No. We cannot talk about something more pleasant. (On a separate note, for anyone dealing with elderly parents, this is a must-read. I chose it to illustrate this post because the title works for being a racist in recovery, too. Unpleasant but necessary…..)
“It is coercion of the strongest kind, because it appears in the guise of a self-evident necessity and is thus not even recognized as a coercive force.”
Ludwik Fleck, “Genesis & Development of a Scientific Fact”
I started 2017 with a post about making this a “no bullshit” year. Seing it out with a post about being a racist in recovery might be as “no bullshit” as it gets.
Attorney, mom, and all-around powerhouse Sandy Broadus introduced me to the term when, during a particularly heated social media discussion, she referred to some of the posters as “racists in recovery.” I may have been included in that group, I may not have. I don’t know.
What I did know was that it was a total hand-meet-glove moment and mine was in the air, waving wildly while yelling, “YES! THANK YOU!!!! THAT’S EXACTLY THE RIGHT TERM FOR IT!!!!”
In my mind, I saw the hashtag (#racistinrecovery). I saw myself wearing the T-shirt. Then I saw myself trying to explain to an angry mob that I had never worn a white sheet, pointy hat, set a cross on fire or dropped the “n-bomb” in casual conversation.
That’s racist behavior. Racist in recovery behavior is something else altogether.
Racist in recovery behavior is what happens upon realizing that the result of growing up majority culture means you have absorbed some default prejudicial beliefs you don’t even know you’ve absorbed. But knowing they’re there bothers you enough to try to undo the damage, at least as much as you can and more if possible. Which is tricky, because you don’t even know where it all is or when or how it’s gonna crop up.
I explained to someone this way: It’s like you’re a tea bag, and you live in a cup full of water. Everything around you is tea. Why would you think there was anything else? How does a tea bag know that there’s a whole different kind of world outside a teacup? (I realize that this assumes sentience on the part of the tea bag. For purposes of this analogy, that assumption is correct.)
Being a Racist in Recovery means stepping far enough out of your comfort zone to trust someone else’s view of how what you are saying comes across. It means being willing to let go of notions you took for granted. It means taking the word of people’s experiences as people of color at their word, not challenging, minimizing, apologizing or denying those experiences. It means standing quietly and listening, and it means speaking up in situations where you hear someone who might want to be a racist in recovery or who is just a straight-up racist say something racist.
I’m not a big New Years resolver. I want to get more exercise and drop a few pounds, clean my house, write more, play my instruments more and waste less time 12 months of the year. But I would love to see #racistinrecovery become a thing in 2018.
Usually I slam out a blog post in a Word file and then transfer it over here to the wordpress template and tinker. Then, after I publish it I find more typos and things to tweak.
This morning, though, I am going to slam down something spontaneous as John Gorka sings “St. Caffeine” and drink coffee in a world where Roy Moore will not be the US Senator from Alabama.
I think in music and songs a lot. I haven’t written very many of my own – as a teenager I played a song I wrote for someone who’d made a few records, and she tore my song a new one and I never tried to write one again. But I know and appreciate a lot of other peoples’ songs, so the rest of this post is going to be the songs I thought of this morning – and one I found for the first time.
His victory does feel kind of like a Hanukkah miracle.
Anyway, along with this one, for all the sex offenders (see definition in prior post) who are going down, here are a couple of songs inspired by Roy Moore and the Alabama Senate election, with some bonus songs thrown in:
“I’m a loser” – You can have this live recording of the Beatles, especially with the screaming girls in the background. Or, if you’re more of the geek type, (like me), there’s this in-studio take which is a little more down-tempo, and which John quits on shortly before the song ends. I also like the instrumental break and the the way it’s mixed. there’s this one.
“Thank you, World” – Karl Wallinger’s band World Party is one of many influenced by the above-mentioned band. Also, it makes terrific music. So it seemed appropriate to express my gratitude to Alabama’s voters (particularly the black women who turned out to help hoist Jones over the finish line). It’s one of my “happy songs,” and I am happy that one less guy who thinks having a Jewish lawyer makes him multicultural is going to be making laws in Washington.
