Paint

I have given into my compulsions, one of which is to paint.

Approximately, seven weeks ago I moved into an old grocery store in a small town in Mississippi. I had lived down the street from the space for almost a year, and every chance I got I went creeping down to the old store, peering through its windows and imagining how I could recreate it. To have the opportunity to do so would be a dream come true, a fantasy that I had been having since as long as I could remember. One day, a couple month's short of having been in my present studio apartment a year, I got up the nerve to ask the landlord if I could rent the larger space. He was all too happy to get more rent.

I won't go over all that I had to do to prep the space for decorating. I'll just say that it had been two years since the grocery store space had been rented, but it seemed, from the look of things, more like thirty years. Mildew was everywhere and earthworms were coming in with each rain, which was a lot considering it was spring. I was not however deterred by any of what had to be done; all of it was a labor of love. In fact, I have become quite comfortable with cleaning dirt from corners, removing cobwebs, bleaching everything down. The results make weary muscles worth it.

Speaking of dirt and comfort, I found myself a week ago circling back in my Chevy Blazer to a pile of junk I spotted along the road, or, well, beside someone's house, as I was headed down a backroad to the next largest town. I did a pass by, then parked across the street from it to assess the pile's contents. Finally, I drove over, got out and knocked on the door. "May I dig in your junk pile?" A half-naked man looked at me curiously then stated, "There's nothing in there worth anything!" I let him have his say, then came back, "So, you don't mind if I look through it?" Shaking his head and closing the door on me, he nevertheless told me to go ahead. I did.

Mantle found along the road in someone's trash. Beneath it, a kudzu basket.

I took away from that junk pile three or four items, most of them heavy--a broken chair, a broken dining table, odd pieces of wood, and, ahem, a full mantle with a lovely burn spot. I had scored big. I drove back down the road, forgetting all about going to town. The Blazer's lift gate was left open to hold the mantle, which wouldn't fit in the back because of its width but which was securely lodged between two of the table legs. I put on the flashers and hoped I could drive the fifteen miles home without running into a trooper. Whenever someone got behind me, I pulled over, and within twenty minutes I was safe and secure at the front of the grocery store-turned-home unloading my goods.

I told a fellow junker about my bounty and showed her a picture of the mantle. Right away, she suggested I paint it--black or purple. I had had the same thought. I may paint it yet, but for now I am enjoying it as is, burn spot and all, for as much as I have a compulsion to paint things, I also am drawn to wood. It is truly one of the most delightful things. Perhaps it lives long after its source is gone. I'm looking over at the mantle now, appreciating how it warms my living area, set as it is against a cool denim blue wall. Like other objects I've collected and saved, the mantle is teaching me about the beauty of imperfection. I am learning about visual balance and life balance. Paint does freshen things. Almost every wall in this place I've repainted in the weeks I've been here, but for me there is no kilter without objects whose patina suggests the lives they've lived.

Sunday Afternoon

No deep thoughts today. I'm just sitting at my table by the kitchen window. A cat just walked through my yard. Before I moved in, the trashcan would always be open, and that cat got used to going hunting in it. I've been keeping it closed.

It's cold here in North Mississippi, cold and windy, but the warm up is coming Wednesday. I cannot wait! I'm sure the vegetable plants I put in the ground last weekend also will be happy to have some sun.

I'm barely staying warm in this space but for a great sleeping bag and lots of throws. The living area has only a small gas type heater but no blower. Worse is that the big beautiful factory-like windows are an energy suck. I literally see gaps as well between the outdoors and the window air conditioner placed in one of window frames. OMG! Who thought that a good idea?! My guess is someone who is in denial about how cold it gets in this part of the state.

This morning at Sunday School (I've started back going after ten years away), the old men were reflecting on how they struggled to stay warm in the houses of their childhood. According to them, they in fact took turns standing in front of the fireplace. A bowl of water left out indoors would freeze overnight.

