IF BLACK PEOPLE WROTE ABOUT WHITE PEOPLE THE WAY WHITE PEOPLE WROTE ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE

IF BLACK PEOPLE WROTE ABOUT WHITE PEOPLE THE WAY WHITE PEOPLE WROTE ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE:  A SAMPLING OF AMERICAN FICTION

Note: I re-fashioned the following sample directly from the language and scenarios of existing American novels, but I reversed the racial power dynamic so that the subject or narrator is a black and the object is white. The race of the black narrator is assumed, in the same way the white narrator is assumed in much of American fiction.

1. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ADVENTURE NOVEL

I first encountered Derek Blackworthy, that enigmatic and legendary figure, in a small port town hidden among the islands of the Pale, where my vessel, the Pana Pua, lay at anchor. On the docks, a number of the Pale scurried about, their small eyes set far back in their heads, their long pink snouts seeming to lead them along. Their hair, dun or rusty or yellow, was like a sick animal’s pelt, for it sprouted in tufts on their faces and arms and even their hands but left patches of their bloodless flesh visible, and I shuddered with a sudden notion that I was now stranded for an uncertain period in a town of large, mangy opossums. 

Seeking refreshment, I entered a den along the quay and requested a cup of the local draught. So dim was the room that I could barely make out the lipless, anemic female who approached to wipe the table with a dirty rag, her long stringy hair tied in a knot. A smell of rancid butter assailed me, followed by the layered and peculiar odors the woman radiated, as the Pale rarely wash either their woollen clothes or themselves. 

Then I saw him, a big good-looking man whose vigor and almost preternatural health could be discerned in an instant. He hailed me from a table at the back of the room, smiling with strong white teeth. He did not seem to be enervated by the clammy weather. Indeed, he looked restless as he sat there.

“You and I have come to a fine place, Friend,” he said. “Are the Pale not a wonderfully wan and listless people? Is that woman who waits upon you not as comely as warmed-over-death?”

I said, “Ashen, waxy, pallid, colorless, unpigmented, peaky, languid, washed out, etiolated, lymphatic--use any epithet you like.”

“Perhaps they were forged in the likeness of some albino of the underworld,” the man said.

I mentioned my fancy about the town of opossums.

“That is too kind!” he laughed with a great bark. “In my country, there is a foul white rat  that lives inside the Earth’s crust, its skin so transparent you can see the young inside the pregnant female’s belly. That is what these Pale people remind me of.” 

I lowered my voice. “Indeed, are they people? I scarcely believe them to be made in God’s image at all.”

The handsome man’s face shone with a kind of strange rapture. “Ha ha!” he cried. “And if they are not really human, is not their world one great playground for black men like you and me? You--Possum!” he shouted. “Bring me another cup of mead.”

(Based on Jack London’s novel, A Son of the Sun, published in 1912)

I'm Mad

Weird things are happening in public education. Taking a tour of a grammar school recently, I was shown a proud new addition: a room full of Stairmasters and stationary bicycles. "We couldn't get the money for a gym, but this WONDERFUL equipment was donated by Councilman Bla-Bla ," the PTA mom said, beaming. "We love it."

I filled with such loathing for this woman and her school I decided I could never send my child there: not because her school had been the recipient of this bizarre gift, but because she was doing this Orwellian thing of pretending it was awesome.

My children are not middle-aged housewives from the 80s. They don't need to tone their booties or work off that last stubborn five pounds round their midsections. They need a fucking gym where they can hit each other in the face with balls.

"I hate Mondays," my son said. "No choice time, and I have yoga."
"What's wrong with yoga?" I said.
"It's so dumb, the teacher is like, Duh, do this thing and like Duuuh, do this thing, and then we all have to go, like, Duuuuuuuuuh."

I love yoga, personally, and my daughter likes it fine, too, but I think my son is right: yoga for kids is a dumb idea. My son does not need to find his third eye or his still center, he needs to run around like a maniac until he gets something approximating tired. He's not 43, he's 9, and every night he scurries up the back of the sofa, then down it and across the room to the other sofa and up, like a zoo monkey, for at least an hour. He stands on the knob of the French door and swings back and forth, back and forth. If he had suckers on his hands and feet, he would run across the ceiling. (Oh, calm down, he's never banged his fingers or anything. Knock wood). I don't even use my sofas; they're both pressed up against the wall to make space for this exercise, because the poor kid needs to do something to release the ridiculous amount of energy he has and this is all I can offer him.

