Fall of the Mighty Whities Part III: The 150-Year-Journey

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

~ Abraham Lincoln

My brain is churning this week, and my heart is fast in pursuit of understanding, so I warn you, dear readers, this post is lengthy. But I ask you, is it possible to write succinctly about a 150-year-journey?

This weekend we went to see Spielberg’s Lincoln. I highly recommend this film with its stunning, dark images, stellar cast, moving story, historical accuracy, and authentic dialog. I am so intrigued my mind keeps replaying scenes, and I can’t wait to see it again.

The film showed an intimate portrayal of Abraham Lincoln during the specific months that he pushed for passage of the 13^th Amendment. His complicated character is shown in his intelligence, his folksiness, his internal struggles, his offbeat humor, his moral sensibility, and his determination.

"Do we choose to be born? Or are we fitted to the times we're born into?" he asks two soldiers in the telegraph office as he is composing a telegram to hold the Confederate delegation hoping to negotiate peace on a riverboat because he fears ending the war too soon will close the window of opportunity to get the amendment bill passed in Congress.

Radical Republican Congressional Leader Thaddeus Stevens played a big role in helping to pass the 13^th Amendment. Wiki says this about him:

He defended and Native Americans, Seventh-Day Adventists, Mormons, Jews, Chinese, and women. However, the defense of runaway or fugitive slaves gradually began to consume the greatest amount of his time, until the abolition of slavery became his primary political and personal focus. He was actively involved in the Underground Railroad, assisting runaway slaves in getting to Canada. An Underground Railroad site has been discovered under his office in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Though Stevens’ relationship with his Quadroon housekeeper, Lydia Hamilton, was revealed only at the end of the film, Wiki states their common law marriage was well known in Washington circles, where many people referred to Lydia as Mrs. Stevens.

In the film Stevens, who climbs into bed beside Lydia and hands her the original passed Amendment bill for her to see and read, suggests that she should come to the signing of the bill. She declines saying it would not be right to have his housekeeper attend such an event. It was a poignant moment in the film for me, a demonstration of the sacrifices we make out of our love for another, particularly when our relationships do not fit social convention.

I knew interracial relationships occurred back then as they always have since people of different races and ethnicities ran into each other (some consensual and some not, but I am speaking only of consensual couples in this case, not situations involving rape, violence, and oppression), and I find it interesting that Spielberg and scriptwriter John Logan chose to portray the relationship as secret. If it were truly known openly, it is proof of how complicated race is in our society, then as now. I imagine Spielberg and Logan viewed the relationship as the inspiration to Stevens’ thirty-year-long fight for the abolition of slavery and for race equality in America.

In one scene the congressmen debated whether passage of the 13^th Amendment would open the way to giving blacks the right to vote. One congressman warned the others that soon there would be blacks in congress if they were given the vote, and, worse, women would expect to follow!

The movie couldn’t have been released with better timing, given this past vitriolic election and the continued trashing the Republican conservatives are raining down on President Obama. Maybe Spielberg purposely held the film’s release until after the election.  Could he have been that prescient or was he just waiting for the holiday moviegoers?

Certainly all this talk of secession from the Union now that President Obama has been reelected seems to warrant a history lesson. The seven southern states that seceded from the Union prior to the Civil War were not exercising their rights; they were traitors to the country. Their reliance on states rights to uphold the inhumanity and brutality of slavery was an abomination brought about by greed, power, and privilege. We need to acknowledge our history and not glorify the ugly parts of it.

After the movie, back in the car, my husband Ronald, daughter Mackenzie, and I talked about what we had seen. I came away understanding how important it was to get the 13^th Amendment passed before the war ended, even without a plan for race integration (which truly did not occur until 100 years later with the Civil Rights Act of 1964). I also understood why the final argument in favor of passage was for legal equality and not race equality. At first I sided with Stevens who wanted to push forward the concept of race equality. But Lincoln counseled Stevens, in a private debate between the two, about the folly of using one’s moral compass to head true north, when the compass has no way of identifying the pitfalls and traps that lie in the path to stop one from completing the journey. He understood they needed to take one step at a time, and eliminating slavery was the first step. In real life Lincoln said of it, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.”

I feel strongly that almost 150 years later, we are still taking steps toward race equality and our journey is not nearly over.

A couple of weeks ago one of the white guys at the golf range handed Ronald a photocopy of a column from his church newsletter. I’ve reprinted most of it below:

Prophetic Prospective

United States citizens, at least those who chose to exercise their franchise to vote this last presidential election, decided to return President Obama to the White House for four more years. This reelection of President Obama has received rave reviews from the European and Middle Eastern political leaders. European leaders who basically embrace the same political philosophy as President Obama see this reelection as an opportunity to advance their political agenda. Arab and Muslim leaders await the Obama administration’s acceptance of the Muslim agenda to move those nations touched by the Arab Spring into the establishment of an Islamic world more in line with Sharia, the Islamic law, as the law of each of their nations.

As Christians, many of us have questions as to how it happened. Mitt Romney lost and Barack Obama won. I am not going to analyze the results, but I do want to remind each of us of the biblical response that we must have as we look into the future…

God instituted human government 4,500 years ago as recorded in Genesis 9:6. God instructs Bible-believing Christians to be obedient to those elected and He reminds all of us that He, God is the One, who puts people in their political positions, Romans 13:1. The Lord reveals in Revelation 17:17 that He will use world leaders to have His will played out in the Last Days. God’s Word also calls for Christians to pray for all those who are in positions of authority – as is our president, Timothy 2:1 – 4.

Let me share several prophetic thoughts with you. Bible prophecy speaks of how the financial structure of this world will be controlled by a world leader, a one world leader, the Antichrist from his headquarters in Babylon, the modern-day state of Iraq…The conflict in the Middle East will also be center stage of the Last Days.

This whole scenario is like reading from prophetic passages of Bible prophecy. Europe and the EU are at least the infrastructure for the revived Roman Empire as foretold in Daniel 2 and 7 when it talks about the ten toes… and the ten horns. An Islamic based government in the 23 Arab states and the Muslim states of the Middle East prepare this region for the future described in Daniel 11, Ezekial 38, and Psalm 83.

God has used human government to fulfill Bible prophecy in the past and He will do so as well in the future. Political leaders will indeed help set the stage for prophetic passages in God’s Word to be fulfilled.

~ A minister from NC

The white guy asked Ronald for a response. Ronald, who knows the Bible better than most Evangelicals, immediately started to parse the column and Biblical references (most of which I left out to save on space and your time, dear readers). Finally the man got frustrated and said, “I didn’t ask you for a sermon!”

“No,” I said to Ronald from my hotel room up in the northeast, as we spoke on the phone, “he didn’t want a sermon. He wanted you to agree with what it said. Doesn’t he get that if he believes God chooses who wins, that God chose Obama?”

Now that I’ve reread it (instead of hearing it over the phone), I see the author is predicting that Obama’s reelection signals the End of Days. Hasn’t every generation thought that certain events were harbingers of the end? The Civil War (and every war) must have made people wonder if the end was near with the loss of over 620,000 soldiers and another 420,000 injured.

Here are a few more letters published this past week in my local paper the Winston-Salem Journal. They, like the article above, also predict the dire consequences of President Obama’s reelection.

Consequences

Congratulations! Elections certainly do have consequences. Witness the 950 jobs lost from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center – in my opinion, thanks to Obamacare.

