Monthly Archives: July 2020

Reading on the Blog: GABRIEL’S SONGBOOK (The Intro)

I started a new Facebook page focused on my first novel, Gabriel’s Songbook, which was published a couple of years ago by Pisgah Press in Asheville, NC. I know I shouldn’t have waited more than two years to consider this kind of promotion, but I guess I’m not much at business or self-promotion. Anyway, I’ll be posting various content related to the novel over the next few months or the next year or until my next book comes out, whenever that might be. Hopefully along the way I’ll learn some things that will help the next book along.

So, click this link – Gabriel’s Songbook: The Intro – to hear me read the opening section. And if you’re a Facebooker, check out (and like) my page named “Gabriel’s Songbook – A Novel.”

21-Day Antiracism in the Curriculum Challenge

I’m taking part in a 21-Day Antiracism in the Curriculum Challenge, and the first day’s assignment is as follows: Reflect, in writing, on your own values, how you bring those values to the classroom, and why you are participating in this challenge. I didn’t follow the assignment exactly, but here’s what I wrote.

I grew up in rural Madison County, North Carolina, just across the NC/TN line from Unicoi County, which is just next door to Washington County, Tennessee, where I live now. My upbringing in the village of Walnut, NC, was on a small farm, in the house where my mother and her ten siblings grew up. Although I suspect that my grandfather’s first wife might have had some indigenous—probably Cherokee—heritage (although I don’t recall anybody in the family suggesting such), his second wife, the mother of nine of his eleven children and my grandmother, was a white woman from east Tennessee. Papa Reeves’s farm was more or less working up until his death in June 1968, after which my family moved into the homeplace with my grandmother. At that point the farm mostly stopped or was sold off, given that my father worked in Asheville, first for a furniture plant and then for the United States Postal Service.

In addition to being home to my family, Walnut is home to four churches within shouting distance of each other. My family, connected to the homeplace through my mother, the next-to-youngest of Papa’s children, attended the Free Will Baptist Church, while Papa’s only other child to stay in Walnut—his youngest—attended the United Methodist Church. Neither the Free Will nor the Methodist could afford a full-time preacher, so I grew up with this arrangement: each church met for its own Sunday School hour; then on first and third Sundays of each month the Methodists came to the Free Will for preaching, and on second and fourth Sundays the Free Will folks went to the Methodist for preaching. We had our weekly youth group and summer Vacation Bible School at the Presbyterian Church. The fourth church, the Missionary Baptists, involved themselves with the rest of us as little as they could, it seemed.

Bottom line: It was a very rural, very Christian, and very white upbringing.

Madison High School had a student body of some eight hundred students, which included just three or four black students. I played basketball with one of them, Eugene Dobbs, and considered him both a superstar and my friend, but I wonder now if I valued him for his skills on the court and our team or as a human being. I can’t say from this distance—more than forty years—how racist I might have been with Eugene and the others. Certainly, I was racist, not knowing any better, so the question is to what degree my racism extended. I hope it wasn’t overtly malicious or aggressive.

As a member of the high-school smart kids club—the Beta Club—I once traveled to an event held at Cherokee High School, on the reservation of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina. I don’t remember if I felt under any threat while on the platform there in front of the school audience. What I do remember, however, is that my white friend and I made fun of some of the names of the Cherokee students who shared the platform with us. What I didn’t know at the time was that in just a few years, I would have a roommate at Mars Hill College, who was—and is—an enrolled member of the Cherokee tribe. We became close friends. I sang at his wedding. He named his firstborn son Cody.

Good friendship and shared experiences strip away layers of difference and identifiers of otherness, humanizing people one to another. This is good and moves us toward antiracism, but it would be a long time before I would learn about and wrestle with the horrific injustices that the U.S. government (white men) inflicted upon my friend’s people, in stealing their land and destroying their nation. (Relations between the U.S. and indigenous nations is now different but hasn’t improved that much.) I think when I was ready to see this troubled history, knowing my friend and having a human connection with him allowed me to recognize, name, and condemn the brutal racism inherent in the dominant white culture of the United States, from its presidents down to members of the Madison High Beta Club.

I could and should keep writing, but I’ll break for now. My experience with my friend from Cherokee, along with some kind of unexplained, lifelong attraction to such others,* led me to the development and teaching of one of my favorite courses here at ETSU, which is ENGL 3070: Native American Literature. The intensive study of this literature for this course has, in turn, made me much more conscious regarding issues of race—and not just that of American Indians—in other courses I teach, such as ENGL 2110: American Literature to 1865 and ENGL 3280: Mythology

* When my cousins and I were children and would go out into landscape of the Walnut farm to play Daniel Boone or Jonny Quest, I always wanted to play Boone’s Cherokee friend Mingo or Jonny’s Indian friend Hadji—an Indian from India.

Open Eyes See the Invisible

A girl I went to high school with—she’s an old woman now, just as I’m an old man—recently posted a meme supposed to be about white privilege that said something along the lines of never having had any such privilege and having had to work for everything she has. I’m sure she’s had to work to get and maintain her stuff over the years, but her meme reveals a common misunderstanding of the notion of “white privilege” as it arises in the context of racism—that is, money and the finer things are not what white privilege is about.

We poor and middle-class whites have a difficult time understanding our privilege in any context other than that of socio-economic status. The reason for this is that the kind of privilege we have is invisible—which is the nature of privilege rightly understood—we incorrectly relate any reference to privilege to wealth, to some silver-spoon-in-mouth quality and ease of life to which our wallets and our purses and our bank accounts reveal we weren’t born.

So, yes, my high school classmate has worked hard now for over forty years, and I hope that she lives as comfortable a life as it’s possible for poor and middle-class whites to live these days. But even if she isn’t comfortable or even close to it—living hand-to-mouth and paycheck-to-paycheck—she’s still white and still privileged in these United States of America.

Here’s how Merriam-Webster defines privilege:

Her invisible white privilege is in the things that are absent from her life, the things to which she is immune—that she probably hasn’t been pulled over by the police for driving in a neighborhood that for a variety of merely physical appearances is obviously not her neighborhood; that she has probably not been followed around a department store by wary clerks and store security guards who suspect that she’s most likely intending to drop a few items into that big bag of hers; that “the talk” she might have had with her parents before she ventured out into the world on her own probably was about “the birds and the bees”—i.e., sex—and not about how to behave around unfamiliar white people in general and the police in particular. That these things—and things like them—are absent from her life, that she is, in a sense, immune to them, is white privilege. That she can drive most anywhere she wants to go without being stopped is a privilege. That she can shop until she drops with nothing more than the ever-present security cameras on her—as they are on us all—is a privilege. That she can interact with the police on equal footing, if she ever has to interact with them at all, is a privilege.

And all of these privileges are the product of racial whiteness.

Words & Music by . . .

Monthly Archives: July 2020