Racism 101

I wrote this one in Spring of 2008....

As Barack Obama stands poised to grab the Democratic party’s nomination for president from Hillary Clinton, we are hearing more and more often that we are a society that has arrived in the post-race era. Maybe in certain public ways, this is true. For me and group of twenty-odd college students, however, the idea that we are post-race was recently exposed as palpably and demonstrably false.

Two weeks ago, I asked students in a course on children and childhood to get out of the classroom and actually observe some children. Because they are not too far removed from being considered children themselves, I wanted my students to ground their comments about children in what we social scientists like to call data. I wanted them to move away from speaking about children through the lenses of their own recent childhoods, or, perhaps, interactions over the holidays with younger brothers and sisters.

My students’ first task was to figure out where to find kids. They visited preschools, playgrounds, malls, coffee shops, and of course, Chuck E. Cheese. All came with wonderful observations about what kids were doing, whether interacting with each other, babysitters, or parents. All but one. One student, let’s call him David, came up to me both apologetic and worried he was going to fail the assignment, because he’d been unable to sit and watch kids. “What happened,” I asked him. Turns out everywhere he went – four separate playgrounds – he was approached by adults who asked him to leave (if they were being polite) or told him forcefully to “get the #$*##& out of here.”

There we were, smack in the middle of black history month, and a historic presidential run by an African American man, and the one black student in my class comes back with this story. David is tall and good looking, with a muscular build that makes him look like he might be a marine recruiter’s dream. He is also very much what my 94 year old Chinese Auntie would call “a nice boy,” and in fact spent three years working in a preschool because he enjoys children so much. “Did this happen to anybody else?” I asked my students. They all answered no, including the other men, one of whom is a self-professed flaming queen who had done his observations – and I quote – “dressed like a disco ball.”

David’s story made me mad. Mostly, I was mad at myself for not anticipating that he might have these sorts of problems, because as much as it is a parent’s job to protect their child from whatever it is that might harm them, it is my responsibility as a teacher not to throw my students into situations that, likewise, might bring harm to them. More than this, though, I was mad that the lesson that David learned during black history month is also an important lesson that children on at least four Los Angeles playgrounds were being taught – intentionally or not. That everyday lesson is this: that black men are scary, that black men are threatening, and that white people have the right to tell black men when to get lost, and to do so with the threat of violence hovering not-so-subtly behind them. Let’s face it, most racism is taught in just this way, through crossing the street, avoiding a neighborhood, or watching a customer. You don’t have to be waving swastikas and burning crosses on lawns to be racist. David’s attempt to do a simple classroom assignment taught that to me and my students, who know, too, that even if Barack Obama is sitting in the Oval office next year, we’ll be waiting quite a while to arrive in the post race era.

There is a town in California, let's call it oh, Los Elevados, one of those towns that I’d sort of thought had gone out of fashion and out of existence with the arrival of things like, oh I don’t know, the civil rights act. It’s the kind of place where one of its parks charges non-residents an entry fee on weekends, and there is no overnight street parking. It’s the kind of town that prides itself on well-kept lawns and Christmas-decorated city trees in winter; the kind of town where rental units are banned; the kind of town where everybody wants to live if they can because the schools have the highest scores going; the kind of town where, recently, a group of black and brown girls were rejected from the local girl scout troop because there wasn’t room for them.

While Los Elevados can’t be described as homogeneous, it isn’t exactly diverse either. The population is about half white and half Asian, and many of the Asians are immigrants, who, as my Chinese friend Grace says, “think race doesn’t have anything to do with them.” The black and brown residents number, all together, less than 1,000. The city has just over 10,000 residents, with a median household income of $125,000 and a poverty rate of just 5 percent. Which means, basically, that this is a very rich town; not even 16% of American families have incomes of 100k or above.

