Woman, Disappearing

(Please note: This post contains descriptions of the aftermath of emotional abuse. Everyone mentioned in this story is currently safe and in no imminent danger.)

The man that now dominates and controls my mother’s life seemed, at first, no different than any of the men who expressed interest in her in the years since my father had died, most of whom she refused. I remember encouraging her to have fun. I remember that we stood, giggling, in front of the big mirror outside her closet door, and picked out what she would wear for her first date.

For me, domestic abuse entered my life indirectly. My mom met a man; he saw that she was vulnerable; she married him; and he is awful. Now we all live with it. I don’t necessarily want to tell the story of the abuse itself; there are enough of those accounts. I don’t want to share any salacious details. What I really want to say is that I miss my mom. 


Within a year or so of my mother’s marriage, her behavior seemed a little odd. But since I lived so far away, I couldn’t do much, and I wasn’t sure what questions to ask. Instead, she seemed strangely distant. I am an only child, and we were always extremely close. But now we could only talk on the phone when she was at work. Her conversations seemed dominated by the strange friends she was making in her new church. When I needed major surgery, I asked her to come visit and sent her the money for a plane ticket, but she refused. “We have a church dinner that week,” she said. 

I spent years trying to figure out why she was mad at me. After a while, my mother’s husband could no longer hide who he was during my visits, and she admitted what was really happening. I now know why she deflected all my questions.

When I ask her about it now, she just says, “I couldn’t tell you.” But I think she made a calculation: she knew her relationship with me would endure even if she pushed me away. She preserved the more volatile relationship in order to keep the peace, and to keep herself safe. 


My experience of my mom’s situation is of losing her, a little at a time. When I was growing up, she was a vibrant woman; brilliant, stylish and colorful. She collected Black American art. She was an unbelievably avid reader. She was curious and smart, taught social sciences and pursued a paralegal degree. She taught me all my Black history. She was religious, but raised me to think critically and make my own choices. She loved to dance, and she loved cooking (she still cooks, but she hates it now, and rarely eats). She loved making things and was a brilliant sewist. “What should I wear tomorrow?” she once asked me, before choosing a beautiful turquoise fabric and whipping up a dress to wear the next day. 

She’s still my mom, but I’m not sure who she is now, 15 years into this awful marriage. When I visit, she’s thrilled to see me, but also exhausted and short tempered. She has virtually no friends, and the few she has, she cannot spend extended time with. She cannot travel. She’s abandoned virtually all her hobbies and interests. Her husband volunteers her free time to their “church,” a place where the pastor relentlessly degrades and berates women.

It feels like my mother is slowly vanishing, and living with that knowledge is to live with pervasive worry and a constant absence. Unlike the loss of my father, which was very specific and final, the grief for my mom is not particularly acute but is always in the background. 


This is an ongoing situation. We live with it, and we adapt, and we try to stay safe. We exploit the loopholes — he is  afraid of computers, so we’re still able to stay in touch. He likes inviting people over, so I’m still able to visit. 

Her situation doesn’t affect my daily life much, but visits are extremely stressful. I won’t detail what those are like, except to say that they have gotten progressively worse over the years, and I have a bunch of therapy-approved coping strategies to help me get through them. My husband has told me that I’m noticeably traumatized for about a month each time I return. During each visit, my mom and I usually get a few hours of time together, stolen here and there, so it’s worth it. 

My mother’s husband is cruel and controlling, but he is an emotional abuser, so her situation is completely outside of what “the system” can do for her. She is safe most of the time, but I am constantly worried. In the back of my mind, I know how easy it would be for my stepfather to obtain a weapon, should he choose to escalate things. I think many of those incidents where a woman is “suddenly” killed by her husband and the news report says “no prior incidents of violence,” are from homes like my mother’s. 

One of the reasons I don’t talk much about this is because of the most infuriating question: “Why doesn’t she just leave?” Well, why doesn’t she?

“A woman escaping a household like this is statistically safer if she can get a few states away, which means my mom’s biggest obstacle is economic”

Abusive men (and they’re almost always men) build entire worlds around themselves. You see this very clearly in cases of high-profile abuse. Harvey Weinstein and Michael Jackson both spent years cultivating networks of enablers, deniers, and a select group of well-compensated people that would become their defenders. 

For celebrity abusers, most of this network consists of employees. But I think this is something all abusers are capable of doing, even subconsciously. My stepfather has a network of his own: first is the church; second is the pastor, who is basically a reinforcing mouthpiece; third is a large group of extremely nosy and spiteful friends. All of these are gatekeepers who have slowly replaced my mother’s social circle and made it nearly impossible, both physically and psychologically, for her to leave. 

A woman escaping a household like this is statistically safer if she can get a few states away, which means my mom’s biggest obstacle is economic. After years of talking about it, I finally persuaded my mom to come to my state and live with me. We were working on this plan when my mother’s health insurance company decided that they would not work in the state I live in, and that was the end of that. 

This is something I deal with silently most of the time, and something my mom dealt with silently for years before she could talk to me about it. But domestic abuse shouldn’t be considered a “private family matter” anymore. It is a public health crisis. There is so much collateral damage every time someone is disappeared into an abusive household. People like me lose vital connections and relationships. People like my mom are forcibly disconnected from their support systems; denied autonomy; their quality of life is diminished; and in the worst scenarios, lives are lost. 

The way we help people in this situation is the way we help everyone: by providing subsidized child care, a functioning health care infrastructure, a safety net, an economy where people can get jobs, an environment free of stigmas and judgements for abuse victims. But those things seem like pipe dreams as I sit here, on the eve of an election where our country will try to escape from its own massively violent, abusive relationship. 


My mom has missed most of my adult life. As my friends and I have gotten older, gotten married and had children, her absence has become conspicuous. My grief for her is always close to the surface, and when my girlfriends describe visits from their moms and the things they do together, I have to look away to hide my tears. When they ask, I usually say “She doesn’t travel,” and let them make their own assumptions. Only my closest friends know why my mom is always absent. 