In the Department of “Not so Fast” there’s Roy Moore himself, who is not conceding. I imagine him and Kayla slow-dancing to Jason Aldean’s “I Ain’t Ready to Quit.”
One of my Facebook friends made a comment about God being female, and that made me think of the amazing and way too underknown John Gorka, who wrote “Mean Streak,” one of the songs that kept me sane during my split from Ex 1. But the one FB pal conjured was “Zuly,” about the Second Coming. This time, Jesus shows up as a baby girl. I’ll let you discover what comes after that.
Finally, two songs for Hanukkah.
This one, by Gorka, is one to think about. It’s called “Ignorance and Privilege,” and I’m just gonna leave it here with space…………………
The last, by my cousin Debbie (z”l) whose mother misses her every day and who I miss almost as much and think about a lot, is a Hanukkah classic. I’ve never played one on TV, but I’ve played “I’m a Latke” on my guitar! Happy Hanukkah to everyone who celebrates, and Merry Upcoming Christmas, Joyous Kwanzaa or just plain Happy Winter!
This morning, Sweetheart came in and sat at the at the edge of the bed.
“There’s coffee downstairs. And it happened after we went to bed last night, but there’s fresh hell,” he said.
I sat up. More quickly than I usually do first thing in the morning.
“Fifty people were killed and more than 200 were injured at a country music concert in Las Vegas,” he said. “A man on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel had automatic weapons. He’s dead.”
“Shit!” I said. “Fucking NRA.”
Downstairs, Fox News was on. I listened to it while I made Sweetheart’s lunch. It was on when I kissed him goodbye and said what I always do when he leaves for work. (“Work safely and come home.”)
It’s still on as I am writing this. As of this moment, we know the guy’s name (Stephen Paddock – I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess he’s white, because if he wasn’t, Fox and the other networks would be making sure to mention that every other minute). We know he was with a woman named Marilou, whose player card was found in the room and evidently she’s now being questioned.
We know there were multiple weapons in the room, that the windows at the hotel don’t open but that it was no biggie to shoot out a window as a prelude to mayhem.
Motive? What kind of sick piece of human offal takes out people listening to music? My first father-in-law Sidney used to say “You can’t judge irrational behavior by rational standards.”
That fits.
But still, we look for reasons.
Okay. I look for reasons. Dude was born in 1953. Is he a Vietnam veteran? Did the Ken Burns documentary kick open some locked door in his psyche? I’m not blaming Ken Burns. I’m also not blaming guns.
I know how to shoot. I’m a good shot. I’ve owned guns and have thought about getting one. Because I know what I’m doing. But the idea of amassing an arsenal and heading off to kill as many people as I can in one go turns my stomach. (There are hunters in my family, but all I’ve ever killed with a gun is paper and clay pigeons. I have also wounded tin cans.)
The National Rifle Association, though? That’s another story. They’re as complicit as anyone for this. They’ve perverted the Second Amendment. Between lobbying to make sure that sensible gun legislation isn’t enacted, making it easy for people to pick up guns at gun shows and generally tarring anyone who doesn’t agree with them lock, stock and barrel as some sort of wussy liberal….They’re responsible for making it as easy for this man to do what he did.
News is now reporting that the shooter was “known” to Las Vegas police. Whose hands were probably tied in regard to his gun ownership. Thanks again, NRA and the legislators who support them. I’m sure you are all sleeping like babies. Because of your actions, more than 50 people won’t ever wake up again, more than 200 are in hospitals and countless others will startle awake, reliving the event via nightmare.
PS When a white guy shoots up a concert full of people, it’s an “aberration” and not “terrorism,” according to a Fox interviewee. I wonder what he’d say if Stephen Paddock’s name was Hassan Abeddin. (Sorry to anyone named Hassan Abeddin.)
On my morning Facebook rounds, I caught this post by one of my offspring:
Clearly, my Photoshop skills are the equivalent of those of a four year old with an easel and finger paints.
In the way of Facebook, I could see beneath her post that a few other friends had posted articles about it, too.
