To Trayvon, with Love

Dear Trayvon,

I am so sorry that we let you down on the night you died. I am so sorry that you did not receive justice in our court system.

I signed a petition seventeen months ago when I first heard about your death, your murder, Trayvon. I wrote five posts about you in the weeks after, trying to sort out just how America found itself at this place in our history where people not only carry guns but use them and then get away with murder, and at this place where being a black male is STILL dangerous and often fatal. Then I spent the last five weeks following the trial as if my own life depended on it, and, Trayvon, my life did depend on it.

We got home last night and the first thing I did was turn on the TV and flip through the news channels looking for an update on whether or not the jury had come to a verdict, and within minutes I saw the breaking news banner at the bottom of the screen. Ronald and I held our breaths while the court reassembled, all except for your parents, and I felt their absence keenly though I understood why they were not there. I know I would not have been able to hear those words as your parent.

I could only shake my head as the verdict was announced.

“Five white women,” Ronald said. “I told you they’d acquit.”

I hadn’t wanted to believe that the all female jury would acquit George Zimmerman. I wanted to believe, all along, that George Zimmerman would stand up in court and ask for the lies to stop, as first his mother, then his uncle, then his father testified that the screaming on the 911 call was his voice and not yours. I wanted him to admit that he had made terrible, fatal choices that night based on his own biases and hatred and that those choices will forever echo through history and the universe as a reminder of our inhumanity.

But Ronald thought I was naïve.

I began to cry when he told me there is no hope for black people in America. There is nothing left to do, nowhere to go, he said, because nothing will change. I believe so much of what he says, because he has such wisdom about these things, but I know in this case, Trayvon, it is his survival as a black man in this awful, racist country, in spite of his many brushes with other people’s potentially fatal decisions, in stark contrast to your short-lived life, that has left him full of despair.

“We can’t give up,” I said, sobs choking my words.

And I won’t, Trayvon, because you can’t have died in vain.  For every George Zimmerman out there, let there be three or four or eight or thousands who learn how to see you, and all black boys and men, as the person you are, not just the color of your skin. Let there be ten or a hundred or a thousand or millions who know that you belong and have a right to belong and will fight for your right to belong at the store, in the rain, on the walkway, in the gated community your father lived in, in Sanford, in Florida, in the United States of America. You belonged here. You had a right to be here. George Zimmerman was in the wrong place and doing the wrong thing. He acted like a thug that night, because thugs are people who have ill intent and who carry weapons to hurt and kill others, and it doesn’t matter what their skin color is or what clothes they wear, because that isn’t what makes them thugs.

We failed you, Trayvon. Not because your parents didn’t talk to you the way my husband Ronald talked to our daughters, just as his father talked to him and his siblings, and his grandfather talked to his father.

“You can’t do what they do,” Ronald told our daughters. And I know your parents told you that, too, because they were good and loving parents and they wanted to keep you safe from a country that hates you because of the color of your skin.

We failed you, because we allowed the rising tide of racism to crash over our country unabated. We failed you, because we let gun legislation through that supports irresponsible gun ownership. We failed you, because we sat on the laurels of the Civil Rights Movement and grew complacent. We failed you, because George Zimmermans exist everywhere in this country and will continue to profile black boys like you and shoot to kill them.

But we won’t fail your memory, Trayvon. You will be remembered, as the Martin family lawyer, Benjamin Trump, said last night, and “forever remain in the annals of history next to Medgar Evers and Emmett Till as symbols for the fight for equal justice for all.”

Know, Trayvon, that there are white people who get it. Not all of them, not even half of them, probably not even a third of them, but there are white people, like me, who understand what it is to be black in America because we have been fortunate or unfortunate enough to experience what you experienced as, in my case, a wife and mother and daughter-in-law and sister-in-law and aunt and friend.

I, for one, will pledge to fight on your behalf.

I just signed a petition for the federal government to re-open their suspended investigation. I wrote the following comment:

This is a socially important case. It cannot be the precedent that it is okay to shoot and kill black boys because they are perceived through the lens of racism. Trayvon Martin did nothing different than millions of other boys his age do every day -- he went out to buy a snack and was talking on his cell phone as he walked back home. He had a right to be there. George Zimmerman had no right to profile him from a distance, pursue him, not identify himself [to Trayvon], and then shoot Trayvon at point blank range in the heart. Please investigate this fatal act that denied Trayvon his fundamental civil rights and his life.

