The worst job I ever had -- data entry for the City of Portland Bureau of Buildings -- had its bright side. What made it bad was the boss, a neurotic woman -- a control-freak who treated everyone like children (which I suspect was the dark side of her direct superior, a woman who wanted to be everyone’s friend.) The bright side was working alongside black people as equals. At the desk next to me was Madison, a dignified African American who had been ghettoized into the worst part of our job: abandoned car removal. Day after day he sat patiently entering their particulars so they could be towed after a certain time period as well as checked against the police list of stolen cars. Long eyestraining lists of trivia.
It was not the most dangerous job. Eddie, a tall Somali-featured man from the Louisiana/Texas border where he grew up among cotton and catfish farms, went out on the street actually ticketing the cars, which often represented the fantasy wealth of someone on the economic and emotional edge. When they rushed out to protect their car and offer to fight, very tall Eddie would say, in his patient soft voice, “Well, all right. If it has to be that way.” Slowly he’d put his clipboard on the hood of the car in question, take off his jacket and carefully fold it to lay alongside, begin to neatly roll up his sleeves -- by that time, the prospective attacker was beginning to bargain. There never were any real fights and he rarely called for police backup.
Madison, once I got it straight in my head which president he was, became my friend and we even talked religion, since he was a strong church member and I was an ordained Unitarian minister but not in a pulpit. One day he said something about God, and I replied with a joking reference to “Her.” In wonderment he asked, “Do you talk about God that way in your church?” He wasn’t angry. I can’t remember whether he suggested I visit his church or I asked if he would mind if I visited. He thought it over and then said, “If you go, call me beforehand and I’ll go along with you.” I think he thought that a white woman like me might feel a little lonesome in a black congregation.
So one Sunday early I called his house and got his wife. “Tell Madison I’m going to Mt. Olivet this morning.” I heard her say in astonishment, not quite muffling the phone, “Madison! Some white woman wants to go to church with you!” He said he’d meet me there.
I’m generally early so I can sit in the back where I can watch the people. This time I stood in the vestibule watching people arrive. They all greeted me, the women in gorgeous hats and fabulous dresses, the men immaculately barbered, and the children spit-shined. In a short time, a matriarch came to interview me. (EVERY congregation has them!) Her hat was splendid and she wore black kid gloves which she kept on while we shook hands. None of the women in this congregation wore pants -- most wore very high heels, even if they weighed more than I did. In the Nineties the principal of my high school in Portland was a woman of this kind -- in fact, she was ordained and led a smaller congregation not far away. But this gate-keeping lady at Mt. Olivet could NOT make out why I was there and when Madison arrived, towing his youngest boy as a chaperone, her gaze on him plainly meant, “I’ll see about YOU later!”
Black people go to church for the whole day, unlike the Catholic get-there/get-blessed/get-out practice of people intent on other Sunday recreation. For these folks, Sunday WAS the recreation. The sermon was not about splitting fine theological hairs as it might have been with the Unitarians. It was a checklist of moral and success-aimed practices and notes -- with an outline and space for one’s own additions supplied in the order of service. This minister did NOT talk politics, though he glancingly commented on a few things. What he was after was preparing people to get ahead in the world in spite of all disappointments, setbacks, and prejudices.
The music was sublime, opera-quality. Think Jessie Norman. The collection was not taken on shallow plates passed along the pews: instead we marched up front and put our money in deep baskets in front of the ushers to make sure they saw what went in and that nothing came back out. There was a sprinkling of married-in white folks, mostly women. All was dignity, glamour, high standards, skill and confidence. It went on for hours. I loved it. But it wasn’t “me.”
Barack Obama’s minister has caused a sensation -- or rather, people looking for a chink in Barack’s high idealism have landed on his minister, trying to hood him with every cliched stereotype they can find. It was okay for the far right to say that we brought 9/ll on ourselves for wicked behavior, but not for Rev. Wright. McCain and other candidates have consorted with and accepted support from far more ferociously judgmental clergy than Wright. Melissa Harris Lacewell, Professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton University, author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought, and seminarian at Union Theological Seminary in New York, has pointed out that a whole range of people of every background and multiple colors attend this church -- inclusion is the formal position of the United Church of Christ denomination -- and this woman, reporting on “To the Point,” an NPR program (3/19), said that just about every black professor at the University of Chicago belongs to this congregation.
