So Much the Same: no justice and no peace

My grandfather died last week. 

He lived as colored and negro before he was ever granted black or African American. A world war two veteran, he risked his life for America only to return to its abuses. Somehow he survived. Somehow he thrived. Sent his three children to college, traveled the world, lived just two months shy of 100 years.

I find that last bit the most remarkable. 

Ninety-nine years in America is a long time for a black man. Hell, 12 is a ripe old age for a black man in America, I say with every ounce of irony I can conjure.

Years ago I had a conversation about the ills of racism in America with PaPa. He was adamant that I focus on how far we have come. He pointed out that the descriptors on my birth certificate mark some level of change, of progress.“Does that mean we should stop?” I asked him.  “If no one is flinging ‘nigger’ at me does that mean I should be satisfied?”

He stopped for a moment. Looked at me and then shook his head. No. No we shouldn’t stop. 

For some reason my grandfather, my PaPa, is running through my head as I am waiting for BART to arrive, coming to the end of an 8-day trip book-ended by my PaPa’s funeral in Houston on one end and a conference in Philadelphia on the other.

My thoughts are heavy. It could be exhaustion or maybe reflecting on my grandfather’s journey through life provides the perfect canvas to paint all my grief all my loss, both personal and social.

Us gunned down in the street by agents of the state requires deliberation and evidence before the loss of life can be deemed tragic or unjustified by the American masses. Video isn’t enough, we need sound. We are guilty until proven innocent…guilty of what I am unsure.

I hopped online when my plane landed and Twitter, awash in RIP hashtags and outrage and mourning, brought me to tears. Just like that. Visions of every black and brown person I’ve ever loved swim before me because our lives are clearly viewed as disposable.

Maybe its our melanin. Maybe it is the visible proof of the enslavement written epigenetically in all of our progeny. Yeah, maybe we are a reminder of America's original sins of genocide and torture and it just can’t bare it, just won’t. America has to wash us out Lady Macbeth style- damn spots that we are.

I thought I was out of tears for all of this. Cried out when Zimmerman was released into the wild like some poisonous gas. But there have been so many…so many more. So many that the names begin to jumble and the timeline is a mess in my head because we are daily targets and nothing, not body cameras or being a child or respectability politics that demand we comply with raised hands, saves us. Our black and brown bodies are shot over and over and over again. 

And like entertainment, like the lynching postcards of old, those bodies are displayed on a loop. A warning. This is what I can do boy/gal. This is what you are worth. This is how little America cares.

I can’t bring myself to ask right now…can’t bring myself to beg for America to stop murdering us. It seems insane to beg for my humanity from the very thing stripping it daily.But yesterday my friend of 22 years, my 6'2 brown skinned brother, drove 2 hours to see me, to share a meal. And we laughed and we debated and we reminisced. And then he got into a car and drove two hours home through the dark Pennsylvania and Maryland night with only a thin layer of metal and wisp of grace to see him safely home. 

And for him I asked. For him and every person I love that has been kissed by some variant of brown I will continue to ask…please stop. Please stop killing us. Please. Stop.

At church on Saturday we celebrated my PaPa’s long life. We shared stories of his driving on long road trips and ability to eat any meal no matter ow horribly prepared. We marveled at how much the world has changed in the hyphen he lived between 1916 – 2016. He carried a computer in his pocket and waved at his granddaughter in Uganda through Skype. 

All that and the thing that strikes me the most as I arrange my thinking to a world that no longer includes him, is not all of the changes he experienced, but how black people’s place in it has stayed so very much the same.

Overlapping

I am guilty of apologizing. I don’t mean the good kind, the kind that shows that I was wrong or inconsiderate to someone (although I try to be a good apologist where that is concerned), I mean the kneejerk additive to my language when I have an opinion or what I have to say might disappoint. I mean the kind that reflects some internal need to take up less space.

