When You Stare Into the Mirror

The mirror stares back at you, and in the process of seeing yourself see yourself, you see that you see. Yes but do others see what you see?

Getting dizzy yet? If not, try this:

“The gross assumption here that both undergirds and haunts tourism, as well as particular practices in ethnography and intercultural scholarship in general is that the researcher/tourist is a privileged viewer and is not held to the culture-specific codes of propriety that govern human sociality in the spaces of their observation”.

Mark Anthony Neal gives a respectful review of Performing Black Masculinity. Remember the joke about the self-absorbed people who say "Well I've talked enough about me, what do you think about me?" This is the sad state of black identity fermentation. What started as nationalism 40 years ago has twisted itself up in self-referential mutations of navel gazing. Except it's called 'gaze' without the navel part, because the Other is supposed to be engaged and thinking seriously about what it means to look. This was an interesting subtext in 1990 but now it appears that it is the text.

All of this is much ado about nothing except perhaps for the twenty dozen academics who can recite this pomo stuff without cracking a grin or falling into a spiral of snake tail eating that disappears into a black hole. And so we get books and reviews of books about the intricacies of what it means to walk into a barbershop and get one kind of 'gaze' and then to walk into a beauty shop and get another. Whoa! Seriously variant vibes, dude. It could like totally stress you out. Like especially if you are like a big black dude with dreadlocks and not really like that Predator dude or Samuel L Jackson on the inside. And like what if on top of that you were gay? Whooaaa! Duuuude. That's deep.

Or perhaps it's more serious. Maybe the intricate existentials of black manhood are so worthy of study that there should develop an orthodoxy that completely redefines manhood as we know it. Wait. That's called tribalism, and the world has been there and done that. I don't think it has worked out quite so well, at least not to the extent that books about the greatness that was the dignity of Bayard Rustin get under the skin of people who do things.

It seems to me you have two fundamental choices. You can admit that you're an individual and deal with the dissonance, or you could determine to conform into something larger and go with that flow. They are both species of my admonition: Get over yourself. And quit trying to generate new a new ethics of thoughtcrime.

Gaze. Sheesh.

OK now I am done being snarky and I ask the serious question. How many times, and against what species of evil should any man be redefined? How much existential space will newly recognized forms of manhood carve out and where are they going to go? The answer lies at the extremes - those of birth and death. When you deal with that fundament of humanity at a level that matters, then you're saying something. The problem is twenty dozen pomo academics aren't saying anything.

As an old man in the classic sense of being closer to 60 than to 30 years of age, I am prone to study military history. I want to know the extent to which certain things run men to gather in actual crowds of thousands to work in concert, and I am rather dumbfounded by the notions that academics and scholars who write books that influence thousands might think of themselves as leaders in a similar sense, especially in these times where the currency of relativism is high. It seems to me that nothing cheapens life like the idea that everyone is so freaking different that they need their own existential space. On the contrary - it is only when you get underneath all of that delicate self-actualization that you recognize your coghood in the gearworks of humanity. This is exactly why I defy the exotic ramifications of post-modernism.