Now I have to admit that I do indeed take a perverse pleasure in gathering and archiving examples of the weird racist things that seem to happen in Los Elevados with astonishing regularity. One Chinese American woman told me once that during a community dance class she’d asked one of the moneyed trophy wives a question, maybe about the time, maybe about directions to a store, I can’t remember. This woman actually pretended she couldn’t understand what the Chinese American woman was saying to her – IN FLUENT NATIVE ENGLISH. Trophy wife simply ignored the request, refused to speak, all the while without a doubt having heard the question. Or the casual snobbery of the very rich who might say to my college professor women colleagues, “Oh, you choose to work,” as if the very thought makes them want to wash their hands. On Halloween, many Los Elevados households many houses prepare two candy caches – one to be dispensed to the ‘real’ residents of Los Elevados and another for the ‘other’ kids who come in from other neighborhoods. I wonder how they tell the difference under the costumes and makeup. Maybe it’s the smell?

Most of the racism and snobbery I try to chalk up to outdated insularity and plain stupidness. But the girl scout thing put me over the edge. Who in their right mind doesn’t let kids into the troop? They must have suspected that the black and brown kids weren’t actually from San Marino. By definition. Since everyone who belongs in Los Elevados is white or (grudgingly accepted) Asian. Luckily, salvation came along in the form of a no-nonsense Caribbean woman who insisted on starting a new troop, launching into the project with the declaration, offered in a rhythmic and pointedly non-elite accent, “We are going to put the BROWN back into the BROWNIES!”

Clearly this is going to be the hippest brownie troop in town. And all I can say is that I hope those girls out- badge, out -event, our cookie-sell and in every other way outshine their counterparts who I can only hope will someday learn the lesson that no, they aren’t better than everybody else who they’ve only vaguely heard or thought about. I don’t wish for those precious little hothouse flower girls to be wilted, but I do hope that they might at some point try some real fresh air and sunshine and maybe even try it with some kids who aren’t white. Hey, you brown brownies of Los Elevados, bring it on and bring it down! Yes girls, you and your moms, you go on and put the BROWN back into the BROWNIES ‘cause there’s plenty of us out here who know that blondies are, really, just a poor imitation of the real thing. And we’ll buy all the cookies you got to sell.

The Girl with the the Golden Hair

“Mom,” my daughter said to me a few weeks ago, “I’m singing this song at school where I have to say, “I’m grateful I’m the girl with the golden hair.” Hmmm, I thought. What the heck do I do now? See the problem is, my girl will never have golden hair and this is particularly obvious because she is half African American and one quarter Chinese and one quarter Caucasian. While her maternal grandmother DID have golden hair as a child, it’s now gone pretty white. Looking at her long, ringletty ponytail, the one she likes to leave in for say about a week without actually combing it much so that it becomes one giant dred, I said, “well, just say ‘curly.”

Turns out it was the Abba song “Girl with the Golden Hair” that she was singing. But as far as I’m concerned it’s still not much of an excuse. (Technically, the line goes “I have been lucky/I’m the girl with the golden hair.) Having to sing the line, whatever it was exactly, certainly was something my daughter was thinking about and it wasn’t hard to imagine why this line stuck with her, given that she’d also said she’d been getting teased about her hair in school.

I already knew that bringing it up at her school was likely to be not only thankless but actively deflected. Last year, when my daughter expressed some discomfort with not having taken part in a Lunar New Year Celebration, something that she felt had happened because people perceive her as black and not asian, and therefore not eligible to participate, I was first told I couldn’t meet with the principal to ask her about what had taken place. As this was unacceptable, I emailed her and described my concerns. Rather than meeting with me as a first response, what happened is that my questions were framed as an accusation that was then emailed to the school administrative staff. Why my private communication to the principal needed to passed on to the staff is unclear, except to warn them, I suppose, that I was, as far as they were concerned, a loose cannon for wanting to find out why my kid seemed bummed that she couldn’t participate in the Lunar New year celebration. So much for trying to address diversity issues in a mutually respectful fashion. This in a school where, as far as I can tell, all the teaching staff is white and asian, the support staff is black and latino, and the janitorial staff is black.

