Beginning Idea

Here is the intro I wrote for my other blog about this new writing project called Frontera:

I started a new blog as I have been working on writing longer essays. I decided to call it Frontera because it is Spanish for border and more and more I want to write to explore borders of all kinds. The obvious one that comes immediately to mind is our Southern border. My friend Samuel asked me once United States citizens talk about being American when what they mean is United Statian. (Obviously we need to work on that term). Where else do countries pretend to represent the entire continent (two continents) while clearly excluding other nations on that continent?

But, the are borders everywhere and there is borderland around those borders. What is it like to enter the borderland?

Borderlands are also the places where new things are born. Many explanations of Jazz say it was when classically trained Creole musicians joined Delta blues ...

Yo Yo Ma in a recent interview said this about the borders (boundaries):

Pablo Casals used to talk about — the great cellist from Spain, from Catalan — talked about infinite variety. ... within the notes that he plays, he’s looking for infinite variety, to Isaac Stern saying the music happens between the notes. OK, well, what, then, do you mean when you say music happens between the notes? Well, how do you get from A to B? Is it a smooth transfer — it’s automatic, it feels easy, you glide into the next note? Or do you have to reach to get to the — you have to physically or mentally or effortfully reach to go from one note to another? Could the next note be part of the first note? Or could the next note be a different universe? Have you just crossed into some amazing boundary, and suddenly the second note is a revelation?

Second Sight

“One ever feels his two-ness” – WEB DuBois

Once, for a short time, I was a pastor at a church. It was a big church, 800 people or so. I was the associate pastor and one of the elders. If you are unfamiliar with the term, elders are like c-level people in business. One of the people reporting to me was in charge of all of our small groups. She began to ask why all the elders were men. We, the leaders, countered that we were not opposed to the idea of a female elder, but didn’t see a good candidate. At the time, this seemed to make sense, and from our perspective as male leaders it probably did. But now, I can see how unsatisfactory that answer would be to a female who was a leader in the church. Not that she was proposing herself, but how was she to hear this from five men? 

I have noticed this trend throughout my job career. Executives tend to hang out with other executives. The more tiers you get the less likely word can make it, unchanged, from the bottom to the top. I tried to listen to what she was saying, but even while I was listening to her, I was already trying to speak for the group of elders. And, at exactly that same moment, I felt that she was right about some of her concern over all male leadership and found myself doubting my own arguments. Conversely, among the elders, I spoke on her behalf, but I was also aware that it was something the group, myself included, didn’t want to hear. It was a fractured moment for me, not the first and not the last. 

I am not writing to explore leadership structure. What interests me and the reason I begin with this experience, is the fracturing and dividing. It is always easier to see everything from our own perspective. But what if you become empathetic to someone who has a different perspective? What if you find yourself agreeing with someone who is outside of your group? Or what if you are the person outside?

Double-Consciousness

There is a famous passage at the beginning of The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois where he describes what it feels like to be black in the US in 1903:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. 

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost . . . He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. (Du Bois, 9)

I know that some of you know what he is saying better than I do. I know some of you who are reading this have felt this two-ness. Maybe not in the same way, but you know what it is like to look at one’s self through the eyes of others, and to feel them measuring and finding fault. 

I am the fault-finder. I am the one who has never been cursed or spit upon. I am the one who has seen the doors of Opportunity thrown open wide. When the local congressmen spoke at my previous employer’s inspirational meeting he said “This is the greatest country in the history of the world.” He was speaking to me. I didn’t agree. I didn’t find it inspirational. But I see now, that it was to me he was speaking. In his mind he imagined the white picket fences of the 1950s, but probably not the little black lawn jockey statues that used to sit on them. 

My question as I read this book by Du Bois is how can I gain "this peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness”, this “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others?” Honestly, it was a peculiar sensation when my friend was asking if the church elders were just a boys club. It was incredibly uncomfortable to see myself from her perspective. And, in this case, it had the added sting that there was truth in what she was saying. For Du Bois the two-ness was forced upon him, but I wonder if there is an impoverishment in my own soul for refusing to accept the two-ness. What if it is this two-ness that people like me need most? 

It’s sort of like the aphorism, until you have walked a mile in her shoes. But it is deeper. What is it like to be her? What is it like to see through her eyes? While seeing through her eyes, how do others speak to her and about her? 

A World Apart

What is it like to see myself and my world through the eyes of another who is “a world apart?” In Between The World And Me, National Book Award Winner of 2015, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about the first time someone pulled a gun on him. He was eleven. Here is how he felt: 

I was amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like a fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived … comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies. I knew this because there was a large television resting in my living room … bearing witness to the dispatches from this other world. (Coates, 20)

I grew up in that world apart Coates only sees on tv. My world systematically ignores his world.

The idea of a double-consciousness, specifically of a two-ness speaks to relationship, “two unreconciled strivings”. It is a relationship between two sections of the United States of America. And in that relationship I am always white and not black. I am always male, not female. Of course, these binaries can be deconstructed. Simply by reading Du Bois and identifying with him in his struggle, in his humanness, these binaries are being deconstructed. Not to mention that some of these binaries are false. What is white and black among such a diverse nation of peoples? 

But already I find myself asking a different question: what about the two-ness in myself? What does it mean to talk of pushing against my own section of society? This is a kind of two-ness that can still be relational, but is not between groups, it is within a group. We could say this is two-ness of the individual and what Du Bois writes about is two-ness of society. I will come back to Du Bois, but I want to explore this other kind of two-ness because I think it is a way for me to understand what Du Bois is talking about. Let me explain. 

