The Question of Normal

I begin my next monograph, tentatively titled "Between Fabrication and Generation[s]": Telling the Story of a Woman, with the following primal scene:

A few days after Tupac Shakur's death, I pulled into a grocery store parking lot in Palo Alto, California, with my then partner's fifteen-year-old daughter. We were listening to one of Shakur's songs on the radio; because he was a hometown boy, the stations were playing his music around the clock—a kind of electromagnetic vigil, if you will. An older (but not elderly) woman with a grocery cart came to the driver's side of my car and asked me to move my vehicle so that she could unload her groceries. The tone of her voice conveyed the fruition of expectation—it was not only a request but also a demand that would surely be met. The southerner in me would have been happy to help; the critic in me did not understand why she could not simply put her groceries in on the other side where there were no other cars or impediments. I told the woman that I would gladly wait in my car until she unloaded her groceries—that way, there would be plenty of room for her to maneuver.

While she did this, I continued to listen to Shakur's music and talk with Danielle. We were "bonding," and I was glad that she was talking to me about how Shakur's death was affecting her and her classmates. When I noticed that the woman had completed her unloading, I got out, and we walked behind our car toward the Safeway. What happened next has stayed with me as one of the defining moments of my life in northern California. As we passed the right rear bumper of her car, she said with mustered indignance, "And to think I marched for you." I was stunned at first—and then I recovered and noted that I had two options: to walk away without a word or to confront the accusation, to model for Danielle how to handle with intelligence and grace what would surely be part of the fabric of her life as a black woman in the United States. I turned to the woman and said, "You didn't march for me, you marched for yourself—and if you don't know that already, I can't help you."

You might ask what this scenario has to do with the question or questions at hand. You might wonder what it has to do with the title of this talk. We have been asked to consider a variety of issues related to race, ethnicity, and queer studies. One of the entry points into that discussion begins with the question "What is normal?" The question demands a response—it is both a challenge to convention and a reinstitution of it. For the respondent is asked to consider the issue as well as defend and/or attack its veracity, depending on his or her political predilections. The next question follows the logic of the first: "How are cultural norms produced and maintained?" It is to this question that my primal scene refers. The statement "To think I marched for you" and all of the violence that it evokes gets to the heart of what it means to be "normal," what it means to sustain "normal," and ultimately what "normal" does to an ever-increasing idea of what I call "the perpetual outside." For the question on the lips of the woman at that Safeway (and I will never think of a Safeway store as a safe way) is fundamentally one about belonging. Her challenge chases after an ideal of and for blackness—for a norm of blackness—that sits alongside, but perpetually outside, the everyday blackness that she encounters. The challenge also sits at the heart of what "civil rights" means and has meant for the...