Shakespeare's Procreation Sonnets, Fill The World With Beauty - A Rude Racial Awakening

'Oh, God, that's beautiful', Abby said when she heard that her friend, Priscilla, and her husband, Mark, had decided to adopt a black baby.  They could have children of their own, but opted for 'the right thing to do'. 

'There are too many poor, abandoned black babies who need good homes', they said, and went to the Good Hope Adoption Agency in Baltimore to begin the process. 

'Why you up in here, honey?  These babies for black folks', said LaShonda Jones, Director of the agency.

Surprised, discomfited, and shocked by the reception - the nursery was filled with perhaps a hundred black babies rescued by DC Human Services and transferred to the Good Hope agency waiting for adoption - Mark could only sputter a response about reverse discrimination, legal action, civil rights until he realized he was being exactly the racist bigot he was trying to avoid.  

Adopting a black baby would put his white privilege to rest once and for all, and here he was stymied by an uppity black women who....

Again, he stopped himself and this reversion to white privilege.  He calmed himself down, took a deep breath and said, 'LaShonda, I am very sorry'; but the woman only folded her arms across her chest, stood as defiantly as George Wallace did on the steps of the University of Alabama when he said, 'Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever', and said, 'That's the way it is in Baltimore, honey.'

Good Hope was not the only game in town, so Mark and Priscilla began canvassing other adoption agencies in the area.  There was Hope and Glory, Black Babies Matter, Families Are Precious and a host of others. 'It's like buying a bloody car', Mark said to Priscilla over dinner after he had been turned down yet again. 

'What's with these people?', shouted Mark over the congealing leg of lamb specially prepared by his wife to celebrate what she thought would be good news.  'Black babies are living in misery only three miles from the White House, and I am told 'No Sale'?'

'Relax, sweetheart', said Priscilla, coming over to his side of the table to give him a hug. 'It's not their fault'. 

But Mark could not relax or be comforted.  His political vanity, his credulousness, his reflexive assumption of liberal righteousness and dogged insistence on doing the right thing had driven away the obvious, naked truth.  

The blush was off the bloom of the rose. What was he thinking? 

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And tender churl mak’st waste in niggarding:
    Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
    To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

 

Shakespeare was a eugenicist, critics said.  Urging the bright, talented, intelligent, and virile young man of the Sonnets to fulfill his duty to populate the world with similarly attractive children was no less than a white supremacist call to arms.  No iambic pentameter, lyrical verse could disguise the racist sentiments of the poet.  The very idea of creating a natural, genetic, superior order was anathema to any progressive mind. 

In the book The Bell Curve, Charles Murray and his colleague described the demographic distortion that happens when the less able procreate at far greater rate than the more able; and if these less able are confined by choice, circumstance, or enforcement, can marry only within their own gene pool, and cannot refresh it by marrying up and outside it, the population will be dumbed down.  

As condemned as Shakespeare was for his racist eugenics, Murray spent years justifying his premise.  He was doing nothing more than observing a demographic fact; and by so doing urged the rapid and immediate upgrading of those minority populations stuck in a confining socio-genetic bind. 

Yet the implication of both Shakespeare and Murray was inescapable.  Regardless of liberal conscience and desire to break minorities out of their vicious circle, there could be no doubt that society would welcome more children born with the genetic and societal codes needed for success. 

Too many couples were choosing to have no children for the wrong reasons - overpopulation, diminishing resources, the warming climate - while many others were having them willy-nilly, fatherless, abandoned, emotionally stunted, and wards of the state.  As importantly, too few of these deliberately childless couples were adopting the most needy. 

When she heard that Mark had abandoned his attempts to adopt a black baby, Abby was disappointed.  Finally one of her friends was about to actually show his solidarity with black people through action, not just words.  Few of her progressive colleagues had ever or would ever take that step.  There was a streak of hypocrisy that ran through the liberal community that she had been unwilling to admit, but once her friends Mark and Priscilla had taken such a defiantly righteous stance, she saw it for what it was. 

She, too, was guilty as charged.  She lived in a lily white community, had moved there because of the schools (all white, high achieving), had all white friends except for the desultory few black women who had won the lottery and moved in from Southeast, and had never once set foot in the inner city.  Mark and Priscilla were virtual anodynes to her persistent white guilt; and now that they had stood down, retreated from their principled, courageous decision, she felt naked and exposed. 

Mark, stung by his summary dismissal by one adoption agency after another, and ashamed at his own credulousness and absurd naivete about race, wanted no part of Abby's recrimination and second guessing.  He could ignore the corruption of Black Lives Matter's executives, the hype of George Floyd, the deliberate, calculated black lawfare that protected and promoted unqualified black employees in discriminatory administrative moves; but he could not ignore the moral corruption of insisting that destitute black babies had to be adopted only by black parents who might not be much better off than the ones from which the babies had been abandoned.

Mark and Priscilla had not just one child of their own but three in succession, and each and every one of them turned out to be a star - Hollywood beauty, Einstein intelligence, and Gates-Jobs-Bezos entrepreneurial innovativeness. 

Abby was an old lady by the time the youngest, Phillip graduated from MIT with honors and married Isabella Davenport Lodge, heiress of the legendary Boston family, a beauty and brilliant mind in her own right; but she had to admire Mark and Priscilla for their turnaround.  Yes, compassion, concern, and a liberal conscience were still admirable qualities and she regretted their loss in her friends' rush to continued privilege and honor, but she had to admit they had a point. 

Abby continued to have her teas and luncheons. poetry readings, and open houses to celebrate one progressive thing or another, but in her heart of hearts, that old ironic streak kept its place.  Maybe Mark and Priscilla were right after all.