We are, all of us, prejudiced.
There. I’ve said it.
It’s a simple fact, really, yet one that we’re unwilling to
admit. The reason for our obstinance, I propose, is that we have falsely
conflated the ubiquitous reality of prejudice with the much rarer reality of
bigotry. They’re not the same thing. Prejudice is merely the tendency (habit,
even) of prejudging, while bigotry is the unwillingness to recognize and overcome
prejudice, and then behaving in ways that demonstrate that unwillingness.
Prejudice, in fact, may be built-in, an evolutionary advantage
that allows us to create patterns based on previous experience. To “pre-judge”
strange sounds or strange people gives us an opportunity to flee, and while
that may sound rude (or even racist) in today’s world, it sounds pretty damn
smart when judging early man on the African veldt, where strange sounds might
just augur something very dangerous indeed, something that might wish to dine
on his very bones. A bit of pre-judging—rather than waiting around to find out—might
just make the difference as to where he spends the night—at home all comfy with
his friends and relatives, or slowly rotting while a buzzard’s beak picks at
his remaining entrails.
I’ve encountered this revelation (redux, as you’ll see)
after reading two more Pulitzer Prize winners. Neither impressed me terribly,
but they certainly impressed upon me.
The first was the previously mentioned Advise
and Consent (begun but set aside a couple of weeks ago, then finally picked
up again) and the second, the more recent Middlesex.
You may recall that I expected Advise and Consent to be something of a “humdinger”; I was mostly
right. (The book even used the word “humdinger” on one occasion.) The story—about
the political machinations associated with confirming the President’s
appointment for Secretary of State—is filled with the detailed inner-workings
of the Senate, overlaid with a bit of McCarthy-ish melodrama involving
blackmail, communism, and homosexuality. The character that helped feed my
prejudicial distaste wasn’t, however (as you might have prejudicially assumed),
the Senator with the homosexual history; it was instead Seab Cooley, the aged
and stubborn Senator from South Carolina.
When Cooley’s picture is first painted you learn little
about him. He’s stubborn. He holds a grudge. He’s powerful. He’s intensely…
southern. Without realizing it, though, I filled in other parts of the
paint-by-number. I assumed he had gotten somewhat
dotty. I assumed he was something of a racist. I assumed he survived through
self-interest. I assumed he was Republican.
All of these assumptions were wrong. In fact, by the end of
the book, Seab Cooley was a guy I respected. Someone I might even, just a
little bit, aspire to be like.
Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex
was altogether different, and nothing like what I expected when I picked up the
book; the cover and title anticipated something English and (possibly)
Victorian (the result of yet another prejudice, no doubt). Instead, the novel
is the ostensible memoir of Callie/Cal, a hermaphrodite. “Middle sex.” Get it?
Callie (I’ll stick with that name for simplicity, and because “she” dominates
about 80% of the novel) is of Greek heritage, just a skipped generation removed
from a brother—sister marriage, a coupling which provides the genetic narrative
necessary to produce her. Pediatrically treated by a kindly but largely
incompetent doctor, the condition (which has subtle but clinically obvious
physical realities) remains overlooked until her early teens, at which time she
makes the decision to personify as Cal (while remaining physically unchanged).
I admit to a subtle queasiness over the topic and the
character, the press of a societal button installed when I was very young. It
made me think of other reactions I’ve had in the past—particularly those from
my teen and college years when I was less self-aware and more visceral. When,
Pavlovian-like, I reacted negatively to outward displays of “not normal”
behavior.
Sad, isn’t it?
*****
This is an essay that I’ve wanted to write for a long time.
The first draft (penciled in a composition book that I can no longer find)
first emerged on a Maine shoreline during a years-ago Labor Day weekend. I’d been
sitting on some rocks just beyond the back porch of the house we had rented for
a week’s vacation, watching the tide slowly ebbing, and a lobster boat circling
the bay. A man stood smoking on the deck of the boat, and I watched him take a
long, last drag before flicking the butt overboard. He wore overalls and a
baseball cap, the former white and the latter grey.
I built a story for that man—as we all often do—giving him a
family, friends, childhood memories, political beliefs. I scribed him where he
stood. In doing so I built on every stereotype I pretended to know about
someone who would grow up and become a Maine lobsterman. I imagined him with
barely a high school diploma and a thick accent, someone who rarely read a book
but was kind to his wife and three kids. His house, I was sure, needed painting,
and he wasn’t above a few beers after a rough day on the water. The overall
effect was of someone whom you might just barely see in an old episode of Murder, She Wrote, hazily out of focus
at a diner counter, drinking coffee and reading the paper while Angela Lansbury
puzzled over some not-quite-right whodunit clue.
A pleased limner, I re-read the description, changing a
couple of words here and there, never once thinking about how I was building my
character.
It was later that evening that I thought about exactly what
I had done, how I had created a character from a nearly still image and the
flick of a cigarette butt, using as material unknown (but obviously learned)
habits of prejudice and composition. I had no sudden regret, of course: such
construction is what we writers do. It’s our sera, our pulse beat. But I was
taking note in a larger way, just for a moment, imagining the many other times
I’d done the same thing, and not because I was working creatively, but because
I was just reacting. Why, as a twelve-year-old kid a bit on the scrawny side, did
I get a lump in my throat when, walking home alone from the park, I saw a trio
of black kids about my age, walking towards me? Why, as a teenager (and
recently Bar Mitzvah-ed myself), did I snicker behind my hand when approached
by several Chassidic Jews asking if I wanted to pray with them? Why as a hormonal
high-schooler, did I believe the rumors about Sharon, who wore those
loose-fitting halters and walked around without a bra, but always treated me as
a friend?
And why was it years later that I first asked myself such
questions?
I truly believe that people who argue they have no prejudice
are like horses wearing blinders, unaware that they can’t see what they can’t
see, blithely moving forward, and that such attitudes are every bit as
dangerous to society as outright bigotry. Perhaps even more so. Outright
bigotry, you see is… well… outright. It’s seen and heard, and abhorred. But it
is also, somehow, managed, in part because it is so obvious. Prejudice is more
subtle and therefore more invasive. It is cultural norm, and so must be where
the battle is fought. But that battle is in each of us; it’s a fight of
self-reflection and self-honesty.
The sad part isn’t that a middle-aged man sat in his leather
chair reacting with prejudice at a Southern politician or a Midwestern hermaphrodite.
Those reactions, unfortunately, are to be expected. The sadness is that there
are so many who won’t admit they have such reactions, and so can never help
society to overcome them.
Read since last post:
- Advise and Consent, Allen Drury (1960)
- Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides (2003)
Currently reading:
- The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
- Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)
Count: 64 read, 23 to go
Photo courtesy of 123RF Stock Photo
Note: for those interested in discussing the intersection of written words, politics, and social issues, Coffee Party USA has re-established the Coffee Party Book Club.
Note: for those interested in discussing the intersection of written words, politics, and social issues, Coffee Party USA has re-established the Coffee Party Book Club.
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