I'm so angry at the DOE, continually taking money away from basic things kids actually need while faddish grants pop up to inappropriately fill the gaps. I'm mad at charter schools: Oh, that's a great idea, putting our children's future in the hands of corporations, only the most unethical form of human social organization ever to have existed. I'm mad that my kids, who can run or swim or ski for six hours straight and just be moderately relaxed, get twenty minutes of recess per day if they're lucky. I'm mad that what used to be our gym is being used as a classroom because three schools are crowded into one building, and that when I pointed  this out to a DOE representative at a meeting, she said, "Your school is only at 106% capacity; I don't consider that overcrowded." (Who IS this woman??? The Devil?). And I'm mad that if I want my kids to be exposed to physical activity I have to drag my ass out of the house at 8:00 on Saturday morning to go do something none of us is that interested in, (soccer: yeah, I said it), because the school system isn't doing what it should be doing during the week.

The Mayor claims he wants New York to be a good place for families but that's bullshit. He just wants people in their twenties to come here, make a lot of money, spend it all on the service economy, then move the hell to Maplewood when they get pregnant. I'm from Soho back in the day, Motherfucker. I'm staying.

Lockdown

My (6 year old) daughter and her friend Rose were talking on the bus when I overheard the word, "lockdown," which sounded interesting. "What's that?"

"We're having it next week," Rose said. "It's like when you lock the door and hide."

"You're saying it's a drill? Like in case...?"

"In case a bad man comes in the school, well, actually there's hard lockdown and soft lockdown."

"What's the difference between soft lockdown and hard lockdown?"

"In soft lockdown, you just lock the door, but in hard lockdown you all hide and you can't make any noise." (Squeal of excitement). I hope it's hard lockdown!"

"I know, hiding is fun," I said, trying not to act the way I wanted to: scream and run around the bus and jump on the seats and push all the emergency buttons.

What is going on in this COUNTRY?

The lockdown is the fallout shelter for our era. A way of expressing feelings of fear and helplessness in the face of a political situation that is not making any sense and is endangering all of us. A so-called "solution," where the easy and obvious solution-- for reasons of deep cultural insanity-- won't be brought to bear. The lefty version of teachers carrying guns. Scared talking to crazy.

I won't preach to you because you know gun control is the solution. Meanwhile, SSRIs have been shown to cause homicidal and suicidal thoughts, impulsivity, psychosis and-- according to one article I read-- waking nightmares in which a person is compelled to act out his worst fear. Teenagers should not be on this shit. Eric Harris was on Luvox and Dylan Klebold was reported to have been taking Paxil and/or Zoloft. Adam Lanza was probably taking anti-psychotics. For a list of other mass shootings perpetrated by teenagers who were on SSRIs, check out Michael Moore's article:

http://psychiatricfraud.org/2011/04/the-real-lesson-of-columbine-psychiatric-drugs-induce-violence/

We need to talk about this.

The Truth About Girls

I always imagined that little boys were crazy masturbating from the moment they popped out of you, but actually it's little girls who are totally into their junk from age two or three. I also now understand the patriarchal fear of the vagina, because my daughter wields that thing like a gladiatorial weapon, all serrated and claw-toothed and shit. When she was three, I used to drive her brother to school with another six-year-old boy I'll call Ben. My daughter would diddle herself in her car seat and grin at Ben.

Ben told his mother, "I want to look away, but I can't."

My son recently told me about an incident in which his sister, who is half his size, managed to stick her naked vagina in his face while he was trapped under a couch and couldn't move. According to him, he was so traumatized "I cried for an hour."

"But was it really that bad?" I said, thinking, It's not even hairy or anything.
"Are you kidding me?" he yelled. "Have you ever had a vagina stuck right in your face?"
"No," I admitted. I'd had my chance in college, and I just never went for it, so what would I know, but I do believe that the pre-sexual boy's fear of the vagina is no joke. According to Camille Paglia, "...a boy thinks female genitals a wound, from which the penis has been cut. They are indeed a wound but it is the infant who has been cut away, by violence: the umbilical is a hawser sawed through by a social rescue party."* Thank you, Camille, I was wondering about that.

My daughter and her friend I'll call Rose have been playing at sex, or having sex, (I'm not sure what the difference would be), since they were at least four. Years ago, Rose told her mother, "We're lesbians." Back-peddling recently, she told me, "We're not gay but we're a little bit gay right now," sounding exactly like Ted Haggard. They were giggling and saying they had secret that they couldn't tell me but then, Oh alright, we'll tell you. "We pretended to have sex the other day. And it felt good."  Oh, whatever, I thought, you really think you can shock me now, little girl?

