Revisiting an oldie, day two
This is the second of my vintage articles I’m re-posting. I wrote it for CityBeat back in the spring of 2010 after a spate of racist events unfolded at UCSD. What I wrote then is pretty pertinent to where I am right now, in my current state of mind, even if I may no longer be as interested in—or as concerned with—treating people delicately when discussing race. The lone comment on this story underscores why my attitude has shifted. Someone named “wilder” said about my piece:
take a chill pill. live and let live. not everyone is out to get everyone else. grow up.
Indeed. I will not take a chill pill. And clearly, of the two of us? wilder and me? I am the grown-up.
I’m a grown-up on a serious journey, and while I’m happy to have the serious discussions to which I refer in the text below, you’re either coming with me or you’d better get out of the way.
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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.
Abortion Redux: The Slavery Comparision
First there was Chicago. Then Los Angeles. Now, thanks to the Radiance Foundation and a subsidiary, The Issues for Life Foundation, the following billboard is being strategically plastered around Oakland and Atlanta:
The folks over at Racialicious have been covering this indefensible attack on Black women since the following billboard appeared in New York City this past winter and, it should be said, in Atlanta well over a year ago. And call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure I saw it on First and Pike in Seattle over Christmas:
It is so deeply offensive, so horrifying, I hardly know what to say. And I’m white.
Writer Stacey Patton took the Radiance Foundation to task last February in a piece for Black Voices News. After pointing out so many things that are wrong with this ad campaign, she relied on tact and precision as she pointed out a few inconsistencies:
For all the brouhaha and alleged concern about Blacks being targeted by coercive abortion doctors, the pro-lifer’s deafening silence on the problems facing Black infants is quite conspicuous. I don’t see them putting up billboards and raising cane over high infant mortality rates due to poor nutrition or inadequate healthcare. They don’t address other real threats to Black children – asthma, lead poisoning, food access, gun violence, the cradle-to-prison and school-to-prison pipelines, poverty, education discrimination and other effects of racism on life prospects. If pro-lifers are really worried about Black genocide there are plenty of other places to look besides Black women’s bellies. They’re all talk when the fetus is in the womb, but once these Black children are born, they say nothing.
That summation is more on-target than a smudge of Ash on the Pope’s brow during Lent. It’s so solid, there is hardly need to add anything.
Except.
With this latest attack comparing slavery with a woman’s legally protected right to choose an abortion, I can’t help but wonder: Do the designers of this PR scam mean to refer to the slavery that existed after the 1864 signing of the 13th amendment? Or the one that saw black men, women, and children brutalized, tortured, and murdered despite the 14th amendment? Or is this the same slavery that continued through Reconstruction, across the turn of the 19th century, through World War I, past World War II, and deep into the 1960′s? Do they mean to equate a woman’s choice to remove a clump of cells from her body, to a woman’s lack of choice when it came to being raped by her master? Is that the slavery to which they are comparing these women?
Just wondering. Because it’s good to know what you’re talking about when making comparisons.
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.)
“What If Sarah Palin Were Black?”
“The impenetrable stupidity of Sarah Palin knows no boundaries. She wallows in mediocrity. Palin is the queen bee of a cult of personality where to be anti-intellectual is a trait to be rewarded. Ultimately, she presides over a confederacy of dunces.” So begins Chauncey DeVega in a short, compelling piece on white privilege. This Must Read can be found over here.
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.”
Hey, mister cop A couple ovaries and some white privilege can go a long way
“… I think it is time for white folks, faced with yet another story like the one emanating today from Cambridge, to do something else. Something that will illustrate that aspect of inequality about which we are more than a little expert. Namely, we must tell our stories: stories about our beneficent and preferential treatment at the hands of the same cops who regularly view our brothers and sisters of color with contempt.” —Tim Wise, author and anti-racist educator
When I lived in Pacific Beach around the turn of the century (I’ve always wanted to say that), my drive to and from work included a short but slow stretch along Loring Street. I always loved my drive home because I’d turn west onto Loring and just like the magic of a sea-and-sky horizon, all of my stress and worries that had accumulated during the day disappeared. Having been brought up in Utah, I cannot overstate the spiritual impact of seeing the ocean, rather than polygamists, at the end of my road each day.
