When I considered joining the cast of writers participating in the Race 2012 blogging project hosted by Monica’s Tangled Web, I had to think carefully about what it was I wanted to say as it pertains to race and politics. As the white parent of a Black child, I come to the table with a unique-ish experience; there are endless opportunities to write, dissect, present, discuss, address, argue, and advocate.

I should say here that race is a part of my life in a way that it isn’t for most white people who have the privilege of talking about race or, sadly, not talking about it. This is not an option for people of color, and it’s not an option for people who have adopted children of color, regardless of color. I wrote in June about an incident that led to a discussion with our young child about the N-word, a chat we realized should have had much sooner. It goes without saying that I don’t know one white family who has had this talk over breakfast. Just yesterday, we had the occasion to explain to our child what it meant to be tarred and feathered. Indeed, it is no easy task to look into the eyes of a child and describe a method of brutalization used against her people.

Not a single morning passes without me having contemplated race before I’ve had my first cup of coffee; I don’t pass the Hispanic woman cleaning windows at my gym without thinking about immigrants; I don’t thank the woman wearing a hijab, who bags my groceries, without thinking about bigotry; never do I kiss my daughter on her forehead at the end of the day without thinking about her future as a Black woman.

I am a member of the privileged white class whose numbers are dwindling (have you watched Race 2012 yet? How about America By The Numbers?). Still, white remains the barometer of all that is normal, the yardstick against which everyone of any other skin color is compared and like most of my white counterparts, I’ve had it easy. Thanks to my blended family, I’ve also had an awakening. I’ve always held the same fundamental beliefs, but before Ruby, I was a toddler on the spectrum of understanding. As a Black friend of mine lovingly likes to say, I’m now an angry Black teenager. I quite like that.

So. My problem writing each post for Race 2012 isn’t lack of topics or angles. Race issues always come back around to politics. One cannot watch our president on a stage next to Mitt Romney and not think about race and what that means to them. One cannot watch The Choice: 2012, a Frontline special on the candidates, and not see the struggle for identity that defines Obama, and the lack of a comparable experience in his opponent. To pretend not to see it, is to not talk about it. And not talking about it doesn’t help us move toward a more equitable and just America.

Fortunately, people are choosing to do it, even when it scares them. One of my fellow bloggers, Sarah Auerswald, wrote a very honest piece today about being afraid to talk about race, even as she has decided to blog about it. Writer Stephanie Spencer (not involved in this project, but someone who could be) also wrote a come-to-Jesus piece on her blog about becoming aware of her white privilege. The angst in both posts is palpable and relate-able and their willingness to admit their fears and failings as they confront issues of race is precisely what needs to be happening right now.

I said it in an earlier piece, that that the election of a Black president has provided inspiration for people of color all across this country. A friend of mine told me during dinner one night last month, that Obama has shown her son “that there is another way to be a Black man.” This is significant in ways that nearly defy description. But one of the greatest gifts bestowed on our country by the election of Barack Obama, has been the giant spotlight it has focused on racism, small and large. As it happens, having a Black man in the White House (which was built by slaves, by the way) has served to bring racists out in daylight, away from the shadows of political correctness and out from behind the armor of the long-accepted myth of colorblindness. Barack Obama may be reticent to talk about race—and for arguably good reasons: he’s damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t—but he’s been a great conduit for the rest of us.

People of color have been engaged in real talks about race for generations. It’s time white people started doing the same, even if it is scary and uncomfortable. I wonder: What are you doing reader, to talk about race in your life? Are you talking about? Are you fighting for justice and equality? Are you, too, in the angry black teenager stage? Because I’d like there to be more of us.

If you missed the premier of Race 2012 last Tuesday night, you can watch it again tonight when it is rebroadcast (check your local listing for air time). Or you can hunker down with your laptop and watch it right here:

In the spirit of the blogging project launched by Monica’s Tangled Web, I have to share an on-point piece from Jack & Jill Politics.  I didn’t write this piece, but “Dear Black People: You Are Invisible and Irrelevant” captures some of my thoughts since watching the debates and then the PBS documentary. I have my own thoughts to add, but for now I’m stuck on Dear Black People. This part right here really struck me:

“These debates have taught me one thing. In the eyes of the debate organizers and most of the viewers, the plight of Big Bird is far more important than the plight of my people. “Binders full of women” are more important than prisons full of black people.”

