From The Chronicle Review's Brainstorm Blog
May 16, 2008
The Racial Impasse
By John L. Jackson, Jr.
I remember speaking to an auditorium full of 7th and 8th graders at a junior high school in Central Florida a couple of years ago. I was attempting to explain to them just what anthropologists do for a living, and I was having the hardest time.
I’d been brought down to lecture at a local university only a few miles away, and the person who invited me, a minister and activist in the community, wanted to make sure that I got a chance to learn about the local area, especially from residents of the all-black town a stone’s throw from campus. I’m used to speaking to academic audiences about my work (undergraduates, graduate students, and colleagues), but addressing an auditorium full of pre-teens and teens was a major challenge.
I decided to start off with an invocation of Indiana Jones, which felt a little bit like cheating (or just pandering), but I thought that they’d at least have heard of the pop-culture icon. Of course, that might have already been a bad jumping-off point, since some of the kids weren’t even born when the third installment of the motion-picture franchise was released — and there wasn’t buzz in the air yet about Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg gearing up for this summer’s fourth installment. Even so, they seemed to listen, probably because any “special assembly” in the auditorium probably beats class-as-usual for most teenagers.
I wanted to give them their money’s worth and to make sure that they didn’t feel like I was speaking above their heads. I bounced around the stage like a prize fighter, making eye contact with kids, telling the worst jokes you could imagine, even singing a bar or two from some popular songs to help punctuate points — just hoping that my physical energy and inadequate grasp of contemporary teen culture might translate into something exciting and engaging to a few of them.
I then moved from a discussion about all of anthropology (in about five minutes) to a longer description of my work, ethnographic research on race and class in America. I asked them what they knew about “race” and how they’d define it. Some students defined it as “what you look like” or “people that look the same.” Others blurted out that it had to do with “your family being related to other families from before.” Still other kids declared that it had to do with “blood and stuff.” But the talk of “blood” was met with a series of hoots, with vocal objections and dismissals.
“It isn’t blood,” one girl said. “We all have the same blood.” Her friend, a chubby-cheeked young boy, nodded his head in agreement. Several rows behind them, another student added, “race is just made up.” Many of the students shook their heads to second that conclusion, even as some of those same students seemed unconvinced of their own position, scrunching their eyebrows quizzically and pursing their lips in disbelief at their own arguments about how race should be defined.
Most students, even junior high school students, have gotten the memo about “race” not being simplistically biological. They know to say that race is at least partially about culture, not just biology, even if they can’t necessarily marshal the specific evidence scholars use to challenge assumptions about race’s biological grounding. To say that race is “cultural” is usually to say that it doesn’t have the inflexible imprimatur of nature behind it. But the stamp of culture can feel just as
intractable.
There are at least two racial camps in the academy right now. One consists of biologists, geneticists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and medical doctors who declare that “race” is not biologically based at all — and never has been. These are the social and cultural constructionists. They say that race is hardly reducible to biology. It is about power and exploitation, a way we fool ourselves into thinking there are natural justifications for the kinds of inequalities that plague us.
There is another group of biologists, geneticists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and medical doctors who dispute that claim. They think that there is a kind of academic conspiracy afoot to pretend that race isn’t real when it is — a move to treat the biology of race as a taboo subject, too politically sensitive to analyze. Instead of taking it seriously, they say, the folks in the former camp use dogma and charges of racism to keep contrary scientists (still interested in thinking about the physical realities of race) in line.
Each camp sets the other one up as being more powerful — and dangerous. They make accusations about one another’s intentions and morality. And they both imagine the other to be a serious problem to the future of scholarship.
There is even a growing third category of scholars, mostly nonscientists, who argue that race isn’t real (the first group is right) but that even the people in that camp use race in ways that are similar to their rivals. In one of its strongest versions, scholars claim that the “culture” of cultural constructionism is really just a smoke-and-mirror trick that allows academics to have their racial cake and eat it, too — by just renaming that race “culture.” (Literary critic Walter Benn Michaels has made this claim most forcefully.)
