The Wall is Not a Thing

Most Americans don’t realize how many people actually work for the Federal Government.  The number is in the millions (2.7 million in 2014), and they represent a good portion of the middle class.  Right now, most of them are not being paid because of the government shutdown. They can’t pay their bills including mortgages, and are at risk of losing everything they’ve worked hard to buy.

Children whose parents rely on food stamps are also at risk.  So are farmers who rely on government loans to keep their farms viable. And what about the immigrant children who are being held in detention centers? The shutdown is catastrophic, not just for Democrats or liberals, but for millions of Americans, including a large number of Trump supporters. 

Two weeks ago, Trump held a meeting with Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer.  Trump announced he would be happy to carry the mantle of the shutdown. He would take full responsibility for it. Senator Schumer ducked his head and smirked. He knew well that Trump was caught on tape once again saying outrageous things.  Of course, Trump changed his tune early into the shutdown. He now calls it Pelosi’s shutdown or the Democratic shutdown. He has always used bait and switch as one of his strategies for getting what he wants (or what the powerbrokers like Putin, who are driving his policy stances, want). I think even his most loyal base is tiring of the game. It is hitting them squarely in their pocketbooks.  Many GOP Senators, who are up for election in 2020, are starting to back away from Trump and his rhetoric. It’s already been proven that they are at risk of being voted out, in spite of gerrymandered districts and voter suppression efforts. We all have to ask ourselves, do Trump and the GOP really have the best interests of America in mind when they cheat to win? I don’t think so. They have the interests of an elite group of Americans in mind, so they have to cheat to win.

I want to recommend a film and a short documentary series to my readers.

The first is the film Vice. It is a fictional account about the rise of Dick Cheney, from a drunken loser, to the most powerful vice president in the history of our country. I admit this film has a liberal slant, but, seriously, facts really are facts, despite what Kellyann Conway says, and if you look at what this man orchestrated in his career in Washington, along with other powerbrokers such as Don Rumsfeld, it will give you pause. During the GW Bush administration, 22 million emails were lost – it boggles the mind when one remembers how enraged GOP elected officials were over 32,000 emails belonging to Hillary Clinton that had already been vetted for security risks and mostly were personal emails about Chelsea’s pregnancy and other mundane topics. The Bush administration also conducted email exchanges on networks that did not record them for prosperity, because they didn’t want them recorded. Meetings were held in rooms where auto-record devices were not installed, and they were held without the president and without his knowledge.  Cheney abused his position again and again, and he started his power abuse back in the Nixon administration. Although there were dozens of investigations into the Bush administration, one can only wonder why there weren’t more investigations launched into the inner workings of this administration that lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and also made the stockholders of Halliburton wealthy beyond their dreams. Corruption in our government is not new, but we may discover it is at levels in the Trump administration that even the most power-hungry official could not envision.

But the path to this level of corruption was laid out a long time ago, across the world. It seems mankind can’t help but feel drawn to power and the abuse of it.

I say this as an introduction to my next recommendation, a documentary series on the Smithsonian TV channel titled Apocalypse: The Second World War. Ronald and I binge-watched this six part series last night. It is a must-see for anyone sixteen and older. The documentary used over 600 hours of declassified government film and film from private citizens taken during the war, and it was devastating to watch. This war was responsible for more deaths of soldiers and civilians than any other war in the history of mankind, and the number is in the tens of millions, maybe as high as 80 million. Historians estimate it wiped out 3% of the world population. 

Jews were left to starve in concentration camps or they were gassed en masse in gas chambers. Before the “final solution” was implemented, Jews were forced to dig their own graves and were shot while standing in them (and this horrific genocide was captured on film) – this method of genocide, later considered inefficient, was known as the Bullet Holocaust. There were millions of others who did not fit into the “master race” Nazis defined, and they were put to death, too. They included gypsies, homosexuals, political dissidents, and resistors.

Photo: Lt. Arnold E. Samuelson/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain

But the Germans weren’t the only ones who acted with depravity and without regard for human life. The Russians let 600,000 prisoners of war starve to death, rather than use food needed for troops. The Japanese were guilty of crimes against humanity for their treatment of prisoners of war and for civilians, particularly in China and the Philippines. Italy conscripted its army and forced young men to fight for a mad dictator. America interned Japanese Americans, many of whom had been US citizens for generations.

This war clearly demonstrated unchecked power is capable of the most depraved, horrific, and inhuman actions by mankind. After the war, trials were held, but many war criminals were given immunity and were allowed to start over. Many resettled in America. The United Nations and NATO were put in place to try to prevent another such war from ever happening.

But we are living in a time now where certain personalities are rising to power and they are at risk of abusing that power. Trump is one of them. He has often used the rhetoric used by Hitler and other demagogues and he has used hatred and fear to get his way.

He is saying he may invoke his power to call a national emergency and build the wall between the US and Mexico. It is a clear abuse of power. He has dehumanized people seeking asylum in the US by describing them as criminals, animals, vermin, and as individuals who would change America as we know it – not very different from the rhetoric Hitler used against the Jews. Horrific acts were committed based on that rhetoric and we should be alert to this fact and try not to repeat the past.

At least five attempts were made to assassinate Hitler as Germans in high positions realized the absolute decimation of humanity the implementation of such rhetoric caused. Such failed attempts only caused Hitler to believe more strongly that God had placed him in power and was protecting him.

When people are experiencing hard times and they feel helpless to change their circumstances, someone like Trump or Hitler can come along and take advantage of that fear.  They needle away at racial and ethnic biases and give desperate people someone to take out their frustration and hatred upon. 

We’ve seen this at Trump rallies and in videos shared on social media. People feel more emboldened to act out against “the enemy” because Trump told them they could. Slowly, more and more inhumane acts become acceptable, including children being snatched away from their parents and imprisoned in camps or people of color being policed by white citizens because the white citizens believe people of color have no right to be in public spaces.

