"As long as they are authentic expressions, I'm wedded to them," my favorite Duke professor announced the first day of class. I wrote the sentence down in my notebook, smug and confident in my ability to speak honestly.
To my humbling surprise, however, it would take several Cs (comment on my first paper: "Mary, your paper offers a vaguely sympathetic gesture. Dr. G. is not into vague. Nor is he all that much into being sympathetic"), a few post-class beers at the 'Dillo and a lot of thinking on my own before I would finally get what he wanted me to get. Which, actually, is very simple:
If two people can manage to break out of the restrictive social norms of the society in which they function--in this case, the academic language of a student trying to impress her professor--they may actually find a way to communicate honestly. For example:
Her T-shirt read, ASK ME ABOUT JESUS!
"Hi, where are you all from?"
Not now, I thought. It was January 1, 2004. Two Duke friends and I were in New Orleans for New Year's. My friend Ari had been, only days earlier as a guest of my family at a local church, spoon fed a healthy dose of Christian evangelism via one exceptionally rigorous, go-out-and-get-the-unbelievers sermon.
Now, as we sat on the concrete stairs of a park in the French Quarter conversing with another person who regarded him solely as a conversion-project, I assumed the discomfort of the situation for both of us.
"North Carolina," one of us said.
"No way! We thought you looked European. Especially you with the glasses and the clogs..." The T-shirted one's friend gestured at me.
Skip the pretending, I thought, insulted by her attempted subtlety. She mentioned she had lived for a while in Norway, to which my friend Adam responded, "It's a pretty liberal place sexually, right?"
"Well, you know, sex is something God made for marriage..." She made her way to Christ through sex, eventually arriving at the big question: "What do you guys know about Jesus?"
"Both my parents are Christian ministers," I said, hoping to outflank the proselytizers and force their retreat.
"So... a lot."
My friend Adam was next.
"I am Unitarian Universalist." They were clearly not used to this response and moved on to Ari, their last chance at a conversion before lunch.
"Well, I'm Jewish."
"Cool!" (Translation: We're not anti-Semitic!)
"So, who do you think Jesus was?"
"Well," he was sincere. "I'm not certain."
She misheard him and asked for clarification, "You are not concerned?"
"Concerned? No I didn't say that. I'm not certain..." He thought for a moment, then, "I am a little concerned..."
They suggested some Jews for Jesus congregations and websites, most of which Ari had visited already, out of curiosity. He asked if they had visited the Holy Land, a Florida amusement park that serves David burgers to kids and Goliath burgers to adults, and we all laughed.
Then, they had to go to a meeting so good-bye, great to meet you, safe trips home, cheers and I relax.
"I can't stand those people." I look to the guys for agreement. But no. They shrug.
"They weren't so bad."
These are the enemy! I had wanted to scream more than once during our conversation. These are the kind of people that we sane, sensible people are not supposed to like!
But Adam and Ari--not me--found a way to see past a label as blatant as an ASK ME ABOUT JESUS T-shirt in order to communicate with the personalities behind the mission, silly as the three of us believed it--the mission--to be. As a result, we got as much from a 10-minute encounter between strangers as I think is really possible--a few laughs, a bit of information about each other and, in my case, a reminder of Dr. Goodwyn's point: That because no one is as opaque as his or her first impression, as flat as his or her stereotype, letting these cultural assumptions determine whether or not you try to communicate sincerely with a person is neither fair nor interesting. It is the boring inaction of presumptuous dismissal.
Jokes about "the other side" that strip it of its dignity, that attempt to make it appear stupid--like the few belittling conversion slaps I made in the first half of this essay--are a popular and well-disguised form of this dismissal. If I can make you laugh with me about another group's selected weaknesses, I can reduce it to an object of ridicule and eliminate any valid part of its agenda from our conversation.
I had hated the Christians for seeing us as Potential Converts instead of real people, and in doing so I reduced them to Christian Evangelicals in my own mind and--what do you know--ceased to see them as real people. Who becomes the hypocrite?
When I remember Duke, I will remember it in part as a place where I have learned about communication--in times when it is the most difficult and least attractive option, it is all the more important if the hope is to create any progressive social change. At least the Christian Evangelicals had the courage to speak up about what was on their minds in hope of causing some sort of effect through conversation. I, a lump of passive aggressive sighs and short responses to their questions, did not.
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