(no subject)
I’m at the Arts Lounge, writing (or trying to write) a paper lambasting Booker T. Washington, the newest bane of my existence. I’m enjoying puffing myself up with moral dignity and superiority and being Ever So Disgusted with his sacrifice of black collective pride in exchange for petty economic gains. Just the same it hurts a little to type it all out, because I know I’d get a better grade if I just lazily repeated the conciliatory arguments made by the teacher in class; he’s one of those Professors who professes to “really want” to hear our own opinions, but tends to give significantly higher marks to those opinions that happen to agree with him.
The thesis I really want to write, but won’t because I do have at least some sense of self-preservation, and the long-standing ambition of eventually graduating with an honors degree, would go something like this: “Booker T. Washington was a valueless prick, because I am frightened to receive my Canada Post package.”
The other day a Canada Post delivery man, standing at my door after having woken me up from a sound (if mid-day) sleep, made a mildly sexually offensive comment. It was offensive only in intonation and context, and hardly even rivals the passing commentary of Clubbing Men. Just the same, when he left to (I presume) continue his postal runs undaunted and uncaring, I retreated to my bed and sat for ages, furious and guilty and sleepless, made filthy by the careless commentary of an unimportant stranger. It was an incredibly minor occurrence, but here I am writing about it days and days later, because I later realized that I was apprehensive to receive the next package from my mother, fearful of another encounter with the postman and the impotently rageful feeling his words had produced.
The point is that those little things… they matter. And if the reason I don’t respond to comments I find inappropriate has more to do with my personal reticence and non-confrontational tendencies, I cannot imagine functioning in a society where compromise and conciliation were the buzzwords of the day, and together what they really meant was sacrificing one’s dignity, one’s self respect, one’s opportunity to stand upright in the world. Those small underminings of one’s self-worth, they pick away at your character. DuBois, criticizing Washington’s policies, states:
“In the history of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached at such crises has been that manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses, and that a people who voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving for it, are not worth civilizing.”
I believe that. If I don’t always act on it myself it’s my failing, but I still firmly believe that a man who bargains away the collective dignity of black America, in exchange for the patronizing benevolence of a few rich white men, deserves any number of excruciatingly slow & painful deaths. Or, at least, certainly doesn’t deserve the generous and expansive Understanding and Appreciation of Limiting Circumstances provided him by my professor, and perhaps our generation as a whole.
What I think is most heartening, though also perhaps simultaneously disconcerting, regarding my studies on the German Resistance, is the outward appearance of the resistors. Yesterday I was flipping through books in preparation for my Major Paper, which will eat my soul during the month of March. One of the men I’ll be investigating in detail, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, looks exactly like a bumbling high school physics teacher, or perhaps a genial and generous dentist in some small town. He does not look like a man who would knowingly sacrifice his life in the quest to halt the evil of a man who was no personal threat to himself or his kin. He does not look like the absolute hero that he was. The external “ordinary-ness” of the men who tried to stop Hitler fills me with the (entirely unsupported) belief that anyone, even a girl who can’t manage to stand up to a lascivious delivery man, is potentially capable, should circumstances demand it, of rising to the occasion and becoming a Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And that men like Washington would dare to earnestly endeavor to take away anyone’s right to their own self-worth, to stand up when they feel they need to, infuriates me beyond expression.
And now I return to the probably halfway conciliatory paper I will be forced to write in order to succeed in this course. Theoretical belief in the importance of Standing Up doesn’t always necessarily translate into immediate action.
The thesis I really want to write, but won’t because I do have at least some sense of self-preservation, and the long-standing ambition of eventually graduating with an honors degree, would go something like this: “Booker T. Washington was a valueless prick, because I am frightened to receive my Canada Post package.”
The other day a Canada Post delivery man, standing at my door after having woken me up from a sound (if mid-day) sleep, made a mildly sexually offensive comment. It was offensive only in intonation and context, and hardly even rivals the passing commentary of Clubbing Men. Just the same, when he left to (I presume) continue his postal runs undaunted and uncaring, I retreated to my bed and sat for ages, furious and guilty and sleepless, made filthy by the careless commentary of an unimportant stranger. It was an incredibly minor occurrence, but here I am writing about it days and days later, because I later realized that I was apprehensive to receive the next package from my mother, fearful of another encounter with the postman and the impotently rageful feeling his words had produced.
The point is that those little things… they matter. And if the reason I don’t respond to comments I find inappropriate has more to do with my personal reticence and non-confrontational tendencies, I cannot imagine functioning in a society where compromise and conciliation were the buzzwords of the day, and together what they really meant was sacrificing one’s dignity, one’s self respect, one’s opportunity to stand upright in the world. Those small underminings of one’s self-worth, they pick away at your character. DuBois, criticizing Washington’s policies, states:
“In the history of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached at such crises has been that manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses, and that a people who voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving for it, are not worth civilizing.”
I believe that. If I don’t always act on it myself it’s my failing, but I still firmly believe that a man who bargains away the collective dignity of black America, in exchange for the patronizing benevolence of a few rich white men, deserves any number of excruciatingly slow & painful deaths. Or, at least, certainly doesn’t deserve the generous and expansive Understanding and Appreciation of Limiting Circumstances provided him by my professor, and perhaps our generation as a whole.
What I think is most heartening, though also perhaps simultaneously disconcerting, regarding my studies on the German Resistance, is the outward appearance of the resistors. Yesterday I was flipping through books in preparation for my Major Paper, which will eat my soul during the month of March. One of the men I’ll be investigating in detail, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, looks exactly like a bumbling high school physics teacher, or perhaps a genial and generous dentist in some small town. He does not look like a man who would knowingly sacrifice his life in the quest to halt the evil of a man who was no personal threat to himself or his kin. He does not look like the absolute hero that he was. The external “ordinary-ness” of the men who tried to stop Hitler fills me with the (entirely unsupported) belief that anyone, even a girl who can’t manage to stand up to a lascivious delivery man, is potentially capable, should circumstances demand it, of rising to the occasion and becoming a Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And that men like Washington would dare to earnestly endeavor to take away anyone’s right to their own self-worth, to stand up when they feel they need to, infuriates me beyond expression.
And now I return to the probably halfway conciliatory paper I will be forced to write in order to succeed in this course. Theoretical belief in the importance of Standing Up doesn’t always necessarily translate into immediate action.