My Cousin Died

It was 10:50 p.m. and I peddled my exercise bike in front of the TV. House Hunters International occupied my brain so I could peddle for the full forty minutes. The phone rang. The black box announcing caller ID blinked onto the TV screen. Private number.

“It’s late,” I said out loud. “Who’s calling?” I jumped off my seat, ran to the phone, and grabbed the handset just before it went to voice mail.

“Hello?”

“It’s Paul,” the voice said.

I was confused. Paul?  Who?

“My mother, you know, she talked to you on the phone. She died. She had medical problems.”

His mother died? Was it someone from the neighborhood, letting me, the HOA president, know of someone’s death? Was it someone from work or someone I had known in Syracuse? Was it the wrong number? Then I knew. My cousin Maria died.

I said, “I’m so very sorry.” Then I repeated it three more times. Shock rendered me verbally challenged. I could tell he wanted to get off the phone. He wasn’t comfortable. “Will you promise to call me with the details of the funeral? We can’t make it out, but I’d like to know.”

“Yes, uh, good-bye,” he said as he hung up.

I went upstairs, knocked on the man room door, pushed it open, and looked at Ronald sitting in the dark at his computer with his headphones on.

“Maria is dead,” I said.

When his sister Sylvia died, I said the same thing. “Sylvia is dead.” I repeated it when his nephew Yancy committed suicide. “Yancy is dead.” I can’t think of any other way to deliver such a message. He delivered the passing of his grandmother, cousin, sister-in-law, and uncle in much softer words.

The day after Maria died, we each had messages on our cell phones when we got out of the movie. Ronald’s father was at the hospital. I felt a surge of fear. “What else?” I asked myself. “Doesn’t all bad news happen in threes?” I tiptoed through the next few hours waiting for more bad news but my father-in-law was sent home with instructions to call his doctor.

I always knew I had two cousins in California, but I didn’t KNOW them. My family has a legacy of estrangement, and my father’s brother Danny was estranged from the family just as my father was estranged on and off in his life, just as I’ve been estranged from my family and Ronald has been estranged from his family.

My father and his brother committed the ultimate sin, but I was never sure what the sin was exactly. Either it was that they had each married non-Italians or it was simply that they had married at all, as none of the other siblings did. Well, Lenny did. He got a woman pregnant and married her, but the marriage was annulled shortly after it began, and no one spoke of the woman or the son she bore ever again.

My father stayed physically close by the family, remaining in Albany, and taking his lashes as they were handed out. Danny moved across the country and left no forwarding address. When my grandfather died, Aunt Josephine called directory assistance to locate Danny to let him know.

After her father died, Aunt Josephine took a trip to California to meet Danny and his family. She came back with stories. She lambasted Danny’s wife and said she was a spender and she vacuumed in the nude. She was a terrible person, she emphasized over and over, and as I listened, a young teen with waist-length hair, wire rimmed glasses, hip-hugger bell bottoms, and midriff tops, I added a parentheses at the conclusion of the sentence each time she said it: (like your mother). She lambasted my mother, too, carrying on the family legacy of insularity.

Estrangement hung like heavy, dusty drapes around our lives. No one ever thought to take the damn things down, toss them out, and replace them with something that let the light in.

First my father died, then another brother Jimmy died just three months later, then my mother (read about my mother’s passing in Shadesof Blue), and then Danny’s wife. After Danny’s wife died, Aunt Josephine stayed in touch with Danny more regularly.  Danny flew to Albany each July, the only month he considered the place warm enough, to visit for a week. One year I suggested Ronald, Cara, Mackenzie, and I drive to Albany and spend the day so we could meet Uncle Danny, but Aunt Josephine didn't think it would be a good idea.

I wondered if she thought our interracial relationship might be too shocking. Yet Danny’s grandchildren were half Mexican.

Two more brothers died, Rocco and Lenny. I attended Rocco’s funeral, but Ronald didn’t come. Lenny was loud and brash just prior to the funeral Mass. He suggested my brother Rocco, named the same as the uncle who had just passed, was not dressed appropriately to be a pallbearer. It had to do with his beard and his hat and his faded corduroy jacket with the patches on the elbows. But there were only three pallbearers as it was, so Lenny had to relent. At a lunch after the graveside service, he looked at me across the table and demanded, “Which one are you?”

“I’m Dianne,” I answered. He didn’t know us by name because he referred to us as “the retards” when we were growing up, as in “if you didn’t have that wife and all the retards, you’d be doing fine.” He was the uncle who married but had the marriage annulled, and I am certain he did not keep tabs on his son or pay any support.

Some years later I attended Lenny’s funeral, too. The only attendees were my biker brother Andy dressed in his leather Harley Davidson vest, Andy’s second wife, two of his biker friends, dressed much the same as my brother and recruited to be pallbearers, Aunt Josephine, my black husband Ronald, dressed “appropriately” in a suit to be pallbearer number four, and me.

I leaned over and quietly said to Ronald, “See? God has a sense of humor.”

I met my cousin Maria by phone when Aunt Josephine died. I was the executor of Aunt Josephine’s estate, which was ironic because many years before my mother had told me that Aunt Josephine had cut me out of her will. It was during my first estrangement from my family and had to do with the fact that Ronald was black.

I had begun speaking to Uncle Danny a couple of months earlier to let him know that Aunt Josephine had a stroke and had lain on her floor for four days before I called her and then called 911 when she didn’t answer. After my initial call, I called him about once a week to update him on her progress.

Danny and I had some nice conversations. But one time he told me he had cancer, something he had not told Aunt Josephine because he didn’t want to upset her. His voice was mellow, each word chosen carefully. He was nothing like Lenny who had demanded to know which one I was years before at Uncle Rocco’s funeral. My brother Andy recently told me that Danny, whom he met during one of those July visits to Albany, looked like Lenny but acted more like Rocco, quiet and reserved.

