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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Conley: I think you were more self-aware as a kid. Because for me it was quite the opposite. I longed for the lawns, the middle class, and when I came back from college after the first year at Berkeley, I asked my mother, "How could you ever raise your kids in a place like this without even grass and trees and a backyard? You're so selfish."
Now, of course, I would never have traded it for the world. I could never leave New York. I'm trapped here because of this experience, I think. And in some ways it's very limiting. I'm envious of people who can feel comfortable in the malls and the backyards of suburban America.
Lethem: I grew up in a sort of hippie-Utopian atmosphere where my parents taught me to be oblivious to race. What I couldn't have been prepared for was the way the community around me insisted that I learn to see myself as white. Even though I wasn't insisting on their racial identity, they insisted that I understand mine. And they named it. I was the white boy. And I could never have produced the words "black boy." I'd been trained it to feel it was unsayable.
Lopate: What's your religion?
Lethem: My mother was Jewish and my father is a WASP from the Midwest.
Conley: Exactly the same.
Lopate: I gotta say, both my parents are Jewish, and I never thought of myself as white, I thought of myself as Jewish.
Conley: I never thought of myself as Jewish, I always thought of myself as white. Race so trumped any differences between ethnic groups within the white population.
Lethem: I think I bridge your two experiences. In Phillip's essay there's this older idea that there were many ethnic zones -- Italian, Jewish, Irish, Puerto Rican, black, Polish. Then there's Dalton's experience, which is essentially being in a neighborhood where the only issue is skin tone anymore.
In my childhood, by chance, I moved from one to the other. From first to third grade I was at a school where there were only blacks, Puerto Ricans and a scattering of motley hippie kids, like myself, who were white. That was Dalton's reality, where the only question was, "Oh, I've got white skin."
Then, for fourth grade, I moved to Carroll Gardens, an old Italian enclave [in Brooklyn]. There I was no longer in the minority by skin tone. But I was met with this very self-aware, self-defining majority of Italian kids, who didn't welcome me either. They introduced me to those finer distinctions that belonged to the older Brooklyn, to Phillip's childhood. "Oh, you're Irish, you're Italian or you're a Jewish kid. Or we can't help you if you don't know what you are." Which was sort of my problem.
Later I realized that the kids from the black housing project on the edge of the Italian neighborhood recognized the difference, too. My brother tells a story of being on Court Street and being surrounded by a bunch of black kids, who were ready to shake him down but weren't certain he wasn't Italian. And they said, "Hey, you a white boy or you Italian?" And my brother's response was, "Well, wait a minute. What do you mean? Those Italian guys are white, too! If you're going to take my money, take their money, too." But the black kids didn't see it that way.
Lopate: Oh, sure, they'd come after them with baseball bats.
Lethem: Yeah. Whereas you and I, Dalton, as the Jewish bohemian kids, whatever we were, there was no team with baseball bats to take vengeance for us.
Lopate: It definitely is quasi-generational. I was born in '43, I came up in the '50s, at a time when Jews were still very black identified. There was all this "Let my people go," and my parents had the Paul Robeson records. There was this feeling that the Exodus story and civil rights were connected. There was a whole involvement in the NAACP, etc. And this was before the big falling out occurred in about '64.
So if my parents taught me anything, it was to mistrust other whites a lot, and blacks somewhat, but not as much as other whites.
