The other day Max Taves from the LA Weekly gave me a brief interview and asked the question of whether it's difficult to be a black guy who doesn't support Obama. I took this be something of an existential question, and I had to chuckle, because as a 'first black', I don't think there's anything I can't handle.
I was, after all, the black kid on the prep school swim team back in 74. I played soccer in high school every day at lunch, not basketball. I chose computers when nobody thought you could make any money in that area of endeavor. I'm an Episcopalian, not a Baptist. Nobody in my family is from the South - you can't call New Orleans 'The South'. New Orleans is New Orleans. But these are not excuses for distance from the black mainstream, they are simple matters of fact, most by choice. I follow my passion.
Whenever you're different, you have some 'splaining to do, because the difference of dissonance makes things difficult. In the end, you simply must accept your strengths and assume others will inevitably. I remember being 4 foot 8 as a high school freshman. My 13 year old daughter who is petite was larger than I was when I was 14. My father was 6 foot 4, and so I reasonably assumed that I would inevitably be tall, and dealt with other things. But that didn't change the difficulty my difference made. Like most adolescents, I thought I was going to lose my mind. But I held it together. In the end, through high school, I only grew a foot, not one and a half; I accepted my difference through the necessity of self-respect. I always had to fight for me, or accept the reduced expectations of my shallow peers.
I grew into a bad habit though, now that I think of it. It took most of my life to get out of it. It was the arrogant habit of expecting to be misunderstood and discounting everyone else's opinion. I had developed so much self-respect and confidence that I didn't bother correcting people who were wrong, assuming that they could never understand what I was on about. So all of my diaries were private, all of my cryptic ideas never explained twice. I developed a skin, a personality with it's own diction as an interface to the rest of the world, rather like Cobb is. A way to relate which isn't really the small and vulnerable me. So amongst the fair haired boys, I was nobody's fair haired boy. Just a short tough kid from the 'hood with a reputation for brains, and long hair.
I wrote my way out of the problem, eventually, having abandoned several layers of pure geek motivation. I care what people think, I make every effort to interact and listen. Maybe I'm overkill on the other side - well, I was until about three years ago when I said I was sick of programming and didn't care if I wrote another line of code. I really started to care about managing the business and shaping the industry. Part of that started five years ago with my conversion to conservatism. The business of the ordinary middle class started to become very, very important to me having learned (finally) the lessons of Stalinism. See, when you 'are' smarter than everyone else around you, you discount their ideas and you do what's righteous no matter how much they complain - because they couldn't possibly know better considering how they misjudge you. Scientists, evangelists, tyrants all have this trait in common. We put on skins and develop a rhetorical distance from the ordinary Joe. It's a consequence of dealing with your oddness, and it becomes a powerful conceit. You have to work your way out of the problem abandoning your abstract motivations. You have to deal with people as they are, giving them every benefit of the doubt because dissonance isn't always difference. It takes courage and honesty. Always courage and honesty.
Then being odd out of the bunch hopefully becomes, as it has for me, merely the confusion of youth. That feeling of being completely isolated even though you listen to the same music, dress in the same fashions, follow the same trends of expression as everybody you know, which aint many people from a few neighborhoods where you live, school, church and work.
It is a youth many people don't need to outgrow. As a writer with a national audience, as a worker in just about every state, I've had to outgrow it. It's a humbling growth for sure. I try not to overly romanticize my originating differences - I come from a small town called black upscale Los Angeles on the Catholic side. My ideas about the perfect woman are still shaped by that, about how a gentleman should act, about achievement, excellence, discipline, responsibility, deportment and propriety. All very Old School. It was the last place that fit me in every way - it was my original home. Every place else has been strange by comparison, and yet I am home in every place because I have worked it all out, where I come from and what that means.
As a writer, I have the good fortune to have records of how I think and feel about things, now going back over 20 years to the edges of that youth along with vivid memories of that youth itself. I probably know how odd I am out of the bunch better than most folks. It's a blessing, a blessing I worked for because I was a bit odder back in the day. I come back to Baldwin.
All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in fact - this may sound very strange - you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
Sometimes when you get to that point of forcing the world to deal with you, well it gets a little tiring. I think maybe that's where I am - not particularly interested in whether the world respects all of my well-documented, logical oddness. I have been an unbelievable black man before. So have most of my existential partners, like Joe Phillips. You get used to it.
So like that old funky-ish song, "You can call it what you want to". I don't mind the explaining, but it's a long story. I'd rather just tell the happy ending.
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