One day I called Danny to check on him, and Maria answered the phone. I was on my way home from work, and we talked the whole way, and then some more as I sat in the driveway. She complained about taking care of her father, and how tired she was. I told her I wished there was something I could do, and she told me to come out and spend a few weeks taking care of him so she could have a break.

“I work,” I said. She didn’t. I don’t think she ever did. Aunt Josephine was good at character assassination, and she had assassinated Maria’s character many times over. Her character flaws included drugs, obesity, theft, and older Mexican men.

In the year or so before her stroke, Aunt Josephine brought up her will on occasion during our weekly calls, and I never wanted to talk about it.  Years before when she claimed to have cut me out of it if I didn’t break up with Ronald, I chose him over inheritance so I really didn’t have much interest. Rather I liked speaking to her about some of everything like bad drivers and criminals and how no one had respect any more. I didn’t want to think about her dying. I’d already seen too many people die, and I have abandonment issues, so every time someone dies I take it personally.

Besides I told her the Church was the right and good heir of her money, but she was having none of it. She wanted to know what I thought about setting up a trust fund for Maria. She didn’t think she could handle getting so much money at once. After all, she reminded me, she had stolen credit cards and jewelry from her father’s apartment. I still didn’t want to talk about it, and I had no concern with what Maria might do with her inheritance, so I changed the subject and told her how some stupid guy had cut me off on the way to work.

After I talked to Maria about her father that time she began to call me regularly.

“She’s not high functioning,” I told my sister when my sister and I were still speaking to one another.

Then Danny died just as my aunt’s will went into probate. Aunt Josephine thought she had fixed Maria’s problem about money by naming Danny as the heir to her portion, but she didn’t account for family dynamics and legacies. When my father died, my Uncle Jimmy, his brother, died just three months later. My mother passed eighteen months after my father’s death. Uncle Danny copied his brother Jimmy and died three months after Aunt Josephine died. There are some strong emotions roiling around in estranged families and dramatic events cause other equally dramatic events to occur.

Maria was her father’s sole heir. Her brother Danny had died in the ‘80s of AIDS. Aunt Josephine had been sure to tell me that his “girlfriend” took care of him at the end of his life.

“I don’t think he was a homosexual,” she said, using the girlfriend as proof. Maybe she forgot that she told me how his mother gushed over him that first time Aunt Josephine went out there to visit, how mother and son stood at the closet together picking out dresses to wear, and how his mother had more in common with him than she did with Maria.

“Maybe,” I said.

There were legal issues to resolve since Uncle Danny died while the will was in probate. Maria had trouble understanding the paperwork.  I encouraged her to hire an attorney out there. She went to a legal aid establishment instead, not like a non-profit legal aid, but a for profit that was purposely established in a poor neighborhood. I tried to call the woman assisting her a couple of times, and I found out she was not an attorney and did not know what she was doing.

“I can’t pay more money than I’m getting to get this done,” Maria said. She was ready to give up.

I asked my attorney to find and hire an attorney to help her. He said he would take the cost out of her portion of the inheritance. She got the letter from the hired attorney that stated his fee. She blew up. She yelled at me on the phone. She wanted to just return any money coming to her. I started laughing.

“Calm down,” I said. “You misread the letter. You aren’t getting two thousand. That’s what the attorney is getting. You are getting almost forty thousand.”

She laughed, too. Later, when I paid out the estate and sent her the check, she called to tell me she used some of the money to purchase a plot at Forest Lawn and a pre-paid funeral. I didn’t want to talk about that either. It let me know she was thinking about dying.

Instead we talked about a lot other things, like movies and our kids and my husband Ronald. She called Ronald “Whiney” but she never judged him for suffering from depression, like a lot of family members did. She would tell me to hand him the phone and she’d talk to him for an hour or more about stuff, anything that popped into their heads. Ronald always felt better after the phone calls, especially when she threatened to come to North Carolina and kick his ass.

She started sending us stuff, too. I discovered Maria had made one of the afghans I had taken from Aunt Josephine’s house when I was clearing it out to sell it. I told her how much Ronald loved it; how he wrapped it around him when he was on his computer in the man room. She asked me what my favorite color is, and soon a beautiful red afghan was delivered to my doorstep.

Then other boxes arrived. One was filled with toys for my dog Ru. After that he recognized the pre-paid USPS boxes addressed to “The Haggins” (she never spelled our name correctly), and he would run around them and bark, because he was sure they were for him.

Once two boxes arrived, and when I pushed them into the house from the porch, I heard the contents knocking around. I opened the boxes and found piles of broken Hallmark kitsch.  They had been holiday decorations like pumpkins and Santa Claus statues, but she had not used any excelsior. She had just piled them into the boxes. Cara claimed some of the pieces to use as props in a play she had written and was just about to perform. It was about found pieces in a junkyard and the stories they told. The rest went in the trash, but I made sure to call Maria and thank her.

She sent knitted, fingerless gloves in black for Ronald and red for me. Each time I return to Syracuse in the fall or winter, I throw one or two pairs into my suitcase. There were six in each color, and I wonder what I will do when I have gone through all of them. Maybe I will have to use the many pairs of knitted slippers she sent.

Another day a box of sixty knitted squares arrived. They were all different colors and patterns. Mackenzie sewed them together, with the patience she has for such activities, and she and Cara used the resulting quilt in one of their performances titled Eve at the River.

