The edification of priviliged white people is not my vocation

This is a declaration of purpose, a clarification of intent, and an admission of disinterest.

This not a manifesto of hatred. It is not an expression of patronization towards my own kind: people of color. It is not a plea for anything, least of all for empathy from the very people whose edification it disavows. It is not whimsy, flimflam, spiteful, childish, angry, evil, reprehensible; nor a dozen other names that it shall probably attract but not deserve.

This essay does have the flaw of being paradoxical: by its very existence — and with the few references at its end — it intends to inform. It is difficult to escape this paradox. I won’t try to.

In the second decade of the 21st century, living in the richest country ever to have existed, I’m constantly surprised to find myself in the company of people who are ignorant of the struggle that people of color, people of non-binary gender, immigrants, poor people, and other under- and un-privileged groups go through on a daily basis. This struggle is continual and unabated. It is caused by transgressions both covert and overt, both subtle and coarse, and often perpetrated by the selfsame people who profess ignorance of their own privilege.

In the last few years, I have experienced several incidents that have convinced me that the job of educating white, upper middle-class people is uninteresting and unsatisfying in the extreme:

1. Summer 2013. A white male colleague refers to the US Civil War casually as the “War of Northern Aggression”. He also questions me if I have any principles (because I have opinions different from his) — while we are driving to have dinner at my brother’s house who had graciously invited him as a guest.

2. Summer 2014. A white male colleague — after several notorious incidents of sexual harassment of women at tech conferences have come to light — publicly asks if we really need to support women-in-technology causes.

3. Fall 2015. I get “feedback” at work that states that I’m “too formal with clients”. Upon inquiry, it turns out it reflects my practice of speaking in full sentences using proper grammar. There is no attempt on the part of those giving this “feedback” to discover that I learned English as a second language as an adult, and have constantly worked on overcoming this handicap. The “feedback” also ignored the large amount of literature that indicates that foreign accents (especially those associated with “brownness” or “blackness”) are looked down upon in the United States, and are equated with ignorance.

4. December 2015. In the aftermath of candidate Trump’s promise of a “Muslim ban”, a white male software engineer asks me via Facebook if I’m “planning on blowing anything up while I’m here [in the US]”. (He knows that I’m a US citizen and that this is my home.)

5. Summer 2016. A white male colleague derides me under the guise of feedback that my posture and voice aren’t impressive enough. He can’t seem to see that he’s 6’4”, with a booming voice, and I’m much shorter.

6. Spring 2017. A white male colleague addresses me curtly in public, and later has the temerity to commend me (in writing) for not losing my temper under his verbal fusillade.

7. Fall 2017. A white male colleague jocularly accuses me of plagiarism in public after I recite an all-too-famous piece of literature.

This is just a sampling of the events that white people of privilege whom I know have perpetrated. In the face of such blissful cluelessness, I admit that any attempts on my part to cure this institutional ignorance are bound to fail. Therefore, I resolve to hereby make no more such attempts.

I have been blessed with the friendship, love and support of many friends and family, for which I’m humbly grateful. I will focus the finite capabilities of my limited life on enriching my relationships with these beloved souls. To the general population of privileged people; especially privileged white people; I have nothing left to say.

References

1. Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is
2. What I Told My White Friend When He Asked For My Black Opinion On White Privilege
3. This Comic Perfectly Explains What White Privilege Is. The last line says something like “Please educate yourself”. The end.

"Essays After Eighty" by Donald Hall

Donald Hall's composition of essays found me by accident. Looking for Bertrand Russell's "Unpopular Essays" in a library shelf, the fingers and eyes instead got stuck on this delightful little compendium of reminiscences by an octogenarian poet who admits to being abandoned by poetry.

Donald Hall was a poet laureate of the United States for one year. This was a recognition and sadly, a culmination of decades of prodigious poetry writing. (He frankly admits to not being a productive poet during his tenure, and resigned a year later.) He wrote more than 20 books, many (but not all) of poetry. He also wrote for children, on baseball, and on art.

Essays After Eighty is just that: a book of fourteen essays spanning a brief 134 pages. These are memories of a life well-lived and well-enjoyed. From his pre-war youth in Wilmot, NH to his years in France with his first wife, Kirby. From his appointment as a teacher at the University of Michigan to the breakdown of his first marriage and a rather late period of sexual liberation in his 40s (if my math is right). From his meeting his second wife, the poet Jane Keynon (almost a generation younger than him) to moving back to his native New Hampshire. From fighting a battle with cancer and winning --  to finding out that Jane had leukemia and seeing her die of it only 15 months later. From the first signs of fear of old age:

"Earlier, if I was 51 and the [recently departed] cadaver was 53, for a moment I felt anxious. If the dead man was 51 and I was 53, I felt relief."

to the inevitable comicality of later old age for those of us who (may) reach it:

"As I escorted my date to New London's Millstone one night, the hostess asked if my companion was my granddaughter. We both shrieked "No!" and never saw the hostess again. Most of my dates were mistaken for daughters, not granddaughters."

Hall pokes humor at his increasing physical frailty, at the ever-approaching bugaboo (he's much too jovial to justify specter) of death, and at the tragi-comedy of otherwise banal life. His memories are fresh and refreshing despite having taken 85 years to ferment in a 150 year old house built by his great grandfather. There is death everywhere in this book: his parents, grandparents, an aunt, both wives, his dog Gus, a casually killed garter snake -- "I stepped on its head and threw it outside", woodchucks, an almost-pet chipmunk, and almost-vermin mice. There's even time to genially mourn the destruction of a comfortable blue armchair by exuberant firemen. Yet this is a book about mortality, not morbidity. Hall does rue that one day, there will be no one left to remember what he remembers -- which is a lot: from the New England Hurricane of 1939, Pearl Harbor, VE Day, VJ day, JFK, Vietnam to 9-11 and Usain Bolt. However, he never lets the book sink into self-loathing or even self-pity. Even as he contemplates his present life -- living only on the first floor of his ancient house, microwaving Stouffer's TV dinners while inching towards his kitchen with his walker in a knee-brace, and eating these dinners alone with his dentures and a Red Sox game on TV -- he is ebullient:

"My problem isn't death but old age."

Or even more magnanimously:

"Not everything in old age is grim."

It may have taken him the better part of 9 decades, but Donald Hall sure has a poignant insight about the relevance of it all:

"At 16, poets think that if they publish in a magazine that will be it. When it happens, it is not it. Then they think it will be it when they publish in Poetry. No. The New Yorker? No. A book? Good reviews? The Something Prize? A Guggenheim? The National Book Award? The Nobel? No, no, no, no, no, no. Flying back from Stockholm, the Laureate knows that nothing will make it certain. The Laureate sighs."

That's a lesson which we can be thankful to Donald Hall for sharing.