Passionate Martyr

I remember my parents taking me to the Buster Brown Shoe Store when I was little, maybe four or five. It was in downtown Albany, probably on or near Central Avenue, and I’m not sure why they brought me there as usually my shoes were bought at the nearest big box discount store, not Wal-Mart back then, but similar.

The shoes we bought were Mary Jane’s, and they were for Easter. The salesman walked behind the counter to ring up the shoes, and he told me I could come on back and choose a plastic egg with pastel beads inside of it from the glass case beneath the counter.

I squealed, ran behind the counter, pulled out an egg with a clear top and blue bottom, and clutched it to my chest. My excitement and urgent determination made the salesman laugh, and I felt my cheeks warm, embarrassed that I had shared my emotions with a stranger.

Today, I’m that same person, shy of temperament but teeming with emotion. I can’t help but communicate it. When I speak or write about race, culture, injustice, and the human condition, I feel the urgency, and I want to share it in spite of my fear of strangers. Afterwards I feel different emotions: remorse for burdening others with our sometimes painful experiences; sadness that I cannot reach more people; hope that I’ve opened the eyes of even one person; frustration that change is slow; anxiety that I’ve revealed too much; desire for solitude; longing for connection; doubt feeding my insecurities; and fear roiling my insides.

If I listened to my fears, I would not have accomplished one thing in life. They scream at me. They predict failure, danger, and death.  I cover my ears, try to calm my breathing, focus only on the next moment in time, and keep going.

I used to tell myself that I could do anything temporarily, for seconds, then minutes, then longer, and that helped keep me going, too. I keep my goals in site: go to college even though neither parent graduated high school; don’t go back home where I feel abandoned and unloved; meet and marry a man whose race is different from mine and know this fact will cause many people to question my sanity, directly impact our life through racism (affecting our economic and quality of life opportunities), and socially spurn us; have children when others express the irresponsibility of bringing mixed race children into a racist society; choose to leave the comfort of academia and move into the corporate world to grow my career, contribute substantially to the family finances, and become well-known in my field as an expert, leader, and trainer; speak up and fight when injustice, racist actions, or prejudice affects our family or others; choose to be dissatisfied with middle-age weight gain, lose 50 pounds, and keep it off for over ten years; start a master’s degree at 45 and finish a second one at 53; move to another state where we know no one; and start a blog that relies on personal experience to talk about race, gender, and culture.

Every person has stories of triumph, failure, and moving through fear to obtain goals. I love hearing people’s stories. Usually within a short time of meeting people I’ve asked enough questions to learn what stories are important to them and define who they are.

In a marriage and family counseling class that I took during my first master’s degree, the professor asked us to introduce ourselves in a few sentences.  I said, “I live a multicultural and interracial life. I’m Italian and Irish-American. I bill myself as a passionate martyr.”

It was a nod to my interethnic upbringing and how it shaped my view of the world and my place in it.

My introduction caused many classmates to laugh. Pretty good for a woman who had a panic attack outside the classroom of the first counseling class I registered for a few years before then.  Back then I wondered why a middle-aged woman, secure in her career and job, would think about going back to school with students who were about the same age as my daughters. Could I contribute anything of value to the classroom discussions? I discovered I wanted to know more about myself, about our multicultural world, and about people in general, and this was one way to gain the skills to do that.

I am that passionate martyr.

(Excerpt from essay Creating a Cultural Context in American Memoir)

Many Americans are not aware they are surrounded by a cultural context that uniquely molds them and colors their perceptions of their experiences and of others. This is particularly true of white Americans. They may say, “I’m not ethnic, I’m white,” for example, but what does being “white” mean? Every individual has an ethnicity, the heritage and social/cultural customs, beliefs and values of a particular group, and has also been influenced dramatically by “social class, religion, migration, geography, gender oppression, racism, and sexual orientation, as well as family dynamics (McGoldrick, Giordano, Garcia-Preto, p.1).” Add personality and temperament to the mix, and no two people are exactly alike.

