 My name is Bill Falls, and I'm the intern dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and I'd like to welcome you to this dean's lecture. Tonight we honor Gregory Bottoms, professor in the Department of English, as this year's 2015 Honours and recipient of the Dean's Lecture Award. The college started this lecture series 25 years ago as a way to recognize and celebrate faculty who are not only highly respected scholars, but also exceptional teachers. Faculty and students are invited to nominate and provide letters of support for their nominees. And then a faculty committee has the enjoyable but yet very challenging task of selecting two people to receive the award each year. Gregory is a remarkable figure here at UVM. Aside from creating a very impressive archive of research, he has transformed the education of his students into a demanding yet pleasurable journey. I'd like to share with you a few remarks made by fellow faculty members around his nomination and receipt of this award. Professor Bottoms exemplifies UVM's emphasis on working closely and individually with undergraduates, working to understand our diverse world across differences of class, race, gender, faith, and ability, and accomplishing great things in a passionate pursuit of art. Another noted quote, as a teacher and colleague, Greg is a model of rigor and dedication. As a writer, he sets a standard of integrity, ingenuity, and grace. He is a gift to our students and to this university. At this time, I would like to call Gregory Bottoms and present him with the dean's lecture award, this plaque, which comes with a little support for his research and scholarship as well to the $2,000. The plaque reads, Gregory Bottoms, honored recipient, dean's lecture award, outstanding scholar and teacher, presented by your colleagues in the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Vermont, fall of 2015. Thanks very much. Congratulations. And we will also hear from your colleague and chair of the English department, Val Rowe. Hi, everyone. My name is Mae Barron. I'm an English minor and an anthropology major at UVM, and I've taken four classes with Professor Bottoms. Three of these classes focused on creative nonfiction writing and one of them focused on this form in addition to fiction and prose poetry. These classes and Professor Bottoms' teaching have honestly changed the way that I looked at writing, the way that I look at myself, and also the way that I look at other people and the world around me. In these classes, I, like many other students, wrote about some very personal subjects, which were at times quite difficult to share. But every time that I shared my work in class, as we do multiple times throughout the semester and the form of in-class critiques, it was an incredibly rewarding experience. One of the things I appreciate most about Professor Bottoms is his ability to work with writers of absolutely every experience level in a way that builds us up and helps us see what's truly great about our writing. At the same time, he pushes us to keep searching for what will make us stronger and what will make the stories we want to tell clearer to the people reading them. Our critiques are structured so that each student will all of us receive both constructive criticism and praise for each of our pieces. This comes in the form of written letters and in the form of in-class discussions, both in large and small works. For me, these discussions were a chance to speak with incredibly intelligent and supportive and open-minded individuals about our writing. And I felt extremely connected to my fellow classmates by the end of each one of these workshops. From Professor Bottoms' I learned not just how to read with a more critical eye, but also how to find the positive elements in work that might not otherwise have spoken to me in first glance. To see the people behind the writing and to ask questions about what brought them to whatever place that they were writing from. From what I've seen, he makes every student who takes his class feel like their work is worthy of being read. And like every voice is worthy of being heard. And this is a message that I think all of us take with us even after class is over. I honestly don't think it's an exaggeration to say that these classes have changed my life. Over the past three years my confidence has, if not skyrocketed, at least significantly increased. And I now consider myself a writer, which I never did before. I see more options for my future and have a clearer idea of what I might have to offer to the world. I've started doing stand-up comedy, which is terrifying and wonderful. And also something I don't think I ever would have tried had I not been given such a safe and encouraging environment to talk and write about my life in the personal ways that I was able to with these classes. In other words, I got to find my voice and that's an invaluable experience. Professor Bottoms is an amazing teacher and an amazing role model and truly grateful for everything that he's done. Thank you very much. Dr. Bottoms, who has contributed so much to our students, the English department, and to the college. Greg Erntes, MFA from the University of Virginia in 1998, came to UVM in 2003, was awarded tenure in 2007, and was promoted to full professor in 2011. He is a remarkably prolific, nationally acclaimed writer created by fiction, a genre includes memoir, travel narratives, and informative essays. As well as an exceptional teacher and a generous citizen of the UVM community. Greg has published writing on a wide range of topics, though the American south and the masculinity are recurring foods. He first won a claim in 2000 with his memoir Angelhead by Brothers Descent to Madness, which Esquire magazine named its book of the year. They called it a total force memoir, adding Bottoms writes like, oh it writes like he's on fire. Later books include two studies of outsider art and artists who are inspired by the faith. Of one, the colorful