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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Lethem: Damage control's a great word for it. When you add race to those pure childhood experiences of fear or violence you create a confusion that has no good name. And so you're afraid the only name for it is racism. To open your mouth at all is to make a mistake.
Lopate: I think it has to do with the Other, on the deepest possible level -- that moment when the Other appears to us as nonhuman, or certainly not as fully human as we experience ourselves to be. And whether that's the way a man feels about a woman, or whether that's the way a white feels about a black or a black feels about a white, it is this issue of otherness. And I think that part of what political correctness has made us do is to jump and flinch. And what I'd like to see is just a little bit more sitting in the mud of confusion and saying, "You're absolutely right. We all are fully complex human beings, but let's not exaggerate our ability to be compassionate with everybody. Let's recognize how hard compassion really is. Let's not oversimplify." You look like you want to disagree.
Conley: I don't want to disagree with your assessment. I wonder, though, about the way it actually plays out in the sort of constant verbal abuse and constant jostling for position -- how many roaches you had in your apartment, how old and dirty your sneakers were, whether your mom was a whore. There are things that would be so easy to say when anger is boiling. How does a kid who's 9 already know that he can't say something about how black the other kid is, if you're white?
It's always the sensitive issues that can't be named. I don't think it's anything particular to race. If a kid is fat, kids will say so, immediately. Nothing's stopping them. But picking on somebody about race or about class -- even among young kids they're already socialized that you never do this. If it was only being fat or being tall or short, a physical characteristic, we wouldn't be so scared to say it. We could say, "Your mother's so dark." And then the person would just come back with, "Your mother's so pale." Somehow racism is different.
Lopate: I agree that racism is fundamental and important. What I'm really talking about is not what it's like to be a kid, but our job as writers. And how do we touch explosive material without hedging too much?
Lethem: I want to throw your question back to you, Phillip. In writing that essay, do you feel that you unearthed anger in yourself?
Lopate: Well, I think I've certainly got fear. But you know, when I wrote "The Countess's Tutor," I was just as nervous saying that the woman I called the Countess was fat. When I described the kid who beat up my brother and compared him to a panther, I thought, "This is going to get me in trouble, this is stupid, don't do this." And I thought, "Well, but at that moment, the physicality is what impressed me." And so this is the question: How do you describe people, knowing that you're not going to take them on fully and walk in their shoes?
In Dalton's book, there are clearly people whom he's going to treat as basically loose cannons, who are totally scary -- like the kid who put the knife to your head -- and who are not really entered into that much. And then there are the friends, who are given much more reality. It's funny, this may seem unfair to say, but in a way you've benefited from one of your friends being shot and paralyzed. It gave an arc to the story.
Lethem: This is interesting, because the writer's guilt at using life stories is recapitulated, in this case, in the white kid's guilt at surviving experiences which the black kid couldn't. He ends up in jail for them; the white kid ends up in college in California. So similar to that "getting away with it," which can be an aspect of the writer's experience. "Oh, we're all traumatized, but I'm the one who's got the material afterwards."
Conley: In some ways I still feel probably more racist than somebody who grew up in lily-white Indiana or somewhere. I tell a story in the book about how in Pennsylvania, where we went for the summer, my sister had a sleepover, and a girl told a ghost story about "the big nigger in the woods" with a complete lack of self-consciousness, just like a story about Bigfoot. In certain ways that's more innocent, and less racist than I'm capable of being in my head at certain times because of my intimate knowledge of surviving these invisible racial and class wars on a daily basis for my entire childhood.
It's sort of like being a spy -- although I wasn't a very good one because of my skin color. Your allegiances are compromised. Your knowledge of the "enemy" or the Other is so intimate that you become confused about where you're coming from and what you feel.
Lopate: You asked me if I was still angry, and I think the answer that immediately came to mind was that most of the anger was at myself. And I think part of what happens when you cross those lines is that you end up internalizing both groups and you can't help but take it out on yourself.
Conley: I take it out on others, in my head at least. I feel like when I'm with whites, I get so angry and so bitter, as if I practically identify myself as the secret black. Then, when I'm in an African-American or a Latino community, I still can't resist the behavioral explanations of poverty. Like, look at my old neighborhood. It's still got garbage and graffiti over it. People don't clean it up themselves; it's their own fault. I start getting angry and conservative and sounding worse than George Bush. If you averaged those two, I'm probably average, in terms of my racial attitude. But they're really nowhere in the middle. They're very extreme.
What the experience gave me was not any hard insight, but more emotionality about it. I've devoted my entire career to these issues because I'm still trying to figure out these contradictory emotions in some rational or scientific manner through sociology -- as if I'm going to uncover the magic bullet, though I know I'm not.
Lethem: The book becomes an argument for literature as the only method for dealing with the experience.
Lopate: Yeah, but there are so many bad memoirs. It's unusual to be able to laugh at oneself and have a sense of perspective, even if you haven't solved the confusion. The chances of creating literature are very small.
Listening to you, I still think I get angry at myself, and I think the reason is partly a kind of self-distrust that comes from having been too many people. I can no longer trust that I am one thing and one person. I've created a chameleon personality that can actually get along with almost everybody. But I guess in some ways I see myself as an actor. That's the training you get on the streets.
Lethem: Sure. By the time I got to college I could already tell that I was more a chameleon than any of the upper-middle-class or middle-class kids around me. I could haul out the ghetto moves for their entertainment, but I knew I was playing. I could also slide into their social context, but I knew I was playing at that.
Conley: I still feel totally uncomfortable in a white working-class context. Probably there's where I feel the least comfortable, and next would be a minority context of any class. I'm most comfortable, increasingly comfortable, in white intelligentsia. But I think it's related to a feeling of a lack of authenticity that is perhaps common to all writers, or to all people who are trying to spin reality.
Lethem: Among writers or academics you can look through anyone's mask and know that it's constructed. You know, as you become credentialized, as you publish a few things, you realize, "Oh, we've all manufactured this identity. No one was born to it. So here's where I can be as natural, at least, as everyone else in the room."