Race’s complicated relationship to reality (real vs. unreal, there vs. not there) is exactly what has everyone so preoccupied. Of course, just as those junior high school kids in Florida could imagine that race is and isn’t biological at the same time, a little of both and a little of neither, racial experts are caught in the same quicksand — of accusation and innuendo, of charges and countercharges. Race is a social construction, but it is also more than that, and this complicated, contradictory notion of race is exactly what makes racism so tenacious, perched right atop the electrified fence between those racial camps.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Et Tu, TV?: Television’s Role-Reversal on Racial Equality
Watching the most recent snippets of Jeremiah Wright espousing race-based conspiracy theories while defiantly saluting journalists at his controversial press conference, I couldn’t help but lament television’s currently pathological role in discussions of race relations, especially given its newfangled subservience to an Internet that allows people to replay TV clips ad nauseum.
The civil rights movement’s successes in the 1950s and 60s were spurred on by the television set and its powerful nightly newscasts. Martin Luther King, Jr., tested America’s religious conscience, but none of that would have worked without the creation of broadcast television as a ready-made national stage for vividly showcasing nonviolent resistance and racial discontent. Television came of age in the 1950s, just in time to contribute to those civil rights victories.
It was one thing to read about water hoses or vicious dogs unleashed on women and children and another to see those graphic images in your own living room. On screen, the aggressors (police officers and violent white citizens) came off as the bad guys in these nightly narratives, with the stoic black protestors cast in the undeniable role of innocent victims.
Television became a window into America’s soul, and the view wasn’t pretty. For blacks, these images were frightening but politically galvanizing. For whites, they offered renditions of a whiteness that most Americans would just as soon distance themselves from.
That was then. Today is much different, and it has become much harder for television to play a productive role in discussions of race nowadays. In fact, it may be hurting more than helping in the fight against all forms of racism.
As a society, we bristle when Michael Richards spews racial epithets on stage at a comedy club. We seethe when Mel Gibson shouts anti-Semitic insults at police officers. And we shake our collective fingers with a “tisk-tisk” when a black presidential candidate’s pastor voices conspiracy theories at a national press conference. But these are mere simulations of old-fashioned racism, and not representative of how race most powerfully circulates today, which is nothing like the way race ever functioned in American society in the past.
Politicians once ran campaigns on explicitly racists platforms, committed to discriminatory practices like racial segregation.
Displays of such hard-lined investments were easy for television to capture. Nowadays, the mere hint of support for such positions, even if not stated explicitly, is a major political blunder. Nobody wants to be called a racist, so people have to be caught unawares.
Today, America has moved on from a past era of de jure racism (unapologetic discrimination codified in law) to one of de facto racism (conspicuous public displays of racial differentiation, even if not backed by the judiciary) to our current moment of what I’d call de cardio racism (hatreds potentially hidden in people’s darkest hearts even if they never see the light of day). This is the new reality of racism in contemporary American society, a racism that has lost much of its traditional swagger.
The media have a harder time figuring out how to depict this humbled and dissimulating racism. It might not even have the capacity to do it at all. Television is not particularly good at representing subtlety. To carry meaning quickly and clearly in a sound-bite culture like our own, visual images have to be blatant, like those waterhoses and dogs wielded against peaceful marchers. With 24-hour news cycles to fill and few prominent heels-dug-in racists to beam into people’s living rooms, the medium today often succumbs to depicting mere racial spectacles, all sound and little substance—Michaels Richards breaking down on stage, mock nooses hung on college campuses, a black presidential candidate’s pastor voicing conspiracy theories at a national press conference. These are simulations of old-fashioned racism that distract us from the subtleties that define how racism actually operates today.
This is part of the reason why most mass-media caricatures of racial issues do more harm than good. With enough cinematic and televisual priming, we start to expect or demand unmasked racial explicitness in our real world encounters. When we don’t get it, we either dismiss cries of racism as unjustified hypersensitivity or pretend that the offending actions are self-evidently racist even when they aren’t, when they are restrained and almost impossible to prove.