apocalypse. Esteemed literary critics had Burkitt's wrote, Greg Bottoms gets us deep inside not just the art, but the making, the visionary angst that drives these outsiders, these unassimilated originals. A savvy, but also deeply heartfelt, intensely searching, attribute. Greg has also published several collections of autobiographical short stories that examine whiteness, racism, and working class masculinity, often from the perspective of his younger self. And that follows good place. He had all of these published seven books, including sentimental, heartbroken, rimex, fight scenes, swallowing the past scenes from the postmodern South, spiritual American trash, portraits from the board, margins of art of faith, and beautiful criminals. These works are not only stylistically brilliant, but also dedicated and compassionate, even or perhaps especially when their subjects are most difficult. That's really the way it is as a teacher and a colleague as well. A profoundly rational, ethical person who models for students not only what good writing looks like, but also what's at stake in writing. Perhaps best expressed in his own description of his work. He says the writer, at his or her best, is an astute and articulate witness. As made as a tested, students from such classes as writing memoirs, contemporary American autobiography, American travels, writing about the arts, the narrative essay, and introduction to creative writing praise his empathy, the sense of humor, his detailed feedback, and his individual support for them. One student who notes that he first took one of Greg's classes to fulfill a requirement writes, that class changed everything for me. His classes have shaped the way I want to enter the real world and the careers I want to pursue. They gave me a important direction and a time when I was lacking it and it has been an absolute privilege to be a student for this long. Other students echoed this sentiment. One found Greg's class challenging yet extremely rewarding and fun. Another reported, I always left class with something new to think about. And the class made it as well thought. His obvious love of literature was inspiring. I am so very honored to be just coming here. Well, this better be decent after that, huh? Thanks, thanks so much. Thanks to the Dean, thanks to May and Val, thanks to my students, thanks to the college, thanks to the committee for, you know, choosing me out of all this. I'm going to pour some water. I don't know if I can talk and do that at the same time. So, because I may need it, I probably will. Okay, I'll set that there. I have to take my glasses off. Okay, I'm going to read from the beginning of a book that I'm working on titled White Kid, A Personal History of Race, Racism, Class, and Culture in the South in the 1970s. The book is a memoir focused on white racial attitudes and anxieties toward and about blacks after civil rights in the 1960s and during busing and integration in the 1970s in Hampton, Virginia, where I am from and where my mother drove a public school bus with me in tow. Running through the memoir between chapters is a long essay in which I describe and think about systematic institutionalized and legal racism by whites against blacks in the U.S., the South, Virginia, and Hampton. When Brown v. Board of Education came down in 1954 overturning parts of Plessy v. Ferguson from 1896, which put in place Jim Crow, a whole series of upheavals began throughout the South and Virginia. I worked my way through Jim Crow realities to integration between the law of the land in 1954 to the Gray Commission, to Senator Byrd's, quote, massive resistance to integration to the Southern Manifesto signed on to by 101 congressmen to how this social change and upheaval unfolded through the 50s and 60s including closed schools, walkouts, promises of vouchers, declarations of that old saw of states' rights and so on to and beyond busing in the 1970s where I arrive quite cluelessly on the scene and into a world already rigidly signified in terms of race and class. So we're all on the same page here. As a Southern white person looking at Southern white people, I explore racism as a dark and destructive force but also as a very human communal thing that has to become at least among those living most comfortably within it a largely unquestioned cultural condition and achieve normalcy to stay in place. The memoir and essay ask a pretty simple question and I think all books should ask pretty simple questions. Answers should be complicated, questions simple. How does that work? So that's like, how does it work? Of course, the ghost of all this I'm writing about in the book continue to haunt Southern and US politics and culture to right now. All right, so white kid, the book begins with two epigraphs. The first one is from Brayton Braytonback and it's from a talk that he gave in 1983 to Dutch Penn and it was called The Writer and Responsibility and it goes, there is in fact no truth. We are too fragile and volatile for that. We work with too many uncertainties. There is rather the continual shaping of something resembling poorly, provisionally truth. And then the second epigraph is from James Baldwin. American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. So it goes memoir, essay, memoir, back to essay and the essay just runs, this is like a hundred and fifty page essay that runs through the book with these kind of story vignettes. Okay? Can you hear me? If you can't, I'm sorry. Okay. Black preacher at the family reunion, 1979. In 1979, the year you were eight, your father's family reunion was held at a public park in Newport News, Virginia. It was a place of woods and creeks and picnic tables set against the eastern shore of the southern part of the James River, a few miles before it empties into the Chesapeake Bay. You heard more than one relative that day say they hoped the place wouldn't get overrun by the locals meaning the packs of young black males on bikes are on foot from the surrounding poor