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Introductions, Cont.

And with that story, I guess I should introduce my roommate Malcolm to you.  Malcolm was from ‘the hood,’ as he called it, which is an aggregation of black culture around an image of mutually perceived community.  I quote this definition from Agerson’s book of popular culture, the defining text for American Culture Studies 101 in the year nineteen hundred and ninety six. This is, of course, academic bullshit aimed at defining black culture in the United States so it’s more palatable to the white middle class. We all grow up in the hood as long as we understand what it means to be a friend to the point where it hurts. When your regrets are bigger than your dreams, when you got nothing of value but the way you feel, and when the broken end of the stick is the most useful, you’re living in the hood and no race has a monopoly on that special brand of magic and loss.

This is the hierarchy of Malcolm:

MALCOLM WAS A HUMAN BEING FIRST: He was a biological creature with a brain and central nervous system that received information through five sensory organs and then interpreted that information in symbolic form that resulted in a collection of past experience that gave the illusion of an individuality which appeared to have separate existence from the natural world; this is what he should have seen first when he looked in the mirror.

MALCOLM WAS A MAN: He was a member of the species of homo sapiens equipped with a penis and testicles which allowed him to impart his unique genetic information into the womb of any receptive human female on the planet (actually during his junior year this happened and he kept the baby).

MALCOLM WAS A BLACK MAN: His ancestors spent more time exposed to the sun’s melanin-darkening rays than mine did, and over hundreds of thousands of years; this produced the genetic variance of darker skin.

Malcolm should have seen himself in this order when he looked in the mirror, but society at large saw it backward as it often does, it saw a black man who spoke a certain way, dressed a certain way, and listened to music with the thump thump and the bump bump. Society in the twilight years of the Bill Clinton presidency saw Malcolm as a member of an oppressed ethnic group whose opinions and rights were often suppressed and who was genetically prone to violence, hypertension, and incapable of truly understanding the nuances of the modern world. The mirror of society is far more powerful than the simple ones made of cut glass and plastic that throw our fleeting reflections back at us to push away the fear that we might not exist and reassure us that we are actually standing there breathing. The mirror of society is more powerful by factors of ten and the refracted reflection it gives us is what we’re branded with for life. Malcolm eventually grew out of seeing himself through his culture primarily because he was saved by a good woman as all good men must be before they become great.

It’s interesting to consider the different ways that people react to oppression.  When it’s real (and too often it is), some react with Molotov cocktails and grocery carts filled with looted stereo equipment; some react through apathy, shrugging their shoulders in a that’s the way things are gesture that only shuffles the problem into the future; and some react through straight up, no strings attached, open-hearted love. Malcolm and I came to understand each other that year and, at the risk of sounding sentimental, I think we developed a friendship based on genuine affection for each other as people. He taught me that the world is one big hood full of enemies, lovers, and friends who make this pain-dulled journey of life bearable through joyful participation in both the struggle and the camaraderie.

Malcolm was not a member of the anger or apathy crowd, never reacting in injury, but acting on the world through humor, mystifying his audiences and having them holding their cheek muscles from exhausted laughter, his overabundance of good nature winning over the hardest of hearts on the smoke bench outside Kohl Hall, and his membership in the Third Floor Magistrates, the most ruthless of underground organizations on campus that year, even commanded respect from the country steroid babies who no doubt grew up to be unthinking racist smoke holes. Malcolm was better than all of that and none of it ever got the better of him.

There was an unspoken rule in the campus black community that no black man should date a white woman and it was so unthinkable that a black woman would date a white man that no one ever spoke of it. Segregation was alive and well in the willing minds of most of the black community, but like a Jim Crow black teen in the rural south sneaking a drink from the white water fountain when no one was looking, Malcolm had an affinity for the blond hair, pink skin and thin-lipped labia of the Northwestern Ohio white female population. We all found it humorous, the way he would sneak them in late at night, absolutely no public affection, phone calls going unaccepted when certain people of darker skin color were present in the room.  Outside of The Magistrates, there was never any bragging from him about the wispy blond pubic hairs he sometimes made a production of picking out of his teeth during our breakfasts in the Commons Dining Hall.

One of his excursions to the try-the-white zone was an interest of mine as well.  Her name was Angela and, oddly enough, this was never a source of friction between us. Malcolm went out with her a couple times, but after discovering her potential ties to the black campus community (and potential leaking of certain sensitive information) he called it off.  I didn’t become interested in her until one late night at Howard’s bar, she with a skirt short enough for me to see high enough up her thigh to remember she was a female and possibly a port of entry to that womanly mystery I was still young and foolish enough to believe in.

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