When sharing with a friend who grew up in rural Alabama my ideas about bathing without a "real" bath or shower, he told me that he had been born in a house without running water. I suspect many people my age had that same experience. Many of the brick houses my friends grew up in in the South were built in the late Sixties through the Seventies. Perhaps those friends are humbled by those truths, or maybe they aren't. I'm not sure. What I do know is that even though I grew up in a house with a full bath, it was always the conveniences that I was trying to leave behind. Life it seemed to me then as now was not meant to be lived without direct contact with the earth. I do not mind fetching water or scratching the earth in order to eat. But maybe if I had no choice.

Whatever the case, I am enjoying working for my bath and for my life in this way.

This morning, I watched a YouTube video in which a woman, a transplant from Argentina, transformed a shipping container into a home for herself and her young daughter. This was not a fancy schmancy modern, architect-designed palace. She did all of the designing and building herself. The home was ramshackle and practical and real and lovely. But admitting that her daughter sometimes complained about not having this or that luxury, she posed, "Who says you have to have pink toys, and a pink room with pink furniture to be a happy kid," and added that where she came from her self-made abode would be considered very nice. My sentiments exactly. Who said you have to have granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, and a kitchen island, or a "garden" tub and Kohler fixtures to experience bliss?

In the last month, I have spent a bit of money, more than I'm comfortable with actually, furnishing and equipping my space though I've received a few free items, cheap compressed paper shelves I've painted, packing crates directly from the trash bin, and a lawyer's bookshelf left at the curb. It had an inch of dirt on each shelf and was home not to books but to spiders, but it looks great now and holds almost a hundred of my books. I can see it now from where I sit, and it's a little visual clutter I guess but also comforting. This place is coming together slowly, and that is part of the joy.

The Stuff I Bought

Maybe a few years ago, I admitted to myself that I'm addicted to junking. I crave junk! I can hardly pass by a broken chair next to someone's city-distributed plastic trash container without slowing my car to assess the cast-off's potential. So yesterday...

My friend whose name I've changed to protect her innocence--Typ--and headed out to an estate sale in Memphis. I was excited, hoping to get some of the art and art supplies of the person who'd left them behind, maybe by choice or maybe by her family members' choice, as she went either to stay with them or to a nursing home. There was in fact plenty such items left in her home, mostly watercolors--at near-gallery prices. One part of me thought--it is only right. She created these of her soul, talent, and hands. Another part of me selfishly and practically thought--Get real! This is a tag sale!!! Always in such situations I am reminded that the things we treasure when alive and well can quickly lose value on the auction block.

1994 Datebook belonging to artist. My open journal sits beneath it.

I did not buy one of her paintings, but I did buy for $2 a datebook from 1994, which she had used to organize herself. In May, her first entry was for a senior aerobics class on Mondays and Wednesdays. Over the next two months, she made note of birthdays, her perm appointment, and a "Celebrate Art" event scheduled for June 10 at 3:00 in the afternoon. She played bridge, attended many art shows and luncheons. She was obviously an important part of the art community. She loved gardening too. Perhaps she thought of it as art; she made mention of her tomatoes, reminded herself in August to "fertilize rhododendrons." There are no notes after August. Perhaps, after the initial motivation for buying the datebook had passed, she grew tired, as artists often do, of being hyper-organized, which is to say organized at all. But at the back of the datebook, she did write down several birthdays from January through March and her and her husband's wedding anniversary--July 18. They made sixty-two years in 2004!

Pat asked the organizer of the sale if the artist was deceased and was told no, but her husband. I didn't go through many of his things. For about twenty minutes I did carry around an unworn Michigan t-shirt, which a lady saw me with and pointed out a cotton golf cap that also sported the school's name. He obviously was a Michigan grad as am I--a connection, then, to both him and, as a fellow artist, to his wife. In June, she wrote, "Art Show Luncheon--Cranbrook Rd, Birmingham." How familiar the street name and city rang. Home for me, or close enough. I wondered then what brought them to an upscale subdivision in Germantown, Tennessee on the outskirts of Memphis.