Read that piece and then consider the dialogue that has engulfed our country in the wake of each debate. Put in such crisp perspective, it’s hard to deny that race is both a fundamental part of this election and also the thing that nobody wants to really deal with. Not the media, not the candidates, not the moderators, and not certain voters. I continue to shake my head at the notion of a post-racial anything. We are so far from where we need to be.

Last night, with my daughter on my lap, I watched the trailer for the PBS documentary, Race 2012: A Conversation About Race & Politics in America, which airs tonight at 10:00 p.m. in San Diego. (Check your local listings if you’re not here enjoying our extended summer.) It began with a montage of images of the crowd at Grant Park on the night of Barack Obama’s election four years ago, a rotating set of pictures set to Obama’s acceptance speech and the cheers that nearly made it impossible to hear. One photo after another showed Americans of all backgrounds in various states of disbelief and elation. Some wept, some hugged, some prayed. Many stood with mouths agape, faces to the sky, witnesses to a moment most of us never thought possible.

I remember that night with a more flat affect now. Intellectually, I can say, Yeah, that was an incredible night. But the visceral emotion of it isn’t always so accessible. Much of that enthusiasm and promise and, yes, hope, have been wiped away by the bipartisan struggles and disappointments that were inevitible. But director/producer Phillip Rodriguez made me feel it all over again, and more importantly, he made it impossible for Ruby to misunderstand the meaning of what happened that night.

And though she didn’t ask any questions until later in the trailer when Rodriguez illustrated how white people will become the minority in the very near future (“You mean, there will be more brown people in America?”), she sat curled on my lap, watching with so much intensity and concentration, a person looking in through our front window might have thought she was watching Finding Nemo.

Welcome. Bienvenue. Bienvenidos. This is the future. And millions of brown children just like her are learning from the first family, that there are other ways of being black than what our society has generally laid out for them.

Please watch the documentary and then visit the Facebook page—and any of the writers who are blogging about the program—and let’s talk about the changing political landscape in America. There is much to discuss, and the sooner we all get comfortable doing it, the better.

This post is part of the PBS election special, Race 2012: A Conversation About Race & Politics in America. Watch the documentary of the same name on PBS,  October 16, 2012. Check your local listings for time.

The night after the first presidential debate, one of Mitt Romney’s top advisers, John Sununu, summed up Obama’s performance while speaking with Andrea Mitchell:

“What people saw last night was, I think, a president that revealed his incompetence, how lazy and detached he is.”

Just four days earlier, Newt Gingrich took a more dog-whistle-y and longer winded approach on Fox News (remark starts at 5:06):

“I’m assuming there’s some rhythm to Barack Obama that the rest of us don’t understand. Whether he needs large amounts of rest, whether he needs to play basketball for a while. I don’t watch ESPN. I don’t know quite what his rhythms are. But this is a guy who’s a brilliant performer as an orator, who may get reelected at the present date, and who frankly, he happens to be a partial, part-time president. He really is a lot like the substitute referees in the sense that he’s not a real president. He doesn’t do any of the things presidents do. He doesn’t worry about anything that presidents do. But he has enormous power in the White House and he’ll go down in history as president, and I suspect he’s pretty contemptuous of the rest of us.”

Both remarks got me to thinking a lot about microaggressions.

According to Wikipedia, microaggressions are the “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.”  These types of insults also impact women, persons with disabilities, and members of the LGBT community. Microaggressions can be verbal (“he’s a credit to his race”) or non-verbal (a woman clutches her purse as she passes a black man on the street), and according to Dr. Derald Wing Sue of Columbia University, though many microaggressions might appear to be compliments, “they contain a meta-communication or a hidden insult to the target groups in which it is delivered.” Dr. Sue offers a great primer about microaggressions and how you can combat them here. (Caveat: You have to suffer some fairly painful piano tinklings in the watching.)

