Funny Vibe

No, I'm not gonna rob you
No, I'm not gonna beat you
No, I'm not gonna rape you
So why you want to give me that
Funny Vibe!

No, I'm not gonna hurt you
No, I'm not gonna harm you
And I try not to hate you
So why you want to give me that
Funny Vibe!

~ Funny Vibe, Living Colour, 1988

Sometimes I wish I could remember what it was like before I was race conscious. Blissfully ignorant, I believed racism had been outlawed with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I can’t claim ignorance anymore. The more I witness and experience, the more I realize that in our current collective frame of mind, racism is insurmountable and true change and true equality are a cruel fantasy.

I am not cynical, just weary.  I see the same weariness in my husband Ronald (for new readers, I am white and Ronald is black. We’ve been together for nearly 40 years.).

Ronald says, “Why do you write about this? It won’t change anything. It will only upset you.”

I’m already upset by it, though. Writing helps me to process it. As weary as I am over the whole thing, as hopeless as it feels, I want to make it better. I’d rather try to make change than tacitly perpetuate racism through inaction.

When Ronald is at his saddest he says, “I’ve seen too much.”

He is referring to when he was growing up in the projects on the Westside of Syracuse and then, later, when he served the community as a firefighter for 25 years and assisted people in crisis. The images are burned into his soul, and they live alongside me. I can’t turn them out. They are valid and real. They have a right to be here.

Watching media stories about the very white institution known as the PGA attacking Tiger Woods for “the drop” and Vijay Singh for “deer antler spray use,” Ronald recalled how certain officers on the fire department wanted to ruin his reputation and bring him shame just because they didn’t want him there. Their hatred, judgments, and actions against him had nothing to do with Ronald’s performance or abilities, but everything to do with the color of his skin. As a witness I felt immense sadness, helplessness, and anger. The same story is played out over and over, and it doesn’t matter if one is rich or famous or the best in the world at something or even the President of the United States. Skin color makes it so.
Everyone will remember that Tiger Woods took “the drop” at the 2013 Masters in Augusta, but they won’t remember that it was found to be a legal drop and that he did not have an unfair advantage.  They won’t remember that it was the PGA committee who determined the drop was legal and failed to let him know prior to signing his scorecard that a television spectator had called in a report of unfair play precipitating an investigation. They won’t remember how uncanny it was for the PGA committee to reverse its decision the next morning. They won’t remember that Tiger Woods is the number one golfer in the world because of his work ethic, drive, focus, and ability. They’ll only remember the commentators, Nick Faldo and Brandel Chamblee, calling for him to disqualify himself in a manner that suggested to me they might as well have worn white hoods and carried torches.  They’ll remember that deep down inside, they don’t think Tiger Woods deserves the title of the number one golfer in the world. Skin color makes it so.

I cringe when I hear about the kinds of attacks waged against President Obama. For a certain percentage of Americans, there is nothing he can do that is right. Hear them tell it, he doesn’t represent them. He is a tyrannical monster who orchestrated the Boston Marathon bombing and who plans to take America away from the very people who most deserve it – white people. Skin color makes it so.

It’s the mundane things, too. Like when we went out to eat the other night and the very nice, young, white waitress did not look or speak directly to Ronald the whole evening. She asked if we wanted separate checks and separate plates for our shared dessert, not just once, but several times, as if she wondered about my sanity, as if she could not imagine why we were seated at the same table, let alone sharing the same food and knocking spoons.

Her final attempt at figuring out the situation resulted in her handing Ronald’s credit card back to me instead of him. The scenario did not compute in her world. It ruined our evening. Skin color makes it so.

Then there are the events that change one’s life and one’s sense of self. They are specters that haunt continually and cast gray shadows that snuff out one’s spark.

I saw such a specter this past week as it hovered over my father-in-law. He has dementia, which is sad enough as we struggle with the loss of knowing him and of him knowing us.

“Who are you?” he asked me several times over the week.

Each time I patiently answered, “I’m Dianne, your number one daughter-in-law.” Sometimes he was fine and knew exactly who I was and minutes later, he didn’t.

One evening we piled into the car, with Ronald driving, to go to the carpet store to order new carpet for my in-laws’ bedroom. When we got inside the store, the salesman who approached us must have reminded my father-in-law of one of his supervisors from over 60 years ago.

“I’ve got something I need to say to him,” he said after I had led him to a chair so he could sit and his legs wouldn’t hurt so much. “I didn’t steal that loaf of bread.”

“He knows that now,” I said. “It’s been straightened out.”

“I want to tell him myself,” he said.

