On Racism

I grew up in Memphis, TN, which is perhaps the most archetypal city of racism. It is the city where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Its history includes the irony of a district called Whitehaven. 

(Whitehaven was blatantly organized as a suburb for upper class white people in the late 19th century. It stayed that way until the Civil Rights Movement. Now it is predominantly black.)

My parents were openly, unabashedly racist. My education and upbringing were colored by the casual use of words like 'niglet' and 'porch monkey.' I was taught a strict dichotomy, an unsparing worldview in which white was good and black was bad. If my room was a mess (and it usually was), my father said it looked like a 'nigger' lived here. He said that because in his culture, according to his values, the gravest insult to a white girl is to be associated with anything black.

When I grew up, I left Memphis, my father, and that culture without a backward glance.

Since then I have lived in many different places. A dorm room in Evanston, IL where I smuggled a mad prophet in defiance of I do not know how many rules. A residential hotel on Polk Street in San Francisco. A gated community in Texas, briefly. Now I live in Fairfax County, Northern Virginia. One of the most cosmopolitan places in the USA, on account of being near the capital of the nation that strives to rule the world.

At first glance, you might think that this affluent, multicultural place is a post-racial paradise. The schools, especially, actively encourage an exploration of ethnic diversity. I have two daughters, and I am delighted that they are not being exposed to continual overt racism.

However, not all racism is overt.

In fact, most of it is insidious.

When my husband and I moved from Texas to Northern Virginia, I was three months pregnant. We moved without having any idea of where we might find a place to live. My husband's sister knew a real estate person who found us our first apartment on Mosby Woods Drive. The condo area was charmingly named after Confederate commander John S. Mosby. It is right off a street called Plantation Parkway. Fairfax High School (one of the best public schools in the nation) which my daughter would have attended had we stayed living there, used to have a 'Rebel' as their mascot. It is now a lion, but they still call themselves 'Rebels.'

The place I live now is called 'Colony Park.'

I want to believe that racism can die in America within my daughters' lifetime. But I know it won't, unless white people take an aggressive anti-racist stance. It is uncomfortable for white people to talk about racism. Indeed, some people go to extreme lengths to avoid it. But the entrenched, invisible-to-white-people racism in our culture needs to be seen, acknowledged, excised.

My 94-year-old father-in-law lives in a retirement community in Culpeper, VA. One Easter, after we had dinner with them in the elegant dining room with its silver buffet and crystal chandeliers, I asked my girls if they'd noticed something about the experience. "Did you notice how all the people eating there were rich old white people? And all the people waiting on them were black." They blinked at me in bemusement, rethinking what they'd seen.

This isn't about 'race baiting.' This isn't about 'white guilt.' This is about looking with clear eyes at things that are wrong. Inequity is the enemy of us all.

My Father, Bill Cosby, and the Kafkaesque Comedy of My Life: Part I

In 1997, I graduated from Northwestern University with a double major, math and history. My paternal grandparents, my parents and my brother had traveled to Evanston, Illinois full of pride in my accomplishment. I was the first in my family to graduate from college, and not just any college - Northwestern is a very prestigious university. The celebrity invited to administer the commencement speech was Bill Cosby.

Like many people of my generation, I grew up watching The Cosby Show. The show resonated with my life: a father played by an actor named Bill (same as my dad), a father of amiable comic charm (same as my dad). But my particular fascination came from the portrayal of a healthy, happy family. The relationships between Clair and Cliff Huxtable and their children seemed pure, untainted, free of spite or corruption. Conflicts got resolved, bonds were reaffirmed in every episode. I knew it was fiction, fantasy. I knew real life was never like that.

What I didn't know was that while perfect families may not exist, my own family was far from normal. Far from what most people think of as real.

Sexual abuse is an ugly topic. And I have never been able to discuss it cogently. My memories are ephemeral. It's the effects of what happened that eventually led me to realize what had gone wrong. The behaviors, the survival mechanisms. The scars.

I wet the bed until I was almost 11 years old. For punishment, I was made to sleep in blankets reeking of piss. I think I was afraid to leave my room at night. My father once urinated on me while I was in bed. He was drunk.

Alcohol, sex and drugs defined my parents' lives. They met in rehab. She was bipolar, and she used uppers when up and downers when down. He was a drunk. A drunk driver, in fact.

One memory I do have is of my mother lying naked on the floor, with my father pointing a gun at her.

Because it wasn't just drugs and sex, it was violence. It is almost impossible for me to type this. Because for so many years I believed it was my fault. Something wrong with me. An innate predilection for evil. Even now, as I near my fourth decade of life, I cringe in shame at the memory of being a 6-year-old girl fantasizing about being raped and murdered.

I think I must have seen pornography of that type. I know my father's tastes ran that way.

(To this day I cannot really enjoy healthy sex. I take pleasure alone in dark reveries. At least it hurts no one but myself.)

Relationships rotten at the core, that was my childhood. I never learned a basic trust that so many people take for granted. Some people take it so much for granted that they can't even see it. They think they are skeptics. They think they are like me. The words I use aren't so different. It's what's beneath the words that bites.

