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.
Showing posts with label white privilege. Show all posts
Showing posts with label white privilege. Show all posts
Friday, April 7, 2017
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Tip of the iceberg: An average life
This is how I feel right now. I am in 9th grade reading Huckleberry Finn with my class and each time they call Jim a nigger, I cringe. And it's said over and over. Many look at me sympathetically, shrug their shoulders, some even touch me on the arm if they are close enough because we all know, no matter how we all long for the adventure, that poor, ol' Jim and I have more in common than Huck and me. I don't deny that most feel uncomfortable with the language that is explained away with a "that's how people spoke of black folks at that time" but when we move on to "A Farewell to Arms" everyone else can drop their shame, their melancholy, longing for the expectation that I have forgiven this past and that "we've come a long way, baby" and get back to modern living.
But I see Jim and I know him because, though you may be looking at me and seeing an upper middle class, well-educated, articulate, funny, put together (at times) African-American (I prefer Black) woman with a handsome, French husband and two beautiful mixed kids, I come from a long line where Jim and folks like him are roots on my tree. I am, as the expression goes, the tip of the iceberg, but under the surface is a lineage of survivors and thrivers, former slaves and slavers. We are mixed by choice and very often not. I spent my early years and my summers on the front porch of my grandparents' home at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Though I lived in a white neighborhood in New Jersey and believed myself assimilated, I sat at the feet of my grands and great-grands and heard about racism firsthand. Not just being called "nigger" or "blackie" or "brown sugar" by white kids testing their power and position in the wide streets of the suburbs, but pervasive, oppressive, strangulating cruelty that only served to threaten and stunt the mental, emotional, spiritual, and social growth of black people. These were not stories or headlines. These tales were the lives of my family and my ancestors. No matter where I am in the world, this is the ground beneath me.
I did not grow up the way many envision black people growing up. Not because it is so rare but because you don't know us. And if you do, really do, then I am not talking to you, but I would venture to guess that you don't really. I dream of a life that is banal, no more exciting or charged than that of anyone else, maybe even the default. The life you think of when you think of every day life. And then I wake up and remember that I am black. That I am a black, sensitive, creative woman who, by nature of being black in America, cannot live an average life. That my life is meant to define, describe, explain, assuage, and calm the feelings of other citizens allowed to live their mundane lives while mine is fraught with symbolism and metaphor and hyperbole.
My grandmother told me often that she wanted better for me, for all of us, was grateful for what she'd seen us achieve in such a short amount of time, hoped that "white people were fair and good" to us. There was palpable fear and doubt, but also hope. I wanted to tell her, to show her that all her suffering and her efforts had not been in vain, that we were advancing. That the rapes, assaults, laws, white supremacy, and pervasive and accepted racism were seen as the horrors they were, were being put firmly in the past, and that WE were being seen for the "content of our character." And the advancement of our family specifically was tied to our advancement as black people in America collectively. Many black families will tell you the same. For us to be able to just be average, regular, unspectacular, under the radar, just living our lives gave her hope. It was the tip of the iceberg. She was sure we'd overcome. I carried that hope for her.
There were small things that reminded me we hadn't come as far as I'd hoped. My father getting followed home by the police on a morning run. People assuming he was a ball player because he drove a nice car. Having a very hard time finding an apartment even with full time employment, good credit, and a clean record. Having to consider that I had a clean record. Listening to people tell me, when hearing my experience as a black woman in America that racism wasn't the problem but poverty and elitism. Um, AND those too. Having to qualify that though, yes, micro-aggressions were not the same as being beaten or killed in the street, dealing with them was still incredibly damaging to the psyche. Having someone, a "friend" write something about "hey, blacks, I've suffered too and look at me" on my Facebook wall in response to more proof of the systemic racism that prevails in our country. Imagine trying to be part of a group or society or country but when the conch shell gets passed to you, everyone talks over you. Tells you it's not your turn.
