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At work but not working on this Thanksgiving Day 2014,
listening to Coltrane’s ‘Alabama’ and Burroughs’s
‘Thanksgiving Prayer,’ not caffeinated enough, a white immigrant been here some
fifteen years. I have been going to bed thinking about ‘post-racial America’
waking up thinking about Ferguson and the death of Mike Brown and with him, Empathy.
Spending the day thinking and talking about short-term memory loss, genetically
inherited trauma and the over-simplification of ‘discussion’ in this
attention span shot-instant response-virtually uncommunicative age.
It is Thanksgiving and so I am thankful for Ralph Ellison
and Malcolm X, not necessarily because I’m trying to be a ‘white ally’ but for
an education. It was history and literature that got me through school and the
likes of Malcolm X and Ralph Ellison who taught me to really read. I can’t say
why the ‘black experience in America’ got me, a white Welsh teenager living in
the Persian Gulf, so deep into book-reading, but it did.
In the British education system, the General Certificate of
Secondary Education, back when I was fifteen at least, I found the teaching of
history to be profound. It was less the subject matter (although that was
endlessly fascinating as I just stated) but the way in which you were taught to
get to grips with that history. It was less about the dates surrounding the
World Wars but Causes and Consequences to those wars. It was less about civil
rights than exercising Empathy for all sectors of society that were involved in
that struggle. Teach a kid a specific history and they will understand that
specific history, teach a kid to teach his or herself how to teach themselves
history beyond memorizing dates, places and names and they will forever have the
tools to understand where the world has been and where it might be going.
The high point of my education was a paper I wrote on
Empathy. I had to take, perhaps half a dozen representations of American people
and how they may have reacted during the Civil Rights era. I cannot remember
the specifics but it was something like: a young black girl in the south, a white
judge in the North, a white farmer in Alabama, a black man who had fought in
World War Two and now lived in Chicago. My job, as a fifteen year old white
Welsh expatriate attending a British School in Bahrain, was to attempt to get in each person's head, in an effort to understand why they may have thought the way they
did about race relations and how they may have responded during that heated era
of struggle. Anyway, my teacher read my paper and said, ‘That’s pretty much
perfect. I can’t think of how you could have made that any better. 100%. Well
done.’ I was floored. I was always a very mediocre student, barely getting by,
barely giving a shit, day dreaming about getting out of school to ride my
skateboard. Therefore, I did not take my momentary academic success lightly and yes, I was mighty proud
of myself. I now knew how to go about teaching myself and I felt ready for the next
step.
That next step was moving to an American Department of
Defense school. Of course I was excited about signing up for English but
really could not wait to take the next steps in History. I wanted to dive further into
Primary and Secondary evidence, cause, consequence, looking into various
subjective and objective interpretations from various angles and to tease out
my own conclusions and theories. Instead, I was given a one book. One fucking
book to cover most of America’s complicated history. One book with one opinion.
One side of the story. And it was a very dry book, with tedious prose, lots of
dates to remember. I was terrible at remembering dates but at the very least I
was sure this didn’t matter. What mattered was how I understood the history,
right? And then the tests came. Test after test, week after week mostly about
dates and so called ‘facts.’ After spending the last two years of my British
education writing analytical papers where I was allowed to posit my own
arguments and theories based on the wide selection of primary and secondary
evidence I was allowed to research, I felt betrayed. Again, I was
disillusioned with school and resumed cruising through at just about a satisfactory
level.
Fuck You, Ms. Houser.
So when I think about reactions to Mike Brown’s death and
the subsequent aftermath. When I think about the knee jerk, emotional
responses, I think about the how little race relations have really progressed.
When I hear terms such as ‘post racial’ and a complete lack of any attempt to
really understand where people are coming from, it is a depressing as all hell
and I cannot but help blame this country’s lack of understanding of
itself. Its failure to teach its people how to investigate its history, their own history. The result is convenient memory loss, shallow
reasoning facilitated by instant (dis)communication, social media and bigoted
memes that do nothing to promote meaningful debate and reconciliation.
I don’t expect everyone to condemn Officer Darren Wilson as
murderer and I don’t expect everyone to be sympathetic to rioters burning
locally owned neighborhood shops but (and I said this about the London riots,
which people also lazily dismissed as mindless or opportunistic materialist ‘thuggism’)
just try and look at the context that all this is happening in and try, please
try, to get in the heads of everyone involved.
The only hope I have in all of this, is that all that hate
and perceptions that people have previously held about each other, have boiled
to the surface and it is now a bit clearer how people really feel. And even though
a lot of this is narrow-minded bigotry and mutual hate and distrust, perhaps it
will be cathartic and perhaps people will now be forced to at least start to
contextualize current events. Where else can it go?
