The Juntoo

The notion that racism not only still exists, but is systemically pervasive in this liberal land of my youth, this hearty soil out of which, by dint of the shared fortuity of our well-placed birth, all my neighbors, men and women alike, emerge inviolably equal and free, is one of which I’d lately found myself disabused.

Previously, the belief I held in the received wisdom of this “truth”—a truth to whose defense, I’ll not hesitate to admit, I once lent all the ardor of my empathy and the vigor of my pen—was unshakeable. In it, I believed wholeheartedly. From it, I simply couldn’t be moved. I wouldn’t dare question the veracity of its motives, the strength of its cause, nor the legitimacy of those great progressive thinkers by whom it was so passionately conveyed, of whose irrefragable brilliance I was, until recently, so fully convinced.

As of late, however, the strength of this once redoubtable belief—as well as the floridity of the language in which it was dressed and the intentions of those by whom was so rigorously tailored—has diminished. It’s grown weaker as my mind’s taken it into deeper consideration, increasingly barren as it’s met the unclouded vision of my eye. With the application of good evidence, research, statistics, contrary arguments, and more reasonable thoughts forwarded by eminently more reasonable people, it’s been undressed down to the skin (which, as I suppose, is what it’s really all about). Now, every part of it is visible in the glow of a newfound light, every sinew susceptible to the examination it’s so long eluded. It’s to be seen in the honesty of all of its constituent parts.

It appears, thus, to be vulnerable, fearful, empty, and deservedly fated to the imminence of its decline.

In a desperate effort, those vaunted progressive thinkers of whom I made prior note, for whom I once held such high regard, are attempting to combat this fate. It’s their mission never to let racism die. They’ll not abide its natural dissolution and its withering away. They believe in its immortality, its undying applicability, and they’ll fight for these ends. When cracked, they’ll pick up its pieces, into which they’ll breathe fresh life once again. When challenged, they’ll defend its deceits, around which too many brave thinkers have been rendered reticent and cautious.

They want, instead, to revitalize it and to use it every day, in every conceivable context. It’s a garb, a lament to be worn at all hours and in all seasons. There is no time when it suits its wearer ill. It’s to be a constant raiment in which they can clad themselves any day or night, an impenetrable façade by which the emptiness of their own ideas might be all the better concealed.

Racism, it’s said, is an unfortunate fact, but an unconquerable armor, a doughty metal jacket through which no argument can ever fully penetrate. It is, in this way, the last refuge of the feeble debater, the maladroit swordsman uncertain of the aim and power of his argument’s thrust. His attacks, while aimless, can afford not to hit their target, so long as he himself can’t be struck down. No matter how empirically sharp, each argument levied against the idea of systemic racism in America that he promotes finds itself bent, if not broken, in the process. It never seems capable of cutting at the truth, of drawing blood and making us feel. And so, dejectedly, it walks away, hardly if ever being equal to the battle in which it was so inauspiciously engaged.

Yet, all that being said, the argument in favor of America’s systemic attachment to racism has been enfeebled, time and again. Still it dons its raiment, but it does so with carelessly and with misplaced pride. A thousand tiny cuts of truth to which—no matter the pigment it promotes—all flesh is unavoidably heir, have opened a view into what lies beneath. In these deeper parts, there’s little with which the hopeful, Liberal eye is to be met. There is no body of fact by which his dizzied convictions might be affirmed.

Finally, we step back in order again to gaze upon the scene. We’re startled by that which we see. Beneath the expanse of racism’s ill-fitting suit, a threadbare gown through which inquisitive eyes are beginning to penetrate, one sees, at last, its bottom half tremble and its credibility crumble.

In having borne witness to the events of the past few weeks, months, and years, an accrual of time by which this country has been forever and irreparably changed, the effect that this belief once impressed upon my soul, this conviction that racism exists in America and is wholly systemic, had been reduced. Less a full-bodied account of this nation as it is than a half-baked narrative of what it was or might be, less an esculent truth than an ersatz whim, it had become a political fiction behind which nothing substantive, certainly nothing empiric, stood. It had become a charge, the severest of which a nation built on the noble ideals of “universal equality” and “justice for all” can accuse itself, by which I’d become increasingly unconvinced.

It seemed to me that specific instances of racism, examples onto which, without hesitation, our collective opprobrium and detestation would be immediately poured, were more often than not imaginary. To put it bluntly, with consistency, they weren’t true. We were emptying our outrage into a bottomless vat, a deep well of feeling and emotion around which nothing solid nor reasonable was ever built. For every one supposedly “racist” encounter of which we, an extraordinarily sensitive and tolerant people, would be made aware, two spurious events would gather steam and demand the frayed edges of our attention. It was like the monstrous Hydra of Grecian myth, out of whose every decapitated head, two more would spring.

With dizzying rapidity, these supposed racist events would be circulated through, though seldom deeply investigated by, the news media—an industry for whose bottom line, frankly, racism is all too enticingly lucrative a topic. These pseudo-events of which overt acts of racism were the subject, these specious tales by which America’s incorrigible attachment to this discrimination based on color was repeatedly demonstrated and confirmed, proved to be exactly that—illegitimate and unreal.

I’ll not bore you with the specific examples (with whose tired plotlines and predictable scripts, you’ve likely become familiar) in my defense of this point. They include notes affixed to the windshields of cars and open letters sent to Oregonian politicians. They include gymnastic ropes suspended from trees, and deaths by suicide confused with murders by lynching. They include nooses dangling with innocent intent from the beams of garage ceilings, to matutinal muggings of an Empire actor. They include messages left on restaurant bills, and confrontations with Amazon workers. They include these examples, and so many uncreative more.

Given that none of the aforementioned proved itself a legitimately racist event, I found myself, if only cautiously, heartened. I was happy to know that they didn’t actually occur and, in acknowledging this, my spirits were raised. It was a trend by which I was increasingly buoyed. Strangely, this placed me somewhat at odds with the rest of society, for whom the untruthfulness of these events appeared to be, oddly enough, an acute source of disappointment. The rest of America, it seemed, had been hoping for them to be true, if only to have them lend credence to a narrative for which we might flagellate our broken selves.

Nevertheless, the lack of “meat” on the bones of these stories, the dearth of the evidence by which they might be confirmed, was a deficiency by which I was greatly encouraged. It spoke to the fact that, perhaps, “racist attacks” in America—at least those kinds described by the creative dexterity of those by whom they were invented—aren’t nearly as inveterate and pervasive as we’d been led to believe. Maybe, just maybe, they were neither as constant nor omnipresent as once we were made to think them to be. Gladsome in the quiet acknowledgement of this fact, I thought I was finally seeing a truth, starkly at odds with that pushed by the media, by which the image of my abused country might be rehabilitated and saved.

My optimism, then, was on the ascendant, or so it was until I heard the remarks of which the network television host and podcast provocateur, Nick Cannon, unbosomed himself. He alone proved premature my rosy conclusion that racism was vanishing from the American mind. Now a notion of which I’ve been fully disabused, my opinion changed after hearing him give to the expression of his thoughts a most sincere treatment. He showed me that racism, sadly, does still exist. He opened my ears to the fact that it does still leap from the mouths of prominent figures and is gaining through their circulation a formidable strength.