In the meantime, I settle for the things I can do for her: visiting her a few times a year (well, not this year), providing whatever emotional support I can offer, sending her things that bring her some happiness or comfort. Our roles have reversed somewhat; I constantly worry about her and am always anticipating the ways I might have to protect her. She is my mom and I would walk through fire for her, and I will continue to do so, for as long as it takes. 

Let Them Die, and Decrease the Surplus Population

An open letter to Paul Ryan and other politicians who aim to destroy and defund essential health care services.

Dear Mr. Ryan,

I am writing to you because your policies would have me lose my healthcare, along with millions of Americans. I am confident that my views on this issue are shared by many Americans, both Democrat and Republican, who will lose access to healthcare under your leadership.

First, I’ll state the obvious: we know you wouldn’t be defunding the ACA if it were called RomneyCare (which is what it actually is). We can see through you.

Quote from articleBut mostly, I am writing because I am heartbroken by the disturbing subtexts I see underneath so much of what you and other Republicans say: punishment, shame, and segregation.

In 2014, you told a story (which turned out to be false, but we know you don’t care about such things) about a boy who turned down the free lunch offered by his school in favor of one in a “paper bag,” like all the other kids. In the fictional story, the boy said that if he had a lunch in a paper bag, it meant someone “cared” about him. You managed to turn this simple anecdote into an argument against the supposed laziness of parents who require assistance, the unlikely equation (by a child!) of “paper bags” to the love and affection of middle-class parents, and, most revealing, you shared your ultimate take on the situation: the idea that impoverished children who receive assistance have “empty souls.”

You positioned yourself as the compassionate one, the Republican who knew better. You are the one with the anti-poverty initiative. Instead, you are just one of hundreds who coalesced behind a known fascist who openly celebrates the destruction of American lives. Let me be clear: the person with the empty soul is you.

Health care and poverty assistance are not the same thing. But you seem to think of them in the same way: you seem to believe that poverty or ill health are deserved outcomes. Your anti-poverty proposals are based on the myth that people can bootstrap their way off public assistance. Those poor people wouldn’t be poor if they worked harder. Those people wouldn’t be sick if they hadn’t done something to make themselves that way. Study after study (after study!) shows that this just isn’t the case. There are no bootstraps, just like there are no welfare queens — and people do not deserve their own sickness. If you believe otherwise, you’ve been reading too much of that fake news.

Punitive responses are often fear based. “If I don’t do xyz, I won’t end up like them.” It’s a belief that allows you to ignore the fact that most of these situations are accidents of birth and luck. Given that you subscribe to it so fervently, the best I can tell is that you are absolutely terrified of ending up poor or devastatingly ill. So let me ask you, Mr. Ryan: which frightens you more — being sick and/or poor, or being sick and/or poor with no tangible means of escape?

When you write policy with your own fears in mind, and then punish millions of people for living a life you wouldn’t want for yourself, your “politics” have become abject cruelty.

America doesn’t have the worst health care of any developed nation. We have the worst outcomes, because our care is held hostage by a stratified, profit-driven system that assigns the best care only to those who are deemed worthy of it. The ACA was the best attempt in recent memory to fix this inequality. Making this system worse — your “high risk pools,” for example (they don’t work, and you know it) — will segregate society by isolating the sick and keeping them down by telling them it’s their fault. Only the healthiest, wealthiest, and by default, the whitest, will survive. From this, I can only infer that inequality is exactly what you want.

This holiday season, you’ll visit with your healthy family, exchange gifts, attend Christmas mass. You’ll share handshakes and hugs with your mirror-like circle of family and friends. Congratulations will be given and received for the ostensible good you will do for our country, and together you will read and recite the words of Jesus.

But you and I know the truth. You’re not listening to the words of Jesus at all. When I think of you and your Republican lawmaking friends, I think of an entirely different set of words:

“Are there no prisons?”

“Plenty of prisons…”

“And the Union workhouses.” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

“Both very busy, sir…”

“Those who are badly off must go there.”

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

Illustration by John Leech, c. 1843.Oh, how I wish you could be visited by three ghosts this Christmas. But I suppose the voices of the American people will have to do, because you will hear from us. Letter by letter, phone call by phone call, one voice at a time until you have heard from everyone whose lives you have altered with your policies; until you have been haunted by the voices of those who died so you could balance a budget; until you are face to face with your bootstrap lie more times than you can count.

My husband and I are self employed, with well managed pre-existing conditions. As it happens, we are not on any sort of government assistance. Like most Americans, the aspects of the ACA that benefit us the most aren’t the subsidies — they’re the provisions of the law that allow us access to insurance in the first place.

If you have your way, we will have to shut down our business to seek employee based health care, or we will be thrown into your “high risk pool,” where we will undoubtedly receive sub-par care which could leave us too ill to work (and then we would need assistance). In other versions of your plan, we would have no health care at all, which could have all sorts of consequences. Our American dream is possible because we are healthy, but you would turn it into a nightmare.

I don’t have any conciliatory messages of hope or reconciliation or forgiveness to offer you, because it should be the other way around. I am saddened at the idea of being governed by the latest in a very long line of men whose idea of  “what is best for the country” means gleefully stripping away my chance at a better life.  And I am angry on behalf of the families of all those who will die without access to life saving care and assistance.

Like millions of Americans, I believe that you do not care about us, but you have the chance to prove us wrong. You have already secured your name in the history books, Mr. Ryan. Now is when you determine what will be written about you.

They Wanted This

Heartbroken, shock, despair, hopeless, terrified: the words of everyone who believes in a forward-moving America right now, upon waking up to a Trumpian nightmare.

In the coming days, we’ll hear from many who would blame us, blame Hillary Clinton and the Democrat elite, blame low turnout, blame the polls and even blame Brexit. They are all wrong.

