The trouble with white people is you can't tell them apart

Like most IWUers, I came from, come from, and will likely continue to inhabit a sheltered, middle/upper middle class suburban environment. Most IWUers, as well as most people in the U.S., will recognize this as code for "white people land," which really isn't an unfair assessment of my hometown. Testament to this is my high school, which at the time of my graduation was over 90% white. The most local diversity you're likely to encounter is at the Baskin Robbins (32 flavors!). One of the many consequences of this is that I didn't, don't, and will likely never feel particularly comfortable talking about race and issues surrounding race, because frankly, what the hell do I know?

Fortunately, I took a Psychology of Racism class last semester, and now know everything there is to know about racial tension.

And by "know everything there is to know about racial tension" I mean "I'd hazard to say I'm a little less blindsighted and a little more sensitive and knowledgeable about race and racial tension."

I've gotten the impression that for the majority of white people who get any kind of education like I did about American race and racism, it becomes the sort of thing you suddenly want to talk about a lot. I suddenly found myself finding excuses to bring up my Racism class at even vaguely opportune times. Much of what you learn is new, shocking, and angering, which generally are all qualities that make for a fun conversation starter.

What I've noticed, though, is that it's surprisingly and frustratingly hard to get engaged in a conversation with anyone about race, because one of the following things seems to happen:

1) the white person you're talking to will either grow uncomfortable or begin to treat you like a conspiracy theorist (seeing as you're spouting off about racial "slights" or "stereotypes" you witnessed that didn't exist)
2) the white person you're talking to will attempt to engage you in conversation but will deviate into a less threatening territory, like feminism or more inclusive economic problems.
3) if the opportunity to talk about race to a person of color presents itself, you chicken out, either because you don't want to offend the person or because you assume your whiteness makes your opinion null and void, if not in your own eyes then certainly in theirs.

None of these are reasons to not talk about racism. In fact, all of them are based on my own experiences and are largely a product of me being a big sissy about the whole thing. Racism, like all social ills, needs to spend more time being talked about and less time being an elephant. But such scenarios are real and legitimate reasons that race-related conversation often gets snuffed out like so many cockroaches in my old apartment.

Point being: despite the substantial eye-opening that I got this last semester, I've rarely been brave enough to exercise much of what I learned. Stalled on the on-ramp, about the only noticeable thing that's changed for me is that I suddenly have a whole new slew of topics and comments that make me angry, or that put me (internally if not externally) in rant mode. To name a few:

- The fact that derogatory racial jokes are never okay, no matter how many times you think they're acceptable because you either 1) aren't "really" racist, or 2) have friends/are in the demographic at the butt of the joke.
- Islam is a religion practiced my Muslims. It is a stereotype or a generalization to assume that any Middle Eastern-looking person is Muslim, or to assume that all Muslims are Middle Eastern-looking. Thinking that making fun of Islam is okay because "Muslims are terrorists" is about the lamest thing I've ever heard.
- There is a way to have a sense of humor about race that isn't offensive. Taking offense at an offensive joke or comment is appropriate, not a demonstration of an inability to appreciate funny.

I'm just saying, if anyone ever feels a desire to talk about these kinds of things, I'm still ready to learn more if you are.

You write such pretty words, but life's no storybook

I like words. This isn't really surprising, I don't think.

But it's worth specification. A love of words can be misconstrued as a love of making other people feel stupid, or conversely, a love of making yourself sound misleadingly smart. For some people, it might also be a love of euphemism; there's fun to be had in being able to say exactly what you mean without directly saying anything at all. But what I personally love most about words is the most basic thing about them: their ability to mean something.

Despite what the more fascist dictionary adherents lead us to believe, words are not fixed signifiers. They change constantly. They have a limited flexibility in immediate contexts and a nearly infinite ability to reshape themselves across time. This means that most words have generations of layers (like onions or Shrek) underlying them. Enduring the nerdy peeling process and uncovering old definitions or uses often gives words spectral dimension, which adds a scholarly lemony zest to your reading experiences.

For example: the word disaster
If you pick at it, disaster is comprised of two basic roots: the classic prefix dis- (meaning "not" or "un" or other negating terms) and astr, the same root that brings us words like astronaut and astronomy. It means "star". In pre-scientific times, people believed that their lives were fated by the alignment of planets and stars. So if a person meets disaster, they are ill-starred--unfavorably fated by the celestial stuff that apparently hates them.

Isn't that interesting?

