"Sound and fury, signifying something" -- a dialogue on race in new jersey

i work in a place whose diversity rivals that of new york city. paterson, nj supposedly is home to 58 different nationalities. i learn from the joys and challenges of working in a diverse place where my identity as white and middle class status is not the norm. but i often struggle or ask myself what is really going on beneath the surface when so many people of different races mix so regularly.

a reporter i know (and a member of the YMCA where i work) recently wrote about language and diversity (published in the herald news on august 30th), using Y locker room talk as a springboard for a real dialogue about race. i believe he answers some of questions...
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By TIM NORRIS

I'm eavesdropping on a locker room conversation, one guy showing another his girlfriend's picture on a cell phone, a younger man talking about how he struggles to find reliable help for his restaurant, another talking about his nephew playing in a big all-star game in Las Vegas, three others piping about woman trouble, an older man cautioning against contradicting an officer of the law.

And I'm lost.

Everybody in the locker room in this YMCA is speaking English, and, at times, I feel as if I can't understand them.

"I'm telling ya, bruh, both y'all's messed up."

"Turn up the radio, yo!"

"Was' up, G?"

"Hooo, she ALL 'o that!" There is much laughter, and teasing, and dramatic exchange.

I stand there like a lump of vanilla with a locker.

I am, for starters, the only identifiably white guy in the room, and I suddenly feel as if I have Wonder Bread stuffed in my ears, as if I have mayonnaise for brains.

My skin, of course, is not just white, but thin. I am plucking out these words and phrases by tweezer; nearly everything else they say to each other has no ethnic flavor.

Still, I feel pathetically and unforgivably white.

This is at least the third time. The second time I felt white was being referred to, in a college seminar on race in the early '90s, as "European-American." I remember feeling a little affronted, as if I'd had some self-serving, makeshift term slapped on me, one meant to diminish my individuality and squeeze me into some stereotype. Never mind that I'm supposed, for instance, to have an ancestor who was Menomonie Indian.

I opened my mouth back then to protest, and then shut it. What social groups, after all, have gone through years of wearing labels based on ethnic origin? And what other social groups have APPLIED them?

European-Americans, maybe, among others. Now we wear labels of our own.

It isn't just a label that's trouble, of course. Any culture with a language becomes a label-maker. We define, limit, assign to categories, slot and dispose. We have all sorts of government and corporate help. Nearly every form or application forces us to check a box under "Race," to assign ourselves a label and to see others as labeled, too, all of us squeezed into little boxes.

Just statistics, right? The real trouble, I suppose, is when we shade the labels negative.

In the locker room, that afternoon, I continue to feel bleached out. The problem, I realize, isn't what they're saying. The problem is what I'm hearing.

They're bilingual, and I'm not. They have had to learn to live and think and feel in two worlds, and I haven't.

The first time I felt white was in conversation with a fellow reporter, Reg Davis, on a paper in the Midwest more than 30 years ago. Reg was bright, optimistic, talented and, among other things, the first reporter of color I ever worked with. I hadn't even met a person of color, in fact, until I started college.

Reg and I were talking about race, and at one point, replying to his despair over being dismissed as inferior, I said something on the order of, "I know how you're feeling." I remember him frowning at me, narrowing his eyes and saying, "You will NEVER know what it's like to be me. I know exactly what it's like to be you."

I felt that same momentary affront. I opened my mouth that time, too, and I spoke through it. How dare he tell me what I can and can't understand?

Since we were friends, and since he knew I'd grown up culturally deprived in a series of all-white suburbs, he answered.

Every time he's singled out, he said, he wonders: Is it because I'm me, or because I'm black? Every time he's turned down for a job or a date or a loan, every time somebody else gets the apartment or reservation or favor he wants, any time a cop pulls him over, every time he's denied or insulted, he wonders. Me, or my skin?

We of the Caucasian variety, he said, don't even think about "white." We call that "normal." He was coming out of more than a century of bogus science and sociology, of men and women being labeled by so-called "percentage" of so-called "black or Negro blood," when birth records carried words such as "mulatto" (mixed blood) and "quadroon" (one-fourth black) and "octoroon" (one-eighth black), based on lineage. Those labels were sometimes used to deny land ownership, or hiring or the vote. You can find those listings as recently as the 1960s. They were designed, among other things, to keep anyone with a dark skin down.