I know he didn’t steal that bread 60 years ago when he was a young father who moved his family up North so they could have a better life. One of his first jobs was at the Millbrook Bread Company. Like my father, he would not pick up a dime off the street if it didn’t belong to him. The truth doesn’t matter because that supervisor believed my father-in-law must have been the one that took that bread, and 60 years later the humiliation and anger are clear while other more dear memories are lost. Skin color makes it so.

When people are judged by the color of their skin, the scars go deeper than memory and time and space. They don’t fade. They embody pain, humiliation, depression, and anger. Skin color makes it so.

I’m sensitive to this, but that’s because racism is a chameleon, manifesting itself in different guises. My blissful ignorance is long gone, and I cannot recall how it felt. I am frequently offended, especially living down in the South where the attitudes seem infinitesimally different from the attitudes of the Jim Crow era. I am offended when people tell me not to take it seriously or to consider the source or that not everyone thinks that way or that I should just get over it. I can’t. I won’t. I’ve seen too much.

Instead I get that funny vibe like at the restaurant the other night or when white people stop and stare at us like we are engaged in something so unbelievable and abhorrent that they are going to post it on Facebook later and talk about it for the next year. Skin color makes it so.

The scars on this escaped slave’s back are painfully visible. This photo of Gordon was taken in 1862.

This is just one of the many subliminally racist images flooding the Internet. This is a target that bleeds when shot.  It eerily resembles President Obama. Looking at it gives me that funny vibe.

Authentic Post-racialism

Authenticity, philosophically speaking, is “relating to or denoting an emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive, and responsible mode of human life.”

I especially like the part of the definition that refers to being emotionally appropriate and responsible. That captures my personal feeling of what it means to be authentic, but I know I struggle with staying authentic regularly and experiencing my authenticity without the kind of anxiety that not only sends me into paralysis but that occasionally makes me pass out cold.

I am a known people pleaser and that sometimes makes me choose someone else’s feelings over my own. That’s a symptom of adult children of alcoholics. We spent so much of our childhood wondering how we contributed to our life situation, constantly reassessing and negotiating our way through chaos, trying to find the path to stability and calm. Oftentimes, even in my child’s mind, I realized there was no such path and that I had only hurt myself in my choices and made no good change in the process.

My biggest fear as a child was abandonment. I thought that one wrong move would leave me at the side of a road in the country, an unwanted waif wandering alone. Then there were the daydreams I had as an adult, oftentimes when I was traveling for work and away from Ronald and the girls: becoming a homeless bag lady in an unknown city, lost, and no one looking for me.

When I cater to everyone else’s needs and desires I tend to leave my own like forgotten dust bunnies under the bed. Inevitably my anger grows until it explodes.

Then the people around me think I am an emotional mess, and no one ever understands that I gave up my authenticity in the effort to please, and that it has not only caught up with me, but also consumed me.

You’d think that since I am about to turn fifty-five, I would have this under control by now. But I am a product of my upbringing, gender, and of society’s expectations, and I am of shy temperament, hating confrontation.

So in the end I am often left alone. My greatest fear manifested.

I have my immediate family, Ronald, Cara and Mackenzie. They are always around, and we support one another emotionally and in many other ways. Then I have a few close friends, but distance keeps them from everyday interaction.

My sister said, after Ronald and I had moved south, “You seem lonely.”

I am, but I didn’t tell her how she contributed to my loneliness. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

People, who are not in an interracial relationship, can never totally understand what Ronald and I face everyday. Simple things, like having couples friends. It doesn’t happen that easily, especially at our age (of a certain generation) when most people have a group of long term friends around them. Then there is the fact that I work at home and Ronald is retired, and that both of us suffer shyness and anxiety about acceptance every time we go someplace new. But mostly I believe it has a lot to do with being interracial. People don’t know how to take us or can’t see us fitting into their social circles. Most times they can’t even explain why they feel that way, but there it is.

Once we held a kids Halloween party at our house. Everyone had a great time. When it was time to go home, one of the neighbors announced they were going to an adult party and everyone was invited except for us.

“The host would be offended,” he said in explanation. Everyone said thank you for the wonderful time they’d had at our party and went off to the second one. No one wondered if our feelings had been hurt or refused to go because of the insensitivity displayed by making such a statement in front of us.

How cool it would have been if even one had said, “I wouldn’t consider going to any party where Dianne and Ron aren’t welcome!”

Ronald captured my mood in a photo after everyone left. I sit glumly on the couch, my eyes moist, and my hand cradling my chin so it won’t quiver and give away how forlorn I am.

