7 September 03
Bees: A Secret Life
I finished reading Sue Monk Kidd’s Secret Life of Bees yesterday. Several people have recommended it to me but it is also under consideration for next year’s Campus Community Book Project.
The story of a white girl coming of age in the Deep South during the era of Civil Rights unrest, it weaves the orderly, matriarchal society of bees through the sometimes turbulent lives of a group of women, most of whom are black, and the black Madonna, an interesting and incongruous figure in this setting. The writing is good. The story is powerful; the threads are drawn together at the end in a satisfying but not quite predictable way. Why, then, am I so ambivalent about this novel?
For a book that features so many strong female African American characters, I fear it will only be seen by black readers (if this book ever has any) as yet another Aunt Jemima story. A friend pointed out recently that black movie audiences and white movie audiences are, today, almost completely segregated. Eddie Murphy, for instance, has made the crossover into the white mainstream, but he no longer has a strong black following. At least in certain films. Did I go and see Antoine Fisher? No. I didn’t. I wanted to; it didn’t come to Davis. But surely that only strengthens her point.
If there’s anything I’ve learned over the last year when racial tension has been rife in my office and in the university, it’s this: African Americans are sick and tired of liberal white angst about race. They don’t want to hear any more “I get it now” stories. They want action, they want change; they don’t want to see or hear about any more handwringing. Liberal white guilt is the least effective agent of change.
The Secret Life of Bees is a story about a white girl, for white people, about a successful, healing, powerful interaction with black people. From where I sit today, it reads as fantasy. I wish it weren’t so.
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As someone who is part black (my father’s mother was black), whose father didn’t tell me until I was 21 that I was part black, whose mother is white, and who grew up watching all the hoopla between American blacks and whites from the sidelines, but who nevertheless got his share of racism from all sorts of sides throughout my life, I have to wonder whether the whole issue of racism and sexism and ageism and whatnot are growing into nothing but dogma in the States. Yes, the blacks have gotten the short end of the stick for so many years, but if you debate with a lot of blacks there is today a lot of reverse racism going on, too. People have become ensconced in their issues, with years of built up vocabulary and arguments that, due to political correctness, few are willing to challenge any more. If you utter even the slightest gainsaying you are attacked with all the pc horror words. Too many people are sitting comfortable in their preconceptions, forgetting to look at what causes racism and sexism and all such ‘isms’ in the first place. That movie audiences are segregated is as much the fault of the blacks as it is the whites. When you are not willing to examine your own attitudes and contributions to society you are just as guilty of attrition as the next person. I mean, look at the very light in which the ethnicity issue is viewed in… it’s “black/ white”, as if there are no shades of gray or any other kinds of people in the world today. Even blacks have to stop talking like that, including claiming affinity with blacks in Africa, who today inhabit a completely different culture and world.
White people may be overcompensating for the inbalance in American culture today. That’s better than 30 years ago. How many blacks go out of their way to really change things? No more than whites, I feel. The whites have their angst and guilt, the blacks their rage and fear. None of these emotions are condusive or helpful in making society a better place. All of them engender a lot of resentment and wasted time. Meanwhile all the injustice continues on and all the other people who are neither white nor black have to sit in the sidelines feeling invisible.
One source of prejudice is the fact that many people think in stereotypes, and Aunt Jemima is clearly a stereotype (she hasnt been exported here to Australia – I had to look her up on Google). Do images of successful African Americans such as Eddie Murphy have the potential to lower prejudice by challenging stereotypes, or do people see him as some sort of honorary white?
Here in Australia most of the mainstream images of African Americans are of Eddie Murphy types, along with successful sports stars etc. As a result, it would be very easy to forget that America has a racial problem.