Looking at her life nudged me to examine my own; we share a path though she is old enough to be my grandmother. I am inspired that she both still lives and that, in the Germantown house, she kept an art studio, on the second floor, and continued it would appear to paint into old age. Some of her watercolor paper had yellowed, some was fresh. I purchased nearly half her brushes, quality. When I got home, I wiped them down with alcohol. I feel her enough I thought. She was an established artist. As I paint, some part of her may live here too.

Visiting

Last summer, I did what seems to me a very writerly thing if not a very Southern thing to do. I invited myself to stay with friends throughout the South for a week or two at a time in order that I might find respite from my own household duties and write!

How blessed I must be to know that my friends in the South would not only oblige my request for a long visit but beg me to stay even longer. It is because of this kind of authentic generosity that I insist that Southern hospitality is genuine.

My first few days in the first home, I didn't get too much work done. I was settling in, deciding where my most auspicious writing space might be, readjusting to a North Carolina climate, and also adjusting to my host and hostess' schedules. Lillian (not her real name) works from home, and is up at 8 a.m. chatting away on conference calls while David (also not his real name), retired but still an early riser, goes about various tasks including making gourmet meals three times a day for Lillian and for whomever happens by. She let me know that their home was my home and that I should make myself welcome including helping myself to whatever snacks I found in their well-stocked pantry.

Had I been smarter I would have mirrored her schedule and closed my bedroom door from distractions, as Lillian did, during work hours. Instead, I wandered down to the kitchen way too often and, after a day or so, gave completely in to eating three artfully prepared meals a day. It would in fact be my expectation of culinary treats that would organize my time with the two, and between meals I either ventured outdoors to enjoy their lush garden or gazed at it from my upstairs window. The writing clarity I longed for days into my trip was I'm afraid ensconced in a blinding haze and scorching heat, a blanket of familiarity and even ironic comfort but not industriousness.

After a week or more, only one thought was becoming crystal clear: I would not be able to work in my friends' homes or maybe even in the South at all. I was too enraptured with being back where I had had my own thriving garden of children and of verbena, watermelon, and strawberries. Right before coming to this evident conclusion, I had visited also with several other friends--old work and church acquaintances and neighbors--from my days as a Tarheel. I had retraced steps, returning to former haunts for evidences in the air of my time spent in these places. I walked in my favorite historic district, which had always been the best excuse for taking a long lunch. I smelled the old smells, ones that people differently oriented in time cannot tolerate but that are are sweet, musky perfume to my nose as they create a sense of time and place that is just right.

Simply put, I was all too willing to ditch the well-laid plans I had packed in my travel bags before leaving The Hoosier State. Of course, I experienced several twinges of guilt for slacking off but not enough to make me snap into action. After all, there were no real deadlines looming, and it was easy enough for me to reason that getting reacquainted with my friends was in fact more important than any work demands, even ones I claimed to enjoy. So, my second week I just decided that my journey south was really about rekindling relationships and being back in a region of the country that always has enchanted me.

Perhaps it is a bit of a cliche to suggest that it's not about the amount of work that one gets done but the quality. I did produce at least one or two blog posts as I reflected on my travels, and, just as importantly, I learned something about writing, or at least about my writing. I learned that I need highly physical experiences and spiritual and soulful ones in order to feel most like myself and most inspired to write. I learned that geography is not just about land masses and other features, nor even cultural aspects alone if by cultural one means the way a people relate to, represent, and value places. Rather, geography is for me all of these things and also my sense that places are alive, more alive than we have known. Humid Southern air is thick and heavy with history, memory, residue, sights and smells. I met someone recently who lives in a grand old antebellum mansion in a small town that was occupied by the Union during the Civil War. This fellow informed me that there are still on his property slave cabins. I am convinced that within those wretched spaces and upon the air there are spiritual essences floating, swirling, and communing both with themselves and with living beings. Those spirits will light upon one's shoulders certainly if one invites them, and they will speak through any available medium. They will speak to any traveler or resident if she would only make herself available, and I do. I submit to a genus loci--spirit of a place--by aligning myself temporally, emotionally, and maybe also psychically. It's an experience much like symbiosis I guess or maybe channeling is a better metaphor. I simply let my own rhythm, movements, and thoughts become open to what I see, hear, feel. One has only a fat chance of experiencing life itself in this way if work is always foremost on the mind, if one is very task-oriented and linear, finding no greater discomfort than in not getting work done or in doing everything in a certain order.