neighborhoods. They were often there playing basketball on the cracked and faded courts. You and several of your male cousins, four or five boys you will remember played war in the woods while you waited to be called to the picnic area for lunch where fifty or so relatives, toddlers to the elderly would chattily swarm around the splintered tables and pile their flimsy paper plates with fried chicken and salads from KSC in all manner of cover dish appetizers and desserts soft shell crabs, coleslaw, banana pudding, lemon squares. After playing for an hour or so in the woods one of your older cousins, Kevin, a chubby 14 year old with a mean crooked tooth grin and a mom inflicted haircut dared you to yell the n-word at the basketball players from behind thick cops of trees. You were looking out at a full court of ten older black boys and young men most maybe sixteen to twenty years old muscles and sweat and back and forth joking one older man, he looked about 35 wore athletic glasses with a band holding them onto his head you thought he was a teacher, maybe a coach because everyone listened to him he wanted to see what he would say when there was a foul, a potential foul he was the center of their disbanding and reforming circles on the court you stared at the men and boys especially at the man you thought a teacher who came across as a person of real dignity and authority and then at the metal hoops and backboards the falling down fencing rolled up in places like the edges of once wet paper the rims were netless the guards looked indestructible like big square storm grates and you had been told, had heard many times that that was because blacks what a strange descriptor you thought even then for people with widely varying shades of brown skin the color of skin widely varying shades of brown would steal anything they could carry even a heavy backboard when you were very young because of things white people who are actually more pink or tan or beige told you and because you were a child and when you were a child everything said is the truth there is no such thing as a word that is not the truth because why would there be you imagine the houses of black people were filled with pointless objects stolen for the sake of stealing almost every word out of every mouth that you understood to be trustworthy made you believe that black people operated like rats running wild in the secret streets hoarding the unusable I'm not going to do that you said to Kevin hiding from the court now in the deep green foliage sweating in the heat the wet sunshine sweating from running and climbing the small hills hills where revolutionary war soldiers and confederate and union soldiers had walked and climbed and run and screamed and fought and killed and died you were maybe 20 miles from where Dutch traders dragged and slapped the first African slaves onto American soil in 1619 sometimes you felt the layers of time beneath your feet or that is how you will remember it smell of honey suckle saw of bees penny colored pine needles stripe of gold light stenciled onto green grass earth smells so strong it must have come from inside your own head Virginia childhood you grow old you go everywhere in the country can travel the world and you sit down to write a sentence and you are still there yeah you are said Kevin no I'm not you said laughing trying to make it seem as if the whole thing was ridiculous would require no more of your attention Kevin took out a knife a little plastic knife from KFC serrated on one side translucent and blue tinted and held it up to your throat as the other cousins stood around watching though you won't actually remember them doing this just remember that they were there and this is what they would do in a scene and this is a story and you are a writer so just go ahead and imagine the other cousins four of them ragged white boys with filthy clothes and knees and faces or whatever dirt creased necks black edged fingernails tap into your repository of working class white people stereotypes if you like use trailer park as a placeholder in the draft do it or I'll cut your throat you thought about it yelling the word and then running and it would all really just be a game some fun at the reunion but you didn't want to do it because the man you still believed was a teacher of some kind and he was teaching the boys playing and maybe not only basketball but other things too because he kept stopping to talk to them and pat them on the back and they were paying attention and smiling laughing at what seemed like his jokes you felt the cousins holding you and you felt dull knife edge saw across your neck and you felt you will feel it again later remembering that electric sting the hot blood on your skin the panic slap of your hand on the wound and later you showed your mom the cut at lunch but didn't say how it happened and your mom said what happened a stick and you said yeah a stick and then she put a napkin against your neck she lifted the napkin and looked every couple of minutes until the bleeding stopped said some stick careful then this image it was hours later and you were standing in the parking lot at dusk and the black man with glasses and a sweat stained gray shirt was laughing with all the other black boys and young men as they loaded their basketballs and bags into a clean new white church van that had written on its side the holy redeemer something something church of Christ you must have been with your mom and dad and brothers but they aren't in the memory it's just you at the end of a hot day with a raw pink cut on your neck and a dirt stained everything and the sky is gray blue with a distended pink belly you were staring at the man and patting gently at your neck he shuts the van doors he walks toward you and asks you if you were okay and you say yeah I am except my neck got cut out in the woods and the man says he likes to use bactine on his cuts you'll remember this very clearly even though it burns a little at first but the cut goes away faster