The skin I'm in

It's been a tough few weeks in our two towns.  A number of extraordinary curricular missteps regarding slavery (a mock slave auction and runaway slave posters presented in two separate schools' 5th grades) and pathetic racist and anti-Semitic scrawls and scratches on the walls of some of the elementary, middle, and high schools in the area have risen from the ground like a septic spill and gotten everyone all up in their feelings.  Myself included.  As the black mother of two black girls of mixed heritage, I have become both the sounding board and the rubber wall off of which white friends and acquaintances can bounce their feelings, their fears, and their embarrassment.  I have read posts on a town Facebook page and gone down the dangerous, thorny hole of defensiveness, divisiveness made more infuriating by a focus on semantics and description rather than on empathy, connection, and apology.

In navigating my anger and my hurt and the confusion and fear of my girls, I have struggled with what has always been my belief, my truth, and with the hope I have wanted to instill in the hearts of my children.  We have paid lip service to the idea of community in these two towns.  We have congratulated ourselves for our openness and inclusion, and with a bit of side eye and tongue planted firmly in cheek, I have allowed it, but the truth is, no matter that I am married to a white, French man, I have not ever believed that the collective "white people" are my community.  I have always felt that my otherness would never allow me space in "their" communities.  That sucks and I hate to admit it.  But I have always been prepared to be disappointed by even my allies.  I have been prepared to lose them, to let go, to be assaulted, humiliated, abandoned by my white friends and colleagues.  I have steeled myself for their indifference, their insensitivity, and their ignorance.  The events of these past weeks have triggered that sense.

My otherness, my black, my skin/culture/race has placed me outside for much of my life because I grew up in the mostly white township of a mixed town in which most of the people of color lived in the borough circling the town.  Defining and defending my otherness within this community became my job, and one that I was not particularly good at because I was a child and because my parents had grown up with only black people and really had no idea what these white people were getting into.  They may have known in theory but had no practical application of growing up and living amongst the very people they'd always expected would not include them.  We'd been given no tools other than "do unto others" and watching and studying their white moves on TV and in real life.

Though surrounded for much of my young life by pink and tan little girls and boys, I always marveled at my brown skin.  It was coppery and gold when the sun hit it and shiny with oils and lotions after a bath.  It amazed me that my mother all butter cream and café au lait could blend with my father's coffee bean and chocolate to make the different browns that covered my siblings and me.  My grandparents, save my dad's father, were all fair-complexioned black folks.  My mom's mother was often mistaken for white for those not in the know (white people).  The skin we were in made us black people, all of us because one drop made it so*, but there was not shame in that, not instinctually.  Only one thing could make it immediately so to young me, could blush the brownest cheeks mauve and purple.  And that was the dreaded slavery section of American history in social studies.

All the lessons and stories told by our families, the reunions, the family trees, old photos, black church, roof-raising hallelujahs could not inoculate me from the burning eyes of my peers and my teachers who needed me to feel some kind of way, show some kind of reaction to their gaze when they told me that it all began here.  With someone with the same coppery skin as mine or dark coffee bean of my father or buttercream meringue of my mother or white coconut of my grandmother sold into or born into slave to toil and suffer abuses named but not discussed, certainly not felt.  We'd move past fast enough to keep the pain and the anguish at bay.  I'd burn and blush, feeling my cells vibrate with that truth in my body and my classmates would consider it for as long as it took, usually the slowest reader, to get through those two paragraphs.

That the enslavement of my ancestors is abhorrent is not and was not questioned.  That my family tree and the stories of my past are filled with tales of horror, rape, assault, abuse, beatings, degrading humiliation, division and separation of families and names never to be traced again (and further receding as each older member of my family, those who kept the stories and the secrets alive, pass on) isn't either.  But it is not quite understood either.  So hideous is this reality to all of us in these United States, the modern world really, that we refuse to sit longer than a few paragraphs with it.  Refuse to share the reality of our foundation, of the roots of this nation with our future.  Allow our children to interpret what we as parents can barely discuss with one another.

I asked my girls last night to consider this.  We are sitting together in a room, spending time after a long day when we are brought outside to the yard and told by our master, the person who owns us and uses us for his will, who keeps us in this cold house in these horribly tattered clothes, that tomorrow, he will send my oldest daughter to another family where she will work and toil for the rest of her life, and that we will more than likely, never see one another again.  I tell the youngest that years later, the same will be done to her.  I tell them that we suffer and that we cannot read or write, have no comforts, and cannot escape this truth as our lives, as what we will live and endure as long as we are on the earth.  I tell them that the same would have been true for those who came before us and those who came after. 

