Black and White

[Glenn Scheper]

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_watts.html
_Pynchon - Essays: "Journey into the Mind of Watts"_

I am afraid to write.
But silence is my worst enemy.

I have glee that I have intimate knowledge,
then shame over the conceit of knowledge,
and fear also that I overestimate it.

But I am white. My wife is black.
We have radically different ways.

How could it have happened to me?

My father went to some pain to avoid blacks,
so that I was raised in an all-white world.
"Separate but equal" leaves equality unable
to be examined. "A = B?" But there is no B.

As I said, my family moved from San Pedro to
Santa Monica "for the schools" but that hides
an aspect I now recall: I cannot recall any
black faces in school, save in the abstract,
the possibility that there would have been
some. Not like in Hawthorne, near the family
laundromats, where I still recall an oddness
of seeing many blacks at the public library.

I recall my fathers mention of comparative
brain sizes as one of the overt markers of
a low-key inner orientation of prejudice.
Not that one should deny laudable goals of
equality; quietly harboring, accumulating,
distinctions that one might blandly label
"risk-assessment". Don't go around blacks.
That's dangerous. They are unpredictable,
liable to be violent. Stay home. Be safe.

Sometimes I think my honey is the worst
thing that happened to me; or the best.
I cast my net of words over her, and she
punches her way out. How are we different?
I mean, very different, but how is either
position to be valorized absolutely, not
relative to hegemonic & other viewpoints?

(expletive warranted), I wish I had the answer.

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
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