Celebrating
This weekend was good. There was a lot of cheese, if you catch my drift:
And not to rub it in (Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Paris, ahem) but there was quite a bit of this:
Which was perfect for our annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day neighborhood clean up.
We worked in the rain last year.
For the third year in a row, we got together with our friends, put on some gloves and worked with our kids to make our community a better place. Later in the day, I did Ruby’s hair—getting her ready to go back to school tomorrow after four weeks off—while Sam cooked a traditional southern meal of smothered chicken, rice and veggies. My in-laws came bearing corn bread and my mother-in-law baked a buttermilk pie, one of MLK’s favorites. That is, at least, according to the Internets.
When we’d finished eating and the dishes were done (courtesy of my father-in-law), we all sat together and watched Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech in all of it’s 17 minutes and 28 seconds of still-pertinent glory. Indeed, this is no time “to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism,” but rather to pay close attention and continue to work tirelessly toward the realization of his dream.
Clarification
ME: Honey, do you know why all the sales people kept telling you how pretty your eyes were today?
RUBY: Because I have brown skin and they don’t think brown skin is very good.
ME: Well (crap), no. (Think quick.) That’s not why. (Address it or not to address it, that is the question.) I mean (always address it), it’s true: There are people in this world who don’t think that brown skin is as good as pink skin. And they’re wrong about that. They’re what we call “ignorant”.
RUBY: And I just walk away from them!
ME: That’s right. You just walk away with your shoulders back and your head held high. You do not listen to them. You do not let their words get inside your heart.
RUBY: No!
ME: But those sales people who told you your eyes were beautiful? Remember them?
RUBY: Yeah.
ME: Yes?
RUBY: Yes.
ME: Well, they told you your eyes were beautiful because they are.
On Privilege and Skin: Don’t avoid me—I genuinely want to talk
As most readers know, mine is a blended family. And while skin color is not my focus when going about my day-to-day life—when I’m praising and disciplining, wiping and nagging, feeding and doting and generally loving up on my kid—it would be a lie to say I don’t see skin color. I see it every day.
Or, it’s not so much that I see it, per se, since I’m not talking about light-passing-through-retina-to-optic-nerve kind of seeing. It’s more of a perpetual existential awareness of race, in general, and of white privilege, in particular.
It’s something I’m acutely aware of when, say, I overhear a white man at my dentist’s office joke with a booming laugh, that his favorite hygienist is in danger of coming back from her African honeymoon “with a bone through her nose.”
Or when a white male college student says to a white female college student, “The reason why UCSD has low enrollment of black students is because the school doesn’t have a decent athletic program.” Or when the white female college student responds with an emphatic and confident, “I totally agree.” Which makes perfect sense, of course, since all black people are athletes, rock stars or gangsters.
In situations such as these, my cave-woman impulse is to bang on my chest with my fists while screaming, What the fuck is wrong with you, you spoiled, small-brained, advantaged diplerp, booger wads? But I’ve found this approach doesn’t get me very far toward engaging these people in a thoughtful chat about why their expressed viewpoint is so skewed. And racist, too. There’s that.
But I’m more evolved than a prehistoric human (hopefully). If I flew off the handle every time I came up against someone who didn’t want to discuss white privilege, nobody would talk to me anymore.
Most who will talk about it will only talk about it so much before they halt conversation with the that’s-just-white-person’s-guilt defense. Even calm and respectful attempts at defending my position with irrefutable examples have a time limit that, once reached, results in eyes darting to anything but mine.
Too often, though, it’s not that white people are unwilling to continue a talk about white privilege; rather, they cannot talk about it at all, due to their refusal to even acknowledge in the first place, the myriad privileges they enjoy, which were never earned but which are nevertheless as inherent as any genetic trait.
But, still, like rolling a boulder up a mountain, when the subject comes up, I try.
One of the hazards of being the white parent of a black child, as a tireless advocate in the effort to eliminate racism, is the perpetual risk of alienation. Another parent once told me—as we chatted about educational paths for our daughters and I expressed my desire for a school with lots of diversity—that I’m “overly sensitive to race.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not overly sensitive to race. I’m aware of it. There’s a difference.” That parent and I haven’t spoken since.
