coldhearted scientist وداد

This is a MESTIZO POST, meaning it is mixed. It might be an ajiaco. It could be a curanto. And a cocido madrileño sounds good right now. I should make one, buying ingredients at La Tienda Punto Com.

1. Research Insight

A commentator here suggested that the world’s fascination with Barack Obama’s racial mixture bespoke the pervasiveness of a binary racialist world-system. I am convinced that this is right and I will have to cite this commentator in my book. That is why the focus on mixture is anything but transgressive. This is a central point, y’all. Central.

2. Crock Pot

On Thanksgiving we will cook in person, but for other days, has anyone ever worked with a crock pot? I never had one because they seemed so utterly petit bourgeois, but I bought one after returning from Peru. There I had become used to walking in off the street to succulent meals. Seduced by the idea of coming home in the evening to a steaming cauldron, as though someone else had already cooked, I bought a crock pot.

I have followed recipes and tried to come up with my own, but nothing ever works well. With the exception of BEANS, what I come up with every time is a stew that gives me the impression of having come from a can or a steam table. Is there a way to avoid this? What am I doing wrong? I have begun to think the crock pot may be good for soups only, in which case I am not sure it is better than a Dutch oven. Do you know anything about these matters?

3. Why

Part of the reason I have such a visceral reaction to people telling me we Americans need to go to Brazil to learn not to be “racist” is that I have never seen Blacks treated worse by whites than in Brazil. In addition, whites participating in this behavior justify it by saying is is not race based. It is not race based because everyone in Brazil is mixed. And since the behavior is allegedly not race based, it is not problematic.

There are many problems with this logic, and the police easily distinguish white and Black. But my reaction to it has to do with being asked to take utter irrationality seriously because it is pronounced by some host or other authority figure.

I notice that a lot of my writing blocks have to do with this. Many of my papers are at some level responses to extremely silly discourses I have had to sit through in the past. When, in the scholarship, I run across certain kinds of allegations or formulations, I am struck with paralyzing, disabling, and very uncomfortable rage. I procrastinate on writing sometimes because I do not want to read the “scholarship” to which I must refer. I do not want to read it because I fear my reaction.

When I was much younger certain sentences and logical structures would just depress me. I would retreat from them into math problems or French verbs, or into making elaborate death plans (I would go to the top of a Buddhist mountain, and meditate until I turned into a statue) or funeral plans for myself (the cortège would be very long and would progress slowly across the continents, and I would ride and ride).

Now the same sentences and logical structures give me an unpleasant adrenaline rush. If the writer were before me in person I would have them bleeding on the floor, or floating down the bayou, in a single blow. I have difficulty reading, citing, and discussing certain kinds of material (except in class, which is more casual) because it arouses these feelings. This is why my writing problems are not problems about writing, they are problems about certain topics having to do with da whiteman.

By calling those problems writing problems, and trying to deal with them as such and with myself as a problem writer, I have only deepened them. I have been told that NOT to call these problems “writing problems” was “making excuses” and “avoidance” but I seriously disagree.

4. Suggestion

I think people who are drinking before dark should have signs on them. It always takes me some time to realize that people who talk wildly, although semi coherently, at work are actually drunk … and I only do not realize it because it is 3 PM in a conference room, not 10 PM in a bar. I find myself feeling exhausted around these people and I never know why – until I figure it out. Meanwhile I feel the same frustration and rage I feel in relation to da whiteman, above. When I was going to leave the profession and people asked me why, one of my answers was “So as never to suffer the combination of lectures on Menéndez y Pelayo and coñac Soberano again.”

We cannot put signs on people, but I have discovered today, finally, where my paralyzing, text-production stopping rage comes from. Always before I thought, “These people are clearly crazy, and clearly in power, so clearly, one must submit.” But one can think instead, “These people are clearly drunk, so clearly, one should take them with a large grain of salt at the very least.”

5. Vie Dansante

This afternoon I continued with post hurricane repairs. I visited the grocery store and graded papers. I  donated the television I never watch to St. Vincent de Paul. It was not an exciting panorama of activities but it was light infused on Olodumare‘s day.

As I woke up this morning my first thought was how I might justify the day’s menu to Reeducation (where one had to justify everything, explain everything). Then I realized there was no Reeducator who would ask questions later. This, I realized next, is how Reeducation makes life so heavy: one was expected to find so much pain, transfer so much pain onto every activity, question everything one did.

I tried to explain to Reeducation that raking leaves was meditative and did not have to be seen as a chore, but Reeducation told me this was denial. But I am no longer Reeducated, I am Savage, so I can walk in tennis shoes all over the Earth’s crust and plant trees, and it is easy.

Axé.