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the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Timothy Noah and Marjorie Williams

the breakfast table
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from: Marjorie Williams

The Last Word

Posted Thursday, July 16, 1998, at 6:13 PM ET

Dear Tim,

Now that we've been to the movies and back, I wanted to amplify slightly on my last response. You missed the totally obvious point, which was the difference between you and Erin J. Aubrey, who wrote the Salon piece cleverly pegged to Jennifer Lopez's buttocks:

Aubrey: used this provocative image for a nobler reason, which was to write a very interesting piece about how confining the roles awarded to black and Hispanic actresses remain.

Tim: just wanted to leer.

But I will credit your sincerity enough to meditate further on one item in your sick self-defense. I'm really interested in your last point, about whether it's acceptable for non-members of some social group to make observations--even simple ones--that members of that group would readily make about themselves. (The common example, of course, being the way some blacks feel comfortable with certain uses of the N-word, but reasonably report being enraged to hear whites saying it.) This question, I think, marks one of the most fluid areas in our otherwise ice-locked conversation about race.

It makes me think of my father, who died two months ago. I happened to ride along in the ambulance when he left the hospital to go home to die. Here we are, bumping along the Manhattan potholes in the back with a young, black, female Emergency Medical Technician. My father is bundled and strapped to a gurney like Hannibal Lecter. Although he has only a few days to live (two, as it turns out), the EMT's stupid rules say that she has to take a medical history during the ride, and check to make sure he's really okay to be released; if she doesn't think he's good to go, she'll route him right back to NYU Hospital. Imagine his anxiety: If he doesn't pass this test, he will lose his chance to die at home. So finally she gets to the point on her checklist where she asks questions to test his alertness: what day is it, who's the president, and so on. "What," she asks him, "was the first thing you noticed about me?"

I see panic on his face--the face of a life-long liberal who thinks the best things went out of politics with Adlai Stevenson. The obvious answer is her very dark skin. Yet he rouses himself, and says in his most sort of humbly gallant manner, "That you're so... trim."

Later we all sat around his bed, drinking strawberry daiquiris (him too) and laughing until we wept at this crystallization of his him-ness. But to this day I'm awed by the scene, its evidence that the social taboos around acknowledging racial difference--the suspicion that terrible bruises can bloom from the simplest truth--could be so important that we would carry them, literally, to the end.

I was raised in that liberal tradition of respecting racial difference, the kind of respect that says it's too electric even to mention. It's obviously better to try to muddle into the mess, giving offense here but making a connection there; sure is scary, though. Which may be a very long way of saying I admire you a little bit for wading into the whole subject of ethnic butts. But don't tell anyone I said so.

Love,

Marjorie

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546474849505152535455565758596061626364656667686970717273747576
from: Marjorie Williams

The Last Word

Posted Thursday, July 16, 1998, at 6:13 PM ET
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Timothy Noah writes Slate's "Chatterbox" column. Marjorie Williams is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
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