2020.07.19 My "Racism"—Brief Ancdotal History, Part Six. Privilege?

Scene XV. Racism—A Discernment

I know it’s unfair to write about my racism without acknowledging that it came about largely because of the absence of Blacks, coupled with the piercing, indelible, unshakeable memory of my childhood friendship with one black girl, Carol Lee. It was that friendship, and the shame I felt when I chose to have my beach club party without her because the beach club barred blacks, that let me know there even was such a thing as racism—a phenomenon I did not know how to name, but whose impact stayed with me. I chose from privilege rather than from heart.

I do not say: “My best friend is black”—as if that assertion proved anything. One of my best friends really was black. Our connection happened over a few summers, and I haven’t seen Carol Lee  in over 70 years. I tried to work Google-magic to find her and did find one image I thought might be my Carol Lee—in an obituary, alas. Nevertheless, my Carol Lee memory became a benchmark strong enough to serve as a plumb line against which I measured, and measure, my felt racism.

My “Racism” has quotation marks around racism, because I’m writing about my discernment process over some 80 years. My scenarios are wisps of personal memory that structure the grid of my learnings—bits and pieces that unfold in answer to my question: I’m not racist—or am I?  I do not yet know the answer.

I intersperse some contemporary wisdom on the subject, everything in the context of my own direct experience.  Racism is word that in 2020 is headlined all over the world and laid at our national doorstep as a call, I’d say from God, to examine and change our personal and national addiction to its practice. It’s time.  

In 2019, I heard African-American, Isabelle Wilkerson, the author of The Warmth of Other Suns, speak about the great migration of southern blacks to urban areas of the North and West, I was spellbound by the memoir-like flavor of her historical study. A whole people were forced to move en masse, because, although emancipated, they were denied adequate access to resources necessary for thriving in America.

The New York Times Magazine (7/19/2020) published Wilkerson’s article, “America’s Enduring Caste System” in which she imaged caste as the usher’s flashlight in a darkened theater silently guiding us to our assigned seats—assigned, but who bought the tickets?  This is caste, not racism, according to Wilderson who writes: “The instinctive desire to reject the very idea of current discrimination on the basis of a chemical compound in the skin is an unconscious admission of the absurdity of race as a concept. With no universally agreed upon definition, we might see racism as a continuum rather than an absolute.”  (Italics mine.)

Anyone who has ever been in high school knows what caste feels like. Everyone is ranked. Everyone is hurt. No one forgets. It is the field in which the seeds of racism, and all other -isms, take root and grow.

Scene XVI. Dominus Flevit 

One makes forced choices when trapped in a radically caste-enclosed and unjust system. I thought of Jesus, how he sweated and wept and groaned before he decided to head to Jerusalem to challenge the system of injustice that trapped his people. He shed tears over Jerusalem when he got there, telling his followers that the things that made for peace and justice and love were “hidden from their eyes.” Many thing were hid from my eyes. I too know so little, so very little about so many things. I was no Jesus. I had no larger vision. All I had was my ignorance, twinges of conscience, and a few tears of my own.

There is a church in Jerusalem marking the site where Jesus wept about all this systemic ignorance and the impending destruction of the Temple. There wasn’t much he could do—not much at all. The church is shaped like a teardrop. When I saw it in 2012, I wept for all I did not know, had not known, still don’t know. The church is called Dominus Flevit (The Lord Wept). It means a lot to me.

 

Scene XVII. A Wound of Privilege

I went to Smith College, partly because I was NOT going to go to Vassar like my maternal grandmother who’d graduated in the “class of aughty-aught".  Also, because I loved Smith’s campus and living in houses—no dorms and no sororities with all that sisterly pain. Mostly, however, because my best friend, Annie, was going there too.

I knew it was a privilege to go to Smith, not because I knew I was privileged, but because my father groaned out loud about the “astronomical”tuition which in 1956 was absurdly low—below $10,000 in today's dollars.

Annie had to leave Smith after one year. Her scholarship money dwindled, and her father couldn’t afford to pay the tuition. Our hearts were broken. Impulsively, I told her my father would pay her room and board, but she said her father would be too proud to accept. We both were right.

Annie went on to graduate from the University of Connecticut with honors. We stayed friends of course, but there was an almost indiscernible crack inside me, like a slight fracture in a bone. What was it? Guilt? It was the fissure of privilege. I could spell that word correctly, but now I was learning to feel its power—the power to rent asunder, to hurt when it was supposed to help.