If we meet you with rage, if we meet you with anger, you call us animals and beat us or pepper spray us or shoot us. If we ask for a fair shake, an opportunity, a chance, you say we are angling for special privilege. If we write stories or articles or blogs about our experiences on the outside, you say we, WE are the ones being divisive. If we tell you we are hurting, we are tired, we are traumatized by the rhetoric, by the hatred, by the violence, the unrelenting insensitivity and ignorance, you say buck up. When innocent black men, women, and children are murdered, people who look like us, in epic abuses of power, and no justice comes on their behalf. When we cry for them, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, cousins, friends, we are asked to consider why they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing. We are told that if they'd just listened, behaved, respected the law and the policies that were not designed with them in mind, they might have lived another day to face it all again.
This racist system is real and it's killing all of us. Not just Black people, but our country. It's not that we are a nation divided by black and white because that isn't true. It wasn't then and it isn't now. But racism, complacency, white privilege and its hideous cousin, white supremacy do threaten to tear us apart. And everything that anyone finds great about this nation will crumble into the seas like the icebergs of white and blue and purple crumbling under the heat of global warming. We are dying ever so slowly from a disease that feels impossible to stop. We are sure it is going to overtake us, consume us. It just might. Like people suffering from illness, we can resign or we can fight it with all we have. There is prayer, meditation, and there is love. And love...
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 1 Corinthians 13
I don't deny it, I am sinking, melting into the sea, afraid I will never be solid again. Each week, as I try to do what everyone else is doing, raising their children, trying to give them values and truths to uphold them, I am crying into the back of my hand, afraid to let them see what lies beneath the surface of their gleaming pyramid called life. I held the hope for my grandmother and now I hold it for my daughters. This conversation is just the start. It's the tip of the iceberg but if we don't tend to it, we are bound to hit the parts below the surface and dash all our dreams of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for an average life made special by our content, by our character, by our cooperation, and by our love.
RIP to the victims of the cowardly act of terrorism in at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
(c) Copyright 2015. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
But I see Jim and I know him because, though you may be looking at me and seeing an upper middle class, well-educated, articulate, funny, put together (at times) African-American (I prefer Black) woman with a handsome, French husband and two beautiful mixed kids, I come from a long line where Jim and folks like him are roots on my tree. I am, as the expression goes, the tip of the iceberg, but under the surface is a lineage of survivors and thrivers, former slaves and slavers. We are mixed by choice and very often not. I spent my early years and my summers on the front porch of my grandparents' home at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Though I lived in a white neighborhood in New Jersey and believed myself assimilated, I sat at the feet of my grands and great-grands and heard about racism firsthand. Not just being called "nigger" or "blackie" or "brown sugar" by white kids testing their power and position in the wide streets of the suburbs, but pervasive, oppressive, strangulating cruelty that only served to threaten and stunt the mental, emotional, spiritual, and social growth of black people. These were not stories or headlines. These tales were the lives of my family and my ancestors. No matter where I am in the world, this is the ground beneath me.
I did not grow up the way many envision black people growing up. Not because it is so rare but because you don't know us. And if you do, really do, then I am not talking to you, but I would venture to guess that you don't really. I dream of a life that is banal, no more exciting or charged than that of anyone else, maybe even the default. The life you think of when you think of every day life. And then I wake up and remember that I am black. That I am a black, sensitive, creative woman who, by nature of being black in America, cannot live an average life. That my life is meant to define, describe, explain, assuage, and calm the feelings of other citizens allowed to live their mundane lives while mine is fraught with symbolism and metaphor and hyperbole.
There were small things that reminded me we hadn't come as far as I'd hoped. My father getting followed home by the police on a morning run. People assuming he was a ball player because he drove a nice car. Having a very hard time finding an apartment even with full time employment, good credit, and a clean record. Having to consider that I had a clean record. Listening to people tell me, when hearing my experience as a black woman in America that racism wasn't the problem but poverty and elitism. Um, AND those too. Having to qualify that though, yes, micro-aggressions were not the same as being beaten or killed in the street, dealing with them was still incredibly damaging to the psyche. Having someone, a "friend" write something about "hey, blacks, I've suffered too and look at me" on my Facebook wall in response to more proof of the systemic racism that prevails in our country. Imagine trying to be part of a group or society or country but when the conch shell gets passed to you, everyone talks over you. Tells you it's not your turn.