At this point, shocking and seemingly inappropriate behavior is kind of the norm for this year’s GOP Presidential Candidate. (His cheerleaders and supporters are the ones who really scare me.)
I tried to imagine the reasons Donald Trump would be wearing a Tallit on Shabbat in a church. The best I could come up with was that maybe he was with a Messianic Jewish congregation. “Messianic Jews,” or as I refer to them, “Christians,” believe that Jesus is the messiah. As I understand it, that’s the foundation of Christianity – that Jesus came, died for our sins, was resurrected, rose to heaven, and will return. The righteous will be raptured and taken to heaven, the rest left on earth to a fate that is not fabulous.
Jews are still waiting for the Messiah to show up. S/He will establish heaven right here. We are supposed to help prepare for that time by doing what we can to help establish an earth that is as close to heaven as possible for mere mortals. That’s why you see so many Jews involved in social action, even those who don’t connect with the religious aspects of Judaism. Also, for Shabbat-Observant Jews (the ones who hew to keeping the Sabbath by not engaging in the 39 forbidden acts considered work), that time represents a taste of every day on earth in the Messianic Age.
So, my take on “Messianic Jews,” is that they can call themselves anything they want, but for Jews like me (who are still waiting for the first appearance of the Messiah), they’re Christians. My only real problem with Messianic types is when they go to small communities where there are no Jews and make presentations in churches to Christians who have never met a Jew in person. I saw this a lot when I was working as a religion reporter in a small community. I had never been able to articulate why I felt so viscerally offended at those press releases (which I ran, but only after I’d had someone else do the editing because my gut inclination was to round-file them, which went against my other gut inclination of everyone having equal rights to media access).
Then, when visiting one of my favorite United Methodist pastors at his church, which was one of the more conservative-leaning (those UMs are a wide-ranging group – a true “big tent” denomination that swings from far left to far right), I saw one of those Messianic announcements on the church bulletin board.
I felt comfortable enough with Paster Kerry to tell him how I felt, and he felt comfortable enough with me to be genuinely interested, even though he didn’t understand what I could possibly find offensive.
And then, call it Divine Inspiration. Call it just plain inspiration. Call it Fred if you want. I looked at Pastor Kerry and said this.
“Imagine a kid from your church who’s been baptized, gone through your Sunday school and been confirmed,” I said. “Now, imagine him coming to see you during his second semester of college, all excited.
‘Pastor Kerry! Pastor Kerry!’ he says. ‘Did you know that Allah is the One True God and Muhammed is his last Prophet? I am going to keep the Five Pillars! I pray to Mecca five times a day, and I eat halal and observe Ramadan. But don’t worry. I’m going to still celebrate Christmas and Easter, because I’m a Christian for Islam!'”
Watching him make the connection was like one of those time-lapse films of a flower opening, only faster. The emotion with which he delivered his three-word response was a study in understated power.
“I get it,” he said.
But, I digress. Absent what I wrote above, when it came to Donald Trump and a Tallit on Shabbat in a church, I had nothing.
So I clicked on one of the articles. The answer was that Bishop Wayne Jackson of Great Faith Ministries in Detroit gave it to him as a gesture of love and hope.
“This is a prayer shawl straight from Israel. Whenever you’re flying from coast to coast — I know you just came back from Mexico and you’ll be flying from city to city — there is an anointing. And anointing is the power of God,” Jackson said. “It’s going to be sometimes in your life that you’re going to feel forsaken, you’re going to feel down, but the anointing is going to lift you up. I prayed over this personally and I fasted over it, and I wanted to just put this on you.”
There had been some speculation on Offspring’s thread that the Tallit might have been connected to Donald’s daughter Ivanka, who is Jewish. I could labor over a snappy ending to this post, but will go lazy by copying and pasting what I wrote (verbatim) on Offspring’s wall:
“Now, at least, it makes sense, even if it makes me kind of squishy and uncomfortable. I mean, what if Pastor Jackson had given Trump, say, I dunno, a Native American headdress? Or some other religious symbol from some other faith tradition? Maybe Jared & Ivanka will be able to explain the reason that a lot of Jews might find it a little … off-putting.