We have to stop this. We can’t continue on this path of hatred and genocide. Two children dying at the hands of authority are two children too many. Their deaths are imprinted on our souls.  If Trump has his way, we will be the ones burdened by our own hand in this atrocity. 

The wall is not a thing. Roger Stone made it up as a sound bite to rile the base, and it worked. No one ever expected Mexico to pay for the wall, or even to use taxpayers’ money to build it. In fact, it appears Trump is the only one left thinking the wall must be built. The number of illegal immigrants crossing the borders has decreased steadily since 2010. The only people coming now are seeking asylum from danger and violence in their own countries. We ought to open our arms to them, not build a wall.

Not only this, but Trump has also tried to denigrate the United Nations and NATO. He may very well destroy the pacts between countries that have so far kept us from another war like World War II.

We need to understand that power is corrupting to certain personalities.  Trump is one such person.  If we don’t understand and acknowledge the past and stand against such corruption now, early in the process, we may not be able to stop it in the future. 

The wall is not a thing. 

The Ugly American

I first remember hearing this phrase when I was in my teens, back in the 1970s. Originally it was the title of a novel published in 1958 and a film released in 1963, starring Marlon Brando. According to Wiki, The Ugly American “depicts the failures of the US diplomatic corps, whose insensitivity to local language, culture and customs and refusal to integrate was in marked contrast to the polished abilities of East bloc diplomacy and led to Communist diplomatic success overseas.”

The term is apropos in today’s social and political contexts.

When I see the hatred and vitriol spewed from the likes of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, and Carly Fiorini, my stomach turns. Worse is the rabid applause and cheers from their supporters. Trump’s supporters attacked a Black Lives Matter protester at an Alabama campaign stop.

But it doesn’t stop there.  Hatred and fear ooze like toxic waste over the landscape of our country. It is overwhelming but it is also deadly and violent.

My husband Ronald and I went to see the movie Trumbo. For those who don’t know who Dalton Trumbo was, he was one of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood, that is, until the House Un-American Activities Committee charged him with being a Communist.

It was a dark time in our history. The Cold War was raging, and America became paranoid. That meant people who did not share the very narrow definition of patriotism were subjected to investigation and possible prison sentences. Trumbo was one of many who served a sentence. Many of the accused weren’t Hollywood royalty but regular folk like teachers and firefighters. Some lost their careers, their homes, their families, and even their lives.

The House Un-American Activities Committee conducted these investigations from 1938 – 1975. Neighbors turned in neighbors, friends turned in friends, and many people believed that doing so protected the freedoms we so often take for granted in this country.

But the opposite occurred, because our First Amendment Right that guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of religion was under attack.

Trumbo said, “Democracy means that people can say what they want to. All the people. It means that they can vote as they wish. All the people. It means that they can worship God in any way they feel right, and that includes Christians and Jews and voodoo doctors as well.”

Today we are dangerously close to repeating history. Some GOP candidates have called for the shutting down of Mosques and even internment of all Muslims. Today Donald Trump announced his new proposal that would prevent ALL Muslims from entering this country, even American citizens who travel outside the country.

One of his supporters, standing in line to watch Trump speak in Mount Pleasant, NC, said of Muslim Americans, ”Ship them all out.”

Historically, we have done this before.  We interred Japanese Americans during WWII, some of whom had been Americans for generations. Jim Crow systematically segregated and contained black Americans through socio-economic oppression and meted out violent and deadly retribution on those who did not comply. The Trail of Tears, the forced migration of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations from their ancestral lands in the Southeast to Oklahoma, led to thousands of Native Americans perishing during the arduous journey.

It’s important to remember that every new wave of immigration in our country caused paranoia and fear. Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrants were all considered dangerous to “the American way of life.”

What is the “American way of life” if it does not include the diversity of our citizens and a mainstream culture that is the melange of multicultural and sub-cultural contributions?

We are not a white country. We are not a Christian country. We are a country that is predominately of Euro-ethnic heritage, the majority of which are Christian, but that does not represent all of us.

Whenever a whole group of individuals is demonized we are hurting our country and our citizens. In this case, because many people refuse to be inclusive and, instead, feed their own paranoia and fear, we are letting extreme Islamic terrorists win. They count on irrational responses, and there are many Americans who are more than willing to comply.

In addition such hatred, fear, and paranoia feed the virulent hate of a growing group of radicalized white citizens who perpetrate their own terrorist acts against other Americans, such as the murder of nine black worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and the murder of three and injury of nine at the Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs. America is amnesic on these terrorist acts because the San Bernardino terrorist act better fits a narrative that includes arming more citizens rather than passing common sense gun control and blaming one group of people for terror in our country.

The ugly Americans: people applauding the murders of unarmed black men; turning their backs on Syrian refugees who are fleeing unimaginable circumstances; shouting their hatred of fellow Americans who choose to worship or not worship in ways that are not congruent with fundamental Christianity.

What’s worse is the hatred directed toward President Obama at this time when we should be standing united behind him. How dare Donald Trump, or any of the other candidates, think he can out strategize the President when he doesn’t have access to the information the President has nor the large number of experts advising him.

I can’t see how that will help us stay safe, especially when we don’t share the same definition of what it means to be safe. There is a sector of America who believes safety lies in removing everyone who doesn’t fit the narrow and untrue definition of American – white and Christian, in whatever manner it takes to get rid of them.

How can we discover who the radicals are when we are busy damning whole groups of people, most of whom are innocent?

President Obama said, “When we travel down that road [of discrimination] we lose.”

Albert Einstein once said,  “Insanity is doing something over and over and expecting different results.” We are dangerously close to repeating history and the outcome won’t be different.