If we meet you with rage, if we meet you with anger, you call us animals and beat us or pepper spray us or shoot us. If we ask for a fair shake, an opportunity, a chance, you say we are angling for special privilege. If we write stories or articles or blogs about our experiences on the outside, you say we, WE are the ones being divisive. If we tell you we are hurting, we are tired, we are traumatized by the rhetoric, by the hatred, by the violence, the unrelenting insensitivity and ignorance, you say buck up. When innocent black men, women, and children are murdered, people who look like us, in epic abuses of power, and no justice comes on their behalf. When we cry for them, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, cousins, friends, we are asked to consider why they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing. We are told that if they'd just listened, behaved, respected the law and the policies that were not designed with them in mind, they might have lived another day to face it all again.
This racist system is real and it's killing all of us. Not just Black people, but our country. It's not that we are a nation divided by black and white because that isn't true. It wasn't then and it isn't now. But racism, complacency, white privilege and its hideous cousin, white supremacy do threaten to tear us apart. And everything that anyone finds great about this nation will crumble into the seas like the icebergs of white and blue and purple crumbling under the heat of global warming. We are dying ever so slowly from a disease that feels impossible to stop. We are sure it is going to overtake us, consume us. It just might. Like people suffering from illness, we can resign or we can fight it with all we have. There is prayer, meditation, and there is love. And love...
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 1 Corinthians 13
I don't deny it, I am sinking, melting into the sea, afraid I will never be solid again. Each week, as I try to do what everyone else is doing, raising their children, trying to give them values and truths to uphold them, I am crying into the back of my hand, afraid to let them see what lies beneath the surface of their gleaming pyramid called life. I held the hope for my grandmother and now I hold it for my daughters. This conversation is just the start. It's the tip of the iceberg but if we don't tend to it, we are bound to hit the parts below the surface and dash all our dreams of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for an average life made special by our content, by our character, by our cooperation, and by our love.
RIP to the victims of the cowardly act of terrorism in at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
(c) Copyright 2015. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Struggling not to fall
When I was a little girl, my family went on a trip to an ice skating rink. I'd never been before, but as I was a young dancer and pretty proficient on the roller skates, I took to it pretty quickly. I remember the cold and the sound of the blades on the ice and the whoosh-whoosh of the wind as I picked up speed. It should have been such a freeing experience. Here was something that felt a little like flying, where I could feel the air in my lungs clear and crisp, where I could whiz around the rink passing people, turning, and where feeling that special magic of being encapsulated in my own energy bubble should have brought me joy... and I was riddled with anxiety.
My parents, who'd both come from humble beginnings, had not had the opportunities or privilege to participate in frivolous activities like skating and skiing and tennis or any of the extracurriculars my brother and sister and I were afforded. Their after school activities were often connected to their schools or churches and they still had to make time for work and help around the home or farm. That day at the rink, my dad was up on skates for the first time too but was thrown off balance, resting on the thin blades did not come naturally. My father was and is a very solid guy. He stands firmly on the ground and gives the appearance of such physical strength that I was well into adulthood when I realized that he was not as enormous as John Henry the steel driving man. For him, skating was a challenge, but one he did not give up on. I watched him make his way slowly around the rink, staying close to the side, shuffling along trying to get the hang of it. I have always been sensitive and empathetic to others' struggles and have always beamed with pride at anyone's attempt at something new, something dangerous, something just beyond their reach. But this was too much for my tiny, little heart. To see my dad, probably the person I loved the most at that time, certainly looked up to (despite our incredible differences), working so hard, struggling, broke me and I cried and cried at his humanness. My world turned upside down when I discovered that he was just a man.
I have not posted for a very long time because again I have been crying and crying. Seriously. I am in a state of absolute pain at my core. The very real humanness of this struggle has poked and prodded at my heart and at my gut so that I just can't get much of a handle on what I believe anymore. I feel the same sensation that I felt watching my father, my hero, struggle around that rink. We are wobbling and tumbling and falling flat trying to get around this fucking rink.