Tighten your seatbelts, because our “tyrant and chief” is just getting started.

~ Peter Wilson

Not This Time

It’s over…but I don’t get it. More than 50 percent of the voters picked the candidate who has been the most divisive president in my lifetime, which has been for almost three quarters of a century.

I have always understood why people have picked one candidate over another, but not this time.  I always felt if my candidate lost, so be it. I could live with the opponent for another four years. But the past four years have been nothing but a failure. Of course, a lot of freebies were handed out.

As you can tell by now, my choice was former Gov. Mitt Romney. Here was an honest, decent, intelligent man who felt it was a privilege to help others, yet he was demonized by the opposition and the press, including this paper, with all sorts of falsehoods.

I’m not the smartest guy in town but would someone explain how this happened? Do we go through another four years of bickering and higher unemployment, dividing the country even more? I hope not. We cannot afford more of this and while I hope I am wrong, I see the middle class disappearing. And while I’m not an overly religious man, I wonder if this is a test from God to see if we as a nation can survive.

I love America and I hope the best years of my country are not in the rearview mirror.

~Art Frauenhofer

Suffering

How very fortunate America would have been to have Mitt Romney as our leader. His is so experienced, so competent and so honest. Instead, we have returned to the hopelessness, ineptness and deceit of the last four years.

My fellow Americans, it will not be all right. We will suffer; our children will suffer; our grandchildren will suffer. And, yea, the Journal will suffer. But, thank God, Sandra Fluke will get free contraceptives.

~Janice Dooley

The consequence they seem to predict is the end of the White reign in America, the day when a black president is accepted not just for the novelty of being the first black president but because the majority of Americans loves, trusts and respects him and his leadership.

Racism played a role in the election campaign but it did not change the outcome. Yet I can only think that there are people out there who are afraid of the demise of white privilege just as there were people 150 years ago who feared the consequences of freeing the slaves.

I see it quite differently, though. Maybe more like Thaddeus Stevens, I see what America can be after this hard fought election: inclusive, diverse, and celebratory of how this country was built by the contributions of many races, ethnicities, and cultures. I envision a new America that honors equality and fairness, in word and in action. No one is asking for “free gifts” as Romney accused Obama of rewarding to a majority of voters. We just want race and gender equality. That’s not a free gift; it is morally and ethically the right thing to do.

But I have the feeling that a good many white people don’t feel that way, and they are hoping and praying God will intervene and give them back the entitlement and privilege they don’t openly acknowledge. Yet they fight for it and accuse others of wanting it.

One of the white guys at the golf range told Ronald he doesn’t think everyone should be able to vote. He believes that an elite group, unnamed but probably white and wealthy, should be the only Americans eligible to elect our country’s leaders. Ronald wondered, as he related the story to me, if the white guy included himself in the elite group. No doubt.

Lincoln also said, "Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."

Maybe Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, or the white guys at the golf range would be willing to walk in the shoes of the 47% for a week. I don’t think they would last an hour. So why are they trying to determine our destiny?

Another white guy at the golf range told Ronald a couple of months ago that, all things being equal, the wealthy would still be wealthy and the poor would still be poor. In other words, wealthy people are smarter, more able, and more motivated than poor people who, he said, are too lazy to change their circumstances.

I believe the days of elitism and race advantage are coming to an end.

I’m disappointed that people are using the Bible to spread hatred and bias and that they are unabashed about mixing church and state. It was true in Lincoln’s era, too.  The Bible was used to justify slavery and unequal, brutal treatment under the law and to predict the dire consequences of ending the social order. Such predictions and prophecies render us spiritually, morally, and ethically bankrupt.

Are people afraid of the new multiethnic America? Yes. I know they are. But haven’t we been moving away from Euro-centric culture (many Americans seem opposed to European socialism; I wonder how they define their whiteness) since the first Pilgrims landed on America’s shores, since America opened its arms to immigrants (the Native Americans being the first to allow strangers on their shores)? Haven’t we always had different cultures mixing to create a culture that is singularly and uniquely American? What are we afraid of?

I wrote the following comment on Facebook and attached the political cartoon below it:

When people hate so much they want to secede from the country they claim to love, we need to invite them to the table so we can offer them the chance to talk about it and to show them we love the country as much as they do and we don't plan on going anywhere. I know, they haven't offered that to us, but I think the high road is the better route, even if it takes a little longer.

Lincoln took the high road, even as he questioned his own methods and the power of his office. The country, with the Southern States once again part of the Union, took the high road and enacted the 13^th Amendment. As Lincoln counseled Stevens in the film about the virtue of using one’s moral compass to head true north, we have to walk in that direction, but avoid what the compass cannot foretell, the pitfalls and traps that may stand in front of us. Let’s relocate our country’s moral compass, find true north, take the high road, and, avoiding that which can stop us in our tracks, complete the journey to race equality. 

Fall of the Mighty Whities Part II: The Gift of Visibility

Mitt Romney chalked up his loss to Obama giving gifts to certain people, the 47% he infamously spoke about, effectively buying their votes. These gifts included health care coverage on parents’ plans for individuals up to age 26; amnesty for the children of illegal immigrants who call themselves the Dreamers; partial forgiveness of student loans; and access to contraceptives. It’s nothing that Republicans haven’t been saying all along in one way or another, but Romney quickly found out that his GOP peers distanced themselves as if he were a pariah.

Newt Gingrich said, “I just think it’s nuts. I mean, first of all, it's insulting. The job of a political leader in part is to understand the people. If we can't offer a better future that is believable to more people, we're not going to win.”

Was his statement a revelation or the first step to hoodwinking the populace with a different approach? I don’t consider much of what Gingrich says as even close to the truth, so, of course, I suspect the latter. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be open to the GOP changing course, but at this moment, it seems unfeasible.

I was traveling for work last week and left my red swing state to arrive in a northeast blue state, so I had some time off from politics other than tuning into MSNBC in the evening back at the hotel. One night Ronald and I watched Chris Matthews together by telephone.

Ronald, on the other hand, continued his daily trek to the golf range where the white guys on the porch also talked about how Obama stole the election. I realize that 49% of America might not be happy with the election results, but, then again, many of us spent 8 years unhappy with President Bush, and there was a good deal more evidence of a stolen election back in 2000 than the skimpy evidence Republicans are holding up as proof today that the 2012 election was stolen from them. I’m finding difficulty in believing that it is something other than racism that is causing the backlash.

One very strange accusation came from Maine GOP Chairman Charlie Webster a week ago. He said, “dozens [and] dozens of Black people [came] in and voted on Election Day. Everybody has a right to vote but nobody in [these] towns knows anyone who's Black. How did that happen? We’re going to find out.” 

He later issued an apology. I guess he was like a social studies teacher I worked with when I student taught in the Syracuse City Schools back in 1978.

“The invisible poor,” she exclaimed in the faculty lunchroom one day. “I’ve never met a poor person. Do they exist?”

Yes, Virginia, they exist, and a lot of them are your students. Not only do poor people exist in America, but also blacks and Hispanics and Asians and Native Americans and mixed race people and gays and lots of others of all races, ethnicities, and socio-economic status. America is not just a country full of wealthy, heterosexual, white people.