It is funny to think of brash and opinionated me as suffering from such a thing but I do. I’ve noticed it recently in emails, “I’m sorry, but you missed the deadline…”, “I’m sorry, but that doesn’t fit with the plan…”. I considered it a courtesy, a politeness in a world that often forgets its manners. 

But I’ve been reading articles lately that speak to the over-representation of apologetic language in women’s speech and how we are perceived because of it. 

Without fail, the response to this observation is that "women are just wired that way. Women are nurturing." If that is how women are wired then why would I try to stop "apologizing" since I'm wired to do so? Doesn't that mean I'm trying to  adopt maleness?                     

                                                                 

I don’t believe that to gain equality women should have to adopt the mannerisms that have been labeled as “manly” to be successful. Equally, I do not believe we should adopt the ones that women have been saddled with because…women. Unfortunately, sometimes these behaviors are snakes eating their tails. Do women apologize because we are told, in a million subtle and explicit ways, that women should be polite and likable or are we polite and likable because we are women? 

We are taught to be quiet, and “ladylike”, and considerate, we are told to be compliant and chaste. The idea of our maternal instincts is pushed to the forefront to guide/shame us into behaviors that we may not possess, or if we do, we may not want to exhibit. It can ingrain itself. A few months ago I found myself in a middle seat sandwiched between two men on a packed flight. Neither yielded the armrests and I found myself reluctant to push the issue. And yes, you can insert here my own agency and personal choice not to voice a complaint, but I’m not alone.

I suspect our generalized behavior (of course there are women who do not fall in this category) comes from social indoctrination. Part of the reason I suspect conditioning over genetics is that I find I have adopted parallel behavioral tics as a result of my blackness. Society has strict definitions. For women, the "appropriate" behaviors are those that people are convinced are the very foundation of femaleness, the opposite holds true for blackness. With blackness, the acceptability protocol is a stricter and narrower definition of whiteness. 

Wade in here with me for a moment.

I know how blackness is received in this country (if you need a primer check here, here, here, and here) and as a result I am always aware of my language and demeanor. I am aware of the space I inhabit and how others might feel about the space I inhabit. I have adopted a specific way of being in the world based on all of those things. Would I have been this me if those rules weren’t thrust at me from every direction – I’ll never know.

The messages directed at blackness are not the same as the ones telegraphed to women but they share similar threads. Threads of "acceptability". To be acceptably black my use of language, my clothing, my posture, my ability to swallow insults - subtle and not- about people who look like me, are essential. I can (and do) move away from aspects of what people's idea of "appropriate blackness" is, but there are consequences for doing so. 

There are labels.  For women..."Slut," "Easy," "Stuck up," "Bitch."

For black people..."Uppity," "Angry," "Ignorant," "Ghetto," 'Nigger."

There are actions. For women, you are catcalled, paid less, raped.

For black people, you are less likely to be hired, arrested, murdered. 

The restrictive space that society "allows" my blackness, my womaness, can be stifling. The rules are limiting of the true expression of who I am, who I strive to be, the parts of myself that can safely flourish. Who I am permitted to be based on my interwoven demographics, both black and woman, sometimes feels like a tiny space. Like every step I take, every expression, is a revolutionary action. And, I suppose, it is.

Book Reflections

When president Obama was elected I wrote about this moment with my nieces in mind. Three of them. I was amazed that they would live only in a world where a black president was possible. A world, that until that election, I didn’t think I’d ever see. 

It felt like such a turning point. It felt so hopeful. Never mind the racist posts that greeted Obama after his election. Never mind the bulletproof glass he and Michelle stood behind just in case.

I lived in “just in case” for at least a year. Then I settled into the assumption that although the racism would continue, he was safe. What I didn’t count on was that the rest of us weren’t. 

Truthfully, I never thought wearing black skin was safe. I knew better. I understood what black people have always understood, that things happen to us when there are no prying eyes to observe, and if you survive, no one will believe your version of what happened. 

Such dark thoughts.

