In which earnestness endures

I have to be on my way out the door in ten minutes, and I don't have a good record for writing quickly. Let's see if I can do it this time!

I was thinking that my last post helped this blog to maintain an undesirable level of earnestness, but when I reread the end of the post, I discovered an even more fundamental problem: I hadn't realized that I was exhausted almost to the point of incoherence, and there are definitely a few logical connections I was making in my head that did not get written down. Sorry, guys! I hope it made some kind of sense.

And perhaps I should be more careful about describing Eynsham as a backwater, in light of the fact that it was founded by Æthelmær, who had been a powerful figure until he retired from court a year before the "palace revolution" of 1006. Beyond this, there are some indications that King Æthelred and his sons may have visited the abbey from time to time and been permitted to eat in the refectory (!), but it's true that it does not appear as one of the leading houses in charters of the day and that Ælfric never appears in charters.

All right, today's business: If the so-called White Firefighters Case didn't bring this home to us, especially as it intersected with Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings, then this week's hoopla over the arrest of Skip Gates certainly made it clear that we have not put race behind us. This case is also about class: not just a black man arrested by a white man, but a prominent university professor facing off with a working-class police officer. Society is a complicated beast. The President has once again showed his political savvy in recognizing that he could help to quell a storm that he had (probably inadvertently) helped to stir up, but his original comments are telling both of the ongoing problem and of a kind of change that he has brought in even addressing the issue in such blunt terms. The whole mess of race relations makes me quite sad. Within weeks of my arrival in Chicago, I was spat on for no reason I can discern other than that I was white - in a neighbourhood inhabited by a large white population, as well as a mix of minority populations. Somehow, I couldn't feel angry about it.

That was also the year that I met an older black woman (also named Emily) who, aside from her obvious failure to take a pretty hefty dose of medication, was still labouring under a crushing sense of injury and bitterness. We could be talking about a book or a piece of music, and the conversation would almost invariably turn suddenly to old insults and painful examples of discrimination. So many people can still remember terrible, terrible things, and there was nothing I could do for the older Emily but hear her out, swearing and all. I used to chat with the girls who worked the cash registers at one of the dining halls on campus - one was jealous of my long, straight hair, while I was jealous of the skull that allowed her to shave her head and look stunning; they were proud of me for having rhythm when they played music on quiet Saturday mornings - but the fact remains that white students vastly outnumbered black students and that the only white people working the cash machines were supervisors. Back to that fossilized class divide that preserves the old outlines of slavery. And for all that I deplore the slave trade, I can't wish that I'd never met the people who are descended from slaves. I can't unwish the country's first black president, and I can't wish to rewrite history.


It's tough, this learning from the past.

EDIT: And on that terribly earnest note, I am terribly late!