and that is usually all there is to it good as new you can get it down at the drugstore give you some sun if I had it but we left the aid kit at church you look at the man he is smiling you want to say that you got your throat cut because you wouldn't yell a racist insult at him but you don't know what racism is and don't have the language and don't know how what other people you back then you might as well have been trying to rebuild a car engine or do particle physics before the man gets in the van and drives away he says God bless you son then he pats you gently on the shoulder and looks into you a second two seconds brown eyes and blue eyes nothing much your mom turns around and says why are you crying? what's wrong? is something wrong? and you say it's my neck my neck hurts and your mom says we'll take care of it honey we will just calm down but it's not your neck or the anger and shame and helplessness you feel because of your cruel and stupid cousin Kevin who could have done anything he wanted to you beating you delirious tied you up hung you from a tree you don't know what it is exhaustion the long day the picnic white knife your white family those black boys and men the squalor of the poor neighborhoods near the park turning slowly and darkly now in the car windows a hand on your shoulder a blessing at dusk the world expands every day words barely touch it and now your heart has opened like a sieve and you cannot hold back its tiny flood there's always the question of where to begin I was born in Hampton, Virginia in 1970 my family, both sides mothers and fathers had migrated there with thousands of others from eastern North Carolina Ahoske, Windsor along the western shores of the Chihuahuan river parts there about to Tidewater or Hampton roads as it is interchangeably known in southeastern Virginia in the early part of the 20th century they sought a better more comfortable life and employment opportunities in and around what would later be referred to by President Eisenhower as the military industrial complex we are Scotch Irish and English with plenty of unknown racial and ethnic filler no doubt but an aspect of identity politics and of American mythologies more generally is that they barely need to be built on an edifice of sturdy facts or reasonable and non expedient interpretations in the early 1990s when I was in my early 20s I was drawn to the literature and counterculture of the 1960s post-modernism new journalism particularly music writing French theory and the upheavals of 1968 media studies ruptures in tradition radical re-imaginings of what and why and how things were the scraping away of grand delusions I particularly admired Marshall McLuhan his quirky the medium is the message and I also admired Franz Fanon the wretched of the earth as different as those two cultural critics may seem on the face of it as their thinking filtered through me in my life in my thinking it taught me among other ideas that the most powerful thing America has produced is not a bomb or a fleet of ships or an interstate highway system or monuments or the marketplace or even an all encompassing consumer culture but a set of powerful fantasies about who we are and where we come from and the origins and backgrounds of our present conditions I awoke into consciousness as a child during the time of busing and integration in the mid to late 1970s at that time was a public school bus driver she was one of only a few white people whom I had never heard say something negative about a person because of the color of their skin she was not highly educated in a formal sense like many women at that time and from the working class she finished high school and assumed she would be a secretary or possibly if she was willing to do a bit more schooling a nurse or a teacher she had no intelligence and compassion particularly towards children she took me with her on the bus almost every day I had a first hand view of one of the outcomes of civil rights in action without understanding any of it from the ages of 5 to 10 I of course knew nothing of race relations or of how we arrived at the tense binary racial situation I inhabited or why I was a product of history as we all are I like the idea of a child's innocence mine for convenient example as a literary device so you of course is me but let's get out of the way now that memoir partakes of imagining because remembering partakes of imagining navigating facts and the evolving processes and products of memory and identity to achieve symbolic truths about self, time, place custom and belief language as novelist Paul Oster wrote is not truth it is the way we exist in the world one doesn't need to be a card-carrying deconstructionist to get that this is a set of true stories or as true as I can make them stories about the absurdity and devastation of American racism and how it has been held in place by fantasy and fear racism is taught in our society Alex Haley famously wrote it is not automatic it is learned behavior toward persons with dissimilar physical characteristics and the white people have benefited from racism that is just a large scale historical fact I also think it has been damaging in the way that holding onto a set of lies and illusions over time brings about spiritual suffering and mental illness setting forth to borrow a phrase from Gromsky a great variety of morbid symptoms I was a white kid who lived for a time at the conflicted center of black and white race relations in the south the kid I was is in many ways a stranger to me now I'm following him through the labyrinth of my memory hoping not to get lost new shoes 1976 you're on your hands and knees looking side to side beneath the tattered bus seats in front of you are new white tennis shoes size 3 or 4 and above them frayed in yellow socks and above the socks a young girl thin brown ankles like chocolate painted bones what else? other brown ankles, other shoes but none are this close, this bright this white, this new metal bus seat poles