Know that men like my husband, though crushed by the disrespect and humiliation they have endured in their lifetimes as they trail-blazed the way toward equality, will continue their fight for justice, even at their personal peril.  They will push through their depression and weariness because they don’t want you to live the life they did. They want it to be better, like when my father-in-law moved from Sanford, FL (where relatives still live) up north so his children would not grow up under Jim Crow laws.

And white people like me will be at their sides, just like whites marched beside Martin Luther King, Jr.  We know it is wrong. We believe you when you tell us how it is for you as a black boy living in a racist country. We’ve even experienced it vicariously, like when the Southern white man stood in our garage when we had a neighborhood yard sale a few weeks back and told us how all blacks live off the government. He said that standing in the garage of our newly constructed home, looking directly at our Infiniti G37S parked in the garage along with Ronald’s motorcycle, and our CRV and our daughter’s Mazda 3 parked at the curb so our driveway would fit the lawn tractor, refrigerator, and chandelier we were selling. I guess they were all bought with food stamps, Trayvon, because, according to him and many other white people, all black people are on the dole and too lazy to work. I slipped into the house, and Ronald told the white man, “You have to go now.”

I wish someone had been there the night George Zimmerman decided you didn’t belong in his neighborhood, even though it was obviously multi-cultural and multi-racial. I wish just one person had stepped out of his or her house and said to Zimmerman, “You have to go now. Let this boy return safely home. He belongs here.”

Trayvon, we will continue the fight for the right of all Americans to belong, to be equal under the law, and to be judged by one’s character and not a physical feature or clothing. We cannot rip racism from a person’s brain, but we can fight the good fight and remove the racism from our institutions and our systems and our laws. One day, people like George Zimmerman will be just a memory, but unlike your memory, we will not remember his name but only his deed that reminded us how far we had to go.

With love and hope,

Dianne

Trayvon, for your parents and your brother and for all of us who love you and who won't forget you, this is how you will be remembered, in this photo taken just ten days before you were murdered

The Honey Boo Boo Effect

My Gemini is showing. I am of two minds. I like people. I dislike people. I wish there were more people around. I wish there weren’t any people around. Some days I can’t even summon self-empathy because I’m a person!

I’ve always watched people and been fascinated by them, even as a child hiding under the table due to shyness but curious to hear what the adults talked about. It’s the imperfections that fascinate me the most. They are also what frustrate me the most. Let me wander a bit as I weave around this ambivalence.

Our imperfections make us unique.  Our diversity makes us interesting. But sometimes I wonder if we’ll ever be able to live in harmony, side by side. Our differences are small, but they hold much more weight than our commonality. They cause disconnects, miscommunications, fear, hatred, oppression, and violence. Yet many people won’t acknowledge this. They want to believe that racism, sexism, classicism, and homophobia don’t exist. They want to blame the victims for the situations they find themselves in and cast them as complainers.

Watch this short video, Stopped and Frisked for being aF**cking Mutt, about the NYPD Stop and Frisk initiative in New York City. 87% of all stops involve a person of color.  9 out of 10 stops result in the suspect being released, but listen to the treatment they endure for just being out in the neighborhood. Learn about the pressure police are under to engage in this initiative. Racial profiling is alive and well in America.

I’m even weary of repeating myself on this topic, over and over. It feels like no one is listening.

Ronald and I often talk about how we identify as a family. Like my daughter Mackenzie, who just got her license changed over from New York State to a North Carolina license, we’ve had to choose whether we identify as black or white.

“I’m other,” she told the DMV official. “Can’t I choose interracial?”

“No, you’ll have to choose between black or white. My granddaughter will have to make that choice, too,” he said, as if that would make the choice to deny part of one’s ethnic identity easier.

“I choose black,” she told him. “It’s how I’m viewed by society anyway. My mom won’t be happy.”

I’m not happy, not because the choice seems like a slap in the face, but rather because she had to choose. Why can’t we, in this supposed post-racial society, identify as interracial? See my post Checking theOther Box.

We’ll be choosing a president soon. Early voting begins in NC on Thursday. I will proudly make my choice for President Obama and Walter Dalton for governor of NC. People died believing in and fighting for the inalienable right of all Americans to vote. I won’t diminish their lives and their struggle through apathy.

Maybe some people believe I support President Obama because I identify closely with black Americans. That is not true. What is true is that I can see beyond the color of his skin and see that his policies and philosophies are in alignment with my vision of America where all Americans experience equality, access, and opportunity; where we all live and play on a level playing field; where our diversity is our strength instead of our weakness; and where everyone is proud to be an American. I understand there are people who don’t share this vision, but isn’t that a part of our diversity? Why feel hatred over it? I don’t.