Despite my father’s money worries, we had wealth—not vast amounts of money but wealth, that invisible security blanket enjoyed by some and not others. It had to do with family security; it had to do with neighborhood, class and family assets; it had to do with privilege and the cruel habit of ranking that limited opportunity. It had to do with the same thing that forced those southern blacks to flee in order to survive. It had to do with something a friend recently said in the midst of her own severe lack of resources: “I’m super scared, but I know I’ll be okay because I have family with money to help—if I get less proud.”  

I had wealth and Annie didn’t. The wealth gap had nothing to do with what I’d been brought up to value: work hard and you’ll get ahead. Oh no you won’t! Annie’s father had worked and struggled all his life. He was bright, had a PhD, and was principal of a school. My father worked on Madison Avenue, a business executive. I was learning about classism, a first cousin to racism, fertilizer of privilege, pollinator of all -isms.

Annie and I were white, yet our friendship was wounded by my privilege. We cried so hard—so very hard—when Annie left Smith and I stayed. My privilege bought me rank and a great education, but it sure did not buy me peace of mind, and it sure didn’t make me feel good. 

At Smith I met my first Jew. I didn’t know what a Jew was. Now that is an hilarious statement. Really! It sounds absurdly anti-semitic now, but I didn’t know what that was. I’d heard of the Holocaust, but not really, if you know what I mean. As with Blacks, there were no Jews in my suburban town.

My sheltered ignorance was appalling, not my fault, and painful anyway. White as I was, I didn’t connect it with my privilege—yet.

I chose academics to make my mark. It did pay off. I studied like a fiend, got good grades, earned graduate degrees, and felt smarter than I really was. Okay, that’s not fair to me, but in college I didn’t yet know how to be fair to myself.

2020.07.12 My "Racism"—A Brief Anecdotal HIstory. Part Five. Race-Blind/Caste-Savvy

By the mid-1950s, my “racism” went underground—buried alive. You know how it is when you’re looking into a blizzard—wild snow so heavy you can’t see a thing except all-white horizons everywhere you look. I was learning to live-race-blind.

I’d made it through Junior High and was headed for High School. At least I had a couple of small but discernible boobs, one cashmere sweater, and a pencil skirt in which actual walking was prohibitive. So I minced along, pretending to be sexy—proud to have had a one-time smattering of blood. A real—my type—boyfriend was the next step to fitting in.

Scene XII. First Kiss

Bob was my very first crush. That’s what they called it when you felt mentally and emotionally crushed by some combination of anxiety and hormonal desire—enough to make you inarticulate and turn dumb. Bob was pathologically shy, hence I targeted him for flirting practice. We went for a twilight walk in the local bird sanctuary. Trees hung over the paths we walked, the air smelled like peaches, and every bird was singing an aria. I felt faint with sheer joy as Bob pulled me closer—and closer. His breath smelled. 

Still, my August birthday loomed, and for my sweet sixteen birthday party I needed a date. This party would have boys. Boys! Bob, the only boy I’d ever kissed, would say yes. Darien had a private beach club. I’d lived this scenario before. Damn! But now I had other problems. 

First, there was the humiliating problem of a swimsuit, preferably one that would magically make me look slim and sleek, like Esther Williams. I’d solved the my-date problem. The more profound and invisible problem was the guest list. My best friend helped me with that. I did not, thank God, have to make racial choices. There were no Carol Lees in “whitesville.”  I concealed the queasy swell I felt inside, but I remembered anyway. I remembered till it ached. I dove off the float, my arms parting the cool dark waters like Moses had, or maybe God—down and down  as deep as I could without drowning. It helped.

Scene XIII. The Right White Boy Named Bill

Bill Brakeman was the most handsome boy I’d ever seen. Even better, he was a failed immigrant, transplanted from Chicago as I had been from New York. We first met at one of those teenage parties hosted by the parents of a classmate who was more handicapped than me. I only imagined I was fat, the worst thing to be, but this girl was actually fat. 

I lurked at the food table, grazing on celery while longing for a huge piece of the chocolate layer cake, when I spotted Bill. He stood in the corner alone with beckoning eyes—not flirting just longing. My heart leaped into his arms. (No wonder “Blue Moon” eventually became our song.) Bill was going steady with someone else, but in the game of high school belonging, steadiness wasn’t a strong player, even though everyone craved it.

Our first official date was the next day. We went to a football game. I didn't understand a thing about football, but that didn't matter, because I was with this boy named Bill who, I was sure, knew what he was doing. Two teams ran out onto the field; cheerleaders jumped and howled; the announcer blasted: Tarrytown versus North Tarrytown. Not even our school! We laughed and laughed and watched the damn game anyway. We became a couple.

