Reading List 2014

Whether you look at the past several weeks of “talkin’ ‘bout race” as a tipping point, a watershed moment, or a wake-up call, the fact is that a lot of potent writing has occurred on topics that clearly need our attention. The problem we call Racism stems from a lack of understanding and empathy. At the root of all the upset surrounding the recent police shootings is a systemic illness of distrust, disrespect, and ignorance.

So for this year’s READING LIST, I chose to highlight five (of the many) books I read this year, each of which enhanced my understanding of the history and the reality of black/white misunderstanding.

Please note: The title links will take you to Amazon.com synopses, intended for ease of research. But PLEASE, buy from independent booksellers whenever possible. Or borrow from the library. Amazon’s bullying tactics toward the publishing industry should not be supported.

OK. Here you go:

BROWNGIRL’S YEAR-END READING LIST, 2014

FIRE SHUT UP IN MY BONES, by Charles M. Blow (c. 2014)

This new memoir details the author’s childhood in the poor, segregated South, and follows him through college, to his first job in big city journalism, and fatherhood. As a pre-teen, Blow was molested by a male cousin - an event that would haunt him throughout his sexual relationships with women, as well as his friendships with men. Questions of sexuality underscore the bigger issues of self-labeling and conformity, in the context of a modern, urban, professional black man emerging from his rural southern roots.

THE GRACE OF SILENCE, by Michele Norris (c. 2010)

I was struck by the distinction, “A Family Memoir,” on this book’s cover because I wondered whether the story was a collection of family members’ memories, or of Ms. Norris’s family memories. It’s both. In researching her Alabama past, specifically the mysterious circumstances of her father having been shot in the leg, Ms. Norris uncovers her family’s Jim Crow-era survival stories. In the telling, she offers the historical context of black “silence” with regard to struggle, as well as anti-white racism in the black community. The personal accounts of both near and distant relatives are compelling and convincing.

WHITE GIRLS, by Hilton Als (c. 2014)

This is radical writing. It’s a collection of long essays, and reminds me of James Baldwin’s work in that it speaks so richly of a time and place. And know that I don’t make that association lightly; James Baldwin is one of my few heroes. By showing us his raw self in an array of unpredictable scenes, Mr. Als reveals American race relations with real clarity. He also depicts 1980’s New York City the way I remember it, though I was too young to have enjoyed the decade like he did. (I’m also too female, and too straight.) He gives clear, hard-to-hear testimony about being a black, gay man “on the scene”; i.e. with none of the privileges of being a white girl. Some of his strongest prose tackles the trappings of art and fame. When he rants, his point of view is cohesive, engaging and real.

THINGS FALL APART, by Chinua Achebe (c. 1959)

This poetic novel retains its relevance, bedecked in fifty-five years of accolades. It’s a beautifully paced story of a man caught up in his traditions, family strife, and community conflicts. His struggles are both universal and specific to his strange tribal paradigm. Achebe’s memorable last pages expose the racist ignorance of the empowered outsider, through a missionary’s utter lack of compassion for the Nigerian people.

THE SILENCE OF OUR FRIENDS, by Mark Long, Jim Demonakos, and Nate Powell

(c. 2012)

I didn’t expect to find a book like this in the Graphic Novels section of our local library. I generally browse the shelves on behalf of my young daughter, hoping for material that will engage but not terrify her. She likes comics, “but not the babyish ones.” The cover illustration has obvious racial connotations. The story is about an incident in Houston, TX in 1968, which divided a community along racial lines. The author Mark Long explains that the story is based on real events, involving himself and his family. I enjoyed the graphic treatment of the story, as well as its message of brotherhood.

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I hope these recommendations help you with any last-minute book shopping you might be facing, for loved ones or for yourself.

Happy Reading… and Happy New Year!

No Staten Island Indictment? What The Fuck??

There is no justice or peace for the family of Eric Garner, or the rest of us.

When the Ferguson ruling came down, I wrote about it for LifetimeMoms.com.
Here's a link to the article - they have the exclusive right to it. Fair enough.

