Tuesday, August 9, 2016

The Population Darkens

My trainer at the gym and I have been wasting (my) exercise time engaged in an interesting conversation about Americans.  He is from my perspective absolutely no different than I, educated, savvy about our inherited culture, articulate, but, as he insists he is Puerto Rican, brown skinned and thus inherently different than I.  True enough he grew up with a big Afro  and as a boy was already dancing on large pieces of cardboard for money.  He was a child of the Bronx and I grew up pink cheeked and clueless in the cultural wastes of the American Middle West.  Except of course not really true as ours was a university town, I was preternaturally intellectually curious and took advantage that everything the university had on offer from an early age. Mike may not have had the extensive university education I had but having lived in New York and been part of the professional theatre and dance scene, Jose Quintero as a mentor, he is no rube from the island.  So our conversation was interesting; whenever I insisted upon our likeness, he would remind me that he was always the last to be brought into a casting call--he wasn't white enough.  The statisticians say that soon the population will be minority white.  As a longtime professor of the humanities I wondered aloud with Mike how the narrative of the West--Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, etc. will now be presented.  It is essentially a story of the white man's increasingly complicated and subtle definition of himself.  For many its crowning achievement was the Age of Enlightenment when the irrational bonds of religious belief were cast off and exchanged for scientific inquiry.  We both of us one a lapsed Catholic, the other a former Episcopalian, fear the new immigrant movements of peoples untouched by skepticism  and scientific inquiry.  We wondered how to encourage peoples who formerly have been excluded to participate.  I think of the students I taught at Lehman College in the Bronx once upon a time, mostly people of color, who traditionally had been excluded from the city's cultural institutions, the museums, the opera houses, who were all very reluctant or indifferent to visit.  Was this great heritage essentially a narrative of white people to be discarded?  We talked of the musical "Hamilton" where the cast is largely African American, many of Puerto Rican heritage, as is its composer.  I remember my inherent sense of disconnect even though I knew what I was going to be seeing when the  opening scene presented a group of men and women in eighteenth century dress, purporting to be friends, family and indeed some of the Founding Fathers, all them clearly identifiable as "Negroes," to use the term with which I was raised.  Down at the Public Theater where the musical originated the audience was largely white.  How do people of color see this show?  I think of my students over the years to whom I lectured on ancient Greek epic poetry.  As more and more of the class by virtue of this change in ethnicity become the descendants of the oppressed, enslaved, the dispossessed how will they identify with Achilles and Agamemnon and Odysseus, war heroes, slave owners, rapacious winners in life's game of chance, although eventually losers in terms of the ancient Greek tragic sense of life, itself at odds with the optimistic world view offered by the religions of the book which will be dominant among these new Americans.  Well, I will be dead soon enough, not to worry, Charlie.  History will sort itself out, always has, if it doesn't sink under the waves.

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