Ronald discovered once again that he does not matter the way the white guys, who hang out on the porch at the golf range, matter. They had all taken out pictures of their wives to show one another. Ronald, trying to prove that he is just another American guy despite his dark skin, wandered over to the CRV to dig into his man bag for a photo of me.

A black guy, someone Ronald has spoken to on prior occasions at the golf range, stood next to his car loading his clubs into the trunk. Ronald showed him my photo and said he was going to show it to the white guys on the porch.

“You do realize where we live,” the other black guy counseled. “It’s not accepted down here.” (Note for new readers of my blog – I’m white and Ronald is black.)

“I know where I live,” Ronald said. “That’s why I’m showing it to them.”

He stepped back up on the porch and displayed the photo, taken at work for my ID card a few years ago. Two white guys stood up and left without so much as an acknowledgment. Another said, “I’ve seen that photo already.”

True, he had. Ronald had shown it to him and a couple of the other white guys on the porch before.

“You also met my wife,” he reminded him. The white guy and his white wife were dining one evening as we entered the restaurant and were seated at the booth directly behind them. Introductions were made, and, when they finished dining, they stopped at our table for another ten minutes of small talk.

“I don’t recall that,” the white guy said. Ah, the invisible interracial couple!

Sunday night Ronald, our daughter Mackenzie, and I went out for pizza and wings at our favorite pizza shop (okay, the ONLY pizza shop we patronize down here). The young white woman, who usually works behind the counter and who always hands Ronald’s debit card back to me, was off that night. The white guy behind the counter was friendly, called Ronald “boss,” and even gave us a discount card because he knows we eat there a couple of times a month.

One of the white guys from the golf range was sitting at the counter behind us waiting for his order to be completed. Ronald turned to acknowledge him but the white guy dropped his head. He later walked by our table to go to the men’s restroom, and he dropped his head then, too. Ronald had spoken to him often over the course of three years. They had shared bowling plaques and awards they had each won, like Ronald’s 299 ring, and they had spoken about golf.

Ronald told the white owner of the golf range about being ignored by the white guy when he went Monday to hit balls.

“Well, he probably didn’t recognize you out of context,” the white golf range owner told him.

“Why not? He’s seen me for over three years, and we’ve had lengthy conversations. I recognized him,” Ronald said.

“But he’s never really looked at you,” I told Ronald when he related his conversation with the white golf range owner.

The invisible black guy!

So I agree with Romney on a certain level that Obama gave us gifts. He gave us the gift of acknowledgement, the gift of mattering, and the gift of visibility. We are not invisible. We exist. Some people just don’t see us.

Ronald and Dianne in 1976

I Love Lucy... and Ricky, Too

I don’t think a lot of people are aware of how difficult it was for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, married in real life, to convince television executives that they should play husband and wife in the TV show I Love Lucy that debuted in 1951. The executives thought the American public wasn’t ready to see a white woman married to a Cuban man.

Arnaz and Ball took their act on the road, and it was soon apparent that audiences loved them. They went on to become one of the most influential couples in the television industry with their own production company, Desilu Productions.

Before I was old enough to go to school, Ma and I watched reruns of the show in the late 1950s and early 1960s every morning with our buttered English muffins on paper plates and our bone china cups of tea. I learned the dialog by heart, and I found something comforting in the couple that might have been too different for the American public to tolerate. Lucy and Ricky reminded me of Ma and Dad: a couple from different places, ethnicities, and cultures navigating life together. Their relationship normalized my bicultural family life, and tied up my complicated home life into a neat half hour package.

Ma had a sharp sense of humor, not slapstick like Lucille Ball, but lightening quick, intelligent, and keen as a razor. Her words were weapons of mass destruction. I know. I’d been the brunt of them many times.

Dad was no musician, but his artistic expression came from his hands: the way he tinkered under the hood of his car, grew grass on our sandy lot, or fixed one of our old, broken bikes or toys that had been passed from older to younger siblings.

Dad was forty-five when I was born, the fourth of the five Liuzzi children spread out over fourteen years by the time my youngest brother came along in 1961. Dad’s hair was salt and pepper for as long as I remembered, but I saw the photos of him taken in Australia where he and Ma began dating during World War II. His hair was thick and dark, rakish over his brow, just like Ricky’s, and his stance was cocky for such a short guy. He looked as if he could stand up to any big guy who threw a punch at him. I liked that about Dad. He never seemed afraid.

Dad was born on March 7, 1912, and Desi Arnaz was born on March 2, 1917.  Even their birthdays were weirdly congruent.

“Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do,” Ricky threatened in just about every episode.

“But Ricky,” Lucy implored each time while sobbing giant crocodile tears.

The fights between Ma and Dad were more evocative and not at all funny. They didn’t end with a big hug, a romantic kiss, and the soundtrack of I Love Lucy swelling in the background. Ma and Dad’s fights were raw, bubbling with profanity and accusations, and contested with both bark and bite.

Still, I clung to my fantasy that they were like Lucy and Ricky. Maybe Lucille and Desi’s real life marriage was more akin to my parents’ relationship.  It was volatile, turbulent and rocked by Ball’s star power and Arnaz’s much more behind-the-scenes persona.  Added to the mix was Arnaz’s alcoholism and his penchant for women. My family lived with alcoholism, too, but it was Ma who drank, not Dad, who I only saw drink a beer or a glass of wine just a few times in my memory. Unlike my parents, the Arnazes divorced. The divorce gave them the emotional freedom to continue working as business partners for several years and to remain close friends until Arnaz’s death in 1986 at age 69. Ball died just a few years later in 1989. Dad passed away in 1981, also at age 69, and Ma in 1983. My mind makes the connection that others might not see.

I loved listening to Arnaz sing his signature song Babalu, his hair flopping wildly over his eyes, and his hands moving rapidly on his conga drum. I liked the way his feet moved in rhythm to the music, his toes pointed slightly inward. My husband Ronald is a musician and percussionist. His African ancestry makes him the extreme of the dark and ethnic look I grew up loving. I can’t help but draw another connection.

The song I loved best from the show was the theme song I Love Lucy.

I Love Lucy, and she loves me,

We're as happy as two can be,

Sometimes we quarrel but then again

How we love making up again.

Lucy kisses like no one can,

She's my missus and I'm her man;

And life is heaven you see

Cause I Love Lucy

Yes I Love Lucy

And Lucy loves me.

Source: http://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/ilovelucylyrics.html

The song may sound corny, but I always tear up when I hear it sung by Desi Arnaz. I remember the episode in which he sang it. Lucy thinks everyone has forgotten her birthday. She ends up on a park bench where she runs into the Friends of the Friendless, a ragtag missionary band. She brings them to the club to embarrass Ricky and discovers that he and the Mertzes had planned a surprise party for her. Ricky puts his arm around her and sings I Love Lucy. I witnessed the love in his eyes as I watched it on You Tube again while writing this post.

I look for that same look from Ronald, even after thirty-six years of being together, and I catch it there still.

Both Arnaz and Ball decided that “basic good taste” would guide the humor and the story lines in the show. They never used their ethnic differences as the brunt of jokes, except for Lucy occasionally imitating Ricky’s pronunciation of certain words.  I believe that is why America could tolerate them as one of the most recognized couples of the era. They were just two people who loved one another and who were building their American dream, in their private life and in their TV life.

That’s what all couples wish for. Gay and straight, interracial and homogenous, old and young, we just want to live, love, quarrel, and make up again. What we don’t want is the rest of the world telling us they aren’t ready for us.