Thankfully, bold and obvious versions of unmasked racism are more media cliché than anything else these days, not all the time, but usually—at least in mixed racial company. These clichés still suffice for melodramatic tales of heroes and villains, but they are hardly up the challenge of representing how convoluted and messy racism is in our politically correct, post–civil rights present.
Pre-civil rights sensibilities won’t help us. They are too black and white. Ironically though, television was more useful when its images still were.
The civil rights movement’s successes in the 1950s and 60s were spurred on by the television set and its powerful nightly newscasts. Martin Luther King, Jr., tested America’s religious conscience, but none of that would have worked without the creation of broadcast television as a ready-made national stage for vividly showcasing nonviolent resistance and racial discontent. Television came of age in the 1950s, just in time to contribute to those civil rights victories.
It was one thing to read about water hoses or vicious dogs unleashed on women and children and another to see those graphic images in your own living room. On screen, the aggressors (police officers and violent white citizens) came off as the bad guys in these nightly narratives, with the stoic black protestors cast in the undeniable role of innocent victims.
Television became a window into America’s soul, and the view wasn’t pretty. For blacks, these images were frightening but politically galvanizing. For whites, they offered renditions of a whiteness that most Americans would just as soon distance themselves from.
That was then. Today is much different, and it has become much harder for television to play a productive role in discussions of race nowadays. In fact, it may be hurting more than helping in the fight against all forms of racism.
As a society, we bristle when Michael Richards spews racial epithets on stage at a comedy club. We seethe when Mel Gibson shouts anti-Semitic insults at police officers. And we shake our collective fingers with a “tisk-tisk” when a black presidential candidate’s pastor voices conspiracy theories at a national press conference. But these are mere simulations of old-fashioned racism, and not representative of how race most powerfully circulates today, which is nothing like the way race ever functioned in American society in the past.
Politicians once ran campaigns on explicitly racists platforms, committed to discriminatory practices like racial segregation.
Displays of such hard-lined investments were easy for television to capture. Nowadays, the mere hint of support for such positions, even if not stated explicitly, is a major political blunder. Nobody wants to be called a racist, so people have to be caught unawares.
Today, America has moved on from a past era of de jure racism (unapologetic discrimination codified in law) to one of de facto racism (conspicuous public displays of racial differentiation, even if not backed by the judiciary) to our current moment of what I’d call de cardio racism (hatreds potentially hidden in people’s darkest hearts even if they never see the light of day). This is the new reality of racism in contemporary American society, a racism that has lost much of its traditional swagger.
The media have a harder time figuring out how to depict this humbled and dissimulating racism. It might not even have the capacity to do it at all. Television is not particularly good at representing subtlety. To carry meaning quickly and clearly in a sound-bite culture like our own, visual images have to be blatant, like those waterhoses and dogs wielded against peaceful marchers. With 24-hour news cycles to fill and few prominent heels-dug-in racists to beam into people’s living rooms, the medium today often succumbs to depicting mere racial spectacles, all sound and little substance—Michaels Richards breaking down on stage, mock nooses hung on college campuses, a black presidential candidate’s pastor voicing conspiracy theories at a national press conference. These are simulations of old-fashioned racism that distract us from the subtleties that define how racism actually operates today.
This is part of the reason why most mass-media caricatures of racial issues do more harm than good. With enough cinematic and televisual priming, we start to expect or demand unmasked racial explicitness in our real world encounters. When we don’t get it, we either dismiss cries of racism as unjustified hypersensitivity or pretend that the offending actions are self-evidently racist even when they aren’t, when they are restrained and almost impossible to prove.
Thankfully, bold and obvious versions of unmasked racism are more media cliché than anything else these days, not all the time, but usually—at least in mixed racial company. These clichés still suffice for melodramatic tales of heroes and villains, but they are hardly up the challenge of representing how convoluted and messy racism is in our politically correct, post–civil rights present.
