'Death by Cornel West'

It is the precept of my African-American studies class. A fellow student has just confessed that he doesn't know how to act around black people. I am saddened, and I am bitter. Sad that this well-intentioned boy has been so thoroughly duped by an imaginary barrier between humans. Bitter that after two-plus years at the number one institution in America, where we are daily trained to talk our way into the highest-paid jobs, many have never learned to communicate past that simple physical distinction of color. That we are still victim to an ignorant fear of the "other."

The next night, I go to a Quipfire! show. In one game, the comedians improvise a skit out of quirky ways to die; one of the audience suggestions this time was "death by Cornel West." Funny enough. Most of us know that Professor West is something of a character — this could be good. Yet when one Quipfire! member emerged bent over, gesticulating wildly and yelling rhymed, metered gibberish, I had trouble joining the audience's guffaws. Maybe it was funny that Professor West's lectures can be rhythmically inclined; I myself remember being moved by the simultaneous beauty and intelligence of his orations, potent in their natural spontaneity. But maybe it was shortsighted to assume that such brilliantly packaged truths would likewise move any other Princetonian's soul. It probably is unrealistic to assume that an all-Caucasian-Princetonian-improv-comedy group should be sensitive to the condescending associations historically made with the "black rhythm" stereotype. Or that they'd be aware that the skillful re-appropriation of this quality can be a tool of cultural, artistic, and intellectual expression. How could they know that, while ridiculing the characteristics of a people's soul, they were naively trivializing a very powerful force.

I kept my smile on, trying myself to not be naive and idealistic. But that smile fell off at the next shamelessly presumptuous declaration from the lips of the hunched actor . . . "I am oppressed!" My mind spun at the boundless implications of the mockery that I had just witnessed, at the students around me hysterically convulsing, at the contentment of the comedian and his cheap, unprovoked derision. Certain people on this campus—a random group of students at a random comedy-show — oh but it's just a hundred students! — found humor in the articulation of the black man's unresolved, hard-to-define pain. Oh but his pain is defined, right? Easily! He is "oppressed!" And what should we do about this oppression? Let's mock it.

Apparently, Blacks are either intimidating or farcical. Or maybe some of us are just too proud, too weak, or too unconcerned to deal with our ignorance on the experience of belonging to a "lesser" race.

The truth is, I was being presumptuous in expecting any different from Quipfire!. Their games are built on the assumption of a common cultural background. Unless we were all privy to the same privileged past, some are bound to be lost in the humor of certain allusions. So how could I presuppose consideration for a marginalized culture that, unfortunately, just doesn't fit the necessary criteria of cultural homogeneity? Most Americans and Princetonians don't have a conception of the historical and cultural tropes of the black experience in America. The laughing majority doesn't know how to approach race, much less the purported race problem. Even sadder, most were never taught the importance of trying to understand. If only more of us had the willingness to educate ourselves, the courage to admit that we were lacking — that courage demonstrated by my painfully honest peer from precept — if only we could make this openness and awareness a truly integral part of the Princeton experience, a major feature of our proudly held Princeton intelligence, then would we hesitate to trivialize that which affords survival to others.

Cornel West does not need my defense; I do not write to defend him. What I am defending is what his dynamic presence on this campus has come to symbolize: awareness. It is suddenly too hard to block out the amplified denunciations of Princeton's stunted legacy of ignorance, to continue to pretend that though "race matters", it will somehow solve itself.

In Professor West's lecture two days before that Quipfire! show, he spoke about his distaste for today's comedians who can only create humor by poking fun at others. Real comedy, he suggested, comes from being able to laugh with others, laughing, all of us, at ourselves. I could easily say that in this ironically prescient comment he had the last laugh. Yet the lesson is more important. To be able to share intelligent humor, we must understand each other; recognize differences, but realize that there is enough of ourselves in others for us to laugh with, not at them. We are the best of America. Let's not make a mockery of ourselves.

Kavita Singh is a comparative literature major from Clermont, Fla.