Here's an excerpt from an email I sent to marc@marcmaron.com (don't know if that still works):
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Are you "Uniquely American"? Do you have 2.5 jobs to keep your home that you never see? Have you worked your ass off to get your BA at night school only to find out that today's BA is yesterday's HS Diploma? I want to hear from you - I want to know how you get by! What do you do to pay the leeches - I mean bills? This is a forum of ideas. You can stay anonymous if you wish, I want to hear what you have to do just to keep afloat in today's sinking economy.
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Guess not! Shit -cut & paste doesn't work here. WTF?
Anyway here's what's missing in the my Maron post:
You noted an important distinction today when one caller talked about a Harvard self-diagnosis website regarding what the caller described as our inherent "racism." You heard the guy, and were skeptical about the use of "racist" to describe the deeply inculcated reflexive distrust of Other that infects just about all of us over here now, preferring to call it "nervous." Thanks for calling attention to that distinction.
In a 1970 interview in the Black Panther Party paper, the playwright Jean Genet insisted that we're all "racist," meaning that - black, white, or whatever - we're all stuck with an ancient cultural reflex that spurs us to (mostly) unconscious race-based responses to people we encounter in our day to day lives.
In 1970 I was a scrawny 18-year-old white kid selling the Panther Party paper on the corner in New Haven. It helped sales (& the Panthers) when I read the thing. Over the years as I moved from hippie-freak kid to hippie-residue college teacher, I've given a lot of thought to what Genet said, and even tried to plant the "we're all racist" probability in the students' heads. Sorry kids! I didn't make this up. I've use used the word "bigotry" to distinguish the odious acting out of embedded "racism."
"Racism" "Nervousness" "Bigotry" The word doesn't matter, but the distinction certainly does, and it has fucked up our interchanges for a couple of thousand years, thanks mostly to the ancient Greeks, who (probably accidentally) programmed Western civilization as we know it.
Welp! Pleasant dreams!
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