To be sure, nothing about Sununu’s remark was complimentary; he brought his lazy-black-person stereotype out into the bright lights of an MSNBC studio, though he book-ended the slam between what could easily be characterized as two legitimate criticisms. Gingrich, on the other hand, disguised the very same message in “large amounts of rest” secret code; he tossed in the ubiquitous sports reference, and was non-plussed by Obama’s mysterious rhythm that “the rest of us don’t understand.” Then, in some diabolical pièce de résistance, he conjured the tap-dancer in blackface with the “brilliant performer” sideways compliment, before topping it off with calling Obama a fake, contemptuous president. Gingrich’s words are so breathtaking, they remind me how lucky we are that Mitt Romney won the GOP nomination.

Oh, but wait! There are those covertly recorded 47% remarks Romney offered to a small group of wealthy donors. We aren’t that lucky after all.

By painting Obama as a rhythmic, athletic, in-need-of-a-nap performer alien to the “rest of us,” Gingrich other-izes not just Barack Obama, but all Black people from (presumably) white people. Unlike many people who unknowingly employ microaggressions (they tend to “occur outside the level of consciousness awareness of the perpetrator”), Gingrich is nothing but calculated. With his carefully chosen words, Gingrich invited listeners to indulge their stereotypes and prejudices like Jim Jones invited his friends for afternoon punch. He and Sununu among others are purposefully using race-bait language to scare the bejeezus out of a whole bunch of white folk, people whose knees are already a-quakin’ over a perceived notion that they are somehow being marginalized. Isn’t that rich? And what could be more terrifying than facing the potential—if imagined—loss of your copious amounts of unearned white privilege?

For some people: Nothing.

And that prospect is what political operatives of the GOP are counting on as they resort to using racial stereotypes, pitting voters against one another, not to mention their self interests. This tactic is older than America (see the short Tim Wise piece at the bottom of this post) and is the ultimate Hail Mary pass for a party that doesn’t have a legitimate platform to bring in a win. So, with a wink and a nod, those on the right are reminding us, as frequently as they can, that the president is Black.

Indeed, someone is contemptuous of the American voters and I don’t think it’s the president.

Tim Wise on White Privilege:

It’s been 30 weeks since Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman which, in media time, is a century ago. The constant stream of news has forced this tragic yet vitally important story out of the spotlight. Today, we have more important things to put above the fold, like the union-represented NFL referees and the universal reaction to the incompetence of the scabs who’d temporarily replaced them. To wit, the notoriously anti-union governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, was quick to demand that the union refs be brought back to work ASAP (one has to wonder if he’d have felt the same way if he didn’t have a skin in the game). And if you happened to watch Thursday night’s line-up between the Baltimore Ravens and Cleveland Browns, then you witnessed America embracing Walker’s position and welcoming the professional refs onto the field with a standing ovation. Funny that many of the same folks on their feet in that stadium last night also latch on to Walker’s attack on the teacher’s union like baby calves to a teat.  I digress, though it’s all related.

Despite the shiny new headlines that mesmerize us each day, the folks over at The Root have been keeping an eye on the progression of the Trayvon Martin case, and today offered an update that includes the following:

Earlier this month George Zimmerman’s defense attorney, Mark O’Mara, issued subpoenas for Trayvon Martin’s school records, hoping to obtain information on the slain teen’s disciplinary issues, attendance and test scores.

It took all of .013 seconds to trip the alarm bells in my head.

As a vehement opponent of standardized testing—for a whole host of reasons, many of which fit perfectly into the Race 2012 discussion—the inclusion of test scores in this subpoena is especially troublesome.  As far as I know, there was never a subpoena of test scores for James Holmes, the aspiring neuroscientist who went Rambo on a Colorado movie theater this summer. Surely, by the Zimmerman/O’Mara logic, his test scores would speak to his character and future behavior.

Or as victims go, what about the test scores of Natalie Holloway, the high school graduate who disappeared in Aruba one drunken night during her senior trip. Would her test scores exonerate her or her killer? Closer to home, what about scores for Chelsea King, a local girl who was violently murdered while out for a run during the day. Would her results explain why she chose to jog alone on a nature trail despite being told not to ever do that? Would we, as a society, ever blame these victims or the choices they made that lead to their own awful and unnecessary deaths? No, we would not. In fact, I feel like I’m treading on thin ice—sacred territory, if you will—by even mentioning either of these young women here. But it matters because this is about the other-izing of Trayvon Martin in a way that we don’t usually see when a victim or perpetrator is white.