Pre-civil rights sensibilities won’t help us. They are too black and white. Ironically though, television was more useful when its images still were.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
New Rule: You Gotta Have Balls, So Poker Is Not a Sport
By John L. Jackson, Jr.
courtesy of TheRoot.com
[THIS IS A TONGUE-IN-CHEEK PIECE I PUBLISHED WITH THEROOT.COM LAST WEEK. MOST READERS GOT THE JOKE. SOME DIDN'T, BUT THAT'S COOL, TOO. AND I'D DEFINITELY ADD A FEW OTHER THINGS TO THE 'NON-SPORT' CATEGORY (AS SOME READERS COMPELLINGLY SUGGESTED).]
With protests raging in the streets of Tibet and world-class athletes pulling out of the games (from fear of Beijing's dangerous air pollution), I know there are many controversial topics that the International Olympic Committee needs to confront as it prepares for the summer games in Beijing.
However, since that worldwide spectacle is just around the corner, I choose now as the perfect time to submit a modest proposal: that we take "sports" out of the Olympics.
Hold the invective.
I should probably admit that my interest in this little idea first hit me while I was watching television a couple of years ago: Saturday afternoon. I was lounging in the living room, channel surfing, when I came across a double-dose of poker—on ESPN and ESPN2. The unbridled fun of monthly poker parties helped to get me through graduate school. That is definitely the case. But parlor games are hardly sports, and poker doesn't belong on ESPN. Period.
In trying to make my case to skeptical friends, I soon realized that I had even bigger fish to fry. For one thing, there were other events—like golf, bowling, and billiards—that I also felt compelled to disqualify. Those activities seem to fall below the threshold for what I would think of as the defining physical nature of real sports. They take skill, no doubt. They are incredibly fun to play (at times, even to watch), but something about them doesn't seem quite sportsy enough -- at least not to me.
With that in mind, I decided to offer up my own definition. Needless to say it has been somewhat controversial.
There are three things that make games or competitions bona fide sports—at least in my book. First, there has to be a ball-like object involved. This might sound arbitrary, but it is vital. No ball, no sport.
Of course, when I say ball, I'm not just talking about the bouncy kinds. Frisbees and pucks count, too. The point is simply that there needs to be an external object that organizes everyone's attention.
Second, there must be a sense of physical urgency when that ball-like thing is in play: running, jumping, kicking, throwing--something. A true "sport" should not permit, say, walking to the next green. Or driving, no less. Again, the activity might take a ton of practice and even stamina, but so does a long calculus exam.
Third, in a sport, your opponent has to be able to directly thwart you—by catching a ball, intercepting a pass, blocking a kick, anything. There might be clocks involved, but you can't just be finishing something quicker than a competitor. That is a race, but it isn't a sport.
Put these three features together, and you have a sport worthy of ESPN broadcast. Leave out two, or even one, and you have a contest, a game of skill, maybe even an athletic competition, but you don't reach the level of sporting event. Now, I know what you're thinking. Given this definition, look at all the sports that get disqualified. Poker meets rule # 3, maybe even rule #1 (if we are willing to over-generously count playing cards as ball-like objects), but sitting at a table with chips and a cigar lacks the kind of physicality that a true sport demands.
Bowling, billiards and golf each satisfies two but not all three of the rules. So, they would be out, too.
Of course, those sports wouldn't be alone. Track and field events are the most egregious (and troubling, for some) non-sports by my definition. How could these most cherished of athletic events be disqualified, even if they usually break rules #1 and #3? What kind of definition of sport is worth having at all if it doesn't see, say, the 100-yard dash as a quintessential sport?
Running on a track is an athletic competition, and it calls for the most elite and challenging of physical skill and training. No question about that. But it is the building block of sport, not the thing itself. You use that skill in actual sports—to tackle a runner, to round some bases, to catch up to a ball, etc.