Having uninhibited girl children presents a problem for forward-thinking parents. We don't want to suppress all this healthy libidinal pro-pussy energy; why would we do that? To turn them into miserable humiliated 'tweens like we were? To be fair, my parents were totally ok about sex, but the culture around it has changed so much. At the same time, there's a point where it starts to get a bit scary. Like when the building Super has to come over to fix something, as happened to a friend I'll call Diana, while her daughter was lustily masturbating on the floor, all ten fingers deep inside her plumbing. Diana finally had to say, "That's something we might want to do in private, Sweetie."

*Sexual Personae. New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1990, p. 16

Waterbugs

I never thought much about waterbugs until a lot of people from other places started visiting me. Let's start with the fact that we call them waterbugs. Every New York native calls them that. One word: waterbugs. Growing up in New York, I actually thought that they were a different class of bug or something, like waterbugis hellabigidae or whatever, but when I looked them up I found out they're just giant cockroaches. The American Cockroach, to be more precise.

Clearly this water bug thing arose among New Yorkers in order to comfort ourselves that we had to deal with giant cockroaches. I had an exterminator come over to my house and I thought he would say something like, "Indeed, I see signs here of the American cockroach." But nope: "Yeah, you got the waterbugs." Even exterminators in New York are participating in the mass delusion! 

People visiting from other places who experience waterbugs flip out; they feel like their world has been turned upside down and the bottom has fallen out, because they are seeing an insect too big to be real. 

I'm not saying we love them, but we get used to the idea of them. We accept them. I think we should make them the New York mascot, as symbolic of the fact that you can get used to anything, and that we live here together in our tenuous peace, all kinds. 

Corollary to Pleasant Teenagers Theory

Maybe this is wishful thinking, but I think I'm tighter with my kids than my parents were with me and they won't hate me as much in a few years. Here's what I'm thinking: we spend more time with them. We do stuff together. I've thought a lot about teenagers 200 years ago and how they don't seem to hate their parents as much, at least in books, and maybe it's because they were all sitting in a little house all winter knitting, singing, and reading to each other and frankly, that's exactly what I do with my kids now, except it's a little apartment.

Now, you might say, what about all those nannies and governesses they used to have? That was a very small percentage of the population, though! Most people slept with their kids in one or two big beds, just like everyone in Brooklyn does now.

People imagine that it's old fashioned to kind of ignore your kids; what I'm arguing is that this thing of not hanging out with your kids, roaming around in giant houses where everyone has his own room and entertainment center, etc, is really more of a post-war phenomenon, and that "attachment parenting," loosely defined, (because I sleep-trained, yes I did, somebody tell that baby who the f--- I is), is the way it's always been done.

Even that mean French Mommy who wrote that book about being mean to your kids probably sits down every night with them for a two-hour meal, which means they're actually talking to each other.

Teenagers who don't hate their parents?

The good news about this is that I've noticed a lot of teenagers these days hanging out with their parents acting like they don't hate them. You may be asking: is this possible? Or just an illusion?

Let me break it down for you. Today's offspring spend their entire childhoods doing things that used to be reserved for kids who were grown up enough to physically intimidate their parents, ie.; back-sassing, sulking, throwing tantrums, and exploring bisexuality. Nowadays, by the time they're thirteen or fourteen they've been doing it for so long all the fun has gone out of it and they're over it. Anyway, what are they going to rebel against? They haven't been able to come up with any music that's more offensive than what we listen to, (totally the reverse), and who among us is going to tell them at this point, “No: don't follow your dream. Do not spend your precious time writing space operas and autobiographical monologues?” So by the time today's teenagers are fifteen or sixteen, they're already pleasant little mini-adults, just like they used to be 200 years ago.

This may sound too optimistic, but I do need to point out that there are a couple of draw-backs to having a society of pleasant teenagers. The first drawback is that this method of child rearing is so exhausting that by the time your kid becomes a pleasant adolescent, you may be too worn down to a fuzzy nubbin of your former self to enjoy it. The second problem is that when teenagers don't hate their parents, they don't hate authority and there's no one left to fight the power or stick it to the Man, and hello? Here we are. The elevator music that teenagers are churning out these days is a symptom of the fact that they're harmonious with their parents, pacified by constant access to entertainment and as addled by corn products as a herd of beef cows. Even black kids can't get angry any more. How wrong is that? Have you heard Jay-Z and Kanye's latest album, where they just go on and on about how awesome their lives are? It's like, that's nice for you, Dawg.