There were handmade rugs of Easter Lilies and Cardinals, the backs rubberized in thick, swirled patterns as if someone had used a palm to spread the goop on them. She mailed five boxes of DVDs. She sent baby blankets for future grandchildren, stuffed animals for every holiday, and a scary, blond, and blue-eyed doll.  The stuffed animals line the dresser top in the guest room. I had hopes she would visit one day.

I let Mackenzie pick through the DVDs and take what she wanted, and I kept the rest for a while; then threw them out. The doll sat on the kitchen island for a few days. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out. Ru was convinced it was for him. He tried his best to reach the counter so he could abscond it. When I moved it to the shelf in the coat closet, he sat vigil for a week, plotting and planning his way to stealing it. He was sure it contained a squeaker like his other toys, and he was in search and destroy mode. Every once in a while the doll catches his eye when I am in the closet to grab a coat or take out the vacuum, and he still has plans for it.

My siblings, Andy and Peggy, and I helped Aunt Josephine clean out Uncle Lenny’s house, then we and Ronald cleaned out Aunt Josephine’s house. At Uncle Lenny’s house, every time I thought Aunt Josephine wasn’t looking, I told Andy to take as much stuff as possible to the trash pile. We knew that everything she kept would someday have to be sorted through again. And so it was.

Not only did she have Uncle Lenny’s stuff, she also had sixty years worth of kitsch in her house. We threw a lot of it out. I gave all the religious statues – the Infants of Prague, Mary Mother of Jesus, and some other saints – to a friend. I gave the set of Italian record albums from the 1940s to the healing priest who visited my aunt at the nursing home. I let the attorney take a set of pots that his daughter-in-law wanted to use in her classroom.  Some of Andy’s friends helped, and I let them choose things to take. I only kept a few things for memory including a pale green glass dish circa 1930s. It probably cost a dime when it was new.

I sent Maria a package with a pair of diamond earrings that belonged to her mother. The receipt for the resetting of the diamonds was folded into the tiny box I found them in, and it had her mother’s name and address on it. I’m not sure how they came into Aunt Josephine’s possession. Maybe Danny wanted to make sure they were safe since Maria allegedly stole and sold some other pieces of her mother’s jewelry.

Another time I sent her photographs of Ronald, Cara, Mackenzie and me. Then I sent her some knitting books. I also mailed her a photo album with the pictures Aunt Josephine took on her first visit to California. Maria was about fourteen at the time.

“I look like our grandmother,” she said as we discussed the photographs. I tried to picture her as a woman in her fifties. Neither one of us knew our grandmother. She had died several years before we were born. I had seen photographs of her. I called her the Queen of Hearts, the character from Alice in Wonderland. She looked mean even if she was only 4’10”.

She and my mother didn’t get along. She cursed my mother in Italian every time she saw her.  My mother asked an Italian friend what the curse meant, and her friend told her it translated as “I hope you burst.” The next time my grandmother leveled it at her, my mother looked right into her eyes (a definite downward stare) and said in English, “And I hope you burst, too, all over your goddamned new carpet.”

I found my grandmother’s death certificate as I cleaned out Aunt Josephine’s house. It stated cause of death as a brain aneurysm.

Maria had cataracts and knitting became difficult for her, so the packages stopped coming a few years ago. She was nearly blind. I wondered what was happening when things arrived with dropped stitches and messy backings. It took almost two years for Medicaid to approve the surgery for just one eye. She waited and waited for her other eye to be approved, but she would die before the surgery was ever scheduled.

Maria had two boys, now grown men, named Peter and Paul. I guess the old Mexican was their father, and he had died long before she and I began talking. I don’t know if Maria went to Church, but she was religious. I imagined if she had more boys, she would have continued to name them after the Apostles. Matthew, Luke, Mark and John, maybe Judas, though I can’t imagine the fate awaiting that child.  I can’t remember the rest. I am estranged from the Catholic Church, too.

I arranged to give confession before Aunt Josephine’s funeral Mass. I knew how much she wanted me back in the Church, and I loved the times when I was visiting and we walked down her block together to the Church she had attended for sixty years to go to Mass. Organized religion scares me in the way it attempts to control, but I’ve always found Mass very comforting.

In the room where the priest put on his vestments, I gave my confession. We did not sit in booths with our vision obstructed by screens and darkness. We sat in chairs facing one another out in the open. I started crying as soon as I uttered, “Bless me Father for I have sinned.”

I was embarrassed that I hadn’t given confession in thirty-five years, and that he could look into my eyes and know if I were lying or telling the truth. And I was angry that Aunt Josephine had abandoned me.

I partook of the Body of Christ during Holy Communion but refused the Blood of Christ. They didn’t let parishioners partake of the wine back when I went to Church as a child, and I was shocked they allowed it in 2005, especially for an estranged Catholic like me.

The priest and the attorney convinced me to try St. Lucy’s Church in Syracuse. They were hoping I’d wander back into the fold. I went one Sunday with a friend. The Church, situated right in the middle of the housing projects Ronald grew up in, was a progressive Church. Everyone was welcome to partake in Holy Communion. I didn’t go up, and I never went back.

For the next few years I donated money at Christmas to the school at Aunt Josephine’s Church in memoriam.

Maria stopped calling me sometime late in 2010. I didn’t receive a Christmas card from her. I started calling her instead of her calling me. I left increasingly urgent voice messages wondering what happened to her. I beseeched her sons that if they were checking her messages would they please call me and let me know if she was okay.

Finally, just as I began searching the Los Angeles obits, she called me from the hospital, her voice weak, her spirit deflated. She had sepsis, at least that is what I surmised, as she had not the words to describe her illness, and had almost died. I asked to speak directly to her son Paul (I’ve never spoken to Peter; never heard him in the background as I had heard Paul countless times) because he had told her I wouldn’t know who he was if he called me, so he didn’t. I asked him to please call me in the future anytime his mother couldn’t. He promised he would.