LifetimeMoms.com

The piece also appears on the LifetimeMoms Facebook page, where it continues to draw heated reactions from all sides, including accusations that I'm perpetuating racist attitudes with my writing. So I've been resisting engagement with the haters, trying to keep my head low and my nose out of trouble.

But here we are again, with another sickening story of a police officer escaping indictment after killing an unarmed suspect. This time out of Staten Island, NY. And this time there are plenty of video, audio and photo files depicting the crime as it occurred. Yes, crime! Strangling an unarmed man and ignoring his repeated cries of "I can't breathe" is a crime. It was ruled a homicide by the Medical Examiner.  Which begs the question: Who is the real perpetrator in this case?

Earlier today I heard an elderly black woman say, "It's like the civil rights era all over again."
Her companion replied, "One step forward, two steps back."

And I thought, Oh no. We are much better than that. Aren't we?

"Black-ish" TV: Biracial Mom Alert

Rainbow Johnson is a biracial woman, an anesthesiologist, and the mother of four charming children. Andre Johnson is her black husband, an executive at a predominantly white Los Angeles advertising firm, and arguably the lead character of the new ABC sitcom Black-ish. The following exchange takes place in the couple’s bedroom. Andre is bemoaning the way that blackness has been coopted by American pop culture. He hates that his boss has just made him the Senior VP of the company's new Urban Division. 

Rainbow:   “Just keep it real.”

Andre:       “Keep it real? This coming from a biracial or mixed or omni-colored-complexion whatever-it-is-they’re-calling-it-today woman, who technically isn’t even really black?’

Rainbow:   "If I'm not really black, then can somebody please tell my hair and my ass??"

Andre:       “Hey. You don’t get it.”

Rainbow:   “No?”

Andre:       “This is how it starts.”

Rainbow:   “What?”

Andre:       “Junior wants to play field hockey.”

I love Rainbow, like a favorite relative.

She doesn’t care whether her son plays basketball or field hockey.

Her parents were nudists: my mother was raised on a commune.

She has a big head of wild dark frizzy hair: in my house we call it wild-woman hair. 
She lovingly bats her doe eyes at her sweet-faced children, marveling at their ability to ignore color lines and labels. She’s not worried that they don't think of Barack Obama as the first black American president - because he's the ONLY American president they've known! Isn't that so wonderful?




Some of her words and attitudes come straight out of my multiracial mothering handbook. Her wifely antics are scarily familiar too. The fact that my husband is white makes our family ineligible for direct comparison to this fictional clan. But we all see ourselves in them. And what I appreciate most is that through all sorts of domestic/marital/parenting disputes, Rainbow wins.

Rainbow is the progeny of Norman Lear’s groundbreaking biracial character on The Jeffersons, Jenny Willis. The daughter of the Jeffersons’ “zebra” neighbors, she eventually married their son Lamont, and appeared sporadically throughout the show's eleven seasons. But Jenny Willis never shone like Rainbow does.

Like the Jeffersons, the Johnsons' family portrait is one of affluence. They live in a fancy neighborhood, in a very large house with a swimming pool and immaculate landscaping. The adults, including Andre’s father (whose residential status is unclear but who’s in their business all the time), have differing views as to the condition of their own blackness, and the potency of blackness in the modern world. Race is not the central topic of every scene, or even every episode. In fact, its their conspicuous wealth that really qualifies their lifestyle.

During episode 2, my detail-oriented daughter said, “I wonder who keeps such a big house so clean, with both parents so busy working.”  She's right, there’s no sign of any hired help. It's impossible to believe that Rainbow and Andre are managing to work full-time AND keep all that house and all those children so clean and lovely without help. 

I remind my daughter of the importance of there being a biracial mom (who happens to remind us of myself) on TV. Focus on that, dearie.

My daughter tells me that I think about race too much.

