The Sunday evening before Martin Luther King's Birthday many of you may have attended the lecture given by Harvard Professor Cornel West in Spaulding Auditorium. I was among those in attendance, and what can I say? The man was brilliant, quoting a swath of literary figures, offering up not merely a diagnosis of the problems of racism in this country, but a prescription for how to live one's life in this time of existential malaise and social indifference.
I had a pretty good seat for Professor West's discussion -- you know, the famous "leg room" seats in Spaulding. Before the lecture began, I was idly doodling in a notebook I'd brought along, drawing yet another one of my badly rendered caricatures of a man and his dog (I have about sixty pages of these from when I took Physics 1 last spring).
Seated next to me were two middle-aged men, one black, one white, who seemed to have come to see Professor West together. About ten minutes before the lecture began the black man leaned over and asked me what it was I was doodling.
"Oh," I said. "It's just this doodle of some guy and his dog. You see?"
"Is that supposed to be a black man?" he asked, his tone admitting only curiosity.
"Huh?" I stared blankly at my drawing. A black man? My artistic abilities are so poor that to me my doodle barely looked human at all, let alone distinctive enough to be racially classified. "What do you mean?"
"Well, the nose and the hair look African," he observed. I noticed that both he and his friend were gazing fixedly at me now.
"Oops," I said. "I didn't realize that. No, it's not supposed to be anyone in particular ... I was just doodling to pass the time, you know, not really thinking about it consciously."
At this point I should probably give a little background about myself: my parents, a pair of '60's relics with the classic New Age, left-leaning residue of that time, taught me tolerance and open-mindedness from Day One; however, the town in which I grew up was about as white as a salt deposit lathered in whole milk, know what I mean? So, like many liberal youths with a neurotic inclination toward guilt, I developed that most unfortunate of character traits, racial meta-paranoia.
Racial meta-paranoia is about as stupid as stupid gets. Basically it is the profound anxiety that overcomes some overly-sheltered but well-meaning white people when encountering anyone of another "race," an anxiety that reveals itself in the following thought process: "This person doesn't think I'm a bigot, do they? I don't want to come off like a bigot, so I'd better be extra-friendly -- but wait, if I'm too friendly they'll think I'm only being friendly to overcompensate for my latent bigotry, so maybe I should be cool, detached -- but if I'm too detached they'll think I'm being that way because I really am openly bigoted, so maybe I should ...." and so on and so forth.
Neurotic behavior like this is patently idiotic, and does, in fact, reveal a latent brand of bigotry, because it implicitly assumes a uniformity of sentiment and attitude among people of another race, a uniformity that, as anyone with half-a-brain will tell you, does not exist. Such neuroses may, in their fashion, be as socially constructed as more hostile forms of bigotry, but that's no excuse. To iterate what should be obvious: the whole point of not being a bigot is to judge people, all people, as individuals, not as cogs in some monolithic and socially constructed machine.
Funny thing, though ... there may be hope for us neurotics yet. Having heard my explanation of the doodle, the two men at the Cornel West lecture immediately engaged me in a friendly conversation about race, Dartmouth, and even my status as a columnist for this very paper. The blatant moral of the story here is that it wasn't they who were closed-minded, as my neurotic initial reaction would have had me believe -- it was I who had to get past close-mindedness. And, thankfully, I did, at least that night.
But we meta-paranoids still have plenty of work to do ... too often we think we're the enlightened ones, and that bigotry is somehow a problem of others. But until we start living up to our good intentions about race, we're going to remain as much a cause of racism as any bigot in a white hood.
