For those of you who don't know much about me, I'm Australian and have lived in America for a year this Friday. Since coming here I've been reading a lot about evangelical deconstruction and realizing just how intrinsic racism, sexism & homophobia are to white evangelicalism, particularly in the States. So I'm on an Evangelical deconstruction journey and realized just the other day that "Evangelical Deconstruction Journey" has the same initials as I do: EDJ (which is where the name "Eady Jay" is derived from)!
I read some fiction alongside the non-fiction that I consume, and today I finished the American classic "Catcher in the Rye," which I had never read before. And I'm not sure if this was just a projection, but I couldn't help seeing this book as the story of a privileged, white, cisgender-male teenager, who was extremely homophobic (queer people and interactions with them are mentioned multiple times throughout the book), he almost never interacted with black people, and his account of a woman being raped on the backseat of a car he was sitting in, was told as though he'd been taught that women only say "no" to be polite, but really they mean "yes" and it's okay to have sex with them! I'm not saying I didn't appreciate that Caulfield felt depressed watching all the phony adults in his life grow up and create lives for themselves--lives stuck in a stereotype of what white American men "should" look like. I understood that he didn't want to be phony and that he was almost envious of his dead brother, and dead classmate, and he wanted to catch boys in the rye field before they went off the cliff edge, sucked into the oblivion of adulthood. He wanted to run away and ward off adulthood or create a life that was different from the stereotype. I appreciate all of that and felt compassion for the boy, and remembered how growing up also felt phony and depressing to me 20 odd years ago! But I couldn't help perceiving the disrespect for women, the lack of acknowledgement toward black people and the blatant homophobia as terribly discriminatory and a very sad picture of white American men. No wonder he wanted to run away, get sick, faint, die, stop his friends from growing up by catching them in the rye, all the while, seemingly having a nervous breakdown! Why should he want to grow into a racist, sexist, homophobic, who has enough money to buy and live whatever kind of miserable life he wants--paying for prostitutes or phony girlfriends; flunking out of school or deciding to make a go of his education because his parents have the money for him to do so?
Did I miss the point, or does this book actually serve to confirm that all us white people are in desperate need of some social deconstruction?!
I read some fiction alongside the non-fiction that I consume, and today I finished the American classic "Catcher in the Rye," which I had never read before. And I'm not sure if this was just a projection, but I couldn't help seeing this book as the story of a privileged, white, cisgender-male teenager, who was extremely homophobic (queer people and interactions with them are mentioned multiple times throughout the book), he almost never interacted with black people, and his account of a woman being raped on the backseat of a car he was sitting in, was told as though he'd been taught that women only say "no" to be polite, but really they mean "yes" and it's okay to have sex with them! I'm not saying I didn't appreciate that Caulfield felt depressed watching all the phony adults in his life grow up and create lives for themselves--lives stuck in a stereotype of what white American men "should" look like. I understood that he didn't want to be phony and that he was almost envious of his dead brother, and dead classmate, and he wanted to catch boys in the rye field before they went off the cliff edge, sucked into the oblivion of adulthood. He wanted to run away and ward off adulthood or create a life that was different from the stereotype. I appreciate all of that and felt compassion for the boy, and remembered how growing up also felt phony and depressing to me 20 odd years ago! But I couldn't help perceiving the disrespect for women, the lack of acknowledgement toward black people and the blatant homophobia as terribly discriminatory and a very sad picture of white American men. No wonder he wanted to run away, get sick, faint, die, stop his friends from growing up by catching them in the rye, all the while, seemingly having a nervous breakdown! Why should he want to grow into a racist, sexist, homophobic, who has enough money to buy and live whatever kind of miserable life he wants--paying for prostitutes or phony girlfriends; flunking out of school or deciding to make a go of his education because his parents have the money for him to do so?
Did I miss the point, or does this book actually serve to confirm that all us white people are in desperate need of some social deconstruction?!