(I misfired and hit "publish" on the below before reading over. It was emailed to the small list of people who subject themselves to this blog regularly. I wanted to polish further, but I've decided to let these thoughts remain in draft form, unfinished and unorganized, as I am.)
Found this today after posting this blog yesterday, in which Cory Booker discusses the power of seeing each other... "I see your dignity, your worth as a human being... I am invested in who you are and what's happening in your life."
Conspiracy of Love
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Under the best of circumstances, it is very hard to see another person. I think about how hard it is to see our boys, in their full individuality. For spouses who've thought they've known each other for decades to see each other. For new lovers to see each other as they are, not as each other's fantasy projected on a pretty screen.
After a while teaching public high school in Crystal Springs, Mississippi in the early '90s, the Assistant Principal, Coach Palmer, came into my room one day, undoubtedly after helping me with classroom misbehavior. He sat down and said he wanted to tell me something. "I feel like you see me," he said. "Like, actually see me. You're different from... others. I just wanted to say that." And he left.
Coach Palmer as a compact man, built like the soccer players I'd grown up with. He taught Social Studies and coached various sports. He was soft-spoken but firm. He was raising six of his own children, and doing his damnedest to raise hundreds more at our school.
I didn't know exactly what he meant, but I felt the "..." suggested other white people. I was surprised by his comment, and also glad he didn't specify. It allowed me to hope he was acknowledging a sympathy with each other that came from recognition of a shared spirit. We shared a love of the children we were trying to educate ~ and who, speaking for myself, were educating me. We were both athletes. We both had big hearts that crested the banks of the identities race/culture/history had assigned us. His ambiguity let the "seeing" be bigger than our racial categories.
In the course of editing our feature film, I received some critical feedback on scenes filmed in Mississippi that included African American characters. The viewer remarked that she was tired of seeing characters of color in supporting roles to white leads, in particular in the "noble savage" tradition of being spiritual guides to whites. Moreover, she was offended by the use of wind chimes made from empty bottles as "cultural appropriation" of the slave tradition of hanging bottles at slave burial sites.
I've reflected on these comments a great deal over the months since I received them. I'm searching to understand her point of view, but I'm also questioning her assumptions. I wish I were blind to the demographics of this reviewer (I am not), but I have tried my best to put that knowledge aside and sit with the discomfort of her comments to benefit from what this exchange can offer to help me improve as an artist and storyteller.
Let me bounce back to the '90s again. My swan song in Mississippi was to direct of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Chautauqua Park, a neglected little patch of public performance space in our small town. Dorothy Alford, a retired English teacher in her late '80s (who was white and whose career spanned the forced integration of schools by the Federal Government), reviewed our play in The Meteor, our local paper: "I declare..." (no, she didn't actually lead with that, but her accent was so much like Scarlett O'Hara, I just had to write it) ... More like: "I never believed in my lifetime I would see Shakespeare performed live again here in Crystal Springs, Mississippi..." Our cast was fully interracial, not based on a conscious political agenda of mine, but on the compatibility of the actors, whom I'd gotten to know quite well as my students. Dorothy Alford didn't comment on the racial make-up; she was just pleased as punch to see live theater return to her community.
I want to take this apart a little: Mrs. Alford would have held some racial attitudes to make my skin crawl. Some in the audience may have had negative opinions they kept to themselves. A case could be made that by staging a dead white male's show, I was reinforcing the white cultural hegemony that continues to exclude and disenfranchise. These things are all true.
But it's also true that the play gave kids a chance to imagine themselves as characters wildly different from themselves, speaking a new form of English, before the eyes of their small, not progressive Southern town. A former student from that play found me years later on Facebook to thank me for helping her "find her voice" in our creative writing class and drama projects. She credited me (too much, her creative engine is her own) for helping her on her journey toward careers in music producing and interior design. She came out in her 20s and has made her life in cities far beyond Copiah County. We spoke last spring about the 2016 election, the dire state of racism in our country, her relief in some ways that the fantasy some white people in particular had that we were living in a "post racial" world under the Obama administration was punctured and we are now dealing with the wounds. (This was all before Charlotte.) She blew fire into my sagging spirits about the relevance of filmmaking to tell stories that can change the course of history ~ for individuals if not our country. She shared her love of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays and Maya Angelou's poetry. As always, I always felt I had more to learn from her than she from me.
Forward to the late '90s. I left Mississippi to follow a guy to San Francisco, whereupon we promptly broke up. I was unemployed, grieving Mississippi. I showed up at Glide Church one Sunday with my broken heart in my lap, where the choir burst into "Pass me not, oh gentle savior...," and I did what everyone does their first time at Glide: I bawled. On stage I saw the vision my heart yearned for: 125 people, mouths wide open with song, swaying together, white/black/brown/yellow/
I have to bounce back to Mississippi, though, to trace another fissure in my heart that I carried to San Francisco. While teaching, I had invited a professional theater group from Jackson to perform at our school among whom was an actor with an exceptional talent for creating characters through his voice, from slave dialects of 200 years ago to the Queen's English. We exchanged glances, then conversation, in the school office after the show; he invited me to his next show in Jackson, Fences, by August Wilson, in which he would play "Cory." Come back stage after, he said. It was an amazing show. I went back stage. He invited me to go out "for milk" sometime and gave me his phone number.