Twoness of the Individual

I have felt and do feel myself measured by “the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” It is an image of manhood that runs in my head, measuring me and finding I am too small. It says I don’t make enough money. It says I need more power. It says I am not tough enough and given the right circumstances I would fall like a house of cards. It says I am nobody. The truth is, I actually have been spit upon, once. It was in high school and it was by a boy who was also white. The difference was that he had muscles and was taller and meaner. I still looked like I should have been in elementary school. It was on the back of my neck and I didn’t turn around. I did feel ashamed. 

I thought about the two-ness of the individual when my oldest son shared a recent incident from school that was bothering him. He was rushing to class in the hallway when a girl yells: “What’s wrong Isaac? Are you on your period? Do you need more pads?”

I have no idea what prompted this. I do know that my son struggles with feeling out of place as I did at his age, feeling out of step with the image of maleness that haunts middle schools across suburbia. If it was this that prompted the insult then it is ultimately the twoness of the individual. Just a further cultivation of this alien ideal of manhood ever deeper in his brain. 

Right after he shared this story, he shared another thought which he considered unconnected. They were watching an animal documentary in biology and the kids in his class were cringing and shielding their eyes when the predator pounced upon and began eating the prey. Isaac’s comment was: “Its funny how most people eat animals but then get upset when they see animals eating other animals.” Good insight. 

Scott Douglas says, “People think the civil rights movement and all these epochal movements involve conscience, and they do, but they also involve consciousness. I mean, you can’t struggle against what you’re unaware of.” We have to become conscious to the ways we keep one another in line, the ways we measure ourselves and one another. The animals in the documentary need their prey for food, it is not clear to me what we need when we pounce and tear at one another. Perhaps when this girl was attacking Isaac she was struggling with her own two-ness, the measuring voices in her head and heart.

Question the Phantom

So, Isaac, my white son, with a lovely suburban life, feels a two-ness, feels the world always measuring. Writing about this, entering into this personal struggle for myself and for Isaac and many others can help me identify with an aspect of the twoness that Du Bois describes, but it is not the same. I think it is not the same because in these examples, Isaac and I are warring with ideals and fictions, not real people. Of course, the girl in the hall was not a fiction. People like me and you, the boy who spit on me, the girl who insulted Isaac—have to embody these images and pounce upon those who fail to measure up. But the images themselves are phantoms. Soren Kierkegaard’s “crowd is untruth” comes to mind. When did the group vote on the proper bicep circumference? I think I missed that meeting. Or when did our group leader pass down the holy law of white male success? Well, I no longer trust his authority. 

In dealing with this twoness, the twoness of the individual, I wonder if the way forward is to question. The oppressor is a spook. He is nobody. If we question him, he will dissolve into smoke. (Of course, it takes great courage to live this way). 

What Du Bois is writing about does involves fictions and phantoms, but ultimately it is real people who are struggling inside one body and one nation. Our nation and neighborhoods, businesses and churches are divided by race and gender, by class, by documents, by birth, by age. I don’t think these divisions can be overcome unless we try and see what we look like in the eyes of the other. The way forward, at least for me and others who perpetuate Du Bois two-ness, is to listen. 

Home Problem

Before this quote from Du Bois he talks about how when white people talk to him, whether they are progressives or antagonistic, they are always trying to find the words to ask one question: “How does it feel to be a problem?” (Du Bois, 7) Maybe Du Bois would even say that their questions was “How does it feel to not belong.” 

But why? The reality is this is our nation. This is our home. Can we find some way to say, no, no! You are not a problem. 

Embracing Double-Consciousness

For some reason, stories of the poor and wrongly treated, who, sometimes, are also the courageous and the righteous, have always had an inroad to my heart. My mom and dad were both first generation to go to college. One granddaddy drove a bulldozer and then did maintenance for GE. My other granddaddy drove a bus and then worked at Peterbuilt. If you go back farther into history, my people were tenant farmers. Somewhere in the past is even a story of the landowner trying to cheat two brothers out of their share of the crop. Until his red blood fell to the ground. Then it was one brother supporting the family, and the other brother sitting in prison. There is only so much injustice poor people can handle from those who seem to have it all. 

Du Bois is writing about something that was forced on him and I do not intend to take that away from him. It is clear the pain he shares in his book. I am trying to find my way into his words. What I really want is to flip the feeling he is writing about. His struggle and his two-ness is forced on him. I want to ask for it. All of us are born into a world divided and all of us will struggle with double-consciousness, but for some of us our skin or our gender won’t let us forget it. For others, there is the possibility of hiding it from ourselves. I go back to my question, is there a great loss in not seeking out the two-ness that comes from seeing myself through Du Bois vision. 

Bilingual Beauty

There is a famous contemporary philosopher named Charles Taylor. He is from Montreal so he grew up speaking both French and English and he believes there is a deep goodness growing up bilingual. He described how important it was to see that everything could be said in two different ways. I am not bilingual, but I know that interpretation is difficult. It was not always word for word. Sometimes entire concepts and philosophies are held in a single word in one language and there is no one word translation; words like: male and female, right and wrong, even “I’m sorry.” These simple words are often very difficult to hear and to translate.

Maybe some of this double-consciousness, what Du Bois calls earlier in the book, “the gift of second sight” means having a bilingual soul. 

At the end of The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin writes about the race struggle coming to a match point in 1963. He quotes Du Bois: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Baldwin continues “A fearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world.” And just before the very end, just before that famous quote about how we might “end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country.” He says when he was very young, seeing the brutality of the world and its malice toward black people, he wondered: 

What will happen to all that beauty? For black people, though I am aware that some of us, black and white, do not know it yet, are very beautiful. (Baldwin 105)

For lack of really listening to others, especially those who are marginalized, ridiculed or kept invisible, we, as a nation, have become impoverished. The beauty itself could be lost, but I don't think it will. But it will be hidden and it will suffer. 

So I want to listen when Mr. Baldwin says: “What will happen to all that beauty?”