 From “Good Fences.” |
I love Black film, movies made by and about African Americans. Almost thirty years ago I fell in love with Maya Angelou and read everything she has written ever since. Literature is a wonderful glimpse into the lives of others, and African American literature is rich and filled with wonderful stories about life, and living in the constant shadow of a larger and occasionally hostile "them."
As a gay man who grew up "white", I didn't get much training in how to deal with being "different." If anything I was a problem to my parents who worked hard to achieve some conventionality in their own lives after growing up with the stigma of poverty, being foreign, and having single mothers.
So the books of Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X and others charmed their way into my heart. Movies like "A Raisin in The Sun" (both versions), "The Color Purple", "Daughters of the Dust", "Sounder", "The Inkwell", and "Good Fences" added to my personal literature, along with plays like "Young Gifted and Black" about Loraine Hansberry's short but full life, and "The Colored Museum" an anthology about past images brought to the present.
 ADVERTISEMENT – please support our gracious community-based sponsors - ADVERTISEMENT |
The arts have offered a window into the complexities of human nature and the games we play in our heads to avoid painful realities from which there is no escape.
 From “Good Fences.” |
_GLBT literature and film is finally coming into it's own and I find many parrallels in the processes portrayed in our stories we tell. But it was the Black folks who touched my heart when I was a child, and have remained in my life as role models ever since.
It's always about making peace with ourselves, no matter what someone else thinks, and then learning balance, celebrating our differences while getting along with others.
As I recently pointed out to a friend, it's about refusing to needlessly suffer at the hands of other. God knows, we all do it enough just to survive.
 please support our gracious community-based sponsors |
Last week's column about Star, Barbara and power evoked a number of responses. Since West Hollywood is a place filled with people who are "different", I'm going to include them here, and then encourage you to explore your own experience of being different and how you deal with it, and how you perceive other's who are different.
Here's what folks wrote me:
FABULOUS ARTICLE. I read it with my best Friend Deborah. My white sister who is from Inglewood.
You hit the nail on the head. A.
 |
You were right on this one. You got out of Star Jones Reynolds' situation EXACTLY what I got. That Barbara Walters is a bitter dissatisfied woman who was fine with Star Jones as long as she was no competition. But once she got the man, lost the weight it was simply too much for her and the other women on the show. They could feel good about themselves as long as Star wasn't their equal. She not only was their equal, she surpassed them.
Excellent description of the "black and the white of things." G.
|
Agree 100% with your article, though I'd bet Rosie made this decision and the die was cast the very minute Rosie decided to go onto the show. T,
|
I'd never been a fan of Star Jones - (she's made a lot of homophobic comments in the past) - and she's possibly the only one unaware that she married a gay (appearing) guy - but I totally agree with your observations. M.
|
Wonderfully insightful and empathetic analysis of the Star/Barbara teacup tempest. Essentially, you “get” something that very few folks, of any class or background seem to grasp in America: Unlike animals endowed with instinctual guidance, homo sapiens matures into survivability through a vetted learning process: We become human through culture, not birth.
 Photo by Mikel Gerle. |
But cultures vary, evolving, like the species, in response to what works (and doesn’t) in specific environments. Since the environments we grow up in differ, so do our (sub-)cultures, and therefore so do our values. Thus, when someone says to me, “I don’t see color. I just treat everybody the same”. What I hear is “I don’t want to have to work to understand you in context, so I’ll assume that what is right and wrong, good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate in My culture, applies to YOU, and I will treat you accordingly.” Virtually none of the values we take for granted are universal beyond the two most basic of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – physical sustenance and safety. All of our growth and interactive values and behaviors are shaped by the home/neighborhood/tribe in which we grow up.
 ADVERTISEMENT – please support our gracious community-based sponsors - ADVERTISEMENT |
You understand and have ably articulated what I’ve heard a lot of black folk sighing about in Star’s brouhaha: the sister was being dissed, and felt no need to act like she wasn’t. In the anthropological terms James Kochman used in “Black and White Styles in Conflict”: Whereas American white culture prompts people to mask their inner selves and conceal their personal feelings in social situations they do not have the recognized authority to define, black culture considers such masking to be “fronting”, and fronting is avoided because it requires suppression of a premium value in that culture: personal authenticity (Kochman’s book was written in the late 1960s and is now very dated, but it remains the best study I’ve ever read on relations between America’s blacks and whites. He was the guest lecturer at the 1985 “Black & White Men Together” national conference held in Columbus, OH, and his words changed my life).
The late Nigerian-American anthropologist John Ogbu expounded upon these issues more recently in terms of class, caste and race.
Perhaps because Southern culture actually encourages engaging fellow human beings rather than exploiting them until they are bypassed, you seem to see and understand clearly how coming to the table from different places can turn dinner conversation into a tower of Babel unless people bring awareness, if not empathy, to intercourse with others. I know you share who you are, Ed, but can you bottle it and put it on the market? Please…C.
|
Wow! You speak my "truth." I grew up with and still have undying admiration-----for the "colored" ("n�e gro") folks in my life, who were kind, loving, and-----much more "real" than many of the constantly judgmental white people in my-----life. We used to walk through Negro neighborhoods on North Boulevard and saw-----all kinds of Negroes, just the same kinds of white people you'd see on lower-----Franklin Street, drunks, ne'er-do-wells, honest, hard working people,-----children, etc.-----
My brother and I regularly sat in the back of the bus where there were seats-----and cool air blowing in the open windows and drank out of the "Colored Only"-----fountains in W. T. Grant's downtown and elsewhere just to see what would-----happen. Nothing did; we didn't die or get sick.-----I won't bother you with tales of the times I experienced intense shame at-----witnessing white brutality, not physical but mental, and feeling powerless-----to intervene.-----
I did not know about or follow the Star affair but you have it right: a-----matter of two divergent cultures, one aware, the other blind.-----I am not blind.-----B.
|
I still feel bits of shame for what I saw and-----endured, though there were bright moments as well, and as a child there was-----nothing I could do. I have always known that the jailer suffers as much if-----not more than the prisoner he guards and it left its mark on me.-----It was apparent to me as a child that I was living in an irrational society-----that did not treat Negroes as they should be treated, as humans like us.-----
 Photo by Mikel Gerle. |
The hypocrisy of the church-going whites (my family of origin included)-----galls me to this day and colors my attitude toward churches in general.-----I thought it was just in the south but coming to California and seeing the-----prejudice here and in Washington State made me realize it is truly a human-----universal evil.-----W.
|
There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times - Molly Ivins.
|
Edward "Ed" Garren, MFT, Edward "Ed" Garren, MFT is a Family Therapist, justice activist, former West Hollywood City Council candidate, writer and sojourner. He is originally from the Tampa Bay area of central Florida. Ed has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Frontiers news magazine, and other books, including "Out of My Mind", a pictorial memoir by Kris Nelson. He is currently working on a book about Addiction in America. More information about Ed can be found at: www.edgarren.us.
Ed Garren can be reached, even in the Red America’s wilds, at