Biased Much?

The following letter appeared in my local newspaper today. It was titled Racism.

In response to the letter (‘a terrible message” July 28) criticizing the woman holding the “We’re racist & proud” sign, I am an American with European heritage. Because of my political and social views, many would label, and have labeled, me a racist. I would argue that I do not deserve that label.

My great-great-grandfather shed blood to free an enslaved people and my family and I have always opposed any measure that would promote one race over another. For example, I think it would be an outrage for a group with European heritage to promote advantages for themselves and call their group the National Association for the Advancement of Anglo-Saxon People. That would be offensive to many of non-Anglo descent.

A European History Month would be similarly offensive, as would an event celebrating White Repertoire Theater. If 12 million Europeans or their families had gained illegal entry into the country, resulting in a drain on the public treasury, I would be opposed to granting them amnesty without consequence.

Again, because of those views, I will be labeled a racist by many screaming racism, because of? Racism. There is no way to escape the label and I am proud of my views promoting equality for all people who obey the law.

If the Rev. Al Sharpton were to call me a racist, I’d never convince him that he is wrong. All I can do is to tolerate, even embrace, the label and proudly continue to hold and express my views.

BARTON TIFFANY

Here is a reminder of that photo:

This is the problem. This letter writer and many, many others don’t get it. They are acting as if everyone, no matter one’s ethnic or racial heritage or the color of one’s skin, is treated the same and experiences social interactions and situations in the same way, and enjoys equal protection under the law; that we all have the same experience as citizens of the United States of America. But that is an assumption, and it is wrong, dead wrong in many cases.

Let me illustrate. Male teens of all races dress a lot alike. That’s part of adolescence – they are rebelling against the older generations but conforming with their own generation while claiming they are fiercely independent. They like hoodies and pants that are way too low at the waist or below the butt for my taste. I’d like to start a campaign to “put a belt on it,” but I digress and I seem to recall not too many adults of the generation above me liked the short skirts, platform heels, hiphugger bellbottom jeans, and midriff shirts I wore back in the ‘70s like everyone else my age.

That same uniform takes on different meanings depending on whether the person wearing it is white or black. A white teen might be described as finding himself and sowing his wild oats; it’s what ALL boys do, all white boys, anyway.

Put that same uniform on a black teen, and he is a criminal.

Subconscious racial bias and racism are alive and well.

And that’s scary, because when a stranger is sizing you up and subconscious racial bias is operating, a black teen may find himself in a fatal situation just as Trayvon Martin did, and Darius Simmons, aged 13, who was shot and killed by his neighbor. No one should discount the enormity of racism and racial bias. It is deadly!

So when I read a letter like the one above, or someone writes a comment on my Facebook page, or says something in a conversation that diminishes or denies the effect of racial bias, I react strongly. Because I have seen how dangerous it is and not just in the news but in my life.

Examples of dangerous or life transforming racially motivated occurences in my life (for new readers, I am white, my husband is black): the seller of our first house decided not to honor our contract after she found out we were an interracial couple; forty white men jumped Ronald because they didn’t think he should be able to date me; two white men rammed our canoe with their motor boat because they didn’t like seeing us together; a car of twenty-something white kids hurtled toward us as we left the movie theater and one kid yelled a racial epithet as they sped off; a white cop held a gun to Ronald’s head as he unlocked his car door because “blacks don’t own foreign cars”; a white guy sucker punched Ronald because he mistook him for an Arab; Ronald was fired from his first job because his boss didn’t like seeing us together; Ronald was arrested for walking down the street. I could list hundreds of more situations, and we are just one couple.

I am saddened by it, too. Because racial bias is insidious in so many ways. When I see a black male child, I see a child. I don’t see a person who has evil intent, or who can physically take me, or who wants to rob me. I see a child.

When our daughters were in first grade, we separated them so they would be able to develop independently. Mackenzie was shy at school and relied on Cara to speak for her, and Cara would have forgotten her head at school every day if Mackenzie wasn’t tracking behind her picking up her lunchbox and gloves and books and boots.