I am hurt and angered and saddened by the outcomes of every case involving a black person--man, woman, or child--being killed by the police. I am insulted by the imagery being used to describe black boys and men--animals, monsters, overpowering, aggressive. I cannot believe that the victims and their communities are being told that it is their lack of respect that has brought the pox on their houses. I am hurt that the trigger is pulled so quickly and that the victim is then blamed for his past or the figure he cut on surveillance video as though those were reasons enough to kill an unarmed person. But I have been destroyed, truly cut deep, by the efforts of friends and neighbors quick to explain to me either the absolute necessity of handling black people this way or in deflection about the tough, brave, good folks in law enforcement out there. Of course there are good cops and good public servants. We are not talking about that and you know it. I never said, "Fuck the police," but I hear in the tone, in the explanation, and in the crazy, blue-cold silence, "Fuck that. Their lives got nothing to do with me."
I can see how easy it is for people, white people, to look at these all black communities, see their upset, their anger, their feelings and disassociate. I know you don't know any of those people. Truth be told, I don't either. Not personally nor tangentially. It's easy to imagine that somehow they don't want the same as you want for yours, that they are willing to destroy themselves and their communities because they "just don't care about themselves or their families or their communities" the same way you do. It is easy to say if they'd done nothing wrong, they'd have nothing to feel guilty about. It is easy to look at someone in a moment of terror or pain or frustration and read them all the way wrong. It is easy to apply your experience to the actions of people you don't know, to expect that they had every opportunity that you did and assume they are just making bad choices or are somehow deserving of the incredibly strict, harsh punishment (death) handed down for being #alivewhileblack. But the most infuriating thing is how easy it is for you to just look away.
I grew up in your community. There were a handful of brown and black faces and all the rest were white and your right to be there no matter your efforts, your intelligence, how clean, good, big your family was, your lawn, your car, your station, you knew the place was yours. That you were free to skate. There was judgment, there were microaggressions every day against my family and me. There were assaults on my psyche if not on my physical self. The same folks I saw in church would not even acknowledge me in the Pathmark. A good friend's mother would rather he put himself in harm's way than possibly end up in my arms (He was gay, but there'd be a little time for her to discover that.). A teacher at school told me that my white boyfriend and I were disgusting. A popular student told me I was pretty but that his mother would kill him if he came home with someone black. Going below the speed limit, friends and I were pulled over and though I was not driving, the officer told me to watch myself. We were held up as the proof of diversity in your community, shown as a symbol to how open and available and post-racial we were despite all that.
And you know what? I did try. I danced and shimmied at the parties, deflected when way off color jokes were told, kindly shot down hideous come-ons conjured by images of hot black chicks who can't get enough. I put the rage and anger and fear in my art, moved to spiritualism and meditation and the quest for a higher power, for the sacred because being just human, a black, female human navigating life in this country that believed itself to be post-racial, post-Civil Rights movement was exhausting and lonely and frustrating. I struggled to get my footing when, even though I was full of promise, I truly just could not find my way. Even now, I still listen to people who want to tell me how they see my experience. How they feel about what I am talking about. How they think I am getting it all wrong, that I did not even grow up in "those communities." How I am a different kind of black person. I'm not.
I never feared for my life but was raised to be prepared for it. Though my father did not know we knew, we'd seen the rifle given him by his father before we moved "up north." The weapon that was to protect us in case "those white people got crazy." We knew the stories of the South, knew that my dad and his brothers and cousins and uncles and all the men before them knew to cross the street if a white woman was walking on the same side of the sidewalk lest folks get the wrong idea and come after the. Knew that they would not look white folks directly in the eye, that they would try to keep their tone down so as not to rile or rifle or scare white folks into craziness. It wasn't my story but I knew it well enough. It's in my DNA. I knew that they endured all that and moved to this neighborhood, this town for a good job, good schools, greater opportunity, and a chance to skate around the fucking rink.