The Ugly American 

Polar Vortex

Shut the door. Not that it lets in the cold but that it lets out the cozyness.

The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.

~ Mark Twain

This reader’s letter appeared in my hometown newspaper on January 28, 2014:

Reading the constant barrage of letters from those who vilify the current governor, state legislature and conservatives and Republicans in general makes me wonder if there is any hope left for this country.

After 100 years of Democratic-controlled government in North Carolina, with all its catering to special interests, crooked politicians, hiring of donors and spending the state into massive debt, these idiots rail against bringing back fiscal responsibility and trying to slow down the growth of government as something terrible. They continue to defend Barack Obama, the dictator-in-chief, who is the most incompetent, radical, dishonest, unlawful and dangerous America-hating person ever to occupy the White House. He has done more in five years to destroy our coveted American way of life, as well as America's standing in the world, to increase the national debt and to ignore the Constitution than all his predecessors.

Those outside of this country, many of whom risk their lives to try to come here, must wonder what kind of mental illness is overcoming America, and surely the Founding Fathers must be rolling in their graves. Obama and his merry band of radicals in the White House and in Congress threaten the very existence of the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world.

I pray that enough Americans are as concerned as I am and will vote accordingly this November. Take back the Senate and send Sen. Harry Reid back to the desert!

~ WILLIAM C. SIDES JR., Clemmons

This is a bad time of year for me. My brain is always on fast-forward during the coldest, darkest months of the year, and this year exceeded cold expectations. The problem is the day-to-day time doesn’t accelerate to catch up. It leaves me hanging out there, twirling in the polar vortex. 

I’m having strange dreams again, too.  I’m moving and hired the worst moving crew. They stomp mud into the house as they carry their straps, tarps, and boxes in. Then, without moving a single item, they sit at the table and take a break. They order pizza that looks like cake and point out tiles that are buckling away from the wall, the grout between them gooey and oozing. I double-pay the pizza delivery guy who drives away on a scooter before I can correct my error. I decide it doesn't matter, so I sit down and share pizza with the movers.

In another dream people from my past confront me. We offended one another and now they want to correct the record. But I don’t want to change anything because the story cannot and should not be edited. Accept what was and don’t alter the truth, I beseech them. They are in my face, one after the other, demanding an altered story and a happy ending.

I used to be forgiving. I believe I still am, but I feel the tug of indecision and the arrival of forgiveness taking longer and longer. I wonder how that has diminished or changed who I am.

One day, after an exhausting foray into local and national news and the burn of several interactions with people who claim allegiance to their Southern heritage that includes segregation, violence, suspicion, and hatred, I gave myself permission to not like someone if he appears unreasonable and if he directly affects the quality of my life. I used to drag them all along with me, unwilling to leave them behind, but now I don’t. I leave them where they are. I say, let them wallow in the misery of their heritage. No progress for them. They want to protect their "coveted American way of life." They choose to take America back, but I refuse to go backwards.

Sounds harsh. They are harsh, too, when they fling their insults and hatred in my direction because I am interracially married. Even worse is when they reach for their guns and point them at those people they believe are trying to take their freedoms away, or rather, if they were honest, their privileges away.

I don’t see good intent, honesty, and love in their actions.

Yet I haven’t condemned them “back to the desert.” Can’t we live in harmonious proximity instead of arming up or shrieking lies and rhetoric? But they won’t stop.

I see their fear. Fear makes people do terrible things. Why are they so afraid?

So many of them claim God is in control yet that belief does not allay their fear. Let go let God I’ve often heard. But they don’t trust God either. Else why are they intervening on His behalf and in His name? I pity them.

This letter also appeared on the readers’ page of my local paper on Thursday, January 30, 2014:

I think that dropping all charges against those law-breakers of the Moral Mondays group was a dumb thing to do (“Charges dropped against 50 protesters,” Jan. 23).

They should be made to pay the state back all of the extra money that it cost to pay the police for all the extra time and money that it cost the taxpayers for protests that are in my opinion useless, because they are too sorry to get out and work for a living, instead of always wanting something for nothing!

HAROLD DYSON, Clemmons

I wish I could figure out what planet these people live on: where hatred, fear, segregation, and violence are the answers to their questions; where there are hordes of lazy people living off the good and righteous "white" people; where guns are the answer to a question that never needed to be asked in the first place.

I don’t want to live there. I don’t care if they live by their worldview as long as they accept that I live by a different worldview. That’s how I changed, when I realized they would not change. Facts don’t matter. Content of character doesn’t matter. Accomplishment doesn’t matter. Humanity doesn’t matter. Fear of the loss of privilege matters. They can only see and hear and experience what they want to believe. 

We didn’t invade their world. Their world is our world. We’ve always been here. They didn’t see us; they didn’t hear us; they didn’t acknowledge us. Now we refuse to be invisible or silent or acquiescent. We are women and men and children, of diverse sexual orientations, people of color (neither "black" nor "white"), interracial, interethnic,  religiously free and tolerant, poor and middle class, liberal and centrist, abled and disabled, progressive and hopeful, stewards of the earth and of each other.

We don’t want something for nothing. We don’t want a free ride. We don’t want great wealth. We want jobs that pay a living wage, equality in the workplace and in our neighborhoods and institutions, access to affordable healthcare and education, environmental safety and protection, and a path to improve the quality of our lives if that is what we choose. That’s the world I want to live in, but the polar vortex is descended upon us, and I am twirling in the whiteout.

President Obama delivering the SOTUS. Far from the dictator-in-chief that some view him as, I see him as a sign of hope and change.

Ghosts 'N Guns

My girlfriends and I sat in a circle in the finished basement family room at my friend Gail’s house on a summer day just weeks before ninth grade began.  Each one of us outdid the one before in relating a scary tale. Gail began her story, and suddenly in mid-sentence she stopped, took a sharp breath, and her eyes grew round as she stared over my left shoulder. Her sudden silence and wide eyes caused me to scream and jump right out of my chair. Her fabrication made my fear no less real.

