Roses Supposes

If I had written this post last night when I wanted to, it would have come out much more freaked out. So for the authentic emotional experience, imagine my voice progressively rising in pitch and volume throughout this piece.

I had a marathon play experience yesterday. The Theater Department put on Palmer Park, a play about integration in Detroit following the Detroit Race Riots written semi-autobiographically by a white Canadian woman. She gave a pre-play talk, which I attended with my advisor, then we broke for dinner, then the play, then a post play discussion which included two black professors from the history department, one of the black actors, and the white director and dramaturg.

Part of the reason I was interested in the play was because I had picked up a copy of it last year at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (where it was first performed). I thought then, and to some extent still think, that it is an interesting, complex discussion of race relations. Certainly more so than the play I lambasted here a few months back. Unlike that one, which truly seemed to a rise just from a liberal guilt sense of including a black person for the pure sake of diversity (read tokenism), this play arose out of the playwright’s own experiences, one of which was this clash between the middle class blacks of her neighborhood and lower class blacks across the street. The play centers around a group of parents trying to keep their school integrated because integration of the middle class kept resources in the school. And this is a moral question I perennially think about…parents make moral decisions based on the best circumstances for their own children which in aggregate often create many social problems (like the incredible re-segregation now present in our country). But even as I write that, I need to emphasize–segregation isn’t necessarily a problem unless it is accompanied by discriminatory social services.

So like I sometimes do, I was listening for the interesting portions of the playwright’s pre-play talk. I heard her equate integration with good education (the heavy implication being than an all black school was necessarily a failing school). She mentioned the economic differences between many of these communities, where, for example, in one school district of Chicago they spend $800 a year on a student and in another they spend $17,000. But that’s not the first thing I mentioned when I turned to my advisor after the talk (I mentioned the interesting class discussion). He did mention the way she equated good with integrated, and I felt like an idiot. One of the legacies of the way we teach and discuss Brown v. Board of Education in this country is the assumption of many whites that “integration” is necessarily a moral good and that segregated schools (read the black schools under segregation) were necessarily horrible b/c they were filled with black students. Part of this is because of the way the psychologists testifying at the hearing used the black and white dolls. But part of it is also the hubris of being white. Well, of course, blacks would want to be in our schools. And of course black schools are failing. It ignores the many incredible efforts blacks have made over the years to become educated.

So then the play. I sat near the black professors, so we could chat, but once there was more than one, I was pretty much ignored. I did get to talk with one a bit before the performance and I knew the play had upset him. During the intermission, two moved down the row, so they were no longer near me. I tried not to take it personally. They had purposefully put themselves in the limited view seats, perhaps because they found it that painful.

Watching it rather than reading it, I realized that the play is sort of a litany of things that the white woman learned while living next to and befriending black neighbors. What do I do with the little girl’s hair when she sleeps over? Why do the neighbors get dressed to the nines to go on a car trip? Why do they spend way more time making their homes sparkling? Is there color preferences within black communities for lighter skinned folk? Why do black folks seem to know so much about whites when whites don’t know very much about blacks? (The playwright mentioned several times that the whites in the neighborhood where something like sheep, so innocent were they of race relations). These are things I think many whites go through when first learning about race relations. I know I had a ton of questions about black culture when I started and a lot of mis-understandings. So I think it is a good thing that she explored these things in her play, and did it in an effective way.

The problems arise in a few different places…The black characters in the play come across as “more white than the whites” (taking that from the phrase “more British than the British”). They have little to distinguish them as blacks other than their heightened pursuit of cleanliness and education so as not to fall into stereotypes. Furthermore, they all bewailed the responsibilities expected of them as educated blacks. They felt responsible, in a burdensome way, for all the blacks not becoming successful. On some level, I think this is the way some whites understand the spirit of responsibility in black communities–through the gaze of its a burden. Because if a white person had to feel responsible for every white criminal in the papers, it would seem like a burden. And most whites don’t necessarily have to take on the responsibilities of an entire race.

But here we’re getting close to something that so disturbed me last night. I had wanted to mention during the discussion time that most of the black middle class folks I knew through my studies enjoyed various aspects of black culture. They did identify as having this specific culture, even while also striving for a middle class lifestyle that necessitated putting on a double consciousness to live in a semi-white world (much less white, on some level, during Jim Crow; and then again, more white too). One of the black professors raised the problem during his comments that the playwright categorized the sense of responsibility as unilaterally a burden, when in fact many, many black middle class folks took it up eagerly and faithfully.

And here is something I’m petrified about my dissertation. I recognized that sense of responsibility early on, because I think I was raised with something similar in the Christian church. But lately, I’ve been stressing in my diss the ways in which blacks lived with that “burden.” And some of my folks did find it a burden, though certainly not all. And some found it a burden one day while finding it a meaningful pursuit the next day. I am also emphasizing in my work the individuality and “lives lived” of my folks…i.e. that blacks had a right not to be activists. Sometimes it feels like all of African American history is searching for the activists, searching for proof that blacks did fight the conditions they were given. But sometimes that feels like it sets up too many expectations, and ignores certain things in the search for activism. One of the things I find most interesting is relationships between individual intellectuals (black to white, but also importantly black to black).

But now I am scared shitless that I am just pressing my own expectations down onto the data of my dissertation. I mean, certainly, I am going to choose the data that I chose based on my own understanding of its importance. But what if I am just as simplistic and uninformed as the white playwright? What if I, too, only see the public face of the double consciousness? What if I have mistakenly painted the sense of responsibility as a burden, because that is the way a white person would interpret things? (on the upside, I thought of this myself during the play, rather than only realizing it after the black professor spoke).

This is the problem with such a massively huge dissertation. The thought of editing it freaks the hell out of me. Particularly in these undercurrent thematic type things. Those are things you work on after getting all the ducks lined up in a row–what is the overall sense that the document is giving off, based on the particular emphases you give line by line. I have a hard enough time working on the themes of a 30 page document, let alone a 700. I try to keep telling myself that it doesn’t have to all happen Right Now, but that doesn’t really help. If I get a call from a job, they’ll want to see my dissertation and will judge my abilities based on it (granted, if it’s a mostly white search committee, they might feel more comfortable with the way I express things, but I would absolutely not want to alienate any potential black colleagues off the bat). And, that black professor most vocal last night will be reading it and commenting on it at my defense. I need to come up with a better justification for it than that given by the white playwright last night (my one black friend liked it!)

Part of the reason I’m rambling on at this length here is that I’m thinking about taking on some of these undercurrents of race relations in a conference paper I need to finish this weekend (unless I give up and use the one from earlier in the semester).