High School was full of racial-like categories—jocks, prom queen/cheerleaders, spicks, hoods, wops, nerds, whores, aka sluts, and madonnas like the one in Betty Singer’s song. Groupings were organized according to physical appearance and ranged from most popular to untouchables— like Phineas, or the girl who still wore an undershirt. There were religious classifications too—Catholics and everybody else. There were no Jews thanks to an  unspoken agreement among realtors not to show properties in the shore towns of lower Fairfield County to Jews.

I was in the middle group—a “madonna” secretly aspiring to slutdom. We girls struggled to climb up the social ladder. A lot depended on who we dated, or if we had a car, or if we had a sport or a special gift. Bill, for example, was an electronics whiz and could fix anyone’s radio. I had won the 9th grade foul shooting contest.

In truth, there wasn’t much social mobility at all in high school. It was a caste system. You just knew it—without going to India. 

Jimmy Fraccola was Italian and olive-skinned—the wop category. He was extremely handsome and had a crush on me. Once at the public beach—not a club—he pulled me under the water and kissed me. It was slimy; I was sure I would drown; I ran up the beach and sheltered with my girlfriends. “You won’t believe what just happened?” I reported, horrified and titillated at once. Jimmy, who aspired to be a cop and had a motorcycle, didn’t give up. He once pursued the car Bill and I were in—a chartreuse convertible no less. His cycle roared and farted, because that’s what motorcycles do, as he pulled in front of our car. I felt as if I was in a movie—the beautiful young heroine pursued by the ‘bad guy’. Would “prince charming” rescue her?  Jimmy, playing cop, ordered Bill out of the car, and threatened to beat him up, announcing that I was going to be his girlfriend. No one asked me of course. Bill stood up to him and told him to leave us alone, or else. I wasn’t sure what “or else” meant, but  Jimmy backed off.  Bill was a hero—my hero.

We were friends immediately. I could be myself with Bill, even gorge on chocolate cake without embarrassment. This bond of affection meant more to me than his looks or his bravery. We could navigate high school together. I didn’t think of this back then, but Bill was also safe—normal, white.

The charge I’d gotten from Jimmy’s dashing bravura at first tempted me, but my gut flashed a warning sign. My mother would have said: “He’s not your type, darling.” Normally, this would have send me joyfully into Jimmy’s embrace, for the sake of defiance. But, resistance tugged at me inside.  Fear of Sex? Well, of course. Italian? Maybe, but Italians were common in our high school. There was Bartolo, Romanello, Fraccola. Still, something more subtle exerted its pull on me. Something I couldn’t then define.

I was learning internalized ethnic prejudice. I was running into the undertow of the high school caste system whose outer accoutrements I easily identified but whose infrastructure consisted of unwritten rigid rules about who could be where with whom and how. There was no why.

Oddly, the Parable of the Sower, told by Jesus and remembered in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, raced across my mental scan.The Sower sows seeds in all kinds of soil, not all of it receptive, hence unfruitful. I had read the Bible, and intuited something wrong about this parable—maybe something that had wisdom about racism in it?

Chapter XIV.  Going Beyond, aka Postscripts

Jimmy died in 2016. James Joseph Bruno Fraccola, still handsome, had realized his dream. He was a cop in the Darien Police Department, also married with six children and thirteen grandchildren. One of those Catholics! According to his obituary, Jimmy had “ranked as deadly marksman and was truly a cop’s cop.” Thank God, he didn’t have a gun in high school! I felt a surge of plain happiness when I read that Jimmy had made good.

Bill and I stayed together over the years—on and off/off and on. We married in1962. Good humor, deep caring, and the blessing of four remarkable children sustained us over twenty years of marriage, half of it painfully insecure. Divorce brought intense grief. We both remarried. For all of it, and all the memories I am grateful.

Bill died unexpectedly of acute leukemia with respiratory complications on February 14, 2020. He was my first true love, the one who first helped me feel real, and I grieve.

The heart is a spacious vessel, capable of holding many loves, an infinity of feelings.

To be continued.

2020.07.05 My "Racism"—A Brief Anecdotal History, Part Four. America?

We weren’t Catholic. I knew that because my mother said Catholics weren’t really American. Who was American? Was Carol Lee? Did she feel not American?  Is racism an American problem? 

July 4th was Independence Day. Americans were celebrating—with flag-waving and fireworks—our independence, our formation as a nation, a democracy.  How ironic it is for me to be writing about my own racism in 2020 when “Independence” the very definition of  our “dream” is NOT fully enjoyed by every American. I have no choice but to observe my world today and reflect on it in the light of my experience.  Am I American?


