Mommy's Checking Boxes

Last year, around Thanksgiving, I decided to apply to graduate school. I could see that my daughters, ages ten and twelve, had entered a less needy phase of life, and I felt ready for my own new phase. So I braced myself, recalling the last time I’d toiled over college applications, circa 1984. This time, I was deeply grateful for the technological tools that ease the process. Filling out all those forms, and writing and revising all those essays, without having to load up my mother’s IBM Selectric with carbon paper and triplicate forms! No need for Wite-Out! Hallelujah! Even my Letters of Recommendation were processed electronically.

On each school’s application, I found that the “Ethnicity” boxes were new and improved, too. 

Some had a “multiracial” box, equipped with a drop-down menu of “specifics”.  Some encouraged, “list all that apply”, with an extra field in which to enumerate the ingredients of “Other”.  Even without the old discomfort of having to single out my blackness, I still felt a queasy Affirmative Action twinge. Would my exoticism boost my acceptance chances? And if it did, was that a bad thing?

In the months I spent waiting for acceptance letters, our family life took an unexpected turn. 

For reasons I won’t disclose here (saving it for a future post), my husband and I found ourselves looking for a new school for our ten-year-old daughter. We threw ourselves into a past-all-deadlines dash to find her a sixth grade slot for the 2016-17 year.  And once again, I was checking boxes.

The thing about my daughter is, her looks don’t disclose her black heritage.  

Her skin is “peachy” like her father’s. I’ve been told she looks Israeli, which complies with her genealogical makeup: five of her eight great-grandparents were Russian Jews. Her hair is smooth and wavy with no trace of curl or kink. No spirals. Nada. 

I checked the “multiracial” boxes on her school applications, same as mine. 

It’s who she is, and how she identifies. I’ve heard her defend her blackness with a hint of defiance. I felt it too, as I filled out her forms. And I couldn’t help but wonder how much longer these statistics would matter: how many more dilute generations will bother to claim a measurable mix?

The good news is that my girl had a great classroom visit at a school filled with children of every imaginable color.  She fit right in, and reported having made a few new friends in that one, short day. A much-needed reassurance that, for the next three years, she will thrive in that new community: Accepted.

Imagine: Race is Over

It's a new year.

An election year. The end of an era. Soon we will stop being America With It's First Black President. It's a messy ending, marked by what many are calling the New Civil Rights Movement.

I was born during the "old" Civil Rights movement.
I was a black child, raised by a white mother, at a time when no one denied that race mattered. Remnants of Jim Crow were rampant in the South. School desegregation was a bold, new concept. My parents and their peers believed that change was happening, and that it would last.

Progress has been arguably slow.
In the meantime, some scholars deem race an artificial construct. But it's been the basis of prejudice and subjugation here in America since the appearance of the first settlers. It's been at the core of hundreds of years of socio-political-economic imbalance. Race is an age-old system of labels, and in order to disable the system, we have to subvert the semantics.

By the end of 2015, I felt totally overwhelmed by all the talk about race, my own included.
As the holiday season approached, I decided I needed a moment of silence. I opted to stay quiet, and just listen. I've been watching the Supreme Court shake out an affirmative action battle in Texas. I've tracked "White Debt" with Eula Biss, and #BlackLivesMatter with Charles M. Blow and Roxane Gay. I've discussed police training methods with a Maryland-based expert who happens to be my sister. I've been taking it all in, without taking sides. I don't feel personally insulted or offended, nor am I living in daily fear for my wellbeing.

But I do worry about this election.
I am stunned to hear kingpins of the Republican party use hate-speech to rally support. It's top-tier intolerance, anti-American blasphemy. It has to stop.

Back to semantics.
I have the privilege (yes, that word) of being able to say "I'm mixed"; I get to be something other than Black or White. Removing the race labels doesn't change who I am; but because I'm both instead of either, it takes me out of the struggle. I'm not on one side - cue Joni Mitchell - I'm on both sides.

In this new year, I want to recommend that we lose the labels.
Use qualifiers like "My parents come from (fill in the blank)."

See how it feels to just be.

Top 2 Summer Reads: Loving Day, and Oreo

As August wound down, I had big plans to write up a Summer Reading List report. That was my September goal, because summertime is reading season, and I read a lot of good books. I  surrender to my summer reality: that any creative impulse that dares to surface between June 15 and September 7 is summarily overwhelmed by the needs and wants of my children.  Life generates a lot of good material, but the time to jot it down eludes me. So instead of struggling to get a few good words onto the page, I settle for the next best thing: other people's writing.