In a few articles (such as this one for the Atlantic), it is already being implied that the outcome of the election is due to people on the Left who “didn’t listen” to the disaffected voters. This is yet another regurgitation of the “economic anxiety” narrative, and misses the point. This was not an election between two candidates, where you could make equivalent choices. This was an election between one person who was a candidate (an imperfect one, but still an exemplary one), and one person who showed us very early on exactly who he was.

Make no mistake: Trump is not sophisticated enough to hide his message in pleasantries. From the moment he came down those stairs, everyone on both sides, educated or not, knew what this candidacy was about. From the “Make America Great Again” shirts to the sexually predatory behavior he described in his own words, everyone, even small schoolchildren, knew what he was. But this isn’t even about what Donald Trump said — it’s about what so many millions of people said in response.

Donald Trump said Mexicans are murderers and rapists. And they said, “I want to vote for that.”

He said he wanted to take our country back to the 50’s. And they said, “I want to vote for that.”

He assaulted and grabbed and belittled and humiliated women. And they said, “I want to vote for that.”

He wanted to ban Muslims, deport millions and destroy families of color. And they said, “I want to vote for that.”

He shouted, swore, bragged, talked about his penis and called Hillary names on stage. And they said, “I want to vote for that.”

He built a campaign whose only consistent positions were hate, fear, racism, and misogyny. And they said, “I want to vote for that.”

The media laughed.

And the people of color, most of them black, whose voices urgently pleaded with the electorate and the media to LISTEN, to avoid this repeating of history, were largely ignored.

And the people said, “I want to vote for that.”

When the pollsters came, they lied. Why? Because they knew better. But their sense of right and wrong could not overcome the truth of what was in their hearts.

In the coming days, in the analysis and the “who called it?” and the blaming, we cannot lose sight of what this election was really about, and whose voices were trampled over on the way to this horrifying moment. We also cannot ignore that this was a very long time coming (yes, you can be a racist even if you voted for Obama — it’s like your “one black friend,”), but there will be many books written in the coming years to analyze that.

My sadness tonight is not entirely existential. A few years ago, I had a dream. It was that most American of dreams: to start a business, to work for myself; to use my talents to try and do something good in this world. Being black, I learned from an early age never to expect too much from our country. But I pursued my dream anyway, because what happens to a dream deferred? So my husband and I jumped out and went for it. We were able to do so, in part, because of Obamacare. It has been one of the happiest times of my life. Now I’m awake, pacing the floors, because of the possibility that for me, and others like me, I could lose access to my dream, I may have to close down my business, and my life could change. Why? Because America voted for it.

The shocked pundits and the newscasters live in a different world. The rest of us have been terrified of this for a year and a half, precisely because we knew it could happen. But to see it on the screen is to see up close the direct and incontrovertible evidence that a dream like mine isn’t meant for me. The right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness now stands exactly as it was originally written — a dream and a possibility only for the young, the wealthy, and the white.

We will hear about a great America. We will hear about the need for unity. But right now, 5 am on November 9, I do not believe America is great. I do not believe there is a united America. America has shown what has been its true face all along. America turned its collective back on millions like me, and there is no unity in that.

*To read more on these sentiments, and a very apt comparison of the Obama era to late 19th century reconstruction, click here.

*For something more hopeful, click here.

*If you’re like me and terrified about healthcare, there may be consolation: my (very!) preliminary research suggests nothing can be completely reversed for possibly up to 2 years, and that even if they “reverse” the ACA they could keep the pre-existing coverage part in — it affects a lot of Republican voters as well.

Simone Manuel, The Joy of Swimming, and My Mom

“If I were an athlete, and I could choose any Olympic sport, what sport do you think I might be good at?” My husband said, “Swimming.”

I’m not athletic at all, but I do love to swim. In fact, “love” is an understatement. When the summer comes around, I start referring to myself as a fish. I can be in the water for hours and hours, flipping, turning, swishing, enjoying an advantage in the water that my plus-size body isn’t afforded on land.

We watched the Olympic “prime time” coverage, and while Michael Phelps is certainly deserving of the attention, he’s all anyone talked about for days. My husband and I tried to think of other jobs Mr. Phelps would be especially good at, with his long arms.  We came up with “librarian.”

So I was tired of the breathless coverage of Michael Phelps. Aren’t there other things you can do in a pool besides swim in a straight line? Why don’t they show any water polo in primetime? When does synchronized swimming come on? And isn’t there a black swimmer in there this year?

And then there she was, as soon as I asked the question: Simone Manuel, onscreen, winning an Olympic gold medal. Unsure at first whether she was even a winner, her joyful surprise endeared her to everyone and the post-race interviewer wasted no time in reminding her of her accomplishment as the first African American woman to win a gold medal (or any medal) in swimming.

Black people have a long and uncomfortable history with water. From a great article by Joe Passan:

The history of black Americans and swimming is a microcosm of the institutional racism that held back the United States for so long and still percolates in society today. The perception that black people can’t swim is ignorant; the reality that black people don’t swim is closer to the truth – USA Swimming estimates 70 percent of black children don’t know how to swim and the CDC says they’re 5½ times likelier to drown than white kids – and it’s a symptom of the errors of our forebears. Errors that someone like Simone Manuel is going a long way to erase.

The city I live in has its own swimming pool history to atone for. The swim club at the end of my block was built in response to the public desegregation of the pools. I live in a subdivision that was built in the 60s, and it has a “neighborhood pool.” It was intended to be one of several unofficial “white” pools throughout the city. These pools escaped desegregation laws because they were private clubs, intended only for residents (all of whom “happened” to be white). While whites enjoyed their escape, blacks swam in pools that were underfunded, too small, poorly maintained, or not there at all.

Children swim at the Hampton Road Negro children’s swimming pool in August 1955. (From the collections of the Dallas History & Archives Division, Dallas Public Library)
Children swim at the Hampton Road Negro children’s swimming pool in August 1955. (From the collections of the Dallas History & Archives Division, Dallas Public Library)

We all know segregation laws were generally intended to oppress and devalue. But there was something more at work when it came to pool segregation.