I can’t be too passionate; I have to be just-right passionate. I can’t be too outspoken; I have to be just-right outspoken. And by “just-right,” I mean the perfect amount that doesn’t make the person on the other end of the dialogue uncomfortable. Never knowing what the just-right amount is—though it’s usually very, very little—if I’m not careful, I quickly become that lady, the one standing in a sea of eggshells with the chip on her shoulder. And really: Be careful what you say to her.
Making sure others are comfortable makes me constantly uncomfortable, and I can’t help but wonder if that isn’t what it’s like to be black in America.
Of course, talking with or confronting strangers is hardly as loaded because my investment is negligible. I’m less inclined to fret about the repercussions of speaking up (did I say too much? Did I offend him?). A checker at Smart & Final recently said to me, during what was otherwise a casual discussion about the difficult economy we’re all enduring: “Those Somali women are crooks. Every last one of them. They are ruining our race.”
“That’s an ugly thing to say and I don’t share that viewpoint,” I countered as I grabbed my stuff to leave, while she flushed and mumbled that I’d taken it the wrong way. Outside, I was calm, but inside I was raging. (As an aside, when Googling “famous white women outburst” to find a metaphorical example, the first two hits were Serena Williams and Kanye West. I’m pretty sure neither of them is a white woman. But! One is an athlete, while the other is a rock star, which reinforces what those intellectuals up there in Paragraph 3 were saying.)
The point is, strangers are easy to address because whichever tack I use, I always walk away, and it matters not what they think of me.
But the same does not go for friends and family. When a conversation with people I care about comes to an impasse, there is no grabbing my things and leaving. I have to find a way to move beyond the discomfort, accept that we don’t all see things the same way and still be true to my values. Like anyone else, I get angry when I feel like I’m not heard, like I’m misunderstood or like I’m being dismissed. But huffing around in hysterics doesn’t nurture relationships.
I try to be mindful, especially in the heated moments, that we all view the world through the lens of our own life experience. It just so happens that mine has taken me on a different path than most. And while I want those whom I care about to take it with me, forcing things isn’t going to make them want to come along.
So I don’t let frustrations keep me from trying. I will always try. I can’t not try. And this, I hope, is how things will change for my daughter and her generation.
(As published today in San Diego CityBeat.)
Just warming up for the Big Post
Overheard at my dentist’s office last week:
Patient (white, middle-aged, male) at reception: I missed Aubrey. I was really hoping she would be cleaning my teeth today.
Receptionist: I know, I know. She’s on her honeymoon.
Patient: Where did she go?
Receptionist: Africa.
Patient: Wow! She just might come back with a bone in her nose. Hahahahahahaha!
Receptionist: Ha ha…um…ha ha (ahem)…ha haa…
Patient: You’ll have to tell her I said that! Hahaha. No. Nevermind. Don’t tell her. I’ll tell her myself next time. Hahahahahha.
Dear John Mayer,
When Playboy asked you whether black women “throw themselves” at you, you said:
“I don’t think I open myself to it. My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock. I’m going to start dating separately from my dick.”
Well, jeeze. This is awkward but…dude! You said that—among many other inane things— OUT LOUD. To a reporter. And anyway, do you really think your racist dick is the reason black women don’t dig you?
The Benetton folks must be cringing.
Honey, you are an affront to frat boys everywhere and that’s a damn near impossible feat. You are not smart. You are not cute. You are not deep. You are not intellectual or witty or cool or hip or dope or fly or whatever it is you fancy yourself to be. You have a small, small, small brain and a very big mouth. You are a self-important asshat raised to the 11th power, quadrupled by dickheadery, topped with three servings of phony and one heaping scoop of overcompensation.
Do humanity a favor, John Mayer, and please stop talking. Just shut the fuck up and go far away. Make that annual Mayercraft Cruise of yours permanent. Put on your Gopher-from-The-Love-Boat costume, set your vessel on starboard tack and make a bee line for an iceberg.
Just…yeah. Don’t come back.
xoxox,
~aaryn
Going Rogue or Somewhere Over The Rainbow
I had dinner and drinks last night with two friends from my adoption group. One of them has three adopted children. Her eldest, a 7-year-old son, is from Haiti. My friend went there to meet him when he was ten days old. She lived there for 100 days, as is the requirement of all adoptive parents. She and her husband stayed at the Hotel Montana, a place she will never be able to revisit because, like most of the buildings in Port-Au-Prince, it was flattened in the January 12th earthquake. Her son’s homeland is demolished, his people suffer more than they did when he left there and what remains is part of his story. The anguish this tragedy has caused my friend and her family cannot be understated.
