2020.06.28 My "Racism"—A Brief Anecdotal History, Part Three. Almighty Insanity

I learned from God as a young child how not to be racist or exclusionary, how to listen to every voice, to love every body. As a teen, I learned about God's own impossibly partial impartiality.


Q  So what would a young teenage girl do when she felt out of place and desperate to fit in?
A  Nothing, because her mother would do something first—in the name of love well meant. 

Scene VII. Dr. McGregor

My mother never could just let me be the introvert to her extrovert. I should never have complained to her about booblessness, let alone the absence of what I was sure would make me normal and get me a boyfriend—monthly blood. Of course this blood could also make me fertile, not a concept I internalized, although I’d heard: “For God’s sake, don’t get pregnant like slutty girls.”  A “slutty girl” was a girl who, for no reason and without explanation, would suddenly disappear from school for a long time.

My mother, ironically, fretted about my gynecological immaturity. She hauled me off to a new doctor for a consult. Before I knew enough to protest, the kindly old doctor, coaxed me, with saccharine affect, onto an examination table, spread my legs and lifted my feet into stirrups—not like the stirrups on a saddle, but I was in for a ride. 

“Let’s just take a little peek, shall we?” the doctor said. Who was we?  A peek at what? I quickly realized that he was not going to check my chest for emergent boobs, and that I couldn’t possibly “take a peek” at anything from this position. I froze.

When had I been in this deep freeze before? There wasn’t time to ponder, because the old doc was speaking, not to me but to my mother. “She may have difficulty conceiving a child. Small cervix. . .”   I cannot possibly describe the cement mixer of emotions that churned within me at that moment, so I won’t.

We drove home—me silent and my mother chattering on about how relieved she was to know there was nothing really wrong with me. I could now safely explore a career in slutdom—a way to fit in or to be fit into. Did slutty types get to go to beach clubs? Even I didn’t know what a cauldron of contempt I was developing—for myself, for the predatory old doctor whom I called Dr. McAsshole, and for my mother who knew no better. 

For God’s sake I shouldn’t be a slut? For God’s sake I shouldn’t get pregnant?


Scene VIII. The Bible

What did God have to do with all this? I’d met God when I was only three under a table where I'd fled to escape the omnipotent Cocktail Hour. My mother told me I was a gift from God. I wanted to meet God. Under the table I chattered vigorously to God about all manner of things, but mostly about parental neglect. It was a glorious feeling—to be utterly accepted.

I never forgot what happened under that table. God, silent and invisible, simply listened—did not tell me what to do, or what not to do. In the course of our non-conversation, I munched on Ritz crackers but left one on the table’s cross beam for God when I left for bedtime. God listened and I knew that I mattered. I was learning about prayer, its futility and its wonders.

At fourteen, however, I needed God to talk. I loved school and books. God’s book was The Holy Bible. In church they’d even called this the Word of God. What could be better? I compulsively read the whole huge book, skipping most of Leviticus. What I learned was not exactly what I sought. I learned that in God’s world everyone fit in, everyone and everything belonged. Seriously, it was astounding.

Again and again, God’s people messed up in big ways. They broke their own rules and God’s too. People were much worse than slutty. They were making God crazy with rage. They begged, wept, cajoled, also lied. Sometimes God reached out with longing. This God was seriously the dumbest parent I’d ever heard of. Every single time God and the people broke up they got back together—every single time. Thrilling.

Jesus, star of the New Testament, who everyone thought was God but I doubted it, was as furious with such mess ups as God was. He taught right behavior, even did demos. Still, he didn’t force it, but simply invited—over and over and over, like God. Nevertheless, his “Let’s go to Jerusalem” plan was so dumb I cringed.

I didn’t understand this book much, except the stories. They were recognizable. Women like Mary Magdalene, possibly a slutty type, was Jesus’s best friend. Old Sarah laughed at God’s assurance she’d get pregnant. How profoundly, divinely anti-biological. I’d have laughed too. And young Mary, a virgin like me, got pregnant with God, not without her consent. God even gave her a rationale: this angel did it. That must be why they could still call her Virgin. What a deal!