When I was a in the first grade, I had some classmates who refused to touch me or anything I’d handled. They said they would “turn brown,” and barring that, they thought there was something awful about my blackness that would transfer to them.

This proximal sense of disgust is a large component of American discrimination. Today, we see this disgust most clearly when we look at discrimination against the LGBT community. In fact people who are more easily disgusted are thought to make up a significant portion of modern conservatives.

But the other reason whites felt so protective of their swimming space is America’s long and fraught relationship with the Black body. Perceived to be threatening, hyper sexualized, “super human,” and foreign, the bodies which built this country make people very uncomfortable in their natural state. America has long used a system of brutality, from slavery to redlining to the police, to keep our bodies away, to make them docile, to break and plunder them.

The idea of being contaminated by the mere presence of someone who alternately frightens, titillates, and disgusts you is magnified when you consider the water, how it flows uncontrolled from one person to another, and the forced intimacy of public swimsuit-wearing. It magnifies whatever scary thing you think “those people” might do.

Just like so many things, casual swimming was one more thing black people didn’t have a chance to learn to know and love. What this created in my family, and in too many other Black families, was a legacy of avoidance and fear.

When I was 2, my mom decided to take me to swim class. My mother says that she was motivated by this history of fear in our family — my grandmother is terrified of water, for instance — and by the stereotype that “black people can’t swim” (there is an unfortunate factual basis for this). Most importantly, she viewed it as a safety issue — she wanted me to know enough to be able to keep myself from drowning, particularly since a few of our friends, also black and middle class, bought homes with beautiful manicured lawns and installed sparkling pools of their own, a deliberate confrontation of this same history.

It took three tries, because at age two, I already had my own fear of water and screamed my head off for the entire class. We were kicked out of the first two classes, and finally my mom found a no-nonsense teacher who was strong enough not to put up with my screaming, and patient enough to repeatedly reassure me that I had nothing to scream about. It was a mommy-and-me class, and I still remember my mom’s lavender suit and the purple one she sewed for me.

Once, when Grandmother came to visit, I said to her, “You don’t know how to swim?! I know how to swim, Grandmother. And I can dive.” After five years, the swim lessons I once protested just seemed like a natural part of summer. At the end of my last class, it was time for the children to have a little diving competition with their families as an audience. In the teacher’s backyard, we lined up to show off our skills. My father, whose initial reaction was less than positive (“Maybe you shouldn’t be taking her to swim lessons?! She hates it!”), brought his big camera. In the photos, you can see in my 7 year old arms the muscles I’d developed from all that swimming. My mother beamed.

I didn’t keep up with lessons, but I do love water and swim every chance I get. But Mom doesn’t swim anymore. When asked why, she said she was too self conscious to wear a swimsuit. Finally, in my 20s, I got her to go into the water, and a friend and I watched in horror as she had something like a panic attack. I didn’t know what was the matter with Mom, until she told me her secret.

My mom is afraid of water, too. It didn’t make sense — the stories of high school swim lessons, the mommy-and-me classes? Turns out, she was terrified the entire time. “But I had no fear in the water with you, because I didn’t want you to be afraid. I wasn’t scared then, because I had to be there for you.” I cannot write that sentence without tears. For 24 years, I had no idea the depth of her fear, and I’d had no idea of her extraordinary courage.

One incredible woman, swiping away 300 years of a racist legacy in her family in one fell swoop. By definition, this is the exceptionalism that makes racism so unfair — but it’s also what we mean when we say we are proud to be black. Because when you are black, you know that every single success we have, from reading a book to becoming the President, is a defiance of gravity; it’s the result of someone’s fight, someone’s venture into the unknown, someone who was willing to drive across town or risk their lives or do some small thing that ended up being extraordinary. One person looked down from the slave ship at that water, and as terrifying as it was, she reached in because to her it meant saving her daughter — me.

Whether Simone Manuel comes from a family that has always loved swimming, or whether she had someone in her family who, like my mom, made a conscious choice to approach the pool, she represents this exceptionalism too, and her victory and international visibility mean that many young girls will get from her what I got from my mother. Via Twitter:

My mom gave me something beyond the joy of swimming: she gave me the confidence to face my fears, to know that I could learn to love something even if no one else that I know has done it before. She taught me what it means to step outside the bounds of past experience, and find something new.

Additional Reading:

Hoping Olympic Gold Might End a Racial Divide

Why Most African-Americans Can’t Swim (Dallas Morning News)

Gone Swimmin’: From Oak Cliff creeks to aquatic centers of the future

McKinney, Texas, and the Racial History of American Swimming Pools

Serena Williams is Constantly the Target of Disgusting Racist and Sexist Attacks

Living with Racial Battle Fatigue: Why Fighting Microagressions Can Feel Like Treading Water

The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates

 

Donald Trump and the Politics of Being Unwanted

The evening of the 4th night of the Republican convention, I went out to dinner with my husband and my in-laws. It was an ordinary weeknight, except that the restaurant was unusually crowded. My mother in law speculated that it was crowded because people wanted to have dinner early before getting home to watch the “highlight” of the convention, where the candidate would accept his unfortunate nomination.

Donald Trump and the Politics of Being UnwantedWe make an unusual group. Me, a plus-size black woman in my mid-30s, and my husband, a white man about 15 years older than me with elderly parents. Sometimes when we go out, they’ll say, “Party of 3?” And we say, “No, there’s 4 of us.”

I’m used to being stared at when I am out in mostly white spaces, especially when I am with my little family. But as we walked to our table, one couple stared at us so hard that they stopped their conversation. They looked uneasy and nervous. And they wouldn’t stop staring at me.

We were seated across from them. Making matters worse was that, due to the crowd, we were seated at what is literally the restaurant’s smallest booth, and I was squeezed in so tight that the table moved every time I took a deep breath. Faced with the choice between asking to be moved, (which would have involved asking my elderly mother in law, who is frail and uses a cane, to struggle to get up and then wait another 15 minutes for a seat), or sitting there hoping dinner would go by quickly, I made the second choice. And the couple kept staring.

