My Legal White Father was a true Marley disciple, and he joyfully danced, much to everyone else's embarassment. I say "Joyfully," and not "gracefully" or "expertly." Because it was embarrassing. He couldn't dance. He sort of planted his feet and bent his knees and snapped his fingers while he leaned a little left, and then right (on the other beat). Or something. Like the stereotype of white people (and to give the benefit of the doubt I will say that y'all are socialized away from Tha Groove as the groove is beastly or something, although I am tempted to muse it is genetic but surely that is ridiculous?) he did not have any grease in his neck or hips. The neck, spine, and pelvis are all glued tight, and the knees, elbows and hands do most of the flapping and bending. It was actually quite terrible dancing. But he was not the type to care if you were embarrassed for him. And that, I do admire. He was one of the only people I've known in my life who truly didn't care. Not talked like he didn't care, not acted like it. He just did not care about social expectation. A lot of people could do well to have a little bit of that in them, I think. At least when it comes to dancing. Because some of the ways in which he shrugged of social mores and codes of behavior were rather unsettling. And not in a funny way.

However, nowadays, I let myself admire Gearheart's positive traits at the same time I condemn his behaviors that I judge as harmful.

LIFE IS COMPLEX....and we always want to boil things down into easy to read divisions and stances. Right and Wrong. Good and Bad. The One and the Other. It calms our mind, always ready to freak out under the hot light of life's electron dancefloor floodlights; our civilized mind always afraid the edges might peel up and show us a mirror, show us our own face on the beast's body. But these hard divisions are puro illusión. I am you. You are me. All these roles are just the same one turned over and about and inside out. The fact that every human is rife with hypocrisy is not a sign that we are false. We run from the accusation because that is how we read it in this world of pretend purity. To so many people, we are either Good or Bad, and the Hypocrisy signals to us that we are Bad. And a host of mannerisms or memberships or products or awards are collected in an attempt to show everyone how Good we are. But this "hypocrisy" in the human being will not be banished, scrubbed clean, or eradicated. And to do so is to invite a blindness to settle upon your own vision. Your eyes will be the only ones, eventually, who cannot see it.

I see this "hypocrisy" as grains of understanding waiting to be absorbed. Signals of empathetic potential, signs of our complexity, warnings not to get too holier-than-thou. Sparkles of light thrown from the great mirror of All, into our own eyes. And we see what happens when men try to pose as god, try to play undivided GoodMan, or attempt to please the great social lens of unrealistic expectation. Eventually these playacting preachers are revealed to be all too human, and even twisted into strange shapes from the self-imposed rack of polarized identity. Too often, these raving public figures' coattails are yanked and we find that underneath the powder and starch and elastic, they are but madmen, AIM-vampires, or motel room meth-chompers. Perfection is a suit that if slipped on, suffocates. Harmony is manifested in the acceptance of our differences, and the embracing of our internal and human dichotomies and contradictions. It is not produced by quashing them or smashing them or denying them. Because nobody is wholly and completely separated from the parts of him/herself that she/he opposes, and if you draw a knife to excise them, you will cut your own lifeline. Such idealistic separation is a mirage we try to maintain to our own peril, and to all humanity, I would (dramatically) posit.

We are always a movement toward one part and a movement away from another. Never arrived and de-segmented, never no longer of the same cloth. That is why the wisest and truest of our species love even their enemies. They know it is but themselves in another guise.

SO, WHILE I SPEAK often about missing Mexican culture for so much of my life (all I have are some spare years in my early youth) I did have culture in my home. What culture was it? Hippie culture, counterculture. Vegan culture (before it was called "vegan"), Bob Marley culture, and culture from the faith my family practiced (an Eastern/India(n), community-based faith that I do not write about in this blog because it is not up for inspection or discussion.)