I’ll return to thoughts of my nieces now, with something more like the hope I found myself cloaked in in 2008. I want to spin them dizzy in a world where black presidents are possible and black skin a gift. Fiction seems the best respite. Fiction seems the most realistic place for that kind of optimistic landscape. Fiction can weave in the reality of a black man in the White House and make a kinky haired black girl the hero in the story.

Yesterday I began my search…again. It wasn’t the first time I went in search of books for my nieces. Thinking back to my beloved books growing up, I notice now that the books of my youth have one thing in common. Not a single main character looks like me. Not Anastasia Krumpnik, or Harriet the Spy, or Ramona Quimby. Not Charlotte from Charlotte’s Web, not anyone from the Lion the Witch and Wardrobe or from Bridge to Terabithia. As integrated as my parents made my toybox, the bookshelf proved more palely homogenous.

Books for children seem to have gotten more diverse since I’ve gotten old; there are folks of all kinds of backgrounds in books these days. But I am difficult, and diversity isn’t enough, I have a few other requirements for what I’d most like to present my nieces with:

1.       Person of color protagonist 

2.       No historical stories 

3.       Female protagonist 

4.       No love interest to live “happily ever after with."

 

What I’ve found is that two out of the four requirements is highly probable in a book, three out of four possible, and four out of four I am having difficulty in finding. I can’t claim to have exhausted the children’s book section of any bookstore or library but oh how frustrating my internet searches have been as I find books with great stories no doubt, but ones that don’t reflect my nieces or the values I want them to have. 

My 11 year-old-niece adores dystopian novels. Hunger Games, Divergent…I went in search of something in that genre for her. I found Tankborn. Tankborn met three of the four (1,2, and 4) but romance snuck its way in. 

The things is, my requirements aren’t arbitrary. I want protagonists of color because I don’t want my nieces to believe that the default or norm, is whiteness. I want them to understand that the world, and the people in it, is a varied place. I want them to see themselves and others reflected in that world not during black history month or for special messages, but just because it is a Tuesday and someone is walking to the store. 

I also don’t want the brownness of characters to relegate them to some historical context of suffering and overcoming. I don’t want stories that have characters that reflect my brown and fuzzy haired nieces to have to relate to the civil rights movement or slavery. I want it to be in the here and now or in the dystopian future where historical context doesn’t limit the types of stories or triumphs they can have.

I want them to see girls and women as the protagonists because the Bechdel test is a low bar and yet so many movies and books fail it. Having a female protagonist isn’t a guarantee that the threshold is met but it goes a long way in showing that girls don’t have to be helpless and boring…girls can be smart and funny and kickass or make mistakes and learn from them. All traits I hope my nieces possess.

Finally, point four is about NOT having a romantic interest. I’m not anti-love. One day I hope my nieces are cloaked in the love of a partner. But at the tender ages of 7,9, and 11 I don’t want them focused on that. I don’t want them to fall into the trap of believing that happily ever after is the result of someone “completing them” or some such nonsense. I want them to understand that people can be friends – deeply and meaningfully- and not have to be more than that. A person can be special and not be a boy/girlfriend. 

While Hunger Games doesn’t fixate on the romance angle (although the movies elevate it in importance to some degree) it is still a component of the books. Still a component of Katniss’ world. Divergent does the same. Fairy tales are based on the premise of one true love. It is all so cloying and transparent. Not yet teens, I want my nieces to explore a world where they and their friends are enough to tackle any new adventures.

Finding books that meet my threshold has proven difficult. I’ve gone back to the classics…maybe classics is a stretch…I’ve gone back to my childhood, back to my love of Judy Blume and Madeline L’engle who meet some of the rules and fall short in others. I’ve researched The Lost Girl and will check it out to see if it is any good (even as I already know it fails rule 4). More than anything I realize that rather than complain I need to do pull a J.K. Rowling and write what I want to see in the world…I hope inspiration hits me soon because my nieces aren’t getting any younger and their minds are being filled…and not according to my preferred rules.

A

Does anyone have a good idea for a children’s book?