I tried to ignore them. I am not sure if it was hostile or curious, but it was definitely one of the several types of “black stares” I have been subject to in my life and we all knew it. My husband said they stared like we were “animals at the zoo.” They stared until the waiter brought them their check, at which time they whispered audibly about getting home so they could watch the Trump speech. They scurried away, and I couldn’t help but be relieved when they were replaced with a friendly looking black couple.

I have wondered for the past year what Trump’s normalization of racism, his liberation of angry white people from “political correctness,” would do to the daily lives of black people. I’m old enough not to be shocked by racism, old enough to have been raised to be “twice as good.” But I’m too young to know what it was like to live in a “George Wallace” America. What will happen when the veil hiding the most virulent hatred from polite society is lifted? I spoke to my mom and grandmother the day after Trump’s fear mongering, hateful speech. After we all offered our multigenerational perspectives, Grandmother said, “You think this is bad? Just wait.”  She did not elaborate further, and the ominousness of her tone reduced my mother and me to silence.

She’s right. My life as a black woman is certainly different than Grandmother’s when she was my age. While I’ve never been free from the literally constant racism (it’s only since I left the work force that I’ve experienced a life without daily microaggressions for the first time), compared to what she went through my life has been easy. And I am heartened by my “woke” white friends who go around shutting down racists on Facebook like a digital game of Whac-a-mole. It is good to see Trump’s demagoguery openly condemned by so many (others, however, seem to have made a deal with Lucifer). And when I woke up the morning after the speech, the birds were indeed singing as the world continued to turn.

Donald Trump and the Politics of Being UnwantedI wouldn’t be a good Democrat if I believed in the dystopian nightmare Trump is selling. But the bottled up resentment that has been allowed to flourish will not be put back soon, in fact it has always simmered on the surface or just below it. We will encounter more of this specific category of people: people who used to be quiet or stick to “code words” who now feel free to stare openly, to comment, to intimidate, to blame us for “division” and “racism” when we have the audacity to remind them that we are black.

In those moments at the restaurant, I knew that not only was I a curiosity, but I was acutely unwanted, a situation created by race and magnified by the social politics of size. As well read and well versed in societal racism as I am, and as sure as I am of my right to exist in public as both a black woman and a person of size, I was frozen, my mind lost to its calculations — whether to say something or stay silent, my discomfort vs. my family’s inconvenience. Compounding the overthinking was the knowledge that these incidents are likely to increase, because I live in a red state where the nonsense seems to speak louder than anything else.

Later that night, the staring couple went home to their living room to watch and applaud a man who cannot speak or read above a 4th grade level, a man who gave a Mussolini speech with “fear of the brown people” as its central narrative. I can only hope at this point that Mr. Trump will be defeated and end up nothing more than just a horrible symbol for white angst. I’m only relieved by the idea that I can and will speak louder — maybe not in the restaurant (it is not always a good idea to verbally confront racists) but elsewhere. Trump has done less than nothing for black people on his own, but his horrifying candidacy has at least inspired us to speak out and assert ourselves and try to affect change.

When “Good People” Are Racist

One thing society has done effectively, up to this point, is to demonize racism. People in polite society know that spitting at black people, calling us names, openly denying us entry to places and other overt signifiers are racist behaviors. We know that racism is bad, and therefore it must follow that being a racist must make you a Bad Person. But can someone be a “good person,” and still be racist?

Overt racists make categorization easy. I know where I stand with them, and as long as I’m not being physically threatened, I can spot them easily and dismiss them. They cannot help but make themselves obvious.

But there’s a messier aspect to this. We have pushed racism underground so effectively that much of the time, people hold beliefs that they think are not associated with race at all. I’m talking about covert racism, the kind so hidden that it has people walking around like ghosts who don’t know they’re dead. And in this post-segregation, post Civil Rights, post Rodney King era, being around these unaware racists really messes with your mind.

"There aren't enough words to describe the mindf*ck of being surrounded by people who are "normal..."When the Trump candidacy began to pick up steam, my frustration and anger at the vitriol he incites caused me to hear in my head the voices from all over the spectrum of racial awareness. I’d just made a major career change, so I was still processing that along with a natural uncertainty about the future, and initially I blamed this for the nightmares I was having.

But dealing with racism had been a big part of my life up to that point, and the way it stood out was not only in classic-style overt racism, but in microaggressions. Leftover was the trauma of being unable to advocate for myself (beautifully described here) or respond to those who said such things for fear of putting my own position in jeopardy.

There were little slights and big slights, too many to count. The jobs where I was hired by phone, then showed up in person and was met with a deep breath and a long silence. The ladies in the lunchroom who kept asking me if I’d watched the latest Oprah. The professor who handed out papers to the class but routinely forgot me: “I didn’t see you there,” she always said. (She probably didn’t.) People who grabbed my hair to give me “compliments.” The endless complaints about the Spanish bilingual program from those who’d forgotten I was a bilingual teacher. The whispers I heard about Obama. The louder comments I heard about Obama. The diversity meetings hijacked by coworkers who said they would gladly work with black people as long as they were qualified. The people who told me I was “articulate.” The coworkers who didn’t recognize me outside the office.

Each of those things reflects very common patterns of absorbed racism, although they can seem truly innocuous out of of context.

I’ve written a little about my experiences with racism as a teacher and the literal choice between keeping it real or keeping my job. But the comments I overheard and beliefs that were expressed often came from people I worked or studied with, who considered me someone they liked. They worked hard, they were dedicated to their jobs, they loved their families. Several of them would have welcomed me into their homes. And if you asked them, they would have said they would work with anyone of any race, could teach any student of any race fairly, that they abhorred racism and pulled out their MLK lesson plans every January. I knew these people too well to categorize them as “bad.” In fact, they were good people.