At length, Cannon spoke of a race of etiolated white people who, having ascended the mountains of Eurasia, unwittingly deprived themselves of the salubrious effects of the sun. At this newly-acquired altitude, they became pallid, effeminate weaklings, a group of golems incapable of the grandeur of their earlier equatorial feats. That, he said, was the consequence of having taken as their home the Caucuses Mountains, a large expanse of snow-capped boulders between the Black and Caspian Seas. As an aside, this is the geologic structure from which the demonym Caucasian derives.

There, in the elevation not only of their physical altitude but their psychological conceit, these proto-white people shed not only their humanity, but their melanin. The latter was no longer needed, and the former dissolved with its shedding; northern climes demand of an epidermis less toilsome access to the rays of the sun. A protein of which, all of a sudden, these early Caucasians found themselves completely drained, melanin (in the a-scientific opinion of Cannon) actually did much more than absorb an excess of ultraviolet solar radiation.

Melanin, he declared, is mixed and infused with the sparkling droplets of “compassion”, an emotion in which, as we’ve recently learned, every white person is so obviously deficient. The natural accompaniment of melanin is compassion, or, as he more poetically put it, “soul”. Black people have more of it, and thus more familiarity with humankind and the ineffability of its suffering. These are the things to which the Black man’s “soul” makes him privy. White people have less of it and, thus, less of a conception of that same brother and sisterhood of which they fail commensurately to partake.

We’ll have to take on the strength of his pronounced wisdom this unobservable fact. What we know, if we’re to take seriously his claim, is that Blacks have a sensitivity toward the plight of their common man to which that of Whites could never be tuned. The heart of the Black man is empathic and beautiful; that of the Caucasian, ugly and callous. The former is that of a saint, the latter that of a brute. The one is compassionate, the other is not and, by extension, the one is human, the other less so.

I wish the foregoing line was a dramatization of what Cannon said, a mere inference based on the veiled scurrility of his words. It is not. Cannon went on overtly to claim that White people, in their lack of melanin, are predestined to be “a little less…” As to precisely what they’ll be “less” of, he failed to make himself immediately clear. Mercifully, the elision didn’t remain long unfulfilled.

As it turns out, Whites are “less” in just about everything, save moral turpitude. He went on to say that White people are, “lacking in self-esteem”, “acting out of fear”, and have knowledge only in the ways of evil toward which they’re naturally inclined. They have to resort to robbing, stealing, raping, and killing if they’re to ensure their own preservation. Apparently, this isn’t completely their own fault; this is a life to which their genes and climate have predestined them. They’re caught under the persuasion of a biological force. Nevertheless, it is a list of crimes, the foulest of which man can be accused, on which their very survival is dependent. Whites were born and conditioned to be “savages” and inheritors of a “barbaric” culture—to which, of course, that of the more pronouncedly “melanated” people is far superior.

They, not Blacks, are the more bestial of the races. They mark the stunted growth, the cruel retardation seen in the course of our evolutionary tree. Their atavism is to be scorned, their lack of development, mocked. In their proximity to non-human animals, the slack-jawed beasts away from whom our species is supposed to have diverged, Whites can draw a shorter line. Theirs is a much more direct lineage than that of Blacks, or of any other more darkly pigmented people, for that matter. Whites are the modern Cro-Magnons, the boorish troglodytes by which our beloved civilized man was once preceded. They are the knuckle-dragging, phallus-slinging, feces-grinning barbarians to whom the noble title of “man” is, for all intents and purposes, wholly inapplicable.

To make his message clear, Cannon concluded by saying that Whites are “the ones who are actually closer to animals…they’re the ones who are actually the true savages”. With the confidence of a scientist, and the conceit of an evangelical, he concluded with these self-assured words this infamous screed.

Ignoring, for a moment, the identity of Cannon—the author by whom these startling lines were given voice—one might think them the product of a less-enlightened mind, from a less-enlightened century. One can easily imagine them spilling from the lips of a figure like Arthur Gobineau, the French aristocrat and racial theorist to the perversity of whose mind, the bloodiest parts of twentieth-century owed much of their philosophy.

Gobineau believed, among so many other repellent things, that race bred culture, and that between the three races observable on Earth (Black, Yellow, and White), there was an unbridgeable gap. The distance simply couldn’t be traversed, so great was their inherent chasm.

As a White European man, one could reasonably guess the race to which he gave the highest priority. White, in his opinion, was best; the unpolluted Nordic type, still better. The secondary race in his ranking was the Yellow, or the Asian, while the tertiary and lowest was the Black. In the most patronizing of terms, he applauded the former’s cupidity, the latter’s physicality, but he had little to say of the endowments of their intellect. He assumed such mental faculties to have been withheld from them and unobtainable, regardless of their efforts. He thought, shockingly, that their best features were their interactions with Whites, with whom, despite his severest discouragement, they might copulate, and by whom, with any luck, they might be improved.

He, like Cannon, spouted the same biologically deterministic rubbish; A man is not his own being, but a product, merely, of the darker or lighter hue of his skin. Replacing “compassion” with “wisdom”, Gobineau attributed the higher refinement of the intellect to less, as opposed to more melanin in the skin. Both thought in the same way and spoke the same language, albeit a century and a half removed.

As did Gobineau in the twentieth, Cannon has proven me wrong in the twenty-first century. Racism does exist, and so do racists. They do so in the form of aristocratic Frenchmen or millionaire television hosts. They do so among those from whom, absent better alternatives, we persist in taking our cultural cues. They do so among the professed “elites” of society, from whom we ought not to expect much better. There’s no longer an argument against this truth. It’s a fact, sorrowfully, to which I’ll have to learn to harden myself.

The age of the university is approaching its end. Its expiration is imminent, its decline forthcoming. Years from now, when it becomes a time upon which we turn and look back, a moment on whose present and obvious moribundity we quietly reflect, we’ll tremble with the recognition that we lived to see it die.

Like the aged parent by whom the devout child is naturally pre-deceased, we’ll bear witness to the decay of this once beloved and august institution, this wonderful alma mater—literally, this bountiful mother—by whose continued and nurturing fecundity, the mind of the West had been sustained. It was in her womb that the coarseness of our earliest thinking was so gently refined, behind the girth of whose maternal power, we sheltered and grew. We became what we are today—a subtle, philosophical, and deeply reflective people, a species to whom all ideas are tolerable, and all opposition, welcome—and we became this because of her.   

This period of gestation, not nine months, but many centuries long (spanning, from start till finish, the Medieval period until a few hours ago) was absolutely vital; during it, we developed as a species as never we had before. We layered upon the fragile skeletons of our old inheritance a greatly thickened hide. The brain, that organ bursting with excitable synapses and prickly potential, was strengthened and tuned to immeasurable degrees. We became more than mute troglodytes, scraping our knuckles on the barren tundra of the earth, but the most sophisticated of walking apes of whom this verdant land had yet taken note. We were furnished with wit and word, while the others, to whom we were so manifestly superior, groaned in inarticulate despair. We were the subject of their envy and they, the object of our scorn.