It strikes me that what many whites, esp. in the north, think is characteristic of black churches is really more related to Southern churches: the Pentecostalism, the high emotion, the gospel music, and even the snake-handling. In fact, this style of church is strong on the Blackfeet Reservation, because it offers hope (note that!) and a certain amount of emotional venting and ecstasy while holding a job -- like Madison’s -- that is mind-erasing and even (depending on how one is treated) demeaning. The sermons in such a place are in a style once well-known in New England, preaching as a kind of samurai sword-fight with the Devil, intense, confrontive, and impatient with this earthly world. If you’re a nice Episcopalian, it can be intimidating, but individual ministers in EVERY denomination are samurai and I’ve heard more than one Unitarian minister express the same sentiments as Jeremiah Wright! The tradition goes back deep into the Old Testament. If sufficiently aroused, I can do it myself.
Like other experienced clergy, I find it laughable that anyone would think that a parishioner would automatically agree with and obey his minister! A member of the Portland UU Church said one day, “I wish Alan would announce for whom he’s voting so I could vote the opposite.” The minister is often like that movie reviewer you read because you know if that reviewer liked it, you won’t. UU’s speak of “freedom of the pulpit” and “freedom of the pew.”
Preaching can be an art form capable of hyperbole, high rhetoric, emotionally inflammatory declarations. Like politics. As for the Iraqi war, I keep thinking of Henry Fonda in “War and Peace,” the version I saw in high school wherein Fonda played "Pierre.” He stands looking at the long winding trail of suffering in the snow caused by Napoleon invading Russia and says (thrillingly, I thought as a child), “Damn you, Napoleon! Damn you to Hell!” Somebody has to say it.
Showing posts with label Hyde Park. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hyde Park. Show all posts
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Saturday, December 15, 2007
SEMINARY SURVIVORS
Religious seminaries are to most people a kind of “black box” with rather sexy overtones ranging from the benign Brother Cadfael sort of herbal seedbed to the frankly sexual terms of semen and insemination. Indoctrination for inseminators, one might guess, and be more right than they COULD guess unless they were former seminarians, which many of our national public figures are. Seminaries are nothing if not political.
For a liberal seminary like Meadville/Lombard, serving the Unitarian-Universalist community, admitting women into preparation for the ministry was both a necessity and a problem, not least because the seminary had shriveled to the point of people speaking of merger or foreclosure. Admitting women would both double the potential student clients and encourage generous donations from all those old widow ladies with portfolios -- or at least so it was hoped. How to prepare women (particularly older women), how to place them, how to support them in churches, was not the seminary’s problem. Even the specifics of preparation were controlled by the powerful UUA Fellowship Committee, the actual gatekeeper that was known to be ambivalent about Meadville. Anyway, Meadville’s long-standing symbiosis with the University of Chicago Divinity School was surely a bulwark against trivial transiences such as feminism. Some of us made it through by persistence, orneriness, and pure luck. Then the problem was what to do once ordained. Many had spent their fortunes at the seminary and were now facing the rest of their lives in low-pay marginal churches while the young men rose up the stairs to the major citadels of prosperity.
When I was told that Armida Alexander, who was a few years ahead of me at Meadville, was serving the Glacier UU Fellowship in Kalispell, I was delighted that she was close by. (By Montana standards -- 120 miles through a mountain pass.) Her class was the first to include many women. I called her up, we talked nonstop for a long time, and she simply got in her Subaru and come over to take me to lunch. She is in her early seventies (as compared with my late sixties), has had more serious eye trouble than I have, but is simply fearless. (Although still judicious.) The weather could hardly have been better in mid-December: dry road and sun. The goddesses were smiling.
We are very much on the same page theologically and both had our theses (both of them on ritual and the theology of worship) blocked by crypto-Christian bullies, which we evaded with Jungian strategy up to a point. That is, our theses are still unfinished but we were given M. Div’s to get us out from underfoot. WITH a thesis, our work would have entitled us to D.Mins, Doctor of Ministry degrees.
