We need to do two things at once: a) Get beyond the black/white “American dilemma.” That’s probably been my biggest failing so far with this series–there’s no real sense of the whole “Mississippi Masala” shtik here, the wild efflorescence of American cultures and racial categories and category-breakers. We’re addicted to black and white.

Possibly that’s because we don’t quite know how to talk about the deep links, similarities, and persistent differences between native-born black and white communities? I mean, we kind of have a vocabulary for talking about immigrants and their children. We can joke about our differences, because they’re obvious and expected. The fact that on “King of the Hill” Hank’s accent is different from his neighbor Khan’s isn’t threatening, it isn’t a sign that the American dream has failed, it isn’t this huge deal. It’s just that Khan is Laotian, they talk different there, big whoop. We know how to avoid taking ethnicity too seriously–Apu “Do not offer my god a peanut!” Nahasapeemapetilon, Groundskeeper Willie–but we don’t know what to do with race. The black characters on not-specifically-black sitcoms tend to be kind of like black Barbies–exactly like white Barbie, only brown. Moesha gets to have an Unusual Name, but if she were on “The Simpsons,” you know she’d be named Karen. This is silly. Black Americans rarely have family histories, ingrained likes and dislikes, snap judgments and assumptions, and traditions that are exactly like white Americans’. Everything from comfort foods to styles of worship are generally different. There are some issues that black people are a lot more likely to deal with than white people (like being treated as a symbol, for instance!). There’s a rich field for humor here, if we allow ourselves to laugh. Black and white cultures are tightly interwoven, with tons of borrowing and mixing, but they’re not identical.

(As long as we’re talking sitcoms, Shamed and I watched “Andy Richter Controls the Universe” recently, and although I’d expected to hate it, its “diversity training” episode was actually unexpectedly funny–it starts as a gentle satire about/against affirmative action, then turns into a culture-clash comedy when the black guy Andy recruits for the company turns out to be very sensitive about his Irish heritage. This could have been a total disaster, but in fact, the light tone worked, and really exemplified some of the stuff I’m talking about here–the show poked fun at the mindset that We’re All The Same And Let’s Celebrate Our Differences! In the end, Andy dates the black/Irish guy’s sister and they discover their shared hatred for “Riverdance.” The general tone: “bemused.” So look, it can be done, black/white culture stuff is funny.)

Of course, we’re also addicted to black and white because that helps us find our place in an uncertain political universe. We don’t have to deal with complexities if we just jam any anomalies into our conventional slots. Hence the pressures to be more “black” described by the South American immigrants here; hence also the discussion forum at Yale on the pressing question, “Are Asians black or white?” (Could I make that up? The meaning, of course, was Are Asians treated like Honorary White People or like Dangerous Yellow Minorities?, but the answer, “It depends, not necessarily either, that’s not a super-useful dichotomy,” was apparently too complex. Welcome to the Ivy League.)

Anyway, now that I’ve acknowledged that I really didn’t get beyond the black/white dichotomy in this series, I can even admit that I’ve spent most of this section talking about black/white stuff, still. Sigh. Do as I say, not as I do.