I remembered that as I ran names through my head trying to think who was telling me his mother was dead. I blamed it on the “private number” caller ID. I was furious at myself for not recognizing him immediately. I decided I was not high functioning.

The next day I wondered if I had been as good a friend as Maria had been to me. I burned with regret. I cried. Ronald assured me that she would not have received her inheritance without my determined effort. Cara thought I had been a very good friend indeed. Mackenzie felt sorry I had lost my cousin.

I’m still wondering if I even know how to be a good friend.

Paul called to tell me the details of the funeral. It sounds small and simple. I asked him how he was doing, and he said he was okay. I asked him his last name. I didn’t know it. He spelled it for me. Then I asked him if he planned to keep his mother’s PO box and he said, yes.

I don’t know if I can be a friend to Paul, but I know I’m going to try to be a good second cousin. All else gets lost in the kitsch of our lives, and that’s how estrangement happens.

Paul called me again today, hours before I was going to post this on my blog page. He was confused and angry with the cemetery staff. He wasn’t sure what he needed to do to get everything straightened out.  I asked him if his brother was helping him, and he said he had spoken to him once since Maria’s death, but he didn’t want to rely on him or call him again. I surmised they are estranged.

He asked if I would help him. I said, yes.

 Me in my First Holy Communion attire

 (Left to right): Jimmy, Carmella (who passed away shortly after this photo was taken), my grandmother The Queen of Hearts, Danny, my grandfather, my father Frank, and Lenny. Aunt Josephine and Uncle Rocco were not born yet.

Funny Vibe

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

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

~ Funny Vibe, Living Colour, 1988

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I want to tell him myself,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Checking the Other Box

Dear Mrs. (or Mr.) Ladderprice,

Let me introduce myself, although I do not know who you are as you have hidden your identity.

My name is Dianne. I am a white woman. I am interracially married with interracial twin daughters. I write about race in the hope that it will somehow contribute in a small way to changing our racist culture. I am a racist because I am part of the majority race that holds the political, social and economic power in our country, and I am a beneficiary of that privilege.

You commented on my post titled Can’t We All Get Along? And I responded, but only briefly.  For other blog readers, here is the URL, and don’t miss the heartfelt comment from my daughter Cara about her experiences as a mixed-race person in America.

http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2012/06/cant-we-all-get-along.html

First of all, I am not certain how you feel about what I wrote. Are you angry and offended by my statement that if you are white in America, you are a racist? I can’t tell, and this is how miscommunications occur. I am going to respond as if you were angered about what I wrote.

Your comment appears to question my credibility and the truth of my experiences. If I am wrong, I apologize; however, I am sensitive to the power of words and the meaning they convey. Time and experience have honed my skills in recognizing racism. I have discovered that some white people question the authenticity of the racist experiences reported by people of color. They might think the person telling the story is exaggerating, reading into the situation, is overly sensitive, or just needs to get over it because we are all tired of talking about race. This kind of thinking blames the victim and allows racism to thrive in our society. Then there are the people that believe those occurrences happen in other places, never in their locale (or pocket, as you called it) because people there don’t act like that. I’m here to tell you they do, but most white people won’t be attuned to racist behavior or even recognize it if they witnessed it unless it is blatant and undeniable, like the KKK burning a cross on someone’s front yard.

You told me that your son didn’t even realize his neighbor was different until he saw him check the “other” box on a school form.

Let me ask you, how would you feel if your son was the one who had to check the “other” box? Checking that box identifies you as different than your peers, not part of the majority, and subject to possible bias, isolation, and sometimes abuse or violence from majority members.

My daughters were those kids back when they started Kindergarten in 1989. We refused to check the “other” box. 

We raised our daughters to embrace their mixed race and multi-ethnic heritage. We taught them about race because they had to know as a matter of safety. They needed to understand that other people would identify them as black in spite of their mixed race heritage and that would define how others treated them. Think about Tiger Woods who calls himself Cablasian, to honor his mixed race heritage, but the media identifies him as black. Think about President Obama, who, even though raised by his white mother and white grandparents and who in some ways identifies with his white heritage more strongly than his black heritage because he had very little contact with his Kenyan father, is identified in the media as the black president.

White children aren’t often taught about race, except in vague ways. For example, maybe they are taught, “everyone is the same.” They are not told the following: we are white, and in this society we are able to negotiate our way with invisible privilege that allows us to go where we want to go, live where we choose to live, work in the profession we have an interest in, and feel free to explore our individuality. The world is our oyster. See that child over there. She is black. She will have to be twice as good as you are to get the same job, and she will probably be paid less than you. She will have to face prejudice and bias as she negotiates her way in society.  She may be denied housing, jobs, adequate health care, and even access to public venues such as bars, stores or restaurants because of the color of her skin. If she is Hispanic or Asian, she may have to carry papers proving she is here in this country legally even if she is a citizen and her family has been here for generations. Her life will be difficult in many, many ways, because she does not have the invisible privilege we whites carry with us.

White children are not often taught the concept of privilege and entitlement, but they learn it through experience.

Even when the white child learns that “everyone is the same,” the child will see that there are differences between him and the children of color, unspoken, but there nonetheless, like when your son saw the boy check “other” when he identified his race. He will see that sometimes assumptions are made about children of color, about their intelligence, for example, or about their behavior, while the white child is given the chance to prove his intelligence and misbehave on occasion because that is what children (white children) do. He will see that white people are smart, strong, and brave when he plays video games or watches his favorite cartoons or movies.  He will learn that blacks are gangsters, criminals, athletes, or abjectly poor, while watching TV. He will see his parents or other white people get nervous or scared if someone of color is walking through the neighborhood or approaching them on the sidewalk.  He will learn that although everyone is the same, some are better.

