Outraged

This week has driven me to distraction. As the right continues to murder Trayvon’s memory, pass laws that are constitutionally questionable, and make fun of President Obama’s impromptu talk on race in America, my sensibilities are electrified by disbelief and outrage. I’ve put together a list of things we can do to become a rational, compassionate nation that supports the equality of all its citizens.

1.              Stop. Stop hating. Stop blaming. Stop thinking some people, like you, are better than others.

2.              Learn empathy. Everyone will face adversity at some point in one’s life. Money will not save you. Smugness and superiority will not save you.  God will not save you. So you’d better learn to feel compassion for the person who is down and out, because you might be next.

3.              If you are white and you think racism goes both ways, the most important role you can play in the conversation about race is that of listener.  You’ve already given your opinion one time too many, and it was off base, offensive, ignorant, untruthful, and dangerous.

4.              If you think you know what it is like to be black in America, and you are not a person of color, stop right now. You have no idea what it is like to be black in America. I have spent almost forty years of my life with a black man, and my children are interracial, yet I do not know exactly what it is to be black. I will never know, because I will never be black. Period.

5.              If you are a minority, any minority (black, Hispanic, female, LGBT), even though it may feel scary and difficult, speak up when someone is being offensive. Let people know, as kindly as you can, that what they said is damaging to you, to them, and to society. If you don’t tell them, they’ll only keep on doing what they are doing and tell the next person that their [black, Hispanic, female, LGBT] friend doesn’t feel that way, so s/he must be wrong. Be the first to let them know their thinking is wonky, and then offer to help them understand. And if they don’t want to speak to you after that, that’s their loss.

6.              Report abuse, harassment, discrimination, and favoritism to your employer, the business you are paying for goods and services, at school, at church, or anywhere else it happens, else how will it ever stop? This is for every person, even if you were not the receiver of the action. Peer pressure can positively affect people, too.

7.              If you do not consider yourself a racist, stop voting Republican. The party has been recruiting racists since Nixon, and they are more and more blatant in their appeals to hatred and paranoia to keep the country divided and advance their agenda that benefits the wealthy and creates a plutocracy.

8.              If you do not consider yourself a misogynist, see number 7.

9.              If you think LGBT citizens should be treated equally under the law, see number 7.

10.          In fact, if you believe all people should be equal under the law, see number 7.

11.          If you are a fiscal conservative, stop lying to yourself. History shows that the Republicans tend to grow government and increase the deficit. See number 7.

12.          If you are truly a Christian, stop supporting laws and policies that hurt the poor and the underserved. See number 7.

13.          If you are pro-life help the children who are already here and give women equal access to quality reproductive health. See number 7.

14.          If you know for sure that corporations are not people, see number 7.

15.          If you are female or identify as an ethnic minority in our country, see number 7. They only want your vote, but they will not represent you.

16.          If you believe socialism is scary and dangerous, you need to think again. The roads you drive your vehicle on, the sewer system your home is connected to, the police department, the fire department, the military, social security, the Center for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, Medicare, Medicaid, and unemployment benefits are all socialist programs. You benefit from those programs, as should all citizens.

17.          If you believe the Affordable Health Care Act is a socialist program designed to assist people who don’t deserve assistance, see number 16 and number 2. Also know that it is good for society overall that people receive proper health care, because it will prevent the epidemic spread of diseases such as TB and people will be healthier overall and not be a burden to others.

18.          Vote. Vote in every election, including local elections. People died fighting for the inalienable right to vote, so the very least you can do is read up on the issues and the candidates and get your ass to the polls. If you vote, you have a right to complain and ask for representation. If you don’t, shut up, because you are part of the problem.

19.          Help someone else to vote. Drive people who don’t have transportation to the poll. Hold their place in line if they are too old or too tired or too infirm to stand there and they need to sit down.

20.          Do not be a one-issue voter. Nothing is more dangerous or insidious, because if you only vote on one issue you are ignoring all the other issues and voting in candidates who may have terrible agendas and they are relying on you to be ignorant and fervid for your single issue.