And when I say this hurts and it's bad and we have to change it, I am called to task for rushing to judgment about the police, about the policies in this country that have tied the arms and bound the legs of black people and black communities. Yes, this is a class issue, the impossible gap between the very wealthy and the working poor is staggering, but there is no denying, no matter how hard one tries, that this is a racial issue. That black people, whether they grew up in their own communities or interspersed with yours, whether they grew up poor, rich, middle class, went to college or did not, whether they sell cigarettes on the street corner or are ivy league professors or lawyers or ball players or scientists or students are viewed with fear and prejudice. And even when you ask the people around you, more than likely also white and as inexperienced as you are, if it is at all possible that what "they" say is true, you are going to get back the answer you want, the one you expect, the one that let's you go to sleep at night while some of us are still awake and in tears watching vigilantly.
I went to school with you, to dance class, to church. I trick or treated with you and sang carols. I took the SATS next to you and lent you a pencil. If you don't believe people you don't know, trust me. Slow your judgment of black people and black communities. Sure there are bad apples. But since you've never really exposed yourself to those communities, you cannot see the people who are working their tails off to succeed in a system that is set up to fail them. Even those of us who grew up in your affluent communities don't have your advantages. And before you try to hold a mirror up to our successes, our achievements, let me tell you that nothing, nothing at all came easy and the road was paved not only with obstacles and sacrifices but hellishly racist shit that would spin your head.
When we are frustrated, all of us, all human beings, and we need to let off steam, to vent, we do the same things. Scream, yell, vent, kick stuff. I know it. Now imagine in your frustration, in your pain, in your rage at injustice and disproportionately unfair treatment, there is little to no release. You are locked in. No one will feel your pain, no one will comfort you, no one will even acknowledge you. No one will cradle your head, no one will even address how much you hurt but rather that you kicked the door in. Imagine that your outrage, that your expression is met with judgment and lectures and invalidation. Imagine that what you know is true is argued about and disputed and negated to your face by someone who has no idea about what you are speaking.
All of us, all human beings want the same things. We want to give all we can to our families, to see them do better than we have, to give them more, to leave the earth, to leave society, the world better than we found it. There are little girls and boys all around the country watching their fathers skate around the rink, stumble, struggle. They are beaming with pride, falling in love with their heroes, cluelessly believing that if their fathers could just make it around the rink that all will be right with the world, completely blissful in their ignorance, as open and trusting and hopeful as every one of you. They are willing their fathers and mothers and families and communities to succeed, to make it around, to get better at it, to progress.
I was a little black girl with big dreams. I believed my dad could do anything. To see him struggle, to see him fall, to see him in fear, to witness injustice, unfair treatment, judgment reserved for him only because he was black, hindrances and obstacles placed in his way, when I knew he'd worked so hard, climbed such heights, done so much, threatened to halt my conviction. I could glide and spin and soar only when I knew he was safe. That he could get to a place where he trusted himself too. That he could falter and get up again. We must find a way to talk about race, privilege, injustice or our only future is dystopian. There must be fundamental changes in policy, better training of police and civil servants. But most importantly, we must see each other.
What frightened me most going around that rink was not that my father was so inexperienced. It was that the really good skaters, the fast ones who'd been skating all their lives might knock him down and that he wouldn't get up. That they'd zoom by so quickly they might rush over his fingers on the ice as he tried to right himself. I was afraid for him, as I am afraid for us now, that he would just give up and never try again. And he did. And I hope we can too.
(c) Copyright 2014. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
My parents, who'd both come from humble beginnings, had not had the opportunities or privilege to participate in frivolous activities like skating and skiing and tennis or any of the extracurriculars my brother and sister and I were afforded. Their after school activities were often connected to their schools or churches and they still had to make time for work and help around the home or farm. That day at the rink, my dad was up on skates for the first time too but was thrown off balance, resting on the thin blades did not come naturally. My father was and is a very solid guy. He stands firmly on the ground and gives the appearance of such physical strength that I was well into adulthood when I realized that he was not as enormous as John Henry the steel driving man. For him, skating was a challenge, but one he did not give up on. I watched him make his way slowly around the rink, staying close to the side, shuffling along trying to get the hang of it. I have always been sensitive and empathetic to others' struggles and have always beamed with pride at anyone's attempt at something new, something dangerous, something just beyond their reach. But this was too much for my tiny, little heart. To see my dad, probably the person I loved the most at that time, certainly looked up to (despite our incredible differences), working so hard, struggling, broke me and I cried and cried at his humanness. My world turned upside down when I discovered that he was just a man.