So much misery lurked beneath the surface of my family. But the surface was bright! That's the worst part, for me. Like Cosby, my father was a charismatic man. He was good at pretense. Not once in my childhood did any teacher or official suspect there was anything wrong with my parents. Things were wrong with me, oh yes, but nobody ever considered that it was anything but my own fault. I remember being paddled by the principal in first grade for crying every day - separation anxiety, because while I couldn't trust my parents, I trusted outsiders even less. In sixth grade my application for advanced curriculum was denied because of my "poor social skills." I developed a deep contempt for authority. I delved into my imagination; very early on, my inner life became more real to me than anything else.

I survived. I adapted. I found ways of getting by involving minimal contact with other human beings. I went to college 500 miles away from home, and when I graduated I ran away to California with a mad prophet I met on the moral wilderness that is the Internet.

In Capitalist America, the Soulless Minions of Orthodoxy come bearing Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas cheer

A few days ago, I learned that a social worker is planning to meet with my 13-year-old daughter at school. The ostensible reason for this meeting is legitimate -- my daughter's been cutting class, for reasons she's unwilling to explain clearly. She needs counseling, yes. But added on to the message from the school counselor about this public social worker's plans was a mention of concern about my daughter's typical attire. Not that it is inappropriate, exactly, but that it is, in some unexplained way, inadequate.

It's not slut-shaming I have to deal with, it's personal-choice-shaming. Poverty-shaming, too.

Over the years I've lived at poverty-level among some of the most privileged upper-middle-class people in the nation, as a poor relation sponging off my in-laws' savings, I have had to confront a seemingly endless stream of unspoken assumptions, prohibitions, and bigotries. With a smile on my face. Because in Capitalist America, the Soulless Minions of Orthodoxy come bearing Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas cheer.

God bless us, every one.

Bitterness is ugly, and I don't especially like myself for feeling this way. But I am so very sick of people giving my children Barbie dolls and insipid, saccharine books. 'Beggars can't be choosers' is the line that sinks like lead in my stomach. They never come out and say it directly, of course. They know better than to give anyone a chance to point out the morally reprehensible implication that the poor have no right to live life as they like. That freedom isn't free -- it's exclusively for the rich.

Still, hey, Barbie dolls can go to Goodwill, books to the library donations bin. I don't mind passing stuff around. It is when government officials interfere in my family's life that I get seriously pissed.

My daughter is a brilliant person with a profound disinterest in the trivialities of teen fashion and drama. I've taught her to think critically, to view the mass media with skepticism, to resist the temptations of the Market Demon. She wears bland clothes that she finds comfortable. Idiots might call her a 'hipster' but she doesn't make her choices based on trying to fit in with any kind of counterculture. She is eccentric, creative, and compassionate. Yes, she's going through a rocky time in her life -- most 13-year-olds are. In her case it's exacerbated by having moved into a more affluent neighborhood just a year ago. None of us are entirely comfortable here yet.

Ugh. One day I'll figure out what to do.

Kitten Dreams

My husband is a wonder when it comes to dream interpretation. I have had a series of recurring dreams involving kittens. So many kittens. Kittens that spring up from the dew-drop-sprinkled grass of a marvelous morning world. Sometimes there are so many kittens that my neighbors become angry and want to kill them. And sometimes the older kittens eat the younger ones. In my dream, I rush about the house, the landscape, trying to save my kittens.

I had no clue as to what this could mean. But when I described it to Jonah, he looked at me and said, "What if the kittens were ideas?"

Skeptical as I am, I can't deny the visceral sense I felt when he said that. Maybe skepticism is something I have been hiding behind. Maybe it's been thwarting me. I don't know.

I am afraid of my own power. Sundering dogs, the lilting synthesis of echolocation. Something within me urges to communicate but it will not persevere. Fear is the center of me. Why am I so afraid?

Neuromagic

I'm fascinated by what scientists are learning about the mechanics of the brain. Sleights of Mind by Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde is the latest of a series of books I've read on this topic. It describes magic tricks in terms of neuroscience. I highly recommend it.

So much of what we perceive, so much of what we think we know, is illusion.

Ego Intent

A psychiatrist once told me that I have a "fragile ego." I don't like the sound of that. I am myself. It's true that I tend to be avoidant of other people, elusive and evasive. This is something I struggle against. There are many things I want to say, but I still feel a need to be secretive, to hide, to never let anyone know me. The compulsion to communicate conflicts with the habit of concealment. That habit I learned as the child of abusive parents. It was a survival strategy, and it worked. I escaped that environment. But the lessons I learned from my parents do not serve me well among ordinary people.

So I communicate in spasms, awkward and unwieldy with words. I'm choosing to use this blog as a kind of therapy for that, a place where I can communicate regularly without anxiety or stress. Whether or not anyone reads this. There's so much I want to say, and I don't think I will be very good at saying it at first. This is an experiment and maybe it will work.