What this meant for me is that I was constantly dancing in between these lines. Every so often, I’d get a professor or coworker who was overtly racist (“Brown people are bad!” etc.) and found over and over again that while their comments were annoying and even painful to hear, they were easier to deal with — I could categorize them. It was the others whose voices kept me up at night, whose interactions gave me headaches and high blood pressure and just plain stressed me out. The ones who were nice to me, the ones issuing my paychecks. There aren’t enough words to describe the mindf*ck of being surrounded by people who are “normal” and “good” but who also, deep down in a place they can’t even find, do not consider me to be as much of a human being as they are.

If someone is even remotely accused of being racist, their impulse is to be revolted, to feel guilty, to shame the accuser, to pervert the facts. Other white people quickly distance themselves from the accused, shame them, fire them, wash their hands of them and say “Things are fine now” and shut down the conversation.

“It’s a monumental task to get white people to realize that they are delivering microaggressions, because it’s scary to them… It assails their self-image of being good, moral, decent human beings to realize that maybe at an unconscious level they have biased thoughts, attitudes and feelings that harm people of color.”1

If you grew up knowing nothing other than “racism is bad, don’t be a racist,” you are probably lacking any sort of framework with which to talk about race with any nuance. You believe people are equal, without realizing that what you really believe is the status quo (where “people” = “white people”). You have absorbed it. This can be true even if you grew up in a “multicultural” environment. It is true even if you grew up poor. So when you interact with a black person, you have assumptions and biases that you don’t even know are there. In fact, what you are experiencing is a different version of reality.

If we un-demonize racism just a little bit, maybe we could talk about it. And then we could talk about coded racism, covert racism, institutionalized racism, white privilege. Maybe people wouldn’t panic when they hear the word “black.” And we could overturn the myth that racism is learned. (It isn’t — it’s absorbed.) People like the ones I worked & lived with for so many years would be better able to ask questions and hear the answers without shutting down.

And people like me… well, people like me wouldn’t have to keep wondering what we’ll say or not say the next time someone we have to work with or maintain ties with says something to demean us. We could breathe a little easier. We could be a little more free.

Edited to add: This essay from the Huffington Post, published the same time as this blog entry, describes what it’s like to realize you have absorbed racism as a white person. He says, “Black people aren’t asking for an apology, they are asking for an acknowledgement of their reality.”

  1. DeAngelis, T. (2009, February). Unmasking ‘racial microaggressions’ Monitor on Psychology, 40(2), 42. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/02/microaggression.aspx

On existential fear while being black

On our way home from Chicago, on a road trip before we were married, my (white) fiancé, now husband, was driving and he was going a little fast. I told him it was night time, we were in Arkansas, and he should slow down. Soon we saw the lights behind us, and I was frightened.

I put my hands in my lap, visible. I made sure my engagement ring was visible so there wouldn’t be a question about why I was in the car. I put my purse down on the floor. I didn’t talk. I didn’t move. I looked straight ahead and froze. The officer came to the window, said “good evening.” He asked how my husband was doing and my husband said, “We’re fine, how are you officer?” They had a conversation. (!) The officer let us off with a warning and a “Merry Christmas.” I don’t know if he saw me.

When we drove off, I told my husband I was afraid, and he said, “But it’s just a traffic stop.”

Well, we had some conversations about that.

My husband is brilliant and sensitive and so he understood very quickly the difference in life experience between him and I, in fact I would not have married him had he shown an inability to do that. And he is one of my greatest champions. But part of the joining of our lives together, as it is with any couple, is a comparison of life experience, and I don’t think either of us realized quite how different life in general had been for the both of us. Chief among those differences is fear.

Like most African Americans I know, I have an innate distrust of the police. (Wait — this is the point where I have to stop and say that I’m college and grad school educated and have never had any sort of record and don’t know anyone who does. And that yes, I have met some good and compassionate cops. And since I finished this post as coverage was coming in of the police shootings — *of course* I condemn what happened in Dallas.) One of my earliest memories of the police is being a little girl in the back of the car when the police officer pulled us over so he could tell my father our car was “too nice” for people like us. One of my most recent interactions, just a year ago, is being screamed at by an officer who didn’t like the way I walked to my car. He screamed so loud that I didn’t know who he was talking to, so loud that it was obvious his goal couldn’t have been anything other than my subjugation.

The thing that’s difficult about being afraid of the police is the helplessness — if the people who hold the power of law will not support you, who will? But the fear extends beyond this.

When we travel, I try to watch where we stop because there are some areas where I’ve had some trouble. When we have flown together, we (well, I) have nearly been denied rental cars and airline seats because the people in charge didn’t believe we were “together,” in at least one case after we had shown ID (with our matching last names and addresses). So I worry about getting separated and stranded somewhere far from home. When I go to the doctor, I prepare myself for whatever demeaning thing will be said to me, and worry whether my complaints will be taken seriously. If I apply for a job, or get a new job, I have to wonder how race will affect things and how much time I’ll have to spend being some coworker’s diversity coach. And in the years that my husband and I have been planning for children, we’ve had many conversations about “the talks” we will have to give to our son or daughter.

There’s a level of fear that I think all African Americans carry with us as part of our burden. Much of the time things are fine, but there is an undercurrent of worry and cautiousness in everyday life that my white husband will never have to know. It’s different from regular every day anxieties; it’s more like a cloud that surrounds the world.

When people are failing to understand why we’re protesting, when people are just baffled that anyone would be angry at cops; when people say “well if you’re not doing anything you have nothing to fear,” when they tell us to just work harder and get a job, they are failing to acknowledge that the difference isn’t in skin color or in cultural history but that our very lives are different, and that they are different because of racism. They are gaslighting us, and they are not acknowledging our daily fight.

 

Chronicles of a Recovering Teacher: Implicit Messages

I was at an event today where everyone works on their own at tables; you can hear one another’s conversations and you can join in or just listen. Some ladies happened to be teachers, and started talking about teaching, and they talked about being micromanaged and the difficulty and began to compare stories.