Now, October's end is here.The school year is in full swing; Halloween costumes have been successfully planned, pinned, and sewn; the last garden veggies have been harvested; the first frosty blades of grass have been spotted. I realize it's late to be offering up a Summer Reading List report. The longer I wait, the less excited I am to tackle the beast. I am daunted by the mighty stack of titles on my desk. So I begin with my two favorite books of the summer - no, the YEAR. They are absolutely amazing fabulous brilliant books, and they happen to share the general themes of my writing and my life:

#1. Loving Day, by Mat Johnson (2015)

and

#2. Oreo, by Fran Ross (1974, reprinted 2015)

Both are novels, each depicting the strained parent/child relations of a mixed race protagonist seeking familial acceptance and clarity of self. Johnson's story is very twenty-first century, set in urban Philadelphia. Oreo also begins in Philadelphia, but is rich with details of the New York City of my childhood. Both stories are based in familiar realities that stretch into startling weirdness, with crazy characterizations of racial and societal stereotypes, comprising bold, intellectual satire.

I love a book that keeps me engaged and smiling, while reminding me, "this writer is really, really smart". I'm grateful that these two applied their talents to the under-represented genre I call:
cross-cultural autobiographical fiction.

Ms. Ross writes like the black godmother of Jeannette Winterson - A scary genius, she disguises the ancient myth of Theseus (which I never would have caught, if not for the great afterward by Harryette Mullen) into futuristic American folklore, featuring a brown teen-aged heroine who travails untoward horrors with superhuman cunning and wit. There are so many surprise turns in the plot, I had to backtrack a few times to catch my breath. That a young, afro-ed, woman writer committed the work of Oreo to the page and succeeded in finding a publisher, in 1974, is a miraculous gift. Thanks and praises to New Directions for bringing it back into the light.

Loving Day is about a father seeking his estranged daughter's trust and acceptance, while trying to reconcile his own father's legacy. Their journey includes a utopian multiracial commune that is hilarious, hopeful, and tragically unsustainable. Loyalty and love are tested, deformed, and mercifully survive. The writing is so good, you hate for it to end. The good news is, Mat Johnson has other books out there, which I'm about to read..

Oreo was way ahead of it's time, and as a recent re-print, has yet to catch on. Perhaps this has something to do with its fearless feminist message!?  But I recently read that Loving Day has been optioned for television.  So I'm spreading the good word about these two great reads, as I remain convinced of our stories' relevance and worth.


I'll eventually get to the rest of the stack, I promise.

"Little White Lie": a film review

I'm a big fan of documentary film, memoir, and multicultural stories.  Suffice it to say, Lacey Schwartz's movie Little White Lie checked my boxes.  I was floored by the many parallels between her story and my own: the scenes of her as a little brown girl, in the arms of her Jewish white mother, then growing into an ambiguously brown young woman with "black friends" and "white friends", and being the only brown face in family photos...  she could have been me. But our stories are far from identical.

We differ in the Paternity Department.  My biological father was no secret.  Although my parents split up very early,  he was present in my life, and I was always told by my mother that I was black, because he was black.  But my father distanced himself - and me - from his family.  All of my memories of family gatherings are with my mother's people.  I grew up in a Jewish and Irish neighborhood, and had only white playmates outside of school.  So it's no wonder I've been accused of "acting white".  I've even been taken for white.  Which I am.  Just as I am black.  I have struggled to balance my two-sided identity, while Lacey Schwartz's family secret delayed her ability to even address hers.  Her black father, and her black identity, were hidden from her until her late teens.

In every scene, Lacey reminds me so much of myself that I can only see her as a mixed brown girl. She incredibly managed to get through the first sixteen years of her life without any friends or family members questioning her lineage. When she finally confronts her father, the man who raised her, he's unable to put the truth of her paternity into words. He's clearly pained, but waits until a much later point in the film (and their lives) to divulge that his wife never confessed her affair to him. They raised Lacey as their white, Jewish daughter, because that's who they were.

I admire this family's willingness to let the cameras roll through such deeply personal moments.  Ms. Schwartz and her parents expose their secret, and their hearts, in order to share this strange and powerful story.  It's a great addition to the Independent Lens catalog of documentary films, one that will surely prompt new discussions about race, identity, and being mixed.

You can stream the film in its entirety at IndependentLens.org

Related memoirs: The Color of Water, by James McBride; Black, White and Jewish, by Rebecca Walker; Bulletproof Diva, by Lisa Jones.

"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.

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.

The Ease of Blending In

I recently had the strange experience of traveling to a far-away island and being mistaken for a native.

It’s much more usual for me to be mistaken for a “foreigner,” with my light brown skin, black eyes, and unruly, curly hair.

Growing up in New York City, I was regularly presumed to be of Latin American descent. Which made sense, since my mixed heritage includes African, Spanish (from Spain), Russian, and Native American. I look like the product of multi-generational miscegenation. Because that’s what I am.