This evolution, this phenomenon of man, was an achievement for which, in great part, we had our university mother to thank. The age of her beauty, was the age of our growth.

Postpartum, the progress continued still; further advanced the cadence of our maturation, a gait upon which, seemingly, no road block could ever infringe. We strode confidently into a future for whose uncertainty, we felt ourselves uniquely well-equipped. Always, she, the university, was the figure by whom we were led. She brought us by the hand, and exposed to us the world about which, previously, we’d known embarrassingly little. It was by her inducement that we were encouraged to jump into it and garner the momentum of its rush. She gave to us the strength to run on unfailing legs, the endurance to look beyond the blurred horizon of our eyes. We took from her our example, a lifetime of instruction, and—in her honor—we set off intrepidly into the depths of the unknown.  

Now, with an inability to intercede on her behalf, and with the glum recognition that she desires nothing better than to step toward the edge, to leap into the fire, and completely to immolate herself in the flames of noxious ideologies and fetid untruths, we watch with sadness the coming of her own demise. It is matricide, yet she kills herself. We see, each day more clearly than the last, her unravelling and her decadence, and her masochistic devotion to the attainment of these ends. Unable to help, unable to steer her in the liberal, salutary directions in which she once steered us, we can do nothing but shutter and gasp. We know that she’ll soon breathe her last mouthful of academic air, a final taste of a sweet vapor, of a delicious wind, by which our lungs were enlivened and our souls restored.

The curtain, so long suspended above her and her age, is falling with a “crash”. We sense the weight of its fabric, as we gaze its plummeting motion from afar. It descends to the orchestral pit above which, for so long a time, it loftily flew. The age of the university is nearing, in distressingly short order, the date of its own self-imposed expiration, a final scene, a suicide-matricide on stage (not unlike that of the Theban Jocasta), toward which it’s been hastening over the course of the past few years. This act of self-violence, carried out in the dread names of radicalism, Marxism, historical revisionism, post-modernism, etc., has only accelerated in the course of the past few months.

Of course, the expiry of this age, the denouement of the university’s human story, is but an end to one chapter of a much larger book. There will be another age, an unturned chapter, a wider vista by which this departing one will be succeeded. The age of the university, despite its earlier virtue, will step away from it, acknowledging that, in its radiant presence, it had become obscure and dark. It had become sclerotic and unwise, narrow and mean, a veritable constraint on the boundless reach of man.

With its demise, the breadth of his potentiality might finally have its space. His freshly liberated mind will exercise, at long last, its natural right to think, to argue, and to arrive at conclusions with which its own character is aligned. It’ll reject all orthodoxies, edicts, and the harsh teachings of which it’d become so servile a recipient. Disentangled of these chains, it’ll climb to higher summits of knowledge, to peaks upon which its stunted muscles and idle sinews can better exert themselves and play.

To this new and coming age, a time during which, with refreshed vigor, the mind will be set to thrive, we’ll give the name the “age of the self-taught”. The age of the university will dissolve before the humility of its title and the simplicity of its aim. It’ll be a pedagogical revolution, with each student finding within himself the essence of his own teacher. Intimacy will replace hierarchy, conscience the university. It’ll be democratic and protestant in this and way, as opposed to the rigid Catholicity of the previous educational structure. There will be no papacy, only the flicker of personal inspiration and charm. It is not the age of the university as an institution, which has long since relinquished its claim to any merit, but of the self-exploring, liberal-thinking, fast-talking, promiscuously-listening, virtuous, and ambitious man. He’ll look not to received dogmas, but to truths with which personal contact can be made.  

He’ll bring forth this age, an age of Autodidacticism, which will soon be in the ascendant. He’ll remember the better values for which the university once stood, and he’ll conserve them so far as he can. He’ll apply their lessons to the improvement of his own education, adorning his mind with the memory of their wealth, but he’ll trim away all the dross and the fat by which they were so heavily burdened and foully corrupted. He wants only that which is gold, that which is worth knowing and grasping.

Once the sole repository of all books, the university has long since relinquished that distinction. It was an aspect, exclusively held, for which it was so long esteemed. No longer is it the only bastion for the literate mind, a building to whose tall doors, the elite alone gained admission. The works over which it claimed proprietorship have become available to the masses. It hasn’t a monopoly on the written word. A local library, lending and exchanging with the other regional libraries with which it enjoys a cordial relationship, plays exactly the same role (at a far cheaper price). This, the public library, is the most under-utilized, overlooked institution to which our clever society has ever given birth. One can’t sufficiently sing its praise and extol its worth.

If materials needed for learning escape the expanse of its fertile walls, they’ll be found with promptitude online. The Internet, despite the easy accessibility of its bubbling filth, is a fount of endless knowledge by which, with a modicum of restraint and an overwhelming sense of purpose, every student could be improved. Anything might be learned with the click of a mouse and the perusal of a screen. Gutenberg’s eponymous site would make the old German printer blush. One need only find within himself the spark of a curious imagination, and all knowledge will be his.

As the age of the university comes to its close, we must find our universities elsewhere. No longer will they be found behind iron gates and ivory towers. Indeed, it is time—as Henry David Thoreau once said—that we had “uncommon schools”, a phrase by which I’m positively tickled. Of course, coming from him, it was a statement befitting an uncommon man. First, however, we must find our schools in ourselves. This, in today’s world, is the most uncommon place of all. That said, it’s the one of whose familiarity we’re most pressingly in need. With the death of the age of the university, we will be re-acquainted. We’re forevermore to be self-taught.

From the mouth of the Buck Mulligan, to the aperture of my ear, the song of my history ever echoes in my head: “My mother’s a Jew, my father’s a bird, and I’m the queerest young fellow that ever you heard”. An earnest warning to you, dear reader, lest you suffer the same fate as me: while short, this line is catchy, and it might not so soon take from you its leave. Brevity, after all, is that which is most conducive to memory, and that which is brief, not to mention eloquent, is often most difficult to shake. And so, again and again the line plays in my head, as I shuffle to its chorus with the jig of my feet.

A lovable utterance, made by an even better-loved man, it’s a line from whose frank simplicity and delicious rhythmic pattern I derive no small satisfaction. Upon reading and re-reading it, and savoring with every exposure the delight of its taste, it never fails to make me smile, to make me laugh, to make me think. These, of course, are the actions by which the musical man, the most poetic of a world’s species, is to be distinguished from the thoughtless contentment of the slack-jawed beast. We, unlike it, walk on feet propelled by the melodious urgings of our souls, looking ever upward to that which we hear, but see not. We feel the radiance of the gilded sun, the euphony of the bulging clouds, the two instruments we can’t understand, between whose forces we’re gaily strung.

“My mother’s a Jew, my father’s a bird, and I’m the queerest young fellow that ever you heard”. If I’m honest, the line has inched quite near to becoming the veritable anthem to my life, a ditty with which my bouncing spirit harmonizes and my dancing heart beats.