21.          If you hear anyone speak disparagingly about another, whether it is about our President, or the black child walking home from school, or the Mexican family waiting in line at the grocery store, or the little girl who is overweight, or the gay or interracial couple who want to enjoy an evening out, tell them you do not agree with them and ask them why they are so mean spirited. Then wait for them to answer.

22.          If you think murder is wrong, stop supporting Stand Your Ground laws, and let people all around you, including your gun monger friends, know that Stand Your Ground is simply a legal get-around to commit murder and you are going to expend your energy getting the laws repealed and fighting for more stringent gun control laws. Then run before they shoot you.

23.          If you believe your child deserves to be safe at school, at home, and in your neighborhood, then support the same for children who may live in neighborhoods and go to schools that are different from yours. Every child deserves that right. Find a way to personally support that belief.

24.          Do not paint a group of people with a broad brush based on one attribute, like skin color or socio-economic status. Every person is an individual, and if you want to be treated as an individual, you ought to treat others the same way. All white people are not the same, and that is true of everyone of every ethnicity, race, gender, and socio-economic class.

25.          Understand that this is America, and that all Americans have the right to be where they are: walking down the street, standing on the walkway of a community, buying Skittles at the convenience store, and going home to watch the second half of the game. Stop thinking some people are more deserving of our freedoms than others. We should all enjoy the freedoms we share as Americans, and you should fight hard for that concept or one day you may find yourself on the wrong side of freedom.

26.          If you are a man, treat women as your equals, not as a sex objects, property, or a baby vessels. Stop supporting legislation that controls women’s reproductive rights. Fight for equal work for equal pay. Don’t support the sex industry because it exploits young women.

27.          If you are here in America because your family migrated here sometime in the last 600 years, support immigration reform. If you don’t support it, you are a hypocrite, and perhaps you should follow your own advice and go back to your country of origin if it will take you.

28.          Do not spend one dime to support the economy of red states that pass laws that are constitutionally questionable, let businesses buy their politicians and political leaders, treat some of their citizens as less than equal, and allow their citizens to be irresponsible gun owners. Your children will grow up just fine if you don’t take them to Disney World.

29.          Teach your children to care for others and to have empathy and compassion for people who may be different from them. Empathy is our greatest equalizer because it opens the mind and squashes irrational judgments.

30.          If you identify as a white American, teach your children about race and ethnicity. Talk to them about white privilege and tell them that it is unfair and that everyone should be treated equally in every circumstance. Teach them to challenge privilege when they benefit because of it. The world will be a better place.

31.          Stop watching Fox News. They are not a news station; they are an entertainment station paid by the likes of ALEC and the Koch brothers to spread the lies and the agenda of the extreme right. Not one word uttered on that station is truthful or newsworthy, so protect your brain cells.

32.          Stop thinking that you are more American than the rest of us. We are a country that willingly took in people other countries didn’t care about. Let’s celebrate our diversity and understand that America has many different faces and perspectives that make us a great country.

Moral Monday at the North Carolina Legislature.

A photo from my local paper depicting counter demonstrators at the Trayvon Martin rally in Winston-Salem, NC.

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

Parenting Creativity

I had conversations with each of my daughters this week about their artistic pursuits. I originally wrote that sentence by describing the conversations as “nice” but that isn’t accurate. They were conversations about struggle, frustration, the process of sharing work and passion, and how hard it is to be an artist of any kind. We spoke about how an artist’s work is affected by where you present your work and who sees it. They’ve watched their own parents struggle with this as well and witnessed our feelings of failure and lack of personal satisfaction. There has been growth, but if it is only internal or only at home with no audience in sight, there is a sense of incompleteness about the process.

I’ve felt my own love/hate relationship with my creativity. As a writer and a daydreamer, my creativity isolates me. Yet I feel the urge to share my writing and then oftentimes end up disappointed by rejection (one agent told me to rewrite and “tell me how you feel.” Isn’t that the clichéd counselor’s exhortation?) or arguments (family and friends telling me what I experienced and how I perceived that experience is incorrect). That’s hard to take because it is my story, my memory, my vision, my perception, and my expression of what happened and how I processed it. The feeling is innate in the telling and the choices made during that telling.

