Back to School

I am beginning a class called Race, Ethnicity, and the American Experience tomorrow morning, so many of my entries will be be something involving literature and my response, like the following:

James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son

I must begin this particular reaction paper by stating that I am the rootless American that Baldwin speaks of in the essay “Many Thousands Gone”. My ancestry can be traced back to Hungary (by way of Canada) and Ireland on my father’s side, and back to Germany on the side of my mother; however, upon coming to this country, my relatives concentrated more on survival and providing for their families than on perpetuating their own culture and ethnicity, so I really have no definitive ties to reject. (29) My opinions have been fashioned by media interpretation of non-European culture, from The Jeffersons to All In The Family and Sanford and Son to Tom and Jerry cartoons (back in the day, when the characters were reduced to loud, slow-moving, big-lipped stepnfetchit type images when exposed to any form of ignited gun powder; when I was eight years old, I didn’t know enough not to laugh at that).
My fifteen-year-old self, assuming that I would have actually read the entire assignment, would respond to Baldwin thusly: I am not the one you are after! It was not I, nor my father, nor my grandfather, who were responsible for the oppression and slavery of black people. If any of my ancestors WERE responsible, there’s nothing I can do about it now!
The response would be exactly that angry and defensive because
a) My main frame of social and political reference came from Jello Biafra and Johnny Rotten
b) The only outlets I had for blowing off steam were the music from the aforementioned social and political influences and the solitary issue of Club Magazine that circulated among the sophomore class at Quigley South High School
With this response, I would be exercising my own version of Baldwin’s “special attitude” (7), possibly believing that I had the right to respond in such a way because my attitude had been reinforced by the media, my father, who was a Chicago Police homicide detective covering the Robert Taylor Homes. The truth
A few years later, my college self would have read Baldwin’s argument that the black man and woman are in danger of losing touch with what it means to be black in America, and would surmise that I, as a white male, was a part of that self-alienation. I would agree ad nauseum with every point of his exploration of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Native Son, and Carmen Jones, and how these portray an incomplete and an altogether false perception of life for the American black man or woman, and I would go even further with knee-jerk apologies (with noticeable lack of earnestness or understanding of what exactly I’d be apologizing for), without internalizing the truth or facts; just riding the rail that “slavery was wrong; was, in fact, perfectly horrible” (14) without exploring the how or why of it, and what my role in it was in 1993 as a liberal arts wanderer and veteran of sensitivity training and pre-civil war literature courses at the University of Illinois at Chicago. (Admission: I surveyed a women studies class to get into the pants of my college girlfriend. Before the angry mob of neo-feminists –and the men who want to get into their pants – show up on my front lawn bearing torches and pitchforks, I must add that
a) I married said college girlfriend one year after graduation, and
b) The instructor ended up being a major influence in my becoming a writing teacher.)

Now I have experience and education behind me (I believe the knowledge finally kicked in last summer); however, I am articulate with nothing from my own personal definition to be articulate about. I am now a teacher in a school that is mainly Latino and African American. I believe that I am a fair teacher, but have had that belief challenged on a few occasions. My current take on Baldwin’s presentation of the conundrum of color is that now I finally believe that I am mature enough (although, that maturity is not demonstrated in this reaction paper) to approach it as an insider, as someone part of the problem, but also as someone part of the solution.