Borrowing, as often he did, from the unacknowledged genius and parodic clout of the Irish poet Oliver St. John Gogarty, James Joyce made famous this line. In a work otherwise unencumbered by any real considerations of length, Joyce thought it fitting, on this single occasion, to abridge his compatriot’s poem (originally entitled, The Song of the Cheerful (but Slightly Sarcastic) Jesus) when he placed it at the beginning of his marvelous, anfractuous tome, Ulysses.

Uncharacteristically, further abridgement was made, as Joyce—whose verbosity, like his creativity, knew no bound—shortened and changed the title, calling it instead, The Ballad of Joking Jesus. One must admit, the brevity, so unusual for Joyce’s style of writing, is absolutely becoming. One might go so far as to call it a technique of which, in his more mature years, he might’ve made better use. It seems, in dealing with another man’s work, a quiet piece of brilliance by which any writer—even one as accomplished as Joyce—might be impressed, he could be as sparing and economical as he wanted, and still as memorably deft.   

All that said, it’s no surprise to learn exactly who this “queerest of young fellows” is; his identity, revealed at the ends of both those titles, gives away the game. That queer and happy product of divine and fleshy love, that eccentric preacher in whose development both Jew and Bird played so formative a hand, is none other than Jesus the Nazarene. Of course, one can only wonder about the identity of the paternal “Bird”, that masculine figure to whom both Gogarty and Joyce make reference. Few will identify Joseph, aged husband of Mary, as the sole recipient of that title, most will give it to God. Certainly, all Irishmen would.

Imbued, as all Irishmen are, with that numinous feeling of the Lord’s omnipresence, and reserving for that lofty figure a commensurable degree of awe and respect, it’s doubtful that Gogarty and Joyce would resort to calling Yahweh something so inconstant and flighty as an avian explorer, a winged and chirping “bird”. Not even an atheist would so deprecate the deity against whom, in his heights of passion, he rails. Even if an Irishmen strips himself of all the outward trappings of his native religion, and declares himself an apostate from that Roman faith in which he was reared, he wouldn’t mount so sacrilegious a climb, wouldn’t dare utter so insolent a profanation, all for the honeyed first line of a poem produced by the tip of his pen.

We must conclude, then, that Gogarty and Joyce enjoyed a peculiar relationship with the man in the sky, the man about whom they so lovingly wrote. He and they must’ve been conversant, must’ve enjoyed direct access to one another, as all real poets must. The acquisition of a muse, after all, isn’t merely the product of an artist’s individual effort, despite the endless hours of study to which he might commit himself, or the untold genius of which he might enviably be possessed. More often, a more powerful benefactor, typically a higher and more divine sort, is required for that end. Thus, availed of their muse, they could both supplicate and adore Him, while bantering about his life with bird-like sobriquets.

The question remains: In what way, exactly, does this little poem (to which, I might add, there are quite a few more jauntily laid stanzas), impress itself upon me?

In saying that this poem resonates with me, I don’t mean to imply that I think myself comparable to the subject on which it’s centered, to that “queer fellow” about whom, in rhyming couplets, it so playfully speaks. I don’t think myself hewn in the same Empyrean image of the only begotten Son of God, that apothegmatic rabbi and unfortunate priest for whose imminent return, we find ourselves still patiently waiting. (Will or won’t he eventually arrive? The course of another millennium might sooner let us know).

Far from it; I admit that I’m low, often crude, and always in a state of moral descent. Notwithstanding the curled long length of my brown hair, and the deeply-etched Semitic lineaments with which my skin is carved, there’s no reason that he and I will ever be confused. And, frankly, that’s alright; my head isn’t so beclouded as to lose its path in the hazy dreams of which deification is so enticing an author. I’m not caught in that web of messianic complexes in which so many twirling mortals become entangled and caught. I haven’t aspirations to prophecies, to holidays, to martyrdoms, nor to cultic adulation. A quiet life and a forgetful death, that’s all I want. Blood-soaked passions and apotheosis have no allure to me. I want to think clearly, to live simply, to love sincerely, and to die not for a purpose, but with placidity and ease.

That said, I do have a Jewish mother, next to whom a lovably “bird”-like father has been, so long as I can remember, devotedly perched. And while I, their adoring son, will never be confused for that “queerest of fellows” (in either that word’s original or its currently sexually suggestive sense; the evolution of the word “queer” is a journey in itself to behold), I am the product of their beautiful, heterogeneous union.

It’s from my mother that I receive my Semitic endowments, those traits for which, on most days, I’m grateful. Beginning, however, with that for which I’m least thankful, I received from my mother my height. It’s the one attribute about which there’s embarrassingly little to speak. My stature, at once diminutive and unimpressive, is that of hers, is that of the Levantine and then Southeastern European Jews from whom I’m a descendant. Of course, she, as a female, wears the smallness of her bone structure much better than I ever could. It is, for her, a contribution to her femininity and the light touch of her grace. It is the small but nimble, brilliant but condensed anatomy of a woman undaunted by the largeness of a difficult world.

Not quite Lilliputian, she, like I, is nevertheless in a constant state of looking up, of gazing with neck extended and eyebrows raised to those to whom her height would never even dare think itself equal. Yet, as a woman fully in possession of herself, as a figure whose aura quite exceeds the confines of a body limited in its physical reach, she cares not. Others are more likely to yield to her approach, to bow in the midst of her matriarchal presence. Short though she is, her power is large, and this is something of which all people, irrespective of size, are in unspoken acknowledgement.

For me, as a man, it’s a rather different scenario; so diminutive a stature is rather more unbecoming, rather more emasculating than its thankless recipient might’ve hoped. As I’ve come to learn through many a hard and unfruitful year (a time during which, despite the persistence of my prayers, the slow march of my growth seems to have been stunted) height, an attribute in which I’m so utterly deficient, is quite highly valued in modern society.

For reasons upon which only our evolutionary history could expound, height is thought to be an expedient look into the worth of a man. It helps in the assessment of one’s natural strength. It aids, with a glance, in the discernment of a man’s intelligence, his virility, and his overall value. It is that by which, from a distance or up close, a man about whom there’s any lingering uncertainty is to be judged. Doubtless, this is an imperfect measure, and often wanting in accuracy, but it’s one on which we still rely. As such, it’s absence is not so useful to the man uninterested in the powers of femininity and the ineffability of that sex’s grace. It avails not the man who hasn’t the opportunity to impress his passing comrade with the strength, intelligence, and virility of his mind, with the smooth facility of his tongue.

Height isn’t the only attribute for which I have my mother and her Semitic origins to thank. Beyond the physical merely, there is something spiritual in me as well. I can’t explain it, outside of being a child of the Hebraic nation. Sons of Jewish mothers, we’re told, enjoy an involuntary transfer of a shared Hebraic past and, as such, I believe it’s very deeply rooted in our bones. As such, it’s not a gift of which a grown son such as me, much less the young boy out of whom I emerged, can readily be dispossessed. This matrilineal connection, so uniquely important to the thinking and genealogy of the Jews, can neither be understated, understood, nor overlooked.  

