During a hike through the east bay hills I chattered excitedly about our new fig tree. I told my friend about the sheer delight of eating figs right off of the tree. The light chewiness of the skin. The light green bulb opening to reveal a rich textured red world within. The gentle, not-too-sweet flavor. As we rounded the lake and started our descent towards the cool water, he told me something he had learned about a particular kind of fig. While I didn’t think I had ever seen what he described, a little square todo box was sticky-noted onto the back of my dusty brain for later.
It turns out that he was right. Just after I took my first tasty bite of a fig today I looked at the bottom. Lo and behold, there was a little hole! By design a little hole opened in the bottom where a flower would eventually emerge. I couldn’t wait to find out if what he had predicted next was also true. I tapped the soft fig on the counter. Indeed, after a pause, a tiny ant emerged. She continued across the bottom of the fruit and out onto the countertop. There she wandered on her way, unaware of her near demise by digestion. Then, just as our ancestors long before us, and just as this ant had, I enjoyed the rest of the delicious fig.
First of all I will get it out of the way: the author John McWhorter seems to have lived a somehow magically isolated experience as a black man in America. “In my life, racism has affected me now and then at the margins, in very occasional social ways, but has had no effect on my access to societal resources; if anything, it has made them more available to me than they would have been otherwise.”
Of course if that’s true, and even the inherited lack of resources and hiring biases have not affected him, more power to him. But certainly this experience and belief colors the article.
I do understand his desire to not be infantilized as somehow weaker and needing special care. Just to give one example, however: at least in my personal experience, I have never met a person of a non-dominant group in America who was excited about being a personal educator and soul representative of their group for coworkers on top of their already demanding workload. Those that have been willing to take on this role seem, unsurprisingly, to prefer choosing when and where they take that on. So I take no issue with suggesting that it’s OK to give people a break and go read a book or go to a lecture by someone who has chosen to be an educator before burdening a coworker or friend.
McWhorter also seems to take one section of the book out of context, claiming that D’Angelo is telling us that “thou shalt not utter” a list of phrases from the book. What he doesn’t include is that these expressions are merely pointers to assumptions the speaker may be making that are worth addressing. D’Angelo then lists the potential underlying assumptions. I don’t see an issue with offering an opportunity to explore what might underlie our language. While perhaps one could infer that she is saying that one must never speak these words, I don’t read that as her intent, although given their relationship to underlying assumptions there are certainly situations where that could seem prudent. The problem is not here in the details. The trick is that, taken as a whole, a much more important issue emerges from her work.
Sin
Of McWhorter’s criticisms there is one in particular with which I strongly agree. I was already struggling with this in the spaces where I discuss or facilitate discussions about race.
Many religions maintain the concept of original sin. Roughly: You are born a bad person. If you ever hope to escape your depravity, you must suffer in precisely the right way. If you suffer in the wrong way, you got no points. If you suffer not enough, you are still a bad person. I have seen all too often the deep wounding that this produces. The Dalai Lama even spoke in puzzlement about Westerners who use a term he could not comprehend: “self-hatred.” The practice of Tonglen had to be re-designed for Westerners because they so frequently struggled with self acceptance that they had to trick themselves by loving someone else first.
This original sin-based approach winds throughout D’Angelo’s work. This is where that leaves many of the white people who are willing to even listen to and consider the effects of racism:
Of course there are plenty who, to avoid this fate, simply wrap themselves in the robes of the persecuted in response to stories about race and talk about how white people are the ones under attack, raging and posturing beside those who self flagellate. Producing either of these effects does not seem particularly helpful.
There is certainly value in, no, for real, facing the results of un-repaired damage to large groups of people based on race. And facing those realities is painful and difficult. It is also easy to avoid if you are in the dominant group (which includes myself). Is there a way that we can grieve together to process the pain and then move on to take action instead of beating ourselves for what hasn’t been done yet? Given that the people who have the most power to actually make change also have the option of ignoring the whole thing, it seems like it would be helpful to create a movement that expresses a positive goal beyond a lifetime of shame.