As I talked, we were all in tears.  I was choking them back as I described to them this horrific scene.  This one horrible moment that does not include epic cruelty, rape, maiming, whipping, torture, starvation, actual breeding of human beings like chattel.  I cried into their hair as I hugged them and said, "This is not the story of where black people began.  We are and have been so much more.  This is how the story of us begins for so many white people.  This is slavery and it's not all that we are." 

When I heard about the mock slave auction that was to be included in the presentation of a child in my 5th grader's switch class, I at first tried to logically connect the dots that would lead a child to this place.  How in the teaching of slavery did going on the auction block seem like a schoolyard game or play?  How did kids end up dancing and dabbing while singing Negro spirituals learned during Black History Month while pretending to be slaves?  How did children feel compelled to participate in this charade?  What had they missed?  My daughter was doing a report on the Southern colonies and while she mentioned slavery as it is not possible not to, she and her partner met the topic with the gravity one would expect.  To be honest, I could feel their fear around talking about it together.  And that's the problem. 

It's fear.  It is always fear.  Looking at one's self directly in the mirror, facing the truth about one's nature, one's motivations, one's soul is incredibly hard work.  When it doesn't look pretty, we don't want to be who we are.  When I look in the mirror, I cannot deny my brown skin and the history it tells.  I can no much cover the blemish of the world's slave trade with concealer and powders as I can the truth of our history that predates that scarring and the advances and re-centering of ourselves in our own narrative rather than in peripheral characters in a white story.  I'm looking and I see myself.  I see our brown and black and meringue and cocoa and peach and tan skin.  I see our tales told on my body, feel them run through my veins, taste their breath in my soul.  I stare into my tired, knowing eyes and I refuse to meet this moment with shame.  The shame is not mine to claim.

My purple blush at my family's history, my people's story relegated to a 1/2 centimeter on the world's timeline.  The story of the soul-crushing, body-breaking, psyche-wounding, intentionally cruel, inhumane centuries of torture on the people of the diaspora told as a Disney tale with singing and dancing and runaway slave posters drawn by 5th graders and then defended as childhood innocence, has knocked the wind from me.  That forty years after I was taught this hideous tale as my truth, my children and their white counterparts are learning it as though history lives outside of our bodies, outside of the bodies and lives of real people is a travesty. 

Perhaps my anger is getting the better of me.  Perhaps it is about time.  I have sat idly, quietly, cautiously, listening to mostly white people, but also other minorities, with a different story to tell.  I have seen various groups "become" white, claim white, be deemed "model minorities" and turn their heads from the mirror, no longer seeing their otherness in the reflection but a clear, unblemished patina of respectability one foundation shade lighter and rouged lips telling the same stories about black people and the lies of our brown skin.  I hear them all describe and define and explain anything and everything but the privilege their white skin, their acceptable otherness has allowed them.  I hear them demand that I, that we, promise that we are greater than the story of us that starts with slavery, that their othering of me/us is not my/our fault, that their othering of me/us is not THEIR fault, that we can discuss the man in the mirror but that they cannot be made uncomfortable and even more, that THEIR children cannot be made uncomfortable.  So my children look in the mirror and have to ask and I have to tell them every time and yours, only when they get in trouble and we can hope they "learn from it."

And so we sit again discussing slavery, the very root of the systemic racism in the United States of America that has and does threaten our role on the world stage with the rise of Donald Trump and his white throngs terrified of looking in the mirror and seeing themselves clearly.  To see that there are many shades of foundation to cover their pain, their blemishes, their scars, their hate, their privilege, their lies, their denial but that we know they are wearing makeup and that the emperor has no clothes.  You are too scared to look deeply past your white cheeks, your furrowed brows, your clenched fists, your pursed lips to see that you cannot blur the reflections of the people standing next to you, that no matter how you try to fade us from view, we are still standing next to you.  

There were meetings of a coalition on race and there was a town hall meeting.  There were "teachable" moments and recordings of bias attacks and petty crimes that were dissected on the towns' Facebook page.  There were cries of "not me" and pleas not to "see us as just white people" and reminders that "no one living now was/is a slave owner."  And I begin to burn in my own skin, to itch, and to fidget.  I am hot, heated, but not from my own shame.  It is because I must ask again that you look at your folded hands, bite your tongue ready to lash out with explanation, stare into your eyes in the mirror or those of your children and tell me, again, that we can all learn from standing on the auction block, that white children participated too, that the runaway slave posters really had a purpose, that you have more to say and still no time to listen because your discomfort of confronting our hideous past is worth more than our sustained and repeatedly opened wound.  It is because I blush purple with hurt while you do all you can to avoid seeing your cheeks flushed by your complicity in this racist system.  It is because we are teaching our children what we learned and what we learned was not good enough.  It cannot be that I know this just because of the skin I'm in.