While it’s claimed to have Biblical origins, in recent centuries it’s likely to have served a far more practical purpose. Theology is often secondary when it’s a people’s goal simply to survive. Jewish mothers, increasingly coupled with gentile men, risked losing the Judaic faith of which they were the increasingly sparse inheritors. Their sons, given the option, might easily slide away from that accosted faith, adopting in the process the more convenient belief system of which their fathers were practitioners. This loss of sons was an unexpected means by which the religion’s population might be diluted—along with constant pogroms, drownings, slaughters, and genocides. And, as we’ve unfortunately seen with the images Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Chelmno, the Jewish population is not one equipped to sustain much more loss. It’s astonishing, given the assaults it’s absorbed, that it’s made it as long as it has.  

Thus, excluding all those dizzy exegetical interpretations of the voyage of the Jewish mother’s soul into the heart of her child, it likely was as simple as Partus sequitur ventrem. A Latin phrase, used most recently in the antebellum South for the justification of the enslavement of a bondwoman’s child, it means, “that which is brought forth follows the womb”. Put another way, it means the child retains the religion, race, or station of the mother through whose uterus he passed before touching his feet down to this earth. In America, this perverse legalism was used for many years, and it was done so for two reasons: it allowed white slave-owners to impregnate the black women over whom they held ownership, and to do so without the burden of having to claim and to raise the child as their own. It also invariably added to the slave population, a number to which further trans-Atlantic shipments from Africa were no longer able to contribute.

Not unfamiliar with servitude (many years between the death of Joseph and the rise of Moses, after all, were spent in a state of uncompensated toil in the deserts of Egypt) the Jews may have enacted this designation of Partus sequitur ventrem simply to ensure their progeny and retain its faith. This is but a guess, merely. For further evidence, you’ll need to consult your local rabbinical scholar. I haven’t the acumen to say with certainty that which I propose, but I can speak from experience that this matrilineal mode of transmission does seem to be peculiarly strong—regardless of the reason behind it. There is an indescribable religiosity, a divine feeling by which the son of a Semite is inexorably moved. Is this enough to preserve an entire people and a distressingly secularized batch of sons? Thousands of years, and hundreds of thousands of enemies, will attest that it might very well be. 

I could speak forever of my mother (and, in her opinion, I might just as well) but my father is the one—the “bird”, to borrow the language of Joyce—to whom, dutifully, I now turn. It’s through the contribution of his blood into my veins, the pouring of his breath into my spirit, that I’m made to feel myself a distant cousin of the great artist, Joyce. My father’s the one, with the delightfully musical last name of Finneran, through whom my Irish ancestry echoes still. Resonating from him to me, and from me to all others, it reaches back to the surreal shouts of Joyce, to the haunting whispers of his deathless voice.  

Bearing the name of a Hibernian, I’m probably closer in relation to the author of Dubliners than I could ever hope. His genius, of course, is inconceivably far from my own, and it welcomes neither aping nor approximation, but with a last name like Finneran, I can’t help but feel a sense of kinship with the man who very nearly wrote the indecipherable story of my own personal wake. With the simple replacement of a “g” by an “r”, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake—that sinuous tale by which even the most dauntless of readers have been frustrated—would be an even more intimate story than it is.

One part Irish, another Jewish, we might conclude—humbly taking as an example the proof of my own being—that this union yields an agreeable result. Both have traits by which their people are adorned, and I hope to take from each what’s best. The Irish, it’s said, are a fair people: they never speak well of one another. Unsurprisingly, it was Samuel Johnson, epitome of the English aristocrat, who said that of a people for whom he had little regard. That said, it’s not an unfair assessment; though scathing, the wise Dr. Johnson was never known to be untrue. While it can be said that the Irish are a fair, it must be held that the Jews are a sober people: they never lose the clarity of mind to which a life of persecution compels them. In this, they are unblinking, unfaltering. That which is said of the latter, isn’t typically said of the former, and the reverse is also true. But the Irish get along well enough, especially when bathed in the genial lubricant of drink.

Thankfully, while I’ve inherited from my Irish forbears their geniality, fairness, and—in the words of Johnson—superficial bonhomie, I’ve not yet acquired their famous propensity to the bottle. My Jewish sobriety seems to have quieted that evil to which, thanks to the genes that course through my veins, I’m at least partially predestined. And so, imbibition is no vice of mine, despite a long résumé of other shameful mischiefs and naughty shortcomings with which I might be charged. No race is immune to its ancient misdeeds, and no man is wholly detachable from his race. We mustn’t hold one another guilty of these crimes.

We take with seriousness the insight of the inimitable Dr. Johnson; his perspective was always keenest, his words always wittiest. But, at root, he was not Irish, and none could know better the character of this people than one of its own. In commenting on his own countrymen, a group with whose handling he was always playfully gentle, Oscar Wilde observed that the Irish—among whom, despite his London trappings and Grecian day dreams, he always counted himself—were too political to be poets.

Made by any other man, one unadorned by the countless laurels by which even the strongest head would be made to feel heavy, one might readily sign on in agreement to the acuity of this thought; coming from an Irishmen, indeed, any other Irishmen, this insight would be all but unobjectionable; it would most conclusively settle the probing curiosity of the foreign mind into the emerald soul. But, having been made by the remarkable Wilde, that most poetically fertile spirit by which—since the era of Shakespeare and then that of Milton—the British Isles have been graced, one has to question its earnestness. It appears, given the accomplishments of the Irish in both the poetical and the political-philosophical realms (Swift, Wilde, Joyce, Beckett, Yeats contributing their names to the former; Burke, Toland, Erigena, and Berkeley, most impressively to the latter), that they’re equally competent in their dealings with either field.

Of course, as always he did, Wilde held up his sleeve a caveat to his statement: while the Irish might be “too political to be poets”, they were doubtless the “greatest talkers since the Greeks”. None would contest so bold a conceit, especially when made by so bold a man. For Wilde, his flamboyance was his own, but his eloquence—that was irreducibly Irish. For the gift of his “gab”, an endowment of which all the literate world remains so unabashedly envious, he had that voluble country to thank. I like to think that all great talkers, once dead, promptly move to resurrect themselves along the rolling hills of Ireland. And so, Demosthenes arises in Dublin, Plato in County Mayo, Protagoras in Belfast, and, from time to time, a wild flower like Oscar Wilde blooms in the laughing expanse of their shade.

Being incompletely Irish, I can’t say I’m the exception to Wilde’s well-stated rule. He spoke of Irishmen born of that land, reared by that land, not of those distantly animated by a drop of its blood. Thus, I feel myself drawn somewhat more to poems than to politics, to beauty than to bureaucracy. My American Declaration is rather Whitman than Jefferson; my heartfelt Constitution, Emerson than Madison. Poetry, I think, can be just as revolutionary a force when it comes to the births of new and vibrant lands. All who prioritize words over swords, quips over bullets, will agree. I think much of pen and ink in revolutions; one epigram will do more than a hundred daggers. Indeed, I might be too poetical to be sincerely political, but I’m ever cognizant of the balance that one must tread.

