I am fond of thinking of America and many other places as well in feudal terms. One of my axioms of this view is that 'rights are the gift of the strong'. The long translation of that is that if you are weak and unwilling to partner with the strong, you spend a lot of time foraging. Extending this metaphor culturally, such foragers live in Sherwood Forest wherein occasionally a hero will arise. However for the most part people in Sherwood Forest are ill-kept, rude, stupid, loud and essentially uncivilized. Moreover they pretend to enjoy freedom whilst they steal for serfs and any unlucky person of means.
This phenomenon is old and unsurprising. Surely before feudalism there were other ins and outs of society. But let's stick tho this one. I bring this up because I am the unfortunate receiver of such missives from the fringes of Sherwood Forest periodically. A thoughtful reader sent me the following from Thomas Chatterton Williams:
The historian Paul Fussell notes that for most Americans, it is difficult to "class sink." Try to imagine the Chinese American son of oncologists -- living in, say, a New York suburb such as Westchester, attending private school -- who feels subconsciously compelled to model his life, even if only superficially, on that of a Chinese mafioso dealing heroin on the Lower East Side. The cultural pressure for a middle-class Chinese American to walk, talk and act like a lower-class thug from Chinatown is nil. The same can be said of Jews, or of any other ethnic group.
But in black America the folly is so commonplace it fails to attract serious attention. Like neurotics obsessed with amputating their own healthy limbs, middle-class blacks concerned with "keeping it real" are engaging in gratuitously self-destructive and violently masochistic behavior.
Sociologists have a term for this pathological facet of black life. It's called "cool-pose culture." Whatever the nomenclature, "cool pose" or keeping it real or something else entirely, this peculiar aspect of the contemporary black experience -- the inverted-pyramid hierarchy of values stemming from the glorification of lower-class reality in the hip-hop era -- has quietly taken the place of white racism as the most formidable obstacle to success and equality in the black middle classes.
The author essentially demonstrates that he is familiar with the literature, but the breathless tone of all that is just another brick in the wall over here. We've heard the sob stories before. They are as old as Sherwood Forest. Still and all, there is traffic to be made recirculating these stories of sociological woe in blackface. Conversely there is a similarly, less profitable but more sensible job to be done reminding those who forget that black does not equal dysfunctional. Not because it's not polite to say so, but because certain folks are doing the work.
I'll also tell another story I am fond of repeating. This one is more close to modern times. When I was a teenager, I used to hang out at Venice Beach. In fact, I was part of the junior guard program there the summer of my fourteenth year. As most folks know, Venice has always been a hippie hangout, and during all those times of palm readers, doom sayers, numerologists and other flim-flam artists, I never once saw a man dressed sensibly with a stack of encyclopedias explaining the actual truth about the world. I thought it would be a very good, albeit thankless job.
So long as I've got the passion to write, I suppose that will be my thankless job - to recount my own path from the center of a principled blackness to now. Now will always be the time where all kinds of folks will stand to remind us of the psychological, economic, sociological doom faced by African Americans by dint of their music, dress, speech patterns, work patterns, or whatever else PhDs are writing about today. But over here in the Old School, we'll understand the simple fact about people that everybody else seems to forget: they are uncivilized until civilized. It a conservative view as well. We have no reason to believe that man's better nature will express itself absent some structure requiring honor. We know that in Sherwood Forest, there is no honor among the trees. You have to leave that squalor and tend to farming or some such reputable industry.
There are any number of reasons ample numbers of people can be found in civilization's backwoods, but at in America this seems to be a matter of constant surprise. Or perhaps a more charitable view of the intellect if not the character of Americans is that we are too polite to assume those reasons. Or perhaps it is even more fair to say that there are those who profit from the denial of those reasons. Either way it is more important that we deal with the results no matter what the reasons are. It seems to me that the first thing one ought to do in dealing with the uncivilized nature of today's rogue populations is to properly shun them. But this requires an abiding faith in the superiority of cultured men over the uncultured and vulgar which far too many Americans have lost. I understand and respect the Samaritan reflex in all of its sociological sophistication, but did we ever stop for a moment and consider the extent to which the denizens of our moder Sherwood Forests wish to remain there?
The 'benign' assumption is that any human given a choice between civilization and feral existence would chose civilization. Given a choice between good music and vulgar hiphop they would choose the good. Between calling women 'ladies' and 'bitches' they would choose the former. Between taking a few years out of one's adult life to gain an education or a skill they would choose that over ignorance and indolence. But no. People continue to be other than who they might be. And some of us are shocked about this. I am not.
I have looked into the eye of the sinful, slothful man and I have called him that to his face. And he laughed and pretended that his kind were the majority. They might be. They might be. Over here we try to keep our eyes on the prize. And so we try not to mind too much, the business of Sherwood Forest other than to acknowledge straightly that it exists and is to be traversed only when armed and alert. Pity the poor man who makes his living studying that Forest.
Other links and stuff on the tangent of 'Acting White'.
So if acting black or acting latino means not having college aspirations or having intellectuality as a hallmark of one's personality, it can only be repulsive to dainty folks with multiple degrees after their names. It is not necessarily an injustice. It's simply counter to the wishful thinking that suggests we all need to be *that* literate as a society. I say we become that literate at our peril and it is this nations ability to deliver Constitutional guarantees to its poor huddled masses and internal Third Worlds, that will make us robust enough to survive the challenges of the future and global economy. I say if the Chinese can pay $20 a day, why can't we? I say we need lower class workers to feel just as American as I do without feeling jealous and envious of me. I talk to my gardener like a man. What's the problem?
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