You talk about progress. You are right. We’ve made progress.

Ronald did not get lynched the first time he looked at me and told me my eyes made his heart skip beats. We did not get arrested or denied a marriage license when we got married.

But we face racism every day. Isn’t it terrible and unacceptable when it happens even once to a single person? It’s an outrage when it happens repeatedly over a lifetime.

Do you think we should forget about or pretend the following events were not racist? You can read about each of these, and many others, in past posts in my blog.

1.     The car that tried to run us down in the movie theater parking lot.

2.     The prejudice and bad treatment my husband received on the job as one of the first black firefighters and the third black officer in the history of the fire department.

3.     The forty white men who swarmed Ronald because they didn’t think he should be dating me, a white woman.

4.      The man who attacked Ronald because he thought he was an Arab.

5.      The time the police arrested Ronald because they told him that no blacks lived in the neighborhood he had lived in since he was twelve.

6.     The seller who decided she didn’t want to sell her house to us because we would ruin the neighborhood.

7.     The photographer at my daughter’s wedding who didn’t know I was the mother of the bride because my skin was too white or that Ronald was the father of the bride because his skin was too black. No matter that familial resemblance is obvious.

Some of those things occurred in the beginning of our relationship, some over the thirty-six years we have been together, and others very recently. They are just a few of the incidents we have experienced. I could describe many, many more that range from stupid to dangerous.

Just last night at the pizza shop, the young white woman behind the counter did what she does every time she waits on us. She took Ronald’s debit card from him. Then she handed it back to me after she swiped it. She only handed Ronald the slip to sign because I walked away, and she had no choice. Why did she hand a debit card back to someone who doesn’t own it? Not just once – every time she has waited on us.

Mrs. Ladderprice, when you believe your country is too great to engage in racism (or any act that limits or oppresses the freedoms of different groups) or that most people are blind to race and skin color, you are fooling yourself and creating an environment where racism can thrive, both quietly and loudly. You are accepting the systemic and institutional racism that our society was built on and that still exists, and you are assisting, through your inaction, to keep it in place. You are a racist because you directly benefit from a system that perpetuates racial division and inequality.  No other action or belief on your part is necessary to identify you as such.

I don’t know you, Mrs. Ladderprice, but can I assume you are white? How many people of color have sat at your dinner table or stayed as guests in your house? How many people of color do you consider close friends, and do they feel comfortable telling you about their race-related experiences? Would you be upset if your son, coming home for Christmas break from college in the coming years, brought home a black girl and told you he was in love with her?

Colorblindness only works when people are truly equal and every person can live and work in a fair and equitable society. It will only work when we have openly, and perhaps painfully, explored our history and the systemic and institutional racism interwoven into our societal norms. But when colorblindness is practiced in a racist society, it allows racism to thrive unchecked by our ideals and better selves.

You sounded angry (and I apologize if I misread your comment) that I had introduced the idea that we live in a country that absolutely divides by race and class. A post-racial society might be a collective ideal – that which our best selves envision as fair and equitable treatment to all citizens of the USA.

Reality is far different. Your experience of being an American is markedly different than the experience of minority Americans or my experience as a white woman married to a black man with twin interracial daughters. The difference is the insidious way racism is institutionalized and systemic in our laws and societal norms and how it negatively impacts people of color every single day and in every endeavor. You live a “raceless” life, one that affords you privileges and freedoms that are not shared by people of color.

If it were simply about people displaying prejudice against others, a different response, one that is just as important because bias is damaging, too, would be warranted. But racism is about power and privilege. It is about passing a constitutional amendment that defines marriage between a man and a woman with hints from certain supporters that it is also about preserving the white race. It is about passing laws that the Supreme Court ruled as constitutional, that require people of certain ethnic heritage to produce their papers to prove they belong here if deemed suspicious by law enforcement, something that is easily abused and misused, just as free blacks had to produce their papers before the Civil War, so they would not be captured and sold into slavery.

Here’s an explanation of how freedom papers were used back then from the historical documents collection titled Slavery in Pittsburgh housed at the University of Pittsburgh. I see clear parallels between our history and the way Hispanics are treated in America today:

Freedom papers and certificates of freedom were documents declaring the free status of Blacks. These papers were important because “free people of color” lived with the constant fear of being kidnapped and sold into slavery. Freedom Papers proved the free status of a person and served as a legal affidavit. Manumissions and emancipations were legal documents that made official the act of setting a Black person free from slavery by a living or deceased slaveholder.

It was prudent for Blacks to file papers attesting to their free status with the county deeds office in order 
to protect them from slave catchers and kidnappers. Antebellum America, including Western Pennsylvania, was hostile territory for a person of African descent. There are records of Blacks being held in local jails because they were suspected of being fugitive slaves. As was stated earlier, Black slaves were perceived as property that, just like other goods, could be bought and sold, stolen or lost.

Filing with the deeds office protected African Americans from the loss, theft, or destruction of original documents, as in all-too-frequent situations where slave catchers confiscated or destroyed freedom papers to force free men and women into lives of bondage. Some free men had to have an affidavit that testified to their free status.

That’s what our country’s history is, and some of that thinking still remains. Just like the lynchings that were popular in the early twentieth century.  Black men were hung simply for looking at a white woman. Lynching is not acceptable today in our country as it was under Jim Crow laws. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ensured that, but James Byrd, a black man, was dragged behind a truck until he was unrecognizable and his body parts were spread out for miles along the roadway; James Craig Anderson, a black man, was beaten and run over by a group of teens on a mission to “fuck with some niggers;” and Trayvon Martin, a black teenager, was trailed and then shot and killed by the neighborhood watch president for looking suspicious in the gated community where his father lived. These are current examples of black males being subjected to and murdered by vigilante justice. Black men are still considered sexually dangerous and violent, a myth created by white slave owners so they could perpetrate inhuman treatment against their slaves. That thinking still sits like an undercurrent in the ocean of our humanity.

