When I went to a New England boarding school in 1972, and then to college, I began to learn about the journey. I learned the depth of the conflicts between me and my classmates and teachers, but I could not express clearly my frustration until years later when I read what the Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller had to say about writers. In order to draw on their store of unconscious inspiration, Miller wrote, some writers tap a cup of poison at the source, which they take to be the wide ocean beyond.
I was obliged to keep at it, to keep talking and listening to people who had very clear ideas about how I ought to feel about African-American culture, how important it ought to be-just so, but not too much; how angry I ought to be, at which injustices. These were people who had never attended a black church or school or spent time in a black neighborhood. Students today face similar struggles. At a lecture I gave at Harvard recently, a black undergraduate told me: “I always felt at boarding school that I had to be educating someone–about my hair, my home, my life . . . " Another asked, “Don’t you feel that you’ve missed something? Like just being a student?”
Sometimes the whole process looks to me like a modern sort of children’s crusade, where we march children–middle or working class, urban, West Indian, savvy, rural, male, female, athletic, overweight, suburban, extroverted, capable, high-strung, compassionate, shy, petted, spoiled, tough–through what Jonathan Kozol so rightly calls the Savage Inequalities of American education. We ask them to be bridges instead of children.
The horrible hoax is that where race and class in America are concerned there are few real adults. The country I grew up in was not interested in race so much as addicted to it, routinely confusing what is human with what is cultural. If America has a collective unconscious, then it is integrated already; it stores the secret knowledge of what we’ve done in this country, our heroism and savagery, and what we deny. The cup of poison tells us that. So, too, does the economic, emotional and corporal violence we continue to act out on each other’s lives. But we just keep sending the children in. We click our tongues when they fail, and we’re amazed when they succeed brilliantly,
So, I’ve had to make room for myself on the journey–first in my own head. It was there that I had to banish the “Let’s Make a Deal” view of American culture where the really important action happens onstage while ethnics like cigarstore Indians wait behind separate doors. I had to make room in my own head for the profound involvement of African-American life in American culture: the sheer volume of the work of African-Americans over centuries-the magnitude of wealth that they created for others and did not control themselves; the self-expression rising up in music, language, art and writing; the practical and social inventiveness; the creation of ways to express honor and respect, according to historian Rhett S. Jones, without money.
I had to push and shove inside my own head to bring Sam out, out from behind that damn piano singing “As Time Goes By,” for the benefit of Bogart and Bergman. I had to elbow aside the “Big Chill” folks living large to the music of black recording artists. African-American culture does not exist to provide back-ground music. And the literature deserves better than teachers threatening that time for Frederick Douglass will, let’s face it, push aside the grammar. The call to arms-nouns or Negroes.
Even if every student from “traditionally under-represented” groups were suddenly made whole and welcome, the rest of us would still have to face up to the staggering effects of our national race addiction. Kicking the habit for me involves committing myself to the journey–not pretending I’m already there. It means finding new standards of self-knowledge and personal and public responsibility.
Coming out of our denial would also give us a chance to grieve and rage-not only at each other, but also at how we have failed to give a proper education to all our kids. We know how: with reasonably sized classes, lots of good teachers and sports and activities and love and respect. Expensive, yes. But what government and private funds were spent to educate me was nothing compared with what it would take to keep me in jail.