“That said, the spirit in which Pastor Jackson gifted it was pure, and he was probably reaching back to the roots of his Jesus, who lived and died as a Jew and so he probably feels some ancestral pull that way.
“That said, it’s not something conventionally associated with Christianity and the Twister-like moves one needs to perform in order to explain it make it a poor choice.
“That said, The Donald complicated matters greatly by putting it on, when his best move would have been to have simply said thank you and brought it home to put away for his grandson’s eventual bar mitzvah.”
There were photos of the businesses that had been burned. A gas station. A bank. A beauty supply store. Before it burned, looters were carrying out bags of weaves.
My house is a mess. We got written up by the city for “weeds” (we have a prairie in our front yard). I do not spend enough time with my mother or my grandson. But it could be worse. I didn’t lose my business, and I still have a job to go Monday.
It would be great if the world got better by burning things down, but it doesn’t. It just makes more heartbreak and fear which, last I heard, isn’t high on the list of building blocks for neighborhood stability.
I had to go over there and see if I could help clean up something. I’ve driven by that gas station a gatrillion times, and when I go downtown after work, I drive past the bank and the auto supply and beauty supply stores that were burned.
I wasn’t sure what I’d find when I got to the intersection a few hours after Walter had left. He’s black and big, and I am white and not. It didn’t matter. Being afraid isn’t enough of a reason not to do something that matters, and for some reason I couldn’t articulate, this mattered.
What I found were groups of people in the park across from the gas station. I instantly recognized my neighbors, Michael & Carolina. On the grass just off the sidewalk, three people were sitting alongside a pallet-sized stack of bottled water. There were bags of gloves and cartons of garbage bags.
“People are just going out and cleaning up,” Michael said. He and Carolina had been there long enough to fill a couple of bags, and were taking off.
I got a pair of gloves and a bag from a woman, who told me that the effort wasn’t really being organized by anyone. People were just showing up. (Click here for a photo, courtesy of Neighborhood News Service.)
“Kind of like last night, only not” I said. She knew exactly what I meant. I headed out with my garbage bag and a pair of yellow gloves, the kind you use to wash dishes.
I hadn’t taken more than a few steps when a young black man asked me something about where the organizers were. I told him what I knew and pointed to the water stack. Then I asked if he wanted to pair up.
Which is how I met Chad, an electrician who recently bought his first house, some 20 blocks away from where we were (roughly the same distance away as Sweetheart and me, but in a different direction). We headed east toward the beauty supply store. There wasn’t a whole lot to clean up, but we picked up some trash, and some glass. And then I saw the bullet casing outside a storefront. I photographed it, then picked it up and showed it to Chad.
“Whoa, a slug!” he said.
We chatted between his cell phone ringing intermittently as he told people where he was and what we were seeing, and as we got to the beauty supply store, his phone rang. His cousin had come to help out. He went to meet her. The street had been cleared of glass and the windows were boarded up, but the ground between the board-up and sidewalk was a mass of piled glass. I dug huge chunks out of the dirt, filling up my bag.
Chad returned and introduced me to Tiffany, who’s working on her master’s degree in public health and works in the field already. We walked and talked as we made our way along the street, surveying the damage and talking about upcoming community events we knew about and were involved in. When we got back to my car, I gave Tiffany my gloves, and asked if they’d be willing to be in a picture. We got another passerby to take it.
I took quiet comfort in the presence like-minded strangers who care as much as I do about the city I love and call home.
The mom and daughter from Whitefish Bay who were picking up garbage, the woman in traffic who called out from her car window to ask where she could drop off donations, and all the other people we saw along the way. Some were cleaning up. Some were just walking along. The front-seat passenger in carload of girls in an SUV announced (with a dash of salt in her tone) that they’d been there the night before. In the park, groups of people were gathered in prayer circles, including a shirtless guy with a huge snake hanging from his shoulder.
There was a lot of work to be done before last night, and a lot of good people already doing it.
