See You in December

I've decided to take a short break from blogging as I am finding it too difficult to work, blog and work on a novel.

November 1st marked the first day of National Novel Writing Month and I decided to enter the contest. The goal is to finish a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.

It's challenging, but I'm plugging away at it. So, see you in December.

Why Color Still Matters

If you’re white, you’re alright
If you’re yellow, that’s mellow
If you’re brown, stick around
If you’re black, get back
Old saying in the African-American community

For two days, I sat in auditoriums filled with a kaleidoscope of black people--a living document of our mixed heritage. The first night I was at DuSable Museum and the audience was made up mostly of adult women waiting to watch the Dark Girls documentary. Not widely advertised, the movie had been listed under the museum’s events and spread via social networking and word of mouth. Due to overwhelming demand for another showing, in less than 24 hours, one of the auditoriums at Ice Theaters was filled to capacity. The second night was still mostly women, but also sprinkled with men and children. Standing room only, a makeshift bench and folding chairs were set up to accommodate the overflow. And we all wanted the same thing: understanding and healing around an issue that has plagued us far too long.

A woman in the audience at Ice Theaters said when she’d heard about the film, she thought that the issue was archaic. She said she wondered why we’re still talking about it in 2011. I shook my head at the thought. This subject matter is not archaic, but real and relevant and we need to talk about it. The fact that it’s been taboo for so long is why it has become a more insidious issue. It’s like a poisonous vapor permeating our being. And it’s time to talk it out and toss it out of our psyche.

Every day, I see the harm our silence is costing us. When I first became a teacher in the 90s, there was a beautiful young dark skinned girl in my class who told me that her color was a curse, and that nobody could tell her otherwise because no one else was as dark as she. I had light complected boys who felt like they had to fight to prove their “blackness” much like our President has to do today. I had another girl who hated another student because of the texture of the girl’s hair. In a heated argument, she yelled at her, “So what you got Indian in your family!” A group of girls threatened to cut the face and hair of a light skinned classmate because of something she had no control over. The stories are endless. Our children have learned to hate themselves from us.

Much of what’s wrong with our youth is an innate sense of self-loathing from the internalization of eurocentrism. What we fail to accept about perceived ideas of standards, is that if we have a superior standard, then we must have an inferior standard. So, if Europe is the pinnacle of all that’s beautiful then the antithesis of that would be Africa in a world where only white and black exists. Colorism is a by-product of racism, but it lives and breathes because we have not made peace with our past.

One of the experts in the film said that we are the keepers of our soul, and it’s time for us to become better care takers. We owe it to ourselves and our children.

Buy. . .or Not?

To Buy or Not to Buy? That is the dilemma I am faced with as I learn that American Girls has released its second African-American doll.

Move over Addy! You've got company. Addy, the American Girls only African-American doll until the recent addition of Cecile, is a former slave who escapes slavery.

Cecile, on the other hand, is from a well-to-do New Orleans family. I'm sure that Cecile will be well received by some and rejected by others just as Addy's reception has been mixed. We don't want to see ourselves as descendants of slaves, but we want our stories told accurately. The real or perceived controversy surrounding the dolls is not my issue. If I decide to purchase either--or both--it will be because I want to add them to my collection. And therein lies the problem for me.

The American Girl dolls, African-American or not, are homely. While they're not quite ugly, they are not cute by any stretch of the imagination. So, do I buy them for their historical and nostalgic value, and not their aesthetic appearance? I don't know.

I love dolls. I always have, but homely doesn't hit home. The jury's still out. But I'm thinking about. In the mean times, Byron Lars has a beautiful new Barbie that I need to add to my collection.

Hold on Addy and Cecile. I just might get you yet.