Not surprisingly, the number of orphaned Haitian children has spiked exponentially, with parents going so far as to relinquish their kids to orphanages in the hopes that they might receive food, water and medical care. It’s a terrible problem, the solution to which will require leadership, international cooperation, many open hearts and some innovative thinking.
However.
An overflow of “orphans” does not mean there is a giant green light in the sky giving the go-ahead to any Tom, Dick or Job who fancy themselves in God’s image, to swoop in and label children with name tags, tell them they’re going to Disneyland and secret them off to be raised up right. Even if they were “just trying to do the right thing,” as their spokeswoman initially claimed. And even though they have since admitted they knew what they were doing was wrong. Does that bear repeating? Yes, I think it does, and in all caps, too:
This group of self-important crusaders—without adoption experience or proper paperwork or association with an orphanage or even knowledge of international charity—people who probably didn’t know two weeks ago whether Haiti was to the West or East of Boise, KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING WAS WRONG.
Another term for it would be “illegal.”
The now-jailed Americans are members of the Southern Baptist Convention, an organization “which has extensive humanitarian programs worldwide,” according to the Associated Press. Which begs the question: With the many “extensive humanitarian programs”—aka, bribery in the form of salvation in exchange for acceptance of a Western view of God but let’s not split hairs—wasn’t there a more appropriate and organized outlet for these nice folks from Idaho to display their do-goodery?
Something tells me they didn’t need to airlift themselves to Haiti to find what they were looking for. Like Dorothy, they could have gone into their own backyard if they wanted to be heroes. I suppose it does help one’s image as The Great White Hope if you’re saving impovershed black kids, as opposed to white ones. Memo to the Renegade Ten: Though perhaps not in the potato state, there are plenty of the former in the foster care system right here in the U.S. of A. In fact, they wait approximately 9 months longer for a placement than their white counterparts. Sure, 9 months is a longer wait than a flight to Haiti. But hopefully, it will be less time than the sentence you receive.
These selfish, presumptuous people, who knowingly engaged in child trafficking, have put unnecessary stress on the decimated Haitian judicial system and will end up doing the same here in the U.S., where they will likely be prosecuted. They hurt proper adoption practices in Haiti, which are currently stalled. They are taxing the relief efforts of organizations on the ground, since now they need to be housed and fed and looked after, which is to say nothing about the one who has required medical attention. And now their lawyer has the balls to say they’re being treated poorly, that “[t]here is no air conditioning, no electricity. It is very disturbing.”
Disturbing about covers it. I feel really sorry for their plight. They must be suffering so.
Like a timeout for a toddler, they should sit in that jail cell until rainy season so they can contemplate the nature of what they did in their Lord’s name.. They should be left to feel a little bit hungry as they think about the entitlement which led them to believe that rules and laws and formalities and bureaucracies don’t apply to them. Then they should be brought home, prosecuted and sent a bill for expenses.
Who wants to place bets they get off with time served and glowing interviews on all the morning shows?
It’s most certainly not comparable to Trent Lott’s comment
Michael Steele is a peach.
The Republican Party’s chairman and blackface (double entendre, intended), is calling for Senator Harry Reid to step down as US Senate Majority Leader over a purportedly racist comment he made during the 2008 election. In the forthcoming book Game Change, Reid is quoted as having said that Barack Obama would be a viable presidential candidate because he is “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
Dear Busybodies:
She is my own and I am her real mother
*********************************************
The first night we met Ruby, she pooped in Sam’s hand. It was 11 p.m. in a rented apartment in Chicago. We were exhausted from an entire day of travel, preceded by two sleepless nights spent absorbing the holy-shit-we-have-a-kid realization that most people have nine months to make. Just three days earlier, we were all, I know it’s late, but do you wanna go to the movies? and I think I’ll take a nap before dinner and Forget about dinner. We’re grown-ups! Let’s have martinis and ice cream! It was like we’d slipped through a wormhole and were suddenly wandering around in a parallel universe with zero resemblance to our previous life.
And now here we were, broiling in the oppressive summer heat, two fools crouched on the floor in our underwear, brought to our knees by an 8-day-old human. “How does the diaper work?” we asked each other. We were flailing. Badly.