Instead of joining the conversation, I grabbed my purse and dove for my headphones. I didn’t want to hear how much being a teacher hurt them, and I didn’t want to hear how difficult it was and how tiring. But I think at least part of my reaction was because I am tired of thinking about how teaching makes teachers feel; or at least, tired of talking about that without talking about why they are made to feel that way.

A while back, The Atlantic published an article that wondered if introverts leave teaching because they are forced into too much group work, or because they’re surrounded by too many loud extroverts. But I don’t think so. I’m a proud introvert myself (one friend described me as an observant super-ninja, and I won’t dispute the accuracy of that), and my humble opinion is that introverts are good at hearing what someone says and quickly figuring out what they really mean. As an introverted teacher, I was always attuned to the implicit messages we were getting, and it was a major cause of my burnout.

This is a huge issue to unpack, as the education system is seen to “belong to all of us,” and so the average teacher is constantly receiving messages about her value from administrators, parents, and from society at large. So here, I’ll focus on the messages we got from administrators.

  • You can’t be trusted. This is probably the most prevalent message. Teachers’ lesson plans are all but scripted in some cases, and for many, their value is determined by factors almost entirely beyond their control (testing). The growing amount of paperwork required for everything from field trips to throwing papers away (!) sends a message that our work must be checked, checked, and re-checked, and tells us that we cannot make any decisions without a committee or a bureaucrat overseeing us. Then, we are constantly being asked to “be creative.” With what?!
  • Your time has no value — not to you, anyway. Teachers’ time is extremely valuable, but not to the teachers themselves. The amount of extra unpaid work required by school districts means that, in terms of hours, schools are powered by thousands of hours of teachers’ unpaid labor. When teachers complain of the extra work, they are scolded or shamed by those who imply that they just aren’t committed enough. And, as is possible in any job, a teacher cursed with micromanaging bosses will also be subjected to harassment and guilt about how she uses her own time, even if she is sick, on vacation, or paid leave.
  • Your work is the most valuable thing on earth. If you teach lower income kids, you’ll hear this one a lot. It basically means that all of these children come with additional issues, and you might be the only one who can save them! But it will never be enough! This “hero teacher” narrative is exhausting and detrimental. Every time there is a study about what “poor kids” are missing, the school system comes up with another experimental initiative designed to get teachers to try and fix it. We can’t make up for everything they lack, that is a fantasy. You see this played out in teacher movies, which all have a pervasive and offensive “white savior” complex about them. The last time one of these movies was shown during a “teacher work day,” I quietly walked out (probably to get some actual work done). I will write more about this “white savior” narrative later on, but it’s harmful to everyone — students and teachers of all races.
  • You aren’t doing anything. This one will resonate especially to those who taught an “alternative” subject, like music, drama, P.E., or anything else that isn’t science or “reading, writing, & ‘rithmetic.” As a music teacher, I was always told of how “fun” my job must be. “How nice to sing all day!” Of course, I knew I was lucky to have a job at all (many states cut their music programs ages ago), but being reminded of that all the time, and being implicitly told I should put up with subpar conditions or outdated materials because I should be grateful to even be there, is grating. It invites a dismissal of your hard work (and that of our students’), and it reinforces the unimportance some people have for these subjects, which leads to budget cuts, which creates a vicious cycle.

If you asked an administrator directly, they’d never admit to anything on this list. They’ll tell you they value all their teachers, that they appreciate them, that they understand their stresses and difficulties. But the messages they send through their actions and requirements are the opposite.

The nature of teaching, the emotionally draining, constant giving of yourself, means that these messages are particularly demoralizing. Not only are you being given these messages at every turn, but you can’t help but internalize them. The heroic narrative. The “never enough” narrative. The “well, if you don’t like it, you’re probably not good enough” narrative. These are painful things. One of the biggest problems with the way teachers are treated by “the system” is that they are not being treated like educated professionals, and the constant invoking of martyrism (give us all your time, save the children, just be glad you’re even here) is a major impediment.

 

Chronicles of a Recovering Teacher: Never Enough

I plan to write more about my teaching experience as time goes on and as I continue to recover from it (I voluntarily left the profession last year), but I wanted to react to this new teacher book, recently released.

For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood by Christopher Emdin

There are so many teacher books, but this one is in the category of “books I would have loved to write but couldn’t because I was too busy teaching.” This particular paragraph, (not from the book, but from an interview with the author), is prescient and painful:

Part of a system of oppression is allowing the folks who have the power to create change feel as though they’re responsible for keeping the narrative. So a lot of black teachers go into urban schools and within the first 3 months they become the king or queen of discipline. Why? Because the system sees a black face as a person who’s supposed to help them meet their goals. But I don’t want to meet those goals; I want kids to feel free. I want those kids to feel what emancipation is like in those classrooms, to feel like they can be themselves, their culture to be expressed. Just a black face in the classroom helps the kids to connect, but it’s not enough if that black person feels their role is to be the enforcer of a white folk’s pedagogy.

While I worked hard on discipline in my classes, I wasn’t any sort of queen, though in retrospect I can see that I was expected to be. And I did specifically and very deliberately foster a sense of personal and cultural freedom in my classrooms. But one of the things that caused me great pain & cognitive dissonance in my years of teaching was the realization that as a black person, I was an anomaly and too small of a person to fix a system that is broken, and even more broken for children of color.

As one of a few black teachers in a white-majority district (teachers, not students), this meant a lot of day-to-day interactions where I was expected to perform blackness in ways that helped it fit into a particular narrative. Sometimes it was as the “discipline queen.” Sometimes other teachers called me “Girl” or “Diva.” Sometimes I got asked to sing at random (to be fair, I was a music teacher, but me singing while the rest of you eat lunch is a little much). I was constantly hounded for being too quiet. And sometimes the tokenism was more obvious.

