The Post Race Space

Last summer I told myself that I would write a book about my grandfather's life - sort of a comprehensive biography.  So, everyday I would go out to work on my book but I would blog instead.  

After reading this blog, people started to say that I should scratch the idea of the Booker Wright bio (thank goodness) and write about my journey to find him.  Think: Little black girl growing up post civil rights feeling different first because everyone around her was white and second because her parents were somehow broken because they've been saddled with the horrors and the humiliation of growing up black in the South - my journey to find my grandfather forced me to face and to reconcile my feelings about race and family.

Now, the vision for the book is set, and writing it is like a dream.  It's not easy, it is definitely a discipline, but I feel like I am my truest self when I'm writing it.  I'm the Yvette that I was always meant to be.

Where am I going with this?  The book and the blog have traded spaces in my creative subconscious.  I know now how to develop chapters and how to plot narrative, but I can't seem to figure out how to get going with this blog again.

A million years ago (okay six) I had an idea to create a blog space where people could come to get an education about race in America.  In 2007 I was just beginning to realize how little I knew about and how little I understood the real ramifications of black American history.  I'd spent years trying to understand why so many black males were in jail, why literacy rates among blacks were so much lower than their white peers, and what the heck was going on with the black American family.  In 2007 I decided to test Shakespeare's theory that what's past is prologue.  I decided to look into my own family's past to see if some what of what was ailing us could be traced back to treatment and circumstances common to all blacks before the tide started to turn.  

What did I find?  First I found Frederick Douglass' honest and simply account of slavery.  Of the many true stories he recounts of slaves what shocked me the most was the one about a woman whose owner hired a slave from another plantation to rape her everyday.  He wanted more slaves, but didn't want to spend the money.  He figured her offspring could work his land.

Raped every day.  Treated like cattle.  How did she care for that child that was born to her of violence?  For how many generations would that seed of disgust and shame travel down the family line?  I can't draw hard lines from mistreatment of slaves, and the humiliation that all black men faced in the last century, but I'm certain that some great amount of that pain stayed with them when they entered their homes each evening and attempted to parent their children.

Anyway, a few months after reading Douglass' work I was having some heated conversations with a few of my white friends – actually we’re not friends anymore, that’s how heated these talks became.  My friends seemed to believe that we were post race.  They believed that the only thing keeping the race debate alive was people like me.  I thought that maybe if they could understand the horror, humiliation, and fear that permeated black American life, at least in the South, just a few short decades ago then maybe they'd have less heat and less anger about politics today.  I wasn't hoping to change their views, just to lessen their volatility.  

During this time I also looked back into my own family's history I found a civil rights hero lurking in the deep, wet, green story of my own family.  

These stories are relevant.  Even if we hate it, even if we want to run from it, the past informs our today.  

All this to say, that I am tired of always using this blog to write about my feelings.  The film is premiering at Tribeca which is huge and I am working on a book, even more huge…but I still have a dream of something bigger than the book and bigger than the movie.  I have a dream (no, I’m not trying to make a funny MLK reference) I really do have a dream about a space on the Internet where people can come and talk about race and class, but where they can also get brief snippets of history that may inform and challenge the way they think.

I'm not trying to change the world on my own, but I do hope that by understanding the past we can have compassion and kindness about the issues of the present.

To that end, I will continue using this space to blog about my research, but I’d also like to start talking about current events.  Please bear with me.  I’ve known for a few months that I need to do this, but I keep getting tripped up.  I can’t seem to get going with the new vision for this blog.  Partly, because I don’t want to look like an idiot. 

I spent about 15 hours on a page and a half of my book a few weeks ago.  I never have and may never have that kind of time to devote to this blog.  So, sometimes I don’t write here at all because I don’t have the time to draw out the best of myself as a writer in this space.

But blogs are about content building.  They’re about writing, writing, and writing some more.  So, I am going to keep writing about the film, my research, and my grandfather.  But I will also start writing more posts that reflect current events.  If they completely stink or if I end up saying the wrong thing, like the blogger who said everyone hated her because she was beautiful, just remember that underneath it all, I’m just a little black girl with a dream.  

"But I Have Black Friends"

Greenwood was ground zero for the civil rights movement.  In school many of us were taught that sweet little Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus was what sparked the civil rights movement.  Most people are taught nothing about the brutal torture and murder of a 14 year-old black boy who MAY or may not have whistled at a white woman.  He was killed a few miles outside of Greenwood, four months before the Rosa Parks incident. 

