Adversary Across The Table

With a supreme act of will springing from the essence of his being, he turned away from his life and the long train of disastrous consequences that had flowed from it." --Richard Wright, Native Son, page 255, 1957 edition

I have held certain cards close to my chest about offering a responsible discussion on race, and after branching out into as many estuaries as there are going back into our seas, I've given up. Fewer black friends than gay ones, yes, but they existed, a blind couple. The wife who thought I was going to suicide over my breakdown at the capable mind games in the hands of my former spastic supervisor, her husband, my neighbor Roger Moore from long ago, sexually attractive paraplegic baller, not many more, leading into the question of why Dr. Ben Carson gained notoriety: because Americans who pay attention to network newscasts which assume a mature audience needn't be coddled like cutting edge medicine, because conjoined twins are still enough of an anomaly to hold our attention, because John Hopkins denotes prestige and Ted Koppel's God complex, and Carson was a minority neurosurgeon in this stratosphere, and yet something cut across the com links and the studio lighting in his emotive force about the Bjani sisters, a viewer could not forget the stress and anguish of "bathroom by committee," and it is that intense emotional investment by which one understands how Carson evolved into the dark horse surprise as 1 in 15.

Do I believe he will succeed Obama? No. Am I aware of the contradiction of respecting his forthrightness juxtaposed against my intolerance? Yes, and I do not intend to resolve it here; in much the same vein that liberal critics plaster Losing Isiah for tasting like tree bark, any critical observations genuinely threaten to veer off the asphalt. People like me give offense, and receive tin ears. We don't even know what having a frank discussion means anymore, except what we internalize when we're in it. Memory seeps like putty after a time, and I seem to recall Richard Corliss making grist about Jessica Lange twenty years ago, but that could not have been possible. The film still was the sociological fodder in its moment, and is, on a certain level, ludicrous. Halle might have been prepping for Cat Woman, and white adoption of black children often leads to depression and mental health disorders.

The film made an imprint, not over its quality, but over its construct and what it straddled, and then gets crucified by superior progressives like Kurchak and lambasted by those like spastic on a rightward drift, who has seen black parents engaged in aggravated assault against their children-- not to excuse my dead mother and her men, but there is still a difference.

Let me switch gears momentarily: I had a traumatic experience in email borne out of desperation and fear and told a former supervisor I thought I had fallen in love with her. On her end she was, or so I speculate, trying to save her marriage by sportscasting to me a little too much. Fifteen years later, I am debating letting a possible occlusion kill me and she wrote herself a demotional grant of some sort and still has a salary. I've put myself on trial, picked pieces apart, and I'll never be entirely repaired, even though I was in a bad space and can't put the onus entirely on her behavior-- but what it did was absolutely shut down LBGT tolerance. I will never knowingly associate with homosexuals again, not after what I put myself through. 

I could, however, sit down with Dr. Carson. The gulf would be there, but both he and I know institutional paradigms to the bean, and I would not assign blame at his door for what happened to me within the community of his ethnicity. This does not mean I'd apologize for the very dark nature of my posts; it does mean I could engage, unless I err that he'd utilize the normal mechanism of recrimination.