Let's Talk About Race, Baby; : Let's Talk About You & Me

Oh yeah, I'm still going there.

I'm not done thinking yet.

And it's still not going to be comfortable.

Start here. NPR.

Yes. You have to.

Yes. It's listening.

A whole 6.5 minutes of your life.

And yes, you will have to listen actively and think.

Now, go do it, because my daughter and all the other little black kids out there in America are worth it.

Right now it seems, there are a couple of kinds of racism happening.

We still have the in your face lynching ropes and supremacy groups and idiots tossing around the n word.

We also have something subtle and almost invisible. Not to mention all the stuff on the sliding scale between those two.

A discrimination that is learned by omission, not out of evil intentions.

I was in high school in the 80's. Small town in the Mid-West. Not diverse. I can count on one hand the number of black kids I saw in those halls in my 4 years. I can still tell you their names. There were only a few, we all knew their names.

I wonder how that felt for them. We all knew their names. There was no escape, no chance to blend in on a bad outfit day or a moody teenage day.

Us and them.

I wasn't raised in a home where we spoke with racist language. I wasn't raised in a particularly judgemental home in terms of race. I don't remember us being particularly anything. I was an 80's high school girl. I remember lip gloss and jelly shoes and pegged pants.

We watched The Cosby Show. I had Michael Jackson albums.

We watched The Cosby Show without knowing any better.

I wasn't friends with any of those kids in my 4 years.

I wasn't mean. I didn't call them names or talk behind their backs. We were in classes and extracurricular activities together.

But I wasn't friendly to them either. I didn't make eye contact. I didn't say hi.

We weren't friends.

I was a little afraid, intimidated.

I'm not sure I knew or realized it then, but I was.

Somehow there was just this unspoken rule that you didn't mix with them. It went both ways, they didn't mix with us. We all knew the silent rules.

Them and us.

This is where we get honest and real. Either you lie or you're better than  me.

There aren't many of us white people with black friends. There are fewer still with black besties.

Even those of us with our mixed up families, white parents and many shades of brown kids, we have white adult friends.

We still don't mix with each other.

We get together to let our black kids play with each other, to give them time to hang out with other kids that look like them, but it's different, and we all know it.

It's almost like we don't know how to intermingle.

I will easily and often strike up a conversation with a stranger in the grocery store or some waiting area, but only with a white person.

Be honest, when that cart walking toward you in the grocery aisle has a black woman pushing it, you don't make eye contact or smile, but if it's a white lady you do.

That white woman sitting in the waiting room of the dental office or therapist or doctor is someone you'll share 5 minutes of small talk with, but that black woman, you'll stare at a 12 year old magazine or delete email off your phone or do anything but start up that conversation. Even when you are both sitting there with a black child on your lap.

Maybe this isn't you. Maybe you are better than me and don't behave this way. I hope for all of us that you are better than me.

I do behave this way. I always have.

It's a similar feeling I had when I became a new Christian and I thought it had to be all about surrounding yourself with fellow believers as a sort of weird protection. Then later I got angry and wanted  needed, to be out of the Christian bubble and back in the world, for sanity and for doing what God actually asked of me; to love everyone.

And I never gave it a second thought until last Saturday when I watched a little gaggle of 6-8 year old girls try to play basketball in the church gym.

I was ticked off to tears over what I saw.

I drove home crying over my daughter and the following thoughts of "what have I done to this child by adopting her"?

I talked. I blogged. I argued. I thought.

I watched some more.

I caught some current media stories.

I thought long and hard again, about myself.

I don't run around bashing blacks or calling anyone the n word or lumping in judgement on fashion or music or food, but hot damn I'm living just as racist a life by privilege and omission as if I were.

And maybe that's all my point is. That I'm looking in the mirror and seeing that I need to be somebody else.

Maybe it was just noticing that the little girls were doing what was modeled to them by their parents, none of us brought up to be racist. None of us intentionally widening the divide.

But none of us shrinking it either.

In a way, with our affluent white lives, we don't have to change anything. We almost never have to mingle or be around each other unless we choose it.

Us and them. Them and us.

Maybe it's that the singular word racist doesn't come close to covering the experiences that are included in it.

All of a sudden though, my life, my heart, in included in that single word.

So go ahead now, fill up the comments, tell me how wrong and misguided I am. Tell me my experiences are imagined or unique. Tell me you don't unconsciously behave the way I do and never gave it a second thought.

Mind Over Matter

Sometimes I think a significant part of life, if not perhaps all of life, is simply a choice of mind over matter.

What?  It's that time again, try to follow as I wander the rabbit hole of my mind.  You might see something shiny along the way, you never know.  Oh, wow!  Squirrel!!