bolted to the black filthy floor line up into the near distance like centipede legs but why are you on the ground? follow the images, remember you're 5 riding in the front of the school bus your mother drives every day through the prime chapel quote projects of Hampton, Virginia she is in her late 20s pregnant with your brother it is 8 years after the fair housing act made it illegal to use federal money to further racial segregation the two of you are the only white people on the bus and she is the only white person in the school system at the moment who will drive an all black bus or go near pine chapel behind you are about 50 of the poorest African-American kids in the state, kindergarteners to 8th graders, kids who stressed and broken families have been over time segregated out and cordoned off into heavily policed and impoverished housing while you live in a small tidy house in a nearby white neighborhood signed for by your father on cheap credit and a guaranteed loan backed by that same government each weekday morning and afternoon in 1976 only a few years after major desegregation lawsuits you sit by yourself in the first loose spring creaking chair behind mom's driver's seat always dangling, listening to the talk the laughing and the cursing of the kids language is a marvel almost a solid material for building thought, memory, fantasy most of your life is in your head such a good boy people said so quiet but your mind is a rapids anything but quiet perhaps you've dropped something a coin one of the plastic toy figures of Batman or Aquaman you always had you then something and now you're on your hands and knees to pick it up you can see all the way to the teal steel back of the bus but it sees shoes that draw your eye cheap white new shoes have meaning shoes tell a story not how you think of course, not at five you're about 14 years from first hearing the words semiotics or ethnography but something you seem to know because the teenage boys in your neighborhood wear blue puma collides or bright white Adidas Stan Smith with three green stripes or blue and yellow Nike running shoes with tan knobby soles they parade these shoes they runway fashion stroll them every day you can see the boys belong together because of their shoes there are other things that connect them as well, medium length feathered hair parted in the middle t-shirts screen printed with words like cheap trick and fog hat and jethro tall and pink floyd their white skin but it's the shoes that really mean or so it seems and it is cheap canvas shoes what the teenage boys call butter cookies that can truly dam a person subject them to the cruelest words, bullying your mother drives a bus your father works at the nearby shipyard money is tight your family never has enough none of which do you know or understand but you wear Nikes and if you didn't you would be trash like your neighbors the Helies so when you get up from the bus floor maybe with a plastic batman in hand you look back at the girl at her face then the older boy sitting beside her her brother you think then the girl again she does not look you in the eye her glasses are thick plastic, cheap her downcast eyes are magnified like a fish in the corner of an aquarium like a squeezed balloon she is small, skinny, about your age five, maybe six her black hair is parted in the middle with two tight braids drooping like weak stalks from the root of her head you would like her to look at you for the first time on this bus you have something important to say to one of the black kids before you got your Nikes your mother relented to your begging for Nikes the older boys in your neighborhood laughed at your shoes every day when they walked by you as you rode your yellow plastic skateboard with the translucent rubber cement colored wheels on your short driveway and the thump-tump on even sidewalk in front of your house they said your mother drove the midnight taxi or the prison bus they said check tykes kicks or nice moccasins key, mo, therapy then laughed pushing each other you didn't understand exactly what they meant or why your white canvas shoes from Kmart that your grandmother bought you were such a joke but you felt the sting from their comments their laughing went inside no more skateboarding said mom now you said then sat on the flowered couch in the small dim living room in the silence and the tea stain light and the boredom time felt so big at five the ocean to swim through like having your eyes open while you slept the hours a dark unmoving sludge you looked down at your shoes such crap crap shoes butter cookies but then Christmas came and you wanted only one thing and you got your blue Nikes you're leaning over the back of your seat now you and the girl and her brother are face-to-face inside the roaring tunnel did you have meanness in you as a kid? certainly some maybe plenty but it's hard to know really since the child's mind is the adult's story a thing you're making on this laptop a tale we tell ourselves to grant some meaning to and approximate our past but you remembered the older white boys laughing at your shoes celebrating a new thing wrong with you a hurt thing wants to hurt that much you know you say only two words nice shoes then you laugh your best neighborhood cool kid derisive like spitting on those embarrassing no-brand shoes the boy beside the girl her brother is the bus monitor he helps your mother keep a lid on potential violence which hums in the air some days your father believes the poor and he has been at the edge of poor for most of his life and perhaps can be murderous over wounded pride will steal useless things because useless things are still a kind of ownership and one notch up from nothing at all and he does not like that your mother has agreed to do this and doesn't have a better safer job the grocery store helping out at a preschool that his low salary reduces freedom forces your parents to make choices they don't want to make the girl's brother is like your mother's fight cop mom