Response to Bananas

Response paper, very rough drafty, to Wendy Lee's "Peeling Bananas."

Though Wendy Lee would call herself a Chinese-American and Carolina Miranda perhaps a "Lots of places-American" (RCWW 179) my sympathies lie more with Lee than with Miranda. That's odd, because, so far as I know, my ethnic background spans German, English, Norwegian, American Indian, Spanish, and (probably) Miscellaneous. But the Chinese author is the one who has something to say to me.

Our family never had any hopes of turning out to be nobility. That was dashed when a bit of genealogical research discovered that we never did have an English coat of arms. The Allen family was pretty lucky to have a coat at all. My aunt was truly mortified to discover that my Norwegian side of the family preserved its records from the 1400s, showing that every one of them was an impoverished fisher, and that my grandmother was, by modern standards, an illegal alien. The English side, the one with the fake coat of arms, seems to have been minor shopkeepers and laborers—and their records only consist of cemetery headstones that go back two generations.

Though we sound like the Miranda family, the comment by Lee that the "strictly Caucasian" homes seemed to have "no traces of their heritages at all" (191) caught my attention. That's where I grew up: no trace of our heritage. Yes, my mother has collected antiques for years. The house is filled with old glass and old wrought iron, but none of it relates to us. There's almost nothing that she can point to and say, "My mother used a kettle like that" or "My dad worked with a tool like that." Much of her furniture is fake pioneer, with fake worn places (you have definitely made a mistake, though, if you add to the worn look). I managed to take (with her blessing and relief) several small things that relate me to my father: his fountain pen, his drafting set, and a lamp he made for high school shop class. But there's nothing very Norwegian or old country in the lot. My older daughter felt that sense of rootlessness. She said it was as if our family had simply risen from the sidewalk. That's why she had a tattoo of a Celtic knot on her thigh. She knew it wasn't our heritage, but at least it was some heritage. In a twist of irony, my younger daughter teaches Japanese in the Los Angeles public school system—a white woman teaching the children of immigrants how to speak their parents' language because the best they can do is the Japanese of a very small child. Visit her apartment, and you will see a lot more of Japan than of Norway or England.

I gave my brother a bit of a shock recently when I revealed that we weren't really Norwegian anyhow. We're Lapp. Look it up. We're descended on my grandmother's side from the wandering reindeer herders who live above the Arctic circle in skin tents. Did that change my sense of who I am? Not really. I doubt if I will ever own a "four winds hat"—that Lapp ethnic garment that resembles nothing quite so much as a court jester's garb. Unlike Lee, I'm not longing to return to my homeland, whether it's Lapland, England, Germany, or whatever.

One of my Japanese friends marveled that everyone in the USA is hyphenated: Chinese-American, Polish-American, Mexican-American. Nobody in Japan is hyphenated. They're just Japanese. Maybe that's why I wasn't too shocked to lose Norway and gain Lapland. I've never been hyphenated. But I think my older daughter would appreciate knowing that we came from somewhere.

Scott Bidstrup

I recently picked up my Ashland essays, this group a set of responses to Andrew Sullivan's "Conservative Case for Gay Marriage," and I was surprised when the same Internet source kept appearing. Four of thirteen essays referred to to a web article by Scott Bidstrup, "Gay Marriage: The Arguments and the Motives." I've got some experience in the whole discussion, and I've got to admit that his name was new to me. I knew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer, Tony Campolo, Mel White, and the Gay Christian Network, but this is a new name, so I decided to follow it up. One third of my students read Bidstrup? Is it some sort of assignment? Is there a sale on his stuff at the bookstore?

Turns out that the explanation is much simpler. Type "gay marriage" into Google, and Bidstrup is the first item to come up. Since he's a webmaster who owns a server hosting over 7000 websites, I'd assume he knows how to optimize a site to get it to the top of the Google heap. It's a matter of getting the right words into the hidden meta keword headers, putting the right stuff in boldface and italics, wisely using header labels, and getting lots more people to link to a site (from "good" websites) than you have links outbound. All easy material for someone who is fluent in HTML, but not necessarily the kind of thing that determines whether a site is a good source for academic discussion.

