Comment about someone's race at work: big deal or not?

[tblue37]

26. Pretending to be "color blind" is just that--a pretense.

I teach a college level intro to poetry class. One thing I try to teach my students is that if they can get past their “deer in the headlights” freeze about interpreting poetry and just collect information that is lying around in plain sight, they can probably find their way into understanding most reasonably good poems.

In an article on my poetry site, called “Eavesdropping on a Poem: How to Understand What You Can Understand," I show what I mean by going through obvious information that can help anyone understand Robert Hayden’s marvelous, poignant poem “Those Winter Sundays”:

Those Winter Sundays

Robert Hayden, 1913 – 1980

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

When I teach that poem in class, we are using a textbook that includes pictures of many of the well-known poets. I ask my students, “What do we know about Robert Hayden—just from looking at the page the poem is on?”

They quickly point out that he was born in 1913 and died at age 67 in 1980. They also notice that since the poem was published in 1962, he would have been 49 at that time. (Since they will eventually figure out that the poem is autobiographical, that will give them some idea of the time frame the poem’s events would have taken place in and what that would mean for our understanding of other details in the poem, and also some idea about how and why the persona has come to understand what he did not understand back then.)

Before we turn to the thumbnail biography the anthology provides for the poet, I keep asking them to tell me more about what they can learn about Robert Hayden just by looking at the page the poem is on, waiting for even one of them to mention one obvious fact:

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Most students never do. Even when prompted to look at the picture, not just at the words on the page, they won’t mention that he is black, though some will say he wears really thick glasses, or that he looks serious and maybe a little bit sad. Only when I have black students in my class (which is nowhere near often enough!) does Hayden’s race ever get mentioned at all. Only after a black student mentions it do the other students feel they have permission to do so.

But of course the fact that a poet is black will almost certainly influence the meaning of his autobiographical poems, so pretending to be “color blind” is absolutely not appropriate when trying to understand the work of a poet like Hayden!