For this balance, I have both mother and father to thank—the former a Jew, the latter a bird. The product of their union? The queerest young fellow that ever you heard. I must stop here, as I risk exceeding the loquacity of the Greeks. Wilde gave me his stern warning, a look to which I can’t help but defer.

Sports are to become insufferable.

I admit, this statement—against which most American ears will bristle—is coming from someone in whose opinion sport enjoys a relatively low status to begin with; it’s not a past time of which I’m exuberantly fond. It’s not, as it is for most men of my age, a consuming affinity in which I invest all of my uncommitted time, a passion to which, every Sunday afternoon and Monday evening, and every Thursday night and Saturday morning, I’m completely enslaved. Indeed, if I’m honest, I prefer books to screens, conversations to touchdowns. At my root, competition neither compels nor moves me, at least not in the way that great literature does. This is no judgment of the enjoyments by which so many of my fellow countrymen are besotted, but simply a declaration of the peculiarity of my own taste. There’s ample room, after all, in the vastness of this land for both athletes and aesthetes, gladiators and readers, actions and thoughts.

Yet, that said, I can’t help but feel an acute sense of eagerness and anticipation for what will be our nation’s long-awaited return of sports. A cultural experience to behold, in a time bereft of culture, their advent has been announced for the end of this month. Until then, I can’t help but be curious about the adjustments they’ll be made to implement, the changes here and there, the revisions large and small, of which we, as an audience newly obsessed with its hygiene, will be ever-so scrutinizing. I’m curious to know of the medical precautions by which these leagues will be encumbered, the logistical nightmares with which they’ll be made to contend, and the uncertainty from which they’ll not soon escape in what’s become, in the span of recent world history, the most unusual and vexing of times.

I want to know how these sports will be received, if they’ll be sustainable, and whether or not we’re seeing before us the first inklings of a paradigmatic shift in the ways that they’re consumed, embraced, and played.

Never, so long as I can recall the twenty-eight years of my age, a time during which so much and little has happened, has sport been absent for so long a duration of time. Being that it is, in most normal circumstances, the locus upon which our culture is fixated, the center-point around which our daily enthusiasm and thinking revolves, it’s shocking to have experienced the prolonged nature of its suspension. Frankly, I can’t remember a time so absolutely devoid of sports, despite never having followed them as closely as I perhaps should. That said, for nearly five months, from the middle of March until the end of July, all major sporting events will have been, for all intents and purposes, cancelled. At a time when we might’ve been watching the NBA or NHL playoffs and finals, a plethora of MLB opening days, and the first moments of the Olympics spectacle of which that eerily quiet city of Tokyo was to be the host, we’ve seen nothing but the wearisome repetitions of our Netflix-laden screens.

During this hiatus, as if to provoke but never satisfy our hunger for athletic competition, we’ve seen a few sports televised in unfamiliar ways. We witnessed acoustically-intimate UFC competitions, whose every landed blow the streaming audience could palpably sense and hear. It was a strange and rebarbative sight, a reminder that a cheering, live audience has something of a buffering effect. It civilizes, in an odd way, that which occurs in the ring. To replace the brutal with the artificial, we were also treated to a sequence of “pro” wrestling events, wildly dramatic events of which the inimitable WWE company is the author. These, with all their ridiculous success, are phantasmagoric scenes of rippling egos and pyrotechnic choreography, pseudonyms and knee-high boots of which most “true” sport fans are understandably contemptuous. Aside from those two sports, pugilistic in one form or another, we were exposed to a few international, namely Asian, baseball games. We recognized the rules of the game to which the players adhered, the runs and the throws to which they devoted their bursting efforts, but it was played at a distance with which we weren’t entirely comfortable. It was not baseball as we know it; not the sport as we Americans love it.

In the coming weeks, those aforementioned sports to which we gave nothing more than our partial attention, that pabulum of games by which, with an awkward hand, we were fed but never nourished, will be coming to their end. Replacing them will be the much better-known and loved entities—the NBA, NHL, MLB, and the early outings of the NFL—for which we’ve so desperately longed. But I fear, in the midst of all the political turmoil and civil unrest into which this frenzied country has been tossed, in the ferment of a world in which we’re still spinning, these leagues and the players, owners, coaches, and managers of which they’re composed, are to become positively insufferable.

For one, the NBA is planning to inscribe along its courts’ periphery the words, “Black Lives Matter”. In reference to the proper noun, or the organization with which this phrase has come to be associated, such a scribbling on the floor is far from unobjectionable. In explaining to one’s interlocutor his rationale as to why this may be, and to preempt the reflexive accusations of racism by which he might be accosted, he inevitably steps into an unpleasant semantic mire. While his preference might be to avoid it, it’s not a hole from which, once he steps too close, he can easily remove himself. That said, unwittingly disputatious and intellectually open as he is, he’ll attempt, with varying degrees of success, to differentiate the phrase Black Lives Matter (that is, the BLM organization, at whose vanguard stands a couple of neo-Marxist agitators) from Black lives matter (the natural sentiment of which all should be possessed). He’s likely to fail in the process, forever buried in the burned-over earth.

In addition to that, there are twenty-nine approved “Social Justice” statements with which the league’s players will be permitted to adorn their bodies. On the backs of their jerseys, a ready canvas across which, in normal times, an alphabet of fabulously wealthy last names will be stitched, such phrases as “Black Lives Matter”; “Say Their Names”; “I Can’t Breathe”; “See Us”; “Respect Us”; “How Many More”; “Group Economics”; and “Education Reform” will be emblazoned.

For an audience of millions enraptured by their every move, the statements “See Us” and “Respect Us” might be just a bit self-gratifying. Doubtless, if they’re not seen to be completely offensive, they’ll be thought to be redundant, and the intended message of which they’re meant to be provocative might be lost. As for “Group Economics”, I’m not entirely sure what to make of that. Indeed, I hazard that no player, certainly no owner, would succeed in filling me in. Theirs, assuredly, is an economics in which I’d like to be grouped. I don’t the suppose the reverse would be true. It seems like a phrase innocent of a definition, one seeking in empathy what it lacks in meaning. Reflexively, I dislike it, especially when conveyed by a billion-dollar business to whose laughably expensive games only the most frugal and devout lower and middle-class families can dream of having access.

In championing “Education Reform”—an admirable endeavor, I’ll be the first to admit—I very highly doubt that the players are referring to those same reforms about which, in both his forthcoming and his many previous books, the great classical economist Thomas Sowell so convincingly writes. Unlike any other thinker with whom I’ve come to be conversant, Sowell presents his opinion on this topic with the unique genius of his stroke. He does so with an empirical flourish and a dauntless conviction, a combination of evidence and force by which any attempted refutation is consistently rendered limp. Is it an increased availability of charter schools or alternative learning options for which these players, along with Sowell, are agitating? Is it a reduction in the menacingly broad powers with which the public teachers’ unions have been entrusted of which those players, taking the lead from Sowell, are desirous? If so, I align myself with them, but I unfortunately think that it’s not.