Scene X.  Phineas, Hairy Legs, and Mr. Fitz

There is probably no culture more cruel and life-threatening than that of a junior high school bus—that long orange monster that rolls around town and picks up strays who gather at a designated SCHOOL BUS STOP.

Unless you were totally normal you were a target for torturous humor. For girls, normal meant cute, perky, flirty, in a cashmere sweater with obvious upper body endowments and a waist, ripe for “slutdom”. For boys, normal meant swaggering and strutting and punching as if they had something no one else did, panting to create “sluts”.

I shifted from side to side, pulling at my skirt or trying to puff up my hair without upsetting the overweight pile of books shoulder-strapped together and poised on one hip.

Phineas failed the normalcy profile—catastrophically. He didn’t strut, he galumphed. He played the violin which he carried with him onto the bus. He wore thick glasses. He was borderline obese. Every day when Phineas thudded onto the bus the boys cooed and wooed him to the back of the bus where they’d gathered for the massacre. They forced  Phineas down onto the floor. They took his violin, removed it from its case and played it till it squeaked in protest; they called him names; they spit on him, and removed his glasses; they held him down so he could not get off at his stop. Every day he walked home. Phineas, to his eternal junior high school shame, cried.

I will never forget Phineas. I felt nauseous. I cried. I prayed. I said nothing. I was learning to be a coward. I tried recently to look him up on Google, which despite its near-divine status, failed on Phineas. Please God, let him have lost weight, ditched his Mayflower-like family name, wear contact lenses, and be a brilliant violinist in some symphony orchestra. 

There was a female version of this horror show. She was overweight like Phineas but with a “normal” name—until she earned the nickname of “Hairy Legs”.  Girls are just as mean as boys but less physical. We relentlessly teased her, because her unshaved legs were, well, totally abnormal. She said that her mother wouldn’t let her shave her legs, and back then girls did not wear pants. I cursed her mother.

She suffered for something she could do nothing about. This made me think, once again, of Carol Lee. This bullying behavior was racist BUT all these students were white. And so was I.

The school bus driver, Mr. Fitz, was the owner of the bus franchise, Fitzgeralds. He was obese, so fat that there was no space between the lower edge of the steering wheel and his paunch. I stared at him to see if I could somehow get him to stop the boys and rescue Phineas. He did nothing. In fact, once I saw him smirking. He could have at least intervened to make sure Phineas got off at his stop.

I felt tortured myself. My way of dealing with my horror was to demand that my mother drive me to school. I would never ride the bus again—never.

These people were all white just like everyone else in Darien, but I was beginning to wonder if racist behavior had broad applications. White-Against-White?  I wished I could talk with Carol Lee about all this.


Scene XI. Gunnar Myrdal

Throughout junior and senior high school there was a required course called Problems of Democracy. Some schools called it Civics. It was to help students understand how our government was structured, how it worked—or didn’t. Our teacher was Mr. Beckwith. I liked him, and I liked the course. I don’t remember what texts we read, but I do remember that Mr. Beckwith talked a lot, in just about every class, about this one book by Gunnar Myrdal. It was on racism. Why was he teaching that when we all were white, and the book was not the assigned reading for the class? Were we even a race? Of course none of us read it, but I have never forgotten that name: Gunnar Myrdal.

I looked up Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987). He was a sociologist and economist and a Swedish Nobel laureate, a professor at Stockholm University in Sweden, and, according to record, openly anti-Nazi. Myrdal’s major work was An American Dilemma. The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, published in 1944. Here is Gunnar Myrdal at about the time he published the book I never read.

Myrdal's book was a study of race relations in America. The “dilemma” was the perceived conflict between high ideals embodied in what Myrdal called the “American Creed” on the one hand and poor performance on the other. Democracy in America was unable to put its human rights ideals into practice for African Americans, one tenth of our population. Myrdal had planned a similar study on gender inequality, but he couldn’t get funding for it.

If Mr. Beckwith was so hot for this book why wasn’t it on the curriculum? 

I was learning about censorship in school curricula. People behind closed doors decided what texts students could read, and believe me the lily white town where I lived would not want to stir up trouble. Taxes fund public education. White people pay high taxes. Money controls learning, controls what is taught and how. I learn best when I’m stirred up. I felt sorry for Mr. Beckwith.

I learned something, a take-away they now call it, from Myrdal’s thesis: when I don’t perform well it’s usually because I don’t like what I’m doing. I’m not invested in the endeavor. America wasn’t invested in its own “dream.”  Was I?  Was I American?  Am I?  Was the Bible?

I don’t know. I didn’t know then either.  First I’d get a boyfriend, handsome if possible.

To be continued.

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.