Now, I can picture a ton of former college track stars all poised to hurl epithets my way, but let me be clear. The distinction isn't meant to disparage track and field events. If anything, I want to offer up this new definition as a way to give things like track and field pride of place come Olympic time. There should be a higher scrutiny given to sports seeking entry to the Olympic Games, especially sports that people tend to watch anyway.
In the United States, that would mean things like basketball. Track and swimming aren't necessarily at the center of American culture for the 3¾ years between games. So, why should they have to compete with basketball or soccer for top billing during their moment of glory? That just seems unfair.
Of course, this isn't a fool-proof plan. We would still have to make exceptions here and there. For example, synchronized swimming would be allowed to stay in the Olympic mix, which means that we should devise some special rule to ban it. And water polo technically satisfies all three of the above criteria, but it should probably be grandfathered into its Olympic slot anyway.
Ultimately, the IOC can tweak these kinds of issues on a case by case basis, and they can also use the above rules to determine what, if any, new sports get added to the Olympic roster. (Of course, to many naysayers, curling shouldn't be allowed into the games under any auspices.)
If you had time to kill and wanted a fun game to play with friends (instead of just poker), you could try to think of all kind of ways to turn non-sports into sports (given the abovementioned criteria).
Force golfers to run from hole to hole as their competitors shoot balls at their heads. Now that's a sport. Give a sprinter a ball (maybe just that same old baton) and let other runners try to tackle her before she reaches the finish line. A clear sport. Throw in skates, and you get a cross between hockey and roller derby. In any case, it is something that should take a backseat to the kinds of athletic contests that the Olympics has always privileged. Let the games begin. And let's leave the sports on the sidelines.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Sixty-Second Lecture at Penn...
...on the state of ethnography in the age of supercrunching science...
Monday, April 21, 2008
Review of Contested Water in The Washington Post...
The Deep End
America's racial history can be read in the chlorinated waters of its pools.
Reviewed by John L. Jackson Jr.
CONTESTED WATERS
A Social History of Swimming Pools in America
By Jeff Wiltse
Univ. of North Carolina. 276 pp. $29.95
Most of us use swimming pools to get away from the toils and tensions of life. Purposeful breast strokes in a local YMCA clear our heads and strengthen our bodies. During the summer, people don skimpy bathing suits and bask in the sun's rays, floating and splashing around in these chlorine-filled symbols of leisure and carefree recreation. But there's also a politics to sitting poolside. In Contested Waters, historian Jeff Wiltse argues that the nation's contentious history of racism, class conflict and gender inequality can be captured by chronicling the rise and fall of municipal pools in northern American cities. And he makes a compelling case.
Contested Waters begins in the 19th century, when poor immigrants (many living in homes without running water) bathed naked in local rivers and lakes. The first public pools were a calculated response to this exhibitionism. Policymakers -- believing, as most people did, that dirt caused diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis -- aimed to promote cleanliness and good health in America's teeming cities while catering to the sensibilities of middle-class urbanites not interested in glimpsing nude bodies in public.
Wiltse emphasizes that the earliest public pools were racially mixed places. Blacks and whites swam together with few clashes and little popular disapproval. Instead, other social lines were stringently policed, specifically the ones drawn around gender and class. Men and women swam on separate days of the week, and a tiered fee structure meant that the wealthiest swimmers didn't have to share their pool time with the raucous, uncontrollable masses.
But pools couldn't stave off diseases the way previous public planners had imagined, so later pools were designed less to promote public health than to discipline rowdy public bathers, teaching them Victorian values of self-control and moral uplift by forbidding the rambunctious activities (screaming, running, fighting) that had previously characterized public swimming. When it became increasingly clear that the rowdy male swimmers weren't internalizing the lessons (and wouldn't abide by the newly posted rules), public pools mutated yet again into a form of recreation that more civilized families could enjoy together. This new mandate encouraged public funding of massive indoor and outdoor facilities replete with shipped-in sand and vast swaths of land for people-watching and picnicking. According to Wiltse, it also spelled the beginning of the end for multiracial swimming in public pools.
