Anti-Racism & Parenting

(Good Morning America)

Following this recent anniversary of the Charlottesville Unite the Right White Nationalist Rally in 2017 that left Heather Heyer dead, the attempt of yet another Unite the Right White Nationalist Rally last weekend in Washington DC, and in the aftermath of last week's racist public statement by the powerful conservative television journalist Laura Ingraham, I feel compelled to share a recent event in my own family when I learned my 9 year-old white son used the “N” word.

The phone call came at 3:30 p.m. and I was still at work.

 

I saw the caller ID listed as my son’s elementary school, and my mind and heart did the whirlwind-thing of “what’s going on!” that every parent’s mind and heart does when they see the school is calling you out of the blue.

It was his 3^rd grade teacher.

She began, “Something happened at school today that I need to address with you.  Your son called another student the “N” word.”

 

At which point the whirlwind I had already been experiencing before I even picked up the phone turned into absolute shock.

 

“What??!!” I exclaimed out loud without even thinking about who I was talking to.

 

I went on to learn more of the details.

 

At recess that day, my son was playing basketball with his friend who is also in 3^rd grade, and is biracial African American and Caucasian.  And during this game, his friend began to talk about another classmate of theirs who is female, Black, and dark-skinned, and his friend referred to this black girl as the “N” word.

My white son said he had never heard this word before.

Fast forward 5-10 minutes later. 

My son was standing in line with his class to go back into the school, and another student, who is brown-skinned and Indian, does a behavior that upset my son, and my son decided to call him the “N.”

(Yes, it happened that fast.)

He said it was the first time he had ever used that word.

What’s more, within a minute of my son using the “N” word, another white student standing in the same line mimicked my son, and called the same brown-skinned Indian boy the “N” word a second time, and the Indian boy, the victim in this case, did not return to school for the next two days after this event.

When I asked my son later that day, in the context of a conversation with my husband to try to process with him what had gone on that day, when his friend initially used the “N” word on the basketball court, what did he think his friend meant?

And this is what my son said:

“I understood that it was a bad word used for black and brown skin people that put them down and it means they are not as good as I am.”

At which point my jaw dropped all the way to the floor of my living room, and I asked him (probably more rhetorically in pure disbelief): “You got all that context from just that one conversation with [friend’s name]??”

Now I should say here, that in this conversation with my son he was already sobbing, and absolutely refusing to look his father or I in the eyes because at school, after the racist incident in the recess line, my son had been called to meet with the school principal and the teacher, and it was in this earlier conversation that my son learned for the first time about the origins of the “N” word in the United States.

That’s right, my white son did not learn about the guts of the pervasive and institutionally racist history of the United States toward people of color in the form of the “N” word from his white parents, and I have come to believe that this was a dis-service to him.

In a way, I did not do my job as his parent.

But where does one even begin? 

Take my son's experience.  

How do you begin to talk about the complexity of a light-skinned biracial black boy using the "n" word toward a dark-skinned black girl? How do you begin to discuss the difference of the "n" word for a black child versus a Indian child? How do you begin to explain the way racism has evolved in this country over 4 centuries and this reality of white privilege?

 

The truth is, I don't know.

 

However, what I do know for sure is: you just do it.  You begin somewhere.

Just as, in a similar way, it would not be helpful to the over-all health or well-being of my daughter to not tell her that there is a strong history of breast cancer in our family going back generations, it would not be helpful to the over-all health and well-being of this nation to not tell my son that there is strong history of racism in this country going back generations.

Because that is her genetic legacy and racism is ours.

And like what we now know in genetics and epigenetics, and in my own experience as a psychotherapist, the pain that is not transformed, can be transmitted to the next generation in the same way that addiction, domestic violence, and sexual abuse move predictably and pervasively from one generation to the next.

Furthermore, like addiction, domestic violence, and sexual abuse, the mechanisms that sustain and give life to racism by well-meaning white antiracists like myself, are quite similar to those other national social problems stated above, and they include: guilt, shame, secrets, lies, and denial- all an attempt to avoid what is hard and true.