So, mind over matter.  It's how you endure things like dental x-rays that scrape your mouth and make you gag.  It's how you buck up and make the phone call you don't want to make.  It's how you eat something you hate at your friends house just because it's polite and she loves it.

Mind over matter. 

But it's more than that.  It's how an artist or performer does what they do.  It's how a dreamer finds success.  It's how a person beats the odds and makes magic happen.

Confused yet? 

Here's the disclaimer, yes, I know I see the world through my own little lens and there are plenty of people out there who never experience anything the way I do.  That's fine. 

As a side note, I think I'm going to develop a general disclaimer for the blog so I can just get on with the business of saying what I say and moving on. 

I guess I just always assume that if you don't like what you read, you'll move on.  I assume if you want to discuss it or say something about it, you'll use the comment box.  Okay, now then, I'm moving on to the topic at hand today.

In my limited life experience, everything to a degree is about mind over matter.  If you're giving a speech or even speaking up in a small group, it's mind over matter.  You decide that you can do it.  You think you can speak something intelligent of value and you will not be shunned, humiliated, judged, criticized or whatever is your brand of torture.  You just decide that it will work and you speak your mind.

A performer does the same.  In their mind, they choose to suspend reality, if you will and get up on the stage and preform their thing.  They decide in their mind that what ever they are going to do for your entertainment will be accepted and appreciated and valued.  They believe inside themselves for those moments that they really are that good or that talented or whatever it is they need to say to themselves to get up there and do it. 

A writer does that too.  We shake off all those nagging doubts, those voices of failure and self-hate. We find a way to get the words out onto the virtual pages without pressing delete, delete, delete in time with the blinking of the cursor. 

It's a trick of the mind to be able to do it.

But there's more, because with me, there's always more.  It's never enough to just have a simple clear presentable thought, there always has to be more. 

So here's the more.

And I'm going to be specific to writing here, simply because that's where I live most of my mental hours and energy.

That suspension of reality can go one of two ways.  It can be the thing that allows you the space and the freedom and the protection from the self-hate long enough to get the beauty onto the page and out into the world at large, or it can be the thing that causes a forcing.  It can be the thing that lets you get caught up in writing the right things for the right audiences and the right markets and agents and so on and so forth and in the end, the writing is lost.  The magic is gone.

I have in the recent past been finding myself avoiding blogs I used to love, skimming over writers who used to put out amazing stuff, simply because they're in the push to sell. 

This makes it sound like selling your work is a bad thing.  It isn't.  I'm the first one to confess, I have a great desire to sell the book I wrote in November.  I'm in the first leg of doing the colossal rewrite that comes under the vague space of editing.  It would be an utter lie for me to sit here and say I don't want it to sell.  I do.  I confess it would delight me in a school girl way to walk into a store one day and see my own book on a shelf all stuck up with a $5.95 discount sticker.  I'd probably stop and take a picture of it.  I'm that kind of dork.

Really.  I am.

But here's the thing.  I want to be very insanely careful that my writing never becomes a sell out.  I never want to be writing to a market, to a genre, to a label, to fit inside a certain set of parameters, even the constraints of Christian that I try to live my life under--yeah, I said it out loud and I'm risking all that in my little life circles--because to me, if what I write isn't pure and true to the story running in my head, I'm abusing the gift I've been given.  So it's a tricky thing to play the games, stay in the circles and explain, especially when I never really feel like I should have to explain or justify or somehow validate my own writing, when it doesn't match up with all the external preset perceptions of who you think I am or who I appear to be or even who you know me to be.  Okay, that sounds a little freakish, but what ever.  Try to follow along.

I've seen some really great writers pick their genre and strive to make all their work fit into it.  I've read some amazing authors turn into the equivalent of instant mashed potatoes as they try to make all their writing deliver the all important message they feel they are supposed to infuse the world with.

It makes me sad. 

At our house, "the fun house", we have a joke about the one unforgivable thing is word abuse and for me screwing with your own writing in that way is abuse of the gift.  And you know what else, the longer I think about it, we're really not joking about that word abuse all that much.  Words are fun and amazing and powerful and ultimately the language of the soul of the being.  They're not a thing to be misused.

Don't read that to say I never say a mean thing or call a person a name or raise my voice.  That's not at all what I said.  And if you have the fortune/misfortune to know me "in real life" you know that I barely ever pull a punch and spare a feeling to speak my mind and whatever twisted thing I see or think or feel or believe to be truth in the moment or the thing that simply needs to be said.  I speak it. 

And so I think my season of transition continues.  I believe I feel a shift coming in the careful writing that's been visiting here. 

It's a punk rising.  An inner diva looking for her stilletos and glitter.  It's time for color in a world of beige.