This guy walks into a bar and says... - Apr 9, 2006 - Printable Version
- Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Gray Like Me: Part 4
by Ken Shade It should be clear to anybody watching the F/X network's "Black. White." that, barring a Biblical epiphany, there is no hope for Bruno. He clearly went into the project with no intent other than to find underpinnings for his bigotry. He can't find the meat of what he sought, so he fights like a starving dog for the few scraps he can sniff out.
In episode four, Bruno declares that he wants to meet "successful black people," and see what they are all about. If he would look, he would see that he is sharing a house with successful black people. Mr. and Mrs. Sparks are successful, but Bruno probably would not give them the credit, even if he noticed. No, when Bruno says he wants to talk to successful black people he means "other" successful black people. He is high-centered on the notion that Renee and Brian Sparks are being deliberately obtuse. He presumes that any successful African-American must have become so because their philosophy of life is the same as his. Such a person will, he expects, tell him that he is right about everything. He is introduced to a very successful musician and teacher, a man with gold records and a "Teacher of the Year" plaque on the wall.
The meeting doesn't go well for Bruno. At the outset, he starts his "black men leave their families" nonsense, and the teacher noticeably stiffens.
Bruno has brought this up several times. I have known guys who did this, over my years between two cultures, and they have all shared one of two motives:
1: They want to feel morally superior. It is the nature of oppressed classes, or individuals who feel oppressed, to presume a moral superiority over their oppressors. Bruno is not a member of any oppressed class, but he is still steaming over the basketball incident, and feels oppressed. (He says he isn't still hurting, but his every action gives lie to that assertion.) Constantly putting forth his whiteness as evidence that he is a better father and husband than black men are makes him feel better than those four guys who long ago conspired to not pass the ball to him.
2: Many white men who say things like this do it because, here we go again, they want black women. They constantly put forth their rehearsed oration about how they're more loyal, true, honest and loving than African-American men, hoping that a few black women will decide to give them a try, or at least flirt with them. I don't think this second reason applies to Bruno, but I've seen it often, and it makes me laugh.
To listen to Bruno, one would think that the majority of African-American men walk out on their families. In reality, the number of black men who cut out is only a little bit higher than the number of white men who do. This is remarkable when you consider the extra difficulties African-American men must deal with.
ATTENTION WHITE FATHERS!!! Being a father is hard, isn't it? It's tough to know what to do in all the complex situations kids place you in. You're expected to carry the lion's share of financial responsibility because the woman you are married to isn't paid what she's worth in the work place. Your role is not as clearly defined as it once was, so it's difficult to know what is expected of you. You may be expected to be a gardener, psychologist, football coach, plumber, carpenter, brick mason, bodyguard and horsey all in the same week. It's impossible to know if you're doing it right until it's too late to change anything.
Yes, white fathers, you're doing the thankless grunt work.
Now, imagine that you are doing it with twenty percent less income. Imagine having far fewer choices when it comes to choosing where you'll raise your family because real estate agents steer you away from the neighborhoods you might desire. Picture yourself trying to teach children to be successful when their schools, recreational facilities, libraries, scout troops, health care and employment opportunities are all a little worse than what the kids they compete against get. Try to envision carrying twice the load you carry now.
That's what black fathers have to do. It's no surprise that hypertension is the number one cause of death among African-American men. The Brunos of the world smugly point fingers at the minority of men who crack under this pressure, when they should be standing in respect for the large majority who stick it out. They should also be asking themselves why, when it's broken down by socioeconomic factors, more black men stay with their families than white men.
While we're on the subject of families, I want to talk about a moment in the show that surprised me not at all. Rose, the white teenager, tells her poetry group that she is struck by how they, as African-Americans, have such a sense of "where they came from." She is talking about their familial ties, but never gets a chance to explain that. The group erupts. All at once, then separately, they express frustration at feeling no sense of where they came from: Africa, not family. They complain about not having African names, not knowing about African culture, etc. If they had allowed her to finish, they might have learned about something precious they do have.
When I was young, certain days meant everything to me. Those were the holidays on which my extended family was together. On Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter, my grandmother's little house would begin to resemble Woodstock. My grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and a few people whose relation to me I never fully understood, filled the place to engage in obscene gluttony and good-natured savaging of one-another's personalities. The Dallas Cowboys were always playing the Detroit Lions, it seemed, and Uncle Bill's occasional shouts of "WALT GARRISON!" punctuated the general chaos. Standing up to go get more food was understood to be a tacit surrender of your place on the sofa, chair, ottoman or rug on which you sat. You'd have to stand up and eat until some other poor, hungry fool stood to reload their Chinette. Then, you could steal their spot if you got to it first. Football and baseball were played. My father's same tired jokes were retold as if new. Laughter was our music and love hung thick in the air.
It was like millions of other family gatherings the world over. In fact, later in the day, my nuclear family would drive the short distance to Deer Creek, where the scene would be repeated with my mother's side.
