Matters: Gray and Otherwise

Phil Robertson of the A&E show Duck Dynasty was quoted in GQ as saying:

“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men. Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”

He also made the following comment about the pre-Civil Rights era:

“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field.... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

Read more at Huffington Post.

He was briefly suspended from the show, but viewer outrage made A&E think again, and he has been reinstated. Free speech, his supporters cried.

Yes, free speech, but free speech for those who oppose his messages as well. Why is it that members of the far right can say whatever they want, including blatant lies about our President with their birther conspiracy, but their opposition is not allowed to respond, factually or otherwise, or the individuals will be charged with trampling on freedoms? On paper our freedoms are for all Americans; in reality, they are for a sub-group of Americans, like the wealthy, or conservative Christians, or Constitutionalists who really only believe in a couple of amendments interpreted in their favor, or, as my husband and I often discuss, for white Americans but not for Americans of color.

We have to keep fighting for equality and to protect the freedoms of all Americans or we all stand to lose. 

I’ve written about the trend of reality shows that represent rural white culture, poverty, and fundamental conservative values in my post The Honey Boo Boo Effect.

I think we should be respectful of all American sub-cultures. We truly are a diverse country, and our diversity should be reflected in the media and in our government representatives. But that respect includes not spreading hateful and discriminatory rhetoric about other groups. And there should be equal representation in the media. Don’t glorify one sub-culture at the expense of another.

Of course, money drives everything. A&E knows Duck Dynasty is one of their top moneymakers, and that is what drove them to reinstate Robertson. Besides, the network knew what it was getting when they took on the show. They like the drama it causes.

Reality TV is getting wearisome but I am not sure we are near the end of its run. Our sense of reality has gotten fuzzy. Social engineering by the conservative base and the wealthy (like the Koch brothers) is frightening, and it is taking us backwards at a pace I find alarming. We need to be proactive, vigilant, and progressive.

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I want to abolish whiteness in 2014. I never felt white anyway. I was that Italian kid with the odd Australian mother. I was one of the poor kids and I didn’t get to experience the things middle class white children did with regularity: vacations, summer camp, bicycles under the Christmas tree, and new clothes rather than hand-me-downs.  I called myself a mutt, but I never felt ashamed of my mixed ethnicity.

As an adult in an interracial marriage with mixed race adult children, I abhor what white represents and the way politicians and the media use it to further divide us. Whiteness does not exist anymore than blackness exists. It is a socially engineered concept designed to oppress people of color and award privilege to “colorless” people.

I am tired of this devil

I am tired of this stuff

I am tired of this business

Sewn when the going gets rough

I ain't scared of your brother

I ain't scared of no sheets

I ain't scared of nobody

Girl, when the goin' gets mean

Protection for gangs, clubs, and nations

Causing grief in human relations

It's a turf war on a global scale

I'd rather hear both sides of the tale

See, it's not about races, just places, faces

Where your blood comes from is where your space is

I've seen the bright get duller

I'm not going to spend my life being a color

~ Michael Jackson: Black or White

Let’s make a pledge to celebrate who we really are, because we are all ethnic, we are all diverse, and we are all human. We have to agree that equality is more than just tolerance. It is more than just announcing we are all equal. It is much more than telling victims of oppression that racism is dead and they are the ones perpetuating it. It is more than claiming some groups don't deserve equality and then blame them for their circumstances.

There is much hard work to be done. Let's work together to get rid of the concept of white and the oppositional concept of black. We don't need anymore divisiveness.

My family is racially and ethnically mixed and we come in all shades of skin tone, but none of us is the socially constructed "white" or "black." (Photos taken at Cara and Mackenzie's first and second birthday parties) 

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I am on another journey first touched on in my post Gray Matters. I promised updates. Here is the first.

I last dyed my hair in October 2013.  It’s been about three months now and the growth of my natural color, a very pale gray or nearly white, is showing. I bought five hats of various styles and gotten many compliments about how nice they look, but I bought them to cover the growing skunk stripe.

Recently Ronald told me that while he liked the hats (he tried for years to get me to wear them but I always feared “hat hair”), he really liked how my gray was coming in. He said it looked purposeful, as if I had planned it. He’s helped me to be unafraid to face the world with my growing stripe.

I am sure part of the seemingly easy transition is because I used demi-permanent instead of permanent hair color. The color is fading all over except at the ends where it is very concentrated. So streaks of gray are showing through all of my hair, not just at the hairline or part.

I’m starting to enjoy the color of my natural hair. I don’t feel it has aged my appearance one bit. I put to rest the horrible discrepancy between what I look like and what society expects me to look like and how awful it made me feel.

It’s another pledge I am making for 2014. Will you join me? No more societal judgments and pressures that make women feel insecure about their appearance. At fifty-six I am pleased with my appearance and that I am healthy and fit. What could be sexier than confidence? Ronald has noticed!

My hair has grown quite a bit since I cut it to my shoulders in November. It's always grown quickly.

####

2013 was a difficult year for me. I lost my beloved father-in-law, a man whose life deserves celebration, and I had two painful surgeries to get the bones of my feet corrected so I will regain stability when walking.