Corrosive and insidious, yet seemingly subtle mechanisms that have contributed to keeping racism alive.

Therefore, the purpose of this particular blog, is to act opposite to that shame, and instead encourage other white antiracist parents to consider for themselves when is the right time to begin to talk to our white children about the “N” word and the larger context of racism in our country.

Because the decision not to, as in the case of my family, may actually perpetuate racism into future generations.

Poetry 134: Touch

Touch

I pity the lobster,

the tortoise and

the grasshopper.

He who, most literally,

carries the burden

of a shell of

protection.

I prefer instead,

the life

of a fragile human.

For we know what

it is like to have

the wind blow against

our skin, and

feel the cool rush

of air across

our bodies.

What it is like

to have the warm

summer rain

fall upon our face, and

feel the clear liquid of life

run down our cheeks.

To float blissfully

on that

ocean blue, and

sense we are held

by something

more mighty than

anything in our

wildest imagination.

And to experience

the ecstatic jolt of

our lovers’ fingertips

as they move slowly

across the small of our backs,

and we learn the warm

tingling sensation of love.

What a shame

it must be

to never know

the grace of touch.

What a blessing

for us.

-Me
(Inspired by a Unitarian Universalist Sermon in Summer, 2018)

The Female Creative Geniuses We Will Never Know

I find myself mourning the female creative geniuses I will never know.

It began a few months ago when I was re-reading In Search of Our Mother's Garden, an 1974 essay by Alice Walker in a book by the same title.

She writes:

Did you have a genius of  great-grandmother who died under some ignorant and depraved white overseer's lash?...For these grandmothers and mothers of ours were not Saints, but Artists, driven to numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release.  They were Creators, who lived lives of spiritual waste, because they were so rich is spirituality- which is the basis of Art-that the strain of enduring their unused and unwanted talent drove them insane.

As a woman and as a Seeker, I have always looked for other women of the past who have crafted  and molded a life of creativity, spirituality and wisdom.

This has been a necessity.

Because the journey of a Seeker can leave you with many bumps, bruises, and detours with guidance and role models, so imagine what the path would look like without any...

But lately, I have found myself in a state of grief (which we know is both deep sadness in addition to anger or outrage)for those women who were never able to share their gifts with the world, with me, and the image that I keep returning to is character of Patsey from the 2013 Academy Award winning Best Film Twelve Years a Slave based on the book by the same name.

In the film, Patsey, played by actress  Lupita Nyong'o, is a 23 year-old black female slave who is the most frequently raped and beaten by the plantation slave owner, Edwin Epps, out of all of the other slaves on his cotton plantation in 1840's Louisiana.

As would be predictable, we never learn Patsey's back story and she of course does not even have a last name, as she is "owned" by the white slave owner Edwin Epps in the same way one might own a cow, horse or shovel.

And yet she fascinates us. Fascinates me.

You want to know what she is thinking, feeling, dreaming about.  You feel her spirit in such an intense way, that to imagine her dying in some unmarked grave feels like the most painful tragedy one could imagine; which of course "she" did.

Millions of "she's" died anonymously, and among them, were thousands of female creative geniuses who we will never know.

Thousands of William Shakespeare's and Michel Angelo's and Ralph Waldo Emerson's who had world-changing gifts inside of them that were never given the opportunity to birth them for the generations to come- the loss of which makes me want to cry.

In the same essay, In Search of Our Mother's Garden, Alice Walker also refers back to Virginia Woolf's great 1929 work A Room of One's Own, in which I believe Virginia Woolf is also mourning all the unnamed, unknown women who also could have been "Shakespeare's Sister" had it not been for the patriarchy and sexism of the day.

Alice Walker then also adds the necessary dimension of race and racism to this same grief.

