<p>well, to keep beating this horse, I have wondered to what extent the humiliations Dross has experienced fit on the same emotional line as the notions contained in the word ‘alienation’ which at one time was such a prominent term used to describe each individuals struggle to belong. This is a vast and unformed idea that perhaps unfairly imports the social/politcal (whatever that is) into the psychological (whatever that is) but doing so goes a long way toward releasing my sympathy for the predicament of non-whites and yet at the same time, and this is the tricky part, casts the old categories of racial unrest into a different light. For instance, how to categorize the suffering of a young person who simply does not blend into a peer group, who does not ‘smell’ right to the others and therefore doesn’t fit in and has a lonely childhood. Should the pain of this ‘not belonging’ have a dimension that is any less tragic because the source of it can not be located in race? Economic injustice only accounts for so much of the heart. And isn’t everyone, with clothes and hair and car and other signs, always struggling mightily for acceptance? This desperate instinct is at the root of what was called an identity crisis whether it plays out in racial tensions, family tensions, peer group tensions. And so race might belong to some larger more fundamental problem of the human soul rather than the ugly prosaic world of school districts, wages and bowling teams,…in other words, we are all, to some extent, black.</p>
<p>I reveal this in an attempt to convince you, hereshoping, that I am not finding any of this simple and that the more deeply I go into it, the less I know.</p>