Every American came from somewhere else. Some traveled over a strait that connected the continents thousands of years ago. Others traveled to escape oppression in their home countries. Some were brought here by force. People settled in areas they felt comfortable in, maybe choosing to live with people like themselves, or near places of worship, or certain topographies that felt familiar, or a particular climate, or where the jobs were. Some people were forced to live on the plantations they labored at, or on reservations, or in urban ghettos, or in rural isolation. These circumstances created a cultural context in which people lived and developed and learned about themselves and others.

Monica McGoldrick emphasizes in her book, Ethnicity and Family Therapy, how important the legacy of migration is when she says, “All Americans have experienced the complex stresses of migration. And the hidden effects of this history, especially when it goes unacknowledged, may linger for many generations. Families’ migration experiences have a major influence on their cultural values (p.19).”

The legacy of ethnicity is passed from one generation to the next, sometimes clearly, as in speaking a native language or practicing traditions. Other ethnic clues are passed down subtly: maybe the turn of a phrase or an unattributed tenet or a story shared from one generation to the next. Sometimes traditions and language are lost over the generations, perhaps through forced or voluntary assimilation into a dominant culture or through physical distance from one’s origins.

Stereotypes are negative generalities that become internalized by the people they are about and by the people who construct them. Their intention is often to hurt, oppress and segregate ethnic or cultural groups. They may be grounded in a bit of truth, but their intent is dishonest and disingenuous.

But there are generalities about ethnicity, race, culture and gender that can enlighten and normalize. These generalities are never meant to define a person, because so many forces in life shape a unique individual, and each of us is unique. Yet knowing that a certain ethnicity or culture tends to think in similar ways, shares a common belief system and historical legacy, or acts in collective synergy, can lend understanding or the ability to step into the shoes of another and experience the world through his or her point of view. The more an individual can learn about the unique lens through which he or she views the world, the more such knowledge can engender tolerance for other perspectives and people and a better understanding about oneself.

McGoldrick describes stereotyping this way:

Although generalizing about groups has often been used to reinforce prejudices, one cannot discuss ethnic cultures without generalizing. The only alternative is to ignore this level of analysis of group patterns, which mystifies and disqualifies the experience of groups at the margins, perpetuating covert negative stereotyping, as does the failure to address culture explicitly per se, considering socioeconomic, political, and religious influences more important. Others avoid discussion of group characteristics altogether, in favor of individual family patterns maintaining, “I prefer to think of each family as unique” or “I prefer to think of family members as human beings rather than pigeonholing them in categories.” Of course, we all prefer to be treated as unique human beings. But such assumptions prevent us from acknowledging the influence of cultural and group history on every person’s experience (p. 13).

As a memoir writer, I think it is even more important to understand one’s cultural legacy. A memoirist is writing a particular story from a particular point of view and a particular perspective. The story is singularly unique yet it resonates beyond the writer.

I do not believe every story must be written from a cultural perspective, but acknowledging that it is one lens through which a life is experienced enriches the depth of story. For example, I was raised in a bicultural family. My father was a first generation Italian-American, and my mother was a war bride of Irish descent from Australia. Being raised in a family with recently immigrated parents definitely had an impact on how I experienced mainstream American culture. In fact I often felt on the fringes, an outsider, with many of my peers.  When I first began to study the ethnic tension in my home life, I did not account for the legacy that my Irish heritage contributed. I only thought about the cultural aspects of being Australian and Italian, but a deeper search revealed that my mother being Irish-Australian mattered just as much to my story.

When I read the following in McGoldrick’s book, Ethnicity and Family Therapy, as I studied toward a master’s degree in counseling, I felt a sense of understanding for my mother I had not experienced before:

The Irish people are a people of many paradoxes. While having a tremendous flair for bravado, they may inwardly assume that anything that goes wrong is the result of their sins. They are dreamers but also pragmatic, hard workers… They are good humored, charming, hospitable, and gregarious, but often avoid intimacy. They love a good time, which includes teasing, verbal word play, and sparring, yet are drawn to tragedy. Although always joking, they seem to struggle continuously against loneliness, depression, and silence, believing intensely that life will break your heart one day (p. 595).