Cara came home each day to excitedly tell me about her new friend. I went to school one day for a special class project, and, as we waited for the kids to return from a school function in the auditorium, I started a conversation with another mom. We were each delighted to discover the other was the mother of the child who was our daughter’s new friend.

The kids returned, and Cara ran over to hug me. I guess Cara's brown skin against my white skin was too much. The white mother physically backed away from us. During the class project she and her daughter sat at the same table as we did, because the girls wanted to sit together, but she avoided speaking to me, and I could tell she was comparing her daughter’s artwork to Cara’s artwork and pushing her daughter to do better. I was saddened by the way the afternoon unfolded.

The next week Cara came home from school crying. She said her new friend had left to go to another school.

I asked the teacher what happened, and because we had known each other for quite a while, she was honest with me when she told me the mother said she was removing her daughter from the school because there was not a single child in the classroom she considered a peer to her child and there were too many black boys in the class.

I knew the black boys she talked about, and I thought they were wonderful, like I think all children are. Their eyes gleemed with the excitement of learning. Their bodies moved with energy and passion. They were friendly, and funny, and engaging, and creative, and smart. I never saw them as different from my children, but she didn’t like my child either.

I wonder if I had been more like that mother, would I have been frightened, too? I don’t think so. I learned from an early age about being open to who other people are. Maybe I learned it because I felt like such an unlovable being, and I hoped others would be open to seeing me if I were open to them. Maybe I always had deep empathy for others, that rare ability to walk in someone else’s shoes. I wish I could endow others with that kind of compassion.

I would travel the country with my magic wand and touch the foreheads and the hearts of people everywhere, so they, too, would see, not through the lenses of hatred and paranoia, but through the lens of acceptance.

So I have to wonder about someone who can look at a 13-year-old boy and see an enemy, especially when so many white middle class children seem to have extended childhoods that last into their mid-twenties and sometimes even later. How, then, can a black boy be assigned adult power and wherewithall and prowess? Racism and racial bias.

There is a a story in the New York Times about Missouri schools where white parents are upset that black parents are transferring their children to better performing schools. Wouldn’t you want that for your child? Why would you be upset that someone else desires it?

One mother who chose to transfer her daughter from a school that had the worst disciplinary rating in the state to a predominately white school watched a televised town hall meeting about the school where the “parents angrily protested the transfer of Normandy students across the county line, some yelling that their children could be stabbed and that the district’s academic standards would slip.”

The mother said, “When I saw them screaming and hollering like they were crazy, I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, this is back in Martin Luther King days. They’re going to get the hoses out. They’re going to be beating our kids and making sure they don’t get off the school bus.’”

Can you imagine thinking that? Wondering if you made the right decision to put your child in a better school and worrying about her safety?

The irony of the white parents thinking the same thing is not lost on me. But I have to wonder how their thinking got to that point. Why are they assuming that having black children in their school, in particular, lower socio-economic black children, will put their own children in danger?

That’s the same kind of thinking George Zimmerman had when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin. That’s the same kind of thinking John Henry Spooner had when he shot and killed Darius Simmons. He said, when the judge asked him if he felt bad for killing his next door neighbor, “Not that bad.”

When he was questioned on the stand he said, “I wanted my guns back. I just, you ever want something so bad…yeah.”

What? His guns were worth more than a child’s life? A child who did not steal his guns? A child who was his neighbor and known to him? How does anyone come to this? Racial bias and racism.

I can’t see us having a conversation on race when the very people who need to be active listeners in the conversation shut it down with their disbelief that racism exists. The truth is in the news every day, and in the lives of millions of people of color. How can it be denied?

The reason most white people think there is no racism is that they have not experienced it,  and they cannot imagine that such horrible things could happen in a country where they feel safe and free to live their lives, until someone of color moves into their neighborhood or attends their child’s school.

I’ll leave you with this video of James Baldwin, activist and writer, describing racism to Dick Cavett fifty years ago. Some things don’t change, and his words are as true today as they were back then.

James Baldwin

The Unfathomable Part II: Put Down Your Assault Style Weapons

I watched Batman with my daughter Mackenzie a few days ago. We watched Pitch Perfect first while we decorated the Christmas tree and drank wine. I had a piece of Ghirardelli’s Twilight Delight chocolate with my wine. Mm, it was a delicious combination. I’m trying to feel normal in this world that is tipped on its axis and is spinning toward self-destruction.

