A More Perfect Reunion

The first class met on a snowy afternoon during the day that Donald Trump, a president less qualified than Jefferson Davis and yet a product of American democracy, was inaugurated. The students, who had grown up in Obama’s America, despaired of what should be done now that the excitement of those years had come crashing to a halt. They felt the world had told them an infinitely cruel lie about what this country is and feared what might become of them in a society that had returned so quickly and gleefully to patriarchy, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, inequality in all its forms. “We are going to do our work,” I said simply, knowing the full answer to their question was more complex than I could answer in the first class. Maybe even more than could be told in a single semester. But I trusted that the deep work of real reading and writing did hold the answers. My job was only to provide more-subtle tools in the most lucid space I knew how to activate.

What gave me any sense that I was qualified to explain any of it, beyond a lifetime of reading, was I had spent most of my life grappling with a host of the same problems: of feeling the world was opening up to include those who looked like me or shared my concerns, only to learn that much of the country wished for no such thing and even those who thought they did still did not understand properly what that meant. I will admit I used to think we were further along; it is only recently I understood how new and strange genuine encounters across lines of identity, those engineered divides of history and humanity, truly are in US society.

Because of my own experience, I was aware of the power of treating my students the same and holding them to the same standard whatever their social identity. I also knew they were not the same and understood the burning hotness of having someone traduce your individuality because they could not disentangle you from whatever their idea was about your group and, just as bad, receiving some well-meaning blandishment from someone in authority, or else a high-minded theory, which in the end is only that, a theory. It is exactly at the theory of equality that we as a society have chosen to stop.

Midway through the semester, the living complexities began to reveal themselves, namely the human differences beyond the surface of meritocracy and the truth about the world we live in, and the current socio-historical moment. First, David wrote something that all the women in class objected to, accusing him of objectification. Some loudly, others with silent disdain. He defended himself by saying the right things, fearful of social shame. He was more mortified of what would happen if he told the whole truth: that he did not mean to give offense but also did not fully understand what he had done wrong or how to amend it.

A week later, Dawn wrote something about her life as an African American woman, dismissing the other students for failing to understand it. She was partially right. Literary studies are organized in antiquated ways. Some of them can’t be changed. Some of them have already been changed, but English departments still haven’t caught up to them. This means the serious students of color have been for generations now learning and integrating multiple canons, one in which they are included and one in which they are not.

Later still, Francis was told that something she said was a product of her Jewishness, when this was not the case at all. She was being reduced from a person to a member of a group. Peter did something brilliantly subtle about violence directed at gay people, without politicizing it, causing the others to miss the point entirely. It was, like the other misunderstandings, a failure not of politics but of reading. Among a great many other things, reading well requires that we see what is before us instead of simply relying on what we believe we know.

Adaolisa, who was as sensitive as she was gifted, felt she was being exoticized. Lucy thought everything was queer and anyone who denied it was homophobic. Ines, who was used to having schoolwork come easy to her, began using her background as an excuse for sloppy work, in a way no one had ever bothered to call her out on for fear of being seen as insensitive, or worse. Her problem had less to do with her background than with the defense mechanisms gifted kids resort to when things become more challenging than they are used to and intelligence alone is not enough. After conferring with a colleague, I ended up assigning her enough extra work that most graduate students would have protested and most departments would claim was too high a standard. To her enduring credit, she did all of it.

All of them were conscientious people, and, with few exceptions, I made a practice of addressing whatever offense had been given, received, or perceived in office hours after class, where none of them could be judged or feel vulnerable before the others. Both because I believed what each of them needed to hear was individual and also because I wanted them to remain open and vulnerable before one another. Without that, none of us could ever learn anything, especially not the things we would rather pretend we already know than admit our frailty. At least I know my first instinct is always to cover up defensively in environments where I feel unsafe or afraid.

Like my students, I had grown up in a society integrated in some ways, segregated in others, and educated in spaces that prided themselves on their multiculturalism (in reality a murkier operation involving teachers who often had little experience of integration beyond the handful of students who passed before them). It was a time that felt on the verge of change. What surprised me was how similar the language my undergraduates used was to the language we used. Little, if anything, new had been said in the twenty years between us. Older people had told me the same thing once. As much as I resented them for it at the time, it eventually entered my hard head how much all of this was a generation-over-generation conversation, one that stretches back to the very first generation to call itself American.

The sentiments and the problems are the same. Only the names and faces of the people have changed. But also the numbers. My parents grew up in a time of black firsts. I grew up in a time when black people in spaces privileged as white were usually few and far between. The only black kids, or a small enough cluster to fit at a single table in the lunchroom. Now there are more, but still not as many as should be. The problems in the ghetto, of course, remain the same, too. That there are ghettos.