This simple paragraph, perhaps feeling stereotypical to some, felt as if it were specifically talking about my mother.

When my husband and I met freshman year of college, a new cultural and racial construct contributed to the perspective through which I view the world. My husband is African-American. His family is descended from Africans brought here against their will to be used as slaves. It’s important to note that his historical legacy sets him apart from African-Americans who immigrated to the US by choice, and how new they are generationally to the US. His family also migrated from the South to the North. This had a cultural impact as well. Interracial marriage, though more common, is still statistically rare. “Factoring in all racial combinations, Stanford University sociologist Michael Rosenfeld calculates that more than 7 percent of America’s 59 million married couples in 2005 were interracial, compared to less than 2 percent in 1970.”^[1]

McGoldrick has this to say about intermarriage:

Although, as a nation, we have a long history of intercultural relationships, until 1967 our society explicitly forbade racial intermarriage, and discouraged cultural intermarriage as well, because it challenged White supremacy. But traditional ethnic and racial categories are now increasingly being challenged by the cultural and racial mixing that has been a long submerged part of our history. Intimate relationships between people of different ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds offer convincing evidence that Americans’ tolerance of cultural differences may be much higher than most people think (p. 26).

She goes on to say, “Couples who choose to ‘marry out’ are usually seeking to rebalance their own ethnic characteristics, moving away from some values as well as toward others (p. 27).”

When we had children, we created yet another cultural, racial and ethnic dynamic. My daughters straddle race and culture in a way neither my husband nor I ever could.

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[1] After 40 Years, Interracial Marriages Flourishing, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18090277/ns/us_news-life

Another Brick in the Wall

We don't need no education


We don’t need no thought control


No dark sarcasm in the classroom


Teachers, leave them kids alone


Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!

All in all it's just another brick in the wall.

All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.

~ Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall Part 2

I’ve been en route and then busy with visiting family for the last couple of weeks, but I am home again, in my quiet house where I can cogitate without interruption, and I am ready to write.  Lots of words and ideas, jotted down so I wouldn’t forget, are pushing to break free, and I warn you, this post is lengthy and random, but it’s all connected in my mind.

Though most people don’t want to recognize racism or consider themselves a part of a racist society, it is integral in our societal structure, one brick laid on another and another, made strong with individual prejudice and what I’ve come to call willful or knowledgeable ignorance – the refusal to acknowledge what is right before one’s eyes, a denial of the truth.

There was a front-page story in the Winston-Salem Journal two Sundays ago: Separate worlds. The article begins with the following:

Many of Forsyth County’s public schools have resegregated over the last 40 years as national court decisions, and local political ones, favored neighborhood schools over racially and economically balanced ones.

It goes on to say:

Past Winston-Salem Journal and Associated Press reviews of the U.S. census data from 1980, 1990, and 2000 have shown Winston-Salem and Forsyth County to be the state’s most segregated major population center. In focusing just on Hispanic population data from the 2000 census, the Associated Press determined that Hispanics here are more segregated from whites than in any other city except Oakland, CA.

Can anyone deny the racism that exists in the town I live in? I’ve already warned Ronald that he will be responsible for selecting the next city we move to. Some people say everything happens for a reason; some think God has a plan and puts you just where you need to be to fulfill a purpose. I think I just made a poor choice, and yet, this may be the last place I call home. I think every place is similar, anyway.  Racism exists everywhere in this country.

I didn’t see the wrinkles and imperfections of this city when we used to drive down to the dance conservatory to see Cara and Mackenzie perform, or to spend time watching their classes, or to pick them up to take them home for the summer. The Carolina blue sky must have blinded me. Every day we live here teaches me that this town has plantation mentality. Every day I see that although we experienced racism in the North, here racism runs deep and true. It’s a part of the lingo and the philosophy that gets passed down through the generations. There is no denying it. And I’m not even out there talking to the citizens as Ronald is.