She’s eleven. She doesn’t care how the Johnsons are being perceived/received in other parts of the country, where wealthy black families are nonexistent.  She doesn’t think about race much. She's more interested in people’s abilities than in their ancestry. A product of whose influence? I wonder. Like the Johnsons, my husband and I want our children to be informed and self-aware, but not burdened.

This “keeping it real” is a mighty task.

Bloggers Love That Biracial Baby! And Hate Her Moms.

Have you heard about the little Ohio girl whose moms are suing the sperm bank over her blackness?

This story has stirred up an incredible amount of chatter on the blogosphere, much of it ugly.
So when LifetimeMoms invited me to submit a piece, how could I resist?

Most of the public commentary has been heavily weighted by prejudice and supposition. Broadcast interviews of the birth mother were the most reliable source of information I could find. She didn't seem like the racist, ignorant, self-serving bitch being profiled on most of the blogs I read. In fact, she reminded me of a handful of friends whose life choices defy their own conservative upbringing. Maybe I bring a little more empathy to the table than some of my fellow bloggers do. My biracial heritage and multiracial family could have something to do with that.

I keep thinking about the little girl at the center of the story. I truly hope that her situation is less superficial than what we're lead to believe. And I hope that when all of this noise we're making subsides, she's able to believe that her mothers love her and have had only good intentions at heart.

My intention is that my post adds a voice of reason to the discussion.
Please check it out:

http://www.lifetimemoms.com/in-the-news/couple-sues-sperm-bank-over-biracial-baby-and-i-hope-they-win

And if you feel inclined to Like, Share, or Comment, please do so on the LifetimeMoms site.


Peace out.

Passing Strange

The term "passing" is loaded.
No matter which way you use it, or hear it, the implication is that someone is trying to be perceived as something they are not. You understand I'm not working in the context of test scores, right?

Growing up in the 1970's and 80's, I never thought I was passing. I was black. When people asked me what I was - which happened often - I answered "Black." If the listener responded with "You don't look black. You look Spanish," which also happened often,  I might have bothered to explain that my mother is white, and that my grandfather from Spain made me part Spanish, but probably not the kind of Spanish they meant. Or I might have shrugged them off and carried on my way.

As an adult, I've rarely been asked about my ethnicity.
But it's come to my attention that more than one of my adult friends had no idea that I was in any way black at all. When I explain that I self-identify as "mixed," the black part sometimes comes as a surprise. This freaks me out! Because I'm not doing anything different as a mixed person than I was as a black person, as far as I know. A societal shift has happened. And through writing, I'm trying to explain how I see it...

The topic of passing came up a few days ago, in an unexpected place.
My mother and I were sorting through one of her last moving boxes, marked Mementos and Newspapers. We remembered hastily packing it, almost exactly a year ago. Among the D-Day clippings and Victory!! headlines, we found her three-ring binder from eighth grade, loaded with every essay, quiz, and math sheet, neatly preserved. She delighted in reading each yellowed looseleaf page aloud, and I enjoyed sharing her trip down memory lane. Until she got to a page that began, "The immigrant has been a problem to the United States because..."

This was a Social Studies essay test.
Her articulate answer explained that the "immigrant problem" brought tenement crowding, cheap labor, and the challenge of educating children of different cultures. The year was 1950. And the orator was my mother, herself the child of immigrants. Born on an anarchist commune in  upstate New York in 1939, but enrolled in a public high school, she was declaring the ways in which the immigrant had been a problem.

I had to ask.
"Mom? Do you remember what you thought of your parents when you wrote that?"
She looked up from her papers.
I said, "Your parents were immigrants!"
She thought about it for a minute. "You know, at that time, in that school, it was important to not be perceived as an outsider. I guess I didn't think of my parents as immigrants."

I couldn't help what I was thinking: that my mother was stuck in an upstate high school, being indoctrinated against the people who raised her. She was twelve, earning a "Very Good"grade on her essay test. And unless someone directly asked her what she was, she was passing.

My mother, the daughter of immigrants, the wife of my black father, always taught me to be myself, and to value authenticity and diversity. But in post-war upstate New York, her Judaism and her parents' immigration histories were muted facts.

