9. A Confession

This is not an attempt at self-justification but a confession.  No one person can answer for the crimes of a community but, equally, no one person, therefore , can evade their own responsibility for what they have done, do, and plan on doing.  Somewhere between communal criminality and individual responsibility there lies a dark ground that no amount of examination can clarify.  

I grew up in Washington, DC during the Civil Rights era of the 1960’s, with a mother who was passionately devoted to social equality of all Americans.  An activist by nature, she involved me in all of her projects, including marching in demonstrations, raising funds and collecting food, clothing, and bedding for people in need, lectures and rallies in support of SCLC and, as time went on, SNCC and other radical movements.  She passed on to me the desire to try to empathize with the terrible injustices of both the northern and southern US toward African-Americans and, at the same time, to realize that the real race problem lay within white people themselves: attitudes, prejudices, and culturally enforced stereotypes that needed to be questioned and laid to rest, not avoided.  The revered figures for me at this time, through her, were Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and James Baldwin.  As each one of these men were killed or marginalized, and as my mother’s sense of defeat and depression grew, I saw more and more how the notion of race as the crucial factor in US history, as articulated by Dr. WEB Dubois, was the literal truth concerning our society as a whole.  This background shaped my 40-year career as a teacher of music and composition, and my nearly 50-year career as a composer.

I pictured myself, then, as someone who set out to be even-handed and receptive.  I believed (and continue to believe) in Affirmative Action and intended to support its tenets in every way I could.  This translated into real actions. At the University of Georgia from the time of the inception of the doctoral program until I left in June, 2000, I directed every doctoral dissertation executed by an  African-American student and also all Hispanic students. I also worked on as many recitals given by an African-American student that was appropriate to my area of expertise. Perhaps of greater significance, I was once taken to task by an African-American student, who felt I had given him a lower grade than he deserved.  He made a good case and he was right, so I raised his grade, justifiably. I’m not sure I would have changed a white student’s grade under similar circumstances but I hope I would have. I also hope that I would have applied identical criteria. At Oberlin Conservatory, where African-American students were few and far between, I certainly taught my share of them and was the principal private teacher for almost all of the female students.  I could not teach all women or foreign students or minority students for reasons of excessive teaching load. But I was clearly, at both institutions, the go-to person in the minds of students who were under-represented in my field of music; who were, to some extent, victims of a society that devalued their capabilities for reasons of race or gender.

But what does all this mean?  Do I “protest too much” in enumerating this?  What purpose lies underneath this exposition? Am I guilty and want to cover my tracks by presenting what purports to be an honourable record?  Am I saying I am a friend to African-Americans? Or am I just a power figure bearing the white man’s burden with pride? There is no simple answer; no ONE answer.  And there doesn’t have to be. It is not (and never is) consistency that matters; consistency, as Hannah Krall has so eloquently stated, is almost a prima facie case for the probability of inaccuracy at best, mendacity at worst.  It is in the contradictions and contrasts, the unlikely and unexplainable, that illumination and clarification might lie.

One of the people whose dissertations I directed is someone whom I have known for a long time.  I conducted on his doctoral chamber recital and worked with him on a number of very successful performance projects, and I believe we both enjoyed these experiences and esteemed each other’s work.  He is a performer who has, with considerable reluctance, I believe, been called upon to exercise his considerable administrative skills and intelligence on behalf of two US colleges. He is an intellectual, a pragmatist, a dreamer, and a committed individual who possesses inter-personal skills of which I am both awed and envious.  He is also a “boss” for whom I would have considered it an honour to work. We have competed against each other in road races, he being by far the faster in the shorter distances with me being able to compete better in distances of 13.1 miles and further. In a sense, we have the appearance of being friends.

But I know that, in a very literal sense, we cannot be more than professional colleagues and acquaintances; good, appreciative, and respectful, but never close.  For any doctoral student, there is an uneasy feeling around the professors with whom one worked the most closely; even the location where one did one’s doctoral work can be tainted.  The professors know too much about you, saw you at your weakest, know all about the defects. Nobody wants to revisit those things.

But this is different.  There’s an awkwardness and a reticence that has nothing to do with past student foibles.  We were as close as we could ever be when performing together, which is, indeed, a very intimate experience.  But it is also impersonal and has a history outside of social history and social circumstances. He is measurably more successful in his career in academia than I have been—Professor, Dean, Provost, outstanding musician, educational innovator—and most certainly better paid.  But, while justifiably proud (or, at least, satisfied) with his attainments, his focus in his life has been on his family (of which he is the only surviving elder male), his peers and friends from his college career, and the support of African-American artists in all fields. What we hold in common can only be called positive; what differences there are can only make us more interesting, each to each.  From where does this awkwardness arise, then, between two people with so much history and experience in common?

Despite these most favourable of circumstances, the history we share is not the decisive history involved.  I am a white male power figure who, no matter how benign, helpful, or supportive I might appear, about whom any African-American man must harbour at least a certain amount of tension, distrust, and anger.  Speaking only for myself—and in light of my own experience growing up—I can certainly say that it would be impossible for me to trust the protestations of a family member, no matter how much I might wish consciously to trust and draw close to them.  In my “friend’s” case and in mine, the same kinds of issues arise. He believes, as any sane black man MUST believe, that when push comes to shove, I will support the maintenance of white power and turn from him; that there will inevitably be a point beyond which I will not go in the name of racial justice.  He would have to believe, maybe to know, that at some level I could never be trusted and that, even if I were totally exceptional in every way, I am still the representative of a group to which he will probably never be able to belong. My thought is that he can not really afford to trust me any more than I could trust one of the members of my immediate family, for very much the same reasons, even if those reasons are not entirely rational.

So what does this mean?  That history blocks change?  That atonement might need to precede any real rapprochement?  That there is too much water under the dam to reverse the direction of the flow?  What would help to alleviate this situation? Some kind of honest and open discussion with everything on the table, as per the suggestion of Malcolm X?  Just living through the situation and seeing where we end up?  

I can’t confront this person with my fears and failings, any more than I want to torture out of him his true feelings.  White people have expressed a bewildering assortment of conflicting and heartfelt views: some profoundly racist, some conciliatory but only up to a point, some perhaps more enlightened.  African-Americans have had to play a variety of parts in order to keep up with all of these personalities, none of which may be any more than coping devices that protect and conceal. And one can conceal oneself for only so long before one can no longer tell the difference between what is part of oneself and what is necessary to survive.  Survival skills that are part of the collateral damage of racism. All I do know is I love and respect this man and wish I had the chance or the skills or the opportunity to let him know this.

I leave this here for now.  Outwardly, I have been successful in presenting an image of a white man who wants to go farther than just alleviate racist behavior and racist history.  Inwardly, I am still learning how little able I am, even now, to comprehend the magnitude of the effect of systemic racism. Inwardly, no amount of outward success can change the fact that I have far to go in understanding and overcoming.