One white guy told Ronald that his great-grandfather owned slaves, and they were treated right. They even had doctors look after them when needed. He averred that they had a good life, better than what they might have faced in Africa.

“Do you know how much my great granddaddy paid for just one slave girl?” he asked Ronald. He had found his grandfather’s bookkeeping logs.

“Don’t know,” Ronald said.

“Eight hundred dollars. That was a lot of money back then. You wouldn’t abuse your slave when you paid that much for her,” he said, proud of how he had proven the humanity behind slavery.

“Oh, just like you wouldn’t mistreat the oxen or the other farm animals,” I said as Ronald finished up the story.

“Just like that,” he agreed.

“Never mind that you consider them animals and property, not people.”

“And they still want to believe it.”

“Take back America,” I said. “That’s where they want to take it back to.”

Ronald had been called a Yankee again and told that Yankees came down here for the weather but hated the people. Ronald told the white man that while he didn’t like the opinions of a lot of people he had met, he had never been rude or called them names as he had been since moving here.

“Did you remind him that the Civil War is over and that they lost?”

“Sometimes I want to,” he said.

I’m not perfect. My emotions are strong and deep and not always appropriate. There they are like banners, displayed for all who care to look, snapping in the wind on a bright day, hanging wet and limp in the rain, or rendered stiff and immobile in sub-zero temperatures. I don’t and won’t apologize for having them.

When we moved to the South, it was a big adjustment. Ronald lived his entire life in one city, and that was the same city in which I spent most of my adult life. We had always struggled to find a few close friends, mostly, I think, due to our being interracial. People, even when we could tell they really liked us, just couldn’t compute how to fit us into their social network. I had lost my aunt, with whom I had a close relationship, a couple years before.  (Ronald and our daughters had changed her mind about black people and interracial relationships.) Then I had gone through a rough patch with my siblings as I settled my aunt’s estate. The unresolved issues dampened my skin like fine, misty rain, and I wanted a big change. Moving was the big change we chose. I hoped we could run away and lose the past.

In the South we knew no one but our daughter, and we weren’t ones to think our children were obligated to entertain us. So I imagined we’d make new friends, and I would entertain a girlfriend or two on long Saturday afternoons spent drinking hot tea and eating scones, settled around a Scrabble board. We didn’t make any new friends. And most of the old ones never visited as they had promised.

I always thought I was strong and resilient, but the move knocked me down for the count. That surprised me. I didn’t realize how attached I was to our old home, the one we raised our daughters in, and to the city that I always thought looked dirty, worn, and gray. The doctor said my serotonin was low. She prescribed something to increase it.

It worked, kind of. I stopped having panic attacks, the kind that caused me to pass out in the shopping mall and crack my head open one humid August evening just months before we made the move.

Then I noticed something after taking the medication for a couple of months. My emotions were neutral. I didn’t cry at movies. I didn’t feel pleasure, displeasure, angry, happy, joy, or despair. I was completely and utterly devoid, empty. I imagined my soul had oozed out of my body and left behind an empty vessel. I thought, “The world could crumble around my feet, drop away, leave a void as big as infinity, and I would feel nothing.” I stopped taking it.

Within a few weeks, I was sniffling at movies again, loudly enough to disturb other moviegoers. Laughing out loud at commercials. Wearing my love like a hot pink blouse and my anger and sadness like itchy woolen leggings. I truly missed feeling, and I embraced all of it: the good, the bad, the best, and the worst. You can’t know one emotion without experiencing its opposing emotion.

I’ll never cede my emotions again.

So my last post, Checking the Other Box http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2012/06/checking-other-box.html

was an emotional rant, most likely addressed to the wrong person, but warranted, valid, and real. It was as honest and authentic as can be.  I’m not afraid to show my humanity with all its imperfection.

“I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be wearing dresses that show my knees,” I said to Ronald this past week as I stared at my reflection in the hotel room full-length mirror. I was traveling for work, and he came along because we were bringing his parents back with us for a visit.