Batman is the movie the Aurora shooter, who shall not be named, used as his stage to shoot moviegoers like tin plates in a carnival game. He used an assault style weapon that used 100 round clips. This past week another shooter, who shall not be named, shot 20 children and 5 adults with an assault style weapon called a Bushmaster before turning a handgun on himself. The parent company of the Bushmaster manufacturer decided to sell the company immediately after the school shooting.

The owner of Cerberus Capital said, ““We do not believe that Freedom Group or any single company or individual can prevent senseless violence or the illegal use or procurement of firearms and ammunition,” Cerberus said. “[Still] the Sandy Hook tragedy was a watershed event that has raised the national debate on gun control to an unprecedented level.” 

(Read more at Cerberusfounder's dad calls Sandy Hook massacre 'devastating')

I remember I waited a week after the Aurora shooting before going to see Batman at the movies. When we finally went, because I refused to let my life be dictated by fear, I cringed and felt terrified during some of the shooting scenes. These men have ruined my movie fun. The very reason to watch a movie such as Batman or Jack Reacher, which I saw yesterday with my husband Ronald, is that such violence is unfathomable and improbable. But it has happened, and not just once. These men have blurred the line between fantasy and reality and dragged us all into the consequence of their inability to tell the difference. It is willing suspension of disbelief in real life, not just in the movies.

Assault style weapons sales have increased since the latest shooting as they did after the Aurora shooting, and people are claiming their 2^nd Amendment rights as they hoard the killing machines. They are joining the NRA in record numbers, 8,000 per day since the Newtown shooting. The local gun show here in Winston-Salem had record numbers of people buying guns and ammunition.  A school board appointee was quoted in the paper today saying that he believes in the 2^nd Amendment and believes certain school staff should be trained and armed.

People say they need the weapons to defend family, self, property and freedom. They say they need them to defend themselves against the government.

Assault style weapons are nothing but human killers. They have no other purpose. I thought our government was “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” We are the government. We are protected by the largest and most powerful military in the world. Why do citizens need to be armed with weapons that are only used for the purpose of mass killing?

Instead of protecting freedom, they are quickly taking our freedoms away.  When I told my husband Ronald about an article I read in the paper yesterday morning where new technology 3D printers can print out plastic parts that can be assembled to make an assault weapon that cannot be detected with metal detectors, he said, “Pretty soon they will have to strip search every person who is traveling somewhere or going into certain buildings or areas, and we are doing it to ourselves.”

What the 3D printer is capable of producing - assault style weapon's parts for assembly

The NRA came out with its statement concerning the Newtown shooting. 

“If it’s crazy to call for putting police in and securing our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy,” LaPierre told NBC’s David Gregory. “I think the American people think it’s crazy not to do it. It’s the one thing that would keep people safe and the NRA is going try to do that.”

 That’s nothing new to me. There was a police officer at every urban school my daughters attended. But LaPierre also suggested that if the teachers had been armed, fewer people would have died. That statement carries a lot of assumptions, like teachers should increase their already overwhelming responsibilities and that every teacher would be happy to carry a gun and perhaps shoot to kill. It also assumes that the teacher who shoots to protect the children is a crack shot and wouldn’t shoot any innocent children or adults in the process of taking out a shooter, or maybe the additional deaths would just be considered collateral damage.

A company is marketing body armor that fits into school knapsacks. The inserts cost about $150, which means only kids of well-to-do parents would have access to them. It also means that parents would need to train their children to place the knapsacks in front of them if someone comes into their classrooms shooting. The body armor will not stop bullets from a gun such as the Bushmaster the Newtown killer used. It also will not stop the damage we are doing to our children in this gun-oriented society.

This stuff makes me sick. Is that where we are headed? Our children’s innocence is being stolen, their lives taken, in the quest for individual freedom. Let’s stop the craziness.

President Obama said, “These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.”

Yes, we must change. Nothing is clearer to me. More guns and more killing are not the answer. More stringent gun ownership requirements are needed. But even more so, we need to lay down our assault style weapons.