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz may not have realized how much they opened the minds of their audience. They just wanted to portray a couple just like them and felt strongly enough about it to go against the tide.

Now that fear has reared its ugliness and rage in America once again, this time as minority numbers grow and a minority person has taken the highest office in the land, I wish we had another TV show that American audiences might not feel ready for.  It would be a show that uses “basic good taste” in writing its story lines and which stars a couple like Ricky and Lucy or even Ricky and Louis, who win the hearts of Americans and who prove that being different isn’t all that different after all.

Demographic Evolution

For many centuries, when it was discovered that there were other lands beyond their own, people explored, traded goods and ideas, and adopted new words into their languages. Sometimes they conquered nations and ruled over them. Sometimes they enslaved the people. Other times they engaged in genocide.

Perhaps the concept of exploration and all the good and bad it embodied was needed for mankind to evolve. Now we are a global community. Progress is rapid and ideas, trends, and news are communicated in seconds. We are connected through technology and the ease of travel.

Cultures are becoming more common than different in industrialized nations, but regional and local cultural mores still operate. In such a world, I think it only matters what personal tastes an individual has in terms of where s/he wants to live, work, and socialize, but I suffer idealism.

This week on ABCNews.com I read an article about the shifting demographic in America. No doubt we knew a shift was coming. The Hispanic population has boomed, while middle class white people are aging, have been shrinking as a group, and have fewer children. Blacks remain at around twelve percent of the population, and Asians, also growing in number, are at around five percent of the total population.

The article, found here, http://abcnews.go.com/US/militias-hate-groups-grow-response-minority-population-boom/story?id=16370136#.T7epWhzeeuR, and titled “Hate Groups Grow as Racial Tipping Point Changes Demographics” states, “The data released this week revealed a tipping point in the country's demographic shift. For the first time in the country's history, more minority children were born than white children, setting the stage for an eventual non-white majority in America's population.”

This trend caused a growth in hate groups around the country. Their growth spiked in 2008 when President Obama was elected and continues to grow rapidly. Even white people who don’t consider themselves racist express fear about the changes in population. Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said, “It's a generalized feeling that 'this is not the country my Christian white forefathers built. We've got to take this country back.' It's not rancid straight ahead race hate, but it is very closely tied to race and the changing look of the country."

It’s an odd anxiety in my opinion, especially because of how this country was settled. First there was genocide and the stealing of land from the native people. Then slaves were brought from Africa when it was deemed Native Americans were not hearty enough to be enslaved. Then after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the dearth of people willing to pick crops and work for low wages in the service of others caused an influx of illegal immigrants. Corporate farmers and the wealthy looking for cheap household help brought them into the country first, then others followed, both legal and illegal, looking for opportunity. Now whites are anxious that the country they considered their home and playground is changing, and they are losing their power to control the situation. It reminds me of the constant feeling that must have run rampant in the South, at the height of slavery, that there were many more blacks than wealthy whites, and if the slaves were ever able to organize, a way of life might be lost. Many of the racist fears that still haunt black men today, like the belief that they have strong sexual desires for white women, grew out of that time. Of course, other historical events and economic trends ended that way of life, but the fear remains.

America doesn’t belong to just white people. It belongs to all Americans of every race and ethnicity. And our culture shows it. The food we eat, the music we listen to, the way we dance: they are all multicultural. Jazz, the blues, Rap, and Zydeco are all uniquely American as is modern dance, tap dance and Hip Hop.  Now Salsa is popular and many businesses display bilingual signage. We are a predominately Christian culture, but we’ve been influenced by many world religions. The popularity of yoga and meditation is an example of how we’ve been influenced by eastern religions and philosophies.

America is an interesting experiment in the merging of world cultures. It makes us unique and influential around the world. I can’t see how that can make people anxious, yet it is ever present.

I’m of Italian and Irish descent with a sprinkle of English and a large dollop of Australian. I’ve spent my adulthood in an interracial relationship with my husband who is black and Seminole Indian. My daughters are interracial –we often told people they were international babies whenever we were asked, “What are they?”  I have always lived a multicultural life. I haven’t chosen one culture or ethnicity over another or felt pressured to. I’ve enjoyed learning that there are different perspectives in the world and have let them open my mind, not close it. My husband is the same way. We’ve always been open to knowing people different than ourselves. That’s how we got together. My daughters feel the same way, too. They use all their cultural influences when creating art, music, dance and theater.

In the article on hate groups, Potok said that younger generations are more accepting of the demographic changes in America. He said 95 percent of them are accepting of interracial relationships. It’s a sign that race is not an important social construct to them. In just a few generations, maybe the color of one’s skin will be unimportant. We will have the chance to enjoy the uniqueness of our global culture instead of fighting over who is American due to race entitlement and who is not due to race prejudice and oppression. Just as cultures and mankind evolved for thousands of years through exploration, we are undergoing another evolution. I can only hope it will happen in my lifetime.

Shame on You

Ronald and I traveled to Cincinnati in the late 1990s so I could attend the annual conference of my professional association. After registering on Saturday afternoon, we hit the streets to explore the city.  A Bengals football game had just ended, and the streets were flooded with fans leaving the stadium. We walked against the crowd, holding hands and enjoying the rush and excitement around us.

I noticed a lumbering, middle-aged, white man staring at us as he approached us. He was heads higher than most of the crowd, so he stood out to me. Our eyes met just as we passed one another and he leaned down and said, “Shame on you.”

His comment stopped me in my tracks. “What did he mean?” I asked Ronald.

“You don’t know?” he said.

“Is he mad because we didn’t go to the football game?” I was distracted by the excited multitude, and I had heard Cincinnatians were serious about their football team.

“Dianne, think about it. I shouldn’t need to tell you.”

We walked in silence for a few minutes as I replayed the scene in my mind, and then it hit me. “Oh,” I said, realizing he was judging our interracial relationship. “Why does he care? What does our relationship have to do with him?”

“Nothing.”

“He doesn’t even know us,” I said, my anger growing prickly on my skin.

I feel that same anger now as I witness the conservatives trying to legislate women’s reproductive rights and access to reproductive health care. Especially in view of recent events in North Carolina, a state that used sterilization on poor and minority women and some men, right up until the mid-1970s, so they could not breed. That’s the ultimate birth control, irreversible, and it was often done without the woman’s knowledge, the medical staff telling the woman or her parents that it was an appendectomy or other procedure. Now the last few survivors of this government-run fiasco are fighting for restitution. The conservative legislators are against it and have kept it tied up in debate for years. Do we really want our government dictating our reproductive rights? They don’t even know us.

I can’t imagine choosing abortion, terminating a pregnancy, but I haven’t been in the situation where I might have to choose that option. We struggled financially when our twins were babies – sometimes we didn’t have enough money left over to buy toilet paper for the month – but we didn’t have to make a choice to feed one child over the other, or to pay the heating bill instead of the food bill or the doctor bill. We had health insurance. We had family who stepped in when needed. I remember my in-laws handing us a few rolls of toilet paper or buying baby shoes. We had a support system in place. Not everyone does. Not every baby is conceived in a loving relationship with an extended family support system in place. Sometimes a baby is conceived out of impulse or because of rape, an act of violence, or because the electric bill had to be paid and birth control was too expensive. We don’t know every situation, we couldn’t, and we don’t have a right to impose our beliefs on anyone.

