Archives for November 2021

The argument over what is called Critical Race Theory has brought an unspoken reality to light. In the harsh glare of that light, many have regressed to an attitude of not wanting to hear about it. White people have long known that they are favored by the legal system in the United States. Some have rationalized with anecdotal retorts to this idea. Everyone has a relative or friend who feels that he or she was the subject of reverse discrimination. These anecdotal renditions are often one-sided. They discount the innumerable injustices that have been foisted upon people of color with the cliché “two wrongs don’t make a right” or the oft used “I never owned slaves. Why should I be punished?”
Turning up the light to a glare, many on the other side have decided that unless the system that tilted the table against people of color be dismantled, it cannot be righted. This results in many rationalizations for behaviors that are unproductive and self-defeating. “The white man always protects his own and that will never change” is a refrain.
I look at my own life in this light and wonder if I have, by my very existence, supported this inequality. I am a white man who has aged to 72. I come from a long line of American families. I am a son of the American Revolution. I was born and raised in the multi-racial city of Newark, New Jersey. I grew up around racial slurs and attitudes. When I was very young, I no doubt adopted these views in order to be part of my tribe.
I was an inquisitive boy who was encouraged to learn. I took that to mean that I was encouraged to question. I began by questioning that which my family held dear: religion. I noticed that I was taught that belief was stronger than reason and faith more powerful than fact. I could not find a basis for this attitude and, slowly, it drove me away from Christianity. Then it drove me to look at all organized religions as methods of control. There was plenty of supportive evidence but was cultural control at the heart of religion or did it just develop into a means of control? Was it a function of the bureaucracy?
The romantic power of faith and belief does speak to us on a level deeper than reason. It does promote potential blind spots in who we are. For those who believe the moral scales can surely be tilted by the moral thumb of belief. However, belief may be at the center of the very construction of the scale. Its framework may be the creator of its own contradictions. When faced with this level of complexity, we search for solutions with simplicity.
I was in school at a time when the teaching of United States History was inculcated into my thinking from early primary education throughout my undergraduate studies. But there were noticeable gaps. While the Civil War was covered in some detail, what followed was reduced to a few scant chapters that were highlighted as “Radical Republicans and Waving the Bloody Shirt” to “Scalawags and Carpetbaggers” who took advantage of the dark period of American History that was glossed over in a race to get to expanding Industrialization and World War 1.
The South was depicted as romantic, beautifully gracious and reliant on an agrarian culture that depended on human labor that would have been wiped out by Industrialization anyway. They were shown as married to this original sin of slavery from their inception. But it was also pointed out that slavery was not unique to the United States. It was pointed out that slavery exists throughout history on most every part of the planet where humans have lived. It was pointed out that in the natural world species sometimes enslave smaller members of their own kind. This was taught as almost a natural division of labor. Was this a huge rationalization of American Slavery or was it an attempt to understand who we were and how we had met and not met the challenges of the past?
Examining the challenges of the past is not a smooth road for organized religion. The Judo-Christian-Islamic faiths are religions of the book, of the words. The words can be changed or interpreted. They have been but each claims divinity for its own interpretation, rendering the others unworthy.
The same is true for the proponents and opponents of Critical Race Theory. Just as Christianity once vilified Judaism and Islam dismisses both as lies at their very core, we face this challenge over race. I think of the many wars fought over religion. I think of the many wars fought over race. No matter what we do, we are the descendants of these conflicts. Of course they are woven into the fabric of our systems. If we cannot accept who we have been, how are we to know who we are and what will become of us? Even the highly praised advocate for social change Gandhi, a Hindu, believed in the retention of the caste system.
Some, like myself, decided on personal interpretation. But we would be just as much fools if we do not think and believe that we carry our past influences inside of us. For all of their flaws, our nation was founded on the idea that we could do better than we had done before. It is the aspirational notion of our union that carries this belief at its core.
Time and again we have failed in this struggle but we have continued it. We have, this point, endured. In this, one of our great writers, William Faulkner was and will continue to be, I fervently believe, correct.

Places where I had intimate interaction and that shared themselves with me for a time. Not the bolted-down desks where I was made to sit and write at school that felt like writing from a cage. A living room couch in the basement apartment where I was young, at home, with my legs bent over a stack of pillows and a pad propped on my thighs. That was also where I liked to read but there were just two rooms and that was where the TV was.
On the floor that was covered by a rug, I watched TV. I tried to write while TV was on, but the TV found its way into the words. I could block everything out when I read and I had to learn to do that when I wrote, and then undo it. Then to be able to slide between doing it and not doing it, consciously and naturally.
The next place was on my bed. I had a desk but it was in a dark corner and the only light was a too-bright overhead. I used it for storage and to lose things in. I wrote on my bed. Sometimes I wrote at the kitchen table, looking up at the street level traffic.
At school, the desks became movable but the rooms were distracting. It was like writing while blocking out and I wandered off course, went on tangents. I didn’t like the place and I wanted to get it over quickly.
I wrote on my bed pretty much all the way through school. I lowered my bed to the floor and pushed it under a window. Now I had the bed and the floor and a window. I was happy! I typed at a kitchen table.
My first writing table was old office furniture, heavy squared maple legs and a scarred top. It had one drawer underneath. I covered it in cloth that women gave me. I arranged objects at the far corners. I was attracted to bronze and used bronzed baby-shoe book ends to hold up the line that I was using. A feather-tipped quill pen sat in an empty, red ink jar. I padded my rolling chair. It was my table. It welcomed me into its embrace. Then I added a plant to grow by the window next to my table. I would ride on the vibrations of my things, along with stereo music.
The TV and radio could be somewhere else. Maybe the radio should be by the bed. I had the necessary elements of a room! Just a window, lamps, a rug, my records, books and stereo. A place to go to the bathroom and to eat. Later, I hung things that interested me on the walls.
The room grew to hold bookcases and paintings. My desk became a blank door set up across sawhorses. There was a lamp at either end. A typewriter and my padded rolling chair. A chair for someone else that I made look like I used for reading, but I still read in my bed on the floor, by my radio and TV. I sat by my multiplying plants.
So what makes a study?
My first thoughts are about things, books and a table but maybe it is a place that provides a sense of comfortable privacy. Maybe it’s wherever you wind up most alone. Maybe it is the place where you perform your last dance. Or the one after that.
Planks of wood on cinder-blocks, a bronzed cup from the 1905 World Fair: they were parts of older studies that didn’t make the trip. Either they were misplaced, discarded, or crumbled.
Always a table somewhere. Once across an opening that looked across to the kitchen. Once in a room that leaked from ice damming.
Then there was my window on the lake from a small room that overlooked it. There was a floor to ceiling built-in bookcase and closets on one entire wall. I added another bookcase and the computer furniture that was now so important to my writing. But it was from my chair at the computer table that I looked out daily on the wonders of the ever changing lake.
Now my study is a room with scarred furniture. Refinished pieces that are thought to be too heavy today. I still do not write at my desk. Now I have an L shaped work station with two computers and a printer and a modem and a router. My router looks like an old style desk set, pens sticking out of their slots that are now antennae for reception. My walls are filled with collages and photographs but none are of family and all have found a family here. My Chippendale fan back chair sits in this room with the secretary it sat next to 70 years ago and in a different world. I came to visit then and now I have brought them back together after so many years and experiences. I feel what they carry for each other across overlapping rugs.
There is one window but I mostly keep it covered to shut out the light. My plants have moved next door and have their own room.