The typical racism argument 'I loved me up some brown man so I can't be racist' or variants of this line—are not viable. My LegalWhiteFather loved Marley and his messages and his music. His humanity. Him. Gearheart sang along to the words where Marley spelled out most beautifully, so many reasons why Blacks (and others) have anger or feel alienated in societies that care not for them, or exploit them. Yet, Gearheart was able to not live the heart of those messages. He retained the N-bomb and his view of the Darkie right alongside his love for an individual of the group. (Read the early Skin of my Soul series to get a flavor of this.) This is not one of those contradictions that can exist within a harmony. It is a contradiction that will sow further disharmonies as long as it is practiced on and exhibited to other humans. As it was brought to my LegalWhiteFather in his own youth.

Gearheart was someone who would tell you he was not racist. After all, he had dear Black friends while growing up in the projects, as well as enemies. I speak, at times, of my communally-based childhood. There were more than a couple homes we lived in where we shared the house with another family. And I don't mean separate entrances, or isolated lives. I mean shared the house. I grew up around ashrams and communal homes and events, and I can remember one home where we even lived with a Black man. He was a real cool character, and we all loved him. Even Gearheart. So you see, we ought not cast "Racists" as some type of person who exists apart from us. Racists are Us. And there is that blindfold we tie on when we try to deny how we are all of the same fabric. Gearheart was hurt as a child and learned some truths that were applicable to his own immediate situation. Extrapolating those cemented his "racism," and perhaps these days he is healthier. I don't know. But when I was growing up, he was a disturbed mix of acceptance and hate for Black people. He would happily buy me a UTFO album for my 14th birthday, and admire my breakdancing skills...but then scream at me for telling jokes like Eddie Murphy because people were laughing at my Niggerness. The inconsistency was...confusing. Since that last sentence strives to be the world's largest understatement due to my inability to verbally make it as real as it should be, I will leave it as is and hope you can put it together on your own.

Oddly (but not really), Gearheart's opinions and thoughts on Latinos were so absent as to be glaringly invisible. I cannot remember one time in my life when I heard one single word on Mexicans or Hispanics. They simply did not exist. And I suppose I learned from this, because as I've written here often, I eventually made my own Mexicanness invisible, too. It was to everyone else, I gathered. We were all COLORBLIND together.

Originally, this post was nothing more than a Friday YouTube post. But as I began to quote Marley (and I had to stop because the post was getting utterly weighted down with lyrics) and watched the video a couple times, I was transported back to my childhood. And I realized how much Marley had been a core of any "culture" that my household happened to have. In fact, "black music" has been a part of my life since I was about that age, seven or eight. Consistently. From being absolutely saturated with Marley's music from my early days (when I later met people who spoke of Marley as if he were an option—"Oh, I love Bob Marley, he makes me feel so summertime"—it seemed odd to me), to learning the lyrics to Rapper's Delight in my early Schoolbus days when it first came out, to owning and playing Sugarhill Gang's 12"s when all the other teenagers in the (rural) area we moved to from Miami were listening to Iron Maiden and Ozzy, to taking breakin' very seriously (practicing for hours on cardboard with my friend, having huge orange pants with Old English lettering on them, going out to non-alcoholic clubs to dance), to braving a Michael Jackson Tshirt in 9th grade (earned me lots of "friendly" punches), and on and on. This was long before any Eminems imagined they could sweep into the genre, and it was entirely a black scene.

As I thought about this, it occurred to me what a strange and doubled over experience it all added up to. Deprived of brown culture by my white family but organically acquainted to a black artist (whom I didn't know I enjoyed for a long time), I angled toward black music and never once was it like the appropriation that happens nowadays. Yet, even with that, I ached for something I never had, something which a part of me identified with but had no name for, a part that I would slowly, slowly, slowly turn toward, as if a young sprout in a hot pool of rayo de luz.

In the first book I've had published (a children's art-heavy book), I chose my dedication and my opening quote carefully. It was Robert Nesta Marley I quoted. For I owe him great thanks. He taught me so many important things. And even though as a child, I often lived in a world of loneliness; even though I lived in a world of confusion where I couldn't understand half the things I was hearing and living, nor find half of myself in the entire equation, I had a guiding hand.

The quote was from the song Babylon System, and the message of Bob's that is so very needed in this time of shameless deception and that I chose to pass on was Tell the children the truth.

Enjoy this double-feature clip of Mister Marley. A little of his healing goes a long way.