Trayvon Martin wasn’t an educated white guy or a pretty white girl. He was a black kid in a hooded sweatshirt. He was an other. So let’s prove it with those test scores! Let’s use them to indict a dead kid for his own murder!

In all seriousness, I wonder what it is we are to learn from them. If his scores are low, do they mean Martin was a bad person? Do they mean he deserved to die?

Or do low test scores mean Martin wasn’t a good tester? Was disinterested? Disengaged? Disenfranchised? Do they mean his school serves a high-poverty population? Or employs not enough teachers? Or has a revolving door of new teachers? Or has textbooks published in the last century and not enough of them at that? Or: What if the scores are average? Or high? What if he was deemed “gifted and talented” by this test or another? Then what does that tell us about this boy who cannot defend himself because, regardless of test scores, he’s as dead as Holloway and King and the 12 people that James Holmes gunned down?

And as long as we’re looking at test scores, shall we have a peek at Zimmerman’s? What would his scores say about him?

These tests tell us nothing of value in this context, other than the request for them is more racial profiling (in this instance, beyond-the-grave racial profiling), the kind that landed Zimmerman in this situation to begin with. Using standardized testing, the choke-hold on public education in America, in this way cannot have any positive implications.

This is as polarizing an issue as any other current event this year; you could add to the item to the Obama-Romney debate roster and watch each side dig its heels in. What are your thoughts, reader?

Anyone with a grade-schooler knows that these semi-formed humans aren’t particularly forthcoming with information. The straightforward question, “What did you do in school today?” is often met with, “I don’t remember.” And my personal favorite, “Did you learn anything?” always comes up against, “Nope.” (To which I always say, “Good!” It’s become a family joke). This type of non-communication communication can be frustrating and makes it more challenging to have meaningful dialogue about important issues. Eyes glaze over if you don’t pick the exact right moment for the exact right conversation and even then, it’s best not to yammer on for too long. Drop pebbles, a wise therapist reminded me last summer. Regardless, it’s solid advice: Despite appearances, ripples have a more lasting impact than any dinner table keynote address.

Still, you can’t seize an opening unless you recognize it first. As my regular readers know, I’m the white adoptive parent of a black daughter, so opportunities for discussions about race are especially important (I would argue that they’re especially important in all families, but that is another post altogether). One way I’ve learned which topics are on the table is by paying close attention to the books Ruby chooses from her bookshelf each night before bedtime. Let’s face it: Clifford the Big Red Dog doesn’t fire up the synapses quite like, say, books about skin color or hair. Let me just add here that it’s been gettin’ deep up in these parts lately, as we’re frequenting the worlds of Dr. King and Ruby Bridges. The versions we read have been adapted to age appropriate form, but each subsequent reading leads to bigger, harder talks. Last Sunday night at lights out time, I tickled Ruby’s back while answering her question about what might have happened to her had she stopped to drink out of the wrong water fountain during the Jim Crow era. That pebble was more like a river rock. And I’m not going to lie: I feel like there’s an anchor weight attached to my heart every single time I lift that veil.

On Tuesday, October 16, PBS is going to air Race 2012: A Conversation of Race and Politics In America, and I’m honored to be included amongst a group of bloggers who—while following Monica Medina‘s lead—will spend the next six weeks writing about race and America and our upcoming election. The goal is to supplement the documentary, to prolong and further a very necessary, but not-terrifically-easy conversation. But have it, we will. I hope you’ll join the dialogue in the comments section here or on Facebook or on any of the other bloggers‘ sites.

Last thing. When I look at that banner up there, I can’t help but picture it as it applies to me personally. If it were my motto, it could just as easily read RACE 2005, or RACE 2006, or RACE 2007,…and so on, because I live this discussion every single day. So get ready. I just may hurl some pretty big stones. I’m strong and not at all afraid of making waves.