Dear Friends And Fans, We Are At The Finale.

 While my own awareness is not much expanded by this seminar, perhaps I can help to expand another seminar-attendee's understanding. My task would be easier done if the other would ask the right questions, but asking the right questions requires a wisdom of “What Must Be Known” to be known. Therefore, I must also take a bit of the part of a guide, putting on display points that I believe could have garnered a greater amount of interest. I shall not pretend to be a guru, but there is value in my life having been experienced as a traveler, observing locals of various locales as well as other travelers far from home (and occasionally (Read: “Frequently.”) missing the mark, culturally, as a natural outcome of this condition). Prithee, do not to find my arrogance here repugnant. No, really, I insist.

My contact zones have been in countries, wilderness, schools, and businesses, and have put me in the way of other people's business. I have been personally involved in crossing into someone's home arena and making it a contact zone. Sometimes my contact zones could easily become conflict zones because the boundaries involved are raised on somebody's moral grounds, whether on mine or on the other party's. In such cases, I try to indicate that perhaps our time and energy would be better spent at one of our other borders. The most frustrating times for planning construction of bridges is when I realize that a bridge is hidden behind a boundary of the cunning language of moral scare tactics despite the border itself actually being amoral. My contact zones chase me around, because I am a wandering individual by upbringing: There is not an established normalcy that I can completely adhere to in any location for long, just facades to hide behind.

Griffin, in Black Like Me, had once had a common history that was acknowledged by the majority of people in his country. Then he altered himself and got treated in some ways like a beast. He found that he had not merely inverted his skin tone: The contact zones that he returned to and went through had an inverse relationship to him compared to what they originally meant to his kind of person. The people around him who identified with him on a superficial level did not recognize that they were actually a foreign contact zone for Griffin, and the people who should have treated Griffin somewhat familiarly felt like he was invading their space, forcing a contact zone into their personal bubble. He became someone who had to rely on his ability to blend in rather than truly fit in in order to survive as a social creature...much like me.

Joe's house in Keesha's House is a contact zone of people of differing types and yet also the same type. The type they all are is at-risk teenagers in need. Because of their commonality, their common need, they get along. But Joe's house is more of a refuge than a contact zone. People become familiar to each other naturally by seeing each other around and by frequently interacting, and thus their differences become less important or apparent to each other. If this were not so, then a teen would soon leave. Yes, they might not have elsewhere to go, but that simply forces them to use their youthful adaptability, malleability, and hardiness to weather one another until their sense of abrasion is worn away.

 Familiarity crafts a boundary into a border, so the more time someone spends in a contact zone, the less of an alien experience it is compared to the first encounter people there had. For example, having gone many times this semester to the Deaf Christian Fellowship, I have become familiar to its members and they have become familiar to me. However, their church meetings remain a contact zone for me. This is because their culture is still not actually my own culture despite my becoming comfortable among them. Even when I adopt some of their mannerisms and customs, I am not fully assimilated. By saying I am not assimilated, I am not saying I am not accepted. I am quite welcome among my Deaf friends every Sunday. But no matter how much I may choose to make and achieve in making myself the same as members of the Deaf community, I will still be someone with a very unique past within that group. No matter what the appearance, an individual brought in from the outside still thinks like an outsider. Over time, the differences that separate people's ways of thinking and perceiving the world might erode via the effects of formal and informal (re)education, but the foundation of this experiential boundary will always exist (well, maybe not in the case of amnesia and total brainwashing, but I'm not equipped to discuss this outlier within this essay, and it is honestly a topic that would require a few research papers to be covered justly). People will bridge this boundary more and more as time goes on, and the more one feels at home among a new group, the more s/he will try to bring the resources from his/her side of the boundary to the group's side. But learning to actually think the way one makes oneself look and act to fit in is a long process full of mistakes and yearning to relapse. The leopard may change his spots and the man may change his skin, but it is not as easy as Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories portray the process. One can behold another's appearance and imaginatively assume that one can perceive all the history and motivations that went into crafting every detail of that person, to perceive what makes one unique and yet the same as everyone, as Richard Blanco does in eloquent words in poems such as Mother Picking Produce and Mexican Almuerzo in New England, fancying a picture other people's lives and thought-life as if their memories were his also. But, honestly, these poems use the mental skill of fabrication, the crazy cousin of memory. 