Here is a short description of lynchings from Wikipedia:

Lynching, the practice of killing people by extrajudicial mob action, occurred in the United States chiefly from the late 18th century through the 1960s. Lynchings took place most frequently in the Southern United States from 1890 to the 1920s, with a peak in the annual toll in 1892. However, lynchings were also very common in the Old West.

It is associated with re-imposition of White supremacy in the South after the Civil War. The granting of civil rights to freedmen in the Reconstruction era (1865–77) aroused anxieties among white citizens, who came to blame African Americans for their own wartime hardship, economic loss, and forfeiture of social privilege. Black Americans, and Whites active in the pursuit of equal rights, were frequently lynched in the South during Reconstruction. Lynchings reached a peak in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Southern states changed their constitutions and electoral rules to disfranchise most blacks and many poor whites, and, having regained political power, enacted a series of segregation and Jim Crow laws to reestablish White supremacy. Notable lynchings of civil rights workers during the 1960s in Mississippi contributed to galvanizing public support for the Civil Rights Movement and civil rights legislation.

Lynchings also occurred in the North where Irish workers feared their jobs would be taken away by blacks, many of whom had immigrated from the South to seek a better life and work.

It is difficult to imagine that the thinking that led to thousands of lynchings could still exist today, but it does.

I write about my experiences to enlighten people much like you, who, I imagine, are kind people who want to believe racism died with the Civil Rights Act and that we have arrived in a post-racial era ushered in with the election of a mixed race president.  You have the best intentions, but your wish to ignore race has made you fall into a kind of apathy and blindness to the racism that is still so prevalent today. Mostly it is because you are not affected by race and may not have personally witnessed any racist acts. I was a lot like you except that four things happened in my life to open my eyes. The first was that my father’s best friend was a black man. The second was an incident I witnessed as a child – our neighbors signing a petition to prevent a black family from buying a house on our street. My parents refused to sign it. The third was meeting my husband thirty-six years ago when I was eighteen years old. The fourth was the way my parents, liberal in every sense when it came to equal rights, condemned my interracial relationship. My mother accused me of causing my father to have a heart attack, and we did not speak or see each other for almost three years, a sad fact, because I would lose both my parents soon after. I saw clearly how different life was for blacks and other minorities in America and how good people who have good intentions can be exposed for harboring racist notions.

I am not trying to spurn or offend you by responding to you in this letter. Rather, I am hoping to open your mind to the possibility that we still have a race problem in America, because I see that you want to do the right thing.

The first step is to acknowledge that being white in America comes with certain privileges that other races do not have access to, thus perpetuating the racism that is prevalent in America. Together, we can begin the hard work of removing systemic and institutional racism from our laws, norms and mores and healing the painful, heartbreaking legacy that racism left behind. Then we can each check the other box, the box that says we won’t stand for anyone being treated as less than because everybody is the same.

Sincerely,

Dianne

Can't We All Get Along?

So much happened this week: Rodney King, a man troubled by personal demons and unasked for fame, and who was brutally beaten by Los Angeles police officers during a 1991 traffic stop, died in a pool accident at his home; the North Carolina Legislature once again failed victims of involuntary sterilization, who were mostly poor, black women, by denying them restitution; a newly graduated college student was denied entrance to and then forcibly removed from a sports bar in Raleigh, NC, because of the color of his skin; and a study in North Carolina proved that police and other law enforcement are twice as likely to conduct a search at a traffic stop if the driver is a minority person, and minority drivers are twice as likely to be arrested at a traffic stop than white drivers. Race is in the news every day, and the reason is because racism still exists.

When I read Rodney King died in an accidental fall into his pool, I remembered the riots sparked by the acquittal of the police officers involved in the high-speed chase and traffic stop during which Mr. King was severely beaten. Seven police officers were involved in the beating that nearly killed King. Four officers were videotaped beating Mr. King with their batons while the other officers stood and watched. Many Americans did not know about police brutality, but this time it was caught on video, played over and over on the news, and indelibly proved that being black in America negatively influences interactions with law enforcement. The riots that began immediately after the acquittal of the four charged police officers on April 29, 1992 lasted six days and lead to fifty-three deaths and thousands of people injured. Only the National Guard could stop the violence.

I sat sobbing in front of the TV, 3,000 miles away, despair oozing through me, as Los Angeles burned on my twin daughters’ eighth birthday. Cara and Mackenzie wanted to know why I was so sad. I was crying for all the people who felt other Americans hated them, treated them differently and brutally, and then blamed them for their poverty and disenfranchisement. The only thing they could do from their powerless status in America was to destroy whatever crossed their path. I cried because I had always been afraid the police might do something like that to Ronald for being black and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had some scary run-ins with the Syracuse police. See my post The Tar Baby of Racial Discourse:

http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2011/08/tar-baby-of-racial-discourse.html

Rodney King famously appeared before the TV cameras and pled with the rioters to stop the violence. He said, “Can’t we all get along?”

He became the symbol of victimization by racist police officers in America. The videotape of the beating opened the public’s eyes to police brutality, but I know that police misconduct, brutality, and prejudice still exist.