The first waves of the civil rights movement began to right the abject harms of racial oppression, only to see them become ever more resistant and ever more subtle, reaching into law and economics, but also deep into cultural and physical space, and inevitably into personal realms that no law should ever reach but that nonetheless demand interrogation.

In the case of my class, wherever they came from and whatever their other concerns, none of them wanted any part in reproducing the structures of oppression: structures they recognized more completely than a great many older people but still struggled to know how to escape. Compounding this, they also wanted to succeed. Many were savvy enough about “the way things work ” to understand that even exposing the full extent of their worries, of their ignorance in front of one another, laid them open to charges of being naive, prejudiced, or worse. They simply said the right things publicly. As a performance it was good enough for most situations, but each of them intuitively knew the difference. We can all sense when someone sees us and when someone does not.

This is the same unresolved state in which liberal society at large currently exists. We know intellectually that the world is unjust and do not wish to be instruments of oppression. Yet if we are honest, most of our lives implicate us in ways we do not know how to free ourselves from, or else know but lack the steadfastness. This complexity is what we politely ignore or treat with platitudes when we talk about race, diversity, multiculturalism, and intersectionality. We have lost focus on the real systemic problems and, in this distracted state, the necessary sense of purpose to resolve them.

Instead, in liberal as well as conservative spaces, we pride ourselves on how far we have come from slavery, from lynching, from the overwhelming physical, material, and psychological oppression we politely call segregation. We declare our good intentions instead of measuring ourselves against the goals we wish to reach, as one does when one is serious about something.

Speaking truth to power, as the old canard goes, means nothing unless we live those truths fully. America has always been a deeply dualistic construct, one free, honest, and democratic and the other brutal, larcenous, and repressive. Saying we oppose these things, or addressing the problem reactively at the site of whatever new tragedy has unfolded, will never be enough. We must understand the completeness of the problem and the full effort required to solve it.

The extrinsic benefits of an elite education include access to opportunities, and they serve, especially for students from historically excluded groups, as social proof of worthiness. As a corrective for the ways prior environments have taught us to see, or not see, even if there were enough seats in such places to address the issue at scale, it remains perfectly possible to inhabit these spaces without meaningful interaction with those who do not share one’s background. It is equally possible to congratulate ourselves for the appearance of multiculturalism without challenging the prejudices we have internalized and to know better than to speak aloud. Because so many of the notions we receive from our society are so deep and so entwined with our identities, it is often a fool’s errand to try.

I wish I could offer a fail-safe formula to eradicate unconscious biases in a foreshortened time period. The question of whether it is possible for us to see one another and ourselves across social divides is one of the complex questions in contemporary culture, informing nearly everything else, either implicitly or explicitly. I happen to think that it is largely possible, even perfectly possible. One sees it so plainly in artists such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, or Philip Roth when he cares to and, each by another remarkable path, critical minds as different as Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, and Edward Said. Without getting too esoteric, I believe that this vision turns on the ability to dissolve the world and access one of the better, more transcendent selves. This conflicts with our usual materialism and will to power, and is more in tune with the view that we are limited beings.

However, for those already programmed by the system, the mask of falseness, whereby we pretend to see, to understand, to know better than we do, runs so profoundly deep—in its vanity, its presumption, its performances now of superiority, now of empathy—and elicits such hostility when it is revealed to be a mask that for most of us regular folk, the answer is similar to whether it is possible to become truly fluent in another language. The younger you start and the more you practice, the greater the chance of success.

As a practical matter, this involves being more aware of the ways that narratives and meanings are produced by their societies, the variety of these narratives, and what they tell us about the desires of society and individual consciousness, including our own. This quest is less abstract than it sounds.

When it comes to race, the cultural borders are especially unstable, which is why they must be continuously reinforced and narratives of authority constantly elevated. This process of policing and reinforcing happens at the individual, social, and institutional levels, and it happens largely in the background of conscious awareness. It is larger and more powerful than the lone individual. Not only can such a system be unmade; its deepest fear individually, socially, and institutionally is also that it can be and will be unmade.

Whether and, crucially, how deeply this information is received lies beyond the boundary of the classroom. I like to think that my students all became more aware of the complexities of reading and writing, and how manifestly entwined these are with their own social beings in ways that expand who they are and what they are capable of. But a great deal depends on how honest and open they can be with themselves and one another in a cultural milieu that contains so many competing values. If they fail at this, sometimes saying one thing while thinking and feeling another, for fear of social censure or betraying the chink in their armor, well so do we all.

We manage our knowledge and self-presentation according to the demands of the environment. There are some things one can tell students only in a classroom, the earlier the better. There remains other knowledge that cannot be contained in institutional spaces but belongs to the unique intimacy of books.