But my high school Spanish classes didn’t prepare me to respond capably to the rapid-fire queries of all those pretty brown people, lost in the city subways, expecting me to help them find their way. I tried: “No comprendo. Habla usted inglés? (I don’t understand. Do you speak English?)” Which would meet with a dejected “No.”

Did they think I was trying to pass? Disavowing my native tongue?

Late last month, my family and I traveled to Puerto Rico.

In preparation, my husband tried to scrape together some key Spanish phrases. His favorite: “Pregunta mi esposa. (Ask my wife.)” Our daughters claimed to not know any conversational Spanish, in spite of five years of elementary school study. So I tried to brush off the buried remnants of the Spanish I once knew, the native language of my beloved Grandpa Juan. We figured we might be mistaken for Puertorriqueños, and I wanted to be prepared.

In the taxi to the airport, I practiced my Spanish with our Ecuadorian driver.

My family was shocked, never having heard me converse in anything but English before. The driver and I discussed our children, their relative ages, and how they would each be spending the summer break. It was hard work, but I did all right.

Landing in San Juan, we were no longer tourists.

We blended seamlessly into the sea of brown faces. Nearly everyone we encountered addressed us in Spanish. Not text book Spanish, but the fast Puerto Rican flavor, with lots of dropped vowels and English slang. By the end of our week, our ears were well tuned to it, though we were grateful for the ease with which most of our contacts could switch to our native tongue.

The big thrill for me was how well we fit in.

The people of Puerto Rico come in all shades of brown. And for this brown girl, it was the first time I have traveled anywhere and not felt “other”. I’ve been to every state in the Union, except Hawaii, and have often felt like an obvious outsider; in a quiet, clear way, like a visitor from somewhere else. Not white. Not black. Possibly not American. I’ve been called “exotic” a few too many times.

In Puerto Rico, I found an unexpected comfort, for myself and my children.  It was the ease of blending in.

Which must be hard to fathom, for those who’ve always known it.

Spring's Holy Days

THE EASTER BUNNY IS COMING TO THE MALL!!

Much like Santa’s December descent, the occasion draws long lines of children smaller and more innocent than mine to be channeled through the velvet ropes, pretty and primed. The Paas dye kits are overflowing the seasonal aisle at the supermarket, while the Manischewitz products stand proud among the ethnic foods. And I am stuck in the semi-annual quagmire known as Commercialized Christian Holiday vs. Solemn Jewish Observances. It happens in April, just like it does in December. And this year, spring’s holy days are right on top of each other. There’s no time to buffer between Easter and Passover, complicating for our kids exactly what it’s all about, and whether or why we do or don’t really celebrate some and not all of it.

I confess there have been times when I wish I had grown up with some religion. Just something to sink my teeth into. Someone, other than my family and teachers, on whom I could rely for supernatural assistance. My mother the scientist came to believe in a higher power at some point in her adult life, but I’m unsure what relation that power has to the Judeo-Christian God. Raised among atheists and anarchists on a commune in upstate New York, she’s not into Jesus. I know that. She’s never belonged to a church or a synagogue, though she enjoyed taking me to friends’ bar and bat mitzvahs, and since she’s become the Jewish grandmother of Jewish children, she looks forward to Passover and Hanukah. She and I are Jewish through the maternal bloodline, as prescribed by Jewish law. But we’ve always celebrated Christmas together. We never owned a menorah.

Not until I married my Jewish husband.

My childhood memories of Easter candy and Christmas trees are not the stuff of his youth. But we’ve managed to weave them into the modern texture of our family. “My Granny Flo is rolling in her grave,” he says, smiling to soften the truth of it, as if I’m forcing our children into shameful practices. We do it all. The seder, the Easter baskets, the menorah and the tree. Our children are accustomed to our light holiday lecture: “Our family is large and diverse. Different people have different beliefs and different traditions, and we’re lucky that we can honor them all.” Our girls, ages eight and six, seem to get it. Unlike most of their friends, they still believe in Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. They seem to believe everything we tell them.

The other day, in the car, my older daughter asked me, “So who came up with all this Easter stuff?”

She meant the eggs, the candy, and the visit from the bunny. I told them the strange and gruesome story of “that man Jesus Christ, from the Bible”: “You know that these stories are very important to a lot of people, right? Well…”   

They didn’t like the part about the crucifixion. Nor did they accept the idea of the immaculate conception. I think the resurrection was more information than they could process. So I guess they’re where I want them to be with regard to religion. But I have to ask myself a whole lot of questions, and wonder if my mother had them too: Will they flounder in the atheist’s quagmire when they get older? What meaning will our mixed bag of holiday customs hold for them as they mature? Will any of it comfort them when we’re gone?  Will nostalgia be enough?

