from my own presence and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? But I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a man among other men (259).

It was upon a slow reading of this section of Fanon’s that I sat chilled in the warmth of my office, a new dictionary turning in my mind, recalling my conversation with John: Sho’ good eatin. To be a man among other men. Sho’ good eatin. To be a man among other men. Your hair curls under your skin. You can’t even shave clean. Sho’ good eatin, right John?

While to me my comment about shaving one’s beard was prompted by a personally historical and conceptually positive view of blackness, it was to John more likely a commentary regarding black vis-à-vis white; which is to say it was a claim made by me concerning his blackness vis-à-vis my whiteness. Some of us are white, and some of us are black. So what? So I meant nothing other than to manifest an attempt to recognize, to sympathize with and to connect to, a man’s blackness. I was stuck somewhere long ago with little Tony and Jimmy playing 45’s at a Valentine’s party. I was implying awareness and acceptance that was easy and uncomplicated; like the first grade was always supposed to be. But since then I should have learned something else simple and uncomplicated: that implication has precious little to do with inference. I realize now, with newfound dismay, that what I “successfully” connected with in the soul of John was more akin to Fanon’s fact of blackness as it existed in John’s history; not in my own. In my arrogance and ignorance I had attempted to show John a white man’s view of Black Man’s history, but had simply reminded him of his own, black, man’s history. I had said to him that, all in all, he was first and foremost black—before anything else.

IN ACADEMIA, one is guilty of plagiarism even when it is accidental. My confession today is that one is similarly culpable for his own racism. And so the question remains as to how we can extract from this story something good; something applicable positively in the realm of race relations. A brief and clever answer would be nice; perhaps something sublime about the need to responsibly loose, claim, revise and apply histories both universal and personal. In this vein, we may do well to note that while history demonstrates that one group of people tends to define all other groups in terms of itself, we must remember that such an act is just as wrong in the small and current cases as it has always been in the monumental and historical cases—for the latter begins with the former. We might also do well to remember that race is not in skin color, nor in our genes, but only in our social constructions (Haney López, 166-71). And with this in mind we might also try to understand that as culture changes, so does race and our outdated views of it. You and I must continually review our own histories small and large, holding them up to the light of current society and reinterpreting them as necessary for the dignity of one another. This is all well and good. And yet I am still left cold, and frustrated, and ashamed.

All of this seems too sterile, too clean and too safe to me today. It looks all too much like a bar of Ivory soap sitting freshly unwrapped in a powder room of privilege. I cannot escape a feeling within my white self concerning black identity, the fact of blackness, and Sho’ good eatin’. To be sure, the belief that race is constructed in relation to others can bring many positive changes in our thinking. But to end with this belief is to run the grave risk of making an implicit, privileged claim within one’s white self that since I have defined blackness, I therefore and obviously understand what it means. It seems imminently logical, after all, that if I define a concept then I determine its meaning. But again, implication has precious little to do with inference. For me today, and for all my talking, the lesson is brutally simple: It is never the place of the White to speak as if he understands Blackness.

Works Cited

Fanon, Frantz. “The Fact of Blackness.” Theories of Race and Racism. New York: Routledge, 2000. 257-266.

Hall, Stuart. “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.” Theories of Race and Racism. New York: Routledge, 2000. 144-153.

Haney López, Ian F. “The Social Construction of Race.” Critical Race Theory. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999.