That is what it feels like this week, another week of ghost stories, another week of shooting, this time near Texas A&M University. Five people were shot and three killed, including the gunman and a constable, who had knocked on the door to serve an eviction notice. What are we so afraid of?

How many more shootings will occur before we cannot tolerate the violence? When will we rise together instead of pushing apart to find a peaceful solution? When will we replace rhetoric and politics with compassion and safety for everyone? When will we ban assault weapons for civilian use? When will we finally say that the collateral damage rendered in the push to support the right to bear arms, the thousands of people who die each year by gunshot, is more precious and more important than the personal freedom to bear arms?

I’d rather deal with ghosts than the specter of human hatred and fear that drives people to want to kill others. And it isn’t just psychotic people, though maybe believing that makes it easier to swallow. There is something growing like a weed in our society. It grows unwieldy and strong on hatred, divisiveness, the quest for individual freedoms, and survivalist instinct. Instead of calling for everyone to disarm and preserve human life, more people are arming up and declaring their intentions to shoot and kill.

I feel like our whole sense of community and the greater good has been replaced by individual freedoms and the desire to do whatever anyone wants to do, no matter that it might harm others. Text while driving? Why not? Shoot someone just for walking through a neighborhood? Why not? Plan and execute a mass shooting to show utter disregard for humanity? Why not? Decide ignorance of another culture is reason enough to shoot and kill others to show one’s hatred and fear? Why not? Can’t pay your rent and take it out on the people who happen to be in your way when you decide to express your anger and frustration with a gun? Why not?

I am so saddened by the tragedies of the past few weeks.  But I know it is the ghost stories that are fueling this particular brand of fear.  The fear that whites will lose their position of power and wealth, as if we all had it to begin with and are more deserving and entitled than the rest of the world; the fear that America will grow more diverse as more people from different cultures and religions move here; the fear that gay unions and independent, self-actualized women will ruin marriage as we know it; and the fear that middle class Americans are quickly losing economic ground.

I was afraid of more than just ghosts as a child. I was also terrified of the dark; spiders; strangers; fire; cigarettes (Ma smoked); certain foods like condiments, beer (Ma drank), and seafood; and new situations. These were all manifestations of the real situation that was the basis of my fears – living in an unstable home with an alcoholic mother.

That’s how it is today. People’s fear is manifested in the form of minorities, terrorists, criminals, and gay couples. What everyone is really afraid of is that we are all losing ground and our lives don’t feel stable or safe.  Who do we blame?

The truth is that corporations, people in the eyes of some politicians, are telling ghost stories while sending jobs overseas and pocketing profits and bonuses. The truth is we were always diverse, and we need to acknowledge that fact and stop pretending some people are better and more deserving than others. The truth is that minorities in America, whether they are black, Sikh, Muslim, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, women, or gay, want the same things that the majority (meaning those wielding power and position in our society) wants – the pursuit of happiness, the right to live their lives, and the right to embrace cultural aspects of their heredity, for example, the way Irish-Americans celebrate St. Paddy’s Day, in relative safety. The truth is the institution of marriage is fast becoming irrelevant in this society where women are sexually objectified and men are just “baby daddy.” We’ve lost the sense of love and family that grows between two people who face the world as one and who help each other weather the storms life brings us.  We fail to recognize that gay couples are trying to preserve and participate in this institution, not destroy it. They may be its best hope.

Politicians tell ghost stories, too, or they repeat ones they’ve heard. They make people feel desperate and scared, and they like it that way. If you are afraid of ghosts, you won’t have time to look at what they are really doing, like the Republicans (I’m a proud liberal) who hope to take away your stable retirement income and the health care that you have paid into since you started working. They pretend you won’t be part of the group losing these entitlements, but you will be, and they hope you won’t notice because they’ve made you afraid of the “others,” the ghosts who are unknown and unseen but that you begin to surmise who they are based on who looks or acts differently than you.

There are reasons to be afraid. Life is hard and bad things happen to good and bad people. Not many people live a life without sadness and struggle. But we need to be afraid of the right things, the things that can really hurt us, and take the right action, the one that does least harm.

As a child I had ways of dealing with my imagined fears – I sprayed spiders with hairspray or ran screaming from the room. I slept with the covers over my head. I avoided strangers and strange places. I repeatedly washed my hands if I came in contact with the foods or cigarettes to which I had such a strong aversion. I had panic attacks that stole my breath and dizzied me.  I paced the floor and imagined different and better times. But none of those things fixed the thing that really frightened me – Ma’s alcoholism and all the bad things that came with it: the arguments between my parents; Ma threatening to leave or to commit suicide; and my sense that I was not worthy of a mother who loved me enough to want to stay. I was but a child and couldn’t have fixed it anyway nor did I understand that Ma had her own fears that overwhelmed.

And that’s what we need to understand about everyone today. We each have our own fears, real or imagined, that we must contend with. How can we do that without harming others? How can we do that with respect and recognition that we are individuals in this collective we call America, and we all have a right to be here, no matter how we got here in the first place or where we came from or how we identify ethnically, religiously, and culturally.

We held a pretend séance when I was around ten. I led the parents and younger siblings into the neighbor’s basement and offered them chairs. Then I stood in the back, my face stern, and my arms crossed over my chest. When no one was looking, I pulled the fishing lines attached to objects to make them levitate. My neighbor David was the medium, and he sported a golden turban as he summoned the ghosts. My brother Rocco hid under a tarp and spoke through a length of garden hose to make his voice sound otherworldly. In our imaginative play we exorcised the spirits with an audience applauding our effort.