Ronald told the white guys at the golf range, all 2^nd Amendment supporters, that if he had to turn his guns in, he would willingly do so. “Sure,” he told me, “it would suck to give up competitive shooting, but if that’s what was required, I’d do it.”

He has had a “conceal and carry” license for over 30 years; owns handguns; is NRA certified to teach pistol safety (though he refuses to be an NRA member due to his strong disagreement with their initiatives); and shoots competitively at bull’s eye targets (never human silhouettes). The white guys at the golf range all scoffed at the idea, although it was a successful initiative in Australia where they allowed citizens to turn in assault style weapons and had positive results in the reduction of gun violence.

I remember Ronald once told someone, “I’m afraid of the same people you are. The difference is I know who they are, and you don’t.”

The individual claimed not to understand what Ronald meant, but I do. So many people believe a stereotyped profile that describes "bad" people: they are black or Hispanic (I won't get into the pervasive negative profiling of Arab individuals -- that's a whole different post for another time), male, poor, and they want what you’ve got. People think that is who they are protecting themselves from, and they are including anyone that fits that description, not even considering the “content of one’s character.” But it is so wrong to make that assumption, and so very dangerous for two reasons.

The first reason is that innocent people will be assumed through profiling to have ill intent and will be treated accordingly, such as shooting them for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, as George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin.

The second reason is that people who do have ill intent are not given proper precautionary treatment; they are assumed to be okay, a different and equally detrimental profiling. A white man loading up a van with the neighbor’s flat screen and surround sound equipment may be assumed to belong there, but that is not always true.

What needs to change is how we view each other -- as individuals and not a stereotype.
White men have perpetrated most of the mass shootings, and the shootings have been racially/ethnically motivated in at least one recent case, the shooting at the Sikh Temple. It isn’t just mental illness that gets these mass killers to the point where they want to kill countless others in order to gain infamy and cause the rest of us to mourn. There is something societal about their motivation, too. It’s the sense of entitlement that white people and wealthy people enjoy in our society, only these individuals feel disenfranchised by it for whatever reason. Maybe that is the great myth – that being white bears entitlement – spread by the wealthy and powerful to protect their status and self-interests. Maybe it used to be true, but the economic instability we’ve faced since 2001 and the growing minority populations in America have changed and shifted things.

It’s the same motivation that makes people want to arm up in their homes and where ever they go. It is a kind of paranoia about losing something to people one considers not as deserving as the person arming up to protect what is his. It is the same kind of hatred and fear that I heard repeatedly during the campaign, pointed at President Obama and others, the 47%, who are assumed to be living off the hard work of the “good” Americans. We’ve assumed too much about who is good and who isn’t.

We have to learn that we are all in this together, that we are the government, and that sometimes the very thing that is good for the majority may not feel good to the individual, things such as gun control laws or the banning of certain weapons. We need to believe in a greater good, not just the personally beneficial good. We’ve forgotten that Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “With great freedom comes great responsibility.”

We also need to know and support the initiative that when people need help, there is a support net to catch them. We can’t pick and choose who gets to have a net or decide to arm up in lieu of a net.

The safety net should be there for all of us. Whether it is for lack of food and shelter, to get proper treatment for a mental illness or physical ailment, to find a living wage job, to have access to education to better one’s circumstance, to have access to preventative health care, or to just feel a connection to the rest of the population and the world, we should all have a way to get there without judgment by those offering the help.

We can go back to an America where we don’t need to be armed up, particularly with assault style weapons designed to kill masses of people. Where people can continue to enjoy shooting sports like hunting or competitive shooting and own a handgun or two for personal protection if they are so inclined. Where we can go to the movies and enjoy the vicarious thrill of the action without the threat of it ever becoming a reality. Where children can go to school to learn in a safe and nurturing environment, and parents can feel safe leaving their children at school. All children should be able to learn in such an environment, whether they live in the poorest of urban or rural neighborhoods or they live in an affluent suburb or attend a private school. Our children deserve the best of all of us, and so do we. It’s time to put down our assault style weapons for the greater good.