One day an administrator came to my room. She said, “John’s* grandmother is in the office. She is accusing us of racism. I know you’ve documented problems with John when he visits your class. Will you come to the office and help us?” She pulled me right out of my classroom and away from my students, and I spent an hour in the office with John’s grandmother and some administrators and another teacher.

John, who was black, did act up in class, like many students did. John’s grandmother was, quite honestly, dirty and disheveled, and she was a spacey and not “all there.” But the first thing I did when I walked into that room was to smile at her, greet her, and shake her hand. The thing I noticed most was that I was the only person there who did that. No one else looked her in the eye and no one would touch her. Most of the others showed a nearly palpable condescension and disgust. Grandmother didn’t understand the school system, with its educational jargon and odd, arbitrary reward systems, and had trouble reading the reports the other teachers had given her. In fact — and I don’t mean this disrespectfully — I don’t think she could read at all.

I wasn’t John’s main teacher, and I wasn’t given much time to speak. I knew why I was there. But I tried not to let my anger at being used as a token keep me from showing compassion and respect to this woman, from trying to help in some small way.

After the meeting, I tried speaking to John’s main teacher, telling her the things his Grandmother didn’t understand, that a kind voice might be preferable to one full of frustration. But the teacher had been so frustrated with John, so tired of having to deal with his outbursts and behavior along with 29 other kids, several of whom had similar trouble (itself another failure of the system), that she didn’t seem to care anymore. When I saw John in my class, I always took the time to talk to him individually, even when it meant 29 other kids were hopping around. Some time later, John moved away, and I never saw him again.

Later in my teaching career I did all sorts of things to try to compensate for the futility I felt as a black teacher. I became a diversity trainer. I wrote sociologically about race and presented my articles to other teachers. I tried to speak up on behalf of my students when they were too quick to be judged by other teachers. And when I got the rare chance, I spoke frankly with my black students, and sometimes their parents, about the unfairness of the school discipline system and how, in its own sick way, it is a preparation for life as a black person in America.

On an implicit level, a subconscious level, the values taught to public school children are those of whiteness (not white supremacy, just whiteness), to the extent that in many cases, literally saying the word “black,” even when describing yourself, can be considered racist. These things shouldn’t be a surprise at all when you consider that the body of education is made up of white, middle class people (women), many of whom subscribe to colorblindness and genuinely don’t believe they are racist.

As I get used to my life as a non-teacher, I am still haunted by a pervasive sense of futility, and by the insidious expectation of “martyrism” that is woven into the profession. Every public school teacher carries these weights, and they are made heavier when you add racism.

Will I read the book? Maybe. Honestly, I’m still so exhausted that thinking about educational theory and reading a whole book detailing the racial failures of education might be too personal right now, because if you haven’t guessed it, I still take these failures personally. I think the biggest legacy of being a black person in a school system where there aren’t many others is that you are never enough to fix a broken system. It’s like I’ve internalized the “Hero Teacher” narrative.

If all that sounds like I need a therapist, well then, consider this my contribution to the personal-essay genre. There are many incidents where this came from, some that involve race and some that don’t, and I think what I most look forward to in writing them down is the idea that maybe I’ll connect with someone else recovering from these same things.

*Names changed, of course.

Movies About Slavery Are No Longer Revolutionary

I watched 12 Years a Slave, I saw the Color Purple, I watched The Butler but I couldn’t bring myself to watch The Help and I didn’t want to read the book, either.

We’ve just had the #OscarsSoWhite controversy and my fear is that the call for “more diversity” will mean more movies like those listed above. These stories absolutely need to be told and many of them, particularly 12 Years, are beautifully done. But if we want to use motion picture as a way to normalize Blackness, the problem needs to go beyond simple “diversity” and into solving the problem of “identity.”

These films haven’t helped race relations much lately, and one reason is because no one is required to identify with us in those films without attaching that identity to our race. (In fact, the only time we win Oscars is when we’re playing somebody’s #sassyblackfriend, criminals, “magical Negroes” or singers & dancers.) While they once represented a major step forward, they are not revolutionary. Mainstream America already knows us as slaves; they already know we can clean floors, they already know the surface notes of our sad and sordid oppressed history. And if I see one more romanticized lynching scene I might just run from the theater screaming.

When I get up in the morning, I don’t wake up, look at myself in the mirror, and break into a chorus of “We Shall Overcome” while speaking softly and sadly of how difficult my life is because I’m black. I get up, I take a shower, and take my dog for a walk. In other words, I’m a person; I’m not permanently downtrodden and I’m not someone’s sassy sidekick, although I have had people treat me that way.

I’m not talking about completely race-blind casting, where the heritage of the lead actor disappears. There are ways to incorporate a nod or two to the person’s culture without it being the subject of the entire movie, especially if the heritage of the person is not the central aspect of the story. Because guess what, I’m proud to be black! but it’s not the only thing I am. I’m a person.

And in case it wasn’t completely clear, I am not talking about abandoning all-Black or mostly-Black films — they are important stories that need to be told (even when they’re not directly about social justice, like The Best Man series or Love Jones). They just can’t be the only story anybody pays attention to, and it’s painful to me when the “best movie in years” is another story about downtrodden, oppressed-yet-heroic Black people. We are more than our suffering.

What would be revolutionary would be major, Blockbuster films where the principal identifying character is black. Where the generic “person” happens to be black. Can you imagine if The Martian had a lead actor who was black? What if films like The Revenant, Room, hell even 50 Shades of Gray had stars — main stars, not sidekick-stars — who were black? And if you can’t imagine re-watching your favorite blockbuster with a black star, well then… that’s exactly why we need them.

*Just as I was finishing this article the trailer for the new Ghostbusters was released, and my immediate reaction was to say, “Well, so much for extinguishing the sassy sidekick!” Because there is a sassy sidekick. And she is *sassy.* Via Twitter I also found this heartbreaking article about original Ghost Buster Ernie Hudson. The only thing keeping me from being even more pessimistic than I was when I began writing this is that I am not the only one upset about this disappointing return to the status quo: