The reason is because I hate to dredge up old memories.

And, I don’t want my kids to ever learn what a bastard I was when I was young.

Hmmmmmmmm

I grew up in South Texas. There were a lot of blacks picking cotton in East Texas, but not South Texas. The meskins didn’t like them. The meskins and whites did the picking in South Texas. I picked cotton, by hand.

My oldest daughter has a boyfriend. He’s Jewish. She says he’s afraid of me. I don’t think he’s ever been in a fight in his life. I’m glad he’s smart. I hope he’s tough.

When I was that boy’s age, I was in the Army. I was in an artillery unit in Korea.

OK, so I’m in this artillery unit, and for the first time I am dealing with blacks. I watch and see some black guy make some grievous insult to a different black. I think, “Ah, someone is fixin to get an ass-whoopin”. But the insulted guy smiles!!! This still to me is crazy. “Why isn’t this guy feeding the other guy his teeth like Chiklets??” I know that no one on Earth, except my father, could use such language against me without blood being spilt.(1) And I spilt a lot of it. To this day, I am incapable of understanding the part of black culture that allows this “playing the dozens”, but I guess that’s just ignorance.

Prof. Neal complains about white students “challenging” black professors. I think this is a cultural issue.

Fast-forward 15 years of my life. I’m an intern at the Supreme Court of Texas. It’s the first day and we are all gathered around for a meeting with the Clerk of the Court. While we wait, two of the interns realize that they are clerking for the most liberal and the most conservative Justices on the court. There’s a recent case that is yet to be decided, and so they start arguing their respective positions. Both make good arguments, and so the result is a draw.

This is what white people do: When confronted by apparent authority – for instance a professor of any color! – they challenge him. So when black professors are challenged by white students, they should realize that the are being COMPLIMENTED, not disrespected.

When whites don’t challenged you, their treating you as less than white.

(1) Years later, there was a University of Michigan study which delved into the inability of Southern whites to accept an insult. I know that I can’t. Once I was an accidental “fly on the wall” when some of the black troops in my company were trying to educate a “new blood”. Some of the info was funny – like “never hit a white boy on the head cuz you’ll break your hand” – but one of the interesting parts was how they advised him “don’t fug with the Rebels”. One of the ways of identifying the “Rebels” was, “don’t fug with the Dr Pepper drinkers”. I was a Dr Pepper addict and this was the first hint to me that Dr Pepper was a regional drink – 20$ of the market in Texas, but only 2% nationwide.

As stream of consciousness goes, that’s pretty coherent. The connection to any point I thought I made is, um… oblique is a good way to put it. For one thing, I don’t see Neal doing a lot of complaining about being challenged. He clearly sees it as unpleasant and significant for a student to mutter like that at the mere sight of a black professor, but he basically swaggers through the recollection and moves on. It’s up to Spencer to pick it up years after it was written and read the complaining into it.

It seems like the attitudes and experiences you’re rummaging through are regional and/or generational. I’ve had students that are more or less challenging, but it’s not in any obvious way a matter of black and white. The ones that come across as most thoroughly Southern are scrupulously polite and call me sir. I had a batch of football players like that about five years ago. It was a little unnerving sometimes, but mostly I enjoyed having them around.

Anyway, you’ve done what you said you’d do, and I appreciate the candor.