“Why?” he asked. I know he appreciated how well the dress fit over my curves and the way my heels elongated my legs. Later that evening when we returned to the hotel, I watched a man back up so he could watch me walk down the hallway, my walk slower, more languid, than it was thirty years ago, but my hips still rolling in that sensual, feminine way. I like that kind of attention, distant and non-threatening.

‘My knees show what age I am,” I said. I think fifty-five must be the magic number. Rest my elbow in the car window and turn to see the skin above it fold and crinkle. Straighten my arms and look at my elbows, and the flesh covering them looks like tiny elephant knees. Glance at my hands, and notice how the skin is thinner and losing its elasticity. Stick my hands under the dryer in the restroom and watch the force of air swirl the skin in skittering patterns. I keep applying lotion, believing I can hydrate myself to twenty-something. Staring in the mirror, I noticed the skin above my knees looked crepe-like, spidery fine webbing etching my flesh. My once smooth and flawless skin has texture.

“Some women’s knees are like that their whole lives,” Ronald said. He’s always trying so hard to make me feel better, and I laugh at his attempts, not meanly, but sweetly and thankfully. I know, though, that his artist’s eye has wandered and explored every new crevice and crinkle. I think it must be painful to see the woman he pursued, photographed, plastered, and painted enthusiastically fade before his eyes like an old Polaroid snapshot. Even I, devoid of the sharp vision he has, noted how his eyes sit deeper in his face, the skin on his forearms, backs of his hands, and ankles is textured, and the bald spot on the crown of his head is growing. Disbelief rises. I think I don’t want to know, but why deny the truth? I refuse to practice willful ignorance.

I have to embrace aging the same way I’ve come to embrace my emotions. The alternative doesn’t appeal.

Neither does the alternative to speaking out about racism. My voice in the matter will be heard. I don’t want to shut others down, but sometimes their willful ignorance rattles my sensibilities.

A couple weeks ago the guys at the golf range told Ronald that President Obama stole his identity by assuming a dead man’s social security number. His grandmother aided and abetted Obama when he was fourteen and perhaps wishing for his first summer job. I got my social security number at fourteen for the same reason – to obtain my ready to work papers.

Apparently the conspiracy to turn us into a socialist country was born years ago by a conniving mixed-race child and his power-hungry white grandmother. The agencies of government that vet candidates for office were too dumb to discover the complex scheme, or perhaps they were in on it. But not the Tea Party and “Take Back America” conservatives – they were on to his masterful and evil plot to displace and disempower D. Whiteman.

“Snopes debunked that myth back in 2010,” I said to Ronald as he told the story, and I typed in a quick search. “Don’t they have the internet?”

‘They don’t want to know,” he said. “If not that, then something else. They just can’t say the truth. They don’t want a black man in office.”

Then my disappointment in humanity was further fueled by an experience we had this past weekend. We drove my parents-in-law back to NC to visit with us for a few days. Every place we stopped along the way garnered stares.

“Dianne, they’re just looking at you. They can’t figure out why you are with us,” my father-in-law said several times during our travels.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m used to it.”

“They think you’re our social worker or something,” my mother-in-law said at dinner in a Ruby Tuesday’s in Maryland. I had ordered my father-in-law’s dinner for him and then asked the waitress to bring him another soda as the first one had too much ice and was shades paler than the usual Coke products.

We had to turn in early. The drive is arduous for two octogenarians, so we pulled over at a Holiday Inn Express in West Virginia at around 7:00 p.m. I went in to book the rooms. That’s something Ronald and I figured out a long time ago. It’s using that white privilege I’ve spoken about in past posts. I’ll get the lowest rate. Why shouldn’t we get the white people rate? There should only be one rate.

We know this because one time when we went down to visit Cara and Mackenzie while they were at the dance conservatory, we stopped into a nearby Comfort Inn. I booked the room and got a really nice rate. Ronald was back a couple of weeks later by himself, I can’t remember why, but when he returned to the hotel, they quoted him $30 higher.

