Breakfast with Carmen Delgado

By W. F. Twyman, Jr.

Mr. Ganz: “I’ve seen it before. I’ve seen it all before.” Bartender: “That was another time, Mr. Ganz. Another place, another kind of people. That doesn’t go here.” Mr. Ganz: That’s what we said too.” — He Lives, The Twilight Zone, Season 4, Episode 4 (January 24, 1963)

[Introduction: On occasion, Carmen Delgado and I get together for conversation. My long-time readers know Carmen Delgado is a fiction, a creation of my imagination. Sometimes, Carmen appears as my Joan of Arc for the Trans Racial movement in the distant future. Other times, Carmen is of this time as she breathes intellectual life across the radio airways in Palm Springs. This evening felt like a good time to catch up with the radio personality Carmen over at Manhattan in the Desert.]

Setting: A table for two at Manhattan in the Desert.

Me: Carmen, how do you survive out here in the desert? It was 110 degrees! yesterday.

Carmen: It is a dry heat!

Me: Not original, Carmen, I used to hear that tired line when I lived in Las Vegas. Hot is hot.

Carmen: That’s what nights are for. People come out at night.

Me: Not convinced. It only got down to 89 degrees last night.

Carmen: Wink, you didn’t invite me out to breakfast to talk about the weather. What’s on your mind?

[Carmen and I place orders with the waiter. I order an eggs benedict with a glass of orange juice. Carmen orders a bagel with cheese cream plus a fruit cup and a glass of water.]

Wink: I just had a splendid podcast conversation on Sunday with my Free Black Thought podcast co-host Michael Bowen.

Carmen: I know Michael. He was on Stephanie Winn’s podcast recently. A stoic mind for our times. I read his stuff. Loved his Black Privilege Vibe piece.

Wink: After the podcast, it occurred to me….

Carmen: Thoughts are always occurring to you. I like the way your mind works. How did you put it, quirky? One day, you and I will have Beloved Cousin on my show again. That was one of our most popular shows.

Wink: I’m not even sure Beloved Cousin is on speaking terms with me. But that’s beside the point. What occurred to me after the podcast was the inability to define Blackness in concrete, vivid terms. People use the label all the time but there’s no agreed upon definition.

Carmen: (sips water from her glass) Doesn’t the one-drop rule define Blackness? If one has one African ancestor in one’s family tree, one is black in the United States. I know, I know — I am missing a lot of nuance and complexity but the one drop rule seems as good a definition as any.

Wink: If I was content to live an unexamined life and go with the flow, I would agree with you. But you and I know there is more to defining Blackness. For example, there are maybe 6 million white Americans who have a black ancestor. They self-identify as white and no one is the wiser. There are white descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings living on Long Island. They look white, sound white, live white and think of themselves as white. Good old Black Sally didn’t make her 5x great grandchildren Black. And Sally was only 1/4 black at that back in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

Carmen: Before you throw out more examples as I am sure you could easily do, perhaps Blackness is simply a fiction. The fiction has social meaning and so it works. Now, the fiction may be based on caricatures and stereotypes but it works as social organization. Sometimes, people associate consciousness of Blackness as a bad thing. Maybe, just maybe, the fiction of Blackness serves a constructive purpose enabling social activism, sense of belonging, and rough identity in a non-Black world.

[Our food arrives. A sand storm whirls down the highway outside the restaurant. The sight of desserts at the front counter captures my sugar-addicted brain.]

Wink: In a perfect world, I would be sure, why not recognize that Blackness is a fiction that works. Here’s my difficulty — racial fictions are never good for society. Unlike the fiction of currency, the fiction of race enables demagogues to manipulate reality, to distort lives of non-conformers into boxes of racial conformity. Reality safeguards us from manipulations.

Mr. Ganz: They were brown scum. Temporary insanity, part of the passing scene. Too monstrous to be real. So we ignored them or laughed at them. Because we couldn’t believe that there were enough insane people to walk alongside of them. —- He Lives, The Twilight Zone, Season 4, Episode 4 (January 24, 1963)

Carmen: You don’t trust the fiction of Blackness in the hands of your fellow man.

Wink: I didn’t think of it in those terms but, yeah, that’s the logical endpoint, the sum of my fears. When someone who has never lived one day as a black person decides I need to be saved from evil forces, I worry that someone who doesn’t know me as an individual only understands a caricature and a stereotype. It is scary when those ignorant of over 40 million individual stories, perspectives and experiences latch onto some recipe for defining Blackness.

Carmen: But won’t there always be misalignment between the perception of white allies and the lived experience of black lives to be saved? As I see it, we err when we see people as groups before seeing people as individuals. You and I have talked about this gap between the fiction of the group and the reality of the individual before.

Wink: There is something in the air, in the water, these days. When I watch black-and-white shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, these shows aired before a segregated nation between the years 1959 and 1965. And as I observe the black characters, you know what I notice? The black characters are all treated as individuals. They are scientists, judges, bartenders, psychiatrists, and boxers — just the wide expanse of mankind. I never sensed anyone treated the judge or the psychiatrist or boxer as an infant. Today, we have distorted the meaning of Blackness into something grotesque. I don’t like it.

Carmen: Should we return to the years 1959 to 1965?

Wink: There are a 1,001 dimensions to the human condition. I would not want to return to those years but I tell you this — black people on the silver screen manifested a human dignity that well-meaning people deny Black people today with dogma and slogan words. It is human to disagree with someone and talk over someone, if one is rude. Whether one is Black should never, ever enter into the equation.

Humans treat other humans with…wait for it…wait for it… humanity.

If you are incapable of doing unto others as you would have others do unto you, then we have regressed in defining Blackness. Treat people as individuals. Grant that dignity and the rest will follow.

Carmen: We lack the nuance to discern and isolate the good from the bad in the years 1959 to 1965. One of your best endearing traits as a writer is your relentless optimism and positivity. You do the discerning for us all not meant for examined lives. Don’t let the clowns get you down.

Wink: The best is yet to come. That’s just the way history works. After darkness comes the light, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Carmen: Nothing like a warm bagel with cream cheese in the morning.

Wink: Nothing like the wisdom of Rod Sterling in the evening.

[Wink and Carmen click glasses]

Mr. Ganz: And then one morning the country woke up from an uneasy sleep. And there was no more laughter. The Peter Vollmers had taken over.” — He Lives, The Twilight Zone, Season 4, Episode 4 (January 24, 1963)

Conclusion: If one can be dark-skinned and not Black, white-skinned and Black, a graduate of Howard University and not Black, a graduate of Harvard University and Black, the descendant of a slave owner and Black, the descendant of a slave and not Black, a member of Alpha Phi Alpha and not Black, a member of Sammy and Black, if one can be all of these things and many more, what is the meaning of Blackness that connects over 2 billion people and the meaning of Whiteness that connects over 300 million Americans?

Are we left with convenient fictions in the twilight zone of race?