Then I think of my husband, the most creative, sensitive, and artistic person I know. He’s been a successful artist. He’s led bands and recorded music.  He is driven to try repeatedly to collaborate but each time he feels that disappointment, the failure of not reaching a shared vision, his sense that others don’t have or want the same intensity of experience, and there he is, a musician left alone with his instrument. He has told Cara and Mackenzie time and again, “Do your own thing. Don’t wait or rely on others.”

One other thing he tells them, that I agree with and often repeat, is, “Amateurs help amateurs remain amateurs.”

Cara had her own bit of wisdom to impart today, to me, her mother. I told her I was rereading my memoir, going over it again, reading it out loud, and looking for weaknesses in the structure and the writing. I said, “I’m not liking it now. I think the second half is complicated.”

“Mom,” she said. “Don’t over edit. You’ll ruin it.”

 I know that. She’s right. My story is braided and complicated. That’s how my brain perceives things, too. It wouldn’t be my story if I edited that out. I saw that as I finished reading the last few pages of the memoir out loud an hour or so ago. It’s authentic and true to who I am and the story I’ve chosen to tell about me in all its complexity. It’s not a story about just race and racism; it’s a story about two creative, imperfect people who feel the impact of differentness in a racially constructed world.

We need that differentness that we bring to the creative process, else it would just be the same artistic product over and over, like thousands of same model cars made on the assembly line.  Some are blue, some are silver, and some are black, red or white, but they are the same damn car. There would be no individuality, no authentic emotional exchange, no true sharing of culture, spirit and humanity.

Mainstream culture embraces the car theory of artistic pursuit. Find a good artist that appeals to the masses; then duplicate him or her until the masses tire and want something else. Artists don’t choose to be tragic figures, but I understand how many end up that way.

Nurture your creativity. Accept its differentness. And when it grows mature and it gives you good advice, be open to it. That’s good parenting.

(Excerpt from essay Mother Mother)

I had a terrible fight with Ma when I was fourteen. I hung out with a group of girls, all living middle class lives. They spent their weekly allowances at the mall and bought T-shirts, Snoopy and Mickey Mouse stickers, Tiger Beat, a fan magazine, and 45s with hits by David Cassidy and Bobby Sherman. I didn’t get an allowance. Ma and Dad couldn’t afford to give me one, and our house looked nothing like their houses. It was cluttered, dusty, and greasy with worn-out furniture and raveling rugs covered in animal fur over asbestos tiled floors. A film of cigarette smoke blanketed every surface.

My newfound friends enjoyed ice-skating at the tennis courts on Locust Park. Just three blocks from my house, the tennis courts were flooded each winter by the village and the skating was free. The girls kept asking when I was going to come, and I wanted to go so I would not be left out or forgotten. They had already expressed their displeasure at my eccentric behavior when I spent a sleepover at one of their houses hunkered down in the corner with the novel Knock on Any Door, by Willard Motley. They couldn’t understand how an old, moldy paperback with a torn cover, taken from Ma’s bookshelf, could possibly be more interesting than looking at a centerfold of David Cassidy in the latest Tiger Beat issue.  But I found Nick “live fast, die young, and have a good looking corpse” Romano much more intriguing. I couldn’t put the book down.

I asked Ma for ice skates, and she wandered into the cellar and pulled out a musty pair of skates from beneath a pile of junk. Peggy had used them a decade or so before. The leather was cracked and brittle, and they smelled bad. I hated them in comparison to the other girls’ brand new skates. When I put them on, the other girls sneered and said they were ugly. I had not skated before, and my ankles leaned inward and grew sore and tired within a short time. I struggled to hold back my tears and formulated my plan for getting new skates.

When I got home, I started crying. I told Ma how my ankles hurt from wearing the old skates and how much I needed a new pair. Ma lashed out at me, saying the kinds of things I was used to hearing like how selfish I was. I lashed back. Then I ran into my room, and sobbed for all I stood to lose by not having those skates.  In a few minutes, as I choked and blubbered, Ma came into my room, sat on the edge of the bed, hugged me, and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize how much the skates meant to you. I’ll find a way.”