There are a lot of reasons I miss having a dog. Election season is one. Tuki used to come with me when I voted.
She was also my candidate of choice on more than one occasion. I voted for Tuki when it was clear that, compared to the humans on a ballot, she would represent my interests more competently.
I wrote in Tuki for County Supervisor the whole time Lee Holloway was in office. The only time I ever saw him at my door was after a pension scandal (he and his fellow supervisors voted themselves and county employees fat pensions at the expense of the county’s well-being). When I asked him about it, he got owly. His opponent had no political experience and misspellings on her campaign literature. Tuki was the clear winner.
Even before she died in November, I knew there was a viable human candidate for County Supervisor this coming April. When my friend Mike found out I’d been laid off last July, he told me he was running and asked if I’d be willing to help with his campaign.
Lke me, Mike is a progressive communitarian. Of course I’d be willing to help!
Also, I quite adore him. I also adore his wife Trudy, their kids Jon and Carolyn and their special needs dog, Turbo. (Turbo is an epileptic – but courtly – German Shepherd.)
I asked about specific things he could affect as Supervisor.
“Three things,” he answered. “Transportation, parks and jobs.”
“Four,” I said. “Mental health services.”
“Absolutely!” he said.
So, since fall, Mike’s been walking the district, knocking on doors and introducing himself to voters. By the time it was time to collect the 200 signatures he needed to get on the ballot, he’d gotten a lot of exercise. He’d also gotten a lot of information from his prospective constituents.
It used to be that simple. Candidates declared their intentions by going directly to We the People to talk about who they were and what they’d do, and We the People listened, used our brains to make an informed decision, and voted.
But most people are busy. Or lazy. Some are so turned off by having seen nothing change for so long that they’ve abandoned the process entirely and don’t even bother with elections or voting any more.
All that is a big mistake. Because people – on the left and the right – have figured out how to turn that cynicism and laziness to their advantage, and they’re doing just that. They’ve given up on changing the system. They’re just trying to milk it in order to get more for themselves or keep what they have by maintaining the status quo. And they’re using your brain – with your cooperation – to get the job done.
You can see it working right now in the run-up to next year’s presidential election. Who will Hispanics want? What about women? How do we get the Black vote? What about the Jews? How do we reach White Men?
Local party/organization bosses are exactly the same. They go out and find people they think the Hispanics/Women/Blacks/Jews/White Men will vote for and recruit them to run. Then, they pour money and publicity into their campaigns and send out press releases touting their credentials “S/He went to a rally for {insert cause here} and is an activist in his/her {insert demographic-catnip-sounding group name here}!”
It’s all designed to appeal to your emotions.
Which is reductive and disrespectful. Almost as disrespectful as the fact that these decisions are, by and large, made by people who don’t even live in the districts they’re working to influence.
So, yeah. Qualifications aside, I’m a little cranky that Mike, who is in his 50s and white, is being told by the people who don’t live here that they have to support the black woman in her 20s because she’s a black woman in her 20s.
Anyway, all this to say that during this election season, don’t take anyone’s word for what the person who wants to represent you stands for. When those glossy things start showing up in your mailbox, or if candidates show up on your doorstep, find out how long they’ve lived in your district, what drove them to run, what they want to accomplish in office and how they plan to do it.
Then, stick it to the reductive disrespecters. Use your pre-frontal cortex instead of your limbic system when you decide who’s getting your vote.
The first time I heard the term “Cultural Intelligence” was in a church basement. The topic under discussion was an update on the redesign of Milwaukee County’s Behavioral Health division; the person updating us was describing an all-too-familiar and depressing reality:
The group doing the redesign work is comprised of mostly white, upper middle class, suburban people who know, socialize and interact with other mostly white, upper middle class suburbanites. These well-meaning people are creating policies and procedures that will affect mostly black, poor, urban people whose realities are very different. Worse, they have no chance to understand that they doesn’t understand, because people with the ability to effectively reality check those committee members (people who are, were, know, socialize and/or interact with mostly black, poor urban people) have virtually no voice at the table.
