My mother is white and my father was black. I am not alone in this. I grew up in the Bronx, New York City. Born in 1967. A relatively safe time and place for a brown girl of ambiguous ethnicity. As the mother of two little brown girls, I like to believe that race doesn't matter much. But the election of Barack Obama woke me up. Ignorance is everywhere. Race labels ring in my ears. They stick and they stain. Even when they fade. This is my rant, from “post-racial America”. Hoping to shed some light.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

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:

Thursday, August 7, 2014

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!





Friday, August 1, 2014

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.