The Step Dance Kid

It’s been a couple of weeks since I first read about Drew Lovejoy. 
I can’t shake an almost maternal feeling of pride: There goes another one of us, quietly ascending to peak performance. If you haven’t seen or heard of Drew Lovejoy, he’s worth a google. Drew is the seventeen-year-old Irish Step Dance World Champion. He happens to be biracial, born in Indiana and now living in rural Ohio. He also happens to be Jewish. This is the third consecutive year that Drew has won the World Champion title. He is the only non-white contestant to ever win the title.

Watching him dance in any number of YouTube appearances, it’s impossible to ignore how much he stands out among his predominantly female, entirely white step dancing peers.

I think of my own short-lived dance world aspirations, as a young student at the Dance Theater of Harlem: my not being dark enough to be black, according to my classmates. The tap teacher often positioned me in the first row, so the others could follow my lead, but I was an unpopular outlier in the changing room. Being the best wasn't enough to keep me there. As much as I enjoyed the challenges of dance, not fitting in wore me down.

I’m not the biggest fan of Irish Step Dance. I can’t even say that I enjoy the form. It doesn’t stir me. But I look at Drew Lovejoy, and his story blows me away. Like Tiger Woods, he has accomplished so much more than the obvious athletic achievement. Living in rural Ohio, he claims to have experienced overt racism more than once. So he doesn’t walk his dog after dark.  

But he sure does dance in the light.

(photo courtesy of jspace.com)

Rocky Mountain High

Our family recently returned from spending mid-winter break in Aspen, Colorado.

We had a great time. The girls skied, I skied, and my husband’s family, whom we were visiting, skied like the seasoned experts they are. The mountains were breathtakingly beautiful, as they are at any time of year. This year’s record-low snowfall has caused disappointing ski conditions: no five-foot base this year. But the mountains’ majesty inspires awe nonetheless.

I always feel a little out of place in Colorado.

I’m a city girl from back east. I don’t ski with confidence. And I could have told you that the African American population in the state of Colorado is under 10% without looking it up; in fact, it’s 4%. In Aspen, it’s 0.8% of a population of 6,658 people. In other words, it’s pretty typical to walk around Aspen and not see any black people.

Then there’s my John Denver problem:

I did not grow up enjoying the music of John Denver.

Lyrics like, “Country road/ take me home/ to the place I belong/ West Virginia/ Mountain Mama/ take me home down country roads” were a huge turn-off to this urban-grown brown girl. West Virginia made me nervous. The state’s history of racism was enough to give me nightmares. I associated John Denver with those scary thoughts, because it sounded to me like West Virginia was his beloved home. Hence, I figured that Denver, Colorado must be a scary place too. John Denver; Denver, Colorado; West Virginia: all scary and definitely not for me. That’s what I figured, growing up.

John Denver made a guest appearance on the Muppet Show once, and that got me thinking that maybe he wasn’t a bad guy after all. I knew the reputation of Jim Henson and the Sesame Street organization to be pretty “modern” in their approach. And I knew that grown-ups could change their politics over time. So John Denver scored a few coolness points by appearing on the Muppet Show, but I remained frightened of West Virginia, and Denver, Colorado, certain they were both teeming with redneck lynch mobs.

Fast forward to my freshman year of college, when I made a new friend who happened to be from Colorado. A Jew from Colorado. I assumed his family must be living in cognito among the cowboys. I discovered that he was from Aspen. Well! Some of my childhood schoolmates had been from enormously wealthy families, and they spoke of Aspen like it was the most exclusive, most fabulous, most expensive vacation destination on the planet. So I drew some pretty judgmental conclusions about my new friend and his family. He explained that the Aspen of his youth was undeveloped big sky country, populated by sprawling ranches and earthy ski bums. But I still had trouble discounting the notion of Beverly Hills transplanted to the Rockies.

In a strange twist of fate, I married my college friend from Aspen, Colorado.

Now, Aspen is a place where family congregates. And I am getting to know the place. 

Over the past ten years, I’ve been watching her grow, and shrink, and change.

I used to get excited when we had an Ed Bradley sighting (yes, the 60 Minutes Ed Bradley) at the supermarket. Then Oprah bought a house there, followed by Will and Jada Smith. There are some huuuuuge corporate houses there, and some sports teams have houses in Aspen – don’t ask me how that works. The point is, it’s a lot less homogeneous than it was even ten years ago.

During this last trip, our family encountered another multiracial family, right there on the ski slopes. Honestly, I almost fell over from the shock. They weren’t flashy, or glitzy, or “Aspen-y” in any way. They were quiet and casual, like us. Signing their little brown girl up for ski lessons, just like us.

I had to recognize that my John Denver bias was from another era.

Little brown girls are everywhere!