Does God abhor abortion? What about birth control pills or condoms? Does He abhor homosexuality or adultery? I used birth control, so that makes me a sinner by some accounts. But I cannot imagine God could abhor those things more than war or killing in His name, or hating with a Bible in hand and claiming it is He who dictates the hate, or turning one’s back on another who is needy, or ignoring the many children who go to bed hungry and who live in squalor.

We are all sinners according to the Bible – how do you legislate that, in this life and in this world? That’s the crux of the problem, isn’t it? I think of Rush Limbaugh, on his fourth marriage, a recovering addict, calling Ms. Fluke a slut because she wants her health insurance to provide birth control and of Newt Gingrich, now married for the third time to the woman with whom he committed adultery against his second wife, taking the marriage vow on the campaign trail. Both claim to be part of the moral right, but both are sinners. How are they exempt from human fallibility in their worldview? And how can they claim moral superiority?

 People use their own fears, prejudices, sense of entitlement and privilege, and assign those beliefs to God. They don’t even know themselves.

Shame on you for pretending you know better than everyone else and that you are better than they are. Shame on you for abusing your power. Shame on you for using affected morality and religious bravado to divert attention away from the real problems we face: racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, classicism, elitism, ethno-centrism, and religious zealotry. Shame on you for trying to make people feel less than because life is hard and complicated, not a one of us is perfect, and we all have difficult decisions to make. Shame on you for judging others because they are different from you.

You don’t even know them.

(Excerpt from Chapter 6: Being Black All by Myself, Shades of Tolerance: A Biracial Love Story)

Mackenzie, labeled Baby A, born at 10:53 a.m. on April 29, 1984, weighed 5 lbs. 15 oz., and was larger than Cara, Baby B, who was born seven minutes later at 11:00 a.m. and weighed 5 lbs. 3 oz. The nurse wheeled in one Isolette with both babies inside. She picked up each baby and put one in my left arm, the other in my right. Baby A’s hair was fine as kitten’s fur and just as soft and deep brown, nearly but not quite black. Her bangs were spiky over large brown eyes that took in the world and her face was a pie. Eskimo, I thought.

Ronald said, “Dad said she picked her head up and looked right at them.”  His parents had been to the nursery to see the girls, just hours after they were born.

Baby B already had a nickname, Squirrel, because she was so small. Her head was long and narrow from chin to nape and her nose spread across her tiny face.  “She got a cookie,” Ronald said, smiling and staring at her nose. Her hair was soft and dark, and though more than most babies, much less than the head of hair on Baby A. Ronald’s dad coined her Squirrel while watching her through the nursery window.

“Well,” began Ronald, “I thought we would name the big one Mackenzie and the little one Cara.”

“I like that,” I said. We had never settled on names. I called them Giuseppe and Giuseppina the whole time I was pregnant, convinced I was having a boy and a girl, even after the doctor suggested the heart rates indicated two girls. I had a list of names that I would hand over to Ronald to look at, and he would cross them out one at a time and state his reason why. Cara and Mackenzie were two names still on the list.

“And Sylvester suggested Mackenzie Marie and Cara Michelle,” Ronald continued.  Sylvester Jr. had shown up at the nursery window, too.

 “Okay, they sound nice.” I said of Sylvester’s suggestions. Never having settled on first names meant we had never gotten to discuss middle names.

His parents told me the next day when I was allowed visitors that Ronald had shown up at their house after the girls were born, his skin gray, and his eyes wide with anxiety. He told them it scared him to see me on the gurney in the recovery room, shivering and unconscious. I hardly believed them: he had been calm and reassuring during my labor, holding my hand, coaching my Lamaze breathing, feeding me ice chips, even arguing our case with the doctor-on-call when he suggested delivering Mackenzie then putting me under to perform a Cesarean section to deliver Cara. I woke up in the recovery room thinking I had had a C-section, but Ronald had convinced the doctor not to do it, and Cara was delivered breech after all. Ronald had been protective and watchful, even staying in the delivery room after the doctor told him he had to leave as they began to put me under.

On Wednesday, May 2, 1984, my regular OB-GYN recommended I go home and said, “Your blood pressure will never go down with all the noise here.” I was released.

Ronald brought tiny outfits, identical except one was pale yellow and the other pale turquoise, for Cara and Mackenzie. They were gifts from his sister Sylvia, but they were too big. I took little hands and fed them through sleeves, folded cuffs to shorten them a few inches, buttoned tiny buttons and tied tiny bows. When I finished, I left them in the center of the bed while I stood close by and dressed. A nurse, shaped like an appliance box, in a pressed uniform, rushed in scolding me, “Don’t leave them unattended! They could roll off the bed!”

I swallowed hard and scooped them into my arms. Will I mother the way Ma mothered me, I wondered.

Another nurse rolled me down to the car in a wheelchair, both babies in my arms. A nurse’s aide carried flowers, plants and balloons. The nurse helped Ronald strap the babies into their new infant car seats and then helped me into the car. “Best wishes!” she called as we drove off.

The chill of early spring still hung in the air that day. We stopped at work so Ronald could pick up my paycheck. Colleagues were out on break and peeked in the car window. “So tiny!” one colleague cooed. I wanted to be happy, but instead I felt scared.

Then Ronald drove to his parents’ house – the hospital, work, Ronald’s parents’ house and our apartment were all within a three-mile radius. His parents were both at work, but his grandmother Mama Mack was there with the home aide, and Ronald wanted to show her the babies. “Too little,” she said when Ronald asked her if she wanted to hold one.

The home aide, a large black woman with a tiny voice, took a look and said, “What beautiful babies.” She backed away and sat in a dining room chair, close enough to be at hand if needed, but far enough away not to interfere with a family moment. Ronald laid a pillow in Mama Mack’s lap and placed the babies, one at a time on the pillow: first Mackenzie, then Cara. Mama Mack’s large chest heaved with laughter. Her gnarled fingers clasped Cara’s tiny, long fingers. Ronald snapped a photograph. Mama Mack would pass away nine months later.

Olio

One of my twin daughters asked me to write about something happy. She’s convinced it will increase my blog readership, and her intuition is hardly ever wrong. So, dear readers, here’s my happy blog.

My husband and I had a lovely adventure yesterday, driving in the G37S down to Charlotte and a golf equipment show. Part of our motivation was to take a drive to see the leaves – a great show of gold, burgundy, and red. We saw horses, hawks and wild turkeys along the way, too.

At the golf course, Ronald tried out some drivers and almost won a free pair of shoes in a wedge-hitting contest. “I still feel good,” he had said after his attempt to hit a ball into a painted red circle 100 yards out on the driving range to claim his free shoes. His ball hit inside the circle but took a jump and was at exactly 9:00 less than a foot outside the red line. Then he won the hourly putting contest, sinking five putts in a row. The crowd around him chanted each number with growing excitement. He received a nice pair of sports sunglasses for his effort.

“Don’t you golf?” one of the vendors asked me.

“Not me,” I said, smiling. My excitement was in watching Ronald enjoy himself.

