My empathy is empirical, Ive been there, many times. I do not drive, but Ive been there, many times. I do not drive, but Ive been pulled over on the sidewalk -- Stopped-and-Frisked. And each time, when the cops searched my bag and saw my books (all my life -- through elementary and junior high and high school -- my bag has always had books, sometimes just two, sometimes several), one or another white cop would, with a tone of incredulous wonder, query me, These are yours? and/or You read these? And I would hear an umbraged voice in my head (sounding, I fancy, like Huey Freeman from The Boondocks) exclaim, Jupiters THUNDER, Man! Wherefore would these books be in my bag if they were not mine?! Black Jesus an COTTON! Of course, I read these books! Why else would I be carrying them? As accessories?! . . . Too, at such times, I hear in my head Hamlets To be or not to be soliloquy (Act III, scene 1) and Shylock: He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and whats his reason? . . . . . . . Why, revenge. The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. (Merchant of Venice, Act III, scene 1) But I check myself. My life is so much of checking myself. I know to not sound too strident, too smart, too proud of my education. Thats the very frank, well meaning warning a friendly white cop gave me when I worked at a police precinct in the Bronx during my senior year of high school. Youre a good talker, articulate. Theyll know youre no thug. But *never* do or say anything that might make a cop feel smaller than you, he adjured me. And after it was established and reluctantly accepted that yes those are my books, and Im smart -- you know, civilized -- they smile with crocodile cordiality at me and send me on my way. And I KNOW: its for they deem me one of the good ones. And then I, too, feel it (well, I feel it often): the survivors guilt. For who am I to deserve less denigration than another black man? And as the cops allowed me to be on my way, I did not *feel* like one of the good ones. All I feel is pissed and guilty, and fatigued from sublimating my burgeoning anomie. Indeed: American society creates around all youth (as every society does) a continual pressure of suggestion to try to live up to the accepted ideals of the country—such ordinary, traditional, taken-for-granted American ideals as to fight injustice fearlessly, to cringe to no man; to choose one’s own life work; to resist with stout-hearted self-respect affronts to decent human dignity, whether ones own or others’; to drive ahead toward honestly earned success, all sails spread to the old American wind blowing from the Declaration of Independence. But our society puts negro youth in the place of the animal in the psychological laboratory in which a neurosis is to be caused, by making it impossible for him to live up to those never-to-be-questioned national ideals, as other young Americans do. -Dr. Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Introduction to Native Son (1st edition) by Richard Wright (Jan. 1940) : https://facebook/notes/carlos-antonio-los-brown/native-to-the-maze/409703012800
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 17:58:26 +0000
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