says he is a gentlemen going somewhere going somewhere. No fights is her one rule. Want to fight? He says to kids, standing up, eyeing them. Get off the bus and kill each other. Nobody cares, but no fighting on the white lady's bus. He scowls at your laugh now. You think he must share your opinion of the girl's shoes? You assume everyone understands that she should be wearing Nike's. Not those sad 299 Kmart specials. This is inviolable logic. You learned it from the cool boys in your neighborhood. He doesn't laugh. Instead, he leans in toward you. You look at him. Listen. You're still smiling. He helps your mother. He can be trusted. He looks at his younger sister, who never talks, who holds his hand at the bus stop, who sits with him every day, sometimes right up against him, holding his arm, her head on his shoulder. Then he looks at her new shoes, which still smell of pressed rubber and canvas of the caved-in box they came over in from China with 100 other identical pairs. Quietly, so your mother cannot hear, he says, what are you laughing at? I bought them damn shoes. I'd take one off and beat your little ass with it. Your mother wasn't sitting right there. Turn around, boy, before I slap your face. Little electric shock goes right through your forehead and all around inside your skull, staticking every thought. You turn around, heart a marcher's snare. You hold your picked-up toy, Batman or Aquaman, tight in both hands. You cross and recross your shins, as if to hide your expensive Nikes. At home, you lie sock-footed on the flowered couch and watch Tom and Jerry wordlessly torture and terrorize each other. You do not mention to your mother what happened on the bus, what the girl's brother said. The next day, walking out of the slappy screen door of the house for the morning route, she asked why you weren't wearing your new shoes. After the Civil War, after the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, after the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the hope of promised equal rights for black citizens was shown to be empty words and toothless laws only. In 1896, in Plessy versus Ferguson, the U.S. legalized separate but equal facilities and services for blacks, which was separate and catastrophically unequal, cementing the social and cultural condition of white privilege and institutionalized racial supremacy for one group and racial subjugation for another, which I only began to learn about in any specific historical sense in my 20s during my counterculture obsessed years by reading W. E. B. Du Bois 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk. We were a country founded on notions of freedom, liberty, and Christian morality. We quickly condemned crimes against humanity and other parts of the world, yet it is hard even now to fully acknowledge our own crimes. The state of Texas, only one example, doctors its required high school history textbooks in 2015 to suggest that slaves were workers remembered by landowners for their songs and folktales. We, let's imagine some branding spokesperson for American power centers, have for some time been able to say that race is a wound in the American psyche. We can acknowledge that. Even fairly conservative whites in the South, and I know many, can accept Frederick Douglass's and John Brown's idea that slavery is America's original sin. We can acknowledge that too. But we have trouble with directness. Some words are like harshly revealing mirrors held too close to the face. For instance, it is difficult to say that the White Supreme Court of the United States in the Dred Scott ruling of March 6th, 1857, written by Justice Taney, regarded blacks as an inferior and subordinate class of beings. Or that for centuries a white man killing a black man registered among most otherwise law abiding whites as the moral equivalent of killing a horse or a good farm dog. Or that black women and babies were used regularly as money and credit in exchanges among whites, including our country's leaders. Or that hanging a black person in the first half of the 20th century reliable statistics on U.S. lynchings range from three to four thousand was an event not so different in kind and ethos than people now gathering around the big screen TV to cheer on Ronda Rousey pummeling someone in the ultimate fighting championships on pay per view. I remember reading a notice in the pre-civil war archives of a Richmond Virginia paper for a missing slave who could be identified by the thick scar tissue around his wrist and ankles from shackles. These are unpleasant facts, sickening facts, causational facts haunting present and often passively constructed statistics on poverty, education, wealth, family and community stress and breakdown, incarceration, health and mortality. We seem to have perfected complex social psychological methods that deflect our attention from facing these facts every second of every day. I think of it as I think of it sometimes as an impressive magic trick. I'm still trying to figure out how it works and I'm trying to understand white people in the South and Jim Crow trying to understand where I come from since I went through 12 years of public education at ground zero of American slavery and lived inside its deforming and deformed and deforming effects and magical thinking and mystifications without ever not once hearing the phrase Jim Crow inside a school. If as a boy in Tidewater Virginia I could have sifted through the layers of time beneath my feet I would have found that on my patch of land, my place, my home, my secular and spiritual site of comfort, Plessy versus Ferguson, among a thousand other laws and policies and practices, helped calcify injustice in American apartheid and then normalized it to such an extent that white boys like me could walk through this world of injustice with smiles on our faces accepting what had been wrought without pangs of conscience or perhaps even notice. In 1958, Walshman and Birmingham School Cultural Critic Raymond Williams