Sunday, September 25, 2005
You never know...
Here's a kind of Gig Journal entry, recalling a date long past...
Just more than two years ago now, the band played an up-scale art gallery in a particularly homogenous town. For homogenous, read white. This place shall remain unnamed, because I'm sure what transpired could happen anywhere. Honestly, I'm a bit surprised it hadn't happened before, and hasn't happened again since. As we were packing up after the gig, various audience members came up to chat and inquire, as they do. An older couple approached me and engaged in small talk. Then, the old man said, indicating my conga,
"You play those things pretty good, and you're not even black."
In the first second after his remark, my mind went into full anthropologist mode, preparing the data on the fossil record and genetic markers that clearly show our kind, H. sapiens sapiens, comes out of Africa, that we are all Africans by birth as it were, that there is no such biological entity as "race," that a propensity to rhythm has absolutely no correlation whatsoever with the amount of melanin in the skin...
But in the second second after his remark, as I filled up with air to transmit all that data, I saw in his watery old eyes and leering grin that any anthropological insight would be for naught. Bones, genes, biological truisms and cultural constructs would have meant nothing to him. This old man wanted to be reassured that all was right with the world as he saw it, that black was black and white was white and never did the two meet.
So, in the third second after his remark, I gave him what my students call "that look," and in reply to "You play those things pretty good, and you're not even black," said
"You never know..."
I turned my full attention to securing my gear, and he and the missus walked off. We haven't yet been asked back.
Just more than two years ago now, the band played an up-scale art gallery in a particularly homogenous town. For homogenous, read white. This place shall remain unnamed, because I'm sure what transpired could happen anywhere. Honestly, I'm a bit surprised it hadn't happened before, and hasn't happened again since. As we were packing up after the gig, various audience members came up to chat and inquire, as they do. An older couple approached me and engaged in small talk. Then, the old man said, indicating my conga,
"You play those things pretty good, and you're not even black."
In the first second after his remark, my mind went into full anthropologist mode, preparing the data on the fossil record and genetic markers that clearly show our kind, H. sapiens sapiens, comes out of Africa, that we are all Africans by birth as it were, that there is no such biological entity as "race," that a propensity to rhythm has absolutely no correlation whatsoever with the amount of melanin in the skin...
But in the second second after his remark, as I filled up with air to transmit all that data, I saw in his watery old eyes and leering grin that any anthropological insight would be for naught. Bones, genes, biological truisms and cultural constructs would have meant nothing to him. This old man wanted to be reassured that all was right with the world as he saw it, that black was black and white was white and never did the two meet.
So, in the third second after his remark, I gave him what my students call "that look," and in reply to "You play those things pretty good, and you're not even black," said
"You never know..."
I turned my full attention to securing my gear, and he and the missus walked off. We haven't yet been asked back.
