Be The Bigger Man

If I wanted to make everyone cringe, it wouldn't really be that hard. I can just conjur the idea of the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard--just the idea, mind you--and some of us at least would get that little tingle in the farthest back lower molars, that un-lingering sting of assumed, sympathetic vibration that is, somehow, wired directly into our lizard-brain FLIGHT! alarms.

As I said, that particular cringe, the purely sensate type, tends not to linger and we tuck that reaction back where we had it, under the unwashable laundry pile of reflex reactions we neither cultivated nor earned, like the way we all hate touching our eyeballs or reckoning in any way with Axe body spray.*

Some universal cringe factors are culturally specific, half inherited as the legacy detritus of the failures of previous generations and have learned as we step and stumble around that rubble and try to pick our way toward an identity of our own. For Americans, the primary instigator of that type has to be race, and most specifically the interrelation between black people and white people.

The history is itself so dark and twisted, the walls of it built out of bodies stacked like bricks mortared together with blood and powdered bone, it takes the worst and laziest kind of contrarian to either disregard it entirely or demand demand demand (usually at some volume) that there is, indeed, nothing to see here.

The problem is that just when we all feel like we've gotten everything calmed down and everyone seems to be OK with just a little bit of passive-aggression from time to time, and we're all sitting together as a nation at the vast collective dinner table, where look! even the guy sitting at the head of it is literally half black and half white, some fucker has to announce that at some point earlier in the evening, he took it upon himself to piss in the fruit salad we all thought we were enjoying.

Thanks, Donald Sterling. Now we're having this race talk again and nobody wants to make eye contact.

And there's always one who wants to make nice by taking the opportunity, now that it's all out in the open, to maybe dig deep into the issue at hand and, gosh darnit, see if we can't make some headway in these choppiest of seas, not really stopping to notice that we're all green from motion sickness.

That was Mark Cuban today, dotcom billionaire and owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, going well out of his way to try to make a complicated, nuanced, balanced point about the difficulty of balancing the biological impulses to self-protection with the socio-cultural projections of who among us constitutes a threat on first sight.

His point is that we've all got some darkness in us**, AMIRITE?! Which is actually a fairly Christian idea: let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

But what he forgets is that we are not a Christian nation. We're a capitalist one, whatever the mummers and professional shudderers present to the media. So Donald Sterling will take his punishment because he cost his league sponsorship money and potentially fan dollars as a direct result of the public relations fallout from the revelation of what were private thoughts expressed idiotically. Er, privately. OK, some of both.

But nobody really gives a shit about what Mark Cuban is trying to say. He's attempting to express a fairly complicated viewpoint about race and the human instinct to prejudge. He gets his words confused as he seems to be taking about a predisposition to smallness and fear, a survival  technique we used to apply to bears and tigers that has been maladapted as an overlay versus dumb subcategories of our fellow man. But he's also speaking very carefully and self-awarely about something that really should be addressed and may actually apply in some way to the Donald Sterling case.

But we don't want to hear it. Not really. Because raise your hand who else doesn't want to talk about race. All of us, right? Well, almost all.*** It's yucky and scary and makes us confused about our foundational myths and all the nice white folks on our money. Plus it's not going to draw mouseclicks or ad sales, not in the way Donald Sterling did and continues to, because (it seems so far) everyone basically agrees, though we may insist on some honing on some of the points. It's an attempt at Christian thoughtfulness, but unfortunately, there's not much of a market for all that.


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*as a scent or even a concept, really.

**Not literally, sadly. If we all had some actual darkness in us, I suspect none of this would be an issue.

***I haven't read the linked article as yet. I will, but I have to brace myself and find some quiet time to wrestle with it and have it wrestle with me. Skimming, I think I see where it's coming from though. I read Native Son this year and it blew my brain open. This is more of that.