We headed north and stopped in Concord for a late lunch at Razoo’s, stopping first at Bass Pro Shops so we could admire the boats and point out the one each of us liked best and imagined purchasing one day.  After a relaxed meal filled with conversation, andouille sausage, red beans and rice for me and ribs and French fries for him, we wandered over to the movie theater and saw the third remake of The Thing. It wasn’t the greatest movie we’ve ever seen (I might have liked the 1982 make, starring Kurt Russell, better, but all three are forgettable), but it had its moments that elicited gasps, screams, squeezed hands, and jumps.  Then we headed home, both sated.

Lots of times it isn’t what we are doing, but that we are together doing it. And we don’t do a lot of things together. Some couples do, but both of us need space just for thinking and creating, and, in spite of the fact that I work at home, I still crave solitude, maybe a reaction to growing up with four siblings and an array of animals in a house that measured less than 1000 sq.ft. Sometimes the bathroom was the only place to grab some alone time. Ronald craves the same, since he was raised in similar circumstances, but his idea of solitude is a book and a soda at a crowded bar, the activity and noise swirling around him. He also enjoys spontaneous conversations with strangers he may or may not ever run across again. That’s out of my comfort zone, though I can handle it on occasion.

When we do spend time together, like eating dinner together every night, that time remains special and doesn’t sink into the category of other mediocre daily occurrences. I think mediocrity can kill a relationship if a couple is not attentive.

Ronald and I have been together for almost thirty-six years, married almost twenty-nine years. We’ve beat divorce statistics three or four times over, and when we have faced hard times and conflict, as any couple who has spent more than three months together, we always find ourselves again. Part of our secret is that we love each other, sometimes unnervingly so to other people. A psychologist might determine we are enmeshed and co-dependent. She would be right, but what might be contraindicated for other couples, works for us. It’s negotiating and knowing what works that can keep a couple together.

The second part of our secret is the respect we have for one another. We were raised in different racial, cultural and ethnic environments, and that causes us to see and interpret the world in different and sometimes divergent ways, but we embrace our differences and respect them. Maybe our differences are what attracted us and the combination of our differences and likenesses gives us the gift of longevity.

I think the most important thing I’ve learned in our thirty-six years together is that there is no normal, no average and no absolute when it comes to people. We are too complex for that. Those concepts are just the middle ground in the great continuum of human experience. Each of us fits somewhere along the continuum, and it is long, maybe even infinite.   We can beat the odds of hatred and divisiveness if we understand that each of us is different but we still share likenesses, commonality, through our humanity. We can beat the odds if we learn to respect our differences and acknowledge them in the continuum of our thoughts, beliefs, actions and feelings. Not a one of us is average or normal. We are who we are. And I love that about myself, about Ronald, about my daughters and about all the people who make their way into my life. It doesn’t mean there is no conflict, because I think humankind is destined for that, but it does mean that we can make room for a bigger concept of who we are, and maybe that will minimize some of the conflict we now experience.

(excerpt from Chapter 1 Who Bee’s You? Shades of Tolerance: A Biracial Love Story)

I was unaware what the future would hold for us when we met freshman year at Syracuse University in January 1976, just back from Christmas break.  With new work-study hours to accommodate my new class schedule, I was working my first Friday, payday, at the Copy Center in Bird Library when Ronald walked in and stood at the counter.

He wore an over-sized green army jacket and a knit stocking cap with a long tail. A girl’s fuzzy pink mitten covered his right hand only to the bottom joint of his thumb.  In that hand he carried a large, black leather artist’s portfolio. He kept his other hand pocketed against the sub-zero temperature outside. His large deep brown eyes, the corners creased with interest and humor, roamed up and down me as I approached the counter.

“May I help you?” I inquired, clasping my hands and placing them on the counter in front of me, my eyes meeting his.

“I want money,” he said, and he smiled like he had just eaten something indescribably delicious, his teeth gleaming in contrast to his skin.

I turned to my supervisor Maxine and called her name. Maxine, man-sized with a perfectly coifed Afro that made her yet another six or seven inches taller, looked up from the microform reader/printer she was operating and said, “Ronnie, leave that girl alone. She’s too good for you.”

“Okay,” he said, shrugging, his smile mischievous, “I just came in for my check.”

“Oh, okay, what’s your name?” I asked as I turned to the register to pull out his check. I pressed the “no sale” button.

“Ronnie Hagan or ‘The Ron’.  Who bees you?” he said, smiling at his own joke.

“Dianne,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, nodding in recognition, “the Dianne with two ‘n’s’. I’ve seen your time card.”

I pulled his check from the pile and handed it to him. A thought entered my mind at that moment as I looked at his eyes, his smile, and his ungloved hand now released from his pocket, soft and clean, with long graceful fingers: This is the man I’m going to marry.  It made me smile and remember that Ma warned me repeatedly to never marry an Italian like Dad, and Ronald Hagan was not Italian; he was Afro-American.

“Your eyes make my heart skip beats,” he said. 

I want to imagine what Ronald saw when he looked at me back then, and I wish he could still see me that way. I pull out the old photos, many of which Ronald took of me during college for his photography classes. My eyes are the focal point of most of them and draw me into each photo, and I can see the loving way he looked at me through the camera lens and the way I looked back at him. The discovery is both surprising and amusing as I flip through one photo after the other.  My eyes are large and round, with long dark lashes and high dark brows over them. I look distinctly Italian after my father, despite my amber eyes and my fine, straight, dark hair, but I have the porcelain skin, clear and unblemished, of my Irish mother. In several photos taken during the warm months, tiny, nearly invisible freckles sprinkle my nose and cheeks.

The contrast between my dark hair and pale skin caused Ronald to skip afternoon classes, he told me later. He had heard about porcelain skin, he said, but never understood what it really looked like until he saw me.

The day I met Ronald Hagan, The Ron, I wore a rust colored gauze shirt, purposely shrunk in the dryer so it became form-fitted to my slender torso; the buttons open from the collar to just below my breasts, a tube top peeking out the opening.  I wore denim hip-hugger bellbottoms that fit snugly over my hips, buttocks and thighs. The bells covered my platform clogs completely and were so long the bottoms were frayed and worn. 

I did not know back then that I was alluring. I know now when I study the old photos; or when Cara and Mackenzie look at the photos and tell me how beautiful I am; or when I look at Cara and Mackenzie and see younger versions of myself and think how beautiful they are; or when Ronald, his arms drawing me into an embrace, says, “You look very Dianne today.”  That is when I know he can still see me the way I was back then, not the Dianne who is aging with crepe lines framing my round eyes and stretch marks and permanent freckles marring the once flawless skin.

I understood in a rational way back then that I attracted male attention – in fact a fellow student had only told me a few days before I met Ronald, perhaps as an unsuccessful ploy to get into my pants, that I exuded a certain “delicious sensuality,” but for me, the allure was just dress up and role-play. 

I still see the lonely child when I look in the mirror: dirty, hair knotted, sad eyes, and dressed in hand-me-downs. I did not know then that Ronald saw his own sad image when he looked at me the day we met. His smile and laughing eyes belied his thoughts.

I display photographs in a digital photo frame. There is a picture of me when I am about eight standing in the center of our cluttered parlor: a birdcage to my left; the buffet directly behind me stacked with magazines, two table lamps on either end, handed down to us by neighbors, with seagull silhouettes on both their shades and bodies, and red tapered candles right beside them as if we had lovely formal dinners awaiting us; my youngest brother’s portrait hangs above the buffet; a photo album open to a page of black and white photos lays to one side; the hand and pink jumper of the blond, blue-eyed baby doll given to me that Christmas lying on top of other items. The dolls never looked like me.