You see, then, how vapidity fills the gap intended for virtue. All too often it does. Society is ready for these conversations to be broached, investigated, and felt—not facilely to be read atop the numbers on a professional athlete’s back.

Just as the NBA is to become insufferable, so too is the NFL. The league has long been awaiting its “reckoning” as it pertains to social and racial concerns and now, in the aftermath of the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, et al., that time seems finally to have come.

Racism, to those observers whose noses are keener than mind to its scent, has been a problem to which the NFL has been sorely inattentive. At best, they’ll say, it’s an issue on which the league’s ownership and management has dallied for far too long a time. In the past, it’s shown casual, ephemeral interest in the problem, the great issue by which our world’s been recently overwhelmed. At worst, they’ll allege, the NFL is guilty of having played a role in its perpetuation. They’ll say that the NFL has winked at this systemic and an inextricable evil, a deep-rooted sin of which this league run by Whites is complicit, and by which it has so foully profited.

Their argument is that for the past five years or so, perhaps since the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2013, the league has dragged its feet in addressing this ghost by which our society is haunted, the specter of universal racism. In the face of recent examples of police brutality, ethnically-motivated killings, social injustice, and the incorrigible victimization of blacks, the league offered in response no sign, no moral position, from which its predominantly black players might find encouragement. Its response, they’ll contend, was always costive and unsympathetic, unforthcoming and insufficient. Never did it lead in its vocal acknowledgement of this issue by which society was, and still is, confronted, an issue about which the majority of its players are intimately concerned.

Now, it seems, thanks to the undying perseverance of these writers and players, the league has awakened to this fact. Like a slumbering giant, interested more in the inertia to which it’s become accustomed, than the toil for which it was built, it has aroused itself to this issue. It’s now standing up on its feet, conscious and alive, ready to address the problem of which that clamorous few has made it so acutely knowledgeable.

Most significantly, in an effort to acknowledge the peculiarity of Black culture and the importance of which it’s so amply deserving, the NFL has decided to play not one, but two national anthems before the start of its games. At least for the first week of its upcoming season, this is the startling brilliance of league’s plan. Prior to the traditional playing of the “Star-Spangled Banner”, during which, one can expect, innumerable players will kneel, the league is going to play a song entitled, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing”.

The former, as the devout reader of my work will know, is but a drinking song borrowed from the pagan artistry of the Brits. It’s an ode appropriated by a war-wearied poet by the last name of Key to which, despite a list of superior alternatives, we’ve inelegantly affixed ourselves. The latter is known in some sectors as the “Black” national anthem, a song around which one people, certainly not all people, can joyously rally. Grand though it is, it’s meant to be an exclusive work, a tune to which only one voice is welcome.

If you’re not already anxious about the repercussions with which the playing of these two national anthems will be attended—the one explicitly “Black”, the other necessarily “White”—I’ll make it so that you are. Forgive me for being so blunt, but the situation upon which we’re embarking will be an ugly one, and we must be prepared to see it for what it is. Undoubtedly, the consequence of the playing of these two anthems, that which is “Black” preceded by that which is “White”, will be not greater unity, but deeper faction. We’ll see not heightened brotherhood and mutual understanding and respect, but much more painful division and unrest.

Every single player, regardless of his color, will stand, without wavering, for the “Black” anthem. About this, there’s no doubt. In fact, he’ll do so with a tension in his spine and a stiffness in his neck at whose sight even the most polished of infantryman standing for roll-call would blush. He’ll never have known a posture so indomitably erect as that worn by the virtuous and muscle-bound football player. None will even consider the damnable effrontery, the grave profanation, of flinching, sneezing, of twitching an eye while “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” is played. To do so would be cause for excommunication, not only from the beloved sport off of which he so lavishly profits, but from the society to which he’ll soon be made to say “good-bye”.  

A majority of players, if I had to guess, will then proceed to kneel for the “White” anthem. It’ll do so in a wave, as if all their lower joints were deprived of their structural stability in one fell swoop. Its message will be clear; the “Star-Spangled Banner”, and all the systemically racist institutions of which that ghoulish song has come to be symbolic, will be, once and for all, undeserving of their respect. It will no longer demand reverence, and it will no longer frown upon impudence. It’ll be nothing better than empty notes ignored by the lot. This time, the display will be unequivocal (it was ambiguous when Kaepernick first did it) and it will be heart-breaking. For having kneeled, the players will be applauded amongst their peers and celebrated by journalists for the strength of their resolution and the collective display of their defiance.

Meanwhile, those who put in a good word for the old flag and utter with cautious exuberance and tight-sealed lips the words of Francis Scott Key, will be castigated as prejudiced, reactionary, and unsympathetic rubes. They’ll be called out for not having been equally as animated in their observance of the “Black” anthem, a song with which they haven’t any familiarity, to which they feel themselves now suddenly subjected. The bifurcation will become ever more stark: those for the “Black” anthem, and those for the “White”. And, given the racial upheaval through which our country’s now living, it’s not hard to imagine where this competition will end.

And so, I repeat: sports are to become insufferable. I look forward to ignoring them—an endeavor for which, thanks to my competing pastimes, I’ll require little practice. But that won’t stop me from lamenting the division that’ll ensue.

Before whom, I ask, should one bow and “take a knee”? In whose grand and towering presence, in whose Brobdingnagian esteem, should one proceed to fold himself in two and meekly genuflect?

I ask in earnest, and in desperate hope of a response, so as not to be caught indecorously and with jaw agape among the standing, the erect, the sacrilegious. I must know whether or not there is such a figure of whose existence I might be made better aware. Is there not one beneath whose chilly grandeur, a giant beneath whose mountainous gaze, the taking of a knee—as submissive and diminutive a posture as is known to the bipedal preference of man—might be appropriately assumed?  

An immediate and unobjectionable answer, I think—regardless of the mosque, the church, or the pious synagogue to which you belong—would be that there is such a being, and that his name is, as you might’ve guessed, God. Allah, Yahweh, Jehovah, Lord—call Him what you will; God is the one figure atop whom no other being rests. He is the unmovable mover, the chief exemplar before whom, in reverence and awe, one might gladly kneel. He’ll do so without the hint of a blush, the reddening of a cheek by which the pious soul is forever colored.

Even to the committed secularist, to whom that trio of religions’ shared deity hasn’t much to say, this would be an uncontroversial proposition to hold. God is the figure to whom you might acceptably kneel. Whomever in your religious conception that faceless deity may be, you’d not excite among your neighbors much criticism for humbling yourself in his real or imagined presence.

Is there, outside the Lord, no other figure before whom you might knee? There are others, but they are few. One is a spouse—be it a husband or wife. The former can bow to the latter, the latter to the former; they are partners between whom the humble grace of the act is shared. It is a mutually accepted, reciprocated, and encouraged exchange. He or she, depending on the circumstance, might be well deserving of a knee. In such a case, it’s less a matter of inferiority, than it is of sincerity and reverence. It’s not a sign of debasement, but one of humble devotion, not a lessening of one, but a strengthening of all. One kneels as though to speak out an ineffable expression of his love—a feeling ultimately communicated not by the flap of his lips, but by the pulse of his heart. No other sound quite approximates the gesture, and that will serve as the finest replacement for words.