We dated for a few months. We surprised his parents, in their '80s, one night when we drove to their house in Albany, Georgia. (Guess Who's Coming for the Weekend, the sequel) His mother was tight-lipped. His father was embracing. Reginald explained on the way that his father had advised him in his time, black boys could get lynched for dating a white girl, best to leave it alone. By the end of the weekend, his dad told me, "Samantha, I feel like I've been knowing you a long time."
I was the first white woman Reginald would be with, but not the last. Years later, after we'd parted ways but remained in touch, he went to England to study at RADA and made a meteoric career as a stand-up comedian. I made it into a show he wrote called "White Women." I was disappointed and relieved not to be featured more prominently, beat out in his heart by a little girl named "Judy," the first white woman he fell in love with sometime in early elementary school. But I got mention in the show in the part about dating a "feminist." I hope it was as funny to others as it was to me; by the time I heard it, the rules about sexual communication I internalized from my college classes had evolved enough to share the laugh. I admired his brilliance in employing comedy to deal with the infinite complexity of interracial dating. I wish I had half that talent, for your sake (dear reader) and mine.
I wasn't over Reginald when I initiated a break-up, but I was overcome with doubt. I had fielded my grandparents' "we're not against it, we just worry for the children" argument against our dating. I was prepared, even welcomed, the fight of making a life together. But I was uneasy about our compatibility. We were young, just starting to find ourselves in the world. I was trying on religion; he was trying to escape it. As evidenced in his show, we were unsure how to communicate about sexuality. (!) We were both in over our heads. As is my introspective habit, I was raking through the many layers race added to the intrinsic complexity of young love. An African American actress in his troupe loathed me without knowing me; instead of blaming her, I questioned myself ~ was I exploiting white privilege to be in this relationship? Was I appropriating a beautiful Black Man? (Though we didn't have the word "appropriate" yet.) Was this some kind interracial adventurism fed by a history of fetishizing and objectifying of the Other? Was our meeting a beautiful thing, a terrible thing, a triumph, a disaster, just a casual thing, or all of the above? Could we actually see each other at all?
Eventually, a simple decision has to be made out of infinitely complex circumstances. We weren't meant to attach to each other for all time. As an artist, he was more developed than I was; I would have stood in his shadow and clutched him insecurely. We both needed to make our ways in the world separately and love other people. It was the right thing to be together and it was the right thing to let go. Now to the extent I see him, it's on YouTube.
Romantic love is always a expression of the soul's yearning to escape existential aloneness. Add race, and romantic love can be a means to escape the confines of racial categories that imprison all of us. When Reginald and I broke up, I grieved a parts of myself that came alive with him and that could imagine myself in a world much bigger than the one I'd been assigned. This and more came flooding through me at Glide Church, in a chapter of my life that led to a more durable love and determination to overcome the narrowness of my life. I may have lost touch with Reginald, but I could keep in touch with the currents that had brought us together ~ art and storytelling, for me through film and theater.
For me, art uniquely invites us to imagine ourselves as someone else. Not to fortify our identity but rather to identify with others. To escape the strictures of identity assigned to us by circumstance and catalogued by race/gender/sexual-
Back to 2017 for now, and our film critic on the topic of cultural appropriation...
Cultural appropriation is an extremely valuable articulation of an exploitative cultural dynamic, and I respect the corrective this idea exerts as a critique to imbalances of power. Watching the Ken Burns documentary Jazz recently, for example, I feel very uneasy and sad about the co-option of jazz by white musicians in the early 20th century; Elvis Presley stole, essentially, of much of the music of Mississippi Blues artists. I watched San Francisco transform in the '90s from a diverse city to one in which young, wealthy white people seeking diversity in their restaurant options drove actually diverse communities from their neighborhoods by skyrocketing rents. So many real and serious issues we need to devote ourselves to working on.
In trying to make art, though, and trying to take the charge of cultural appropriation made against my film seriously, I have touched on the raw nerve and maybe discovered a destructive dynamic among progressive white people that I want to try to name. For now, rough draft, I'm calling it White Shaming.
A few other events coalesced to make me reflect deeper on the patterns. A theater friend of mine, also white, who is trying to put together a production of the musical 1776 received a furious email rant from another woman, also white, about the insensitivity of putting on a show that features white people and celebrates the Declaration of Independence, which in her view amounted to nothing more than a manifesto of oppression; the author of the email is also a local leader of the Black Lives Matter movement in our (very white/homogenous) community. A Facebook exchange with a friend of mine (also white) soured when I posted a celebration of the 19th amendment, to which he expressed feeling obligated to point out that it only served white and Chicana women (not historically true, a more serious point about voter suppression, for all women, being lost in the confusion of the social media form).
