Reciprocity, (Ir)reality and Rachel

For years, going back at least to the time I was in middle school, I was always subject to imbalances in social reciprocity. I was always the one chasing my close associates for get-togethers, phone calls, or other interactions. I became acutely aware of this near the end of middle school when two people who I thought were my very best friends just dropped me cold, saying that they no longer wanted to be bothered by me. I was shocked, and I spent the next several months learning how to make new friends.

It was painful, but I did learn to make new associates, if not friends. I learned to be the savvy chooser rather than waiting to be the grateful chosen. Eventually I made up somewhat with one of my friends who had dropped me (the other one never spoke to me again). On the second go around, however, we were not as close, and I accepted the fact that a person doesn't have to be everything to you in order for you to interact with them. They can be your tennis buddy, or your research buddy or your joking at the water cooler buddy and not come anywhere near being your best friend. Sometimes, the individual interaction matters little in the grand scheme of things. Rather, it’s the improvement to your overall tennis game or to your research project or to your workplace enjoyment that matters.

Over the years the memory of the lesson that I learned in middle school has waxed and waned, since it is my nature to be all in with people when I declare myself to be closely allied with them. But then that old imbalance of social reciprocity starts up again, and I find myself excusing their failure to engage interestedly. I shrug off slights, saying, "My friend is busy and that's why I can't hear from him. I will be there when he's ready to meaningfully engage."After all, being the chooser rather than the chosen means that sometimes you have to wait for a response, hoping to figure out what is going on with your friend. You look and you hope for the signs that will vest the relationship with meaning, constantly sounding for depth that you hope is there.

And looking and hoping works just fine, until you get other associates who actually do seem to value you and who do reciprocate heartily and warmly, portending a relationship rich with valuable possibilities. And then you stop and say, "Wait, I am busy, too. I need to guard my time and save it for people who matter to me and to whom I really seem to matter." Yes, again I say seem, for much of life is irreal in the philosophical sense, not the opposite of reality or truth but an altered version with its own internal rules and consistencies. As my mother used to say, it’s no shame to engage with someone who only pretends to offer you value in return. But it’s sad indeed to engage with someone who doesn’t even pretend to do so. There is very good reason that one of my mother’s mantras was “Don’t put yourself on anyone or anything.” By this she meant don’t demand more out of people and situations than they are willing or able to give. It is not just a matter of being the chooser or the chosen. Attention and caring are forms of currency; I have said this before in other contexts. Before any expenditure there is a value calculation to be done.

This social reciprocity calculus works much the same way when it comes to addressing socio-legal or political issues.  For the intellectual crowd, issues sometimes pop up that take up all the space in the room, crowding out other more substantial matters. Some of these issues of the moment are not only attractive at surface level, but they offer the promise of depth of engagement, broad meaning, and the chance to make a difference in how people are treated or how the matter is perceived. However, whether we choose them or they choose us, these issues beguile us like a friend that isn’t. Digging beyond the surface level reveals that there is little takeaway and even less meaning to any singularly focused association. But like a tennis buddy or water cooler joker, such issues can be wonderfully valuable for how they contribute to our greater view of things.

So, whether it’s assessing Alice Goffman’s book On the Run or Rachel Dolezal’s claims of blackness, we should take them for what they're worth in the larger scheme of things, thus addressing what really (but what is realness?) matters. And speaking of the larger view of things: (a) It’s funny that these two women have in common fixations on black underclass life and victimization that may not be grounded in reality (b) renowned sociologist Erving Goffman’s (father of Alice, which may explain the seeming uncritical, even fawning reception of her work from graduate school at Princeton until the present) notions of stigma as spoiled identity and performance in everyday life may help us to theorize about Alice and Rachel as exemplars of a broader phenomenon.

Trayvon Martin, Whistling Vivaldi and Whistling Dixie

I, like so many, am struggling to cope with the killing of Trayvon Martin and the trial of his killer. I am reading and reflecting on the many commentaries in an effort to make sense of it all.