Turns out that Bidstrup is quite good on this topic, though my students didn't often delve very deeply. He's apparently:

• Gay and not too effeminate about it either
• Politically liberal and convinced that George W. Bush is one of the worst things to happen to America
• Not at all in sympathy with right-wing Christian religion, especially the form that tries to take control of the government to impose its standards on everyone else
• Living in self-imposed exile in Colombia because he's convinced that Bush's Patriot Act surveillance endangers everyone who has a contrary opinion to the official government line

He looks like a good project for Internet reliability and bias study!

Reactions to Sullivan Reactions

I'm about to sit down to read the last stack of reactions to Andrew Sullivan's "The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage." Now I know that it's quite difficult for a college freshman to disagree with a teacher and it's pretty obvious that I generally agree with Sullivan. Here are a couple of my own reactions to the student papers:

Several students have commented that Sullivan plays loose with statistics. He says, "the majority of people 30 and younger see gay marriage as inevitable and understandable," and my students ask, "How do you know? What surveys? Where were they taken? When?" The students have a point. Sullivan's argument would have been stronger if he'd given some indication of where his "majority" comes from.

I get disturbed, though, by simple misreading of the article.

1. The opening refers to action by the Canadian Federal Courts. Canada is a separate country from the USA, so actions they take (even if they also call their judiciary "Federal Courts") have no legal effect in our country. The United States Supreme Court hasn't made any ruling yet (five years after the writing of this article) on the legality of gay marriage.
2. In a similar vein, a ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Court doesn't directly affect the other states. If gay marriage becomes legal in Massachusetts (as it did after this article was written), that only affects Ohio and the other states indirectly.
3. The U.S. Supreme Court issue was much more limited: should a specific sexual practice be illegal for gay people but legal for straight people?
4. Sullivan isn't really saying he's leaving the Roman Catholic Church on this issue. The Catholics only come into the discussion because they have a stricter view of divorce than the civil courts (though those who know the Catholic stance on homosexuality should realize that Sullivan is pretty far from Catholic orthodoxy on this issue).
5. The "when I grew up and realized I was gay" paragraph doesn't say so directly, but the perspective seems to be a young man looking forward to his life and wondering how he will fit into the world. It's certainly not reflecting on a divorce that took place because he "decided to be gay."
6. Perhaps the most frustrating misreading refers to Sullivan's opening paragraph. He begins by saying that the winner for dull, unimaginative writing in the New Republic's humorous little contest was "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative." Sounds like something announcing a new rule for salmon fisheries. The irony is that that incredibly dull contest-winner would turn out to be an appropriate headline for something so earth-shaking as gay marriage in the Western Hemisphere. Sullivan wasn't saying he learned of Canada's decision by reading an article with that title. He's doing irony (a variety of humor).
   

Response to Audrey Edwards

The Incredible Non-Vanishing Negro

Audrey Edwards' article, "Making the Case for Teaching Our Boys to ... 'Bring Me Home a Black Girl'" is useful for many things. She's provided a textbook case in misusing statistics (for example, when she conveniently forgets to mention that interracial marriage was illegal in much of the USA in 1960, but cries out in alarm at the increase in interracial marriages between 1960 and 2002). She's great at quoting experts who are speaking outside their field of expertise (for example, citing a sex therapist's opinions on economics and cultural change). The most interesting thing about Edwards' article, though, is that she doesn't know what she is talking about.

Edwards is worried that an increase in Black men marrying White women (she capitalizes the races as if they are political parties or religious denominations) will lead to a "weakening of the culture and economic resources of the Black community." The issue she raises is how to "ensure our cultural and economic survival as a people" (341).