I have not posted for a very long time because again I have been crying and crying. Seriously. I am in a state of absolute pain at my core. The very real humanness of this struggle has poked and prodded at my heart and at my gut so that I just can't get much of a handle on what I believe anymore. I feel the same sensation that I felt watching my father, my hero, struggle around that rink. We are wobbling and tumbling and falling flat trying to get around this fucking rink.
I am hurt and angered and saddened by the outcomes of every case involving a black person--man, woman, or child--being killed by the police. I am insulted by the imagery being used to describe black boys and men--animals, monsters, overpowering, aggressive. I cannot believe that the victims and their communities are being told that it is their lack of respect that has brought the pox on their houses. I am hurt that the trigger is pulled so quickly and that the victim is then blamed for his past or the figure he cut on surveillance video as though those were reasons enough to kill an unarmed person. But I have been destroyed, truly cut deep, by the efforts of friends and neighbors quick to explain to me either the absolute necessity of handling black people this way or in deflection about the tough, brave, good folks in law enforcement out there. Of course there are good cops and good public servants. We are not talking about that and you know it. I never said, "Fuck the police," but I hear in the tone, in the explanation, and in the crazy, blue-cold silence, "Fuck that. Their lives got nothing to do with me."
I can see how easy it is for people, white people, to look at these all black communities, see their upset, their anger, their feelings and disassociate. I know you don't know any of those people. Truth be told, I don't either. Not personally nor tangentially. It's easy to imagine that somehow they don't want the same as you want for yours, that they are willing to destroy themselves and their communities because they "just don't care about themselves or their families or their communities" the same way you do. It is easy to say if they'd done nothing wrong, they'd have nothing to feel guilty about. It is easy to look at someone in a moment of terror or pain or frustration and read them all the way wrong. It is easy to apply your experience to the actions of people you don't know, to expect that they had every opportunity that you did and assume they are just making bad choices or are somehow deserving of the incredibly strict, harsh punishment (death) handed down for being #alivewhileblack. But the most infuriating thing is how easy it is for you to just look away.
I grew up in your community. There were a handful of brown and black faces and all the rest were white and your right to be there no matter your efforts, your intelligence, how clean, good, big your family was, your lawn, your car, your station, you knew the place was yours. That you were free to skate. There was judgment, there were microaggressions every day against my family and me. There were assaults on my psyche if not on my physical self. The same folks I saw in church would not even acknowledge me in the Pathmark. A good friend's mother would rather he put himself in harm's way than possibly end up in my arms (He was gay, but there'd be a little time for her to discover that.). A teacher at school told me that my white boyfriend and I were disgusting. A popular student told me I was pretty but that his mother would kill him if he came home with someone black. Going below the speed limit, friends and I were pulled over and though I was not driving, the officer told me to watch myself. We were held up as the proof of diversity in your community, shown as a symbol to how open and available and post-racial we were despite all that.
And you know what? I did try. I danced and shimmied at the parties, deflected when way off color jokes were told, kindly shot down hideous come-ons conjured by images of hot black chicks who can't get enough. I put the rage and anger and fear in my art, moved to spiritualism and meditation and the quest for a higher power, for the sacred because being just human, a black, female human navigating life in this country that believed itself to be post-racial, post-Civil Rights movement was exhausting and lonely and frustrating. I struggled to get my footing when, even though I was full of promise, I truly just could not find my way. Even now, I still listen to people who want to tell me how they see my experience. How they feel about what I am talking about. How they think I am getting it all wrong, that I did not even grow up in "those communities." How I am a different kind of black person. I'm not.