Profiling Fatality

Everyone who isn’t a total recluse has heard about the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old black boy from Sanford, FL, the city my in-laws were born and raised in, and in which we still have family. Trayvon left his father’s house in a gated community to run to the convenience store for some skittles and iced tea during the halftime of a game he was watching on TV. On his way back he realized he was being followed and called his girlfriend who encouraged him to run. He didn’t, and self-appointed neighborhood watch president George Zimmerman caught up with him, confronted him, then shot and killed him.

Zimmerman, identified as white by the police but Hispanic by his family, claims self-defense under the Florida “stand your ground” law and the Sanford police apparently agreed with him, at least until public outrage changed their minds. But as of this posting, he still has not been charged.

Profiling is a dangerous game and so is carrying guns.

I’m married to a black man. I spent many hours in our thirty-six years together worrying if he was safe out there in the world, a world that mostly considers him to be criminal or dangerous just based on his skin color. No matter that he spent twenty-five years serving and protecting the citizens of our community as a firefighter. No matter that he is a devoted husband and father. No matter that he is a talented artist, musician, and single-handicap golfer. No matter that he is an ethical man who wouldn’t pick up a dime off the street unless it was to return it to its owner. His black skin is all that mattered when police frequently stopped him for DWB, driving while black, or when women locked their car doors as he walked through a parking lot back to his car or when people treated him disrespectfully or ignored him completely.
Once Ronald got home very late. I was worried and angry. "Where have you been?" I asked when he walked into the bedroom. "I was ready to start calling the hospitals."
"I'm going to turn on the light," he said. "I don't want you to be upset by what you see, okay? Then I'll explain what happened."
He turned on the light, and I recoiled from the sight before me. His T-shirt and shorts were covered in blood. His cheek and lip were swollen.
He had gone to Planet 505, a bar on Westcott Street, to listen to a band. On his way back to his car, he was jumped from behind and punched in the head. A fight ensued. The other man, a white guy, kept calling Ronald an Arab. When the police arrived, they immediately assumed Ronald was the perpetrator and cuffed him. At least the other man admitted he had started the tussle, and Ronald refused to press charges. While the inside of Ronald's cheek had been torn open when the man grabbed him in the mouth during the fight, the man now had four broken fingers to show for it. He refused medical assistance, and Ronald drove himself to the emergency room where he received three stitches inside his cheek. The man said he attacked Ronald because he was the "Arab man" who had broken into his car. He believed this because that night Ronald wore a Kufi, a hat worn in northern African and some mid-Eastern countries. He profiled him much like Zimmerman profiled Martin because he wore a hoodie.

I’m married to a black man who has a license to conceal and carry a gun, but he doesn’t, unless he is transporting his guns to the shooting range for Olympic-style target practice. He doesn’t carry them holstered, but locked and unloaded in a gun box in the back of the SUV.

He also is certified to teach pistol safety and taught classes a few years ago.  He told me how men walked into class with swagger, and how they sent their wives to class with guns too big for their hands and too heavy for them to handle. Some class members, men and women, mentioned they couldn’t wait to shoot someone.

I was appalled by his stories, but he felt he could provide a service: if people were going to own guns then at least they should know how to use them safely. He added some of his own expertise, for those anxious to shoot someone, about what it is like to react in an extreme circumstance, like firefighting or maybe in the case of someone breaking into your home. Your body wants to flee; your heart is racing; your breath is heaving; your senses are heightened; your fine motor skills leave you, and you lose your accuracy, that is, if you ever had it. He wanted his students to know that it isn’t easy to make good decisions under such circumstances and that an impulse decision might be the wrong one. In addition he would ask them if they had thought about what it would mean to shoot someone.

Did George Zimmerman ask himself what it would mean to shoot someone?

I wrote about how shooting someone can change a person in my post Human Urine (http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2012/01/human-urine.html).

Zimmerman said he shot in self-defense, but was he brandishing his gun when he approached Martin? How would you react if someone approached you with a gun? I think I would be paralyzed by fear. Perhaps you might push him, if you could. Maybe that’s what Trayvon did. We won’t ever know what happened that night.  I wish Trayvon Martin had arrived safely back in front of the TV to catch the end of the game after his snack run, but he didn’t because he was profiled and someone who was carrying a gun made a bad decision and acted on it. Was protecting Zimmerman’s neighborhood worth Trayvon’s life? Will he ask himself that question for the rest of his life?