This Bible was crazy, yet hopeful to me. This adoringly partial God was so impartial that everyone fit in. I  didn't name it this way back then, but my experience was letting me know how not to be racist, how to love and listen equally. 

I was learning about Love—for God’s sake.


Scene IX.  Betty Singer

Betty Singer had this voice, unlike any I’d ever heard— high and angelic. Some of us junior high school girls would circle around Betty at recess and beg her—beg her—to sing her song, Ave Maria. We swooned. I didn’t understand a word. It was in Latin, but it sure wasn’t on Miss Povey the Latin teacher’s reading list. Betty told us this song was Catholic. It was in the Bible, she thought. I’d missed it if it was. Still, this Mary song had something to do with the God I knew under the table, because when Betty sang my mind stopped all its worrying. I listened.

The seeds were planted for my later investigatory explorations of those Catholics, but for now I had to get on with my own biology—and make sure God didn’t get me pregnant.

2020.06.21 My "Racism"—A Brief Anecdotal History, Part Two. Falling Apart.

Slowly, yet deliberately,
I touch the painful place.
I don’t know why;
I just need to.

Is there a strange kind of comfort in acknowledging the
pain?
The wound?

Strangely, the rollercoaster slows.
I hear the words,
“Pay attention. This is your life. This is Sacred.”

Mary Ann Bigelow, Spiritual Director, first published in Presence International Journal for Spiritual Direction


When I was twelve I perched on the lip edge of hormonal torrents, geographic moves, the feeling memory of a childhood wound, and the intense awareness of cruelty to others who are in some way different and tormented for it, and by it. I opened my whole self wide to the wound of whiteness, femaleness, and shame. I call this cascade my “racism” wound. I call this holy.

Scene V. Carol Lee

Carol Lee was my best friend in Westhampton, L.I. where, before the Connecticut move, we summered to get away from big-city heat. We had been spending summers at a farm in upstate New York, where I had my own pony, but my parents, I’m assuming, were climbing, so we switched to THE  Hamptons—another move for which I would hate them. I was afraid more than anything of being a snob. I’d heard my mother and her women friends talk with disdain about “snobs”on Park Avenue. Thank God we lived on Lexington Avenue and were not therefore snobs. I happily claimed that we were not snobs, because we were in WESThampton not EASThampton.  A similar claim would make us not elitist and therefore not snobs.

But of course I didn’t figure all this out when I was twelve. I just overheard stuff and picked up the nuances of class. I wanted to be Carol Lee’s best friend as much as she wanted it. We became fast friends, and friends make everything better.  So do bikes.

I didn’t think of my parents as rich, mostly because my father always, always worried about money. He worked in advertising on Madison Avenue, yes. He advertised soup while my mother advertised me and bought me clothes galore. Sometimes I overheard their arguments about my mother’s extravagance and felt guilty about my clothes—but not guilty enough to dissuade my mother. Still, I figured my parents must have been pretty rich, because in Westhampton they joined a private beach club. I fell in love with the ocean and its waves. I  could swim all the way out to the floating raft which had a diving board. Once I drifted out too far and had to be rescued. I did not think I had to be rescued but the lifeguard did. It was uber-embarrassing to be rescued, yet it was a small “whew” too.

I have an August birthday. My parents were going to give me a party. Did I want it at the beach club or at home?  I chose the beach club, and excitedly told Carol Lee all about it.

Life turned cruel.

There was a hitch. The beach club was only for white people. Carol Lee was black. I did not understand. The ocean didn’t care. I told my parents they should ask for an exception. They didn’t. Nor did they tell me what to do. I was just so furious. I had to choose between Carol Lee and the damn beach club. For the first time, or the most conscious time, my life choices became my fault and my responsibility. That’s the moment I became a deal-maker: I chose the beach club and demanded another party for me and Carol Lee. I got my two parties—one more populated than the other, and my best friend was hurt. So was I. We stayed friends, but it was never the same. I don’t remember how I told her. I do remember that I did not tell her about the beach club’s rules.

