On shame, identity and the South

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a short, but piercingly poignant meditation of obesity, black culture, and shame. Here's an excerpt:

The buses in Harlem heave under the weight of wrecked bodies. New York will not super-size itself, so you'll see whole rows in which one person is taking up two seats and aisles in which people strain to squeeze past each other. And then there are the middle-age amputees in wheelchairs who've lost a leg or two way before their time. When I lived in Brooklyn, the most depressing aspect of my day was the commute back home. The deeper the five train wended into Brooklyn, the blacker it became, and the blacker it became, the fatter it got.

I was there among them--the blacker and fatter--and filled with a sort of shameful self-loathing at myself and my greater selves around me. One of the hardest thing about being black is coming up dead last in almost anything that matters. As a child, and a young adult, I was lucky. Segregation was a cocoon brimming with all the lovely variety of black life. But out in the world you come to see, in the words of Peggy Olson, that they have it all--and so much of it. Working on the richest island in the world, then training through Brooklyn, or watching the buses slog down 125th has become a kind of corporeal metaphor--the achievement gap of our failing bodies, a slow sickness as the racial chasm.

He goes from there to talk about how internalizing shame over the condition of black folks, and imagining that white folks have always have it easy, motivates him (and all black people). Coates admits that he knows the world isn't like this -- i.e., that it's always easy for whites -- but knowing something in your mind isn't the same as knowing it in your heart. He quotes Bill Cosby's line -- "My problem is that I'm sick of losing to white people" -- and says its what every black person thinks all the time. Coates admits that every time he sits down to write, he thinks that this time, he's got to show them.

I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing. It's beautifully written and painfully honest. And you know, I have to admit that it revealed something to me about myself, and why I have so much anxiety over obesity, and my own struggle with weight. It's not far from Coates' own story. When I was growing up in the rural South in the 1970s, the only obese people you ever saw were poor white and black people. This was before obesity became mainstream. In those days, if you saw an obese white person, chances are he or she was poor or working class. I grew up around these folks; a few of them were in my extended family. I remember the women especially, how they had to sew their own clothes not so much because they couldn't afford better, but because it was hard to find clothing for massively fat people in those days.

Today, of course, obesity is far less of a class marker than it was a generation ago (smoking among white people over 30 has taken the role obesity used to have), so what I'm about to say will sound foreign to many readers. But when I was a kid, in my part of the world, white obesity often (but not always) correlated with other class markers, re: behavior. There was racism, of course, differentiated from the casual racism that nearly all white people had in its degree of snarling nastiness, much of which surely came from an emotional need to have someone to look down own, to make one feel better about one's own miserable lot. But there was also loose, chaotic morals; a willingness to use foul language in everyday conversation, even among children; a propensity to violence, especially when disciplining children; and a lack of concern about social respectability that amounted to contempt for the opinion of others.

In other words, rednecks.

I wasn't a redneck, nor was I raised in a redneck household, so why do rednecks make me feel a sense of shame. Because where I come from, unless you were born into a land-owning family -- I most definitely was not -- you may not have been a redneck, but chances are either your forebears were, or somebody close to you was, or is. Besides, it was a small town; everybody knew everybody else. One of the most admirable things about my mom and dad is that they are not and never have been snobs. They both grew up poor, and worked hard to get into the middle class. Having prospered through middle-class virtues of thrift, self-discipline and so forth, they have firm, clear ideas about morality and propriety. But they get along with everybody, and treat everyone the same. I have literally seen millionaires and rednecks both entertained at my mom and dad's table, and they both got the same treatment; it wouldn't occur to my folks to do any different. I hope I can live up to the standard they set in this regard.

Yet the Ur-Redneck looms large in the mind of cosmopolitan white Southerners like me. I can remember the fat, foul-mouthed girl in my 9th grade English class, whose parents both worked as prison guards, who made fun of me and anybody else who participated in class discussion. She was aggressively ignorant, and stood in my mind for the worst of redneck culture. And yet, she and I got to be friends later on, and I had to admit that though she was no less a bigot and a bully than she ever had been, there was something admirable about the way she was loyal to the people she took into her circle. Flannery O'Connor had the number of white Southerners like me when she wrote about Asbury, Hulga and other intellectually prideful characters who had transcended the quotidian bigotries of their culture, but who had become inhuman in the process (one suspects she was also writing about her own temptations, given how she struggled with her mother Regina). The middle-class striver is always afraid of sliding back into the lower class, which is why bourgeois people are often so quick to judge others, and to distance themselves from the trashy. On the other hand, it could well be that middle-class people who have enough memory, either personal or cultural, about how much had to be overcome to raise oneself and one's family out of the degradation of poverty culture are desperate to build an unbreachable psychological wall between themselves and the barbarians (so to speak). Both, I think, are true. What is the opposite of nostalgie de la boue? Fear of it? That's the middle class person's condition.

Anyway, reading Coates's piece made me reflect on the love-hate relationship I have with the South, which is my native culture. It's not that I carry around with me a burden of shame and an "I've got to show them" competitive mentality, as Coates does with reference to blackness. Living in the North for so long -- and culturally speaking, Washington DC and South Florida are the North -- made me appreciate what was deeply good about the South. That's something I didn't see when I was a young man, and could only see its flaws. Maybe I came to terms with my inner redneck; in any case, I came to see rednecks with a lot more nuance than I did before. And being around Northern white people, so many of whom were full of self-congratulation about their social progressivism, not realizing how provincial and bigoted they were, made me profoundly identify with Randy Newman's famous satirical song "Rednecks." It really is true, I think, that the only kind of person its perfectly safe to piss on in smart company is white working-class Southerners. "Sweet Home Alabama" is the classic, anthemic f-you by people who don't think they have a damned thing to be ashamed of. I love this song because it makes me forget that I chose to leave, and am something of a fraud and a poseur because of it.

And yet, when the South keeps coming up last in many quality of life measures -- health, education, unwed births, etc. -- it's hard to deny that there's something particularly wrong with us. It's redneck culture -- white rednecks and black rednecks both, people who live chaotic lives, dwell on grievance and resentment, and despise boring bourgeois standards of sobriety, order and respectability. It seems like we can't overcome it. A fellow Southern exile once said to me that it's so easy to love where we're from when we don't live there, because we can edit out the stuff that's hard to live with. That's very true. And yet, I confess it's hard for me to feel quite at home anywhere else. When I go back to visit, there's something about the place and its people I dearly love, and treasure as part of myself. I don't feel, as Coates does about black folks, a sense of shame over the woebegone state of Southern whites, or of Louisiana life. But then again, unlike Coates, I don't live with it. I chose to separate myself from it (and anybody who thinks Dallas is the South is sadly mistaken; it's the southernmost Western city). Shame motivates Coates and his writing, but for me, it's a sense of cultural rootlessness, and a craving for a sense of belonging to a place. Too much has happened to me over the years to form the kind of man that I am to make me feel at home in my actual homeland. And yet, when I'm away from Louisiana, I think about it a lot, and long for it. True story: I used to walk around Brooklyn romanticizing Louisiana, then go back to Louisiana and after a few days, start pining for my old borough home in Yankee Babylon.

For Coates, shame. For me, displacement and a resulting craving for authenticity. But the fact that I chose displacement and exile adds a shake of shame about disloyalty into the cocktail too. Coates ends: "And this is what I think about, almost always,before I write. I think about showing them. I think about showing myself." Me, I don't have anybody to show anything to (this was the greatest gift living and working in New York City gave me). When I sit down to write, almost always I think not about showing myself, but about finding myself.