In fact, As far as I am concerned temporarily suspending work concerns is not just the only way to experience the South; it is the only way to truly experience any place. One has to make deep connections, and, not to worry, finding one's way back to the individual self--as if such a thing existed--is as simple as getting back into one's car, onto train, or plane. The self-cast spell may linger for a bit, especially if one wants to stay connected, but before long it will be broken. Somewhere in the process of return, one should take out a journal and write.

Julie and Julia: an unlikely response

About ten years ago, in an article titled "Talking about Racism," noted psychoanalyst Paul Wachtel made a case for limiting use of the word racism. His rationale for decreasing usage was that the word had become overused and its meaning had become inflated. Although I do not disagree with Wachtel's observation, I absolutely reject his solution to the problem. Wachtel suggested that the word racism be reserved for only the most blatant and inhumane examples of it, for instance, lynching, or burning crosses on lawns. Again, I have to disagree, for, simply put, some of the most egregious examples of racism are not overt but rather so deeply ingrained in American culture that they pretty much go undetected most of the time.

However, this blog post is not simply about racism. Well, it is and it isn't. It is most directly a response to a movie I watched over the holiday weekend, "Julie and Julia." More to the point, I am writing about elements of white supremacy in the film. Now, there's a term that has gone out of use. It is much more caustic I think than the term racism, and both for that reason and because it points to some thinking and to some acts that have not disappeared from American culture it is appropriate that someone begin applying it to otherwise seemingly innocent thoughts and practices.

"Julie and Julia" was on its surface a darling of a film, and I have to admit that that was what first interested me in viewing it. I tried to get my daughter to see it with me, a nice mother-daughter outing I thought, and she agreed until we got to the cinema. There, she begged off and deserted me for "Zombieland." After my viewing of "Julie and Julia," I have to say that my daughter made the safer bet.

There are in this movie about a young woman (a southern girl if I'm not mistaken) who moves within one year from self-loathing to fame two underlying and interrelated themes--conflated time and recovery of the "lady persona." The first is necessary in order to complete the project of the second. To be clear, I am suggesting that with this film the idea of the white "lady"--a social, racial, and economic construct--is recovered. Before I go on to illustrate my point let me say a word about why such recovery is important at this time. We are living in an era when girls have "gone wild." (About an hour before going to see "Julie and Julia" I watched on a blog some video clips that are clear examples of video porn. And although all of the women in those clips were African American, romp shaking of the sort that we see as of late is not limited to this group. Needless to say, the phenomenon of the video vixen provided just the right contrast to the virtuousness of Julie Powell and Julia Child, a contrast that presented in bold relief a message concerning white womanhood.)

What is conflated time, and how does this movie utilize this tool for the project of recovery? Well, as one reviewer put it, the movie weaves the life of Julia into that of Julie (or vice versa). That is to say that the movie closes the gap between the 1940s and the new millennium. How so? First, Childs is not foreign to Julie (although I suspect she would be unfamiliar to most millennials), and since Childs is not alien to Julie but rather a subject of admiration, Childs can in this story serve as a prototype of virtuous white womanhood, or, better put, of the white "lady." Clearly, Childs is not meant as mere inspiration, however. No, Julie must become a simulation of Childs, which is to say that she must become a postmodern version of the earlier figure. Let's just say, Julie has a good start at this task at hand, since she in fact has an actual mother, a physically absent yet never spiritually absent force who responds to her daughter's every professional and personal decision. Like a good Southern matriarch, she intends to keep her protege on the right path, one that will keep the family name high.