My victory felt shallow and tarnished, but I got my skates the next day. I know now that Ma had no money for skates and was more worried about putting food on the table. And she was right I was selfish. The minute I had those new skates on, though, I forgot about it. My ankles still sagged inward and hurt, but my skates were shiny and new.

I made sure, even if I went into debt, that Cara and Mackenzie never suffered my shame. It caused fights between Ronald and me as my store credit cards hit their limits, but I never wanted them to feel unworthy. In principal I didn’t allow them to wear the more expensive popular brands that many of the middle class kids wore. It was my way of keeping them grounded, and I reminded them how some of the other kids they went to school with might never have a new winter jacket or a warm pair of boots. Each year we donated clothes they had outgrown to the school nurse, so she could give them to students who needed them. I explained that their old winter jacket would become someone else’s new jacket and that if they saw someone wearing something that used to be theirs, they should never mention it. That’s how parenting is done sometimes, as a correction of the past. It doesn’t make it better or even right, but it happens just the same.

The Face of America

If I asked you to imagine an American, what would the person look like? Do you see President Obama as the face of America? Oprah Winfrey? Tiger Woods?  Jennifer Lopez? Marc Anthony? For many people, the face they’d envision would be a white face, probably a man, someone of European descent. Yet the 2010 Census shows ethnic minorities are growing. The Hispanic population grew 43 percent since the 2000 Census. Hispanics constitute 16 percent of the US population. The Asian population also grew by 43 percent, and they represent 5 percent of the US population. African-Americans represent 13 percent of the US population. Nine million people, or about 3 percent of the population reported being more than one race, or mixed race.

Texas, California, the District of Columbia, Hawaii and New Mexico are states in which there is a majority-minority population, where more than 50 percent of the population reported being from a minority group.

Yet most people still picture Americans as white. White is more of a mindset, a social construct related to power and privilege, than a race or ethnicity. Many white Americans don’t feel culturally connected to their countries of origin.  Mainstream culture, though often influenced by the cultures of ethnic minorities, is often assigned “whiteness.” Yet many things uniquely American were originated within ethnic minority cultures in America – jazz and tap dance are the most well-known examples.

Some people are calling for a colorblind society, and I hope for it as well, for an acceptance of everything and everybody that we are in America. It is a different way of viewing the concept of the melting pot. Initially it was thought immigrants would assimilate into mainstream culture. But the new, progressive view of the melting pot could be the sharing, acceptance and acknowledgement of all the cultures that contribute to making mainstream American culture unique.

We are not there, though there have been attempts – the multicultural movement in the 1980s and 1990s, for example. Unfortunately, terms such as multicultural and diversity were often used incorrectly, only in reference to ethnic minorities. It was misunderstood that we are all ethnic and that is what makes us diverse, each one of us. Even for individuals who came from family that has multiple generations in America, their family origins were passed down to them through the food they eat, the legacy of migration or immigration, the stories they pass on to the next generation, the traditions they keep, and the way they celebrate holidays and rites of passage.

Until we recognize and acknowledge that each American has an ethnic origin, that the concept of white or black or brown skin is a social construct and has little to do with race, culture and ethnicity, we cannot live in a colorblind society. At this time in our history, colorblindness will mask the very real racism that is woven into the fabric of who we are. It is a part of our history, our institutions, and our collective sense of identity. Are you in touch with your ethnicity? Who do you picture as the face of America?

(Excerpt from Chapter 5, Why You Gotta Be Jerkin’? Shades of Tolerance: A Biracial Love Story)

Dad looked gray, and he sat quietly in his chair. He laid the newspaper on the floor in front of him, and held his chest as he leaned over and read, just as he had when he had his first heart attack. This time he did not wait the entire weekend to go to the doctor.

Frank drove us to see Dad in the intensive care unit. I sat in a chair by the window, the sun falling on my hair, lighting it up like a red flame. Ma always told me she thought I would be the one to have red hair; she hoped for it, for a child that looked more Irish than Italian. But I was not that child.

I did not know what to say to Dad as he lay in the bed with tubes and wires connected to him. I could not think of anything to make him feel better. The hospital smells and the beeping of the heart monitor made me anxious.

“Your hair is red,” Dad said, “You dyed it, didn’t you?”