That’s because we didn’t front load by consuming the What to Expect series like most anticipatory parents. Noooo. Instead, we took an intellectual approach and spent months educating ourselves about raising an adopted baby. An adopted black baby, to be exact. Swaddling’s for the birds, we thought. We will know how to discuss feelings of abandonment!
So we studied about loss, identity and connection, about transracial parenting, white privilege and black history. We took classes and watched documentaries. We learned about the racial hierarchy of adopted children and listened as black adult adoptees discussed the experience of being adopted outside their race. Determined to do right by our future child, we scoured the Internet for resources. And we sifted through reams upon reams dedicated to the importance and care of black hair. We had no clue what a receiving blanket was, but we were prepared for anything.
Except, of course, the need for receiving blankets. And, too, for what we’ve come to refer to as The Soft Serve Incident when—after having been parents for an entire three hours—Sam put his hand where the diaper should have been, in an effort to save the carpet.
After that, we jettisoned our course of study in favor of the less compelling but more pertinent 900-page User Manual. Still, as much as our kid just needed to be fed, clothed and cuddled, all of our diligent research came in handy when faced with every looky-loo and inquisitor who crossed our paths in Target. It was a prep course for something that one cannot prepare for. Truly.
Today, after four years of public parenting and being some sort of perceived expert on All Things Black for too many sheltered people, I admit, it can be tough to remain pleasant. I want to be an advocate for adoption, a staunch ally in the fight against racism and, mostly, to model the best possible responses for my child. But I sometimes struggle to find my balance between kindly addressing curiosity and lashing out at stupidity. I want to be approachable, but I also don’t want to indulge a never-ending cascade of questions from strangers while I’m in the pool helping my kid learn to use her big alligator arms. Not that alligators have big arms, but she doesn’t know that and the imagery is working.
Here’s the thing: Sometimes I just want to hurl my fantasy responses at the too-many nosey barkers of the universe.
I understand, Woman at the Zoo, that your brother’s wife’s uncle’s third cousin’s step-daughter is thinking of adopting if she can’t get pregnant with her second baby. Nevertheless, I will not tell you how much our adoption cost. Incidentally, did you crap yourself in the delivery room? Did you have an episiotomy or did you tear? Do tell!
I know that Ruby and I don’t look alike and that to some folks, this has all the excitement of a 12-car pile-up behind a jack-knifed big rig. But do you really need to know whether I like the color of her skin? Because I’ll tell you right now, Lady at Home Depot, I’m not so much digging the pasty look of yours. Also, you have a booger hanging out of your right nostril, which I would discreetly mention, but I’m not going to, since now you need to know whether I intend to tell my child she was adopted. My answer is: Un-unh. Shhhhh! It’s a secret between you and me!
I, too, learned that black absorbs heat while white reflects it. That doesn’t mean black people get hotter when out in the sun. Last I checked, 98.6 degrees is the normal temperature of a human being who isn’t fighting an infection or in the throes of a new love affair. And to the Woman Who Just Couldn’t Drop It, UVA and UVB rays cause cancer. Sunscreen is for everybody! Oh, and I promise you, there were actual black people living in England in 1968. Don’t argue, there were. They just didn’t live in your neighborhood.
No, I’m not babysitting. No, I’m not “just like Angelina!” And, no, you may not stroke her hair in wide-eyed wonder (though, had you asked first, the answer might have been different). And not that it’s any of your business, Mrs. Electric-Scooter-Rider at Henry’s, she’s not a crack baby; nor does she have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. By the way, are you riding in that thing because you’re fat or because you’re lazy? I mean, in my opinion, you really could stand to do a little walking.
Look. I know you have questions about why my family looks the way it does. But if your question has to be prefaced with “I don’t want this to come out wrong…” or if you feel a little skeevy before you ask, it’s probably best to simply go on wondering. And if you can’t bear the not knowing, I suggest you jot a note to consult Google when you get home, and let me be just another mom parenting her child.
(As published today in San Diego CityBeat.)
Go Figure
I have something to say about citizens bringing guns to Presidential events.
Which is perhaps more inflammatory than the swimsuit worn by that…person…in my previous post. Or, perhaps not. You be The Decider.
See how you feel about this one, and then have a happy weekend
Something is horribly amiss at this Ohio police department.
Ruby would like to know what her fellow Americans are going to do about it.