A University of Wisconsin geneticist, J.F. Crow, once said something unforgettable to me in an interview: "Biologically, race is a myth. We are all rainbows of genetic variation." We have, in other words, the whole pool of humankind, back to the beginning, sloshing around in each of us.

Myths, of course, can pack a wallop. They can insult, diminish, threaten, even kill people.

They can also make people who buy into the difference feel scared, or angry or at least uncomfortable, the way I was in the locker room just then.

I felt out of it in another way, too. The other men seemed to share something else foreign to me: brotherhood. Not to overdo it, I couldn't help noticing some affectionate greetings, some collegial use of "brother," a mutual sense of support. It reminded me of the '60s "soul" handshakes that evolved into bumps and elaborate hand-play and extended into society as high-and-low-fives and chest bumps in an ever-evolving series of publicly expressed affection and solidarity.

Since I am so white-bread (although I have always LIKED white bread) and have sprung from mostly reticent races, the English and Norwegian and Welsh and French-Canadian and Scottish, and grew up in mostly regimented situations, I go lighter than I might on the emoting. And I still content myself with the straightforward "grip-test" handshake of Caucasian legions worldwide.

Several in the room with me that day might be like that, too, a little formal, a little shy, but I found myself focusing on differences. Beyond basic skin color (which, I've always argued, comes in a wide spectrum and NEVER purely in black or white), speech was the most obvious.

"'Was' up, brother?"

Long debate

Debate over a particularly "black" English goes back a-ways. In 1924, a linguist aptly named George Phillip Krapp identified a Negro language originating, he theorized, as the "baby talk" of slaves imitating their masters. His kind of thinking prevailed. Look at comic books from the '20s, '30s and '40s and you'll be struck by the caricatures of black men and women in advertisements, some with misshapen heads and big white lips and huge round eyes. To our eyes they are grotesque and inflammatory.

I didn't inherit that extreme view, but I grew up prejudiced, anyway, in a prejudiced family in a prejudiced culture. We pre-judged anyone with a dark skin as being (a) differently human and (b) more childlike or primitive and (c) less intelligent and cultured. We had plenty of encouragement, including government and religious pronouncement and popular entertainment and advertising.

On the matter of race, regardless, we were idiots.

In the 1970s the language debate shifted, into an approach to black vernacular English called "ebonics." The school board in Oakland, Calif., started a firestorm in 1996 with a plan to use ebonics in its schools, hoping to raise the involvement and achievement of inner-city black students. Most linguists now agree that the urban black patois is a language of its own, with its own grammar and syntax, evolved from the African and European languages and, further, the founding tongues that inform all human speech. Geoff Pullum, a professor of linguistics at the University of California Santa Cruz, says people who mock ebonics have "confused lexicon with syntax, accent with dialect, difference with deficiency, and grammar with morality. They made amply clear the deep hostility and contempt whites feel for the way underclass blacks speak."
Given the schism over Spanish speaking, advocating that we become tri-lingual might sound like an invitation to an ear-boxing.

Still, as a good friend of mine says, why should language and culture be an "either-or?" Why can't it be a "both-and?" Why can't we enjoy more of the variety, the arts, the food, the music, the conversation? Well, for starters, we would have to respect the speaker, the way we would any other member of the human family. And we would have to open ourselves to learning it ... or at least to feeling comfortable when others speak it.

In that YMCA locker room I am lucky, I realize, to be among men who talk freely to each other without becoming self-conscious over a white listener, without feeling they are representing their race to an outsider. I also realize that each of them, at different times, has talked to me in my own language, "white" English, fluently and easily, about taxes and teenage children and good places to eat and getting a car repaired. I might not be ready for the fist bump, or the strident exchanges, and I can't call someone "bruh" or say "yo, G" without feeling like an insecure, pretentious wannabe. But I've found an easy way to start connecting.

Reg Davis explained one other thing to me, years ago: the meaning of "call me by my name." With the group at the Y, I don't remember all of their names, yet. I'm bad on that. But I make it a point to keep asking, and I'm learning. Each one of them, I realize, speaks in his own voice, from his own experience. One of these days I might tiptoe beyond a "How ya DOIN'?" and try a "Hey, what's happening?" A baby step, right? A step, not in the black-or-white direction, but in the right direction.

Reach Tim Norris at norrist@northjersey.com