When I saw this painting at the Milwaukee Art Museum yesterday, I knew it was the image I wanted to go with this post. Tamir Rice was already in my mind, and he will never be as old as the young man in this painting. It’s called St. Dionysus; the artist’s name is Kehinde Wiley. Check out more of his work at http://www.kehindewiley.com
Or, to put it another way, there is one person of color on the board. There used to be two, but one took a job that meant having to leave the board.
One thing the two people of color were able to achieve was getting the County to pay for Cultural Intelligence training for Human Service workers. Last month, offered a seat at one of the trainings, I jumped at the chance. We had to take a pre-workshop assessment. Our scores would be given to us at the training.
I wondered what mine would look like. A few years ago, I took one of Harvard’s Project Implicit tests. I wasn’t surprised to pull a score showing an automatic preference toward white over black faces.
Cultural intelligence measures one’s ability to work and relate across all cultures. When we got our scores, my “CQ” was higher than I had expected. So, just for the heck of it, I went home and retook the Project Implicit test. My automatic preference had disappeared. That I’d had it wasn’t a surprise. That it’s gone isn’t surprising, either.
As a white lady of a certain age, my first experience with people of color occurred before I understood anything about what color was. Lily Mae Madden cleaned our house once a week and sometimes took care of my sister and me when I was way too little to know anything other than that Lily Mae wasn’t scary like my mom and I loved her. She was big and soft and kind. Her husband, Sam was tall, slender and as kind as his wife. My sister and I adored them.
By the time I was in kindergarten, they had passed out of our lives. There were no black children in my class. Or my school (which went to sixth grade). Or my neighborhood. There were no black characters on my TV screen (“I Spy” came on after my bedtime), until “Julia” came out in 1969.
In junior high and high school, things changed some. My urban public high school had no ruling class. Race differences were a reality but not an issue. White and black kids hung out together during the day, and maybe some socialized outside of school. All the girls in my crowd were white, though none of us thought about it in those terms.
In college, I was a fish out of water. It was my first real brush with class differences, although I was too green to realize it. At my small, private liberal arts school, most of the students had come from families with way more money than mine and many had gone to private boarding schools. The norm was to spend junior year somewhere else. My “somewhere else” was Israel.
The program was through the Reform movement, a year on the same kibbutz outside of Jerusalem. Professors came to us, and our single summer class was three hours of Hebrew instruction, six days a week. I wanted to learn Arabic, too. Attempts to connect with anyone who could help me find a class or teacher were quickly quashed. (“What do you want to do that for? You don’t want to do that.”) I was a good sheep, out of my element and with enough strange things to handle. I didn’t push things with the authorities.
I still tried, though, and achieved a small victory.
My aunt, in Minnesota, had a friend there whose cousins lived in Acco, a lovely city in Northern Israel. The Shaabi family’s Roman-era house was a cavernous stone structure just across from the sea wall along the Mediterranean. I didn’t learn much Arabic. But I was able to experience an aspect of Israeli culture I wouldn’t have otherwise. The experience taught me a lot about race relations at home. In Israel, it was the secular Jews, the religious Jews and the Arabs living separate lives in shared space. Here, black and white people mostly live separate lives in shared space.
I was 30 when my first marriage ended and my quest to find a family-supporting job led me to a racially mixed nonprofit agency where people socialized outside of work. The result was my first experience walking or driving down a street and wondering, instead of being a little uncomfortable and scared, whether the non-white person coming toward me was someone I knew.
These days, everybody I pass on the street looks like someone I might know and it feels weird to be in a roomful of people where everyone is the same color as I am.
I don’t know how to make that the reality for more of us. I wish I did.
Because it’s the only real way we can stop living in a country where police officers who look like me won’t be able to pick off a 12-year-old black kid with a toy gun and get a free pass from a grand jury. Tamir Rice’s family deserves better. The same goes for Trayvon Martin’s, Deontre Hamilton’s, Sandra Bland’s, Laquan McDonald’s and Walter Scott’s.
George Lakoff has retired as Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is now Director of the Center for the Neural Mind & Society (cnms.berkeley.edu).
