My Incredibly Insightful Comments on Minorities

I've been living in Genesee County for about a month now, listening to the abyssmal garbage that is Flint rock radio virtually every day. I hate it because the fascination of twenty-year-old songs is so great that there are three "classic rock" stations in the area; I hate it most of all because the only station that consistently plays new rock completely ignores any songs that are not revoltingly aggressive and ultra-masculine. I hate the fact that people are impressed by singers who have nothing to say except that they hate their parents and want to have sex. I hate the fact that a song whose guitar "riff" consists of a single note repeated endlessly is a huge success. I hate the fact that they are all so ridiculously strong and confident and ignorant. When I get home from work and have a chance to listen to music of my choice, I listen to singers who sound weak and whose themes focus on their weakness. I listen to people who are every bit as talented as the radio stars, perhaps even moreso, but are excluded from the airwaves because they are not immediately familiar.

Although I have made it a point to avoid "minority literature" for the most part and even made a point of complaining about the fact that we had to study cultural theory in my lit crit class, it would appear that at the level of my music preferences, the level that is least tied to academics and thus stands some chance of being less artificial, I like hearing from minorities, and even women. And even in my Dead White Male books, I like the ones who seem to be the most oppressed. I like the fact that Milton created his amazing poetry after being effectively a minority of one for his entire life: too smart for everyone around him, too unorthodox in his religious opinions even for the revolutionaries who executed the king. I like that James Joyce came from a cultural backwater. I even like to read some of the Dead White Males simply because they seem to have fallen out of favor or are difficult to understand for reasons beyond their control, Spenser, for example, or Langland. And I am jealous of people who have their minority status built in: why was I cursed with this white skin? Would I not be twice as impressive, nay, three times as impressive, had I graduated in the top ten of my class, gotten a full-tuition college scholarship, and spent a semester at Oxford, and been Chicano, or Hmong, or a Kosovar refugee?

And seriously, though I did a good job of alienating my parents by majoring in a completely impractical field and most of all by converting to Catholicism, why couldn't I have topped it off by being attracted to men? I like girls too much to risk driving them away while developing a taste for men: it must be so easy for those people who are born with that particular taste. Then look at my biography: all the same accomplishments, all the while hiding my homosexuality and eventually becoming a pariah in my own family when the love that dares not speak its name speaks its name. Not only would I look like a real trooper, but then I'd have a bit more of an excuse for what I laughingly call my "love life" for the past couple years. It would be rough going for a while, but I would be more than willing to go through that suffering to round out my introduction in the Norton Anthology.

In all seriousness, though, if I had to take that lit crit class again, I wouldn't get upset about the cultural studies, even though I, as a Living White Male, have no culture to call my own. I joke about the "benefits" of being in a minority, but those artists who have had to live with that burden for all their lives do usually seem to have a special insight into the human condition, almost as though they've had enough suffering for several lives. The closest I will ever come to that is my Catholicism, and after I leave Olivet, that "minority status" will probably lose much of its relevance. On a more fundamental level, though, I think that the voice speaking right now, the one that has been sincerely expressing my views for the past paragraph, is definitely a minority in my life, or at least this voice doesn't get a lot of the attention. Look at the end of my second paragraph and my entire third paragraph: I slip into Mr. Sarcastic and all of a sudden I'm on the verge of being a bigot. This is the kind of thing that gets me in trouble, isn't it? It's the mixture of tones that confuses people. I like to think that I could pick up the switch in tone on a "close reading" of one of my articles, but that requires more time than I can reasonably expect of my customers here. Thus, from this point forward, I will try to abide by the following rule: an article is either entirely sincere or entirely sarcastic, and any deviations from the former to the latter will be clearly and distinctly marked.