For this weeks blog post, I want to flesh out an idea that I am going to expand upon in my response paper. I am going to talk about the scene in the novel involving Kevin proposing to Dana and a, according to many people in our class, troubling thing that he says right after. I am not sure of the exact quote, but Kevin says to Dana that they should get married and that she could even write his manuscripts for him. This is said to be troubling because Kevin views Dana as a lesser person as he thinks he is entitled to her services as a typist. I think that this can be view from a completely different angle; a little joke that one person said to another with no malice involved. We know that Kevin’s moral stances are very similar to Dana’s and very similar to our own moral code and therefore, progressive. With this in mind, it seems to me as though Kevin was just poking fun at her harmlessly; like all couples do. He had asked her to do this thing in the past (which she says had made her upset) so he pokes fun at her by offering her the opportunity to do it again. To say that this has some sort of malice in it is, in my point of view, naive. We know Kevin to be a pretty level headed guy who chooses to stay with Dana even with his own family disapproving.
I think that needlessly bringing race into every situation does just as much harm as racism itself. Of course I am not saying that race plays no role in our lives, but what I am saying is that when you have a character like Kevin who demonstrably proves that race doesn’t matter to him, bringing up race for everything he does is just damaging. How can we ever move past racism if everyday human interactions that would be “fine” amongst people of the same race are only scrutinized when it is two people of different race. It is the person who is judging the situation that is even making race a factor at all and that is more harm than letting human interaction be human interaction.
I think that needlessly bringing race into every situation does just as much harm as racism itself. Of course I am not saying that race plays no role in our lives, but what I am saying is that when you have a character like Kevin who demonstrably proves that race doesn’t matter to him, bringing up race for everything he does is just damaging. How can we ever move past racism if everyday human interactions that would be “fine” amongst people of the same race are only scrutinized when it is two people of different race. It is the person who is judging the situation that is even making race a factor at all and that is more harm than letting human interaction be human interaction.
To see Kevin as maybe being a little boneheaded or tone-deaf in this scene isn't necessarily to "bring race into it." If anything, I think the relevant nexus is gender--Kevin does value Dana's writing, but he also seems to see it as subservient to his own. And in the gendered coding of types of work at the time, his basically requesting that she serve as his secretary (still primarily considered "women's work") does seem to hit a nerve in Dana, more as a woman than as a *black* woman, per se. Obviously, it goes way too far to suggest that Kevin secretly relishes the idea of Dana as his slave (although, when Rufus basically gets her to serve as *his* secretary, one more of those uncomfortable parallels appears). But to say that their relationship doesn't necessarily represent the idyllic transcendence of all the racial and gender issues that afflict the 19th century would be naive. He may be joking here (and she does take it as such, and still does happily agree to marry him), but it's maybe an ill-timed and unintentionally revealing joke.
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