So many gun proponents think we should all be carrying guns, maybe like the Wild West. But I think only the police and other safety officers should be carrying. The “stand your ground” law is being considered in the state I now live in as well as the right to carry in public parks. That scares me. Most people aren’t trained the way the police are trained to handle guns and potentially dangerous situations, and bad decisions will undoubtedly be made that will change or end people’s lives.

I remember the boys my daughters went to school with in our urban school district in Syracuse. In kindergarten they were sweet, creative, and fun loving, if not mischievous. By eighth grade some were over six feet tall. They were boys still, but they had man-sized bodies. Already people showed fear around them, particularly the black boys, but to me, they were the same boys with the mischievous smiles from the kindergarten class.

“Hi, Mrs. Hagan,” they called out when they saw me in the hallway or the parking lot, some with baritone voices. I feared for them in the same way I feared for my husband. How would the rest of the world treat them?  I know my fears weren’t unfounded. Look at Trayvon. He should have been able to watch that game, eat some skittles, drink his iced tea, talk to his girlfriend, have some teenage fun, go on to college, get married, become a father and a productive citizen, but instead he died. He was profiled and someone had a gun.

When our young black men are categorized and profiled, what chance do they have for success? Why can’t the world see the sweet faces and mischievous smiles beneath the hoodies? Why can’t they see another human being full of life and potential? Why must our young black men die too soon?

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

Ronald would grow silent and pensive in the months and years that followed as he slipped into a deep depression – the depression that would rob me of his stories and leave me wondering if we would stay together after all we had been through; the depression that lay on him so heavily he wondered, seven months after his almost fatal fall, if he could attend his nephew’s funeral.

I dreamed about Yancy the night he died in July 2005. His sweet child’s face, even though he was a man by then, his sensitive eyes, his looming silhouette, all in the dream, but there was a gun in his hand and it went off. Whom did Yancy shoot?

I thought the dream was odd because Ronald and I had not seen him for years. He was the baby who made me cry when Ronald called me at my summer job in 1977 to announce his birth. Sylvester Jr. and his wife Marsha separated when Yancy was just six, and later divorced. The lingering mistrust between Yancy’s parents left him mostly with his mother. Yancy was angry, too, that his father started dating white women right after the split and eventually married one. He must have thought it was the ultimate betrayal.

 Twelve pounds when he was born, Yancy had grown to over six and a half feet tall by the time he was a young teen. He dropped out of school. He served a prison sentence for assault and robbery just after he turned eighteen. He was a boy in a man’s body, a boy whom many people viewed as a threat because of his size and the color of his skin; a boy who could not contain his anger over the way his life veered off course. Perhaps it had never been on course. His descent into delinquency, drug use, paternity, joblessness, seemed a self-fulfilling prophecy. He had been a smart, adorable little boy, and that is how I remembered him best, so the dream surprised me. I pushed it out of my head the next day until the phone rang.

“It’s Mom,” Bertha said. “Yancy shot himself.”

“Oh,” I said, “I thought he shot someone else,” the dream pushing its way back into consciousness. I must have confused her. “Is he going to be okay?” I continued, thinking it had been an accident, hoping for it: maybe he had shoved a gun down into his waistband to hide it, and it went off.

 “He’s dead,” she said.

Marsha called me a few hours later. “I want Ron to be one of the pallbearers,” she said, grief halting her voice. “Yancy reminded me of Ron: both of them so sensitive, so artistic.”

“I’ll ask him as soon as he gets home,” I said, the blood pulsing in my temples. When I told Ronald, I saw the vein quivering over his jaw the way it did when he was stressed or angry. He dropped his head. “I don’t know if I can go,” he said. “I don’t think I can do this.”

“You don’t have to,” I said, protective, worried, sorry I had to tell him. “I’ll go. Cara and Mackenzie will go.” They were in Syracuse producing their second evening dance concert. “We’ll represent the R. Hagans.”