It wasn’t a stellar year for the progress of our country either, as we witnessed the least effective Congress in history, the GOP and Tea Party smear campaign of the Affordable Care Act, the war on women, the war on the poor, and the war on workers. The ACA rollout had its own set of problems, but as far as I am concerned, being someone who works with databases, I expected a rocky start with the site. It was a huge undertaking.

Now we can look forward to 2014 with the hope that things will only get better. Perhaps we can even look at the prospects of reinstating long-term unemployment for the millions of people still looking for work and of raising the minimum wage and working toward income equality.

Happy New Year, dear readers! Life is not a straight journey but one that takes course over many roads: some beaten flat by many feet, some rarely traveled, some full of seemingly insurmountable obstacles and painful realities, some that seem to lead nowhere, but none not worth the taking. Enjoy the journey.

Rumble Jumble

My brain is rolling around loose in my skull this week.  It feels like a rumble jumble up there. It’s that time of year.

It’s coming off the Christmas holiday and going on a soup diet so I can get control of my sweet tooth and my fat cravings.

It’s having a nightmare about zombie heads that roll around and kill people. And the heads were people I knew. Somehow I was able to turn a few of the heads back into whole people not infected by the zombie germ. Can’t remember how I did it though.

It’s being back at work after a week and a half off and remembering how much I have to do and feeling frightened but up for it at the same time.

It’s about getting a bug to write another essay and letting the idea cogitate while reading up on my topic of interest. The research gives me a frame of reference and helps build structure to my  “pursuit of mental rabbits” (that’s Scott Russell Sanders’ phrase) as I start to pour out all my thoughts and emotions onto virtual paper.

It’s about getting a rejection for my memoir manuscript and licking my wounds and thinking about what I want to do next, even as I work at producing more writing. I did not submit to multiple small publishers, just one, even knowing that multiple submissions would have been more efficient. But I’m not sure what I think about the publishing world and if I want to be a part of it. I’m not looking to publish the next great bestseller. I’m not trying to be a full time writer. I’m not trying to gain credentials to get a great teaching gig.

It feels hard enough sometimes to be part of the corporate world in my day job and my career is on it’s downward ride to retirement, though I’m not sure when that will be. I’m a humanist in a capitalist society. I never did fit in, and I’m not sure I want to fit in, but I believe I have something to say and a unique way of saying it. I’ll be cogitating a lot on this in the next few weeks.

It’s about racism that creeps into my life when I’m not even thinking about it. Like when I was reading about the hateful people in Alabama who talk of terrorizing people by profiling the Hispanic population. Children are frightened to go to school and adults are afraid to go to work. How is this helping? It’s helping to “take back the country.” Except the people that want it back are the descendants of those who took it in the first place. Why can’t we all just get along?

Then Ronald and I went to Best Buy. I had my purse on my shoulder and Ronald had his man bag on his. He carries his Nook and a notepad and his phone in it. It’s about the same size as a small shoulder bag for women. As we entered the store, I turned my head to smile at the greeter, an older white male, but his expression stopped me short of smiling. He looked frightened and ready to flee or press the button on his walkie talkie to notify security.

“Do you have a return?” he asked, looking directly at Ronald.

“No,” Ronald responded. He never stopped walking.

After we left the store we looked at each other.  “Really?”

It’s not like we haven’t talked about it before. One incident, and we shrug it off as someone’s mistake or bad day. But add up a whole day’s, week’s or month’s worth, and I can see how a person of color can jump down the throat of someone who asks a seemingly innocent question. Celebrities lose their freedom to shop and spend leisure time because they are constantly recognized and swarmed by their fans. If you are a person of color in America, you never had that freedom in the first place. You are always being watched. What would it take to earn the freedom to experience stress free shopping, dining out, movie going? And why would one have to earn it? Isn’t it an inalienable right of being American and being human?

Maybe I’ve had too much soup. I’ve got that rumble jumble in my brain.

(Excerpt from Chapter 7, The Ubiquitous They, Shades of Tolerance: A Biracial Love Story)

I graduated with a dual degree in English Education and Speech Communication. I took the first job offered to me after graduation –bill collector – so I could continue to stay in Syracuse. I hated it and hoped a teaching position would come along soon.

That fall I was offered a teaching position in a rural school district outside of Syracuse right during the interview. I was too inexperienced to realize that should have concerned me. My first day, a chilled November day in 1979, was disastrous. I had strep throat, and I drove the forty-minute commute with a three-day old driver’s license in my purse. A bit shaky on the highway still, I talked to myself the whole way. I arrived at the school thinking how great it was that I had survived the drive only to discover that the other teachers had walked out due to an expired contract. When they finally came back in the building an hour later, the teacher, whose place I was filling, gave me a tour. She was quitting to have a baby.

As she guided me through the crowded halls, her hand instinctively held in front of her belly, she rattled on about the students.

“A lot of the students are going to be your age,” she said.

“Oh?” I said, feeling feverish and overwhelmed.

“They come from farms, and lots drop out during planting and harvest seasons,” she responded. “And I should tell you, we don’t have a drug problem like they do in the city schools. We have an alcohol problem. Not much else for teens to get into around here.”

