Prelude to a conversation

 

Dear _________,

 

My calling you was an act of desperation.  Lately, I am only at peace when I talk with someone whose friendship is extremely special.  Strangely, that peace doesn't occur in speaking with my first cousins once removed.

 

You are one of the very few people with whom I share uncensored  ideas, share  my intimidations of mortality.  Note that I allude to Wordsworth's final lines in "My Heart Leaps Up"----

 

The Child is father to the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

 

and their use in the epigraph for "Ode: Intimations of Immortality."  I am no Romantic.  I am stuck with how mortality intimidates and have a lot of commerce with being mortal.  I do not delude myself about transcending the terms of engagement with reality and actuality that I set for myself.  As horrible as life is,  I am content to live in dread.  Richard Wright taught and continues to teach me well.  Without waiting for an answer, I  pose the question-----If the child is father to the man, which daughter is mother to the woman?  Thus we entertain the whiteness of whiteness.

 

The spectacle of this whiteness unhinged me on January 6; listening to such conservative thinkers as John McWhorter, Jason Riley, and Ralph Richard Banks on C-SPAN 2 ( December 16, 2020 program ) unhinged me even more.  They were unfair, I think, in their condemnations of CRITIAL RACE THEORY. CRT is not unified; it has many warts to be sure;  nevertheless, it does ask questions that only the stupid contend are not appropriate for the 21st century.   All that I got from the program is that makers of extremely academic discourses about theory  do not know  or care duck-crap about the sufferings of the men who collect my garbage each week.  Garbage collectors and people who dispose of what we manufacture in sewerage systems possess a natural equality with ourselves.  Our academic preoccupations trick us into assigning them to different class and caste coordinates in the scheme of reality.  I find little reason to be proud of this posture.   I find every reason to be ashamed of it.  Is the guilt I feel nonsensical, absurdly irrational?  I never asked myself that question during the four decades of my teaching career.  I simply followed my mother's injunction to help those who were less fortunate than I was  and sought to help them in accord with my notions of tough-love. One ought not blame the victim unfairly; one ought to help the victim escape from the prison of being a victim.

 

I  applaud  you for continuing to teach inside and outside classrooms with intelligence, a secure sense of histories,  and clarity that is essential for the 21st century. I commend you for being radical beyond any disabling box that liberal , centrist and conservative thinkers  blissfully  cooperate in constructing to enslave our minds.

 

With gratitude,

 

Jerry

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