“When is it?” he asked. I gave him the details, and he turned and picked up the phone and called the Fire Department to request funeral leave.

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.

The Tar Baby of Racial Discourse

Senator Lamborn announced on radio while discussing the debt ceiling problem that “they will hold the President responsible. Now, I don’t even want to have to be associated with him. It’s like touching a tar baby and you get it, you’re stuck, and you’re a part of the problem now and you can’t get away.”

He later apologized, but I cannot disassociate the image from the man. It’s one more incident that offends my sensibilities. The salt has been poured yet again on the open wound of racism that I experience as a white woman who is married to a black man and the mother of interracial daughters.

Tar baby, which originated in African folklore, became popular in the early twentieth century and was used to describe nasty situations that only grow worse by attempts to solve them. The term is also derogatory and racist, especially as used in the mid-twentieth century.

Language evolves and changes with social and cultural evolution. Otherwise English would be spoken in the same way it originated – a language that is more different than the same as modern English and which sounds incomprehensible to most current speakers of English. Words become obsolete, are modified, pronounced or spelled differently, and some words fall out of favor or become associated with a negative legacy. New words are created to capture advances, new ways of thinking, new things, or someone’s creative verbal play. Other words are added from other languages.

Words can be emotionally charged, used one way and meant or interpreted in another.

I sat at a meeting in the early 1990s as an assistant director of a university department. The meeting was called to introduce the new Dean of Students who had been personally recruited by the chancellor. He stood in front of us, a white man in his forties, well educated, and well-spoken. He talked about the challenges of his job and decided to tell the story of one student’s recent experience to illustrate what he faced on the job everyday.

The story went something like this:

The coed went to a bar with friends and got drunk. She met a male student at the bar who was also drinking. They seemed to hit it off, and she invited him back to her apartment. Her roommates heard noise in her room and went to check on her. They opened the door to discover that their roommate was having sex…

The Dean paused for dramatic affect.

… with a black man.

I felt my hands and armpits moisten, my vision blur, and my heart thud against my ribcage.

The Dean continued the story with what registered in my racing mind as smugness.

The roommates called the police and when they arrived they asked the couple what was going on. Both responded that they were having consensual sex. The man was getting ready to leave. The police said there was nothing they could do since it was consensual. The young man got up, dressed and left.

The next morning the young woman’s roommates asked her if she realized what she had done. Did she realize she had sex with a black man? She called the police and filed a rape report.

I felt a collective gasp in the room and my anger boiled. All the attendants were white with the exception of one young black woman. I raised my hand.

“Yes,” the Dean said and nodded his head toward me.

“You lost the power of the story,” I said, my voice shaking, “when you racialized it.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

I felt my whole body thrumming. I said something like, “the story is about a woman drinking and bringing a stranger into her home. You didn’t mention her race, but mentioned his. You diminished what really happened. You racialized the situation.”

“No, I didn’t,” he said, shrugging his shoulders as if I were a crazy woman, and turning to address the next question.

I gathered my papers together and left the meeting, in front of everyone, before it concluded. I cried all the way back to my office.

That woman put herself at risk. She drank too much, didn’t know the man, and invited him to her home. The danger was not that he was black, but that she was under the influence and had invited a stranger back to her apartment. But I knew the danger that young man put himself in, too. Maybe the promise of sex overrode rational thought. Maybe he had not experienced racism that way before.

Several months prior to the meeting, my husband, my black husband, got arrested. A loving partner, involved father, dedicated firefighter, and talented musician with a college degree in sculpture and music, there was nothing criminal about him.

He was at a Westcott neighborhood bar, situated just beyond the east end of the campus, with friends, and they bought him a couple of beers. A non-drinker, he decided to leave his car and walk the couple of miles home. The police stopped him. They had gotten a call about a window peeper on a street Ronald had not crossed, and they claimed to have followed tracks in the snow that led to him. They told him no blacks lived in that neighborhood even though he was less than a mile from our house and his parent’s house. His parents had lived in the neighborhood since the 1970s, as had Ronald who spent his teen and early adult years there. The police charged him with trespassing, attempted to bump his head against the doorjamb as they put him in the back of the cruiser, took him downtown, refused him a phone call, had his car towed, and told him even if he didn’t do it, they would make sure it cost him money.