There are in this film many other infusions both of the lady figure and of "the Southern," which not surprisingly work hand in hand. Some reviewers (a definite minority) were sickened by the syrupy sweetness of this movie, by a perfection and confection created by the loving husbands of both Childs and Julie. Both men were saints, the exact honorific description that Julie expressed at her husband's overall support of her work and the same idea expressed by Childs as she gleamed within the aura of her husband's near angelic devotion and pure love. This was no story of a single mom, fighting sexism and discrimination to beat the odds on a tough road to success. No. This film is a postmodern glance to "better" times. There is lots of sex in this movie, but it is clean, wholesome intimacy, the kind that takes place between legitimate partners, i.e., between wives and husbands. Again, both Julie and Childs have perfect marriages. (The problem the film invents between Julie and her husband, a spat that results in his leaving her for a day and a night, is totally unbelievable given how there for her he is the rest of the time. The problem of Julie's ambition is then simply an unsuccessful plot device.) As for Childs, her problem is more real. She has everything a woman could ask for but fertility, yet her life is nevertheless full. A spoiled Southern Belle, one might argue, she has the luxury of indulging at least a couple of whims before her husband pays for her to attend the famous Cordon Bleu. One could easily reason that Julie is Childs' spiritual daughter or granddaughter, and, if one were to look seriously at both women as figures or representatives of white women's virtue and its recovery, one could make a case that the white mother figure yearns to have her wayward daughter return home, to her rightful place and station. (A prodigal daughter, Julie has sinned against her forebears by both marrying below her station and moving off to the God forsaken North.) In making such a case, one might begin with Julie's unhappiness at the beginning of the movie, a existential angst if not depression caused by living in the unfamiliar and unglamorous Queens, New York and by confusion concerning her life's purpose. Would that we could all have such great problems. These false issues take viewers back to the days when ladies would tire and faint so easily.

Now, my reading of this film most would agree is perfectly rational. Just one thing: the movie is based on two "real" lives. Ironic. Art imitating life; life imitating art. It is incredibly hard to know these days where reality ends and fantasy begins, and "Julie and Julia" demonstrates in so many ways this postmodern problem, beginning even with its title and the fact that a real person actually came up with the idea to marry herself to this lady of the past whose name so closely resembles her own. The critical question for those viewers willing to be critical of an otherwise adorable movie is whether the social construct of the lady has any real relevance in real life? In asking this question I will probably be accused of taking art too seriously, advice which I have gotten used to and which I recognize for what it is--censorship of mind and spirit. And, I suppose I can also be accused of conflating time myself, for truly I am not that removed from a culture in which the white "lady" construct served some definite purposes, set against and of course above the Mammy construct, the servant black woman. If I am correct that Julie is a postmodern lady, then we might expect to see a Mammy figure somewhere in the movie. She exists in a largely muzzled black coworker, Julie's neighbor in cubicle-land. With barely three full lines, one wonders why this somewhat naturalistic character is in the film. Is it because the real life Julie had such an acquaintance? Reading things the way I do, the black coworker is there only to support Julie's dream; we hear few words from the quiet one, just a quick offering of a gesture of approval and support and, later, a statement of loyalty when Julie gets in trouble (fake trouble) at work for taking a day off to cook and to blog. Though there is in this movie a smart reference to "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" the answer to that obviously still discomforting question is I'm afraid another white couple and, if things go as planned, some other white women intrigued by Julie's project. Who's not coming to dinner? The black coworker.

If the white "lady" construct served in the past to keep black and other women of color subservient and invisible, why would the result of its recovery serve different purposes today? Short answer: it doesn't. White supremacy always serves the same purposes: to hold up images of white beauty, grace, and virtue, characteristics that anything but innocently justify social inequity. But how does this insidious feature of American society play itself out? Julie Powell writes about her otherwise uninspired life, gets an article in the New York Times, which immediately catapults her to fame. Why? Why? Why? And how? Was it because her writing was just that good? Better than that of countless other bloggers, who write on much more serious topics and who will never have a road to publication so nicely paved? Was it because she struck a chord with an audience tantalized by the commingling of white female purity with delicious food? Early in Julie's project, her friends convince her to ask her audience for money. "They like you," they assured her; "they will fund your work." And indeed, they and we did.