I was swathed in smoldering inner pain I did not understand.  Carol Lee wasn’t a “servant”  Nor could I blame Russia as I had with Olga or the NYC Puerto Rican influx. This was me. This was my conscience. I was learning morality—and diluting it with compromise.

There had to be a better way to do things I loved and have the friends I wanted. 


Scene VI.  Snowy White Land—Colorlessness

They say white is not a color or is a non-color. That makes me feel colorless, bland, like white rice—little taste or substance. I always ordered brown rice in a restaurant, but that was mostly to be different from my too-adoring mother who favored Minute Rice—all white.

My parents joined what would come to be called “white flight”—white people moving out of the city to the suburbs, Darien, Connecticut to be exact. Darien must have had the same rules as the beach club. There weren’t many colored girls in my New York private school. Of course not. It cost money. I knew that, because my father tried and failed to persuade my mother to send me and my younger sister to a public school. That suggestion, apparently, was horrifyingly “black” and not for us. The public school in Darien wasn’t very colored at all, so I puzzled about color lines as I grieved.

I grieved the city —its colorfulness. I didn’t know the word “diversity” then, but I knew I felt the absence of color. 

I blended into this white-on-white culture. I guessed that whiteness alone was supposed to make me feel safe and secure. It didn’t. What did make me feel safe was finding a best friend whose skin was whiter than mine, and who had white blonde hair to match. Most importantly, she actually understood the “facts of life.” We bonded immediately. 

Academics also helped, because I was smart. Meritocracy was the way of it then. Who could imagine life without grades?  I loved A’s. They were my way to self-esteem. I was learning to run things with my mind—majoring in thinking. As to emotions, they were hidden but painful because now I did not fit in physically. I needed boobs, maybe a waistline—a little stature. I needed to menstruate—right away if possible.

What is the most rational thing that a young girl of thirteen—failed immigrant to suburbia, entering junior high school, lost in a sea of boys and boobs—could do?   (Luckily, I have no photos of myself at this time.)

To be continued.

2020.06.14 My "Racism"—A Brief Anecdotal History, Part One. Hard Learnings.

I do not feel qualified to write about racism as an abstract idea outside of my own experience. So I write about racism—mine. My initial thoughts in triplicate:
    I’m not racist.
    I don’t think I’m racist.
    Maybe I’m racist.

I have put quotes around “racism” in my title, because it took more than race to shape my “racism.”

From the dictionary first: "Although ideas of race are centuries old, it was not until the 19th century that attempts to systematize racial divisions were made. Ideas of supposed racial superiority and social Darwinism reached their culmination in Nazi ideology of the 1930s and gave pseudoscientific justification to policies and attitudes of discrimination, exploitation, slavery, and extermination. Theories of race asserting a link between racial type and intelligence are now discredited. Scientifically it is accepted as obvious that there are subdivisions of the human species, but it is also clear that genetic variation between individuals of the same race can be as great as that between members of different races." -OED

It is always easier to be reflexive, to hop onto the latest popular bandwagon of moral awareness.  It is much harder to be reflective, to integrate positive and negative experience into a whole system of thoughts and feelings. I call the reflective way, spiritual intelligence—or wisdom. It always starts with experience. My reflections are still very much alive emotionally.

Scene I. Dinah and Lou    

Growing up in the 1940s, I lived in a New York City apartment on the upper east side where Dinah was our laundress, and her teenage daughter Lou babysat for me. I spent time with Dinah in the basement where the laundry was. Lou and I raced around playing hide and seek while Dinah scrubbed the clothes and ironed them all—our clothes not hers. I loved Dinah and Lou and assumed easily that they were family. I worried that they lived in the basement, which was concrete and ugly. I was reassured that they had their own home on 125th Street—31 whole blocks away. When Lou babysat she took the subway home. Once my mother gave her fare. I never asked about nor noticed the color of Dinah’s and Lou’s skin. However, I never understood why I couldn’t go play at their house. I was learning to be white—sort of.