She writes:

Virginia Woolf wrote further...that 'any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century [insert 'eighteenth century,' insert 'black woman,' insert 'born or made a slave'] would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard [insert 'Saint'], feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill and psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by contrary instincts [add 'chains, guns, the lash, the ownership of one's body by someone else, submission to an alien religion'] that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.'

So who were these creative women geniuses that we, the next generation, will never have the fortune to know?

One can only imagine...

Finding Hope...In Comedy?

Growing up in the 1980's, my primary experiences of stand-up comedy consisted of 2 television shows:

1.) HBO's Comic Relief with the amazing young trio of comedy : Billy Crystal, Robin Williams and Whoopi Goldberg, and

2.) Billy Cosby's 1983 stand-up show: Bill Cosby: Himself-

with other occasional stand-up moments sprinkled in of Roseanne Barr and Richard Prior.

But, truth be told, it was not me who was the real stand-up comedy fan, it was my older sister.

I was just kind of tagging along for the ride because she was watching the only television in the house aside from the little black and white with the hanger for an antennae that was kept in the kitchen for the must-see 6:30 CBS Evening News with Dan Rather and the occasional Saturday morning cartoons while eating breakfast.

So I watched it with her because:

a. She scared me, and I would not have dared to change the channel,
b. I desperately wanted her to like me so showing interest in her interest seemed like a good tactic, and
c. I secretly did love the frequent swearing and adult themes that seemed to be a staple of stand-up comedy.

However later, as an adult, comedy did not have much presence for me- aside from the occasional SNL (Saturday Night Live) skit that went viral on the internet.

In fact, if anything, comedy seemed to be a source of sorrow for me as the parade comedians who were familiar to me passed away: Richard Prior, Gene Wilder, John Candy, Chris Farley, Robin Williams, Bernie Mac, and it seemed as if their deaths were so often in sad, sudden and unexpected ways.

So it was with pleasant surprise that my path recently crossed with someone who actually is an aspiring stand-up comedian in her own right, and she recommended  that I watch the stand-up comedy show "Nanette" by Tasmanian Comedian, Hannah Gadsby that is currently on Netflix.

And thankfully, I did.

As Hannah Gadsby explains it herself, Tasmania is on the “ass-end” of Australia surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, and Hannah herself grew up in the Bible Belt in the northwest corner where it was still illegal and an actual “crime” to be gay until the 1970’s.

In her comedy special, Hannah Gadsby, born in 1978, shares her perspective, insight, pain, and of course wit that grew out of her experiences as a gay woman in Tasmania and later in comedy.

She shares moments like this one when her mother who, lets just say never picked up the book The Dummies Guide to Helping Your Chikd Come Out of the Closet, most sincerely says to Hannah when she is well into adulthood already:

I wanted you to change because I knew the world wouldn’t.

The show is actually only one hour long, but it is so jam packed with hilarious one-liners and poignant and thought-provoking storytelling, that I was forced to frequently use my remote control to pause and rewind (an advantage of Netflix) so that I could take it all in.

A few memorable moments from the show that I jotted down are the following:

We think it’s more important to be right than it is to appeal to the humanity of the people we disagree with.

Hindsight is a gift.

There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.

Your resilience is your humanity.

And here comes my personal favorite...

Why is insensitivity something to strive for? I happen to know that my sensitivity is my strength. I know that. I know that it’s my sensitivity that helped me navigate a very difficult path in life. So when somebody tells me to ‘Stop being so sensitive,’ I feel a little bit like a nose being lectured by a fart. Not the problem.

Before watching Hannah Gadby’s stand-up show, if you had asked me where I might find or encounter hope, I would not have considered comedy.

Because in my mind comedy was reserved for either cynical satire or pure entertainment- neither of which prompted hope in me.

However now, seeing comedy instead through the lens of artful (and funny) storytelling which is able to offer its audience an inconvenient truth about the world, I can absolutely, and gratefully, find the small helping of hope that I have been looking for.