In Black Like Me, Griffin also falls prey to this false connection by conceiving a whole backstory for the character that he is becoming as he gazes at his new reflection. However, Griffin quickly saw that he was still clearly camouflaged poorly after his Sci-Fi-worthy transformation, and even when he made further adjustments to his costume and performance, he did not automatically gain the opinions and subconscious attitudes of his new “brethren.” Yes, Griffin describes a shift inside his own mind when he occurring had to receive the same treatment as Black Americans for a while before he could honestly empathize with the perspective they espoused. Even after he had adopted many of the characteristics and perspectives that marked Black culture in America, he quickly and easily resumed his old ways once he brought his “whiteness” back into the light. In the same way, the homosexual character Harris of Keesha's House found that he could no longer hide his sexual orientation under a heterosexual shroud. Before Harris came out of the closet, nobody knew that they were constantly creating a contact zone of an entirely different moral notion and modus operandi regarding romantic desire and the intimate interaction of bodies. What both Griffin and Harris discovered was that revealing the spirit that invigorated them caused many within the group that once identified with them to consider them traitors. Ironic that people can get along fine and function like a unit until one speaks their mind.

Regarding getting ideas out in the open, I had been holding onto a somewhat unexamined and undeveloped notion that being included or “allowed in” by a group was probably all that was needed for “membership.” While this is somewhat true, it is only the minimum requirement. Being fully involved and fully acknowledged requires more: More in common with the others members, more of the same motives, more commitment to the group's goals and rules, more capability for producing the same ideas and lines of reasoning. A member might avoid being an outcast despite not thinking and feeling and experiencing life the same way as the rest of the group, but holding onto the ways of an outsider will pull that member to the fringe of the group. The closer to a group's defining border a member is, the more likely s/he will feel “on edge” among the majority of the group with which s/he fits in best or must cast in his/her lot.

People who cross borders into a foreign environment need to have a “safe-house” to run to when the sheer relentless strangeness becomes overwhelming. People of a subculture (rather than an outside culture), or even just plain “uniquely unlike” group members, who live like a country locked within another country find that a border or boundary can suddenly arise from almost anywhere, catching them off guard and causing an exhaustion or injury that their mainstream “fellows” cannot see or understand. Therefore, these people need to have a safe-house, too. These are the types who may disappear inexplicably on a daily basis only to reappear not very long afterward as if nothing unusual is going on. They tend to have trouble explaining their need for a refuge and may have some trepidation about revealing any details about its existence, nature, or location. Unlike someone who is clearly an outsider to the group, they cannot say “That's what people in my group do” because they are talking to people who are in their group yet don't do the same things, and they can't wave them away with a dismissive “It's none of your business, you wouldn't understand” because that's what an outsider does and the person doesn't want to be fully excluded. I can say this sort of thing about this type of “Inside-outsider” (or “Border-lander”) because the characters who flock to Joe's house in Keesha's House are this type, and I am as well...although for reasons differing from the characters in that book. Then again, each of them has reasons differing from those of the next character.

Now to speak a bit about myself: My “safe-house” in most circumstances has often been a restroom. What a fantastic coincidence that the word itself indicates a retreat from the outside world, someplace in which one can relax no matter what the greater surroundings may be. Granted, the relaxation is meant to indicate a relaxation of the bowels, but the fact remains that a location set aside for something that most of the public around the world agrees it does not want to see is a refuge one can count on for temporary social relief, as unorthodox as it might seem to some people. I couldn't always count on rules for privacy to be the same everywhere I went, but the boundaries surrounding the facilities that facilitate excrement at one's discretion tend to socially and physically solid. Thus, restrooms are ideal places to prevent an invasive form of bridge-building.

The concepts I have been talking about in this essay are not particularly new to me, and the important information covered in class tended to run along the same lines I've already been fed for years. Black Like Me was the only written work that gave me much to look at with intellectual interest, which I respected for its depth even if the subject matter was an old hat on a dead horse for me. At the time it was written, though, it was still touchy material to create and set loose upon the American public, so it reads as such. Plus, the approach that Griffin took was quite unique for his time and even for our time! He truly dove into his research with body and soul, and thus emerged with a prize worth displaying and discussing. Perhaps he should mount his skin on a wall, as a trophy and as a symbol of how he bridged a boundary with great daring and dedication. I, ahem, mean that in the most respectful, admiring, and poetic, albeit sociopathic, sense possible.

But I ask: Was it enough? When people are still forced to retreat into safe-houses as happens in Keesha's House, has every boundary been bridged? Are not the same principles of bigotry still functioning in the psychological frame of the Human Being, so that it will react with hostility towards its own kind that it sees as being of unlike kind based on slight variations? Is there not oppression of people occurring categorically even if or when racist attitudes are mostly dealt with? How do we know when a border is too open or too closed? Will people only stop to consider such questions when people perish trying to bypass a vigilant force protecting the border, as in Luis Urrea wrote about in The Devil's Highway? A shame we cannot regress to childhood to learn at what point we twist our mentalities so unhealthily, then reach around and return ourselves to a state of innocence. Alas, that is but useless idealism put in a statement: People have never been fully innocent, and we like our boundaries.