Remembering 911

I remember it fell on a Tuesday-- a beautiful, breezy, end-of-summer day. The trees were mostly green, but patches of red, yellow and brown were making their presence known. I remember having a full schedule of activities planned before and after work. My first stop was a follow up appointment with the surgeon who had removed fatty tumor from the upper right part of my back. My appointment was early in the morning and if I managed to get in and out quickly, I wouldn’t be that late for work.
I was thinking about my visit with the handsome, arrogant doctor and wondering if I should flirt with him since I hadn’t see a wedding wing on his finger. Arrogant is not really my type, I thought as I shifted to my long list of things to do on the list of living. As I reached to turn off the radio, something caught my attention. I stopped to listen; a plane had crashed into one of the towers at the World Trade Center in New York. I listened for a few minutes, but I knew I had to go. The day’s happenings were unclear to me at the time so I hurried into the office, signed in and took my seat as an eerie feeling descended over me.
Everyone was glued to the television in the waiting room watching the attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon. It was pin-drop silence as we tried to make sense of what didn’t make sense. Chaos was reigning in New York, but it was business as usual in Chicago in a weird sort of way. On some level, I believe we found solace, in the semblance of normalcy. Something horrific was taking place, but nobody knew what to do because there is no protocol when horror unfolds in your face.
When my name was called, I unglued myself from the T.V. and went in to the examining room. The normally over-confident, clean shaven doctor was visibly shaven. He was talking as if I wasn’t in the room—something about understanding what they did because of things that the United States had done. Then he started talking about his family in D.C. His mother and uncle lived there and one of them worked near the Pentagon. He said he’d been trying to reach someone all morning, but the phone lines were jammed. I sat quietly, not knowing what to say as I tried to steady the rhythm of my own heart.
After a few more minutes of talking and pacing, he snapped into doctor mode, examined my incision, and told me that all was well—with me. I thanked him and left, but my mind would go back to him in the days that followed. I sent him a card wishing him and his family well. He did not reply. When I returned to my car, I called my mother who lives in Chicago because I needed the assurance of hearing her voice on the other end of the phone.
I work for the Chicago Board of Education, and when I got to work, we watched and waited. We were in public building and, we didn’t know if the schools would remain open or close. Carmen, my friend and co-worker decided to reschedule the twins’ birthday outing. Like most everyone else, I went home to watch and wait in anticipation of what was to come. In the days that passed, life for us in Chicago returned to normal, but we are forever reminded of our vulnerability.
Sept 11, 2001 is branded in the minds of Americans—a day in which our lives changed forever in visible and non-visible ways. Safety became our first priority—something we can no longer take for granted.

The Relationship Circus

Washing my car the other day, I was privy to what should have been a private conversation between a young woman and young man at the car wash. From the snatches of conversation I heard as I vacuumed out my car, it seemed as though she was giving him the business for disrespecting her.

I shook my head as I listened to her emotionally charged tongue lashing wondering why she was giving so much energy to man that she knew wasn't hers. She acknowledged that she was the jump-off and claimed to have understood the nature of his relationship with this other woman.

Listening to her reminded of how often we become ring masters of our very own three-ring circus. Step right up as we engage in death-defying acrobatic stunts to prove our worth, turn summersaults and backflips, and jump through hoops to demonstrate our loyalty and committment. It's amazing how often we don the clown suit under the guise of love.

Some of us have teetered on the tightrope between sanity and insanity--leaning toward the latter trying to hold on,on an already slippery slope. A word of caution to the ring masters: step out of the ring before it's too late, and you seal your own fate.

Some of us have our head in the mouth of the lion, and maybe because we've been there for so long, or we think we know the nature of the beast, we don't know get out while we still have our heads. So, take my advice and pull out before the lion swallows you whole, and rips a hole in your soul.

The Hoopla Around the Help

After first reading the book, then seeing the film and now reading the various articles popping up about The Help, I must confess that I don’t share the sentiments of those strongly speaking out against the film. There’s the chorus of why another story of a black woman as a maid, the chorus of a white woman telling our story, and the chorus of it being stereotypical int its one dimensional protrait of the maid as "mammy" and its lack of historical depth. The Help, based on the bestselling novel of the same name written by Kathryn Stockett, is a fictionalized account of the lives of domestics in the turbulent 60s in Mississippi.