We don't have any of those, anymore. With the deaths of three of my grandparents came the breaking up of the little solar systems they were the centers of. Those family gatherings have broken up into many other gatherings in other houses and towns, centered on nuclear families of the generation to which I belong. I have cousins, many of them, who I now only see at funerals. We have reached the point where somebody has to die to get us all together again.
If I sound nostalgic for those times, it's only because I am. I once believed they would go on forever. Now, I wish they had.
My black family, on the other hand, has massive yearly reunions involving anybody even distantly related, from anywhere in the country. These are big-time productions, and they take a lot of work and money to pull off. They do it because they are drawn together not only by common love for their elders, but also by a deep appreciation for kinship and shared experience. This is what Rose was trying to say. The difference may be an African legacy. It may be because of a greater need for support structures in a society that wasn't built for or by you. Whatever the case, black extended families work harder to remain families, and that's something to value, even if you don't know what your last name should have been.
Bruno's conversation with the teacher isn't a total loss. He picks through it to find a statement or two which, taken out of context, will support his attitudes. He returns to the house the families on the show share and announces that he has it on the authority of a "black teacher of the year" that there is no particular way to act black, so he isn't going to try anymore. He omits the fact that the "black teacher of the year" also said that Bruno is a "racist" and "full of crap."
Bruno pulls of another master stroke when he decides to show the Sparks family a video he once made. It's a rap video, which he claims to have made as a humorous way to give middle-aged men a voice, since all other rap videos give voice to young men. This is his explanation, and it's rubbish. Even he doesn't believe it. He just wants to show this video as a way to get some digs in on the Sparks'. He calls it "Middle-aged Man," or something like that. However, the things he raps about in the video have nothing to do with age. They're all about race. He stiffly, piously, and with a touch of sadistic glee, derides all the worst aspects of hip-hop culture, which he takes to be African-American culture as a whole.
Everybody in the house, including the members of his family, are left in awe of just how pathetic this man can be. They aren't offended, they're just appreciating more deeply that he is King Buffoon.
Bruno doesn't understand that a white man making fun of black people just isn't funny. I am sure he is among the mass of whites who don't seem to understand why it's OK for Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor and Chris Rock to poke fun at whites, but not OK for any white man to return the favor. I've heard a lot of people complain about how unfair this is. They think it's unfair because they haven't thought about it very much. If they did, they'd catch on immediately.
When the Coyote falls off of a cliff, it's funny. If the Roadrunner fell off, it wouldn't be. If a grown man is hit in the face with a pie by a child, it's funny. If that man smashed a pie into the face of that child, it would make people angry. When Laurel makes a fool of Hardy, we're glad he let the air out of Ollie's pomposity. The humor in these gags comes from seeing the man on top, the oppressor, the bully, get his due from the weak and/or persecuted. By the same token, we white people can get pies in the face from black folks, and it's funny. It's discomfiting to hear caucasians make fun of African-Americans, even if it's done with some talent or style. It's just too close to the cruel and offensive racist jokes that were once acceptable in polite conversation. It's too close to a pie in a kid's face. African-Americans have played Jerry to white America's Tom too long for things to be any other way.
Rose and Carmen are beginning to show some real personal growth. The high point of this episode is a conversation between them about "acting black." They are finally able to articulate how artificial this whole situation is. They realize that they'll never be able to completely succeed at acting black or assimilating into A-A culture because blackness is "not what you are, it's who you are." Carmen expresses doubt about her future with Bruno because she sees his lack of growth and acceptance. She wonders if she will ever be able to relate to him the same way she used to. She has seen things in him that she does not like. She's starting to see things in herself that she does not like, but she feels open to change. Bruno is open to nothing. There is little hope for Bruno, but there is hope for Carmen. Rose is all about hope.
Brian and Renee are hoping to save their son, Nick. They want for him to care about something important...anything important. In this episode, he may be beginning to. He won't listen to his father, but a barber is able to convince him that giving permission to white kids to use the word "nigger" in his presence isn't right because those other kids are not part of, and do not understand, the black experience. When Nick tells the white kids in his etiquette class that it is no longer acceptable, they seem almost relieved to now know where the boundaries are. Nick had changed the rules our society teaches about that word, and they didn't know where to draw the line.
I don't know why Nick doesn't care about life very much. Maybe he is losing hope. Perhaps his only desire, that of being a "G," doesn't require hope. Maybe a lack of hope is the very reason he can only picture himself as a "G." It may just be teenage affectation. His sullen stare makes reading him almost impossible.
Brian and Renee face raising an African-American son in a society that has declared war on young black males, so Bruno's bigotry isn't all that much of a problem. They'll be fighting to give their son vision and hope long after this show is over. I know because I face the same problem.
This story is late because it has been an eventful week in the Shade household. Something has happened that at once makes this whole series seem insignificant, yet lends urgency to it.
My thirteen-year-old African-American son should be able to stand at the bus stop without fear. That's exactly what he was doing on Friday morning, when three adult men attacked him and brutally beat him as he lay unconscious on the sidewalk. His description of the event was simple: "I was just standing there. I heard voices behind me, so I turned around. The next thing I knew, I woke up in the ambulance."
He didn't have any warning of what was about to happen. He was just waiting for the bus. He didn't speak to his attackers. He didn't even see them. According to witnesses, they just ran up behind him, knocked him unconscious with the first punch, and kicked him in the head several times while he was down. When I arrived at the emergency room, his nose was badly swollen. There was, and still is, blood in the sclera of his right eye. Three teeth were broken and realigned. He was bruised. His upper lip was huge and he was covered in blood.
Based on the statements of witnesses who heard what these men were saying, the incident is being investigated as a hate crime. Anthony was the wrong color, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
Not seeing it coming, he didn't have the chance to be afraid at the time, but he is afraid now. He returned to school, injuries and all, on Monday. I have accompanied him to the bus stop, carrying a baseball bat, each morning since then. He wants me to do this until the guys who hurt him are in jail. Of course, I don't mind doing it. It's part of my job as a father. Besides, I love the kid. I want him to be safe and happy. I don't want him to be hurt anymore.
The men who attacked him may have robbed him of his ability to feel safe, either for a while, or forever. It's too early to say. I can say this, though. This isn't the worst injury ever visited on my son. Two weeks before the attack, I learned of another, far worse, harm that had come to him.
Anthony has been a discipline problem at school for a very long time. He isn't cruel to anybody, but he is a first-rate class clown and goof-off. I have tried everything I can to get him to take his life seriously. He doesn't value it, and he can't even articulate any kind of future for himself. I have pulled my hair out, trying to understand him.
I got some insight when his friend's mother reported to me something Anthony had told her son. He told his buddy, a white kid, that he saw no reason to try to do anything right because he knew he would not get credit for it from anybody. "Why should I care," he says, "if, no matter what I do, I am going to be treated the same?"
I didn't even have to ask where he got this notion. As soon as I heard it, my son's whole life flashed before my eyes. I remembered the teachers who blamed him for everything bad that happened, yet never demanded anything good from him; teachers who thought all was well, so long as Anthony was not molesting the little white girls. I remembered the principals, deans and scoutmasters who didn't require him to meet high standards because they presumed that he could not meet them. He was allowed to slide along because people who do not consider themselves racist thought him capable of nothing more than maybe just sitting down and shutting up. I have tried to set the bar high for him, but he goes out in the world and finds no bar at all. He has learned that he is exceeding expectations by simply not being a criminal. He feels hopeless because he has not been given the same chances to feel successful as his classmates. I talk about his opportunities in life, but he thinks I'm not really seeing the world he lives in.
To a degree, he's right. I cannot see exactly what he sees because black is not what he is, it's who he is. It isn't who I am.
Stealing my son's hope is a far greater crime than what happened at the bus stop. Those injuries will heal, but how do I heal Anthony's hope? How do I make him believe that he can accomplish anything he wants to accomplish when he gets a different message from everybody else? How can I restore his belief that he has some control over what will happen to him? How can I show him opportunities to succeed when the message he gets from society is that he is destined to fail? If he is a success, he'll be a far more compelling story that your sons will be because our culture expected it from them. If he fails, the Brunos of the world will say "I told you so."
The sight of my son, lying on a gurney, swollen, bloody and confused was something I will never be able to forget. But, the sight of a boy, a generation of boys, not knowing how to hope is far uglier.
This is part 4 of the continuing series "Gray Like Me".
“I Am The White Sheep Of My Family.” (Gray Like Me: Part One)
http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/GuyWalksIntoBar/1012.html
I Was Illiterate (Gray Like Me: Part Two)
http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/GuyWalksIntoBar/1013.html
“I don’t want to have to watch my words!” (Gray Like Me: Part 3)
http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/GuyWalksIntoBar/1014.html
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This guy walks into a bar and says... Archives:
Thanks, Brian! (Ken Shade, Mar 22, 2004)
The Cripples Are Pissed! (Ken Shade, Apr 10, 2004)
This is Gratuitous (Ken Shade, May 20, 2004)
I Wanted Ronald Reagan To Live Forever (Ken Shade, Jun 7, 2004)
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My Children Think I'm an Idiot (Ken Shade, Dec 27, 2004)
This Will Prove to be a Serious Nuisance (Ken Shade, Mar 19, 2005)
Texas to the Rescue! (Ken Shade, May 13, 2005)
Sometimes, Mommies Cry (Ken Shade, Sep 13, 2005)
"He has slipped the surly bonds of truth..." (Ken Shade, Jan 29, 2006)
"I Am The White Sheep Of My Family." (Gray Like Me: Part One) (Ken Shade, Mar 13, 2006)
I was illiterate. (Gray Like Me: Part 2) (Ken Shade, Mar 20, 2006)
"I don't want to have to watch my words!" (Gray Like Me: Part 3) (Ken Shade, Apr 1, 2006)
Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) Gray Like Me: Part 4 (Ken Shade, Apr 9, 2006)
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