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If I’m not careful, I can get increasingly granular in my assessment of the success or failure of my integrity practice, spending endless hours in self-recriminating loops. Should I have said that?… What if I’d done it like this instead?… I should have gone there… Done it in that order… Said the other thing. You get the (tiny, tiny) picture.
But if I step back and widen my lens I can get a larger view, ask deeper questions that transform my integrity practice in more significant ways. Like, what if many of the underlying categories I use to identify and interpret people were made up and, therefore, potentially wrong? Or if not entirely incorrect, then at the very least, partially so?
I was invited recently to participate in an event to honor the 30th anniversary of author Toni Morrison receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature. Morrison got her Master’s Degree at Cornell University and lived in Ithaca, NY from 1953-1955. So, we feel a kinship to Toni here. We claim her as one of our own.
The event involved a community read and discussions of the only short story Morrison ever wrote, Recitatif. It was previously published only once— in an anthology in 1983— but has now been re-issued as a separate volume, with an introduction by British author Zadie Smith1. Despite my nearly lifelong attachment to Morrison and her novels, I had never even heard of Recitatif. When I was asked to lead one of the discussions, however, I couldn’t say no. Anything for Toni.
The story does not disappoint. Like every Morrison work, each word is carefully crafted to advance her underlying proposition. In this case, Toni herself wrote that the story was “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.”
In other words, over forty-some-odd pages, Morrison spins out the story of two women who first encounter each other as 8-year-old girls, form a deep connection under unusual and stressful circumstances, and then meet again repeatedly over the years, their affinity for each other waxing and waning but never disappearing. Because race is such a basic way in which our lives are dictated and defined here in the United States, each character is affected by it. How could they not be? And yet, Morrison never allows us to entirely decide which character is white or black.
She strips away all the details of language— word choice, tone, and dialect— we might consciously or subconsciously use to decide which one is which. Then she peppers the story with other details— how their mothers dressed and behaved, where they worked and lived, what their husbands did for a living, what they would or would not eat— to tempt us to make a racial assignment. But the clues are offered in such a way as to make their racial identities slippery, resistant to our desire to grasp them firmly. Just when we think we know, another detail is presented that twists our assumption upside down, and we are empty-handed again.
This is weirdly unsettling, and it’s meant to be. Morrison is experimenting on us, as readers. Testing whether or not we can see the many ways beyond race— mutual abandonment, childhood poverty, gender, cruelty, motherhood, geography— that the two characters are tied to each other as human beings. In the introduction, Zadie Smith writes of this underlying humanism in Morrison’s work: “If it is a humanism, it is a radical one, which struggles toward solidarity in alterity, the possibility and promise of unity across difference. When applied to racial matters, it recognizes that although the category of race is both experientially and structurally “real”, it yet has no essential reality in and of itself.” It is, she writes further, “a socially pervasive and sometimes legally binding” fiction.
This may be new news to some of you, and uncomfortable news at that— that race only has meaning and reality because we make it so. I can relate. Way back in 1992, when I was in college, there was not yet any widespread discussion of gender as anything other than a binary— men and women, the end2. There were trans people then, as well as people who rejected the binary entirely (what we would call non-binary today), but they were mostly closeted or flew under the radar of the mainstream culture and sometimes even themselves. One of my professors, though—a woman who herself defied certain conventional ideas of the feminine— challenged us to see beyond the strict boundaries of the gender binary and to wrestle with its social function.
In class one day she passed around a handful of black and white, 8.5 X 11 portraits of people of truly indeterminate gender. As we gazed at them in some confusion, she asked us to step back and witness our reactions to the photos. Did we find ourselves automatically assigning a gender to the individuals in the pictures? What details caused us to make those determinations? Were there other details we potentially screened out or discounted that challenged that assignment? Was not being able to know in which gender category to place each person uncomfortable?
It was definitely uncomfortable for me, I’ll admit. Up until that point, “men” was a hard and fixed category and one which I knew I had to keep careful track of to protect myself from possible threats. Not knowing if I could put someone in the “potential threat” category oddly sent off more alarm bells than knowing for sure to what category the individual belonged. Better the threat you know than one you don’t. I could feel my pulse rising and my brain scrambling to put each individual in their “proper” box. To know, so I could rest easy in the determination of whether I was encountering an “us” or a “them”.