All the hoopla around The Help rips off the post-racial band-aid America has been wearing since the election of President Obama. This movie that is stirring up controversy and raking in millions reminds us of the raw and real pain of our racist past. And I welcome it. In his critique of The Help, Leonard Pitts Jr. of The Miami Herald says, "As Americans, we lie about race…Lies that exonerate conscience and cover sin with sanctimony."

Pitts shares the story of his mother who worked as a domestic for a doctor in Memphis in the late ‘40s/early 50s. One day the doctor’s daughter came up and began rubbing the woman’s skin because the child thought the woman's skin was dark because it was dirty. Seems that when the little girl asked her grandmother why the maid’s skin was dark, the little girl was told that the darkness was dirt. "Years later, Mom’s voice still mixed anger and humiliation when she told that tale." Pitts describes his own irresolution with the film. "I suspect it traces to nothing more mysterious than the pain of revisiting a time and place of black subservience. And, perhaps, the sting of an inherited memory. That episode cost my mom something to tell — and even more to live."

In L. Lamar Wilson’s piece, Wilson complained that the director had an opportunity to show love to the maligned black women in our society and she failed. Wilson wondered why Abilene couldn’t recite the words for self that she spoke to Mae Mobley. And while I fully understood what Wilson was getting at, I was blown away by words of a reader whose response to the article appeared in the comment section following the story.

“I am a fifty-six year old black man whose mother was a maid, a servant, and raised little white boys and little white girls . . . As I write this; the hurt of being devalued soars into my chest, just as it did when watching the movie. . . I couldn't say them to myself when the world around me was saying, "you are dumb, you are ignorant, you stink, you are ugly, you are bad." THAT VOICE was too, too loud and there were no volume control."

The reader goes on to say how his mother's teachings affected him when he watched his mother put on her uniform and assume her subjugated positon in society.

We need to stop acting as though were are not a nation in pain. We need to stop lying to ourselves because the lies that we've all been told about race "pinched off avenues of aspiration till “the help” was all a Negro woman was left to be," Pitt said. "I think of those lies sometimes when aging white southerners contact me to share sepia-toned reminiscences about some beloved old nanny who raised them, taught them, loved them, and who was almost a member of the family. Almost. It is Kathryn Stockett’s imperfect triumph to have understood this and seek to make others understand it, too. I think mom would have appreciated the effort."

The multitude of voices speaking out both for and against The Help need to heard if we are to heal our hurt.Perhaps through these dialogues and debates we can come to some understanding what it was like to stand in and walk around in the shoes of the hired help. We will never know what it was like to live in their shoes, but through our conversations with each other, we can move from sympathy to empathy and outrage to understanding so that we can appreciate and celebrate these unsung heroes.

We need the balm of couragerous conversations to heal our wounded souls.

Holding Love Hostage

Recently,I was playing with my new toy--the cable remote, flipping through the channels, when I stopped as one of the judge shows caught my attention. Not a fan of judge shows, I stopped because a woman on on America's Court with Judge Kevin Ross was suing her boyfriend she got arrested for disorderly conduct after she make a false complaint against her then boyfriend.

Seems that the woman wanted to get married, but the boyfriend didn't even though the woman insisted that she and the boyfriend had discussed marriage. The boyfriend showed the judge the cards the woman had given to him signed, "your wife." Because she said he had promised to propose to her and chickened out, she called the police to scare him into marrying her.

The judge told the woman, "It's not about the wedding. It's not about I'm married," he said pointing to a wedding ring. "It's about someone who loves you and wants to to be with you." The judge dismissed the charges against the boyfriend. And even though I sometimes thing some of the people on some of these shows are short a table leg, I do know people in hostage situations disguised as love.

I know people who are strong arming or being strong armed by "love". There are people in relationships with people who love them, and yet they don't love their partner in return. Real love doesn't weigh you down and chain your soul; it's time for someone to be set free.