I wish we could exorcise the ghosts that plague us today and be rid of some of our imaginary fears, the ones that motivate some people to arm up with the intent to shoot and kill. Maybe then we could face the things we really need to be afraid of and find a way for everyone to live in safety.

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

Do the Right Thing

Ronald and I went to a movie early this evening, a late matinee, so it was dusk when we left the theater. We were holding hands, just like always.  There were few people outside the theater. A car drove past us, and the white teen in the back seat turned and stared at us as the car passed. Then the white female driver cut the car hard right, pulled up just ahead of us, and slammed the breaks on. We didn’t quite know what to think, so we crossed the parking lot behind the car, still holding hands. Suddenly the car turned left, in our direction, and slammed the breaks again. We kept walking, but we heard the tires cut hard on the tarmac, and the car turned directly at us, speeding up, and missing us by inches from behind. I scooted forward but Ronald held his ground, as the teen in the backseat yelled some racial profanity as they drove off.

“People think that doesn’t happen anymore,” he said as we walked toward our car. But I know it does, and I was scared. It happened just weeks ago when some white teenagers decided they wanted to kill a nigger.

I keep asking myself why anyone would care that we are together. Or why people care if they see a gay couple. Or why they think Chaz Bono will corrupt family values because he went on Dancing with the Stars. How would any of that matter to someone else?

We had just talked about it last night when we went out to dinner. As the hostess seated us, we felt the eyes of the group of white people, who were sitting at a large table we had to pass, on us. Ronald said he was tired of it. Thirty-five years tired. Most days it doesn’t compute. We don’t waste a moment’s time caring what other people think, and then it slaps us silly one day when we aren’t paying attention. Like when that car veered toward us.

“I would have taken care of it,” he said to me in the car. He protects me. He’s always done that. He makes me feel safe, assures me he wouldn’t let anything happen to me. Not told me about the things that might scare me, like when he was inside a large apartment building that was engulfed in flames, and his air hose disconnected. He became disoriented. He would have gone down if one of the other men hadn’t slammed him up against the wall and reconnected his hose. I only found out because I heard him in the other room, weeks after the big fire, telling his dad. But he didn’t tell me. He didn’t want me to know he could die on the job.

I was staring out the passenger window as we pulled out of the theater parking lot, trying to calm my breathing, trying to stop my mind from imagining what might have happened. Knowing that he would have kept us safe, but wondering if that would have meant he or someone else would have gotten hurt.

“Don’t sweat the one that didn’t get you,” he said. My heart kept beating against my chest. I won’t ever get used to people who hate others and want to do something about it.  It scares the bejesus out of me. I don’t think of people that way, because I don’t think that way. But there they are, staring me in the face, threatening assault.

 (Excerpt from essay Keep Hope Alive)

I felt that same fear in the undercurrent of complaints about Obama. No one but a white supremacist could say his hatred was due to Obama being black. Ronald said, “It’s a good thing Michelle is black. Whites would think he overstepped his bounds if he married a white woman, and he wouldn’t have a chance of getting elected.” He still feels the disdain from some white men for his perceived overstepping of boundaries even though we’ve been together for thirty-five years.

Others claimed Obama was not qualified. Some said he could not understand the common man because of his Harvard education or the manner in which he spoke. They forgot that President George W. Bush was from one of the wealthiest families in America and graduated from both Yale and Harvard. Many of the people who complained Obama did not understand them, felt simpatico with Bush. Some said Obama was a Muslim, and that somehow made him unqualified in this country founded on religious freedom. Some said he was not born here. All lies.  They could not imagine a black man leading their country.

Obama would come to know the incredible pressure of being the first black president of the United States, a pressure that must come with the feeling that any personal failure is a failure for the whole race in other people’s eyes. I told Ronald that he did not want to be the first black officer on the Syracuse Fire Department.  A few of the top officers believed he had the skill and drive to be the first. I think he knew that first individual would face unprecedented tests of perseverance and resilience. His brother-in-law was that person, the first black lieutenant in the one-hundred-year history of the Syracuse Fire Department. The weariness in his face, the fatalism in his voice, spoke of the weight of carrying the future of black firefighters on his shoulders. I see it in Ronald’s face, too, as one of the first black firefighters on the force after the consent decree. He and his black brothers made the naming of the first black lieutenant possible. If they had failed, would any other black men or women ever have the opportunity to follow?

But on that day in Charlotte, waiting in line for hours [to see presidential candidate Obama], passing through the metal detectors, emptying my pockets, and getting wanded by security, I was excited, hopeful.  I wanted to believe all the struggles my husband had been through in his twenty-five years as a firefighter, and all the struggles millions of other black men and women had been through, had helped to change the way our country viewed people of color. I wanted to believe we were living in a post-racial society.

I was scared, too.  The one thing I worried about most, being married to a black man, was that some crazy, white cop would mistakenly identify him as a suspect just because he was a black male. Forget the height, weight and age description of the suspect; one black man looked like all others through some eyes. Poll black men, and most of them will tell you they have been arrested at least once.  Esteemed scholar and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested at his own home on July 20, 2009 when police arrived to investigate a possible break-in. I understood and felt his disbelief and outrage: a man in his fifties who walked with a cane not recognized by his own neighbors in daylight and accosted by police at his own front door.

Ronald’s arrest was a misdemeanor for trespassing. (See post Tar Baby of Racial Discourse, August 3, 2011)

…

I was scared Senator Obama would face the same trials as my husband, but on a grander scale.  Would some crazy person, believing he was preserving the America he envisioned, do harm to Obama? “Your president” my husband would hear in the years after the election as if Obama only represented a portion of America.

“Who’s the leader of the white people?” I asked at a diversity training session back in the late 1990s when one of the white males in the group called Jesse Jackson “the black leader” as if there were only one capable and only one necessary.