There are those who claim that Meadville’s troubles came with the early loss of one of their buildings in a tenure lawsuit. The building that was sold had been the communal kitchen and partial dormitory of the students in the first years. It’s at bed and table that many long discussions supply the roots of ministry, the rhizomes of professional relationships later. A minister needs someone trustworthy to call sometimes. A congregation may need another minister to come and put something bluntly to their minister. The denomination may need a friendly but frank and firm first-hand report. (Sorry about the alliteration -- I just read a review of “Gawain and the Green Knight!” Which might be quite relevant, actually.) If the self-governing principle that is supposed to be the heart of professional privilege is to work, then people have to know each other.
Armida and I have more than seminary as points of reference. We’ve both been part of the Pacific Northwest Minister’s Association at the time when its fiery international energy was almost the beginning of a separate organization, which might have been one of the forces in favor of dividing the Canadian and American denominations. We’ve both had relationships with Rockford, IL, Armida coming from it as a hometown and returning occasionally, and myself serving out my Clinical Pastoral Education there one long hot summer. And now we have the tie of Montana. This is a very rich relationship and yet we haven’t seen each other for a long time -- decades.
Armida exclaimed as she stepped in the door, “This looks exactly like your room at Meadville!” Of course. My wicker chair was there. The books were there. Very similar bookshelves. The same art. We lived in different buildings, old near-mansions next to or across the street from the seminary. Now the decision has been made to sell out the graceful old places and move over across the Midway green belt left from the Chicago World’s Fair into black-ghetto territory newly gentrified. The buildings will be modern, the students will be housed right there, and it will amount to a Baghdad-type encircled “green zone.” A student was recently shot to death near there. On the other hand, the massive Lorado Taft cement sculpture on the Midway has been restored. The modern University of Chicago Law School is on the south side of the Midway, but I don’t know whether that’s a plus or a minus. Depends on the context, I guess.
The marble stairs and wood-paneled walls of graceful old Meadville will become something else. The all-marble "hierophany" unisex bathroom, where Mircea Eliade used to warn of his presence with puffs on his aromatic pipe, will be gone. They’ve already torn the steeple off the faux-cathedral First Unitarian Church kitty-corner from the school. With such losses go many of the icons and settings of student life as Armida and I knew them. We are aware that a congregation should not necessarily cling to a building, architecture does not a community make, and yet we feel sharply the loss of continuity with roots. After all, the UUA itself refuses to give up its location at the top of Beacon Hill, it’s crumbly old red brick buildings, in spite of major infrastructure and demographic drawbacks. (It’s built on an ancient mountain of garbage and the neighborhood goes through many changes.)
So Armida and I could talk in shorthand and we had a long list of people to ask about though neither of us is on any good gossip pipeline. This is either an advantage or disadvantage of being in Montana. I’ve been technically “out of ministry” since 1988 when I left Saskatoon, though I did pulpit supply until 1999 when I came back to Valier. From 1982-85 I rode circuit among the Montana UU groups, but Glacier declined to participate.
Armida has been doing “interims” which means staying only a year or so while a congregation finds a new minister. It requires a good deal of tact, almost at a therapeutic level, as well as adaptability about living arrangements. (Glacier created an apartment right in their building for her.) The Glacier placement is part-time, year-to-year depending upon the economy and Armida’s health, but with huge potential rewards for both sides, not least because Armida has a long-standing interest in Native Americans. My usual resistance to religious liberals having ANYTHING to do with Native Americans is dropped for Armida. She will not indulge in foolish little oppressions of patronization and romanticism.
This day of talk was for me a magnificent and much-needed gift (though I hate to admit being anything less than self-sufficient!) Esp. in this season of worry while I wait for the bio of Bob to come out. But an on-going relationship over the next year or so will do us both good, I think. Armida is a fine poet but says she’s stopped writing. Maybe we can see about that... We’re like old-wood rosebushes that have not quit blooming yet, though the gardeners are tending other plants.