Scene II. Olga

Olga, the new student in my private girls school in New York City, was Russian. There was something a little “wrong” about being Russian, and Olga’s accent. These identifiers made her prey. Some of us fourth grade girls used to chase her down a few city blocks and and taunt her. She was a fast runner. I was a bully. I was leaning about shame and shaming.

Scene III. Fred

My dad, the fourth of six children, grew up in Morristown N.J., an affluent suburb or Manhattan.   He and one older brother were the only two who moved “away from home”—all the way into the big city. I didn’t know the word heresy yet, but this was family heresy. Every Sunday there was, what I’d soon learn to call a command performance—attending THE family Sunday dinner. We gathered around the big table. After “dinner” Ma, a would-be opera singer and the matriarch, would gather “her boys” round the piano for singing. That’s when I got bored and snuck into the kitchen to talk with Fred. Fred was a funny, wonderful, and handsome black man who, when Ma stomped her foot onto a hidden button under the table, would appear like magic. “More potatoes, Fred,” she’d say, and Fred returned to the kitchen and brought forth potatoes. Fred was like a waiter in a restaurant—a live-in waiter. He lived in “the servant quarters” somewhere in the large house. I wanted to visit Fred, but the “servant quarters” were off limits. Again, I did not understand why I couldn't pop in on Fred, but I was getting the idea that Fred, like Dinah and Lou, was somehow separate. I didn’t associate that with skin color, probably because the other “servant”, Nettie, was white. I was learning about class.


Scene IV.  Puerto Rican Girls

At eleven, I was old enough to walk with a friend to the RKO movie theater at 86th Street on Lexington Avenue just eight blocks from where I lived. One afternoon my friend and I were walking home from the movies and were accosted by a group of Puerto Rican girls. They yelled, screamed, grabbed our scarves, and pulled our hair. I was terrified. We broke free. I ran faster than I thought I could. My parents feared Puerto Ricans’ taking over our neighborhood. I feared them too. Soon we would move to Connecticut. I used to think that if I hadn’t told we might have stayed in the city I so loved. I was learning about ethnicity.

I never forgot that mighty and grand theater and how mighty and grand I felt being on my own.



All these learnings were rules, unspoken yet obvious to everyone—except me, a budding non-conformist. It wasn’t long before I would be deeply stung—unexpectedly thrown off kilter when at twelve I faced a draconian choice I was too young to manage. To be continued next week.

2020.06.07 Trinity Sunday

Today, for Christians, is Trinity Sunday. To keep it simple, Trinity means Diversity within Unity, neither compromising the other— all of it divine.

The Trinity is a vision to emulate, especially at this time in the United States of America—a time when we are struggling to be united and free of our original and ongoing sin of rank-ordering our common humanity according to skin color, sexuality, social class, ability, political leanings, mental health, or religious preferences. We are murdering each other, thanks to this sin-sick practice.

I do not need to rehearse the events in history or just last week; nor do I need once again to remind us all about the purposeful misinterpretation of the Creator’s charge to humanity to care for all creation. Dominion does not mean domination, unless rank-ordering is the ethic, a practice that destroys Oneness, Diversity and Goodness.

As a therapist and spiritual director and priest I know that deep wounds interrupt the flow of Life itself. There are many ideas out there about what America’s wounds are. Racial injustice tops the list right now. I agree, yet I think the deeper wound is that we Americans are afraid.
    -afraid of ourselves
    -afraid of each other
    -afraid not to be great
    -afraid to be great
    -afraid to weep rather than shout,
    -afraid even to touch our wound.

Slowly, yet deliberately,
I touch the painful place.
I don’t know why;
I just need to.

Is there a strange kind of comfort in acknowledging the
pain?
The wound?

Strangely, the rollercoaster slows.
I hear the words,
“Pay attention. This is your life. This is Sacred.”

                                     
Mary Ann Bigelow, Spiritual Director, above words first published in 
Presence, International Journal of Spiritual Direction, March, 2020

To heal our wound we—together— must touch it, hallow it, give it belonging, a voice, bless it, talk about it in conversation, pray it, make it holy.  This is spiritual intelligence. This is Trinity.

P.S. Happy 86th Wedding Anniversary, Mom and Dad.