Seventy years later, about twenty miles south of my mother's old high school, my family and I are thankfully living in a different light.

Ferguson, MO Fallout

I was sitting in a local deli eating lunch with my children when I got my first taste of the Ferguson, Missouri police brutality fiasco. A muted TV above our heads showed CNN's Wolf Blitzer standing in front of night-vision video of a rioting crowd, under the attack of what looked like grenades. I first assumed it was footage of a recent civilian uprising in some far-off land. And then the caption finally clarified: it was a place I'd never heard of, here in America. In the Mid-West. Ferguson, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis. "A predominantly African-American neighborhood."

I hadn't heard about the shooting of Michael Brown. In these last days of summer, I've been wrapped up with my kids, taking long breaks from the grim news of the day. And suddenly I'm watching unidentifiable armed forces attacking American civilians, and I can't imagine why. It's terrifying. The civilians, all of whom appear to be black, are fighting back. It's unclear whether they're fighting the police or the National Guard. But it's not footage from 1965. It's obviously happening right now.

I told my girls, "I don't know what's going on. It looks like people are rioting somewhere. And they're being attacked. Don't watch, OK? Don't look at the TV. We'll go home, and we'll find out what's going on." But I continued watching, and the closed caption eventually provided the back story. 

Days of media discourse followed, about the shooting, the reaction of the local community, the actions of the local police force, and state and federal reactions. Again, it's one in a long list of cases of American young black men being killed by armed, trained police officers. It keeps happening, all over this huge country. If Michael Brown's neighbors hadn't rioted, and the police hadn't reacted with force, would news of the shooting have reached New York? Would we have ever heard of Ferguson, Missouri?

My children understand that racism exists, but they don't feel threatened by it. They feel safe in our diverse community. They know adults and children of every color, and they don't fear people according to skin color. What luxury!!

While many of us believe we're living the promise of racial equality, I'm convinced that we are the true minority. In an attempt to get some clarity about the unseen fallout of the shooting of Michael Brown, I came across two powerful bits of journalism:

1. Mother Jones printed comments left by participants in the fundraising campaign to finance the legal defense of the offending police officer. Please note, I don't disclaim the officer's right to a fair trial or a defense fund; it's the sentiment voiced by his supporters that is so deeply troubling.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/darren-wilson-donors-racist-ferguson#disqus_thread

2. The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof contributed an opinion piece last week that enumerated some mighty strong statistics, supporting the point that American race relations deserve more attention.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-after-ferguson-race-deserves-more-attention-not-less.html?_r=0

The problem is inequality. Sustained by racism, unchecked.

Sensitivity Training

A friend recently alerted me to the fact that my casual use of the word “retarded,” in reference to some shallow remarks left by strangers on a Facebook page, was hurtful. Her two-sentence email was a slap in the face. Shame on me.

I used the “R word,” as she put it, in my Facebook status update. For all my friends to see.  Even as I sit here, maintaining this blog about identity and labeling and racism and human misunderstanding, I’m guilty.

My friend, the one who outed me, is a writer and activist. She is practiced at speaking up and speaking out. She and I know each other through our joint participation in a long-standing writing workshop. She knows my work, and shares my compulsion to write personal narrative non-fiction as a means to broaden the collective understanding of our core topics: hers is Autism.

The term “R word” out of context doesn’t have the universal weight of “N word.” 

But that’s not the point. Or maybe it is.  I don’t use the R word in front of my children. But I now see that in my adults-only Facebook circle, I use a pretty light filter. And I’m having trouble explaining that. I didn’t think I had a filter; I thought I was conscientious all the time.

I’ve been called plenty of names; names that are labels, and are hurtful.

Here’s a short list:

Oreo

Nigger

Brill-o Head

Half Breed

High Yellow Bitch

Mutt

Kike

Freak

I’ve survived the hurtful names. I haven’t had to struggle through a hard life of repeated persecution by bullies or cruel siblings or a fascist dictator. I’m just a privileged, educated American who’s been called shitty things a bunch of times, by jerks of every size, sex, and color. And until my recent misstep with the R word, I was feeling pretty righteous. But I haven’t forgotten the hurt.