published the essay Culture is Ordinary. I still remember reading the essay for the first time when education was becoming cool to me and thus worth pursuing because coming from where I came from picking up some better understandings of the world and its workings, a passable ability for abstract thought and connection sometimes felt a little punk rock. Intellectualism was a stigma rather than an asset. My father, whom I loved, once asked me if I was going to college where I studied English and journalism just to stare at the moon and hope to figure out the meaning of life. This passage from Williams might have been my first introduction to the idea that there were powerful and unperceived mental environments at work on me. Quote, culture is ordinary. That is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these in institutions and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land. The growing society is there yet it is also made and remade in every individual mind. The making of a mind is first the slow learning of shapes, purposes, and meanings so that work, observation, and communication are possible. Then second but equal in importance is the testing of these and experience the making of new observations, comparisons, and meanings. The questions I ask about our culture are questions about our general and common purposes yet also questions about deep personal meanings. Culture is ordinary in every society and in every mind, end quote. Culture is ordinary, yes, but to me as a boy, as the white kid of these stories, it would have been as invisible to my attention as the air. For decades a boy like me in Jim Crow, Virginia, in the South would have been trained by the ordinariness of culture and the acceptance of this culture to take for granted that black people were not worthy of going to white schools or voting or using toilets or water fountains for whites or eating in white restaurants. This is the least of it and the list could go on and on. I would have been inculcated to know for instance that a black girl would pollute my swimming pool with her skin or a black boy giving blood to save my life after a bad accident would have poisoned me or perhaps even made it so my mannerisms would become those of the negro. The black child's blood a kind of magic potion of inferior and infectious identity. I think this is why what Williams wrote was so powerful to me. A Welshman speaking to a Southerner, it was clear and useful theory. It helped me understand that my mind, every mind, was inherently haunted by received wisdoms, however ridiculous and destructive assumptions, however unjust and evil. This is the real power of racism the world over and in America and the South and my boyhood city in particular, its ability in human culture and thought and the nuances of communication to achieve normalcy and then take on the character of unquestioned truth. One more short memoir, Home Shopping 1977. One Saturday you go to the new Sears Superstore with your mom and dad. Who knows why? That's lost in the sinkhole of memory. But your parents were hard workers. They were house proud and yard proud. They believed the grass and flower beds and shrubs should look clean and sharp and good just as they believe their boys should look clean and sharp and good. When you are a hopeful working class American, when you are not so far from poor, in paychecks and genealogy, you carry yourself with outward signs of dignity and properness so no one mistakes you for lesser than who you perceive yourself to be. So let's say your father needed a rake, a sprinkler, some mulch. Sears is big like a warehouse, like an airplane hanger, a box store before that phrase is commonly used. You love coming here. You can walk by yourself over to the toy section then wander your way towards sporting goods, the bicycles and weights and golf clubs and basketballs. There is a lot of crime where you live, a lot of violence. Every boy must be able to fight. How many fights have you seen by the time you were seven? 25, 30, split eyebrows, pop noses, ears red like paint, a tuft of after battle ripped out hair like a piece of abandoned bird's nest, scuttling the sidewalk in a breeze. But the mental image of the world for your family at any rate has not become a dangerous place yet, a place where one minute of TV violence or crime conveys the feeling of a thousand crimes right outside your door, right inside your head. It's a television decade, the years of Manson with a swastika on his forehead and squeaky from giving interviews and handsome smiling Ted Bundy and the Zodiac killer and son of Sam and these are distinctly American characters delivering distinctly American chaos and sex and murder and apocalypse and their stories come filtered through and shot out of a box into your small living room and yet you roam through neighborhoods and stores and fields and parking lots. Your life is an unpredictable adventure, often at least in these memories, parent-free. You know there is a pool table in the sporting goods section, polished wood, green velvet, it's a display model, anyone can play. A sign on the side says try me. You turn a corner and several black teenage boys 13 or 14 years old are playing, they're laughing mocking one another for missed shots, you can't get to the bikes and punching bags without walking through them so you stand at the end of an aisle 10 feet from the boys and watch and wait. You think that when the boy's shooting has to walk around the table for the next shot on the other side you will squeeze by, keep your head down, be on your way. What's up little man? A smiling boy says but seemingly to no one in particular because he's still looking at the lay of the balls on the table. He has on a Washington Redskins jersey. As you've been watching from a distance he's been talking the whole time. All the other boys laugh at what he says, in fact when he did a white country boy voice a few seconds ago making fun you think of one of the white clerks who has been walking