I'd counter with the question, "Who is Black?" As far back as Frederick Douglass, interracial unions were producing "a very different-looking class of people" (Douglass 14). (Douglass' mother was Black and his father White.) Barack Obama is often cited as a model for the new generation: a black man who can run for president. Obama's DNA, however, is only about fifty percent African, and his Black father was an immigrant from Africa (so never had any experience of American Black culture). Edwards is terrified that Blackness will vanish, but most American Blacks have some White blood. Edwards seems to worry that when a black man and white woman (I'm dropping the capitalization because it's much too political) have a baby, the child will be lost to the black community, but her instructions to Ugo ("Dark, light, shades in between—it don't matter to me as long as she's Black") show that she buys the idea that a mixed-race child is black (340). Not white, not 50/50. She calls a "light" girl Black. We've made a lot of progress since the North Carolina legal definition of "Negro" (which I found in my trusty 1919 Funk & Wagnalls dictionary): "a person who has in his veins one-sixteenth or more of African blood." (that's one great-great-grandparent), but Americans seem to agree with Edwards—blackness sticks with a child more than whiteness.

My daughter-in-law is from Central America. She was adopted as an infant by a family in Ohio. Her maiden name is decidedly north-European. She doesn't speak a single word of Spanish. Is she a "person of color"? Is my son in a mixed marriage? Only if you do a DNA test; culturally, they are identical. This brings up an interesting point: does culture follow skin color? What is Black culture? Is it the conspicuous consumption of a rap star covered with gold jewelry? Is it the single mother in the ghetto struggling to raise her children in a neighborhood filled with gangs warring over drug territory? Is the gangs themselves? Is it John Lee Hooker, playing blues from the rural Mississippi delta? Is it Maxwell Manning, assistant professor of social work at Howard University? Is it the African Methodist Episcopal Church? Or perhaps the Black Muslims? Or maybe a more traditional Muslim group? Black culture isn't monolithic; about the only thing my examples have in common is that people with dark skin are part of them. I suspect that Manning, Hooker, and a hip-hop singer wouldn't find much to talk about over dinner—in fact, they'd have a difficult time understanding one another at all because of language and cultural differences.

Or perhaps there is another question: why is anyone worried about black culture vanishing? Listen to American popular music, not just rap and hip-hop, but almost anything written since 1900, and you are very likely to find African roots. George Gershwin, good Jewish boy that he was, couldn't have written "Rhapsody in Blue" without including its jazz roots—roots that go right back to Mama Africa. Or look at American teenagers. I'd wager you'll find more white boys in clownishly oversize clothing with a waistband near their crotch and a sideways baseball hat (styles that came directly from the black ghetto gangs) than you will find black boys in Dockers and polo shirts. The typical customer for hip-hop music is a young white male. He buys the CD after watching his hero, a black basketball player, sink a three-pointer. We may love it or hate it, but African culture is the engine that drives much of our music, clothing style, and speech patterns. (If you want to get all of the Africa out of your speech, just try to stop saying "OK"—a slang term directly from west Africa.) The white supremacists may have a point about white culture vanishing; the black supremacists don't.

White supremacists and bigots may abound in our culture (alas), but Edwards and her mouthpiece Valerie Williams don't seem to know much about them. Williams claims that "there's not a White person in America who doesn't feel superior to a former slave" (Edwards 344). Perhaps that's true—I haven't interviewed all the white people in America (as Williams appears to have done—but she missed me). I do have a pretty intimate experience of white bigots, however. I've been a blue-collar worker for most of my life and have a fair number of family members who are less than generous in their opinions of black people. I've heard a lot of talk about black people (much of it very insulting), but "former slave" isn't on the list. Lots of other insults are there, often focusing on intelligence or cleanliness, but slave status just never occurs to the bigots.