“Bill Clinton,” he responded smugly.

I supported Jesse Jackson both times he ran as a Democratic primary candidate. I joined the Rainbow Coalition and passed out campaign literature. I saw him both times he appeared in Syracuse, the first time pregnant with my twins, holding my arms protectively out in front of me so the crowd could not crush them. “Pregnant woman, make way,” I said as I pushed my way to the front of the crowd.

The second time, the girls were around four and I wanted to take them, but Ronald thought the crowds would be too much for them. At the end of his speech Jackson asked all the children to join him on the stage. “Keep hope alive!” he called out over and over. I cried because Cara and Mackenzie were not there. I was in the front row with my union steward colleagues even though I had moved on to a management position.

Maybe the time was not right for Jesse Jackson. Maybe he was too militant for some. Maybe the history of black/white relations was still an open wound in America. But I thought he was a beacon of light for hope and change. I saw his opportunity pass, though, when he became a caricature of himself; his message sounding tired to the next generation who already believed racism was part of the past, a selective amnesia. Then, despite his “wide, deep, and unequivocal” support of Senator Obama, he was overheard saying Obama was talking down to black churchgoers.  Was Obama too white for some blacks and too black for some whites? How black is too black? How white is too white?

“You don’t sound black,” Ronald has been told over and over.

“How can I not sound black?” he responds. “I’m black. This is how I sound.”

American mainstream culture is indelibly and distinctively defined by the presence of black culture.  Rock and roll, jazz, zydeco, rap, tap, and modern dance are uniquely American and uniquely influenced by black culture. Why couldn’t Obama be judged as just an American? Why did people think of him as the black candidate?

“They’ll think of you as black,” Ronald told our daughters when they got accepted the spring before their senior year of high school to attend a predominately white dance conservatory located in the Southeast.  The faculty was all white except for the occasional visiting instructor. Ronald wanted to prepare them for their first contact with racist belief that was entwined tightly in common everyday occurrences and interactions. They had attended urban public schools that were fifty percent ethnic minority through the end of their junior year of high school. Their group of friends billed themselves the “beige girls” and the group consisted of mixed-race and mixed-ethnic girls, all light-skinned, but still brown.

Cara and Mackenzie hadn’t believed him. They thought he was describing how things were when he was young. But within a few months of arriving at the school, both were calling and complaining.

“One of the teachers told me I looked like an Ailey dancer,” Cara said. “So she was saying I look like a black dancer, not that I look like a dancer.”

“Some of the white students are afraid of us,” Mackenzie said. “They thought because we are black and from New York we must be carrying box cutters. I told them we are middle-class kids just like they are.”

The unofficial and exclusively American one-drop rule that defined anyone with African ancestry as a Negro was codified into law in the 1924 Racial Integrity Act in Virginia. Other states passed similar laws. In the 1940s the Registrar of Statistics in Virginia counted mixed-race families as black. His reasoning was "two races as materially divergent as the White and Negro, in morals, mental powers, and cultural fitness, cannot live in close contact without injury to the higher." He had his office recode people as colored without notifying them of the change. The effort drastically affected people’s ability to socialize, worship, earn a living or choose where to live.

The anti-miscegenation law banning interracial marriage, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 and the one-drop rule were all found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the case Loving vs. Virginia in 1967. Ronald and I met nine years later in 1976. South Carolina and Alabama would continue to carry anti-miscegenation laws on the books until 1998 and 2000 respectively.

Family, friends and strangers tried to convince Ronald and me our relationship was doomed for failure. They let us know their disdain, or told us having children was irresponsible, or that birds of a feather flocked together. Once when Ronald traveled with me on a business trip, we were walking down the sidewalk, our hands clasped, when a large white man leaned toward us, shaking his head in disgust, and said, “Shame on you.” Did he know we were together for more than twenty-five years at that time with two wonderfully smart and talented twin daughters? Did he know our marriage had beaten divorce statistics?

What if Obama’s parents had decided having children was irresponsible?

Fighting Fires

Where were you on 9/11/01? It is a day that many of us won’t soon forget.   I particularly remember the overwhelming fear, sadness, and dread I felt as I watched the firefighters. They were the people running into the World Trade Center buildings where death and mayhem reigned. Over three hundred of them would die that day, others in the years to come, and many others would suffer permanent physical, mental and emotional damage. I worried that Ronald, a Syracuse firefighter, would be called to go down to New York City for the search and recovery work. My selfishness was only exceeded by my fear.

I read an interesting article today on ABCNews.com (http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/firefighter-ptsd-suicide/story?id=14466320) titled Firefighter PTSD, Depression and Suicide – Helping the Helpers. It talks about the high rates of PTSD, depression and suicide among firefighters, mostly not recognized or acknowledged before 9/11. I know about this intimately. Ronald, now a retired fire lieutenant, was exposed to constant death and danger on the job for twenty-five years, unimaginable for most of us. As one of the first black firefighters in Syracuse after a federal consent decree ordered the department to align hiring practices with city demographics, he was also exposed to the closed and racist culture of firefighting, where outsiders were not welcome.

I respect the work firefighters perform for us. It’s a call of duty and service for many, Ronald included. But I know this, firefighters are human and they suffer the attendant failings, fears and weaknesses of all of us. That they still put their lives in danger so that we may be safe is not only astounding, but we forever owe them our gratitude, respect and understanding.

What you read next may make you wonder how I can feel that way, but believe me when I tell you that we humans are a complicated, perplexing bunch, not easily described in black and white but in many shades.