Oh, no, anything but alcohol, I thought to myself, trying to keep up with the perky teacher, her belly seeming to propel her forward rather than slow her down.

She pointed to a student going in the opposite direction down the corridor. “She’s from the only black family in town,” she said, as if it were special news. “We don’t associate with them.”

My head swirled and all movement around me seemed to slow and stop. I lagged behind the teacher now, and she stopped to wait for me.

“Are you okay?” she asked, looking concerned.

“Fine, I’m fine,” I said. “I’ve got a sore throat.”

“It’s the cold weather. There’s a blizzard due this afternoon. Do you plan to move here? It’ll be a lot easier for you.”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

I drove home in the blizzard, the wind howling and pushing my car sideways on the highway, my visibility near zero. But there was a blinding darkness in my mind, too, and I wasn’t sure which was worse.

Two hours later I pulled up to Peggy’s house, where I had been living again since graduation. I was exhausted, discouraged, and crying.

“What’s wrong?” Peggy asked when I came in the back door covered in snow. She was pregnant with her second daughter, and she seemed all belly like Ma had been when she was pregnant with Andy.

“I can’t go back there,” I said.

“Why? What happened?”

“They’ll be burning crosses on my car,” I said. “They don’t like black people. They’ve got no teacher’s contract. I almost died driving home. My throat is killing me.”

“Slow down. What are you going to do?”

“The only thing I can do,” I said, sucking in air and wiping my hand across my eyes, smearing mascara across my face. “Quit.”

I dialed the number to the superintendent’s office and told her I was submitting my resignation.

“You can’t quit,” she said. “You signed the health insurance form.”

“There’s no contract,” I said. “You misled me.”

“Did you get offered another teaching job?”

“No,” I said.

“Did you know it is New York State law that you have to give thirty days notice?”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll come teach for the thirty days, but that’s it.”

“Don’t bother,” She said, disgust oozing through the phone lines. “I better not find out you are taking another teaching job. I’ll have you blacklisted.”

“Do whatever you have to do,” I said, and hung up. Then I sat on the floor and cried.

“Dianne,” Peggy said, “What are you going to do now?”

“I’ll figure something out,” I said. I stood up to grab the phone and called Ronald.

“You should have stuck it out,” he said. He would, for twenty-five years, after he got on the Fire Department.

“I couldn’t.”

The next day I applied for Christmas work at J.C. Penney. I swallowed Orajel just before the interview so I could speak through an enflamed throat. Disappointment must have shown in my expression despite my best efforts.

“Don’t look so sad,” the chubby personnel manager said, rubbing his hand over his balding head. “I just offered you a job on the spot, and I don’t usually do that. The least you could do is smile.”

“I’m grateful, really,” I said, but I doubt I convinced him.

Out on the floor in the women’s accessories department, I was told to keep a special eye on black shoppers. The black undercover security guard would trail them if we called his number and let him know they were in our department. One day I told him off.

“You know,” I said, “if you stopped wasting your time chasing after all the black shoppers and followed some of the little old white ladies carrying tote bags, you might actually catch someone shoplifting.”

I continued to apply for teaching jobs and was offered a substitute teaching position that started in February 1980 at a wealthy suburban middle school. My hope was that the teacher, who was pregnant, would end up quitting and I would get the position full time. In 1980 there were too many teachers and not enough positions. The baby boom generation had all graduated from high school, and the next generation was what would come to be called the baby bust generation. Schools closed and getting tenure as a new teacher was difficult. Oftentimes substituting was a way to become known to the administrators in the case that a rare opening occurred.

I taught three English classes and one Special Skills class. Of my ninety students, only one was black. He was a small, quiet boy, maybe trying to blend in and not be noticed.

I quickly discovered how difficult it was to take over classrooms mid-year. Every comment from the students seemed to be, “Mrs. Smith didn’t do it that way.” But I was determined to succeed, and though I kept my job at J.C. Penney just to be sure, and then stayed up until 2:00 a.m. each morning reading and correcting papers, I stayed with it. That spring I moved into my own apartment.

Ronald borrowed my car one day to go on job interviews; he was still waiting to hear if he passed the firefighters’ exam. He picked me up after school had been let out. One of my students stayed late for an after-school activity and saw me getting into the car.  She must have spent the evening telling friends the juicy news. The next day she confronted me.

“I saw you yesterday,” she said, her red hair, the same color as her freckles, gathered into a half ponytail, her glasses shielding her eyes with glare.

“Oh?” I said.

“Is that your fiancé?” she asked, twirling a strand of hair. Two of her friends stood next to her, giggling self-consciously.

“Yes,” I said.

“My mother said she would kill me if I ever dated a black man,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, but I already knew this was a career-ender. I imagined she had told her parents, and I had no doubt her parents, in the name of protecting their child, had called the administration. I felt my heart drop.

“Well, what do you think of that?” she coaxed.

“I think your parents have a right to their opinion,” I said. “I don’t feel the same way. I believe you love the person, not the skin color.”

“That’s interesting,” she said, and she and her friends giggled and left the classroom.