One commentary that particularly struck me was by musician and author Questlove (Amir Khalib Thompson). Questlove wrote in New York Magazine about how the death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his killer left Questlove feeling not only dismayed but devalued. For Questlove, Martin’s death was a reminder that too often, black lives seem not to count for very much. As Questlove notes, our very physical presence is sometimes a threat to good order. Questlove wrote:

I'm in scenarios all the time in which primitive, exotic-looking me — six-foot-two, 300 pounds, uncivilized Afro, for starters — finds himself in places where people who look like me aren't normally found. I mean, what can I do? I have to be somewhere on Earth, correct? In the beginning — let's say 2002, when the gates of "Hey, Ahmir, would you like to come to [swanky elitist place]?" opened — I'd say "no," mostly because it's been hammered in my DNA to not "rock the boat," which means not making "certain people" feel uncomfortable.

I mean, that is a crazy way to live. Seriously, imagine a life in which you think of other people's safety and comfort first, before your own. You're programmed and taught that from the gate. It's like the opposite of entitlement. 

The problem is, I do have desires to go to certain places and do certain things and enjoy the perks and benefits of being a person who works his arse off as much as I do. So I got over my hang-ups of not wanting to be the odd guy in the room sometime around 2007. It's been mixed results at best.

Sadly, the fear of black physical presence is not new. Questlove’s piece is reminiscent of an anecdote from the book Parallel Time:Growing Up in Black and White by Brent Staples. Staples wrote of his time moving about Chicago while a graduate student:

I tried to be innocuous but didn't know how. The more I thought about how I moved, the less my body belonged to me; I became a false character riding along inside it. I began to avoid people. I turned out of my way into side streets to spare them the sense that they were being stalked. I let them clear the lobbies of buildings before I entered, so they wouldn't feel trapped. Out of nervousness, I began to whistle and discovered I was good at it. My whistle was pure and sweet -- and also in tune. On the street at night, I whistled popular tunes from the Beatles and Vivaldi's "Four Seasons." The tension drained from people's bodies when they heard me. A few even smiled as they passed me in the dark.

Staples, like Questlove, comes from the position of being a large (over six feet tall) black man in a world that too often deems any black man, woman or even a child as a scary Negro. And if anyone doubts that black women and children fall into this category also, they haven’t lived in my shoes nor in any pair that remotely resembles my shoes.  Whether it is driving while black,  reunioning while black, or other WB (while black) incidents, too many black people face the perplexing, infuriating, heart-breaking, debilitating, dangerous, and sometimes fatal task of addressing what scholar Jody Armour labeled “negrophobia.”  Negrophobia is the notion that because of their perceived dangerousness, an otherwise irrational fear of blacks might be justified in situations where whites (or deemed whites—for as George Zimmerman reminds us, whiteness is frequently situational, contingent, delegated and/or relative) take preemptive action such as shooting to thwart a black attacker. This is the Trayvon Martin case in a nutshell.

 This scary Negro trope runs rampant through the minds, media and literature of a country that, for all of its racial progress in some areas, remains wedded to Birth of a Nation style anti-black imagery. Such imagery affronts black men in particular, rendering them as little more than exemplars of the criminalblackman—the mythic black wrongdoer posited by scholar Katheryn Russell Brown. 

 Whistling Vivaldi, negrophobia, the criminalblackman and the killing of  Trayvon Martin are all potent aspects of what social theorist Erving Goffman called discredited stigma—stigma resulting from differentness that is already known or is assumed on the spot. This difference of blackness “spoils" the identity of black people, often rendering irrelevant black people’s adherence to social norms and expectations in other aspects of their lives. If Staples whistled light-hearted pop tunes or classical music to allay the fears of mostly white passersby, he was only trying to assuage the fear of his stigma-ravaged black identity.


 All too often, however, no amount of whistling will calm the fear of blackness. Because this is true, assertions that the Trayvon Martin case was “not about race” leave us with no real way talk about what happened. A man thought someone looked “suspicious,” called police, acted against police advice and followed the allegedly suspicious person, thereby provoking a fight, and then shot and killed the unarmed person.  How does the story about initial suspiciousness or the subsequent fight make sense without viewing it from the lens of the discrediting stigma of blackness? It doesn’t—unless instead of whistling Vivaldi, you’re whistling Dixie.