Grief and shame and other emotions are also legitimate. When D’Angelo turns real displays of emotion and pain into a pathetic weakness in white people, she makes it extremely difficult to join her cause or feel empowered to move through those feelings. It is true that in mixed groups the rage and tears of white people distracts from the conversation at hand and directs support away from black or brown people. However, D’Angelo takes it further: “tears that are driven by white guilt are self indulgent. When we are mired in guilt we are narcissistic.” While it’s true that this processing is best supported by fellow white people, it is equally true that it must be a welcome part of the process. Expressing and deeply experiencing these emotions is an essential first step to transcending them. If we don’t take the time to build a capacity to handle greater levels of emotionality we cannot face difficult realities and without being able to face those realities we cannot change them.
I’m glad more eyes are open. Let’s not waste this moment. Let’s accept that it’s part of the process, take the time to move through the guilt and and pain, and when we’re done hitting ourselves with stone tablets, rejoin the larger group and use those rocks to rebuild.
This is a very strange story to be writing during the time of a pandemic. Or maybe, it’s not. Maybe this is a time to, every now and then, take a moment to drink some tea and take time out from the insanity that has become daily life. Either way, my friend was asking about this and I couldn’t find a satisfactory version of the story in English that jibed with the way I heard it in China. So if you ever wondered why people tap on the table with their knuckles when someone pours tea in China… or were angry because you thought they were trying to make you spill when you were pouring… read on and be ready to owe them an apology and some tea.
According to the story (that I’m sticking to) the origin of this tradition began in the Qing Dynasty (1644 – 1911 A.D.) Emperor Qian Long liked to travel across the land to see what was happening for himself. Apparently an early version of Twitter that used literal birds simply wasn’t efficient enough to give him a satisfying snapshot of the world outside the palace. Of course, like any rock star it was hard for him to go anywhere without being recognized and mobbed. Unlike rock stars, not everyone loves emperors so the whole mob thing could be a real mixed bag. So he traveled in disguise.
Of course, he brought his crew with him. But like any crew that’s been with you for too long, they had a lot of habits that weren’t going to work out on a road trip. Especially not in disguise. For example, the emperor insisted that he serve tea just like anyone else. Being loyal servants, the idea of being served tea by the most mighty ruler in the land made the lot of them incredibly uncomfortable. To make up for this, they came up with a secret way to bow before the emperor every time he poured. They would use their first and second fingers like a pair of legs and bend them to tap the table with their knuckles. This was like kneeling and bowing.
In Chinese saying thank you requires three syllables: (谢谢你 | xiè xiè nǐ | thank you). So whenever the emperor would pour tea, they would fold two fingers and tap the table three times with their nuckles as they thought the words xiè xiè nǐ silently to themselves.
Like anything cool, this caught on. Now you will see people doing this all over the country and it is a nice way of thanking someone for pouring tea without interrupting the flow of conversation. Also, we all get to treat each other like emperors. And drink tea. Which is wonderful.
It’s been a long time since I have written in this way. Long before there were blogs of any kind, I wrote to an email list. People found my life, or at least the colorful version of my life I shared through my carefully chosen words, to be entertaining enough to follow for many years.
Some big life changes put me in a position where I couldn’t get work and still be known as the person who wrote those stories. I was forced to scrub the Internet clean of all versions of myself.
But I miss the special sort of motivation that comes of sharing stories with you, one of the mysterious, unknown and unpredictable people of the Internet. Knowing I would write publicly later, moments in my day suddenly became brighter and lasted longer. I looked at them more closely. I held those moments a little longer in my hands, and words emerged that shaped themselves into poetry and condensed into deeper meaning. These gifts had been there all along, waiting for the light of my eyes and the warmth of my hands to have permission to grow.
And so I am returning. It is good to see you again. And if you’ve read this far, I hope that you consider trying this experiment yourself.
The recipe:
Set a timer for 50-60 min.
Type words
Set a timer for 10 minutes
Quickly edit the words, shaping them slightly in the short time you have
Press the “publish” button. That’s right, you don’t get to edit any more. This is where the magic happens. By not being allowed to overthink, you will produce more and learn more quickly. And the world will receive the gift of your perspective and the opportunity to learn from your journey.
The beat poets considered editing to be a form of censorship. You wouldn’t want that, now would you?