The panic I felt as I wondered where Ronald was in the early hours of the morning paralyzed me. He had run-ins with the police before, DWB, driving while black, incidents, like the time he unlocked the door to his Toyota Celica and felt the cold metal of a gun barrel at the back of his head. An officer was holding the gun and said, “Black guys don’t own foreign cars.”

I called hospitals while I waited for word from him, hoping no officer would ring my bell to deliver bad news. Ronald was allowed to call me at 6:00 a.m., just as I had about given up hope that he would come home safe.

The trespassing charges were dismissed. I thought I could file the incident away as another case of racial profiling that ended without anyone getting hurt. Then my graduate intern, who was white and dating one of the white campus security officers, told me a disturbing fact: she had visited her boyfriend while he was working and noticed Ronald’s mug shot hanging in the guard shack. When she told him she knew Ronald, he told her his photo was in every guard shack on campus. Ronald often came to campus to pick me up from work or to have lunch with me, and I worried what would happen if one of the guards recognized him from the mug shot. To my relief, my intern convinced her boyfriend to request their removal.

When the dean told his story at the meeting he sealed my belief that the campus was a dangerous place for people of color, particularly black men, particularly my husband, even though he graduated from there. I was afraid that our daughters would lose their father and I would lose my spouse in some sort of nightmarish misidentification or misunderstanding.

The dean and his story became my tar baby.

I wrote the Dean a letter and asked to meet with him. He was aggressive when we met in his office, frightening. He said he was not a racist, that he never said the word black, only that the man and woman were of different races, and that I must have something personal going on which set me off. I didn’t tell him I was interracially married.

Then I went to the Dean of Social Work, one of the first black deans on campus, to tell him the story. I told the vice president of my division. She was a white woman who became one of the first female VPs on campus. Finally, I filed a complaint against the dean at the EEOC office on campus. The black EEOC officer interviewed other attendees at the meeting and since no one else cited the story as racist, the complaint was dropped. The VP called me and told me to back off. I had become the topic of conversation in the upper echelons of the university. I felt defeated. I wondered how many students would suffer at the hands of this man who had been hired as their advocate and guide.

About a year later, I was at home listening to the university radio station on a Saturday morning. The newscast included a story about the Dean of Students losing his position after the campus women’s group complained about his treatment of coeds who had been victims of date rape.

Soon after I saw an article about him in the newspaper. He had started a home-based business, a Christian family values website.

Twenty years later, I haven’t been able to get loose from my tar baby.

I still wonder what I could have done differently in response to that dean and his story.  What would I say now that I didn’t know to say then? Maybe that I know he tried to bully me in his office the day I met with him, and that his bullying did not change my opinion. Maybe I would have been open about my experiences of racism. Maybe I wouldn’t have looked so hard for allies to come to my assistance.

What I wouldn’t change is how I feel about the way the dean manipulated the story, as if the man’s race posed danger. His racialization of the event distracted the listeners’ attentions from the real problems that come from making poor choices. He planted an image in their minds or awakened one already there. If anything, the story should have been a cautionary tale about overindulgence and instant gratification.

If I had the chance to speak to Senator Lamborn, I would tell him that his word choice was insidious. Consciously or not, he planted a racist and derogatory image in the minds of millions of Americans who don’t understand their own role in the perpetuation of racism in this country. Most people don’t define themselves as racist, but many support a racist, segregated society, a system of haves and have-nots, a particular definition of what an American is that is inclusive of some but exclusive others. Senator Lamborn perpetuated the narrow concept of Americans when he used the term tar baby in conjunction with President Obama.

But liberals aren’t free of the tar baby either. They have stumbled as much as the conservatives. Maybe President Obama, who has stayed mostly above the racial fray, has taught us something about racial discourse. Don’t fight dirty, participate at all times with dignity and respect, don’t let your emotions get the best of you, and acknowledge the truth of your experience.

I’ve not used the term tar baby in conversation before I wrote this, and I plan not to use it in the future. That’s the beauty of language, changing to meet our social and cultural evolution.