My Black Neighbor

I have an embarrassing history of being a poseur. I'm one of those people who pretends to hear the joke and laughs, or pretends to understand it and laughs. I have acted like I knew what drug paraphernalia was to avoid looking lame (backfire: I was wrong!), and I used to fib about having met Lenny Kravitz once at a concert (my friends did, but I had lost them in the crowd earlier).

Sometimes I think my tendency to be a "poseur" relates to Atkinson, Morten, and Sue's 1989 model of racial and cultural identity development (R/CID). There are five stages: conformity, dissonance, resistance and immersion, introspection, and integrative awareness. Likewise, I think that we of the majority go through similar stages when developing our own awareness of diversity, as well as our own racial identity.

(I am half-minority, but so often I find myself relating to the experiences of Caucasians more than the experiences of Asian-Americans. I have experienced racism and insensitivity for being Asian, but overall I feel like I've somehow slipped through the cracks into Caucasian acculturation.)

Anyway, so I conformed to the majority identity for most of my life, and then dissonance started slipping in. I remember that my dad spoke with hostility about rap and hip hop, glaring or ranting if a rap video happened to be on MTV when he walked through the living room. Would you believe that I didn't feel okay about liking a hip hop song until well into college? It's true. I felt weird about it, like I wasn't supposed to be listening, like it wasn't made for my ears, like it would make me seem...lesser.

Somewhere along the line, I lightened up and started attributing value to music and other art forms that are sometimes diminished by Caucasians. Here's an example: I love most of Spike Lee's movies. If I understand correctly, his reputation among many Caucasians is that he's a race-card blowhard, kind of like the film director equivalent of Al Sharpton. I am fascinated by his treatment of race, enjoy his style of cinematography, and count Bamboozled among my Top Five.

But sometimes I feel like maybe I am kind of stuck in the resistance and immersion stage of cultural awareness. I took African-American history in college...to learn more, or to earn credibility? I have seen The Roots and Outkast and Lauryn Hill live...have I played up my attendance at those shows more than my attendance at Grandaddy and Twilight Singers shows? Am I a poseur?

Which brings me to the story about my black neighbor, and my previous post about white privilege. I have a neighbor who lives in the next building over. He's African-American. (I use the two terms interchangeably, but choose "black" when succinctness adds impact. I probably need to blog about this, too.) He has a car and a motorcycle, and he likes to clean them while blaring his music loud from the stereo. Invoking my new knowledge of white privilege, and realizing that my neighbor probably catches race-related flak on a daily basis for any number of traits that may or may not be tied to his race/culture, I almost always let him blare away. Most of the time it stops after a few songs anyway, and occasionally I like the music. But, honestly, it's usually distracting or disruptive to me and once it was late enough at night that I felt justified in asking him to please turn it down. He did.

So here's the question that haunts me every time this happens: Am I being less racist or actually more racist for these micro-decisions? In my attempt to counter my own white privilege, am I actually defining this guy by his race instead of recognizing his full personhood, including the possibility that he blares loud music from his car because he's inconsiderate, and not because he's African-American and that's something that African-Americans stereotypically like to do and the oppression of such is racially vindictive?

It's funny, because there are so many reasons for people to be offended by these questions right now. But they are the questions that go through my head about once a week, when he plays his music. What would you do? One cannot deny that I am trying to pay the utmost sensitivity to his experience as a black man, by trying to choose the most racially considerate reaction. After all, a white woman telling a black man to step in line has all sorts of ugly implications. But one could also argue that my obliviousness to his skin color might be the ideal expression of acceptance in a situation as mundane as parking lot turf wars. I don't want to define anyone by their race! But I don't want to be clueless about how their race impacts their everyday experiences, either. How many other people "correct" him on a daily basis? How many other times are his actions rejected by others, and how many times is his race, and not his own character, faulted for it? How likely is it that he blares his music in the first place because he feels the need to do something marginally subversive without immediately being put in his place? Does he even think about these factors? (Probably not, since most people are less neurotic than me.)

Why am I blogging about my neighbor's racial identity when I've never exchanged a word with him other than, "Could you please turn it down a little?" We do exchange waves sometimes, at least. Maybe I should strike up a conversation with him about what his side of these incidents is like. Again, would that be thoughtful or horribly offensive?

In the end, I'm okay with this confusion and ambiguity. In fact, I think it's the point of the whole exercise. Race and culture are tough topics to tackle, and this is an example of how hard it can be. It would be nice to have the luxury of simple, clear answers, but that is (yet again) a privilege that everyone doesn't have, and one that I am willing to give up. I will continue to feel like a poseur, to be uncertain whether I'm getting it all right or all wrong, to inadvertently say offensive things and have to eat crow about it afterward. I think that confronting my own ignorance is probably supposed to be a painful, awkward process. Hopefully all the awkwardness of this entry means that I'm doing something right.