For a liberal seminary like Meadville/Lombard, serving the Unitarian-Universalist community, admitting women into preparation for the ministry was both a necessity and a problem, not least because the seminary had shriveled to the point of people speaking of merger or foreclosure. Admitting women would both double the potential student clients and encourage generous donations from all those old widow ladies with portfolios -- or at least so it was hoped. How to prepare women (particularly older women), how to place them, how to support them in churches, was not the seminary’s problem. Even the specifics of preparation were controlled by the powerful UUA Fellowship Committee, the actual gatekeeper that was known to be ambivalent about Meadville. Anyway, Meadville’s long-standing symbiosis with the University of Chicago Divinity School was surely a bulwark against trivial transiences such as feminism. Some of us made it through by persistence, orneriness, and pure luck. Then the problem was what to do once ordained. Many had spent their fortunes at the seminary and were now facing the rest of their lives in low-pay marginal churches while the young men rose up the stairs to the major citadels of prosperity.
When I was told that Armida Alexander, who was a few years ahead of me at Meadville, was serving the Glacier UU Fellowship in Kalispell, I was delighted that she was close by. (By Montana standards -- 120 miles through a mountain pass.) Her class was the first to include many women. I called her up, we talked nonstop for a long time, and she simply got in her Subaru and come over to take me to lunch. She is in her early seventies (as compared with my late sixties), has had more serious eye trouble than I have, but is simply fearless. (Although still judicious.) The weather could hardly have been better in mid-December: dry road and sun. The goddesses were smiling.
We are very much on the same page theologically and both had our theses (both of them on ritual and the theology of worship) blocked by crypto-Christian bullies, which we evaded with Jungian strategy up to a point. That is, our theses are still unfinished but we were given M. Div’s to get us out from underfoot. WITH a thesis, our work would have entitled us to D.Mins, Doctor of Ministry degrees.
There are those who claim that Meadville’s troubles came with the early loss of one of their buildings in a tenure lawsuit. The building that was sold had been the communal kitchen and partial dormitory of the students in the first years. It’s at bed and table that many long discussions supply the roots of ministry, the rhizomes of professional relationships later. A minister needs someone trustworthy to call sometimes. A congregation may need another minister to come and put something bluntly to their minister. The denomination may need a friendly but frank and firm first-hand report. (Sorry about the alliteration -- I just read a review of “Gawain and the Green Knight!” Which might be quite relevant, actually.) If the self-governing principle that is supposed to be the heart of professional privilege is to work, then people have to know each other.
Armida and I have more than seminary as points of reference. We’ve both been part of the Pacific Northwest Minister’s Association at the time when its fiery international energy was almost the beginning of a separate organization, which might have been one of the forces in favor of dividing the Canadian and American denominations. We’ve both had relationships with Rockford, IL, Armida coming from it as a hometown and returning occasionally, and myself serving out my Clinical Pastoral Education there one long hot summer. And now we have the tie of Montana. This is a very rich relationship and yet we haven’t seen each other for a long time -- decades.
Armida exclaimed as she stepped in the door, “This looks exactly like your room at Meadville!” Of course. My wicker chair was there. The books were there. Very similar bookshelves. The same art. We lived in different buildings, old near-mansions next to or across the street from the seminary. Now the decision has been made to sell out the graceful old places and move over across the Midway green belt left from the Chicago World’s Fair into black-ghetto territory newly gentrified. The buildings will be modern, the students will be housed right there, and it will amount to a Baghdad-type encircled “green zone.” A student was recently shot to death near there. On the other hand, the massive Lorado Taft cement sculpture on the Midway has been restored. The modern University of Chicago Law School is on the south side of the Midway, but I don’t know whether that’s a plus or a minus. Depends on the context, I guess.
The marble stairs and wood-paneled walls of graceful old Meadville will become something else. The all-marble "hierophany" unisex bathroom, where Mircea Eliade used to warn of his presence with puffs on his aromatic pipe, will be gone. They’ve already torn the steeple off the faux-cathedral First Unitarian Church kitty-corner from the school. With such losses go many of the icons and settings of student life as Armida and I knew them. We are aware that a congregation should not necessarily cling to a building, architecture does not a community make, and yet we feel sharply the loss of continuity with roots. After all, the UUA itself refuses to give up its location at the top of Beacon Hill, it’s crumbly old red brick buildings, in spite of major infrastructure and demographic drawbacks. (It’s built on an ancient mountain of garbage and the neighborhood goes through many changes.)
So Armida and I could talk in shorthand and we had a long list of people to ask about though neither of us is on any good gossip pipeline. This is either an advantage or disadvantage of being in Montana. I’ve been technically “out of ministry” since 1988 when I left Saskatoon, though I did pulpit supply until 1999 when I came back to Valier. From 1982-85 I rode circuit among the Montana UU groups, but Glacier declined to participate.
Armida has been doing “interims” which means staying only a year or so while a congregation finds a new minister. It requires a good deal of tact, almost at a therapeutic level, as well as adaptability about living arrangements. (Glacier created an apartment right in their building for her.) The Glacier placement is part-time, year-to-year depending upon the economy and Armida’s health, but with huge potential rewards for both sides, not least because Armida has a long-standing interest in Native Americans. My usual resistance to religious liberals having ANYTHING to do with Native Americans is dropped for Armida. She will not indulge in foolish little oppressions of patronization and romanticism.
This day of talk was for me a magnificent and much-needed gift (though I hate to admit being anything less than self-sufficient!) Esp. in this season of worry while I wait for the bio of Bob to come out. But an on-going relationship over the next year or so will do us both good, I think. Armida is a fine poet but says she’s stopped writing. Maybe we can see about that... We’re like old-wood rosebushes that have not quit blooming yet, though the gardeners are tending other plants.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
AMADOU CISSE
Amadou Cisse will not have his life stages recorded by a documentary interview film for the reason that he is dead. But he is part of a pattern; he’s even a type. The good boy from another part of the planet who escapes from the evil of his own Third World circumstances only to be ended by the evil of our supposedly civilized place. This is politically complicated by the color of Amadou’s skin, which was black. One of my seminary’s maintenance staff was also murdered some months ago. He was also black but I don’t think he was killed on the campus, so he’s not coming up in the stories. The campus in some minds is a “cluster” of seminaries and university and to other minds just the quadrangles of the U of Chicago buildings. Amadou was shot in the chest just south of the Midway, a sort of grassy moat along the south edge which means to some that he was “off-campus” and to others that he was “on-campus.”
Surveillance cameras captured a photo of a pale car with two red doors on the driver’s side. Descriptions of the shooter tell his height and weight and what he was wearing -- but not his color. He dropped his gun. This is assumed to be the third in a cluster of shootings: one at 12:33AM at 6045 Woodlawn (Meadville/Lombard, my seminary, is at 57th and Woodlawn.) where a man was shot at; the next at 1:15AM when two women were actually robbed at 924 E. 57th; and the death of Cisse at 6120 S. Ellis at 1:26 AM. The gun is recovered and so is the car, which was -- of course -- stolen beforehand and abandoned afterwards. Could any car be more recognizable? Why steal such a car in order to commit a crime unless one were not rational?
A counter-indication to grouping the shootings is that there were multiple men in the second incident, but the surveillance camera may not have picked up other men if they stayed in the car. On the other hand, if it took five men to rob two women, why were the first and third incidents a lone shooter unless he were some sort of maverick or unrelated? Was it a gang initiation? Was there a competition?
What would be more shocking than a U of Chicago student shot to death? Why, if the shooter were a U of Chicago student! But this is unlikely. (Unless the victim were a thesis advisor. For those who have never tried to get a thesis accepted, this is a sardonic joke. But Amadou’s thesis had just passed. No motive there.) The shootings were just after midnight on a Sunday, which is a very dangerous time in a drug-saturated ghetto, because the addicts who have been partying since Friday are now out of money, not high enough to feel good but not yet crashed enough to be paralyzed. If the two women who were robbed were also students, they probably can provide a lot of information. If not, especially if they were black, they may choose to be non-committal because the very characteristics that make Cisse of special concern to the university, his brilliance and his foreign-student status, would make him “other” enough for South Side ghetto women to think of him as “other,” maybe a person who shouldn’t have been there anyway. Remember the reaction to O.J.’s trial.
What if the shooter were white? It would immediately be a “hate-crime.” Especially if a noose were involved instead of a gun. A noose is now a marker for racism.
Cisse was Senegalese, one of the parts of Africa heavily raided for the slave trade, and so his physical type -- dark, rounded and sturdy -- is almost what Americans think of as typical of African-Americans until we began to see so many photos of tall, thin Somalis with oval faces (often fashion models) and then all those basketball players who must surely have Watusi genes. He was Islam, the kind of gentle, patient, philosophical Islam that has a parallel in quiet, enduring, Bible-based Christianity -- but the news is shying off from mentioning his religion. Rather they emphasize the suffering of his family which has lost members in the unstable African nation. Cisse was nearly thirty, had just finished his Ph.D., and would have been returning soon, but if he had been killed there it would be one death among many of the kind. The main culture of Senegal, Islam, encourages acceptance of tragedy as God’s inscrutable will. Ours does not. Ours is preoccupied with deservingness. Thus there was less outcry when the Meadville maintenance man was killed.
When I was there (1978 - 1982, with my third year mostly in Connecticut) three incidents registered strongly with me. One was a handsome young black man wearing a Harvard sweatshirt who had figured out that many of the huge old houses were offices downstairs, where visitors went in and out all day, and student housing upstairs, where the occupants rarely bothered to lock their doors. He raided Fleck House easily, partly because of his color and partly because of that sweatshirt -- two signals for liberals. He got Peter’s inherited and cherished pocket watch, but he got nothing of mine because Mike kept going into my room “to shut off the radio since I wasn’t there” so I reflexively locked the door even if I were going only down to the kitchen.
The second incident came when a series of attacks on women had aroused feminist ire. (U of C officials seemed to just assume it was the price women paid and anyway, what could they do?) Since it was time for parents and prospective students to visit and possibly consider enrollment, the women managed to get the local crime records, made stencils, and spray-painted the legend “a woman was attacked on this spot” or even “someone was killed on this spot.” That in itself was not so shocking as the fact that these statements were seemingly everywhere. All day the U of C maintenance staff, wearing heavy rubber gloves, scrubbed with caustics to remove the paint, which lingered as pale smudges. The lesson was clear: this is a violent place but we don’t admit that.
The third is fuzzy but more shocking. As I remember it, woman student living off-campus was shot to death as she struggled to unlock the door to her apartment building. It may have been a personal killing, which is somehow more acceptable, implying some sort of cause in the form of a grievance.
People die all the time, but we want to know why and how, so we can figure out how not to die ourselves and how to protect those we value. There’s a crazy comic strip in the Great Falls Tribune that’s meant to balance Doonesbury with right-wing ideas. Yesterday it was a quote from Bill Buckley that went something like this: “Liberals believe everyone has a right to freedom of thought -- but then they are shocked that anyone should think differently than they do.”
The idea that education makes people invulnerable is a conviction that universities do not want overturned. It seems as though impoverished, drug-addled people don’t think at all. They are equal opportunity destroyers. Which is not to say we should destroy them, though we are pleased to destroy their “habitat” through gentrification. Meadville has been offered a new location in that gentrified sector. Maybe they ought to reflect on the assumptions of ghetto dwellers.
Surveillance cameras captured a photo of a pale car with two red doors on the driver’s side. Descriptions of the shooter tell his height and weight and what he was wearing -- but not his color. He dropped his gun. This is assumed to be the third in a cluster of shootings: one at 12:33AM at 6045 Woodlawn (Meadville/Lombard, my seminary, is at 57th and Woodlawn.) where a man was shot at; the next at 1:15AM when two women were actually robbed at 924 E. 57th; and the death of Cisse at 6120 S. Ellis at 1:26 AM. The gun is recovered and so is the car, which was -- of course -- stolen beforehand and abandoned afterwards. Could any car be more recognizable? Why steal such a car in order to commit a crime unless one were not rational?
A counter-indication to grouping the shootings is that there were multiple men in the second incident, but the surveillance camera may not have picked up other men if they stayed in the car. On the other hand, if it took five men to rob two women, why were the first and third incidents a lone shooter unless he were some sort of maverick or unrelated? Was it a gang initiation? Was there a competition?