Yesterday on the golf course, as I walked with Ronald while he played a round, we met up with the group of black guys we had played with a week or two back. One kept stealing glances at me. Another one asked me if I wanted to ride in the cart alongside him for the last couple of holes. It was hot and windy, and pollen had scratched my eyes raw. I jumped in.  I gave him a fist bump after he’d driven his ball off the tee.

I saw the other man give me that sidelong glance.

Later I said to Ronald, as we headed home, “That guy doesn’t know how to take me. He couldn’t believe I got into that cart.”

“And that it was okay with both of us,” he added.

Those black guys have probably never met a white woman who wasn’t tucking her purse more tightly under her arm and race walking to cross to the other side of the street, while juggling her keys to discreetly lace them through her fingers as a weapon to at least slow him down should he attack. No matter that he just happened to be crossing her path to get to someplace else. But that same woman might claim she is no racist. Were it a white man, she might be wary, maybe clutching her purse a little tighter, but later she would describe him as eccentric, not dangerous. She doesn’t even understand how deeply and subconsciously the image of the “sexually dangerous” black man has been pressed into her brain. No wonder I seem an oddity.

I once heard an expression, “He’s an asshole, but he’s a good asshole.” I think I heard it from the white firefighters, talking about other white guys. If you are of the same race, it seems that you can be difficult, eccentric, even hostile, but still liked. I see that all the time. Like when family members accept and embrace the spouse of a child or sibling even though he or she might not have been their pick, just like I tried really hard to get along with my siblings and their spouses. But it doesn’t seem to be like that in my experience as an interracial couple. The person of the other race doesn’t get to be an asshole, ever, without serious repercussions, like abandonment.

The standards are different and, therefore, we are judged differently, as both individuals and as a couple. That makes life difficult, especially in families where dysfunction is a norm, and interaction is already precarious. When siblings or parents claim to be liberal, but still harbor these differing standards, they talk a certain way but their actions aren’t always in alignment, like that woman crossing the street but claiming she doesn’t have a racist bone in her body.

You know what? We just want to be assholes, but good assholes. We don’t mind when you are.

Also please understand that sometimes we just want to unload on someone we are comfortable with, or thought we were, and with people we trust, or thought we did. Racial occurrences happen to us regularly and we get sick of having to put up with them. Many black people would never dream of sharing with whites what they experience daily in a society of white privilege, but, because we are both, we tend to share, if not one than the other. Our choice to be together has opened us up to being in both arenas. We can’t just stop talking to everyone, or can we?

But just because we chose to be together, doesn’t mean that we ask complete strangers to offer their opinion, “Shame on you,” or try to run us down with their car, or decide we aren’t worthy of buying that house. It gets stressful sometimes and we need to talk about it.

What we don’t want to hear is, “I have a black friend, and that’s never happened to him,” or “I can’t believe that happened here. My community is not like that,” or “How come everything always happens to you?” We’d rather just hear, “Wow, it sucks to be you sometimes.” Because when you say the other things, you diminish our credibility and our life experience and pretend that your world is too great for stuff like that to happen. But it isn’t that great and it does happen, only not to you.

Also don’t expect that we will attend social functions separately because one is preferred over the other, one causes less trouble by fitting in better than the other, or because you think one of us is an asshole but not a good asshole. We are a couple, we actually enjoy doing things together and celebrating special occasions together, and we are well behaved and sensitive to social cues. We’re done worrying about whether or not others are comfortable having us around and whether or not we’ve done anything, like just being together, for example, that might be considered offensive to others attending the function.  We feel the favor is often not returned and therein lays my explosive anger. 

[Side note about my anger: Cara and Mackenzie have a great deal of fun reenacting occasions of my expressed anger from when they were children. They imitate my tiny voice with made up swear words (turkey lurkey!), my left eyebrow raised, one hand on my hip, a foot stamp, and the other hand wiping spittle off my chin. I agree that my outward expression of anger is mostly comical, but I promise you that my inside anger can be a lot like Katrina reaching the shore of New Orleans, ready and strong enough to devastate, mostly me – I have weak levies.]

That leads me back to abandonment and authenticity. Ronald and I talk about our isolation over and over. We talk about how important it is to remain true to ourselves in spite of, and because of, our experiences. We’ve cut ourselves off from people who don’t get that about us. It often feels like we are the only ones who understand what we go through. We won’t leave one another, no matter how alone we are together. Sometimes he or I apologize to the other, “I’m sorry you have to go through this because of me.”

 We both know no apologies are necessary, though. It still feels good to know there is at least one person who truly understands, appreciates our authentic selves, and who actually cares enough to say, “Wow, it sucks to be you, and us, sometimes.”

That’s when I’ll know we really live in a post-racial world – when every one of us is free to be an asshole, but a good one.