I never feared for my life but was raised to be prepared for it. Though my father did not know we knew, we'd seen the rifle given him by his father before we moved "up north." The weapon that was to protect us in case "those white people got crazy." We knew the stories of the South, knew that my dad and his brothers and cousins and uncles and all the men before them knew to cross the street if a white woman was walking on the same side of the sidewalk lest folks get the wrong idea and come after the. Knew that they would not look white folks directly in the eye, that they would try to keep their tone down so as not to rile or rifle or scare white folks into craziness. It wasn't my story but I knew it well enough. It's in my DNA. I knew that they endured all that and moved to this neighborhood, this town for a good job, good schools, greater opportunity, and a chance to skate around the fucking rink.
And when I say this hurts and it's bad and we have to change it, I am called to task for rushing to judgment about the police, about the policies in this country that have tied the arms and bound the legs of black people and black communities. Yes, this is a class issue, the impossible gap between the very wealthy and the working poor is staggering, but there is no denying, no matter how hard one tries, that this is a racial issue. That black people, whether they grew up in their own communities or interspersed with yours, whether they grew up poor, rich, middle class, went to college or did not, whether they sell cigarettes on the street corner or are ivy league professors or lawyers or ball players or scientists or students are viewed with fear and prejudice. And even when you ask the people around you, more than likely also white and as inexperienced as you are, if it is at all possible that what "they" say is true, you are going to get back the answer you want, the one you expect, the one that let's you go to sleep at night while some of us are still awake and in tears watching vigilantly.
I went to school with you, to dance class, to church. I trick or treated with you and sang carols. I took the SATS next to you and lent you a pencil. If you don't believe people you don't know, trust me. Slow your judgment of black people and black communities. Sure there are bad apples. But since you've never really exposed yourself to those communities, you cannot see the people who are working their tails off to succeed in a system that is set up to fail them. Even those of us who grew up in your affluent communities don't have your advantages. And before you try to hold a mirror up to our successes, our achievements, let me tell you that nothing, nothing at all came easy and the road was paved not only with obstacles and sacrifices but hellishly racist shit that would spin your head.
When we are frustrated, all of us, all human beings, and we need to let off steam, to vent, we do the same things. Scream, yell, vent, kick stuff. I know it. Now imagine in your frustration, in your pain, in your rage at injustice and disproportionately unfair treatment, there is little to no release. You are locked in. No one will feel your pain, no one will comfort you, no one will even acknowledge you. No one will cradle your head, no one will even address how much you hurt but rather that you kicked the door in. Imagine that your outrage, that your expression is met with judgment and lectures and invalidation. Imagine that what you know is true is argued about and disputed and negated to your face by someone who has no idea about what you are speaking.
All of us, all human beings want the same things. We want to give all we can to our families, to see them do better than we have, to give them more, to leave the earth, to leave society, the world better than we found it. There are little girls and boys all around the country watching their fathers skate around the rink, stumble, struggle. They are beaming with pride, falling in love with their heroes, cluelessly believing that if their fathers could just make it around the rink that all will be right with the world, completely blissful in their ignorance, as open and trusting and hopeful as every one of you. They are willing their fathers and mothers and families and communities to succeed, to make it around, to get better at it, to progress.
I was a little black girl with big dreams. I believed my dad could do anything. To see him struggle, to see him fall, to see him in fear, to witness injustice, unfair treatment, judgment reserved for him only because he was black, hindrances and obstacles placed in his way, when I knew he'd worked so hard, climbed such heights, done so much, threatened to halt my conviction. I could glide and spin and soar only when I knew he was safe. That he could get to a place where he trusted himself too. That he could falter and get up again. We must find a way to talk about race, privilege, injustice or our only future is dystopian. There must be fundamental changes in policy, better training of police and civil servants. But most importantly, we must see each other.
What frightened me most going around that rink was not that my father was so inexperienced. It was that the really good skaters, the fast ones who'd been skating all their lives might knock him down and that he wouldn't get up. That they'd zoom by so quickly they might rush over his fingers on the ice as he tried to right himself. I was afraid for him, as I am afraid for us now, that he would just give up and never try again. And he did. And I hope we can too.
(c) Copyright 2014. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
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