“No, it’s just the sun,” I said.

“Yes, you did. I can tell,” he said, laughing a little, but I knew he was upset.

“It’s the sun, Dad. If I move, you’ll see. I haven’t touched my hair.”

I stood up and moved to the end of the bed, away from the sun, so he could be sure.

I called Ronald the next day from work on the Watts line.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“No,” I said. I wanted to run back to Syracuse.

Ma started in on me minutes after Steve dropped me at home that evening.

“You were my princess,” she said.

“What?”

“I had every hope for you,” she said.

“Ma, I don’t want to talk about this.”

“You caused your father’s heart attack. You might have killed him.”

I stopped breathing. The room swirled around me.

“Ma, don’t say that!”

“You’ve thrown your life away!”

“Stop, Ma, just stop!”

“You’ve broken my heart! I want to die!”

“Ma, why do I have to choose? I’m happy. I love him!”

“Your children will be hated. You’ll be ostracized. My princess,” Ma said. She moaned. She began to sob, and I joined her. “Aunt Josephine cut you out of her will,” she continued.

“So what?” I said, “What’s that supposed to do? How would that change my mind?”

“You’ve cut yourself off.”

“Ma, what if I choose you?” I said, the words thick in my throat, “You won’t be here forever. You’ll leave me alone.”

I cried. Ma bawled. I pleaded. Ma accused.

The next morning, with no sleep, I showered, dressed, ate some breakfast, and left the house at 11:15. My eyes were swollen and dry – I had no tears left. I walked down Locust Park toward Central Avenue to the bus stop.

Steve pulled up beside me in his brown Pinto.

“Hey,” he called out the window.

“I feel like shit,” I said, “Ma and I fought all night.”

“Over Ron again?”

“Yes, I don’t have time to tell you about it. I’ll tell you later.”

“Want a ride?”

“No, I need to walk,” I said. He waved and drove off.

Steve drove me back to school that fall. We stopped at Peggy and Dawson’s house to visit her before Steve headed back to Albany. After her daughter Liza was born, we had found our way back to each other. I often babysat Liza at the dorm, letting all the girls on the floor dote over her as she played peek-a-boo with me in the mirror, her large, azure blue eyes with the dark ring around the irises surprising her reflection, her blond hair falling in sweet baby curls. I felt about Liza the way I imagined Peggy felt about me when I was little.

I told Peggy about my many arguments with Ma, about how difficult it was to see Dad in the hospital again, and how hard the whole summer had been.  I had been berated and chafed every day to make a choice.

“So maybe you should just stop talking to her,” she said, “then she’ll have to choose if she wants to lose you or be in your life with Ron as part of it.”

“How could I do that?” I asked.

“You just have to,” she said, “When they come up, I’ll have you and Ron over, so she can get to know him. That might make a difference.”

“It won’t,” I said, “She won’t change her mind.”

“She might. But either way, you have to be strong and live your life,” she said, hugging me, and I remembered how she took care of me when Ma couldn’t or didn’t.

I stopped talking to Ma. 

Ethnicity of White in America

“Do you think of yourself as ethnic?” I like to ask people, and I’ll ask you, my blog readers, as well.

I remember a conversation with my aunt Josephine, my father’s sister.  She and my husband Ronald were going round and round about ethnicity and race. Both talkers, both Cancerians born three generations apart but sharing birthdays within a couple days of one another, they loved a good debate. Aunt Josephine told the story of how, in the 1960s, she was turned down for a better position at the New York State Department of Education after the (white) man interviewing her asked why her father hadn’t changed their last name to something less ethnic sounding.

“You know,” Ronald said. “A lot of people don’t consider Italians to be white. That’s why you had a hard time.”

“That’s not true,” Aunt Josephine said. “We’re white. It’s the Sicilian’s who aren’t.”

(The following is an excerpt from my essay “Keep Hope Alive”)

I grew up in an era that embodied the civil rights movement and the fight for women’s rights. I lived through the fire hosing of black protesters in the South, watching it from afar in our parlor in Albany, New York, and the push to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Yet I felt equality was more an ideal than a reality. I experienced sexism, male managers more interested in picking me up than in the skills I brought to the job when I first entered the workforce after college.  I witnessed racism especially after meeting my husband who is African-American. I saw the inequality between classes, too, as a child of one of the poor families living in a suburb outside Albany.