Though I am more habituated to encountering people on many points on the gender spectrum now, by necessity I still habitually track the potential threat posed by “men”, or people who present as men, as I move through the world. That moment of frisson— does this person pose the particular danger that men do?— still rises, even though my life is infinitely safer than it was in 1992. The difference now is that the category of “us”, for me, has expanded to include trans and non-binary folks.
How did this happen? Increased exposure, I suspect. The more people who appeared in my world who didn’t fit into my rigid categories without my experience of risk changing at all, the easier it was to fold all manner of gender-expressing people into the “us” box. Then my kids came out as trans and non-binary, and whatever gates I’d put up to separate myself were annihilated by love.
I’ve loved any number of men, though, in the same years, and though several dozen now live provisionally in my “us” house, the truth is their presence is, if not actively uncomfortable, just on the edge of it. The potential that I have allowed danger in the door— emotional, psychological, or physical— lurks in the corners. Love, it turns out, doesn’t erase structures of power and privilege, particularly for those on the receiving end of oppression. Patriarchy’s remedy isn’t simply individual intimacy. To act as if it is can get a woman killed.
This is also why I don’t take personal offense if individual black people in my life don’t trust me or welcome a deeper connection. Why should they? Caring for me doesn’t erase the weapons of my privilege. Over time, I can lay those burdens down repeatedly, functioning as a person and not a threat, softening the edges of the boundary between us by understanding their fictive core. But unless or until the real structures that circumscribe black people’s lives are dismantled, the categories— and the risks inherent for anyone defined as other— remain.
We are pattern-readers as a species. One of the oldest parts of our brains, the amygdala (part of the limbic system), evolved to see patterns, and any related threat, everywhere we go. What started as a way to find edible plants and spot predators in a landscape became a way to identify and categorize people as friends or foes. So, there’s no moral judgment, for me anyway, in our biological tendencies to constantly, and often unconsciously, scan our environment for similarities and differences, and then to assign those perceptions to us/not us. Biologically speaking, we just reflexively do what we do— eat, sleep, mate, categorize, assess threat.
Our pre-frontal cortex, however— admittedly, a younger version of our brains, evolutionarily speaking— is where we source our ability for complex, abstract thought. It allows us to think beyond simplistic, binary patterns of us/them, male/female, black/white to understand and language our complex interrelatedness.
The pre-frontal cortex is, in fact, where we formulate and process written language and speech. Written language is its own limiting system, however. In an interview, Zadie Smith paraphrased author Karl Knausgaard, arguing that the function of language is to define and categorize things, to put a box around them. This makes order out of chaos but also distances us from the wild reality of people and the world.
So, if love and language aren’t the answer, what is? We cannot erase our natural tendencies toward seeing patterns, and we cannot ignore the realistic threats that exist in the world around us. Nor should we in either case. But we can resist amplifying our experience of threat or manufacturing threat in our own minds. We can step back from our category stories and appreciate just that; they are stories, the meanings of which can change if we choose to transform them.
And the people that feature in our stories? They are infinitely more complex than we often perceive or portray them. As Morrison challenges us, we can choose to see them beyond fictional categories and approach our differences primarily with curiosity, while staying open to the inevitable, and sometimes lengthy, list of similarities. We can soften ourselves, and in the process soften the separation between us.
In the United States, when a person is sworn in to testify in a court of law, they swear to tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. Lawyers know this is a tricksy business because none of us know the whole truth of anything or anyone. We only know, hopefully, with careful and thorough reflection, the entirety of our truth. And if we offer it openly and faithfully then we have fulfilled our duty. To the court, at least.
But the duties, such as they are, to our integrity are deeper and wider. I have to work to bring my outer life into alignment with my inner beliefs. To tell, through the actions I take and the choices I make, “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” of myself. But I also have to step back and see the wider view, that my truth— about myself, other people, and the world as a whole— is, at best, only partial. Sometimes, it might even be wrong.
