Some questions (without many answers) about race
How much does race matter? I want to consider a few different ways to approach the question and ask you, dear reader, to do the same. How you do so may affect your attitude and your actions and the way you relate to others.
I am an English teacher by trade, and I sometimes choose works of literature for my students that will make them think about this topic. In a fictional story first published in 1985 by Tobias Wolff called “Say Yes,” a white character named Ann asks her white husband if he would have married her if she were Black. His gut response is to call it a bad idea because “How can you understand someone who comes from a completely different background?” The discussion becomes rather heated, and she presses him: “Let’s say I am Black and unattached and we meet and fall in love.” He shoots back, “This is stupid. If you were Black you wouldn’t be you.” I will not give away the ending to this engaging story, though thankfully attitudes about interracial dating and marriage have broadened somewhat since 1985.
Another piece I came across more recently has really caught my attention. It is by Ohioborn Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison. Morrison published eleven novels and quite a few non-fiction essays. Her only short story of record is titled “Recitatif.” It concerns Twyla and Roberta, who meet as young girls in a homeless shelter in New York City. To put it in the simplest terms, Twyla’s mother placed her there so that she could “dance all night,” and
Roberta’s mom did the same because she was sick. These two girls flounder for four months and encounter various characters along the way, including a mute woman named Maggie, who works in the kitchen. Maggie suffers some verbal and even physical abuse from the girls and others. Later in life, they meet by sheer chance multiple times, including at a protest over school busing, discussing (sometimes painfully and disagreeably) their present circumstances as well as their past in the shelter.
Although there are references to race, neither character is identified as
Black, white or any other color. I felt the need to have this information, but then I asked myself why. Morrison appears to have written this way deliberately, making me and other readers the subject of her “experiment,” forcing us to examine stereotypes, put them aside, and look more deeply inside the person. In a highly insightful essay about this story, British author Zadie Smith says of these characters: “As Twyla and Roberta discover, it’s hard to admit a shared humanity with your neighbor if they will not come with you to re-examine a shared history.”
Near the end of her essay, Smith goes on:
“The long, bloody, tangled encounter between the European [and American] peoples and the African continent is our history. Our shared history. It’s what happened.” How we deal with that shared history has become part of an intense debate about how to educate our students regarding the past (slavery and deadly and demeaning discrimination), and how the past continues to influence the present.