So I’m grateful to my friend, Liane Kupferberg Carter, for calling me out.

Thanks, Liane!

You can read Liane's piece on the R word here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/liane-kupferberg-carter/the-r-word_b_443627.html

I'm published on Lifetime Moms.com!

It's crazy, I know.
This week, instead of posting here I've contributed to the website Lifetime Moms.com.
I have my dear friend Laura Grimm to thank, for sharing this blog with the powers that be. They liked my writing, gave me an assignment, and now it's live!
THANK YOU, LAURA!

I want to take a breath and welcome any new readers who may have found me via Lifetime Moms. Please take a look around...
I hope you get something positive out of this brainchild of mine. If you do, please subscribe and/or leave comments, so we can keep the conversation going.

I'll be back with a fresh post as soon as I recover from all this excitement.
Meanwhile, if you haven't already seen it, check out:

http://www.lifetimemoms.com/in-the-news or
http://www.lifetimemoms.com/in-the-news/my-kids-arent-impressed-that-keke-palmer-is-the-first-black-cinderella

and see my piece on Keke Palmer, Broadway's newest Cinderella.

Cheers!

Race & Beauty

Earlier this week I caught an interesting piece on WNYC, my go-to public radio station. The host, Brian Lehrer, was discussing the topic of Race & Beauty, with journalist Maureen O’Connor, whose recent article is the current cover story in New York Magazine.

It seems that black, Hispanic, and Asian women are seeking the services of cosmetic surgeons like never before. Statistically, non-white women are enjoying the power of more disposable income these days. The big question was, are women going under the knife in deliberate pursuit of a Western/white beauty ideal?

I’m in my forties. I’ve birthed two children. I can say without hesitation that there are things about my body that I wouldn’t mind changing.  I didn’t realize how content I was with my body in my twenties, until that body morphed into my current one.

I’ve been body conscious as long as I can remember. At sleep-away camp, where my bunkmates and I freely took off our clothes in front of each other simultaneously, comparisons were unavoidable. Who was the most developed? Who had hair in embarrassing places? Who had a bubble butt?

That was me: bubble butt. No bathing suit could fully cover the roundness.  In dance classes, my leotards were either loose through the middle, or giving me a wedgie. Most blue jeans were huge in the waist if they fit over my hips. My mother assured me that my “hourglass shape” would be fully appreciated when I got older. “Look at Marilyn Monroe!” she said. “She’s arguably one of the most desirable women ever! Look at her curves.” But I didn’t want to be curvy. I wanted a small, flat butt like the models in magazines, and most of my friends.

Then there were the lip comments. At some point in middle school, someone came up with the term “b-j lips”. The “b” stood for “blow”… get it? It was decided that most black girls had b-j lips. The boys acted like it was a bad thing, and those of us who bore the label really wished we didn’t. But by high school, a couple of the white girls with full lips were earning locker room praise for their “b-j lips”. It turned out the boys liked girls with b-j lips!

And then came the Tyra Banks photo on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

I repeatedly overheard grown men debate whether or not Tyra was white.

It was as if their hard-ons obstructed the link between their eyes and their brains.  Tyra had the bubble butt, and the full lips, and the glowing bronze skin of a beautiful (albeit very fair) black girl. All that beauty made her race debatable.

Now, in 2014, we have Anjelina Jolie and Scarlett Johansson with their famously full lips representing the beauty ideal. The Kardashian sisters are trotting around some pretty “ethnic” booty enhancements. And the US Military is restricting black enlisted women from wearing their hair in natural styles.

It’s all very confusing. Are we consciously moving toward a diversity-based ideal of beauty? A melding of many ethnic attributes into one gorgeously ambiguous form? If we’re becoming more accepting and more diverse, why is the plastic surgery rate among non-white women ballooning?

Ballooning. Funny choice of words, as I sit here on what was once a pretty cute bubble butt.