I don’t feel white. I never have. I’ve always thought of myself as other, an outsider. My father was a first generation Italian-American who didn’t speak English until he attended St. Anthony’s Catholic School in downtown Albany. My mother was a protestant war bride from Sydney, Australia where my father was stationed during World War II. Neither one graduated from high school. As a child I felt on the fringe of mainstream white America, far afield from the clapboard houses with white picket fences shown on TV with mothers in starched aprons, high heels, and pearl necklaces, and fathers coming home after work in suits and ties, briefcases in hand.

In my house a boomerang hung over the kitchen threshold and a black plaster aborigine sat on the knickknack shelf in the parlor. The Infant of Prague statue, dressed in red and cream finery, stood at the center of my dresser top, a stuffed koala bear, made from real koala fur, next to it.

Ma wore housedresses and vinyl slippers and Dad came home with shirts soiled with newspaper print from handling bundles of papers in the mailroom where he worked. His face always had a five o’clock shadow, the whiskers making him look swarthy. He carried the afternoon newspaper, which he would read in its entirety that evening, folded under his arm.  He washed up and shaved a second time each day before coming to the dinner table.

Dad spent his weekends tinkering with the engine of the car he bought used and that he hoped to keep running for as many years as possible. Ma read novels, watched old movies and yelled at the kids in the neighborhood. “I’ll cut your bloody head off if you do that again,” she said when one boy threw dirt at the mutt we kept chained in the backyard. The police arrived soon after because the boy’s mother thought Ma meant it.

I looked different than the little children at the feet of the blond-haired, blue-eyed Christ in the picture on the wall of my Sunday school classroom. I had skin as white as snow, but my dark hair and amber eyes made me look foreign in comparison.

My parents were older than the parents of my schoolmates. Most people could not pronounce my last name.

We ate pasta and Italian bread to satisfy Dad or boiled dinners like ham and cabbage to please Ma’s palate.  I liked both with equal zeal. When I heard the neighbor tell my mother she grew up calling Italian bread “WOP bread,” I felt the same shame I felt when I heard other kids call Brazil nuts “nigger toes.” Even if I did not know what the words meant, I could hear how unclean the words were in the way they were spoken, spit out with disgust. When Ma lost her temper, she often said Italians were barbarians, trying to hurt and diminish Dad.  I don’t know if she understood how it made me feel, as if I were not as worthy as white children.

As an adult I learned my skin color afforded me certain invisible privileges in spite of ethnicity or class after I met my husband Ronald and witnessed how easily I blended into white society while he could not, or how we could not blend in when we were together. Our relationship, our marriage and our children indelibly sealed my sense of otherness in a white America.

Excerpt from Chapter 4 The Ghetto Will Follow You, Shades of Tolerance

Ronald, or Ronnie as his family called him, had pinch-able cheeks sitting up high under the biggest, saddest, dark brown eyes. Bertha would later claim he was her brightest skinned child, and chided him when he played golf as an adult and let the sun beat on his skin until it was so dark Cara and Mackenzie called him “blurple,” a combination of black and purple. He also had “good hair,” deep brown, soft, and delicately waved. He was small for his age and looked younger than his years.

From the time he was very little, he explained to me, he saw halos of color around every person: greens, blues, purples, oranges, yellows and reds.  He did not realize until he was much older that not everyone saw what he saw. He never considered it supernatural as I did when he first told me: a day in Bird Library at Syracuse University when I lost the necklace he had given me on my nineteenth birthday. I was standing outside the restroom in the library basement, blowing my nose and wiping my tears, when he came around the corner and hugged me.

“How did you know I was here?” I asked incredulously, “I was supposed to be in class.”

“I saw your aura – all purples and reds,” he said.

“You see auras?”

“It’s just the way I see,” he said, “I can see what people really look like. That’s why I want to draw them.”

I imagine him in childhood as often wearing a solemn expression – a combination of worry and anxiety. It must have made him look as if he bore the weight of his worries on his shoulders.