This week the Researchers for N.C. Advocates for Justice made their findings public after reviewing state data collected on more than 13,000 traffic stops conducted between 2000 and 2011. Dick Taylor, the chief executive of the trial lawyers’ group behind the study said of the results, "When you are stopped, you are more likely to have a negative outcome if you're Hispanic or African-American. The disparities are there. We need to look in a serious way at why that is the case."

While stopping short of calling law enforcement agencies institutionally racist, he said the data certainly raises troubling questions that should be addressed through training. Can that be enough to stop radically different experiences with law enforcement based on race?

The North Carolina Legislature approved the state budget, but without a provision to compensate about 1800 victims of involuntary sterilization (only 146 have actually been identified), so it will be another year of waiting for justice. Some argue that compensating the victims would open the door for other groups, such as descendants of slaves and Native Americans, to file similar claims for restitution. I am not opposed to restitution for other groups for the abuse and genocide wrought against them. How else to help level a playing field that has been unfair, uneven, and one-sided for hundreds of years? Their blood, their heartache, their failures, and their inability to become part of mainstream America in large numbers, are on all our hands. We are obligated to right the wrongs of the past, else how will we progress as a country and not repeat the violence and evil perpetrated against people that were historically considered less than equal?

Jonathan Wall, a twenty-one-year-old black graduate of Morehouse College and a native of Raleigh, NC, wrote about his experience at a sports bar in Raleigh, and it’s been circulating on the Internet. First, he and his two friends were told they could not enter the bar because they were not members, but when a police officer stopped by, the bouncer let them in. They were the only black patrons in the bar. Jonathan was told, as he sat alone at a table, that if he didn’t order a drink immediately, he would have to leave. He told the bartender he was waiting for his friends to return to the table. Minutes later, he was forcibly ousted. A cousin relayed a similar experience at the same location.

I remember a time in the early 1980s when Ronald and I went to listen to a band at a club in Syracuse called The Lost Horizon. As we approached the door, we heard someone tell the bouncer, “Next black guy that shows up, tell him we’re full.”

I wanted to turn around and leave, but Ronald, pulling me by the hand, climbed the steps and stood in front of the bouncer and the manager. He looked directly at the manager and said. “I heard what you said.”

The manager looked at the both of us and said, “No, man, that’s not what I meant. Come on in.”

“No,” Ronald said. “I heard you.” He turned and led me back down the steps, and we left. It would be years before we returned to that club. But I know it still happens. Read about Jonathan Wall’s experience at this URL:

http://philipchristman.com/2012/06/18/a-friend-of-mine-gets-booted-out-of-downtown-sports-bar-raleigh-nc-for-being-black-because-this-is-1960-apparently/

Racism still exists because it is woven tightly into our history, our social interactions, where we choose to live, where we choose to work, and where we choose to worship. Racism is subliminally communicated in video games, movies, and in television programs. It is institutional and systemic to the way our society operates. People use hate language and hateful generalizations in describing the president, for example, or certain groups of people, such as Islamic people or homosexuals. It’s easy to demonize a whole group, rather than look at people as individuals. White people mostly enjoy their individual uniqueness, while most minorities are not treated as individuals as they negotiate their way through society.

It can be hard to swallow, but if you are white in America, you are a racist, even when you don’t personally believe you are. I realized that when I was taking courses toward my first master’s degree and began studying and writing about multiculturalism in a deeper way. How can I be a racist when I am interracially married? I am a racist by virtue of my skin color, and if you are white, so are you.

I benefit because of my skin color in many ways when I am by myself, for example, I’ve used my husband’s credit card at stores, written and signed checks in his name, and even moved money from his account (we have separate accounts) into mine. I can walk into any business and be treated with respect and feel welcome there. I built my career by moving from one company to another, each time accepted on merit (though gender affected my career in both positive and negative ways). In most of my social interactions, when I am by myself, I am openly accepted. When I am out and about with Ronald, and we are identified as an interracial couple, then my ability to navigate my way through society is greatly impacted.

We have been refused service, had to go to court to purchase our first house, even had our canoe rammed one time out on a lake in Upstate New York. I’ve been confronted by angry colleagues, people who embraced me and enjoyed working with me, for not telling them I was interracially married, as if that changed who I am. I didn’t change, but their perception of me did.

See my post Schadenfreude to read about being confronted by colleagues:

http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2011/11/schadenfreude.html

See my post Legacy of Racism to read about our housing discrimination experience:

http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2011/08/legacy-of-racism.html

The people who practice racial superiority are the ones demanding to “take back America.” They are afraid of demographic changes and our progress toward equality among people of all races and ethnicities. They fear they will become the minority and what that will mean and how they will be treated. They believe their kind, white Americans of European ancestry, should stay in power and continue to live with entitlement and privilege at the expense of those they consider less than because of their ethnicity or skin color. Yes, they are the true racists, but we all support a society that is classist and racist.

I think that many white people believe they will lose that sense of privilege and entitlement, but in a country like ours, there is more than enough to share, and all Americans could feel they are a part of a great country. Our ideal America is a country where everyone who is able can find a job and make a living wage, have access to affordable education and health care, live in affordable and adequate housing and provide for children and loved ones. That is not the America we live in now. We live in an America of race and class disparity.

Racism is everywhere, and examples of it can be found as easily as reading the newspaper.  

Changing to a truly equal and desegregated country takes work and commitment from the majority of Americans, not just the people being oppressed and a few enlightened people from the majority group. We can change things together. Can’t we all get along?

They Call Him Mister Tibbs

Ronald and I watched In the Heat of the Night on TCM this week. Made in 1967, the year the Supreme Court ruled anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, it remains a socially important film. That year Poitier starred in another socially relevant movie, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and a favorite of mine, To Sir, with Love. He was the first African-American actor to win an Oscar for Best Actor for his role in the 1963 Lilies of the Field (Hattie McDaniel was the first African-American to ever win an Oscar for her portrayal of Mammy in Gone with the Wind made in 1939. Halle Berry was the first female of African-American descent to win Best Actress in 2001 for her role in Monster’s Ball).