Once men and women (as parents and children) started swimming together, African American swimmers (now saddled with the accusations of bio-pathology and disease-carrying earlier attributed to all poor urbanites) were perceived as a threat. A predilection of black men for raping white women was assumed by some of the most enlightened and celebrated urban thinkers, including Nobel Peace Prize-winning settlement house activist Jane Addams. Most opponents of miscegenation considered pools even more dangerous than schools, Wiltse argues, because they provided a kind of close and intimate contact that classrooms hardly allowed.
Wiltse claims that it was America's mid-20th century defeat of legalized segregation that rang the death knell for public pools in major American cities. Though whites had once swum alongside African Americans without comment or concern, they were no longer willing to do so. Several cities even tried to avoid race riots by reverting to gender-segregated pools, but it didn't work. Whites continued their retreat to private clubs and residential pools safely tucked away behind picket fences. Once they stopped frequenting urban public pools, it became much harder to justify spending tax dollars on maintenance. In such a context, Wiltse argues, everyone ended up losing: the suburban middle-class that had cordoned itself off from supposedly unsavory aspects of urban life and the urban poor that had been relegated to barb-wired and dilapidated mini-pools -- when there's enough money for any pool at all.
As this extremely readable narrative makes clear, empty and discarded public swimming pools exemplify the decay and decimation of post-Civil Rights urban America and the squandering of communal possibilities. In the end, Wiltse persuasively shows that there are some very serious consequences to how Americans play together -- and to when and why they decide that they won't.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Racism? You Make the Call!
With my book hitting bookstores last week, I have started to get stories from readers about their own experiences shimmying through the subtler minefields of contemporary American racial politics, especially during everyday social interactions. Since I’ve been receiving these first-person accounts, I’ve decided to start a new feature on the blog—Racism? You Make the Call!
I’ll relay people’s tales (mine included) about negotiating these subtler forms of potential racism in contemporary America and allow other readers to weigh-in (if they'd like) on how they’d interpret the experiences depicted. The question is always the same, a version of what the Lebron James cover evokes: Are blacks being too sensitive, or are whites not being sensitive enough?
THE FIRST ENTRY:
I’m two miles through my usual three-mile treadmill jog at a posh gym in downtown Philadelphia when I spot one of the gym’s ‘fitness experts’, a red-headed twenty-something woman, handing clean towels out to every single runner on every single occupied treadmill in the entire aerobics area—everyone, that is, except for me. At the time, I happened to be the only Black runner in the bunch (even though the club has a racially diverse clientele), but I still didn’t automatically jump to thoughts of racism. At first, I was just confused. Did she somehow not see me when she walked right by—two feet from my machine? The more I thought about it, the more I got suspicious. I only spent a nanosecond at annoyed before finally getting downright angry, taking it all out on the treadmill and on my aching body, just about sprinting my final quarter mile.
As I ran, I desperately tried to come up with alternative explanations for the slight. Maybe she heard that Black folks were particularly fond of sweat and so didn’t want to be culturally insensitive by pressuring me into dryness. Or she could have imagined that I’d take it as some kind of racial insult: “What, you trying to say that I stink because I’m black?” Or did she think that I might read her helpfulness as flirtation and try to pick her up? So, she doesn’t date black guys, hunh?
But none of that really made sense to me. Clearly, I couldn’t really call it old-fashioned racism, and it wasn’t. I mean, they did let me purchase my gazillion dollar membership to the club in the first place. I could use any machine I wanted any time I wanted. The redhead and I sipped water from gym-supplied cone-shaped paper cups at the very same water fountain. That is the stuff of traditional racism. So, to make sense of what I thought had just happened, I started to think more creatively about things, very creatively: maybe she assumed that the whiteness of the towel would freak me out—that I’d think she was giving me some kind of subtle KKK reference. White towels…white sheets?
Or, instead of feeling like she didn’t want to give a black person a towel, maybe she was just intimidated. Afraid. She could have smilingly handed me one of those towels, only to have me scream obscenities at her for interrupting my running rhythm, part of the national imperative to fear black men and their penchant for violence.
