“And Love Them?”, a short story published in 2000 by Thomas Glave, details the inner monologue of a white woman concerning her experiences with black people throughout her life and within social situations. Glave, a black male author from the Bronx, New York, illustrates a continuous turmoil within the narrator’s perception of black people as a whole by recounting anecdotes such as a conversation with black colleagues about police brutality, an encounter with a black homeless man, and her experience with an ex-boyfriend.
From the very first stream of thought that is narrated, Glave establishes an informal tone with the inclusion of both run-on sentences and short, spliced phrases. This staggered structure of raw ideas and monologue imitates a continuous chain of consciousness that one experiences in the privacy of one’s own head. Coupled with phrases such as “…you can’t tell them that”(98) interspersed throughout the text, the reader internalizes that the ideas expressed by the narrator are ones that she simultaneously believes in resolutely and would not outwardly defend. Another critical idea that is illustrated through the textual structure of the story is the usage of the word ‘them’ to represent the ‘us versus them’ mentality that the narrator clings to. Within her anecdotes, the narrator repeatedly refers to black people (the group she perceives as ‘them’) as always appearing ‘angry’ and ‘hating’. While some of her anecdotes seem to reflect an angry attitude – such as the homeless man who yelled at her – the final inclusion of her ex-boyfriend provides insight into what the reader begins to suspect: despite her many defenses otherwise, the narrator holds an strong bias against African-Americans and generalizes the entire race through a lens of them being “angry”. Her fear of her ex-boyfriend being an angry person despite him treating her kindly is a manifestation of the image she holds of black people, with the exception of those she considers ‘polite’, which she then refers to as “… real human being[s]” (96). In contrast, her explicit dehumanization of those who she believes are always angry and vengeful further solidifies her desire to separate the two races in her mind into ‘us’ and ‘them’, despite her claims that African-Americans are the ones doing the separation.
I found this short story to be incredibly powerful, especially given the recency of its publication and its relevance to contemporary issues in the 21st century. The allusion to the 1992 riots following the police brutality involved in the death of Rodney King felt eerily familiar to the events of 2020 and the nationwide response to the Black Lives Matter movement. In addition, I found I could also draw parallels between this story and Ralph Ellison’s “Backwacking: A Plea to the Senator” in which sexual intercourse is similarly characterized as an act of violence because of the narrator’s preconceived biases against black people. However, what really captivated me about the story’s progression and creation was the stark juxtaposition of the author’s inherent perspective to the narrator’s perspective, with the author being a black man writing from the perspective of a white woman.
Thanks for the post. Great.