Dark, straight hair touches the tops of my shoulders and turns this way and that, the bangs mussed across my forehead. My nose overshadows my pointy chin and two large front teeth fill my tiny, downturned mouth. My eyes are too large for my face, sit in dark crevasses, and stare tentatively at the camera, pleading acceptance.

My skin nearly matches the white sweater I wear. The sweater is crumpled, the sleeves too long, but it is buttoned perfectly from top to bottom, something I find surprising, because I remember many occasions catching my buttons mismatched after I had already arrived at school and my peers had taken notice. I can only see a slash of navy beneath the sweater, but I remember that it is a navy pleated skirt that never lost its shape, and for this I am thankful, as my clothes were never ironed until I began ironing them myself at age nine. I can only see the tops of my hands but they are clasped in front of my skirt.

This is the child I recall – the one who is burdened with the possibility that she may get lost in the clutter and no one will come look for her.

There is another photo taken when I was four. I stand in front of the Christmas tree in a dress with a black velvet top, a lacy empire waist, and a white chiffon skirt, covered with black and white velvet spots, falling well above my knees. My skin is vibrant as I stand bare-armed and bare-legged, my right knee turned in and pushed straight while my left leg bends slightly, all in an effort to stay standing in my black high-heeled shoes with elastic straps. My arms hang at my sides, my hands hidden in the flounces of the skirt, my left one holding the strap of a small white purse. My hair is short, a pixie cut; the only way Ma could keep the knots out of it. I face the camera squarely: my eyebrows are raised in disbelief, my eyes are defiant, and my mouth is wide open, screaming for attention.

This is the child who will not allow anyone to forget her or wrong her. This is the child who, even when dressed in fancy duds, gets ugly if she has to. Though my overall temperament is shy and quiet, I have relied on her often in the years since Ronald and I met whenever I had to fight for my right to love him. And now, at this time in our lives when our stories are no longer protecting us, this fierce little girl rises within me.

Ronald saw me through artistic eyes the day we met. Years later he told me he used to comfort himself by drawing the shape of my eyes over and over or visualizing my slender fingers with long oval nails or the perfect clarity of my skin.

He stayed the afternoon at the Copy Center, standing on the other side of the counter, talking, staring at me, my shyness making me blush under his stare. He told me he had watched my time card last semester, I imagine looking for clues, and was attracted to my handwriting. He said it was visually interesting like hieroglyphics, my letters printed but looking like symbols instead of actual letters.

            “How do you say your last name?” he asked.

            “Lee-YUT-zee,” I pronounced carefully.

            “And how do you spell it?”

            “L-I-U-Z-Z-I.”

            “That’s a nice name. You ought to put it on a t-shirt.”

            I had never been told that before. Mostly I spent a lot of time spelling my last name over and over and correcting the pronunciation of it. But within a month of meeting The Ron, he had bought me a black, fitted t-shirt with Liuzzi printed in rainbow colored capital letters across my chest.

Maxine intervened every once in a while with her own opinions. “Ronnie, I told you she’s too good for you. Go to class.”

Maybe her words were meant as a warning. Maybe her reaction was the first instance of someone wanting our relationship to break apart before it even started. Maybe she knew what I did not know back then, perhaps because I had been too young or because, in a child’s eyes, it did not seem to have the same significance as the Civil Rights Act of 1964: nine years before I met Ronald, in June 1967, the Supreme Court had struck down anti-miscegenation laws in a landmark case, Loving vs. Virginia. The decision caused fifteen other states to remove similar laws from their books. Two states, South Carolina and Alabama, kept laws banning interracial marriage up until 1998 and 2000, respectively. In spite of the Supreme Court decision, many people still believed interracial marriage was an abomination. I would come to hate the expression “birds of a feather flock together” because I would hear it in the coming years as the reason why interracial relationships were wrong.

But on the day I met Ronald, I did not know the Supreme Court had intervened on behalf of an interracial couple, arrested while asleep in their bed in Virginia, nor had I ever heard the expression about birds used as a justification for racist beliefs.

Besides I could see Maxine was fond of Ronald, the way she lowered her head and looked up at him, like she was a much smaller and younger woman. She had fallen for his charm and flirtations, too.

I liked Ronald – he was after all the man I would marry – and I gave him the phone number to the campus only phone at the end of the hall on my dorm floor.

Hidden Dirt

Why does racism still occur regularly and with frequency, but many people deny its presence or question the victim? Because then, as a society, a cultural collective, we don’t have to deal with it. We’ve swept it under the carpet, easily hidden it, and the room looks clean. But the dirt is still in the room. Racism still exists. It’s the dirt under our carpet.

(Excerpt from essay What’s Race Got to Do with It?)

I’ve experienced this fear of not speaking up about racial injustice.  Once Ronald and I went to an athletic shoe store. We were there for about half an hour as Ronald tried on shoes. He selected a pair and told the white salesman that he wanted to purchase them. He filled out a check that was preprinted with our address and phone number, and he produced his driver’s license as proof of address and identity. The salesman refused the check. He had looked Ronald’s name up in the phone book and didn’t find the number listed under his name. I told the man I was Ronald’s wife, and to look under my name in the phone book. I pulled out my driver’s license to prove it, but he still wouldn’t take the check.

We left the store angry and humiliated. I wrote a letter to the editor of our local paper and complained about the treatment we received. The evening after the letter appeared in the newspaper, we got an anonymous phone call.

“You got exactly what you deserved,” the male voice said before the line went dead.

Racism hasn’t died. It’s gone into hiding, and interracial relationships draw it out.

Right after Ronald and I moved to Winston-Salem, NC, in 2008, we had a different experience shopping for shoes. I had picked out two pairs of shoes at one of the department stores and was at the counter paying for them, Ronald at my side. The white saleswoman kept staring at us.  I began to feel uncomfortable until I saw that she was crying.

“How long have you been together?” she asked. “You look like such a nice couple.”

“More than thirty years,” I responded.

“I’ve been with mine for eight,” she said, tears spilling down her cheeks. I knew she meant her husband was black.

“Has it been hard?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, her voice halting. “My son stopped speaking to me, and my sister is kicking us out of the condo she rents to me.”

We stayed and talked with her for about twenty minutes before she was called away by other customers. She was a woman in her fifties, had served a distinguished military career, and was divorced with grown children. She still met opposition from her family.

A year later, after inviting her and her husband to dinner several times, I stopped seeing her at the store. She never took me up on my invitation, saying her husband was suspicious of meeting new people. I wondered whatever happened to her, and found out in 2010 right before Cara’s wedding. She was back in the shoe department.

“I missed you,” I said when I saw her.

“I’ve been out on stress leave,” she said. She explained how she ended up in court battling her sister for the right to stay in the condo; how the neighbors had yelled racial slurs; how she and her husband had been at odds about how to proceed; how she had a breakdown and had taken leave; and how she had lost the court case and was forced to move. The store had given her back the position in the shoe department when it became available, and she was happy to be there.

“Call me. We can have lunch, just the two of us, if you like,” I said, leaving her my home phone number. But she never did.

I understood her sense of isolation. I’ve felt it myself. Sometimes it just feels too much like work to make friends, trying so hard to find people who can picture Ronald and me together and not feel uncomfortable about it. Sometimes I wonder if there is something wrong with us, something that doesn’t have to do with race at all. Maybe we are just unlikable. But I know that’s an excuse, a glossing of the truth to make it more palatable.