Yet he harbored a spark of mischief, a morsel of strength and knowing, and a sprinkle of infectious humor. His Grandma Nellie said, “That boy ain’t nothing but a desperado.”

I tell him, “You were mischievous – always getting into things.”

“Yup,” he says, grinning.

His problems, he told me, were curiosity and creativity. The solution, at least from his dad’s perspective, was to keep him still, to keep his creative energy and curiosity bottled up so they would not spill out as they often did.

The housing projects, lines of brick two-story apartments with tiny patches of lawn and concrete patios, covered one city block after another. The tenants were a mixture of race and ethnicity. Some of them had been displaced after the interstate went through the center of the city. The urban renewal initiative razed houses that were owned by a tight-knit community of blacks in the 15^th ward, and the interstate cut the city in half from north to south, leaving a distinct division between the neighborhoods dotting the west side of the city and those dotting the east side.  Other tenants were newly migrated families from the South, like the Hagans, or immigrants from other countries. A few of the Onondaga left the reservation in Nedrow and moved to the city, ending up in the projects as well. The men looked for work at General Electric, Carrier Corporation, Chrysler or Niagara Mohawk, the utility where Sylvester Sr. became the first black sub-station foreman in the 1970s. Some families, like the Hagans, were only there until they could afford better housing; others would live there for generations.

The projects were full of adventure and peril, if a young boy could get past his watchful parents’ eyes. Ronnie had an innate ability for wandering alone and watching all the people and activities happening around him.

The projects, he says, taught him early on that the line between childhood and adulthood was often blurred. I wonder why I never figured that out as a child, hyper-vigilant and responsible, but still thinking I was just a child.

Ronald says he saw children performing adult duties in the projects while being largely unsupervised – running to the store for bread and milk, parenting younger siblings, using sex as bargaining chips for drugs or a trip to the NY State Fair. Men sometimes remained trapped in juvenile foolhardiness – hanging out on the street corner, drinking booze from bottles hidden in paper sacks, snorting cocaine or smoking weed, shooting craps and running numbers, dogging women and girls alike for sex.

Some of the kids Ronald knew from the projects would spend their adult lives in the same place they spent their childhoods or they were in jail or dead. The machismo the boys wore like armor as children, they wore like battle scars as adults: gaunt faces, missing teeth, and wild, yellow eyes with bodies ravaged by alcohol, drugs and the hard life. Girls, their sexuality a gift of hope for a better life, matured into weary women with pendulous breasts and sagging stomachs, tired, cynical eyes, whining children pulling at dress hems, and purses filled with food stamps.

Ronald learned in the projects that adults were sometimes untrustworthy – they could hurt you or steal from you. Sometimes they acted like children or just crazy. Sometimes they tried to sell a kid drugs or they’d beat a kid up because they were chasing after the same thirteen-year-old girl. Sometimes people spilled out of their apartments, screaming at one another, kicking and punching and pumping hands in the air to make a point. Or they had weapons, knives or guns that they grabbed in the heat of the moment.

Ronnie saw this while he wandered through the neighborhood, often times after his brothers told him to go home because they didn’t want him around while they were playing with their friends.

He says he felt distant as if he were watching a movie, part of the audience but not part of the action. But sometimes he got pulled into the action, and then, he tells me, he would be right in the center of it.

“Poverty forces things out in the open because there’s nothing to hide behind,” he says. I understand how this belief, offered to me as fact, stated without reservation, has become a lens through which he views people and himself.

Excerpt from Shades of Tolerance Chapter 2 Bloody Mick

My sister Peggy, the oldest of the five Liuzzi children, was ten years old when I was born. Peggy recently told me she quickly realized Ma had no interest in taking care of me. She thought maybe Ma was overwhelmed or too tired, so she stepped in and made sure I was fed and changed. For the next eight years, she was more a mother than Ma. She would enter my life again when I most needed her as a teenager in an interracial relationship.

I was four when Peggy lost me, or, should I say, we lost track of one another.  Had I paid attention, I would have been right at her side. It was 1961, and she doesn’t recall the incident. Yet the panic and fear of those few minutes stayed with me.