In the Heat of the Night is about a black homicide detective, Virgil Tibbs, from Philadelphia, who is traveling back home from visiting his mother in the South. He winds up stranded at the train station in the small town of Sparta, MS waiting for the next train. He is arrested for the murder of a northern industrialist based solely on his being a black man. At the police station Chief Gillespie is sure he’s solved the case.

He says, “Well, you're pretty sure of yourself, ain't you, Virgil. Virgil, that's a funny name for a nigger boy to come from Philadelphia. What do they call you up there?”

Tibbs says, “They call me Mister Tibbs.”

TIbbs ends up helping to solve the murder, but not without feeling the full weight of the hatred and threats of the townspeople. In one scene TIbbs is questioning a wealthy citizen, Mr. Endicott, in his greenhouse. When Tibbs suggests Endicott is under suspicion for the murder, Endicott strikes him across the face. Tibbs strikes him back.

Eric Endicott: Gillespie?

Chief Gillespie: Yeah.

Eric Endicott: You saw it.

Chief Gillespie: I saw it.

Eric Endicott: Well, what are you gonna do about it?

Chief Gillespie: I don't know.

Eric Endicott: I'll remember that.

[to Tibbs] There was a time when I could've had you shot.

This movie always hits me hard emotionally. I see the same attitudes in people, the same shock, when they see Ronald and me together, as if we are offensive and need to be eradicated.

“Nothing’s changed,” Ronald said. “The thinking is the same.”

He spent an hour trying to explain to one of the golf range guys, an older white man, that it would be odd to tell someone he just met that he has a white wife. He asked the guy, “Have you ever told anyone your wife is white?”

The guy answered “no” and seemed surprised that Ronald asked him that question.

“Then why would you expect me to?” Ronald added. Slap, slap. Did the guy think, “There was a time I could have had you shot?”

Another Sidney Poitier movie I love and have watched over and over is Raisin in the Sun made in 1961. Lorraine Hansberry wrote the play, which debuted on Broadway in 1959, based on her own family’s suit against the covenants of a neighborhood that didn’t allow blacks.

She later wrote in her memoir To Be Young, Gifted and Black:

"25 years ago, [my father] spent a small personal fortune, his considerable talents, and many years of his life fighting, in association with NAACP attorneys, Chicago’s ‘restrictive covenants’ in one of this nation's ugliest ghettos. That fight also required our family to occupy disputed property in a hellishly hostile ‘white neighborhood’ in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house… My memories of this ‘correct’ way of fighting white supremacy in America include being spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. And I also remember my desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our household all night with a loaded German Luger (pistol), doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court."

In the film version, Mr. Linder, the representative of the white neighborhood the Younger family has purchased a home in, has come to offer to buy them out.

Linder: I want you to believe me when I tell you that race prejudice simply doesn’t enter into it. It is a matter of the people of Clybourne Park believing, rightly or wrongly, as I say, that, for the happiness of all concerned, that our Negro families are happier when they live in their own communities.

The family is offended by the offer and refuses to sell.

Linder continues as he gathers his things together and looks at the family who has become hostile towards him:

Well – I don’t understand why you people are reacting this way. What do you think you are going to gain by moving into a neighborhood where you just aren’t wanted and where some elements – well – people can get awful worked up when they feel that their whole way of life and everything they’ve ever worked for is threatened.

Later, after Linder has left, the daughter, Beneatha, wonders aloud, “What they think we going to do – eat ‘em?”


Her sister-in-law Ruth responds, “No, honey, marry ‘em.”

Nothing’s changed. See my post on our housing discrimination experience: The Legacy of Racism:

http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2011/08/legacy-of-racism.html

Speaking of marrying interracially, I love the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. I remember Ma talking about it when it came out in 1967. She liked it, but she didn’t know then that she would live the experience in 1976 when I started dating Ronald. Poitier’s character, John, who is asking his parents and his fiancee’s parents to accept their marriage, says at the film’s beginning, “After all, a lot of people are going to think we are a shocking pair.”

Nothing’s changed. We shock a lot of people.

One film starring Sidney Poitier still has the power to make me cry. Patch of Blue made in 1965 is about a blind white girl who sits in the park stringing beads to escape her prostitute mother and her drunken grandfather. She meets Gordon, an educated black professional. They fall in love. At the end of the film, Selina asks Gordon to marry her, and he tells her there are many kinds of love. He is concerned that she does not realize they are racially different, and how difficult it will be to stay together. But Selina surprises him.

Selina: I know everything I need to know about you. I love you.

[touching Gordon's face]

Selina: I know you're good, and kind. I know you're colored and I...

Gordon: What's that?

Selina: ...And I think you're beautiful!

Gordon: [smiling] Beautiful? Most people would say the opposite.

Selina: Well that's because they don't know you.

Nothing’s changed. I feel that about Ronald: so many white people think of him first as black and not as a retired fire lieutenant, an artist, a musician, a dedicated husband and father, and a man. To them he will always be a black man, and the prejudice and stereotypes they carry inside color their perceptions about him. They don’t know him, and they don’t want to.

Sidney Poitier made some important films in the 1960s that made social commentary on the Civil Rights Era. Today those films are just as important because we have a long way to go on the journey to understanding race in America. I told Ronald while we were watching In the Heat of the Night, “They ought to show this movie in every classroom in America.” The surface of race relations may look different, but I know that nothing’s changed.

I’ve included an excerpt from my memoir. It’s one of my Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner incidents.

(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.