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Scheduled Readings

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An excerpt from Breakout:

That's always been a funny thing to me, this whole notion of selling out. What exactly is "selling out" for a black person? Tryin' to be "white?" How does one be black or white?
Hmmm. I'm surrounded by white people. I'm supposed to adjust myself in order to learn how to play The Game, but I'm not supposed to imitate them. I'm supposed to play by the rules to get what I need. I'm not supposed to get too close, especially with the women, that unwritten, ominous taboo. Oh. Okay.

That's where it started for me, the whole absurd set of contradictions of what it's supposed to mean to be black in America. In many ways, we do imitate, but we're not supposed to assimilate, the black politically-correct response to this society's enduring resistance to acknowledge the apartheid-like history of this country, and its enduring effects, that make true assimilation impossible anyway. Then again, the only way to live and survive in this country is "The American Way," so we've got no choice but to try and participate, right? It requires assimilation to a certain degree, but then there's that old barrier of our skin and the perceptions that have been built into it, creating what W.E.B. Dubois called the "double consciousness" inherent in all black people: being "black," which, historically in America, meant being delegated to a less-than-human status, yet being American at the same time, an identity that was originally equated with being "white." Black people live with the tension of wanting inclusion despite our frustration of America's resistance to inclusiveness, whether that resistance is a result of choice on the part of society at large, or the inevitability of historical effect.

There's a part of all black people that wants to "sell out" in the sense of wanting acceptance and acknowledgement of our humanity. On the other hand, there's a quiet acceptance that perhaps things will never change, and the best we can hope for is the 21^st century version of separate but equal, not legally separated from society at large, but separated because of the de facto results of government-sanctioned segregation. That frustration, that resentment, is what creates the notion of not "selling out" to white folks; a mindset of choosing to stay separated because it's inevitable anyway.

There was never a clear definition, to me, of what it was to sell out. Nobody ever actually told me, "Don't sell out, but I responded to that thing: that thing, growing up in America, we all respond to, that thing we can't see or touch, but we know it's there, and we know it has rules, just as sure as we know the sky is blue. It's the thing that separates us into "others," with jaded perceptions and implicit directions to stay separated, and the result is that we're not able to break through to each other's humanity, hence denying our own without being aware of it. We are more than socially-designated colors.

From the Author:

I was midway through my final year of graduate school the first time any notion of spirituality presented itself in a thought-provoking way. The first person who told me I needed to “get in touch with myself” was a palm reader. She hit enough generalities about me, as any astrologist would who knew a questioner’s birthday, to make me listen in spite of my skepticism. A couple of months later, the subject came up again when a colleague of mine lent me a book called The Tao of Pooh, which basically says that the simplicity of Winnie the Pooh isn’t vastly different from basic tenets in Taoism, or Daoism, or whatever it was I had never heard of.

I devoured that book. I recognized hints of a distant truth when the author described Taoism as the way of the whole man, the true man, the spirit man (and woman), while on the other hand you have the Brain, the Academian, an incomplete and unbalanced creature who divides all things into little categories and compartments…in short, me, and many others in our ‘this-or-that’ culture.

I was in no hurry to become a Taoist monk, but the subject of knowing one’s self came up yet again two months later when one of my best friends hipped me to a PBS series called The Power of Myth, featuring Joseph Campbell, legendary scholar of world mythologies. By the second episode, I was hooked on this “spiritual” thing, especially when I found out Campbell influenced George Lucas and Star Wars, scoring points with that inner child in me. It really was one of those life-changing deals…swallowing the red pill and looking beyond what we’re taught.

This idea of spirituality coincided with a time I was feeling the weight of 10 years of educational opportunity coming to a stop like a freight train, barely knowing who I was or what I wanted out of life. The complexities of being black in predominantly white academic environments plagued me much more than I acknowledged; too many compartments and categories to contend with. Despite the blessings of education, I was fairly miserable: unbalanced and incomplete. All this “spiritual” stuff made me recognize that the value of what I was supposed to get from those ten years, i.e. material comfort and some level of status and acceptance, wasn’t necessarily of greater value than what those ten years did to my sense of being.

It was during this time that I began to ask questions; of me and of the things we normally take for granted – generally speaking, the way we think and the way we live. The outcome of this query was Breakout: A Search for Being. I do make a sincere effort not to over-indulge autobiographical self-psychoanalysis on you the reader, but I also try to give us all something to think about, outside of the box our minds are born into. My hope is that Breakout can be therapy for anyone who has the same questions I have.