The family was at Thatcher State Park, just outside of Albany, on a summer day. Peggy, tall in my eyes, with ash brown hair, hazel eyes behind cat’s eye glasses, pale skin and freckles across her nose, held my hand and took me over to a food stand to buy small cups of soda. She let go of my hand to carry the sodas back to our picnic table. Without her hand to guide me, I did not follow her. I stood in the crowd of shorts and skirt-covered legs and sandaled feet, overwhelmed by the size and number of adults. I grabbed a hand.

“Oh, my. Whom do you belong to?”

It was a lady’s voice, but not one I knew, and I was too shy to speak. I looked up at her. Her face seemed far away, and her cheeks, rosy with circles of blush, seemed to slide toward her chin as she looked down at me. Her Jackie O. sunglasses hid her eyes, making her seem alien and frightening.

“Where’s your mother?” she asked. I thought she sounded angry. I still held her hand. I pointed toward the picnic tables. “Let’s walk that way and see if we can find her.”

“There you are,” Peggy said, marching over and grabbing my hand. “Thank you. She didn’t follow me back from the stand.”

“Keep an eye on her,” the woman said, turning and walking back to her group of picnickers.

A nightmare haunted me after that incident. We were at Thatcher Park and Ma was calling me because it was time to go home. She stood under a large oak tree in her short-sleeved black dress with the white collar and white buttons on the bodice and sleeve caps, her silhouette all breasts and belly. I ran over, and she grabbed me. She pulled her face off, and underneath was her true face, that of a witch with a long crooked nose and craggy, green skin. I screamed. She took me back to her cave. Her longhaired scarecrow husband, dressed in denim overalls and a red and white plaid flannel shirt, sat cross-legged before a fire pit. A tin plate of food balanced on his knee. 

“Good stuff,” he said while chewing.

I stared, and the witch cackled.

“That’s your little brother. Now I’ll cook you for my dinner.”

She picked me up and held me over the fire pit. I kicked and screamed with all my might, and the flames licked my Keds.

But that was how it was with Ma and me. I always thought she regarded me as if I were covered in pricklers; and I always regarded her as the mother in my dream who devoured her young.

Peggy was born on November 4, 1947. Frank came two years later on October 4, 1949. He was chubby when he was young and drank skim milk instead of whole. His ears stuck out from the sides of his head, made worse, Ma said, because he wore a cowboy hat crushed down over his ears for the first six or seven years of his life.  I had a hard time pronouncing his name when I was little, something about the ‘f’ and ‘r’ troubled me, and I called him Winko.

Rocco was born five years later on Frank’s birthday in 1954. “Take him back,” Frank told my mother, “he’s not what I asked for.” Rocco was the baby Ma said she almost died having. He was the largest baby, and I always imagined he was too heavy to stay inside her tummy. She told the doctor at delivery that if he had to choose, he should save the baby. Ma had a sweet spot in her heart for Rocco, letting him put his feet in her lap so she could rub them. He was a child of few words but he knew how to use a pencil and drew for hours a day. His nose was broad and flat, and Ma said he was part Aborigine. I imagine Ma liked how the word Aborigine rolled off her tongue and how it caused any neighbor or stranger to whom she mentioned it to stare at her with wide eyes and open mouths. But I liked believing Rocco was part Aborigine, and when I was in elementary school, I announced it whenever I could fit it into conversation.

 I was born three years later on May 30, 1957 at 5:30 a.m. Ma’s abdominal muscles were so stretched by the time I came along that I languished sideways in her womb. The nurses piled rolled blankets at her sides to coax me down into the birth canal headfirst. Hearing Ma tell the story of my birth, I believed my turning headfirst into the birth canal was the first of many times in my life that I would do my best to please others. But there was no pleasing Ma, no offers to rub my feet, and I stopped trying early on. Princess was not a word she had used to describe me before the day she learned I was in love with a black man.

Andy was born one month before my fourth birthday on April 29, 1961. I remember Ma pregnant with Andy. I kicked her in the stomach while she washed my hair at the kitchen sink, her baby-filled tummy pressed against me, and she left a red handprint on my shoulder blade where she slapped me.