Cultural Reassignment Surgery
ESSAY
“I got it,” he said. The guy in the otherwise empty classroom snapped his dark brown fingers like he was Einstein, having finally pieced together the proper equation with an E and an M and a C in it. “You’re c-c-c-culturally black.” He leaned back into his chair, crossing his arms and nodding approval at his own ability to maintain an insane worldview in which white people simply had to be more privileged than minorities, even if that meant turning me into one—despite my pale skin and a set of baby-blues that would get a nod from Sinatra.
Tyrone was a black guy seven years my junior. He had a stutter like a faulty version of one of those heart-shaped quarter beds in stuffy velvet wrapped honeymoon suites. He was veteran, having been some non-deployable MOS in the Air Force that allowed him to do a four-year stint basically in the backyard of the town in which he had grown up, where he happened to have been raised by a white lady who adopted him, who happened to be an unmarried psychologist—hence the major we both shared.
I shook my head as if to clear it of the retarded revelation before it could crawl its way into and through my eardrums and reach my brain, where I just knew it would begin the long process of chewing at neural connections until I, too, could think such a ridiculous thought.
“What are you talking about?” I said, scrubbing at my face with both hands. I was tired. We had been at this for hours instead of the research project we were supposed to be working on about young men and pornography addiction (look up the Coolidge effect sometime if you want to see Pornhub for the evolutionary bug-zapper that it is). I was worn down from the circular reasoning struggle session and was getting irritable.
“Well,” Tyrone said. “You grew up p-p-p-poor and in a bad n-n-n-n-neighborhood. Most of your siblings went to jail as f-f-felons? Everybody was ad-d-d-dicted to something?”
I nodded, eyebrows glued to their highest setting out of equal parts fatigue and disbelief at how many times we’d been over this already while he tried to convince me that white privilege was both real and a useful concept. We had been over my upbringing a half-dozen times. Evidently, having barely managed to escape the trailer park and the cigarettes-to-meth pipeline didn’t exempt me from a blood debt owed for being pasty or a categorical privilege that was all the rage at the moment.
“Well,” he said. He slapped his hands like a baker ridding himself of the powdery white of excess flour. “You’re b-b-black.” I pinched the bridge of my nose—hard.
“What would that make you?” I said. The part of me that was a glutton for intellectual punishment was morbidly curious as to what turn he would have to take next, what cognitive twists and knots were necessary to maintain such an inane and literally black-and-white view of the world. He’d told me about his upbringing. He had grown up fairly affluent, with little to no chaos or criminality—though I was beginning to suspect quite a bit of c-c-crazy—in the household he was raised in.
“I guess that makes me c-c-culturally w-w—,” he struggled but stuck with it. “W-white,” he stuck the landing and beamed at the invisible judges. I started packing my bag. I bid him a goodnight and begrudgingly scheduled a time the following day to finish our damn project.
On the way home, I couldn’t seem to wrap my head around how someone could be so religiously affixed to a set of ideas that required them to ignore both the forest and the trees. As I moved through that program and into grad school and began to get more fully exposed to the cult of empathy, some of that began to make sense.
Have you had an experience like this academically, professionally, personally, or otherwise?