Finally, I am reminded of one of my own spiritual giants, Sojourner Truth, who it is said took her blouse off before a crowd of onlookers who had doubted her womanhood. She is now famous for having had the nerve not only to do such an unladylike act but to ask, "Ain't I a Woman?" After all of this time, women of color, faced with the ever-present ideal of the white lady, held up in such high esteem, must still take their clothes off, both to be recognized as women, and to be (de)valued. This is the cost of white supremacy, and it continues unabated.

Henry Louis Gates Controversy

This is a blog post in the truest sense of this new genre of online writing. Usually, I write in hopes of connecting with other people in the blogosphere. Today, I am writing to get some thoughts off of my chest.

Let me be clear at the outset. I am not a fan of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. I am not really a critic either although I have tended to agree with the way that Professor Adolph Reed has sized up Gates, Cornel West, and Michael Eric Dyson. Like Reed, my responses have been more to the phenomenon of academic stardom (and money made from it) than of these academics themselves.

So really, it is in the context of a hyper-consumer society that has not missed the opportunity to commoditize even American intellectuals that I respond to Gates' unfortunate and ironic arrest. When I first heard of the arrest, on Facebook, a "friend's" remark--so much for a color blind society--elicited this from me: I feel a new book on the horizon for Gates. Only one friend responded to my veiled criticism, saying that she had tried to read several of Gates' books and found them inaccessible. "Verbose" was the exact word she used.

I myself have read three of the professor's books and skimmed some others. I am not, again, a critic of the man. I simply have not read him closely enough to level serious criticism. The one book that I did read closely several years ago is Colored People. When I read closely, I really read closely. I read with my body, with all of my psychic energy and my soul. Colored People bothered me greatly. It made me ill. What I read in that book was what I saw as the forwarding of stereotypes of black sexuality. Was it my imagination or were the black women described in that book Jezebel-like, that is, over-sexed, and lacking intellectual interests? The women that Gates meets early in life in his West Virginia hometown seem a stark contrast to the people in general he will meet later at Harvard. These seem, in Gates' perspective, cultures foreign to each other.

One other of his books that I read somewhat closely though that reading also was many years ago is Future of the Race, written with then fellow Harvard professor Cornel West. No apologies. I was disturbed as well by this book. I cannot recall any specifics, and I have to admit that when a book affects me this way I try not to read it again. I don't want reading taking years off of my life. Anyway, as I recall the problem that I had with this second book was that Gates and West were reading black life inside of an American capitalist, democratic paradigm, which is to say that West and Gates were reading black life inside of a box or the box. Black life so analyzed, one would expect successful blacks (those who have adjusted to the paradigm) to be praised while those who haven't to be maligned or treated as a problem or the problem. When Future of the Race came out, West and Gates were interviewed on "Good Morning America" by Charlie Gibson. Gibson may have recently taken Sarah Palin to task, but he was ill prepared several years ago to offer a serious critique of this book by two famed Harvard professors. And this is just fine since West and Gates were not brought onto the morning news and entertainment show to be criticized anyway. Now, that in and of itself is a problem (objective journalism?), but the network's agenda was to me painfully clear. West and Gates--media-appointed spokespersons for "Black America"--were in fact asked how they saw the black condition today, and one of them stated that we were living in the best of times and the worst of times. The other, as I recall, nodded in agreement. Asked to explain the description, one of them gave examples of black success set against black failure. "That's right! You heard it here folks. Blacks themselves see other blacks as the problem. More news in a moment..."