(Excerpt from Chapter 7, The Ubiquitous They, Shades of Tolerance)

The Syracuse City Fire Department had a history of being staffed with white firefighters. Prior to 1981 blacks constituted less than one percent of the force. The department was mostly made up of Irish-American and Italian-American men whose fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins and grandfathers had been firefighters. The U.S. Justice Department and the city of Syracuse filed separate actions in 1978 for non-representation of the community demographics on its force. In 1980 a consent decree was issued to align hiring practices of blacks to reflect the community racial makeup. The department demographic was to consist of at least 10 percent ethnic minorities. By 2004, two years before Ronald’s retirement from the force, the percentage of black firefighters was at 16.5 percent while the community was 25 percent black.

 Two white men filed reverse racial discrimination claims in 2005 that stated the department hired from two lists, a white list and a black list. They purported the department had passed them over for recruits selected from the black list who had the same scores as the two white men. White firefighters posted the test scores of the new black recruits on the official fire department bulletin boards in every station. They supported the reverse discrimination suit. The court dismissed the claims in 2010.

The facts above are about faceless men and percentages, but Ronald would become one of the first black firefighters after the consent decree was issued.

He decided to take the firefighters civil service exam in 1980. He had talked about becoming a state trooper, and I told him I thought he might get killed in a job like that. Then he talked to a state trooper to find out when the exam was scheduled, and the trooper told him they did not want recruits like him. Ronald knew he meant blacks were not welcome on the force, so he signed up for the firefighters exam. The irony of his wanting to become a firefighter after I expressed my fear about the danger of being a state trooper was not to be lost on me, particularly after the fatal fire near the university just two years before.  His longing for this kind of dangerous job surprised me at first. I saw him as the artist and musician, not the alpha male type, but Ronald’s complex nature fascinated me.

Ronald scored well on the statewide exam and was selected for the July 1981 class of firefighter trainees. The class, the first selected after the consent decree, had thirty new firefighters: fifteen white men and fifteen black men.

During training one of the chiefs told Ronald that he believed Ronald might very well become the first black fire lieutenant in the history of the department. He told him he was impressed with his skills and how quickly he learned. Ronald was skeptical.

The chief was wrong. Ronald would become the third black lieutenant, resisting the pull to be first. I always told him it was because he knew, deep down in his gut, the other firefighters would have made it impossible for him to become the first.

What Ronald came to experience was that the chief’s enthusiasm for his future on the department would make the white firefighters, who had brothers or sons or nephews waiting to join, resent him.

He was assigned to one of the busiest stations in the city, Station 8 on the south side. The chief had indicated that the experience he would gain working at such a busy station was critical to reaching his potential as a future officer. Ronald stopped over a few days before his first shift, and the firefighters on duty were aloof. He quickly toured the station and left.

On his first day, he pressed his uniform with its newly sewn on patches. He buffed his black steel-toed shoes and pinned on his badge. He was firefighter number 429 – it would take us twenty-six years to realize that Cara and Mackenzie were born on the same day, April 29^th, as his badge number. We noticed one day as we walked toward the car, two years after he retired, and saw the vanity plate with the Maltese Cross, the universal symbol of firefighters, and his badge number. He would think of the coincidence as simple serendipity.  I would believe it was a sign of predestination, even if we had taken so long to notice it.

When he arrived at the fire station, Ronald reported to his officer. Lieutenant Andy Schaffer was the kind of firefighter who figured if he did not have time to put his air mask on, so what? It was just smoke. He had a large horse-like face, cratered and pocked skin, and thick gray hair that raged all over his head. He was referred to as touched, but then again, a lot of the old “smoke eaters” were touched. Ronald had heard stories about them during training.

“You know you niggers can’t help how you are,” Lieutenant Schaffer said to Ronald at the breakfast table after the morning equipment check.

“Really?” Ronald asked.

One of the other firefighters put his beefy arms on the table, stared at Ronald, and tipped his crew cut toward him.

“We don’t want you niggers here,” he said. “I’ll do everything I can to make sure you don’t make it. I’m a union steward, but I won’t represent you ever.”

Ronald left his first day angry and discouraged, but he also knew he would not let anyone stop him. He bought firefighting manuals and studied them on his time off. He memorized the pocketbook of city street names and maps. At the station, though, he read Drum Magazine, a magazine dedicated to professional musicians. He did not want the other firefighters to know he was studying.

Within a month of Ronald being at Station 8, Lieutenant Schaffer started calling him his “little Brillo head.” He would pass behind Ronald, place his arm around his neck and rub his knuckles across the top of his head.

Firefighting is a fraternal brotherhood. Oftentimes when off duty, each station shift hung out together, playing sports, drinking, socializing. If a firefighter chose not to engage in activities outside of work, he was looked upon unfavorably, as if he might not rise to the occasion if one of his brothers was in imminent danger. But things got worse when Ronald joined the Fire Department Bowling League. I went with him one night to watch him play, the only woman at the alley.

As I sat at the table behind the lanes, I shifted under the stares, my cheeks feeling warm.

“I don’t think they like me,” I said to Ronald.

“It’s me they don’t like and us,” he said.

The atmosphere degraded as the evening progressed.  The firefighters became unruly, drinking one beer after another, leaning in to one another, making comments while staring back at me, then laughing. A heavy set middle-aged firefighter staggered up to the lane when it was his turn to bowl. He picked up his ball off the rack and swayed with the weight of it. He turned toward the pins, his elbows bent, the ball centered at his chest. He bent slightly and his pants fell to his ankles, boxers and all. The men all laughed and turned to see my reaction. I had turned away.

“They’re all pigs,” I said to Ronald.

(Excerpt from Chapter 8, Watch Our Show, Shades of Tolerance)

Ronald heard more insidious remarks about our daughters and me at the fire station: jokes about how I’d “figure it out one day,” and run off with a “suit,” one of the white male mangers they imagined I worked with; they joked we would never need a babysitter because all we would have to do is wet the girls’ lips and stick them to the wall; they called them zebras; and then there was the officer who told Ronald he should have stuck our two-year-olds in a cab and gotten his ass to work the day Ronald’s car broke down on the way to the babysitter and then the fire station; another white firefighter got angry that Ronald called him to let him know he would relieve him by official changeover at six p.m. but would not make the unofficial relief time of four p.m. because he was driving his daughters to a summer dance program in another city. “Tell your lazy kids to get up off their asses and stop inconveniencing me,” the firefighter had said.