*The one-drop rule is a social and legal principle of racial classification that was historically prominent in the United States asserting that any person with even one ancestor of sub-Saharan-African ancestry ("one drop" of black blood)^[1][2] is considered black (Negro in historical terms). This concept evolved over the course of the 19th century and became codified into law in the 20th century. It was associated with the principle of "invisible blackness" and is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status.  (Wikipedia, One-drop rule).



(c)  Copyright 2017.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

In All Fairness

My 7 1/2 year old told me last night, after I'd begged her to stop Rainbow Looming and do her 30 minutes of reading and put in two cents on her project about Helen Keller, that I was unfair.  Her exact words were shouted, "You are unfair, Mommy!  Other moms are more fair than you!"  To which I responded, without raising my voice, "Then go and check them out.  See if you want to live with one of them.  Because I can assure you that when you are over at their place for a play date they are giving you the fun, cool mommy.  But I bet their own kids will tell you that they are just as unfair and uncool as Mommy.  Now get to reading."  She stormed out of the room and kicked around a bit in her own bedroom before coming back to her senses and picked up her book to read.  She came to me and asked that I sit with her while she read to which I immediately obliged.

After we'd read and I was braiding her hair for bedtime, I told her that I'd been very hurt by her comments earlier and that while I did not like having to be a nag, it was my job to make sure that everyone in the family, little kids and Papa, were taking care of their responsibilities.  I told her to imagine just how exhausting it was when no one listened to me but everyone yelled at me. I didn't have to say much else as she started crying and apologizing.  While reassuring her that it was not my intention to have her cry but to consider how it must feel to have someone say cruel things, I also wanted her to understand that we would not communicate with each other in the house with outbursts and hurtful statements.  The three of us, Lily and Virginie and myself, reviewed better ways to tell someone how you feel.  Ways that did not involve shouting, pouting, and throwing tantrums.

I know this scenario plays out in so many households daily, maybe even hourly.  And I have to think that the person who can change this kind of communication at my house is yours truly.  When I was growing up, there wouldn't be much conversation about it, and when I say wouldn't be much, I  mean ANY.  My parents, like most others at that time, told us what to do and we did it.  Often, "because I said so," was answer enough.  I do go to that one from time to time, but I prefer to explain my actions; it's a personal choice.  If I don't offer the answer "just because" when they ask a question about nature or math or art, I don't want to give that answer in regards to social situations and personal behavior. 

"It's not fair!" means that I am asking them to do something that they not only don't want to do but are actually put out being asked.  Or told to do it.  We can argue, and we do, or I can tell them why I have asked, in this case, for Lily to do her homework.  I can tell her about responsibility and expectations and her role and mine.  She is welcome to tell me that she is tired or frustrated or disinterested or angry or sad, but she cannot just tell me that I am being unfair.  My parents used to say, "Life is unfair."  That's true.  I have thrown that in there too and for good measure have even given examples.  Rarely do those examples involve a first-world child with everything in front of her, coming home from a play date, eating her favorite foods, and snuggling in a blanket while she Rainbow looms.  I guess this is my "kids in China/Africa/somewhere would love to eat your broccoli" argument.

When mine tell me, "that's not fair," I want to show them as delicately as I can when I am "Cool Mommy" and as snarky as I might when I am "Overworked/Put upon Mommy" that "that's not fair" often comes out of sounding like they believe themselves to be the most important persons in the whole wide world.  From believing not that the sun rises and sets in them but that they are, in fact, the sun.  I can imagine that letting them believe they are not the most important people in the world might go over badly with some parents.  I imagine this because I see adults asking permission of their children for just about any decision they need to make.  Mine ARE the most important people to ME and to my husband.  But they are not the center of the universe.  It would be awfully painful for them to discover this fact outside of the house when they were too old to still believe so.  My grandma, Jessie Mae used to tell hers, "I'm always going to love you.  It is my job to get others to like you."  In other words, she taught her children, my father included, how to be good, kind, decent human beings, and not to think of themselves before everyone else.

Of course I do not want my children to be put upon or feel less than in anyone's eyes, and they have been fortified with feelings of adequacy and sprinklings of how special and important they are, have been celebrated for jobs well done, and tickled under their chins with giggles about how lovely they are.  But learning about how to be part of a community, a family, a group is just as important to me as their developing self-love and pride in the things that make them special.  What's not fair is allowing them, while they are cute and sweet and under my roof, to believe that the world will start and stop for them, revolve around them, that they have no responsibility to anyone but themselves, and that they will be accountable to nothing but their own desires.  When they say, "that's not fair!" responding with the truth and my expectations and a little guidance, I am hoping to ensure that they are not unfair, unkind, and selfish towards others.  Feeling like the bad guy?  That's not fair.  But I'll take it for the team.


(c) Copyright 2014.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.