Also: the word tradition, as well as the word trade, derive (unsurprisingly) from the same French origin word meaning "delivery" or "handing down". This Old French word (traison) is also the root of the word treason. So one word associated with nationalism and another word that designates a betrayal of national ties are linguistically derived from the same asexual parent.

It's interesting.

It also, in my opinion, makes your reading more meaningful. In both senses of the term.

Baby, this is no business for a sweet little girl like you

If you know me or have snooped in my tax forms, you know that my parents are generally older than those of most people my age. (My "there was a one-in-three chance I would be born mentally retarded" factoid is one of my favorite mini-personal anecdotes.) If Cathi and I had been born at more conventional times, we would be nearing 40 right now. I'm not at all convinced that having older parents is something that heavily impacted my life, making me wildly different from youthful-parented normies. But there are a definite set of generational characteristics often attributed to Baby Boomers, and I can sometimes see them in my parents, highlighted by our wider-than-usual age gap.

Coming instantly to mind is tattoos. As a slew of comedians have observed, tattoos have become oddly common, considering that at this point they require a heftier load of permanent personal commitment than marriage. While even people my own age are sometimes puzzled by this trend, my parents come from a generation where, as my dad put it, only serious deviants and crusty sailors got tattoos. There was a fragrant stigma that went along with them that still instinctively prompts both my parents to wrinkle their noses at tattoos, even when confronted with the girly ankle flower variety.

Related to this, I think, is the fact that the cultural attitude towards deviance has changed since my parents were growing up. A while ago, one of my psych textbooks made the claim that in the 50s, conformity really was cool. Rebellion really was frowned upon, by practically everyone, not just lieutenant generals and floral-patterned great aunts. I instantly called my dad to verify this. He's always hesitant to make sweeping claims, but he agreed that, when he was a kid, there definitely wasn't the cultural encouragement to be the against-the-grain badass that there is now.

So, I guess, over time, as murderous biker outlaws became portrayed more and more as TV show heroes and less and less as the rapists on after school specials, tattoos gained appeal as the cool, rebellious thing to do and simultaneously lost the stigma. At least its one theory to explain the shift.

And really, I do think it's a shift that needs explaining. In general, I get the impression that practically everything in our culture, since the 40s and 50s, has moved in the direction of speed and immediacy. News periodicals can't stop talking about how saturated our culture has become with the pressure to keep moving. We skip from career to career instead of sticking with one company through retirement. We squat temporarily in crappily built houses instead of investing permanently in a solid homestead. Given this, it would have made more sense if someone had invented the three-year tattoo ("His name will be gone just in time for your second husband!"). This veritable explosion of everlasting skin brands is, in this light, really perplexing.

In the spirit of having Parents of the Old World and Friends of the New, I guess I do fall somewhere in between, opinion-wise. I feel no repulsion (and often like and admire) the tattoos of my friends. But in lieu of a fascist political coup that requires personal barcodes, I have no intention of ever getting one myself.

"Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the while we long to move the stars to pity." -Flaubert

"Our best writers have frequently written that language is hopelessly inadequate to their expressive task. Flaubert, quoted at the top of this chapter, typifies this sentiment. He despairs, convinced that he always falls short of his highest aspirations. No one understands what he intends. He is fated to 'beat out tunes for bears to dance to' when what he really wants is to 'move the stars to pity,' a sentiment that seems to be shared by virtually all writers. Jackals pissed on his works, said Flaubert. The bourgeois climbed his literary pyramids, he complained, without knowing and, worse, without caring whether or not they understood what his works were really about. Presumably they climbed up for the view.

"But what kind of view could such hapless readers hope for if they could not see what they were supposed to see and even the author himself was unhappy with the final product? The answer may be that rather than get us to our destination, intelligent reading only tells us where to look and roughly what to expect. It hints at possibilities, at novel states of being that we might, with luck and hard work, attain, if only for a moment. This outcome is never guaranteed, and we accept this. Reading seldom achieves what either author or reader originally intended, with any precision. Instead it elicits an intuition of possible knowledge and provides a motive force to move the imagination in a certain direction. A good reader can hope to discover not so much the exact content of a work as the possibility of a new domain of understanding. In this, there is no longer any boundary between author and audience. They become one and the same in their desire to realize raw, unexpressed possibility or, more accurately, in their deliberate pursuit of enhanced awareness of something. The same motive force that drives writers to write in the first place drives their future acolytes to read what they have written."

Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare