CHRIS BOGART'S "THIS CONVERSATION": MY RESPONSE TO A "WHITE" MAN'S TAKE ON RACE RELATIONS

Note: You will usually find references to "White," "Black," "Red," "Yellow," Brown," and any other such references to a group of people by misnomered skin-color in quotation marks.  

Preamble for Days

Chris at Barnes & Noble
reading, 2019

As I struggled to bring this piece to life, I realized that it was going to be more about me than it would be about the book, This Conversation, or the author, Chris Bogart. I wondered if this would be the first time that anyone who has read my responses to written texts will get what I mean when I say, “I don’t write reviews. I write responses.” People have continued to mislabel my responses as “reviews” despite my protestations to the contrary. Oh well…

For those wondering about my perceived difference between a review and a response, a review is a description of the text, what it’s about, the format, the content, other works that it’s reminiscent of or contrasts with, what the reviewer thinks of the quality, its entertainment or educational value, etc. A response on the other hand is simply what the work does to and for the responder, in this case, me. That might include all the elements above, but not necessarily so.

I have my speculations about why Chris asked me to respond to This Conversations, but I haven’t explored those speculations with him. My suspicion is that he held certain assumptions that were linked to my appearance, to other responses I have published, and, perhaps, poetic expressions of mine he has heard or read. 

That’s an awful lot of preamble isn’t it? Well, I figure it’s only fitting since This Conversation, itself, has plenty of preamble. Before the main body of the work, there’s a Letter to the Reader, an Introduction, and a Preface. I’m not well read enough to know if that much preamble is common practice, but hey, I’m all for it. And I’m not even done with my preamble!

Most people I know—or even heard of— seem to subscribe to the practice of categorizing and defining people by superficial characteristics. The superficial characteristic relevant to this writing is skin color or “race.” It is a practice I have grown out of or grown through, and I think it only fair that you know my perspective of this book—and all such like it—is…uh…colored by this growth and development. On to the response…

A Response to This Conversation
From an aesthetic standpoint, the book is creative, uniquely designed, and well written. The blending of dialogue with poetic pieces in a variety of styles and forms renders the book worthy of perusing and appreciating simply as an artistic creation. It is an easy read, and for someone with sensibilities unlike my own, it is likely to be a thought—and emotion—provoking, educational, affirming, and even hopeful read.

I mentioned the practice of categorizing and defining people by superficial characteristics above. The author announces his subscription to this practice early in the book. In his Letter to the Reader the author writes,

“I wrote this book of poetry, my fellow white Americans and anyone else who chooses to read it…to convince those of you with whom I share a skin color…” and still in the same letter, “It is your minds, my fellow white Americans, and, more importantly, your hearts, that I will be talking to today in this book of poetry.”

Yes, I had known that I would have to wrestle with myself as I read This Conversation and the bell rang before I had even gotten to the main body of the work. From the first line of the Letter, my worldview and I were circling each other squinty-eyed, seeking an opening. 

I was prepared for a lot of references to people being “black” and “white,” so the wrestling was quite tame at this point. I could expend a lot of time and energy trying to explain why I believe the notion of referring to people as “black” or “white” is destructive to the collective, but I’m trying to keep this down to chapbook size. Click here if you’d like a taste.

Anyway, despite my jangled emotions and internal resistance, I believe the author’s good intentions are clear. It’s obvious he believes conversation can make a positive difference in "race" relations, or in his own words, “This Conversation…must ultimately change the America in which we live…” referring to the disparity between his interpretations of “…the promises that the Founding Fathers had made in the Declaration of Independence” and peoples’ real, lived experiences.

The first poem of the book, This Conversation: When?, also provides a clear indication of the author’s constructive intent. In asking and answering when we might experience equity in our society, Chris expresses immediacy and urgency in the last stanza and line:

    no. this conversation we will start here today

    must finally answer
    this one simple question
    at last and forever,
    and for all time eternal
                with only one answer—
                and that answer
                needs to be

               Now.

I applaud the author’s intent. Not crazy about his methodology, as you'll see below.

Disturbing Dissonance: Redacted “Nigger”
This Conversation isn’t a dead ringer for a CIA or FBI document, but it sure did ring clandestine bells with the prevalent redactions. The first one appears even before the Table of Contents:

    “I might be poor white trash, but at least I ain’t

    no xxxxx!
    —Poor Southern white sharecropper, 1965”

In his poem Carefully Taught, there are six (6) such redactions. 

Page 22

The primary disturbance for me here is if you find the word “nigger” offensive, or think that others might, why are you quoting others who use it, and why are you writing poems using the word in disguise? Does anyone not know what the word is that you’ve redacted? If I shoot you with a concealed weapon, does that decrease the damage? I have many more thoughts on this, but this response is going to be plenty long enough already. If interested in some of those thoughts you can find some here.

Conversation = Skirmish?
Another drizzle of dissonance descended when I noted that the exchanges between the interactants in This Conversation were conceived of as skirmishes: "A Civil Discourse: Second Skirmish." I wondered why "skirmish?" A skirmish is a fight, a battle. Is it merely poetic license, a catchy title to attract eyes? Which is it, a conversation or a battle? Does the author see a distinction? Yes, a ton of questions arose, and I extended that wondering to, "Why, in our society, is so much framed in terms of winning and losing, games and battles?" 

Us and Them Mentality Prevails
Perhaps it is my limited perspective, but inconsistency usually nudges me into closer examination. There are snippets of dialogue during the “skirmishes” that indicate the author recognizes the “us and them” mentality as problematic. An excerpt from Civil Discourse: Seventh Skirmish suggests as much:

Regardless of color.

Regardless of race.

This is the “we” I was talking about,

Rather than the “us” and the “they.”

However—and this may merely be a function of language— the author also writes in the Introduction:

“…institutions built to support a segregation of the races hardened like a stone wall around African Americans, denying them most of the freedoms that should have been afforded to them by full citizenship and participation in a fully integrated society…the hearts and minds of many white Americans were still hardened against their full equality.” 

The “us” and “them” mentality appears to be on full display.

Persistent Othering
Within the “us and them” mentality and resultant behavior, the “them” is the “other,” and seldom in human relations is the “them,” the “other” valued as highly or treated as well as the “us.” While I suspect good intentions are behind the following, I find the capitalization of “Black,” while failing to capitalize the color designation of other groups, problematic. It feels like more subtle “othering.”

From the Sixth Skirmish:

Don’t you have people of color in your life?

Black friends, Black coworkers?

    Do they have any friends
    Who are not white?

From the Seventh Skirmish:

    And does your son have any Black friends?
    In fact, he does,
    I said, sipping my own.
    And brown and white friends too. 

[emphasis added]

What is that disparity about? Perhaps Chris will decide to respond to this response and we can continue this conversation.

Relatedly, something I’ve noticed on many occasions, in written and audio versions of fiction and nonfiction texts, is a particularly deft method of “otherizing” people who are not categorized as “White.” In the Third Skirmish on page 31, the author writes:

    In an effort by whites
    To keep the Blacks out.

Two questions here: 1) Again, why is “whites” lowercase and “Blacks” uppercase? 2) Why is it “by whites,” and “the Blacks,” and not “by the whites” as is the case with “the Blacks.” Often when I hear this reference it feels like “the dogs,” “the cats,” “the others,” as though they—as in anyone who uses this sort of construction—are speaking about some sort of nonhuman objects.

Listen, I can speculate about the inconsistency until my pigment disappears, but regardless of my speculations, the fact remains that, once again, those categorized and identified as “Black” are set apart from those identified as “white” and “brown.” Despite all the good intentions in the world, the “othering” persists.

Okay, I can’t really address everything in my 12 pages of notes here, but perhaps you get my drift:

• I choose to believe that Chris Bogart has good intentions
• I think that This Conversation is well designed and scripted
• Many are likely to find it a fascinating read
• It can serve as an excellent catalyst for conversation
• It remains shackled to the enduring skin-color categorization paradigm.

Chris at Barnes & Noble, 2019

When I review purchases online, I am usually asked whether I would recommend the product. Although this is a response and not a review, I highly recommend Chris Bogart’s This Conversation for those interested in the morass of “race” in the United States. 

I thank Chris for the opportunity to read and respond to this work, despite the inherent challenges and I welcome a response from him to this response, which I would be happy to post and share. After all, conversations are not monologues.