Greenwood had demonstrations.  Greenwood had visitors like Martin Luther King, Jr.  Greenwood had blacks who were beaten; Greenwood had sit-ins, dog attacks on marchers, and on and on.  All the while the majority of the white middle class in Greenwood went on with their lives as if nothing unusual were taking place around them.  But they had a black friend named Booker Wright.

My grandfather worked at Lusco’s Restaurant for 25 years.  I know true, genuine affection must’ve passed between him and his white customers.  But at what cost?  Did they feel as though the issues of the day did not relate to them because they had a black friend?

Please Don't Kill My Sons

There is a fear that permeates black culture that usually goes unexposed.  Black mothers and fathers worry about the of safety their black sons, simply because they are black. 

When I was in my twenties I was at the mall with my little brother.  He was about 14 at the time, but he was already taller than me.  I don’t think he’d ever lifted a weight, but he was still long, thin, and muscular.  Like his classmates he wore baggy pants and t-shirts everywhere he went.  Unlike his classmates he had a severe learning disability that left him with a pronounced stutter and the mind of someone much younger.  He had to be watched closely.  In spite of this, my brother is the essence of kindness in its purest form. 

Once when we were kids I tried to get him to sneak into a movie with me after the one we’d paid for was over.  He refused.  I started going anyway.  He cried, and begged me not to break the rules.

That day at the mall, he and I were eating.  I finished before he did and I decided I wanted to stop at a store while he finished his food.  I told him to wait for me.  I told him I’d be right back.  I went to a store, not far at all from where I’d left him.  When I returned he was gone.

I called to him.  Walked into store after store and could not find him.  I remember becoming convinced that he’d been taken by a security guard of one of the high end department stores and that he was being questioned.  Because of his disability, they might even have thought that he was mocking them.  I was panicked.  I searched and searched.  Thirty minutes passed.  I asked people if they’d seen him.  Finally I found him.  I burst into tears and buried my head in his chest.

“Uh-uh, it’s, it’s, it’s okay, Yvette,” he said as he awkwardly patted my back.  I didn’t tell him why I was so upset.  But I didn’t take my eyes off him again.

When I was pregnant I prayed for sons.  I love my boys and the way that they dig in the dirt, play with mealworms, and never tire of laughing at the word “toilet.” 

My oldest son has some anxiety and when he feels as though he may cry he makes angry eyes to fight the tears.  He’s only seven, but he’s as tall as his friends who are ten.  Late last year we went to the dentist for a cleaning.  I told the hygienist about his anxiety and I never left his side.  I rubbed his arm as a stranger put a loud tool in his mouth that sprayed water everywhere.  Every now and then he fought back tears by making angry eyes.  After a few minutes the hygienist said, “If you don’t work with me, buddy, I won’t work with you.”  To me he looked all the more afraid, to her he looked defiant. 

How old will he be when I have to have the talk with him?  He’s so tall.  Do I have to tell him when he’s eight that people will mistake his anxiety for a precursor to violence and that they may shoot him dead on the street?  

Speechless

My oldest son said something to me tonight.  He said, “If I was regular, I would be white.”

I don’t know how I got here.  Actually, I do know I just don’t feel like admitting it to myself.  There are so few blacks in Arizona that people like me have to make a choice.  Either we live in predominantly black neighborhoods with terrible schools and random shootings or we live in predominantly white neighborhoods with great schools and little crime.  I obviously chose the latter.  Was it the best choice?  Tonight it feels like it was not the best choice.  I hate Arizona. 

I thought I could decide what I would pass on to my children.  I thought I was smart enough to know how to save them from this.  The minute those words left his sweet little mouth, all the running and all the effort of shoring up a different childhood from the one that I had suddenly caught up to me and I felt exhausted.  Is his life something I can construct out of thin air with prayer, advice from the best books, quality friends, and a literature-rich home? 

The horrific event that most civil rights experts credit with sparking the movement happened just a few doors down from my where my father lived when he was five years old.  My parents grew up at ground zero for the movement.  They took me out of Greenwood partly so that I could have a life that wasn’t defined by race.  In the end, pain over being a different color than my peers and neighbors was the anthem of my childhood. 

Now, here I am.  My beautiful, fresh faced, caramel colored son – the most beautiful boy I have ever seen – is coveting the one thing he can never have. 

Booker Wright said that he didn’t want his children to have to go through what he went through, and then immediately after that he took on the persona of a white person and said, “Hey, tell that n---- to hurry up with that coffee!”  Clearly, part of what motivated him was the idea that his children would find a world or make a place for themselves in the world where their race wouldn’t matter. 

For generations my family members have tried to throw this thing off and then run in the other direction, but it always seems to find us or at least it finds our children, stealthily and efficiently like a boomerang.