“He might as well have said ‘black asses.’ I know exactly what he meant,” Ronald said in the car as we drove back to Syracuse. He arrived at the station well before six, pulled the firefighter aside, stuck his face close to his, put his finger on his chest, and said, “Don’t ever talk about my daughters like that again. You don’t know anything about them and you don’t have a right to an opinion.”

Sometimes he retaliated. “You better watch your daughter,” he told one white firefighter. “White girls love black guys, and she might come home with one.”

The seeds of Ronald’s depression were planted in childhood, and they would thrive at the fire department.  Facing a litany of jeers, racist remarks, disrespect and pranks meant to make him look bad, I wondered how he didn’t blow up at the lot of them. He did, about six years into the job, soon after he was transferred to Squad, an elite and coveted placement that served as a steppingstone to becoming an officer.

One of the officers there wore a swastika on his uniform collar; the other firefighters asked him daily if he was ready to put in his voluntary transfer papers since they did not want him there. One night Ronald lost his temper and picked up a firefighter by the throat, held him against the wall even though he was a head taller than Ronald, and warned him what would happen if they took it out to the parking lot.

“I might not beat you,” he said, “But you’re gonna feel me and regret it tomorrow.”

Ronald picked up a trashcan and heaved it at his lieutenant during another heated exchange. Many years later the lieutenant would be promoted to chief and he would lie about a fire scene as a way to stop Ronald from successfully completing probation as an officer. He told some of his cohorts that he would make sure Ronald didn’t pass probation. One of the other black firefighters overheard him and told Ronald to watch his back. The chief reported that Ronald had not handled the supervision of the fire scene properly. His deception was discovered, though, after a few other officers at the scene gave their assessment and rated Ronald as fully competent. The administration was forced to investigate. Soon after, Ronald’s probation supervisor told him the chief would no longer be a problem. Then the chief announced his retirement, and Ronald passed officer probation.

While he served on the Squad, Ronald and I decided that if he put in his transfer papers, he would never earn the respect due him, and that he would stick it out until the administration put him on the mandatory transfer list. I said, “We’ll stay together through this, no matter what happens. If you put in for a transfer, they win.”

The five years he remained at Squad would be some of the most difficult years of our marriage, both of us thinking that his time there would be the thing that finally drove us apart.  I remember telling myself that relationships moved along a continuum between love and hate, and it was okay if we were leaning toward hate, because we’d swing back the other way. It comforted me enough to get through the bad days, months and years.

I was traveling for my job as a manager on a special records project at Bird Library in 1988, a few years into Ronald’s tenure at Squad. Across the country in San Jose, I was out of touch for most of the day. On the nights Ronald worked while I was gone, Cara and Mackenzie stayed at their Nanny and Papa’s. On his second night in, Fire Control issued a code 99, working fire. Squad and Rescue went to every working fire, along with the station in the fire district, so they responded to the call. As the engine pulled up to the curb just minutes after the alarm, the night sky glowed deep orange. The fire was fully involved, meaning it was blowing out the windows and spreading very quickly. The firefighters watched as an elderly couple, trapped inside the house, framed by the picture window, perished before they could reach them. No one would ever know why the couple waited so long to call 911, but the delay killed them.

The officer in charge, devastated by the loss of lives, ordered the roof crew up the ladder, perhaps hoping the building could still be saved. Ronald was on the roof crew. They are the men who carry large chainsaws and axes up a ladder, hook themselves to the roof, and cut ventilation holes, the fire raging beneath them. Ronald ascended the ladder and assessed the roof visually and by touch. He climbed back down.

“Can’t do it. The roof is spongy. It’s about to go,” Ronald reported.

“That’s a direct order! Get the fuck up there,” the officer yelled.

“No,” Ronald said.

“I’m citing you for insubordination!” the officer said, but Ronald would not hear the words, only see his lips move, because the crash, as the roof crumbled and descended into the conflagration, drowned out all other sounds.

Ronald told me about the incident the next day on the phone as I sat in my room at the Ramada Inn. I could hear the hurt in his voice that the couple had not survived, but I also heard relief that he heeded his gut.

 “Look,” I said, trying to steady my voice, imagining a different kind of phone call, “it’s great you take care of me and the girls the way you do, but if you ever get into a situation again where you think following an order will kill you, walk off the job, right then, right there. Promise me. We’ll figure it out later. And, remember, your gut never fails you.”

 “Hey, does Dianne know you hate white people?” one of the white firefighters asked him at the breakfast table a few weeks later.  He smirked and looked for approval from the other firefighters. Ronald had heard the question hundreds of times over the years.

“You’re right,” Ronald said, staring back at the firefighter, his eyes narrowed and dark with disgust. “I don’t like white people, but Dianne isn’t white. She’s Dianne.”

I knew what Ronald meant when he said I was not white and that he didn’t like white people. I didn’t feel white, not in the sense they did, as if white was better, but the firefighters probably did not understand him. They thought he was a “crazy nigger.” Ronald was not black in my eyes either; he was Ronald. His skin color was there, but it was not all of him. When I focused on his skin color I only saw how it looked against mine, warm and complementary, the way an artist uses color for shading and contrast.

Soon after he hefted that trashcan at his officer, the administration transferred him to another station. One of the chiefs pulled him aside and said, “I have to transfer you. You got that, right? But just between you and me, sometimes you have to kick a little ass.”

Ronald knew how to kick ass.