What would be more shocking than a U of Chicago student shot to death? Why, if the shooter were a U of Chicago student! But this is unlikely. (Unless the victim were a thesis advisor. For those who have never tried to get a thesis accepted, this is a sardonic joke. But Amadou’s thesis had just passed. No motive there.) The shootings were just after midnight on a Sunday, which is a very dangerous time in a drug-saturated ghetto, because the addicts who have been partying since Friday are now out of money, not high enough to feel good but not yet crashed enough to be paralyzed. If the two women who were robbed were also students, they probably can provide a lot of information. If not, especially if they were black, they may choose to be non-committal because the very characteristics that make Cisse of special concern to the university, his brilliance and his foreign-student status, would make him “other” enough for South Side ghetto women to think of him as “other,” maybe a person who shouldn’t have been there anyway. Remember the reaction to O.J.’s trial.
What if the shooter were white? It would immediately be a “hate-crime.” Especially if a noose were involved instead of a gun. A noose is now a marker for racism.
Cisse was Senegalese, one of the parts of Africa heavily raided for the slave trade, and so his physical type -- dark, rounded and sturdy -- is almost what Americans think of as typical of African-Americans until we began to see so many photos of tall, thin Somalis with oval faces (often fashion models) and then all those basketball players who must surely have Watusi genes. He was Islam, the kind of gentle, patient, philosophical Islam that has a parallel in quiet, enduring, Bible-based Christianity -- but the news is shying off from mentioning his religion. Rather they emphasize the suffering of his family which has lost members in the unstable African nation. Cisse was nearly thirty, had just finished his Ph.D., and would have been returning soon, but if he had been killed there it would be one death among many of the kind. The main culture of Senegal, Islam, encourages acceptance of tragedy as God’s inscrutable will. Ours does not. Ours is preoccupied with deservingness. Thus there was less outcry when the Meadville maintenance man was killed.
When I was there (1978 - 1982, with my third year mostly in Connecticut) three incidents registered strongly with me. One was a handsome young black man wearing a Harvard sweatshirt who had figured out that many of the huge old houses were offices downstairs, where visitors went in and out all day, and student housing upstairs, where the occupants rarely bothered to lock their doors. He raided Fleck House easily, partly because of his color and partly because of that sweatshirt -- two signals for liberals. He got Peter’s inherited and cherished pocket watch, but he got nothing of mine because Mike kept going into my room “to shut off the radio since I wasn’t there” so I reflexively locked the door even if I were going only down to the kitchen.
The second incident came when a series of attacks on women had aroused feminist ire. (U of C officials seemed to just assume it was the price women paid and anyway, what could they do?) Since it was time for parents and prospective students to visit and possibly consider enrollment, the women managed to get the local crime records, made stencils, and spray-painted the legend “a woman was attacked on this spot” or even “someone was killed on this spot.” That in itself was not so shocking as the fact that these statements were seemingly everywhere. All day the U of C maintenance staff, wearing heavy rubber gloves, scrubbed with caustics to remove the paint, which lingered as pale smudges. The lesson was clear: this is a violent place but we don’t admit that.
The third is fuzzy but more shocking. As I remember it, woman student living off-campus was shot to death as she struggled to unlock the door to her apartment building. It may have been a personal killing, which is somehow more acceptable, implying some sort of cause in the form of a grievance.
People die all the time, but we want to know why and how, so we can figure out how not to die ourselves and how to protect those we value. There’s a crazy comic strip in the Great Falls Tribune that’s meant to balance Doonesbury with right-wing ideas. Yesterday it was a quote from Bill Buckley that went something like this: “Liberals believe everyone has a right to freedom of thought -- but then they are shocked that anyone should think differently than they do.”
The idea that education makes people invulnerable is a conviction that universities do not want overturned. It seems as though impoverished, drug-addled people don’t think at all. They are equal opportunity destroyers. Which is not to say we should destroy them, though we are pleased to destroy their “habitat” through gentrification. Meadville has been offered a new location in that gentrified sector. Maybe they ought to reflect on the assumptions of ghetto dwellers.
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