Racial Equality - Tale of Two Countries

I picked up the USA Today this week because an article on the front page caught my attention – Poll: Racial Divisions Remain.

It’s no surprise to me that the quest for racial equality is measured differently depending on whom you ask, but I was glad USA Today conducted a poll on the topic and considered it important enough for front page coverage. In spite of the potential for inaccurate results with a lot of these newspaper polls, I think there is something to this. I hear it when I speak to others on this topic. There are those who believe we live in a post racial society, based on the fact that we elected a black president. There are others, myself included, that think President Obama’s election was a first, not a trend, and certainly not indicative that we no longer live in a racial society. Racism is alive and well – different, but still present, still insidious.

I worry about the idolatry of the movement to “take back America.” For me, it’s code that a certain, elite group believes it owns this country: those that want to push the hands of time backwards, who fear social programs and government intervention (except when it comes to certain hot button issues: abortion; gay marriage), who wish to force fundamental religious dogma on all citizens and in our governance, and who wish for segregation and exclusion of those deemed different.

I’m as American as anyone, and I’m proud to be an American, even as I hope for change, progress, and inclusion of all the people who make up our great country. We have room for different philosophies and approaches – it’s what makes us great. What’s your vision for America?

(Excerpt from essay What’s Race Got to Do with It?)

Ma descended into depression and then alcoholism in the years after she crossed an ocean to be with Dad at the end of World War II. Her in-laws refused to accept her because of her cultural and religious differences, and she felt profound isolation and loneliness. Her drinking escalated as my three older siblings each left home, leaving my youngest brother and me behind.  The chaos inside our house, and the brutal verbal abuse my parents engaged in daily, eroded my confidence, trust in others, and sense of self. My home environment probably exacerbated my shyness and fear of strangers. Everything about my life felt skewed and fragile.

When I met Ronald, he seemed the epitome of self-control, stability and protection. Our different races and culturally different upbringings felt a bit like déjà vu, but also contributed to the feeling that our relationship would deliver me far beyond the circumstances of my childhood. Perhaps it was the same hope Ma fostered when she fell in love with Dad.

Monica McGoldrick says the following about exogamous relationships:

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. During courtship, a person may be attracted precisely to the loved one’s differentness, but when he or she is in a marital relationship the same qualities can seem grating.

This is true of our marriage. It took me years to realize that when Ronald speaks loudly and passionately, he is not angry. It took him just as long to understand my silence is a coping mechanism, my way of hiding inside my head when the external world is overwhelming.

Human beings are social and crave interaction. Being interracially married can break or eliminate one’s social support network. In the beginning we did not worry about what others thought. We were too busy focusing on one another, the pull and excitement of new love occupying our full attention. But soon, external pressures intruded.

Erica Chito Childs, an interracially married white woman, studied the social dynamics of interracial couples and documented her qualitative research in the book Navigating Interracial Borders. She borrowed the term “miner’s canary” from Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres who defined it in their book The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Power. They described the ways in which the experiences of racial minorities in America expose the hidden toxicity of racism much like canaries in coalmines expose toxic air.

Chito Childs says, “In many ways, the experiences of black-white couples are a miner’s canary, revealing problems of race that otherwise remain hidden, especially to whites. The issues surrounding interracial couples…should not be looked at as individual problems, but rather as a reflection of the larger racial issues that divide the races.”

Back in the early eighties Ronald joined a men’s bowling league with a white friend of ours, Randy. We had known Randy since undergraduate school. His wife Sharon, also white, and I decided we would go watch the men bowl. Almost immediately one of the white men on the opposing team started making comments about me, like, “What’s she doing with him?” and “She’d be better off with me.”

At first I thought it was funny. Ronald was in his twenties, a firefighter, a musician, and an artist. He dressed handsomely and neatly. He was of average height, but he had bulging biceps, and his backside, as he stood at the lane ready to throw his ball, made my head swim with delight. The white man was much older and overweight with a beach-ball-sized belly. He wore a T-shirt stained with food and dirt, needed a haircut, and drank like Ma. I wondered aloud what made him think I would choose him over Ronald.

The more he drank, the bolder he got. When Ronald got up to bowl, the man purposely distracted him. He stood close to me, invading my space. I grew frightened, and Ronald became frustrated and angry. Then the man said something to Ronald that I could not hear. Ronald picked up a nearby beer bottle and smashed it on the table edge, holding the jagged top like a weapon. All of a sudden, I lost sight of him.  A group of thirty or forty white men had swarmed him.

I pushed my way through the men, my heart pounding. One of them had his arm around Ronald’s neck and others pushed their faces into Ronald’s and shouted profanities at him.

“Stop it,” I screamed, pushing at the men surrounding Ronald and trying to pull the man’s arm from around his neck. I felt swallowed by the mass of bodies. Terror raced through me, bright lights flashing in front of my eyes. At that moment I realized our relationship could move some people to violence. “Stop, please! Let go of him! Why are you doing this?” I cried looking at the faces around me. The men backed away.

“Let go of me. We’re leaving,” Ronald said. They let him go and he walked through them to get his bowling gear.

“Why did you do this?” I asked the man who had held Ronald by the neck, my voice squeezed by disbelief. “Didn’t you see what your teammate was doing?”

“I guess it wasn’t right,” he said.

Randy and Sharon stood planted, side-by-side, spectators to it all. Randy looked puzzled.

“Should we leave, too?” he asked Ronald.

“Do whatever you have to do,” Ronald answered, his breath heaving.

“I know a few of these guys. That’s Mr. Bigelow. He’s a nice man.”

“He’s nice to you,” Ronald said, picking up his ball bag and turning away. I followed him to the exit. He held the door for me, and, as I stepped through it, I turned back to see Randy packing up his equipment. Outside Ronald opened the trunk to put his ball bag in the car, and he picked up the tire iron, testing its weightiness.

“Don’t,” I said.  “It isn’t worth it.”

Ronald looked at me and held the tire iron out in front of him. Then he put it back in the trunk and closed the lid.

Ronald developed his own explanation about interracial couples and racism. He called it the “’Does Your Dog Bite?’ Theory.”

“Does your dog bite?” the theory goes.

“No, he doesn’t bite.”

“You mean he doesn’t bite you, but you don’t know how he’ll act around me.” And so it goes with people.

Despite my parents’ marriage fraught with cultural discord, I wanted to believe Ma and Dad would understand. My father’s best friend was a black man, and their friendship spanned six decades. Ma and Dad said the neighbors were ignorant when everyone except my parents signed a petition to prevent a black family from buying a house on our street. They were friends with an interracial couple in the1960s, having them over to our house several times for coffee, tea and cookies. My sister’s friend from college, a black man from Kenya, stayed with us for a weekend. My godmother called in a panic when she heard about his visit, but Ma laughed over her concern.

So it was with astonishment that I witnessed my parents attacking my relationship with Ronald, using the kind of verbal abuse usually reserved for one another: invoking the N-word, refusing to speak to Ronald, and making predictions that I would end up on welfare with a passel of mulatto children.  I wonder now how many children constituted a passel, since there were five of us. And there was the time Dad had a heart attack when I was twelve.  He was unable to return to work immediately, so he and Ma collected welfare.