Today's clip is a good one from a great 70's television sitcom. Included is a white guy so committed to shed some of his whiteness that he purchases a book on black slang. Meanwhile, Mark Crispin Miller's The Bush Dyslexicon sits lonely on the Amazon sales chart--forever depriving folks of a great argument of how George Bush would be treated if he were black and continued to butcher the English language.
Something that should be taken seriously, in all of this, is the power of literature to heighten someone's social consciousness, or even move them to think (or act) on social injustice outside of one's skin or culture. Literature like this is especially needed in regards to racial inequality and the continued occupation of Iraq. In his essay, ""Protest Literature" historian Howard Zinn commented on the reactions of himself and his students when digesting black poets and writers as white readers:
"There are other situations where we believe we know something but don’t really know it in a visceral way, don’t really know it emotionally, to the point where it moves us to action. White people in the United States always "knew" that black people were discriminated against. Certainly that was true of the white students in my classes at Boston University. But it was only when they read Malcolm X’s Autobiography or Richard Wright’s Black Boy or the poems of Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes that they were confronted by the reality of the lives of black people. They had no idea why black people might be so angry and so were not only confused but also afraid of that anger. The prose of Malcolm X, of James Baldwin, could make them, for the time, feel and understand the anger.
I knew, as a young man, or thought I knew, that black people were treated as inferiors, discriminated against in a hundred ways. One day I picked up a book of poems by Countee Cullen, poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and read a poem called "Incident." In it, he recalls a trip to Baltimore, eight-years-old, sitting on a bus, when a white boy, about his own age, stuck out his tongue and called him "nigger." The poem’s last lines are: "I traveled all through Baltimore, from May until December, but of all the things that happened there, that’s all that I remember." Those lines reached deep inside me, for the first time making me understand what it must be like to feel humiliated because of your color. After all, humiliation, aside from color or any other trivial human characteristic, is a universal experience."
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