Of Air and Breath
Minorities in rural southeast Kansas are treated similarly to supernovas — sure they may exist, but they’re impossible to observe from our vantage point.
“I heard they have a black kid on their team!”
High school basketball teams would find themselves trapped between arrogance and curiosity as they watched opposing lay up drills during pre-game warm up. Maybe their supernova would dunk it. Maybe he’d shuck and jive. Anything is possible when observing the cosmic. There were three black students in our tiny high school at the end of the twentieth century. This brought the total number of black students during the decades bookending Y2K to…three. We didn’t talk about diversity or code-switching or inclusion in our tiny corner of America for the same reason you don’t talk about pouring concrete when you’re water-skiing. We talked about racism though. Or at least we talked with racism. It was a chord regularly played. There was a story about black hunters who mistakenly shot birds thinking they were quail. Those birds became n-word quail. Chuckle. In the right can of mixed nuts one would find a large brown variety colloquially called n-word toes. Speaking of basketball one should be careful enjoying that sport too much, after all, it was turning into n-word ball. “Good” people didn’t use the n-word…unless the chord could be played for laughs. Good people could, on the other hand, berate your cotton-picking hands or brain or ass. When the clouds of culture split just enough for a teenager to realize that “cotton-picking” is not a folksy derision but a racist equation to slavery said teenager may sit silently and wonder about love and hate and family and place and the ever-present “other”.
Black people existed in television shows, books and videos, in cd’s and radio waves. MLK Jr. is Nelly is Carl Winslow. Racism was obviously consigned to antiquity if I could blast Petey Pablo from the factory stereo of my five-speed Ford Ranger. Yet what was one to do when one’s American History class included video of black bodies gnawed by police-trained german shepherds or blasted by government funded fire-hoses? Mentally one could trust the thickness of television screens and treat those images like distant entertainment which introduced young white dudes to the dangers of the “hood”. Quiet gasps are delicious morsels of nobility when one is certain such disasters could never happen to them.
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Have you ever had a conversation about race in which the stove-top is set to simmer? I’m writing this during the riots and demonstration which follwed the murder of George Floyd by a member of the Minneapolis police department. Angels of lament placed Mr. Floyd’s body atop the unholy brown altar America has been piling with all sanctity since the fifteenth century. The murder inspired peaceful and violent protest across the country for more than a week. Whatever solidarity I feel with black people due to my own anger at injustice is truly fools gold though. I’m empathetic and enraged, but my body will never be at risk due to its existence. I will never worry about my daughter and two sons when they’re late making it home. I’ll be perturberbed. I’ll pace planning my parental speech about responsibility and trust. I won’t pray a nervous police officer with military-grade weaponry has his body cam on just in case. Even when I imagine my indignation is explosive it can’t compare to what my black fellow Americans feel.
So the conversations are set to simmer. One such conversation happens every semester in a public speaking course I’m fortunate to be a part of. Yes we talk about race in public speaking. I teach at a community college. I teach at a community college in the homogeneous context described above. My college has a rodeo team for goodness sake. Yet the college also has basketball, track and football. I’ve taught at two colleges. In both settings my classes were and are majority black. My students have to code switch the minute they walk in the room. And it must be exhausting — here is another white gate-keeper. I can’t imagine the fatigue. Before I call roll the stove-top is warming. The American Dream is an axle upon which so many post-adolescent decisions spin. Students discuss the meaning and implications of such a profoundly obvious piece of shared mythology. Ostensibly they’re learning how to motivate their audiences toward participation — really we are exegeting and parsing our reality. Students, barrel racing rodeo gals and loc’ed defensive backs, machine gun off elements of the American Dream. One begins to notice a downloaded mechanism in the mythology. Education+Hard Work+Good grades+Romance=well paying job, comfortable home, manageable children and wealth. Students notice that the American Dream(™) family is led by hetero-normative parents waving from behind a picket fence. I always ask THE question:
what race is the American Dream(™) family?
Even my black students say they see a white family piling into their SUV as we tap into the shared national consciousness.
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A confession: I want to appear woke and hip and as an ally to my black students. Its an honest and sincere position but not without the stench of selfish intent. I make fun of country music during a discussion on linguistics and metaphor (country music deserves it) and champion Young Thug’s music because I genuinely like Young Thug but also because I want to make the space safe for my black male students — hopefully your stereotype alarms are ringing. The exercise concerning the American Dream had always been led with a profound smugness on my part. Here I was, the white teacher calling out white systems of oppression. Look at me. White Jesus.
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When we talk about the inherent racism of the American Dream students typically laugh it off and seem altogether unsurprised. Yet we’ve spent almost an hour by that point articulating ways in which our education systems and their pursuit of said system’s approval and validation is fueled by that mythology. Many students fix their face in a staring shrug, admitting their inability to stop the current they’ve found themselves in. However last semester one student, a Black male, said “Shit, none of that can ever be for us.”
In one sentence my smug posturing was revealed to be anemic. I could play all the speeches by King and Baldwin and Morrison and it wouldn’t change the fact that many of my students felt that none of that was theirs for the taking.
I am part of a well meaning group of folks who give black young men air and tell them its breath. So similar, but as different as sleep is to dreams.
Currently the American Dream is being called to account across our country. This week every state has played host to demonstrations in response to the lynching of George Floyd. I thought myself a rare champion of diversity when I read Bell Hooks and James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates and books about the Jim Crow era, redlining and housing covenants. I was doing my best to weep with those who weep visiting the national civil rights museum with my white wife and white children. Then I drove ten miles per hour over the speed limit to our final vacation destination without a single fear that being stopped by police for my haste would be disastrous. There are arguments being flung back and forth regarding looting and violence which accompany the demonstrations and while I lament the destruction of property I realize how infrequently I’ve truly lamented the destruction of black bodies. Maybe something is ablaze in us, in me, now — a fire refining our “isn’t it a shame” and leaving behind only hands reaching for a better dream.
I’m supposed to be writing this to demonstrate my experience working with minority populations and goals for fostering diversity in my career contexts. I’m not sure I’ve adequately addressed either aim. I do have a goal though. I want my students to be heard, if only by me for moments, when they call for a dream that is their own. I want to say the name George Floyd and see a father and son and brother and friend and not merely a bullet point punctuating an argument. I want to say his name with honesty and immediacy. I want to say his name and feel skin and bones and sinews and hopes and fears and yes even dreams bound up in something bigger that we can all share. I want to say his name alongside my students’ names and know they’re loved.
