Notes from a Post Race Society NPR( National Privilege Radio) again getting it wrong Post Race Coming of Age Story

When I heard the NPR piece "Playing the Race Card" by Michele Norris, I knew, it was gonna be bad.  The term itself is used to silence progressive Black folk , like the term "politically correct" is used to silence real feminist, when speaking truth to power.  

Michele Norris

NPR's"Playing the Race Card" is described as a series inviting listeners to send in "six word stories" about race, "....people take a complicated and controversial subject and boil it down to six words, what it means for them.." 

In my mind, red lights flashed, loud alarms sounded, and a mechanical voice blared, "Warning! Warning! Beware!  Banal Yet Dangerously Specious National Conversation To Erode And Erase The History and Consequences of American White Supremacy, Directly A Head, Warning! Warning! Beware 

Inviting America to "tweet" about race is highly problematic, trivializing an already increasingly marginalized emergency, that's stranded atop a frayed and thinning high wire rocked to and from by angry and uncaring winds of both; white conservatives and (subconsciously and now consciously, since the election of Barack Obama) white Liberals,  who both want to be done with the whole issue of  

race, once and for all, to move forward with clear consciouses.

I very much doubt that NPR would solicit tweets about the Jewish Holocaust, nor would NPR described it as simply "complicated and controversial", like a bad basketball call, especially if Jews were still deeply suffering and traumatized from it.  But such is the direction of Post Race America and that's what this series is about.

The story begins in North Carolina with George Washington III.  When I heard the name, I assumed he was an "ancient", as it was once common for enslaved Black folk to be named after philosophers and presidents by their captors, as jokes. Therefore, I was shocked when George Washington III  spoke, he was much younger than I thought . His name wasn't discussed for context.  It also wasn't discussed for context that both of his marriages were to white women.  His current marriage, added their mixed children to his wife's white children from her previous marriage, along with Washington's previous mixed children from his first marriage, including18 year old Jordan.

The story's marrow is that George Washington III took Jordan to an optometrist and based upon his own  experience as a Black man in America, checked the African-American box for a question asking his son's ethnic identify.  

Jordan said nothing, until the car ride home, where he explained to his father, that sometimes he doesn't check the African-American box. At this point the story becomes a Post Race Coming of Age Celebration as George Washington III,  both humbled and proud, admits his error to his son. George Washington goes on to state, he's not sure if he's up for the task of campaigning to change such questions  to include "mixed race" or to allow people to check multiple boxes. But he did later go back by himself to the optometrist and requested his son's paper work, so he could recheck "mixed race". I'm assuming he brought celebratory white-out for the mission.

This story just doesn't ad up.  A northernly State like Illinois hasn't advanced to mixed race categories, yet a southern state like North Carolina, which still has laws on it's books where oral sex is a crime against nature, supposedly does? 

I also doubt NPR, would run a story, where the son of a Jewish man, married to a Christian, tells his father that he doesn't want to be considered Jewish, and then describe the story as " wonderful"  as Michele Norris does.

George Washington III and Jordan

Michele Norris completely white washes the crisis of Black identity in America, rejecting Chole Ardelia Wofford aka Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, DuBois, Frantz Fanon, and every other intellectual who struggled to examine what it means to be Black in a country of white supremacy that since it's inception has equated Blackness with every thing negative and evil.  Indeed in Wofford's brilliant novel the Bluest Eye, the sad and doomed preteen  Pecola Breedlove, is raped and ultimately driven insane  for "blue eyes"  In Michele Norris's post race world, to escape Blackness all one has to do is check a box.

The fact that, Jordan is too dark to "pass", an infamous term used up until the 1960's, when very light skinned Blacks sometimes turned their backs on their Black identities to "become" white, combined with George Washington III's marriages and his remarks in this piece, makes me think this story is far more complex than about Jordan, not wanting to choose between his parents.  I'm not against interracial marriage, but in America, whiteness is status, consciously and subconsciously and this story is not just about sweeping it under the rug,  but white washing history in order to escape it.

On Being Haunted by Carson McCullers/ The Black Experience as the Origin of Southern Gothic

"Lou'siana, Lou'siana
Mama's got the low down blues
Lou'siana, Lou'siana
Moma's going on a cruise"

-Bessie Smith
Lou'siana Low Down Blues

I keep trying to figure out, some clever way to explain how I stumbled upon Carson McCullers, a mostly obscure southern female blues writer born into the world with a rapidly deteriorating body and a May Fly's life span, but with a fire raging inside her.

But there is no literary flourish to make a wanna be writer sound profound. The simple fact is, it's been less than three months since I've learned of her work and I can't recall how.


The only straw I can grasps at, is that she came through the doorway created long ago when an ex lover dragged me to New Orleans, kicking and screaming.  I returned permanently altered. Yet I isolated New Orleans/Louisiana completely outside the south because I was uncomfortable feeling so at home in the south.

Of course this was immature. New Orleans/Louisiana exist in dual worlds, one physical, out of which the name "The Big Easy" arises. The other, is darker more ethereal with porous boarders between past, present, and future, sensed only by those with developed "antennae".  The American South is are far more in New Orleans/ Louisiana's gravitational pull than the midwest, especially for Black people. 