When I exited the club that day, about 45 minutes later, the towel oversight was still bothering me. I looked all over the gym for that redhead before I left, just to let her know that in the future whenever I’m running on a treadmill on her watch, it was truly okay for her to give me a towel, especially if she’s readily dispensing them to everybody else in the joint.
Waiting for the elevator to the parking garage, I’m still trying to make sense of things, and maybe my puzzled look translates into an unapproachable snarl, because the three other gym patrons who happen to be departing when I do, all white, choose to take a different elevator from the one I get on, even though both elevators arrive at the same time and one of the guys, a blonde thirty-something man who didn’t seem to know the other two at all, is much closer to the elevator I chose than to the one he decided to enter.
So my entire empty elevator ride down, I’m trying to figure out why they all piled themselves into a single elevator when at least one of them could have had a much less cramped ride with me.
I’ll relay people’s tales (mine included) about negotiating these subtler forms of potential racism in contemporary America and allow other readers to weigh-in (if they'd like) on how they’d interpret the experiences depicted. The question is always the same, a version of what the Lebron James cover evokes: Are blacks being too sensitive, or are whites not being sensitive enough?
THE FIRST ENTRY:
I’m two miles through my usual three-mile treadmill jog at a posh gym in downtown Philadelphia when I spot one of the gym’s ‘fitness experts’, a red-headed twenty-something woman, handing clean towels out to every single runner on every single occupied treadmill in the entire aerobics area—everyone, that is, except for me. At the time, I happened to be the only Black runner in the bunch (even though the club has a racially diverse clientele), but I still didn’t automatically jump to thoughts of racism. At first, I was just confused. Did she somehow not see me when she walked right by—two feet from my machine? The more I thought about it, the more I got suspicious. I only spent a nanosecond at annoyed before finally getting downright angry, taking it all out on the treadmill and on my aching body, just about sprinting my final quarter mile.
As I ran, I desperately tried to come up with alternative explanations for the slight. Maybe she heard that Black folks were particularly fond of sweat and so didn’t want to be culturally insensitive by pressuring me into dryness. Or she could have imagined that I’d take it as some kind of racial insult: “What, you trying to say that I stink because I’m black?” Or did she think that I might read her helpfulness as flirtation and try to pick her up? So, she doesn’t date black guys, hunh?
But none of that really made sense to me. Clearly, I couldn’t really call it old-fashioned racism, and it wasn’t. I mean, they did let me purchase my gazillion dollar membership to the club in the first place. I could use any machine I wanted any time I wanted. The redhead and I sipped water from gym-supplied cone-shaped paper cups at the very same water fountain. That is the stuff of traditional racism. So, to make sense of what I thought had just happened, I started to think more creatively about things, very creatively: maybe she assumed that the whiteness of the towel would freak me out—that I’d think she was giving me some kind of subtle KKK reference. White towels…white sheets?
Or, instead of feeling like she didn’t want to give a black person a towel, maybe she was just intimidated. Afraid. She could have smilingly handed me one of those towels, only to have me scream obscenities at her for interrupting my running rhythm, part of the national imperative to fear black men and their penchant for violence.
When I exited the club that day, about 45 minutes later, the towel oversight was still bothering me. I looked all over the gym for that redhead before I left, just to let her know that in the future whenever I’m running on a treadmill on her watch, it was truly okay for her to give me a towel, especially if she’s readily dispensing them to everybody else in the joint.
Waiting for the elevator to the parking garage, I’m still trying to make sense of things, and maybe my puzzled look translates into an unapproachable snarl, because the three other gym patrons who happen to be departing when I do, all white, choose to take a different elevator from the one I get on, even though both elevators arrive at the same time and one of the guys, a blonde thirty-something man who didn’t seem to know the other two at all, is much closer to the elevator I chose than to the one he decided to enter.
So my entire empty elevator ride down, I’m trying to figure out why they all piled themselves into a single elevator when at least one of them could have had a much less cramped ride with me.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