“I stayed here a couple weeks ago with my wife, and that’s not what we paid,” he told the clerk behind the desk.

“Impossible,” the clerk responded.

“Look it up,” Ronald said.

He did.  “They made a mistake,” he told Ronald, but he gave him the rate I paid. How could he not?

We chose the Holiday Inn Express because my parents-in-law have used them in their travels for the last fifty years and feel comfortable there. The reason my parents-in-law like the Holiday Inn is because back in the mid-twentieth century that was one of the few hotels that would let blacks book rooms. I guess there’s no way to know if they gave them the same rate as white people.

That kind of memory stays with a person. It’s like Dillard’s. A long time ago, they did not welcome black shoppers. My in-laws have never forgotten, and they refuse to shop there when they visit the South. Though I love the store, I understand why they don’t, even if it happened fifty years ago.

I booked two non-smoking king rooms, asked for the AARP rate (he never even asked me for my membership card), and told the clerk, an Asian Indian man who spoke broken English, that my parents were elderly and needed to be close to us because they had health issues. He gave us rooms across the hall from one another.

I returned to the car, we parked, got our luggage, and piled into the hotel. The clerk stared as we passed the desk. I had a bad feeling from the start. I’m not psychic, but I use my intuition, and nothing felt right. I chalked it up to a long day on the road and the worry that clutched at me because I knew this trip was going to be awfully difficult for my parents-in-law to make. As soon as we got up to the rooms, the evening slid into chaos.

The clerk did not give us two rooms with king beds as I requested. One room had a king and the other had two doubles. No problem, Ronald and I took the one with the doubles (we slept in a single dorm bed together for three of the four years of college), but the one with the king bed had a broken A/C unit. Ronald and I trudged back down stairs to tell the clerk. His uncle, a small man the same size as my father-in-law, stood behind him with a toddler in his arms. Ronald explained the situation. Then I added that if the A/C could not be repaired, we would have to move on to another hotel.  “You understand that my in-laws are elderly and have health issues. They cannot stay in a room without air.”

The desk clerk said he’d be up in twenty minutes. A half hour later, he still hadn’t come.

Ronald went back down while my in-laws propped open their door with a chair. I was trying to get them into our room to wait, but they didn’t want to miss the clerk. There were white people filing past us down the hall with dogs, lots of dogs. There must have been a dog show in town. They all stared as I stood with my in-laws, my father-in-law growing more upset as the minutes ticked by.

Downstairs the clerk told Ronald he was rushing him. Ronald explained, again, that his parents are elderly with health issues and the temperature in the room was well over 100 degrees. Finally the clerk agreed to come upstairs with him. The clerk’s uncle tagged along.

As soon as my father-in-law saw them, he wanted to explain the situation, but already tired and not feeling well, he was agitated and emotional. My mother-in-law made him sit down as the two men stooped around the PTAC (that stands for “packaged terminal air conditioner”) and examined it. Ronald stood nearby them. I waited in the hall.

After several minutes, the clerk announced the PTAC needed a new circuit board and maintenance would be there in the morning.

“Unacceptable,” Ronald said.

“Open the window,” the clerk answered. Even though it was evening, the temperature was still in the low 100s.

Ronald went into fire lieutenant mode. When you’ve managed fire scenes, you learn to communicate clearly, succinctly, loud enough to be heard, and with no room for interpretation. He did not curse. He did not lose control of his voice. He stood inches from the man’s face, his finger in his chest.

“You’re done. I gave you a chance to make it right,” Ronald said as the clerk backed out of the room, Ronald in close pursuit.

The clerk said, “Let them sleep in your room with you or take them to a different hotel and you stay here. You have another room.”

“Why don’t I call the police and they can help us sort this out?” Ronald said.

“Okay, okay, I have another room.”

“Too late.”

I jumped in. “I’ll see you at the front desk to check out. I already told you we’d be leaving if you couldn’t fix the air.”