around watching the boys you smiled. He is kind of like a comedian on TV. Secretly you think black people are funnier than white people because of shows like What's Happening and Good Times and Sanford and Sun. Red Fox is a cranky genius and that bit about the heart attack and how he looks to heaven and says Lisbeth, oh man even though many of the grown-ups you know are more like Archie Bunker and all in the family but somber with no laugh track or opening or ending credits and are you supposed to be with Archie or against him when he says words like coon and faggot and treats his wife like a maid. All this subtext and multivalence often confuses you. The funny boy stands up after a shot and turns and looks directly at you. He says, I said what's up little man? You freeze. This ain't our table, man. He says you can play if you want. He holds out the stick. What can you do? You take a step forward. There is only one thing you can do and that is what he is suggesting you do. You take the stick and don't think and walk over and lean over the table with the pool stick awkward in both hands and take a shot. You miss the white ball completely and leave a blue chalk streak on the table. The black kids laugh but it's not mean doesn't feel mean. Now you are the comedian. You keep trying to make a shot. Oh man they say giggling. Oh man they say out of breath from laughing as you miss a sixth and seventh and eighth time leaving marks all over the table. Some almost like gouges in the green. The boys are nearly falling down with laughter. Oh man. You're seven a little shy but you like being the center of attention sometimes. So you're not someone destroying property. That idea doesn't enter your mind. You're an entertainer with some new and different friends. Black friends like that one black friend you had last year in first grade Barry Fox like Red Fox. This is like a scene on a black comedy show on TV because white people appear in those shows as racist devils like landlords or properly enlightened saviors like teachers or anti-war liberals but blacks rarely appear on white shows almost never as serious actors and dramas unless they are cop dramas in need of criminals or Mr. Jefferson moving into Archie Bunker's neighborhood to better display and focus and expose Archie's racism to raise the consciousness of the white audience at least a little bit. All right the boy in the redskins jersey says all right little man little man let me show you how to do it. The other boys are still laughing looking at the now scuffed and nearly ruined table. Redskins jersey says like this here you place this hand flat on the table near the white ball then you lay the stick across your hand right in this little groove here between your first finger and thumb then you line up the tip with the ball and try to slide your back arm like this here and hit the white ball hard right in the center with the tip. You don't want to mess up the felt little man unless you're going to buy this table. He is a good teacher you think you understand. He stands up your new friend and faces you and holds out the stick again to let you try to do it the right way. Hey a tall white man shouts he has on a navy polo shirt with sears above the breast pocket he is jogging toward you and the boys. The boy in the redskins jersey drops the stick onto the hard white floor and it clack clack clacks. You stand there paralyzed as the black boys go sprinting through the department store toward the outside doors even though they didn't do anything but play pool on a table that they were invited by a sign to play on. The white man follows them but he is no match for their youth and speed. You don't move for what seems like a long time but is probably only a minute or two. Your mother and father saw the boys running wondered and worried about you where you were why those boys were running what was going on they are beside you now what happened they asked what happened why those boys running did they do something did they take something did they bother you after a long pause thinking you say they didn't bother me they didn't take anything. The tall white man thin white man walks back to the table panting he rasped like a smoker he looks at the green velvet scuffed and marked and says that's it those kids those kids they come in here and they aren't going to buy anything and then they ruin a nice pool table worth hundreds of dollars he keeps saying that now the table is worthless unsellable this is ruined useless no one will buy it useless who did this your mother and father asked did you see guilt is like gravity holding you in place you were only a kid but still you could be like a white savior on a black tv show made by white people probably produced by Norman Lear at CBS and maybe criticized by the American Black Panther Party for its paternalistic white gays and its unflattering depictions of black poverty and family dysfunction but you haven't heard of any of them yet you could prove that there is justice in the world and people are people and don't jump to conclusions based on appearances and so on you could do that and this is a story and you could change the ending and make your younger self look better a precocious social justice go-getter a curious little not racist white boy in a country in a region and a state built quite directly and literally out of racism but that's not what you do what you did not how you remember it not who you were you shrugged your shoulders your face probably blushed you weren't going to sacrifice yourself for some black kids you didn't know who'd already made their escape you were learning how to be in this world what to express and how what to withhold you said you didn't see anything you heard the boys and walked over here and saw the table and then the boys took off running everything else you left out life was a series of little survivals you told a story to your parents and the Sears worker and it was conveniently the one everyone already believed anyway thanks