For the record, I have always been skeptical of anyone who claims to be an intellectual but who is unwilling to question the broad framework of our society. Why not question capitalism? Why not question even our sacred democracy? Do these systems not have their flaws? Maybe there are fundamental problems both with the economic system and the political system that we have been so pushing on others around the globe. Intellectuals must, as far as I'm concerned, remain open to this possibility. If these systems were in fact divinely inspired and are therefore beyond criticism, then I expect all the more that they can withstand criticism and come out on top still. So, I have a problem when black intellectuals analyze social and economic conditions of blacks without a thorough look at these systems and the ways in which these may contribute to problems blacks face. I certainly have a problem when blacks who have not thrived under these systems are seen as misfits. To make myself really clear, let me say that inside of a capitalist-democratic framework, West and Gates' analysis is dead on. What I am saying is that these men--anointed as our leaders by the media--do not step outside of this framework.

Well, these are the underlying themes that speak to me from the pages of Gates' memoir and of the book co-authored with West. Now, if I am right, if Gates thinks that the system is just fine and dandy and that it is people of the black underclass who need to do all the changing, then I would have to ask if Gates is indeed a friend to blacks. And this question brings me finally to my real point. I am concerned about our tendency to rush to the defense of Gates. Why do we do so?

Okay, it doesn't take a Ph.D. to answer that question. When we see the image of a manacled Gates--once the picture of esteem--with his mouth agape, we cannot help but to pull up from our psyche deep-seated images of brothers and fathers, uncles and cousins, who have many times found themselves in similar situations. So, Gates is our brother then. He is our blood. He is us. There is simply no separation. I get this, and it is compelling. This is in fact the same reason that, once Michael Jackson's life reached its sad end, black people in general refused to judge him. Instead, we felt his pain. So, not only am I for coming to the aid of Gates and of describing what happened to him as an outrage, I agree with a comment made by Jesse Jackson that racial profiling denies blacks equal protection under the law. We cannot and should not then sweep under the rug what happened to Gates.

At the same time, however, blacks have to look closely at Gates himself and his politics, maybe not right now, but after this whole thing dies down. We cannot be so naive as to trust that every black person has black people's best interests at heart. Receiving the support or endorsement of Oprah Winfrey, of Tom Joyner, or even of Barack Obama does not a real advocate of blacks make. Celebrities--Obama for the moment excluded--usually are not capable of offering the kind of serious critique that, in my opinion, needs to happen when we elevate people to genius status and pay them according to the accolade. Who will help us to read such people closely and critically. And will such critics receive equal air time?

For instance, here's an example of appropriate criticism. As Gates went to defend his indignation at the whole fiasco, he stated that he was not a rabble rouser. Aside from the fact that that phrase has a really problematic history, who exactly was Gates using the term to separate himself from? Who is a rabble rouser? Who is belligerent? Why did Gates feel the need to defend himself in exactly this way? Might it be because he is super-literate unlike (the perception of) those of the underclass that continue to be a problem in America? What was even more troubling with his defense was when he offered that he was more white than black, that his father was even whiter than he, and that his wife was white. What was Gates' point with this exaggerated claim to white identity? Was he arguing that he should not be seen as black, that race falls apart because those who look black may have more white inheritance than skin color would suggest, or that whites are less known for losing their cool and since he is more white his outrage should be respected? Gates' own defense is so shot through with troubling ideas that it doesn't become too hard to believe that he may have in fact talked about Officer Crowley's mama, which brings Gates back full-circle and once again qualifies him to be seen by us as, you got it, pathologically black, having inherited all of the contradictions and insecurities that go along with the history and identity.

Gates' arrest I described as ironic. It is so not because I buy into the idea that his power and position should allow him to transcend profiling. It is ironic because the aftermath of the initial incident has revealed that this super-civilized Negro suffers the same double-consciousness that led to the demise of a man who died just a couple of weeks ago, a man who sang that it didn't matter if you were black or white.

If blacks were to come to Gates' defense based on this truth of shared pathology, that our esteemed professor is doubly conscious, paranoid, and as insecure as all of us are who wear the mask, I could almost stand up for him myself. But, I am pretty doubtful that Gates would ever so belittle himself, saying, "Alas, I am human and black!" Until he does so, I will let others mount his defense. I will watch quietly and try not to be physically bothered.