Downstairs, my voice shaking, I said, “I explained to you that they have health issues. You see they are elderly. I better not see one cent charged on my credit card.”

Then he argued with me about the room numbers. He said we were in 320 and 322. We were not side by side but across the hall from one another in 320 and 321. I didn’t want 322 charged to my card.

“Really?” I asked. “Weren’t you just up there?”

“The computer doesn’t lie.”

“I don’t either. We are in 320 and 321. I want documentation that you cancelled the rooms.”

He said he had none and I took a business card from the desk and told him I would be checking to make sure he didn’t charge me. There was a white woman standing at the counter during our exchange. She stood with her mouth open and her wallet in her hand. As I stood waiting at the elevator to go back upstairs, I mouthed to her, “Don’t stay here.”

She excused herself from the desk and came over and whispered, “What happened? He was so rude to you.”

I explained. She said, “Oh, God, we prepaid.”

“Good luck,” I said.

I took my in-laws to the car while Ronald gathered the overnight bags, and the white woman and her family were parked next to us. It was the first she knew of our interracial status. She and I spoke again.  She offered the understanding that I wish for lots of times and don’t get as I navigate this interracial world.

I don’t think every white person hates black people. It’s the way our culture operates silently behind the scenes. Racism is institutionalized and systemic in how we live, work, and socialize. It’s about power and privilege and the oppression of others. Most people don’t realize it. They think racism is an individual thing, but it isn’t. That’s just plain bias or hatred. That white woman was kind and understanding, but in our society, she is still part of the majority race and benefits from that membership, just as I do. Until we eliminate the unwritten racism hidden in our social structure, it will remain, and the majority will continue to enjoy power and privilege while minority groups continue to suffer their status of “less than.”

Later, lying in bed with the lights turned off in our king room at the next hotel we found along the route, Ronald and I chuckled as we recapped our day before dropping off to sleep. We talked about all the people who stared and wondered what our story was. Then I mentioned the look on the hotel clerk’s face, how it went from arrogant to fearful, when Ronald went into lieutenant mode and told him we were leaving. We didn’t know if the man was stupid, rude, prejudiced, acting superior, or all of the above, but it had made for a very bad evening, one that we’ll talk about for years to come, no doubt.

“I guess all the white folks with their dogs were worried that the niggers were going to turn out the place,” Ronald concluded. He keeps a sense of humor about these situations.

“Yup, it’s always an adventure,” I said, laughing.

I told Ronald the story of the white woman who nodded to me one last time after I had pulled our car up to the front door to wait for him while he imparted a last warning not to charge our credit card to the clerk and his uncle. The woman tilted her head and smiled, and I smiled back at her and shrugged my shoulders.

We are all just another brick in the societal wall, but I hope that together we can modify the structure so there will be true equality. I’m talking about the kind of equality where everyone pays a better rate at the hotel and the clerk aims to please all of the hotel guests. We can’t run away and lose the past. Instead we have to shake up our willful ignorance and face the undeniable truth.

Riding the Interracial Marriage Highs

No one should be surprised that interracial marriages are at an all time high. 8.4 percent of all marriages in the U.S. are interracial, up from 3.2 percent in 1980.  The increase includes interracial marriages of all combinations but is tied to the increase of the Hispanic and Asian populations in our country.

I remember going to the movies with Cara and Mackenzie to see Save the Last Dance in 2001. It was a movie about dance, and that’s why we went, but it was also a movie about an interracial couple that faces prejudice from peers and family. I cried through the whole movie: not sniffles and discreet dabs at my nose with tissues, but outright sobbing, snot and tears flowing, and shoulders heaving. I didn’t realize until then how much emotion I had stuffed inside me and pretended didn’t exist. I felt the full onslaught of anger, loss and hurt at the way people treated us and how much of it went unresolved after the death of my parents, Dad in 1981 and Ma in 1983. Cara and Mackenzie were embarrassed and baffled that I had reacted so strongly to a predictable and sentimental film.

