Bookshelf Revelations

I got a subletter today! He is my total opposite: blond haired, blue eyed, economics major, wants to start up his own company, etc, and he's 22. He came by to visit, and he was full of energy, which I appreciated--it's already awkward enough that you're in my home so you can live amongst my thing for a few months, but I took him through the 2 rooms, and after asking a series of pointed questions (mold? break-ins? repairs? noise?) decided he was taking it, and wrote me the check. We started talking about our backgrounds, and his eyes didn't glaze over when I started talking about anthropology, and how much of my life is now colored by my social scientist lens. He made a small joke, "Well, I guess someone could look in here and analyze the interactions between a white guy from the south, and a Black girl from the north!" For some reason, I appreciated him looking race in the eye, and even using the term Black, as opposed to African American, which always sounds so friggin' awkward when white people say it (but Black is rarely ever better). So I mentally classified him as a liberal. Then he saw my bookshelf, and was looking at the titles. I stupidly felt myself getting feeling uncomfortable since I have a number of titles there that I wouldn't want just anyone (read: straight, white, male) to see. What would he think when he saw the following titles:

1. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (simply a great book)
2. The Bisexual's Guide to the Universe (an extended joke of a book, not to be taken seriously at all)
3. Are Men Nescessary? (a simply terrible book, and a waste of $3.00--and had the nerve to have the original selling price of 24.00)
4. An International Anthology of Erotica (I read, not watch, my porn)

Of course it shouldn't matter what he thinks, but he is going to be living in my place for a while, so I feel a bit justified in my concern. But he surprised me. He pointed to Possessive Investment and Black Sexual Politics, and told me he loved reading, and that I should give him a list of 10 books to read while he's there. I was so pleased...here was my chance to enlighten a white person on all the forms of white privilege and hegemony! I immediately started making up a list.

Then I told my two closest friends in Austin of the request--and they fell out laughing. "It is not our job to educate them," one said. I'd heard it before. I'd heard how exhausting and discouraging it is to even bother. Then why do I believe in anti-racist white people? I guess because, to be perfectly cheesy, I still believe in humanity. I still believe that if people knew what they were doing, how their thinking was destructive and oppressive, that they would try their best to change their behaviors.

Even as I write that, I'm thinking how silly I am. We have global warming, poverty, low literacy rates, and "crime" (what really is criminal?), and yet no one, including myself, has done anything to radically change them. So me giving this one white boy a couple of books to read won't change anything, really. But then again, if we were to all think that, we would be even more screwed up as a people and a world. Given the choice to educate a white person and a Black person, I would certainly choose the Black person, but for now, I have this small opportunity and I'm not disillusioned quite yet.