In but a few scenarios, to whose peculiarity we’ll now make our turn, there may be a third party before whom one might reasonably kneel. That would be the person to whom, in a display of inhumanity or foul and dirty action, one has done a severe injury, upon whom one has thrust a grave moral disservice. Having attempted, in one fiendish way or another, to reduce one’s fellow person to a status unequal to that of a man, one must ready himself similarly to be reduced. It is the consequence of having done ill. Not quite lex taliones, the retributive justice that asks for an eye, an eye, kneeling before one’s victim is a symbol of contrition and an acknowledgement of his guilt. It is a sign of humility, though not in the aforementioned, marital or holy way. It carries with it neither supplication nor devotion, but ineffaceable guilt. It is as difficult a maneuver as they come but, when executed well, it’s an invitation to forgiveness, to atonement, and to the greater wellness of all.

This third reason for kneeling, for the acknowledgement of sin and the expiation of guilt, is of chief relevance today. Those participating in this act, for which the above reason is the underlying motivation, have been growing in numbers, seeming to attract to their cause scores of newly-awakened congregants. It’s been used by Whites to demonstrate to Blacks the seriousness of their unease, and the religious fervor of which they’ll avail themselves to relieve it. In videos that I’ve watched, filled with scenes at which I’ve cringed, crowds of White people, variously aged, are to be seen kneeling before crowds of Blacks. In thinking about what’s going through each sides’ heads, beclouded, as they are, by this plague-ridden summer of unrest, I’m made to feel quite unsettled.   

What about the Black community’s response to its experience of seeing White people kneeling?What of the magnanimity of that people, the broad-souled deportment of that formerly oppressed and abused race, that historically-wronged class to whom, in a groveling display of moral confusion and “Insta-ready” penance, so many of our White countrymen are now bowing? Where is the wide girth and endless latitude of the Black man’s soul, the depth and bottomless anchor against whose weight the Black woman’s empathy can’t be moved? What of their combined forgiving and indomitable spirit, that justly-celebrated highness of character with which, through the puissant words of their greatest of writers to whom, with devotion, I repeatedly return, to the genial interactions between colleagues and friends of which, in my own day, I’ve been the lucky participant, I’ve come to be so familiar? 

A resilient and proud people, by whom an equally resilient and proud country was built, are we to assume that they’ve become in our decadent age so feeble-hearted, so insecure and shameless, that they’ll suffer the nauseating display of a mass of genuflecting Whites? Are we to conclude that this is a scene by whose display of “virtue” they’ll be made to feel—what? Somehow better? Are they to feel all of a sudden superior to those who are, if only for the moment, stooping their bodies so uncomfortably low? Is the moral authority of which, at least outwardly, the Whites have dispossessed themselves to be claimed by them?

Stolid and unflappable, graceful and direct, do our Black compatriots really want to weary their eyes with the pathetic sight of scores of their White friends and neighbors—a guilt-ridden people between whom, so far as one can imagine, little overt racial animosity actually still exists—kneeling in their presence, praying for their forgiveness, and pouring upon their shoelaces bedewed, weightless tears? Is it their desire to have their time wasted, listening, as they do, to some hopeless white liberal’s renunciation of his divine right of skin? These oddly American autos-da-fé, these weird and well-scripted public confessions, are events upon which, like them, I’ve gazed, and, also like them, through which I’ve suffered. Their messages are somewhat consistent; they’re embarrassed by their birth, contemptuous of their parentage. They are ostentatiously self-deprecating, histrionically self-loathing, and, at least outwardly, completely unhappy with themselves. That of which they might wish themselves to be dispossessed, their skin and the heritage by which it’s attended, can never be let go. What, then, will come of their rhetorical effacement of their epidermis, the windy and wordy surrender of the integument in which they’re enclosed? What will be left of said liberals after the metamorphosis of their being, after the abandonment of their selves and their all-important skins?

Will our Black friends, our valued fellow Americans and colleagues, abide without cringing as they watch the overly-dramatic production of this scene? Will they persist without laughing, will they wait with quiet repose, as said mawkish Caucasian proceeds to wash their perfectly hygienic black and brown feet with the salty, inadequate lather of his Crocodilian tears?

I would hope not, but I’ve been disappointed more times than a few. The Black community should want nothing of the sort. It’s not a group of people, diverse as any other, in need of vapid displays of penitence without commitments to change. Black Americans, at least those with whom I’m friendly, and those with whom I speak, want nothing less than the sight of White Americans, positioned as worms, crawling around and atop their feet. This is no correction to an ancient imbalance of power. This is no path along which, in future endeavors, we can jointly and equally tread. This is not a sight by which we’ll be edified and lifted still higher. It is as damaging to the recipient as it is to the supplicant—a recognition to which Black and White ought to get wise.

Which leads me to my next question: What about the response of those aforementioned White people? What about those faces, more numerous as a percentage than the rest of the lot, who, as if reflexively compelled to fall to the earth, now find themselves kneeling? What about these people who, with selfie-sticks ready and cameras aroused, prostrate themselves and signal to the sky the unfailing status of their virtue? What about that light-hued, though darkly-brooding race, that troubled people to which, as a consequence of the accident of my birth, and a deficiency of melanin in my skin, I meekly claim “membership”. It’s a group of whose antics I’ll never partake, to whose sentiments I’ll long stand athwart, but what, from my distant perspective, am I finally to make of them still?

While these White people, a crowd amongst whom, despite the distant similarity of our European appearance and Western mien, I feel no rush of consanguinity, debase themselves before the grandeur of their “Black betters”, they exclaim that they, and they alone, are the one’s responsible for saving the entirety of that afflicted race. No other people, certainly not the Black neighbors by whom they’re surrounded, can be trusted with the responsibility of so daunting a task. They alone can handle this, and no one else. What haughtiness! What conceit! What arrant condescension! What indecency, smugness, and misbegotten pride! What lack of faith in their Black brothers and sisters before whom they genuflect and weep! What over-estimation of their soteriological power! What fatuous sense of moral superiority off of which they won’t release their white-knuckled grip!

They kneel like sinners, hoping to make themselves saviors. They genuflect like friars while thinking themselves saints. They want, more than anything, to play this role for the Black race—as that of a pope among a mass of plebeians, from whose exclusive holiness, a treasury of merit will soon flow. They want to be the deus ex machina, the descending deity covered in white, by which this twisting plot will be settled and our future progress restored. The moral vacuum left by their forebears, the unscrupulosity of which they’ve made themselves the inheritors, is their own to fill. They’ll do so, and become the heroes of their own story. As they do, they’ll retain, implicitly, the superiority of their angelic, self-flagellating race.

These are my reflections of genuflections. Make of them what you will.