Thinking about difference

Lately I have been thinking a lot about how human beings perceive difference. This, of course, is an occupational hazard. Much theoretical ink has been spilled on how human societies and individuals deal with difference – psychologically, culturally, historically, linguistically: “I and thou,” “Self and Other,” “sign, signifier, and signified,” the evocative and provocative “free floating signifier.” As scholars, how do we/can we/should we represent people unlike ourselves? What are we to make of physical difference, the most dramatic example being male/female, and the gender constructions based upon those anatomical distinctions? Racial difference which is less physically marked but no less socially important? The less immediately visible categories of religion, ethnicity and class conveyed through verbal and non-verbal forms of communication: dress, gestures, ritual, conversation? Finally, as privileged intellectuals, can we represent those differences without being dismissive, condescending, patronizing, presumptuous, or just plain wrong?

I believe that we can and should speak of difference, if for no other reason than, as an historian, I am required to translate the thoughts and actions of people from the past in ways that make sense to my own time and place. If this can’t be done, I’m out of a job. So I try. Students sometimes challenge my attempts – rarely on epistemological grounds, more frequently on identity-based claims. Every time I teach the history of slavery and race relations, for example, I know that at least one student will wonder what an uppity white girl from NJ could possibly tell them about the history of their own people. On a few occasions, students have said as much to my face. This doesn’t really offend me. I advise them to stick around for a few weeks and if they don’t like what they see, drop the course. No big deal.

Race also comes up because of what I don’t teach. I once had a colleague who told her students that I was a racist due to my failure to include material on Native American history in my undergraduate historiography class. This did offend me – until my sense of humor kicked in. True, Native American history wasn’t in a syllabus that covers the history of history from Herodotus to the present in 16 weeks. It does include material about identity-based history (working class/women/African-American). I cover indigenous history in my Latin American history classes and I also do research on Brazilian Indians, but as she barely knew me, she wouldn’t have known that. Had she, I suspect her ire would have only increased. Not only do I assign books on Native American history written by non-Native Americans, but I am attempting to write Native American history myself. Given my identity, could I hope to do so properly?

Moving beyond academic pettiness, the perception of difference, of course, has huge consequences in everyday life. It typically justifies wars, massacres, genocides, and all sorts of socioeconomic and political discrimination. It should go without saying, however, that although human beings may have an innate propensity to create oppositional categories to make sense of their world, difference need not be the basis of inequality or exclusion. Why can’t difference simply be … different?

When thinking about such heady ideas, I have found it useful to take a step back and observe how children deal with living in the world. This leads me to what got me thinking about all of this in the first place. A few months ago, my kids started taking African dance classes. My eldest daughter was exposed to African drumming and dancing two years ago at a summer camp and has been begging for lessons every since. I finally located a class for children sponsored by the African American Performing Arts Center, a lovely facility that promotes a variety of cultural activities. My youngest daughter tried a few classes and quickly dropped out. Why? She felt self-conscious. Why? Because she was different. “Mommy,” (delivered in an overly loud stage whisper) “I’m the only one that’s white.” Interestingly, despite the fact that her kindergarten class is almost evenly divided among Hispanic, black, Native American, and white kids, and this never seems to have been an issue, being the only one that was different mattered. No problem; she plays with other siblings who are stuck there during dance class.

My older daughter, however, has been all but color blind since she was very small. If anybody thinks it’s strange that this fair blond kid likes African dance, they haven’t said so. The dance community consists of African American kids and their families, some biracial couples and their kids, and some white parents who have adopted African kids. There’s a few African and Haitian families as well. Nice folks.

While going through the whirlwind of rehearsals leading up to the first performance of the “African American Performing Arts Youth Ensemble,” however, one could not escape constructions of difference. I overheard one adult volunteer attempting to herd a bunch of kids running amok into some kind of order, trying to sort out names. She asked Renee, “are you Ruth?” “No, she answered, “Ruth’s the white girl.”

The white girl. Of course, she is. As her mother, this revelation should not have come as a surprise. But in a certain sense, it did. This is probably the first time she’s been identified with reference to her race. Since “white” is the dominant racial signifier in US society, there is rarely cause to specify. Towards the end of the dress rehearsal, the dancers formed a “solo circle” which allowed any child who felt so moved to go into the center and dance while the remainder of the group clapped. The Brazilianist in me instantly recognized this as a “roda” a circle or “wheel” that one sees in Brazilian samba. Sometimes the kids went out alone, sometimes in twos or threes. Ruth went out with two girls but as they hadn’t coordinated what they were going to do, it didn’t work very well. Later she said, “mom, I felt weird being out there with Diandra and Isis.” “Why?” I asked. Whiteness, it turned out, had nothing to do with it. “Because they’re so tall,” she said. “I felt really short.”

The performance, by the way, was great. It had absolutely nothing to do with elitist, intellectual qualms about white people appropriating the cultural forms of the “other.” The drums were loud, the dancing was great, the applause genuine, the occasion heartfelt. My kid was out there having the time of her life, dancing with verve and a huge, radiant smile. She took my breath away.

A final post script: at the dinner following the performance, one of the drummers asked me if I was the parent of the “tall, blond girl.”

I had to laugh.

