Chicago Center Director's Critique, read 12 July, 2009.
Great start to the journal—some great reflections and analysis, Scott wrote. Your descriptions, while dramatic, tend to lead the analysis by crating the reality you then respond to. Race difference, as constructed in your journal through dialect, appearance, caricatures, and encounter, dominate in a way that threatens to diminish or obscure the human connection and to concede the race an absolute that historically has functioned in the interest of Euro-Caucasians. Consider your own relationships to race is a necessary starting point.
In explanation: I suppose I do seek to make a story out of my life. I let myself be affected by images and instances. Sometimes, I suppose, my viewing lens is blurred—colored by my emotionalism and my Caucasian understanding of the world. It's a disconcerting situation to be in-- to learn that the reality one truly sees is one's own creation in some ways. I no longer trust my gut feelings for the same reason-- because my gut feels in a racially preconditioned way.
This tendency that Scott describes is something for a journalist to fear. My own embedded prejudices and naivete are nakedly apparent when I seek to tell these stories. I cannot seek to fill predetermined roles in my head when I see the world. Not if I seek the truth. How to escape these confines? But here, in my journal, I record life and life is made only of impressions. You can’t live life over again and take a more candid, more analytical look at what you see. What must change is the sharpening of that lens.
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