A host of responses often arise when we are confronted with being wrong— defensiveness, denial, hostility, regret, and anxiety. Our moralistic tendencies swoop in and insist that if we are wrong then we must be bad, and who wants to be bad? Truly bad (as in, outside of the social boundaries of belonging) and not sexy bad?3 As a social species, we’re not wired to handle feeling bad with automatic equanimity. Our limbic system senses threat (Danger, Will Robinson!) and automatically steps in to figure out how to confront or avoid it.
Instead of experiencing our wrong-headedness as an inevitable aspect of our inability to ever know the entirety of the truth, tight in the grip of our most primal brains, we rush to shore up the walls of our category boxes. Justify them. Protect them.
As uncomfortable as it may periodically be to move through the world undefended, better to hold our ability to categorize the world for safety’s sake more loosely, to take the risk and bet on our common humanity. We’ll never know the whole truth of what we’re seeing, but that was never the point.
Removing the need for armor to live together is.
In the British edition of this reissue, published first, Zadie Smith’s piece is included as an Afterward, and that was the correct way around. Given the nature of Morrison’s premise, to read Smith’s analysis before the Morrison skews the experiment. If you read this story, read Smith after, the way Smith, herself, intended.
I’m discussing gender presentation here, and not biological sex, which is equally varied, it turns out. It is, however, though related, a different topic.
Do I have to explain this? IYKYK.
Fabulous. I may have to check out that book. Also - I had about 6 different responses to bits in your article, but as each new section came, I could only remember the most recent. All were positive comments, but I'll just leave my last thoughts on being wrong. Being a few years younger than my VERY smart older brother (whom I adored and idolized), I spent half of my life really really not wanting to be wrong. About anything. It's taken years of sober self-reflection to let go of that defensiveness. Being wrong does NOT mean I'm "stupid", as I had been telling myself. And it has been so goddamn freeing to be able to say "Oh! I was wrong about that!", and not have it threaten my sense of self-worth. As a matter of fact, I now say my personal motto is "Fallor Ergo Sum" (Roughly - I'm mistaken, therefore I am). And in my gardening classes, I have "You always learn more from your failures than your successes" at the end of each class description. I've found this to be totally true and valid for nearly everything. I can be taught the 'right way' to do something, but when I try it a different way and it doesn't work (in a spectacular way), then I really *understand* why the right way is the right way, rather than it just being what I memorized as right. Even with the progression of science, I try to think of the changes and leaps that happen as not that we were "wrong" before, but just doing the best with what we knew to date. As in, "the whole truth" is kind of unobtainable, but good to always be striving for.
Damn, I do go on. Maybe it's good I didn't comment on every part of that that lit up my brain.
But again, excellent. And thank you.
So many pieces of the puzzle you have put together.
The lyric that follows was originally written in an hour after it blew into my brain, somewhat revised after testing with friends.
Perhaps a Miss, my not wanting to use the word feMale, could approach the fact that many males are having trouble chiselling out of the walls of patriarchy. I am struggling with that lyric.
I am not an Island
I'm not an island
I'm a woman
I'm a lover, I am a giver
I have sisters
I'm a woman
I'm not an island
I am not a piece of property
That you can or can't afford
I am not your trader's favorite stock
But I'm not to be ignored
I am strong within my boundaries
I am not your fair absurd
I'm the fount of our salvation
And I will have the final word
I'm not an island
I'm a woman
I'm a lover, I am a giver
I have sisters
I'm not an island
I'm a woman
I'm a lover, I am a giver
I have sisters
I'm a woman
I'm not an island
I am the mighty hurricane
That will beat upon your shores
I am a resurrection
I am knocking on your doors
Do you think that I am kidding
Do even think at all
While you play your favorite pastimes
And throw your favorite balls
I'm not an island
I'm a woman
I'm a lover, I am a giver
I have sisters
I'm a woman
I'm not an island
I am thriving in the sunlight
I am living my ballet
I will harken to that music
As I hear my sisters play
With one step for the future
And one for all mankind
We shall weave this dance together
And advance in pace and kind
I'm not an island
I'm a woman
I'm a lover, I am a giver
I have sisters
I'm a woman
I'm not an island
Malcolm J McKinney 2023