What purpose are these exchanges serving? My best theory is that well-intentioned white people are unwittingly engaging in a process of trying to soothe the pain of guilty conscience and consciousness about the horrific violence of white racism by shaming other white people who they feel don't sufficiently "get it." For me to name this phenomenon risks painting a target on my own forehead, and I feel my chest seize and my palms grow sweaty as I anticipate an angry response. But I am delving into this with a goal to achieve some kind of deeper healing, for all, from the scars shame inflicts. Because my guess is that people who use shame to try to control the behavior and beliefs of others were themselves victims of shame at some point in their lives.
Seeking inspiration from other progressive movements, I have appropriated an idea from the Gay Pride Movement ~ namely, Pride. Pride is opposed to Shame. For too many centuries, LGBT people have been made to feel shame for who they are. The Queer revolution in our history, with the brilliant metaphor of "coming out of the closet," is a gift to all people. I believe we all have closets we need to come out of, myself included, around our sexual identities.
The Civil Rights Movement proudly took ownership of "Black" to express pride in being shame, to collectively take the language of oppression and own it as liberation. Language creates our realities; to make "Black" Beautiful was to upend a hierarchy of shame whose perniciousness could make perpetrators of emotional violence even within the African American community, when shades of blackness could be used to insult one another.
Among Jews, Shame takes the form of the "self-hating" Jew, a controversial category but a description of a dynamic with reality to it... That powerlessness and oppression can turn inward, against oneself and members of one's own group, and manifest in shame toward the appearances or behavior of members of one's one group.
It's overwhelming to engage the historical moral responsibility of being white in this country, and it is tempting, in the absence of a white identity one can feel proud of, to dedicate oneself to the causes of others and appoint oneself the enforcer. But where this leads, I fear, is to an identity based on Shame. This is the exact opposite lesson from the one we should take from our history's liberation social movements, in which personal acceptance is a pre-requisite of taking one's rightful place in the world as a human being.
So what identity can any conscious white person in America inhabit without shame? I once white-shamed a white guy at a Zydeco festival in Louisiana, not to his face, but to an African-American couple sitting next to me. He was an embarrassingly bad dancer, which of course I did not want to identify with, so I made a stupid comment I'm too ashamed to write here. Their reaction was swift and morally clear: "We don't judge people by color here. He is enjoying himself." I burned to my core. I was ashamed, but I learned ~ and I've never forgotten.
Shame in any form poses dangers to our spirits and to making art. It makes us afraid to explore, particularly the unfinished parts of ourselves. The charge of cultural appropriation can be valid, but it can also be a dressed up way of doubting a storyteller because of who they are, not what they are saying.
In the case of the critic of my film, in this case she has some facts wrong. The bottle tree tradition, which I riffed on, is a West African tradition carried into Appalachia and the South in which bottles inverted on tree branches are believed to attract evil spirits, who like the color blue best, hence the prevalence of cobalt blue bottles. Julie Dash's masterpiece Daughters of the Dust depicts such a bottle tree among the Gullah people and a heart-breaking scene in which the tree is smashed in a fit of anger.
I took the idea of re-using bottles, but invented the idea of wind chimes. I was exploring the idea of making music from the empty refuse of sorrows drowned in alcohol, with a nod to the folk art of bottle trees and their cultural history. An artist friend in New Hampshire, self-described as a "Jew-witch," designed the chimes we used in the film. The chimes are not meant as denoting a burial site, and I'm not aware ~ even after researching in the wake of this comment ~ of any slave tradition of hanging bottles near burial sites, nor of making bottle wind chimes per se. I'm genuinely trying not to be defensive, but I am left to wonder, did this critic see my film, or did she see what she expected, applying filters habituated in a university environment of politically activist art criticism?
Similarly, I was aware, in writing the script and shooting the film, of the dangerous precedent of patronizing African American characters in roles as comforters and care-givers to white lead characters. I make films because I hope people will see my story, so I am going to ask her and others with similarly habituated blinkers to see more: The characters I wrote are supporting, that's true. They are also individuals who don't fit the roles we expect. They are small business owners, family members, friends. I tried to capture the formality authentic to my experiences living in the South, where manners are a container for tolerance, including (in this story) the messiness that the (white) characters bring with them on the road. I wasn't ready to tell all stories at once, but this does not mean I disrespect the characters whose stories are not fleshed out. The most artistically honest thing I could do was tell a family story whose depths were more familiar to me. As I build my directing skill and strive to grow as a person, I hope to tell many stories of diverse characters with integrity. And when I do, I hope the charge of cultural appropriation will not be levied against me.
For me, many questions remain... How do I make art, tell stories, authentically, honestly, with the limitations of being just one person, but reaching for genuine connection with others? Where is the line between creative cultural riffing and improvisation that leads to new art forms, fusions (my favorite in all aesthetics), and cultural appropriation? How do we find the security of relationships, of benefit of the doubt, to give ourselves and others permission to try on our identities for a song, for a show, for a night and feel a little of what it's like to be me? The Reverend Cecil Williams made clear every Sunday that we are all in recovery. Maybe we need to recover our ability to see anew, with eyes like children with curiosity, a desire to touch, a yearning for stories in which carpets can fly and we are free to be you and me.
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