And even though the beautiful Pacific was little more than a gray blur in my rearview mirror every morning, I liked my ride to work, too—especially on Thursdays. Thursdays were extra-good because, on Thursdays, there was a Sam Elliot-esque motorcycle cop standing at the side of the road, aiming his radar gun in my general direction.
I always made it a point to go the speed limit so I wouldn’t get a ticket. But a side benefit of 20 mph on a Thursday morning along Loring Street at the turn of the century was that I could practically see this man’s soul as I drove by. It looked pretty damned good tucked into all that tight, dark blue polyester.
So, one particular Thursday morning, I opened my eyes only to realize that my alarm had failed to go off which, ironically, is about as relaxing as waking up to the sound of a shotgun firing next to your ear. It’s funny how alarms don’t sound when they’re not set, isn’t it? As a result, I moved through my morning at a pace wholly unsuitable for someone who might drive past a cop with an active radar gun.
Completely distracted and fumbling with the faceplate (’memba those?) for my stereo, it wasn’t until Sam Elliott stepped away from his bike and motioned me to pull over that I realized what day it was. Shit, I thought to myself or probably even said out loud as I hit the brakes and veered toward the curb. Shitshitshit! The last thing I could afford was a speeding ticket. At least I didn’t run him down. That had to count for something.
I turned my engine off and, with my hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel, watched as Sam Elliot walked / lumbered / sauntered / strolled toward me. He was moving in slow-mo, and I could swear now that the sun glinted off the front of his mirrored sunglasses. It was a typical socked-in beach morning, though, and any sunbursts or flares were pure invention, as was the Joe Cocker / Jennifer Warnes An Officer and a Gentleman duet that played in the background.
“Good morning,” Sam Elliott half-smiled at me from beneath the ’stache. Generally speaking, I don’t care too much for the hair-lip, but for this guy—who was better looking from a distance, as it turned out—I’d made an exception.
“Well, it is now,” I smiled back.
“Really? Why is that?” he asked me.
Love lift us up where we belong….
“Because,” I said, “I drive this road every day and, the truth is that for months now, I’ve been hoping you would pull me over.”
Where the eagles cry, on a mountain high….
“And why is that?” Sam Elliott asked again.
Love lift us up where we belong….
“Because”—and here is where I attempted to talk myself out of a ticket from waaay out on a limb—“because you are so devastatingly handsome, I wanted to get a closer look.” I flitted my eyelashes and leaned toward him through the window.
Far from the world we know, up where the clear winds blow….
He smiled bigger then, looked down at the ground and then back up at the sky. He wrinkled his forehead, maybe blushed a bit, and I’m certain his eyes squinted behind his shades. “OK, well—may I please see your driver’s license?” I handed it to him and he walked back to his motorcycle.
Shitshitshit, I thought. Did I really just do that? I cannot believe I just did that!
If I wasn’t already nervous and sweating from being late, now I was nervous and profusely sweating from being pulled over and from being a lowly jackass. Still. I was checking my Game Face in the driver side mirror when Officer Elliott re-appeared at my window with a notebook. He handed me my driver’s license and wrote me a warning ticket for going 35 in a 20 zone. That’s right: a warning ticket for driving 15 miles over the posted speed.
Sam Elliott told me to have a great day and then, almost as punctuation, took off his sunglasses and winked at me. Honestly, his eyes were better with the Ray-Bans on. But it didn’t matter to me anymore if he looked like Lou Dobbs because I’d accomplished my goal, even if I had to use my gender and my privilege to do it.
(As published on August 5, 2009 in San Diego CityBeat.)