Struck by the non-response of her Facebook friends to the following post, Laurie Stone kept her movement of mind going…
I’m at the sink, and a memory comes back. At summer camp in the Poconos the counselors all came from the south. Did they grow them in a tank and harvest them each summer? They were not a submissive lot. They were beautiful and sporty or whatever. We used to sing together. On a bus, a hayride, just waiting for something to happen. There was a playlist, and we would sing the songs in an order the older girls knew by heart, and on the list was “Dixie.” We sang out, “I wish I were in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten . . . In Dixieland I’ll take my stand to live and die in Dixie.” I had no idea what this meant. The owners of the camp would have said they were liberals. They worked in show business. I loved one of them, we all did, Eddie Justin. He would come to our bunks and tuck us in. Not creepy! I do not recall a single person of color as a camper, counselor, or service worker. We sang “Dixie” and “Mississippi Mud”—oh fucking Jesus, no!—in honor of our beloved goddesses of volleyball and sleeping under the stars.
xxx
Quick thoughts on a massive range of complex structures. If this were anything other than social media, I wouldn’t write this disclaimer: I am going to get things wrong according to your lights, and I am going to plain get things wrong because the subject is massive. The subject is the national education we are all delivering and receiving about racism and the ways it is seeded in white people and the ways it is always hurting people of color, the big murders and the little murders.
If we are white, we are remembering moments from our childhood when we were taught to think and feel certain ways, and if we are people of color we are remembering moments from our entire lives when we were treated as other and it pained and scared us. This national education is great. It’s part of national consciousness that is deepening and enlarging, however stupidly and wrongly long it has taken for consciousness to bump up a notch. I am thinking aloud right now about reflexes or impulses in white people, the things we are checking in ourselves when we catch ourselves in a moment stemming from our cultures.
My mother was openly racist. My father was not. My mother also taught my sister and me not to be afraid of the things she was afraid of. This really mattered to her. When we were sent to summer camp, for example, she made sure we were taught to do absolutely everything that scared her. Because we were taught not to be like her in many ways, we were not like her in many ways. My sister and I were embarrassed and disgusted by her racism and told her so.
This is a side thought or maybe it’s a central thought. It’s a good thing to check your reflexes and see in them the racist ways you were taught to frame moments that involve other people—all other people and in particular if you are white people of color. We learn from knowledge of how our minds work at conscious and unconscious levels and at levels that are half conscious and half unconscious—where we can watch ourselves with detachment do the thing that has erupted from somewhere that feels beyond our control but actually is in our control.
Here’s where things get complicated. The reflexive—the half-conscious and half-unconscious space—is also where art and comedy quicken to life. What I mean is this: we laugh at things we are almost always surprised to have laughed at, some bit of cruelty and pleasure in that cruelty. That’s what the laughter is, it’s pure pleasure we are shocked to learn we feel. I always laugh when a person falls, even when that person is me. It’s just fucking funny. So basic. The banana peel.
In checking ourselves for our reflexive responses, we don’t want to second guess everything, be so ashamed and so scared of showing ourselves as the complex mess of things we are, no matter how hard we struggle not to be. I’m seeing people here scared to respond to things they think might mark them in some way, place them in a camp they don’t want to be lumped in. I’ll be blunt. If you have a visceral, weirded out reaction to seeing Black people doing anything anywhere, check that impulse right away and try to change it. If you are reading something or seeing a work of art that arouses complex feelings in you, don’t let your embarrassment hound you into a state where you suppress yourself so much you aren’t able to be known to yourself or visible to others.
I wrote this post because yesterday I posted something about remembering at camp we were taught to sing the song, “Dixie,” which is a celebration of Confederate culture and resistance to the North. I had no idea at the time what the song celebrated. The post was about remembering this song Now, in the moment of vast public self-checking, and hardly anyone reacted to it. I thought they didn’t react because they thought I wasn’t damning enough to the white, Southern counselors we were offering a tribute to by singing the song. Maybe this is not why people didn’t react to it. In any case, it produced these thoughts.
They are difficult to compose. The thinking here is groping. I just read this post to Richard, and he said, “It’s too abstract. It doesn’t sound like you. There aren’t enough examples.” The thing about examples is they engrave stereotypes in both directions. So this post will be a cloud more than a body.
xxx
I’m going to try out a thought. Individuals change when not changing is unbearable. I am using my own experience. Change happens because you can’t stand for another moment the pain of repeating an action. You’ll do anything to stop being that thing. In this framework, realizing you experience racist thoughts and act on them reflexively or consciously is like realizing you are a drunk and don’t want to be one anymore. Wanting to make things better for others—a lovely idea—appears not to be enough, or morality and social movements would get the job done. A social movement can stir consciousness and a rethinking of one’s actions, but a social movement will not by itself produce change in individuals. Haranguing doesn’t do it. Shaming is the last thing that will do it. Calling out, another term for shaming, won’t cause anyone to rethink themself, even if it causes them to curb their behavior. Personal suffering can’t always do it, but I think it’s key, and maybe all things that we determine in ourselves that must go are kinds of exhausting and enfeebling and soul crushing addictions.
Laurie Stone’s new book Everything Is Personal is available here.