Airing one's dirty linen in public

North Carolina, 1950, Courtesy Arnika Dawkins Gallery

Today there was a discussion among friends about Paul Beatty's book The Sellout. We get together to talk about books, but for me this one was a slog to read. Partly that was due to the "rap" nature of the narration. Beatty's background, before his ventures into fiction, was as a rap poet, for which he has enjoyed considerable success. And while I concede the excellence of the conceit of the novel -- a black man in Los Angeles claims a bit of the city and reinstitutes slavery there for which he is arrested for offending the constitution -- I was uncomfortable with the novel. Of course, my friends and probably everyone else would say that discomfort was the author's intent: I, a white person, deserve to be made uncomfortable by racism experienced by blacks throughout the novel.

Later, however, thinking back on our discussion, I discern another reason for my discomfort. Thus, the title of this post. Let me explain.

I grew up in the 1950s, when divorce among ordinary folks was quite rare. In 1955, for instance, the rate stood at about 2.2 percent. Among that 2.2 percent was my father, who had been married for a short time many years before meeting my mother. Compounding this unusual state of affairs was that my father was Catholic. He and my mother, who was Protestant, were not married in the Church. As a Catholic child, this was an excruciating state of affairs, as my religious instruction made clear that divorce was a serious sin. It was indeed a shameful subject, one that was never talked about. I am sure I never mentioned it to any of my friends.

Fast forward. I go to college. In my first semester I take a course called Sociology 101. A friend of mine, a veteran of high school English instruction, has coined the term "the Rubicon theory of reading," according to which there is a sentence beyond which no student will pass. For me, the very first sentence in the textbook in the sociology course might have signaled the end of my university career: "Sociology is one of the social sciences." It was English, but what did it mean? I think you get where I was coming from. Still, with persistence, I came to terms, sentence by maddening sentence, in the thick textbook, with concepts like culture, socialization, role conflict, division of labor, altruistic suicide (!), secularism, gemeinschaft, gesellschaft, and ethnocentrism.

The subject around which American liberal and illiberal political opinion was centered in 1961 was that of racial integration, a charged issue to which I was introduced, of all places, in the sociology class. In my perusal of the table of contents in the textbook, I had noted that a chapter was devoted to race, but one morning this perplexing American social problem was addressed by my professor with considerable vehemence. I can't recall the specific content of his utterance, for the blood rushed to my head and made coherent thought impossible. To hear this white professor dwell so openly on instances of shameful treatment of blacks made me uncomfortable, which I suppose was his intention. My discomfort could be seen as an effect of the new environment into which I had plunged at seventeen, one that challenged one's dearest preconceptions. Indeed, the episode is the first I recall in which new social realities truly collided with my own convictions.

I speak not of civil rights, however, but, rather, of the professor's forthrightness. From my point of view, the professor was engaging in a flagrant breach of decorum: he was talking about inappropriate things, like sexual intercourse, in mixed company. My discomfort was principally because of the black students in the class. I would have been equally mortified had he held me up as an example of the suffering that a child feels because of a parent's divorce Although I could scarcely know what a black person had suffered –– no more than could the professor –– I knew that blacks suffered. But I also felt that suffering was an intensely personal matter and that the real blight was the deep inner wounds. The shame of discrimination was probably as deeply rooted as were my father's shame about his divorce and his conviction of living in sin. Being forbidden to use a water fountain was not something you wanted people to notice when they thought about you.

What had a strong effect on me was the professor's breach of decorum, particularly the lack of challenge or response to it. Although his comments, focused as they were on the less-than-human treatment of blacks, might be very wounding to blacks, openness was apparently part of being a smart, with-it person, especially if it concerned airing mortifying aspects of one's experience.

Now, to the point of this long preface. One thing Beatty's novel makes evident is the relentless focus on the shame blacks often feel about "being black," especially if "black" is the first thing with which one identifies oneself. In the last chapter of The Sellout, the narrator goes to open-mike night at a club patronized by blacks. The black comedian opens with this line: "Your mama been on welfare so long, her face is on the food stamp." Now, that is not something to joke about, IMHO. Whites should not find this funny. On one evening a white couple strolled into the club and took front-row seats and laughed and snickered knowingly at the comedian's jokes,"like they'd been black all their lives." The  comedian got irritated by their laughter, "howling the loudest. Slapping the table. Happy to be noticed. Happy to be accepted." He finally drove them from the club.

I was thinking about that when I watched the opening of Dave Chappelle's Netflix special. I had never heard of him until I read about The Sellout. What struck me about Chappelle's show was the number of white and Asian faces right up front laughing their heads off at his jokes. I didn't watch very long, so I don't know if he engaged in the "mama's picture on the food stamp" variety of one-liners, but every other word out of his mouth was a "foul" one.

So, when I think back about my life and that of my parents in the 1950s, it strikes me that, above all, even in our shame about certain things in our lives, we always kept our heads up and maintained our decorum. And I bet that was also the case for blacks, who lived in even more shameful circumstances: they kept their heads up and maintained appearances. Now that we have all become "liberals," we air our dirty linen in public and find it funny to do so.