Creole Gumbo on my kitchen table                                                                                                                                              Note the authentic Cajun  Gumbo Spoon  made  from  an
Oyster shell

I cook and eat gumbo, chitlins, and greens, not just because of my connections to Nola, but because of my connections to the whole south including Mississippi. I can no longer ignore, the south's history, because like an insane mad scientist, it made me.  For most of America's history, It kidnapped, in-slaved beat, chiseled, carved, raped, murdered, hung, burned, garroted, drowned, etc., the flesh of the African  painfully reconstructing it into the Black race. And here I am. 

Mr. Rubin Stacy

Ms. Laura Nelson. wife and mother of two 

There is also no place in the south where the soil was not completely drench by the juice of the Strange Fruit who are my ancestors, which is the foundation of Southern Gothic. 

The doorway that now connects me with Nola also connects me- as my ancestors did- with all parts and spirits of the south, good and bad.  This is a haunting

I'm working my way through four of Carson McCuller's novels and just finished her biographical novel "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter".  

Below is my from Goodreads review, which is the FaceBook for readers.

In this southern town, a deep and toxic main of desperation, regret, and terror, runs through it.  
Most have succumbed under it’s putrid influence.  But brief glimmers of innocents, hope, and, dreams, still exists, and though often mislaid, there is love. 

A small band of social and cultural outcasts sense the darkness, but know not enough to identify it.  

They're only three who can.

 Jake Blount, a wandering itinerant worker, angry drunk, and communist sympathizer, trying to figure out the secret to getting the masses to rise up against oppression.  

Antonapoulos, an obese mute, thought dimwitted, for years lived placidly and seemingly content, with his best friend John Singer. One day he rebels, going from kind and gentle, to brazen acts of petty thievery and minor public violence, that get him committed -by his uncle- to an insane asylum, in a far away town.   

Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, a Black doctor who allows  (to borrow the term from Samuel Beckett) “the mess”, to pull his family apart.  Years later he rebels by simple acts of personal dignity and humanity as a Black man, and professionalism as a doctor, to educate the Black community.

At the center of “the mess” connecting and fortifying these renegades, which includes, Mick Kelly, (who a character Carson McCullers based off herself), is John Singers.  Singer is a gentle and deeply empathetic mute who keeps the door of his boarding house rental room, always open even when he leaves (in which case he leaves a note on the table) to visit Antonapoulos, who’s well being is connected with Singer’s ability to sustain the outcasts and himself. 

McCullers, does what many white writers attempt, to give real and original voice to Black characters. While most fail miserably, she connects.  In fact, her use of Black southern vernacular actually give their words more power, as opposed to sacrificing their dignity, which is the problem with Zorna Neal Hurston’s work, including “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and “Mules and Men”. 

Zora Neal Hurston

Charlotte Osgood Mason

 Hurston, unlike the rest of the Harlem Renaissance writers, wrote primarily for her white patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason, who called those she assisted financially, her "God Children", and demanded that they at all times call her “Godmother”.  Their God Mother also shackled their artistic freedom, demanding they fixate their artistic work in the primitive speak and child like behavior that represented one of the common Black stereotypes of the time. 
Mason also demanded to approve all work before it was published and made "corrections".
This caused Langston Hughes to leave the financial comfort Osgood provided and strike out on his own during, The Great Depression.

Chole Ardelia Wofford aka "Toni Morrison"

McCullers doesn’t stop there, treading further into the darkness, she takes the reader into Chole Ardelia Wofford aka Toni Morrison territory where few writers cross. I sensed the coming onslaught of literary cataclysmic violence that Wofford uses to painfully baptize the reader into her faith such as her
brilliant and classic tragi-comic novel, "The Bluest Eye" when Soaphead Church drives the sad and already traumatized, fragile child, Pecola Breedlove, insane 

At twenty-three-years of age, McCullers, was far more clumsily than Wofford, which induces a far more painfully and raw shock in the novel, such that my first visceral response was anger at this dead white southern women.  How dare she mutilate him that way!? Why did she do this!? What right did she have!?  Indignantly I thought , she only got away with this racist bullshit because she wrote this novel in 1940. 

And she's wasn't even finished with her trespass. 

McCullers brings "him" home from the hospital to haunt us with his unchanged simplicity and the simplicity of his yearnings.  His family and friends gather in the southern winter darkness, around the fire to welcome him home, passing around jars of fruit flavored moonshine that sympathetic neighbors leave at the front door in sympathy.  He, "feels the stumps of his legs with his strong dark hands" and says "I just wish I knowed where my f-f-feets be. That the main thing worries me. The doctor never give em back to me after what them men done did. I sure do wish I knowed where they at. I certainly will be glade to taste some of that boogie –woogie. To have something good to drink on, is the only thing m-make forget this misery. If I just wish I knowed where my f-feets are”

 When I got over the shock of the brutality, I knew why,  Carson McCullers “went there”. The same reason why "the caged bird sings" cause it has to.  The problem is more people can’t and don’t want too. And the fact that she did so in the 1940's in North Carolina is simply amazing. 

Gospel singer Ethel Waters and Carson McCullers

My favorite Bokowski poems is his ode to Carson McCullers below. Due note along with alcoholism she had numerous illnesses including various strokes starting in her early twenties. If any one deserved a good drink it was her.

she died of alcoholism


wrapped in a blanket 
on a deck chair


on an ocean 
steamer.

all her books of
 terrified loneliness

all her books about


the cruelty 
of loveless love

were all that was left 
of her

as the strolling vacationer


discovered her body

notified the captain

and she was quickly dispatched


to somewhere else
 on the ship

as everything
 continued

just 
as


she had written it"