They were rising seniors in high school and were about to leave to attend their first year at the conservatory that was predominately white. Their whole school career had been at urban public schools that were around fifty percent ethnic minority. They wore the confidence of acceptance amongst their peers. Too soon they would experience prejudice, stereotyping, isolation, and racism at the conservatory, but at the time we saw the movie, they could not understand what their own parents had experienced.

I realized that day that I just wanted to be like everyone else: worry about the bills; wonder how Cara and Mackenzie would fare 700 miles away; work at getting to know one another again after raising two kids and beginning a new phase in our relationship. I didn’t want to have to think about Ronald being treated poorly because of his skin color or worry whether or not we’d have problems if we tried to buy another house or went to have dinner at a restaurant or tried to get a hotel room when we went south to see the girls. That’s all anyone wants – to feel the freedom of not being judged and to live one’s life without someone stepping in and trying to make something out of it that it isn’t.

(Excerpt from essay Staying on It: Beauty and Aging)

My aging hair upsets me the most. I can never recapture its color, a blend of browns, golds, and reds that lit up in the sunlight and glistened with health. I didn’t start dying my hair until I was in my late thirties. I had, long before then, advised my sister Peggy, ten years older than I, to dye hers.

“My God,” I said to her when I was searching for her in a large crowd of people on the concourse under the New York state capital plaza. “I didn’t recognize you. You look like Aunt Josephine.”

She called me a week later, my thoughtless comment still stinging, and asked me if she should start dying her hair. “Yes,” I said, “you look older than your years.”

I knew women whose hair had turned gray or white prematurely when they were in their teens or twenties, and I loved the uniqueness of it. But why am I so tormented by my own gray hair?

“Don’t dye your hair,” Ronald said weeks before I started getting it done. “They can’t duplicate your hair color, and I’ll notice if you color a single strand on your head.”

It took him six months.

Now he complains that my hairdresser doesn’t know what she’s doing. “She’s putting the lighter color underneath the dark,” he said. “It looks like your scalp is showing through. It should be the other way around.”

“Ronald, that’s not what she’s doing,” I said, anger flaring for his pointing out what I can no longer hide. “That’s how white my hair is, and when it starts to grow out, that’s what you see. I’d have to have it colored every two weeks to keep up with it.”

Debra Gimlin studied how middleclass white women take care of their hair and the role hairdressers play in helping them in her book Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture. She says, “Clients above all want ‘natural-looking’ hair. However, this quality is related not to its being ‘natural’ in any genuine sense but rather to the painstaking construction of ‘naturalness.’”

Both Cara and Mackenzie think I might like the white or gray my hair really is, if I would just grow it out and try it. I talk to Ronald about it, but neither one of us seems to be able to make a definitive choice. Besides the awful skunk stripe I’d suffer with for the months it would take me to grow it out, I’m afraid that I’ll have succumbed to being old.

“I don’t want to look like George and Barbara Bush,” I’ve told Ronald on several occasions. His hair is salt and pepper, he has a growing bald spot, and he sports a spare tire at his waistline. I’ve promised to tell him when the bald spot has become too large, and he should shave his head. Cara, Mackenzie, and I see how he has aged, but strangers think he is years younger, even twenty years younger than his chronological age. I feel the unfairness and obsess over it.

“Are you going to leave me for someone younger?” I ask, dreading the answer.

“Dianne, I’m still here. Let me deal with the sadness I feel sometimes. Give me time to sort through what it feels like to watch you age,” he said.

I was hurt that he felt sad for me, even as I felt sad for myself. I felt old women became invisible but old men continued on as always.

“Dianne, it’s like a favorite pair of shoes,” he said, as we lay on the bed, my head resting on his shoulder, his arm around me. “They might be worn, but you’ve grown attached to them.”

A pair of shoes, I thought, anger breaking like beads of sweat, an emotional hot flash, but I realized it was his way of saying that he couldn’t imagine living without me, just as I could not imagine living without him.