LogFAQs > #894915248

This week I attended my second week of classes on my return tour of college, in and among my time running my comic shop. And normally I don't experience multiple facets of my life lining up into simple patterns which beat something over my head repeatedly, but this week I was gifted with an after-school special replete with two distinct examples of the same thing happening.

I've had, for a long time, difficulty understanding why it's become so unpleasant to talk about the things I love. Those things of which I'm a fan. At the shop, for example, proselyting about the good news of whatever comics are coming out in a given week has become a chore. The conversations with various customers are less positive, more confrontational. I daresay customers are antagonistic. Now, I could go on a tangent of how I think running a shop is becoming more and more of a negative experience over time, but this is different. The communal gathering of fans discussing something they love shouldn't leave a bitter taste in my mouth.

In a similar way, in my English lit. classes on campus, I find that the discussions of the novels or poetry we read has lost a lot of the depth that really drove me to this major in the first place. There are certain universal truths we can uncover in even the simplest works, and if nothing else, I can develop an understanding of a different style of writing that helps me convey my own messages in a better way. But that does not seem to be the end-result of the four sessions I've attended in English lit. thus far. Instead, after reading a particular work, the discussion inevitably turns to the writer's gender, sexual orientation, race. Discussions don't focus on what the writer was exploring in their world, it's constantly about holding a modern judgmental lens up to the writer's era and determining just how courageous or politically incorrect they are by current standards.

We read a short essay written by a black modernist who had traveled to Europe in between World Wars. The essay clearly states in the third or fourth page that he set aside the fact he was African-American to explore what it was like to be from a younger country travelling in an older one. The discussion topic was about America, this young nation, as it breached the main cast of the world stage in a volatile time and as it stacked up against older, more storied nations with a very different cultural mindset. And I swear to god, the first thing out of the gate was about Donald Trump. Some other student, a front row student of course, couldn't resist the opportunity to immediately derail the conversation by sharing their totally unnecessary opinion about how they hated Trump. This caused some guy in the back row to launch into a tirade about how everything had to be so PC and we couldn't have real discussions (none of this related to what the front row student had said, which was totally unrelated to the essay at hand).

The teacher, in his infinite wisdom, tried to course correct at this point and ask the class to talk specifically about the experience of the writer here, in this essay. This writer in the 1920s. What is the author trying to convey? Well, first thing out of the shoot, we have to denote he's black. He's talking to us as a black man in a time of great segregation. And at this point, I chime in because apparently I'm masochistic, and I say, "Well, if you look at page three, he flat out says he has to set aside his personal experience as a black man to explore this topic, and he does."

Well, the teacher liked this because it was more to the point of the conversation, but the class was immediately launched into a tizzy because we need to talk about how his experience as an African-American is the root of this entire essay. Someone said to me very pointedly, "Are you discounting the experience of this writer as a black American?"
---

"Reading would be your friend." ~Dave Meltzer