I realize that this essay wasn't aimed at me; its target audience is young black men—or perhaps their mothers (which may explain why it was first published in Essence, a magazine for black women). They may see the black community as a hermetically sealed enclave that tries to keep its money and marriages for its own, a place where culture and color are pretty much equivalent. I suspect, though, that most people who read this essay echo the concerns of Martin Luther King, and want Edwards (and her stepson Ugo) to learn to look at the heart, not at the skin. Edwards knows this too, and she really does agree. After all, with lots of historically black colleges to choose from (She must be aware of Howard University; she quotes an assistant professor), Ugo ended up at a predominantly white college. Why? Presumably because Ugo (and Audrey Edwards herself) wanted more from a college than a simple color match to his skin.

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Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Ed. William L. Andrews and William S. McFeely. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1997.

Edwards, Audrey. "Making the Case for Teaching Our Boys to ... 'Bring Me Home a Black Girl.'" 75 Arguments. Ed. Alan Ainsworth. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008. 340-44.

"Negro." Funk & Wagnalls American Dictionary. 1919.

Summary of Andrew Sullivan

"The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage," by Andrew Sullivan, discusses the possibility of same-sex marriage becoming legal in the United States. Now that Canada has followed several other countries by legalizing gay marriage and several United States courts are considering provisions to loosen legal restrictions, real marriage (not a pseudo-marriage) has become a real possibility. This is a very conservative move because it will tend to foster stability within the gay community while encouraging family ties, something older gay people really regretted losing. The world is changing: under-30 straight people seem to have less difficulty accepting gay marriage so younger gay people will feel less social stigma about coming out and finding partners. The move toward gay marriage isn't really a religious issue, though; it's matter of civil law. Many religions already have marriage or divorce restrictions that are stricter than the civil law, so there should be no problem with them following their own conscience. The central issue is learning to respect even those we disagree with.

168 words

Reading Response

"Does Race Exist?"

I have to admit to being racially confused. I grew up in suburban Washington, D.C., in the late 1950s (well south of the Mason-Dixon Line) and remember racially segregated restaurants and motels. My deeply prejudiced parents and my environment should have produced a bigot, but one of my most beloved teachers was José Garcia, whose hometown was Austin, Texas. He was about as Hispanic as anyone can be, yet I saw him as white. I didn't see any racial difference between myself and a couple of Japanese kids in my class either. It was during my childhood that the District police, frustrated with the traditional driver's license racial designations of W, N, O, and I (White, Negro, Oriental, and American Indian) instituted photo driver's licenses so officers wouldn't have to figure out whether a mixed-heritage person actually belonged to this particular card. And yet, with my East-coast delicacy, it always seemed gauche to talk about race, especially with someone whose heritage was obviously different from my own.

All of this is a long preamble to point out point out why the title of this article attracted my attention. It also points out why I felt relieved that some of my gut-level thinking turns out to be true: there ARE legitimate differences between people groups; American Blacks ARE difficult to classify; simplistic categories such as skin color ARE pretty much irrelevant. And one more, implied at the end of the article: political correctness DOES muddy the waters when we are trying to answer medical questions that are related to race.

I'm an English teacher, not a medical researcher, so even though this article was written for the mass-market Scientific American, some of the technical stuff flew right over my head. After three readings, I'm not yet sure I have the whole business of the Alus nailed down. I'm not sure that matters. What does matter is that we can begin to talk to each other without panic.

I remember when The Bell Curve was published. It was denounced as a piece of bigotry, and then the subject seemed to simply drop. What should have happened instead was the kind of discussion we see in Bamshad and Olson's article. First a discussion of what we really mean when we apply racial labels, followed by a discussion of how mixed the globe (and especially the USA) has become, and finally an attempt to unravel causes and effects (in the case of The Bell Curve, causes for low performance on standardized tests). Perhaps incidence of sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, and diabetes is a little less threatening to discuss than racially determined intelligence level. At any rate, I'm glad for a clear-headed discussion of what race is really about.