Writing History

I have been thinking about writing a lot lately.  This derives, in part, from teaching a graduate seminar on historical theory this semester.  The reading list is not for the faint-hearted: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Gramsci, Levi-Strauss, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Foucault, Derrida, Spivak, to name a few.  The texts are dense at best, obscurantist at worst.  I am confronted weekly with the implicit, and sometimes explicit, questions: “Why are we reading this?”  “How can this help me to be a better historian?”

I am still working out these questions for myself.  Theory has enriched the ways in which I think about the extent to which human beings exercise free will or are bounded by the cultural norms and institutional constraints of their societies.  It forces me to be honest about what information I can or cannot derive from a documentary source.  It causes me to question how narratives are constructed, for what purposes, and by whom.  And it makes me confront the reality that there are no hard and fast lines that distinguish fact from fiction.  That said, most theoretical works would be all but impenetrable to the average reader.  They are tough going even for specialists who have been trained how to read them.  The conundrum remains, how do I convey these theoretical insights without restricting my readership to a narrow audience of other intellectuals with advanced degrees like myself?

One option is that I need not concern myself with a wider reading public.  Academic acclaim is not based on the number of copies one sells or the length of time that elapses before one’s work goes out of print.  Academics generally derive a fairly trivial amount of their income from book sales.  As an aside, I should add that a colleague of mine who wrote a guide entitled, ironically enough, Writing History, earns enough in royalties on that title to pay for his five kids’ summer programs every year.

However, I am also reminded of a recent comment by a student who argued that we need not feel apologetic or defensive for having come up with a specialized, professional language with which we can communicate specific, nuanced ideas to colleagues.  Certainly, researchers in the hard sciences feel no such compunction.  However, I find myself caught between the desire to produce a well crafted, evocative story and to probe its theoretical intricacies in a sophisticated way.  Can one do both?

This dilemma came to a head recently in another class.  I had assigned a recently published book that was well reviewed but that I had not read before ordering it.  Oops!  Upon reading it, I found it simply dreadful, but it was too late.   Every theoretical buzzword and concept was prominently displayed, overblown claims were made on the basis of inadequate or inconclusive data, in short, content-free jargon.  I felt that I had been bludgeoned by the equivalent of badly designed, dysfunctional kitchen sink.  A rather large one.  Even worse, I found myself having to justify to my students, why I made them waste their valuable time and money reading this thing.  I opted for contrition and some reflections on how and why the peer-review process can go badly wrong.  I was genuinely disillusioned that the editorial process, such that it was, had served this scholar so poorly.

Around the same time, a guest speaker came to speak at a workshop in our department.  This was Camilla Townsend, an historian of the Americas writ large, and coincidentally, a long term friend of mine.  Cami and I met as girls at a convention sponsored by the Wizard of Oz Club.  We were both fans of L. Frank Baum and even as a 12 year old, her gifts as a writer were already apparent.  We lost touch and found each other about ten years ago at a history conference, discovering that we had both become historians of Latin America and the Atlantic World.

Cami is a beautiful prose writer.  She examines figures that have been written about so much that you’d think there would be nothing left to say.  Pocahantas.  Frederick Douglass.  Malitzin, also known as La Malinche, an indigenous woman captive who served as Hernán Cortés’s translator during the conquest of Mexico.  But through a careful and imaginative reading of the limited documentation about these individuals, she causes us to rethink what we think we know.

After her visit, I read her Pocahantas and the Powhatan Dilemna which had been sitting on my shelf unread for some years.  Quite simply, it was lovely.  It was the first history book that I have read purely for pleasure in probably ten years or more.  She was quite clear about what she thought could be verified and where she was on shakier ground.  Her voice and methodological interventions, however, remained unobtrusive and did not distract from the compelling story she told.  I was reminded of advice once given by the writer we mutually admire. L. Frank Baum.  In a 1902 editorial entitled “What Children Want,” Baum wrote: “the language employed should be simple and unadorned.  As for a moral, children are quick to discover and absorb one, provided it is not tacked up like a warning on a signpost.”  Substitute “theoretical framework” for “moral,” and these might serve as guidelines for the historian as well.

During Cami’s talk, a colleague commented on the quality of her writing and asked if it “every got her into trouble.”  A strange question at first glance.  The implication was that writing too well could be bad.  Cami responded that, “yes,” if one writes too accessibly, one runs the risk of not being taken seriously.  The analysis and hard work that goes into one’s interpretation can be overlooked if one doesn’t hit the  reader over the head with it.  One can also write for one’s colleagues in the manner respected by the profession in other contexts.  It is a matter of pairing style with venue and intended audience.

I am left with the thought that for the historian, a theoretical foundation might best be utilized as if one were a ballet dancer.  The best dancers wear their training lightly.  They distill years of specialized training and bloody hard work into gestures of astonishing lightness and beauty.  The effort is concealed; in fact it is necessary to do so in order for it to appear effortless.  Perhaps I can aspire to that in my writing.  If I use  theory to inform my conclusions and qualify my claims, that may suffice.  I would like to write something that is beautiful, yet substantial, definitive not because it includes every empirical factoid but because the prose lingers in the mind.

Maybe I also should rethink how I use footnotes.