Here’s another video I recommend you watch. Called SacrificeTotal Gift of Self, this video is pro-life and presents anti-contraception arguments. It is a weird mix of religion (the Old Testament) and pseudo-science. Be prepared to be in total awe. Women, beware. You may find yourself suffering the vapors and wondering where women’s rights, choice, and equality went.

No wonder I feel so ambivalent lately.

There is a trend on television that intrigues me. It is a celebration of rural white poverty and culture. Turn to TLC, CMT, Animal Planet or the History Channel, and you’ll see what I mean. Here is a list of shows that are now popular:

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo

Duck Dynasty

Swamp People

Mudcats

Hillbilly Handfishin’

Call of the Wildman

Moonshiners

My Big Redneck Wedding

What I find interesting is that there are two opposing draws that create the audience for these shows. Some viewers watch for the pure exploitation aspect. They make fun of the cultural aspects and the people in the show. Some viewers watch the shows because they believe these shows celebrate what true Americanism is.

I’m disappointed by both approaches. America is diverse. There are subcultures all over the place, and none are more American than others. Together, these subcultures contribute aspects of American mainstream culture and Americanism. We are unique in the world due to our diversity.

No subculture should be subjected to voyeurism and exploitation or held up as the epitome of what being American is. A show that respectfully explores a subculture is fine. How else do we learn about one another? But give equal time to all the subcultures that exist in America, and do it non-judgmentally.

I watch a few of these shows. I admit it is like watching a train wreck. They are hard to turn off. Here Comes Honey Boo Boo had a particularly evocative effect on me when I tuned in one evening.

Here is this precocious, chubby, blonde, seven-year-old white girl living in abject poverty and filth, who eats “sketti” made with catsup and melted butter served over pasta, and who participates in child beauty pageants. Her dad works six days a week in the chalk mines, her mother is foul-mouthed yet loving, and her seventeen-year-old sister just had a baby who was born with the hereditary defect of an extra thumb.

The show is just wrong on so many levels. I felt extreme guilt for watching the few episodes that evening, as if I were peeking in someone’s windows. But I couldn’t turn the channel. I was mesmerized. Yet I feel such compassion for this family who got paid two thirds less than other reality show families per episode. Is it an effort to gain their fifteen minutes of fame or an effort to improve their condition and the lives of their children?  What a horrible situation to find oneself in and yet it is repeated in show after show and in more and worse ways than the show before.

All the shows about weddings were brought to my attention this weekend at an event called TheWedding Dress Project. This project is the dreamchild of my daughter Cara, who envisions deconstructing gender stereotypes through the deconstruction of wedding dresses, prom dresses, and tuxedos. Groups and individuals take apart these symbols of traditional gender roles and remake them into other items in order "to deconstruct and re-imagine the societal factors that perpetuate violence in the home and the emotional trauma that results."

A speaker at the event, Dr. Jenn Brandt, Director of Gender Studies at High Point University, gave a short presentation on the business of weddings and what the average wedding costs these days.

I am guilty of watching some of the reality wedding shows, including Say Yes to the Dress: Atlanta and My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.  These shows are exploitative and voyeuristic, too. In Say Yes to the Dress women are reduced to tears searching for the perfect wedding dress while their entourage of family and friends criticizes their choices.  My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding highlights the lives of Irish Travelers rather than Romani Gypsies as the title seems to indicate. After lavish weddings, these sometimes fifteen or sixteen-year-old girls are relegated to a life of drudgery, keeping up their homes and waiting hand and foot on their husbands. Many of these women never graduate high school. Most of the brides only meet their husbands briefly before the wedding.

I find it odd that I watch these shows about weddings when my own wedding took place at the Public Safety Building (that housed the county jail back then as well as the county courtrooms) after traffic court one Saturday morning.  Here is a photo of us, taken in our wedding clothes just a few weeks after we got married in 1983. Not terribly fancy duds nor a lavish event, but our marriage is nearly thirty years strong.

These shows emphasize the wedding event and downplay the marriage.  A societal shift, no doubt, a la Kim Kardshian, toward extravagance and the growing ephemeral status of marriage.

I am as disappointed in myself as I am in others. I wonder, as I struggle with my ambivalence about people, how Honey Boo Boo and the parade of characters that march across our television screens have affected all of us. Let me include politicians in that group of characters. There have been some awful negative campaign ads in my home state of NC, a swing state. Are they diversions that deflect us from thinking too deeply about the real problems such as racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia that we face in America? Maybe, but I can't be certain in this Gemini frame of mind.

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.