This is the everyday way in which racism scrapes away at us. My kid has to sing this stupid line, a line that could only reasonably apply to white kids, and if I go to her school to register discomfort, the answer I can predict is something along the lines of why are you so upset over a little thing and by the way you’re making me unfomfortable which is certainly inappropriate and in fact I think you’re something of a troublemaker and you should really stop acting like this. After all it’s only a little thing. But what if, for instance, the line went “I’m lucky/I’m the girl with the cornrowed hair” or the dredlocked hair, or the nappy hair? Call me crazy, but I don’t imagine my daughter’s nice little school would make white kids sing that line without thinking twice.

That ‘little thing’ was one I decided to address with a big old visit to my hairstylist, who along with everybody else in her shop, all four of them, lovingly washed, conditioned and combed my child’s waist length twirling hair, trimmed it, and showed me how to allow it to dry into gorgeous, springy, shiny ringlets. They told her how beautiful her hair is, how special it is, and she basked in the warmth they showered upon her. Later that night, in her hula class, her friends ran up to her to tell her how nice her hair looked and she beamed all over again. (Hula class is another – wonderful – story: the girls are black and brown and asian and white and latino and all the kinds of beauty they possess are refracted in and through the network of families and friendships we have forged together over the years.) It’s this lovingess that she needed, the warm lovingness of others, because no matter how many times I tell her she’s got the hair I always wanted, it just cannot make her feel so good and right as when the rest of the world tells her so, or at least a few of those who are out there in the world.

I am grateful she’s the child with the curly hair. I’m grateful she’s everything she is, but I am not grateful that she society we live in too often makes my child regret the glory that is her hair, her skin, her vivid imagination and her raucous vocabulary, and all because she is not white.

Me, the Marauding Easter Bunny

As the saga of me trying to negotiate the strange territory of my daughter's school continues, the latest development is this: a friend smartly noticed that the principal had indicated in an email that she planned to speak to my daughter and given that her last email had basically honed in on the question of my daughter's honesty, my friend thought it would be wise to make sure that Benin had a parent present if the Principal decided to talk with her so that the incident could not be reduced to "you're a girl who told a lie and you should learn not to do that." So I sent a brief note saying that under no circumstances was the principal to speak to my child without a parent present. She responded by saying she did not understand the tone or the content of my note. One is tempted to say, "What part of you may not speak to my child without me present" do you not understand?

I think at this point I could safely be described as "hopping mad," and with Easter approaching, that might be a seasonally appropriate image. Only this easter bunny is on the warpath, so to speak, and I use that term rather purposefully because not only am I so mad I could spit, but I'm mad about being treated like bringing up issues of race and diversity is pretty much like speaking gibberish. So this Easter Bunny is not above thinking that a scorched earth approach might be the way to go.

One reason I'm so mad is that I seem to have turned into the Asian version of an uppity nigger. I don't know if there is a term for that, but whatever it is, I'm it. The other reason I'm mad is that being on a treadmill of denial is debilitating. "What racism?" It's like a big elephant in the room, and to add to it, the elephant has taken an enormous shit, and the nice manners required in our society breed a conspiracy of blindness that claims that those people who see the elephant are in fact the ones who have a problem.

The truth is, most racism is wonderfully well-mannered and polite -- its even loving. This is something that my father and his friend Jeff Chan noted in an essay they wrote way back in 1973. That essay was called "Racist Love" and I have to say that in the main, the essay still reads as totally fresh. Which is scary. They talk about how the good minorities (like Asians) are the ones that are useful for white supremacy, and the bad minorities are the ones who challenge white supremacy. Now, since in nice schools, the bargain is that we all agree that white supremacy is to be called -- nothing at all (it's the invisible elephant) -- saying something like "I see an elephant," or "I think I smell elephant shit" is cause for alarm because it upsets the status quo. One response is misdirection -- turn it into another issue, preferably in which the elephant-sighter or elephant shit smeller becomes the problem: someone who needs to be put in their place, shut up or shut out. Another response is honest confusion. Get used to NOT seen elephants for long enough and you really do lose the ability to see them. When I'm feeling compassionate, and not like a marauding easter bunny, I might be inclined to view this as a disability that needs to be dealt with like any other.

So here I am, a hopping mad marauding uppity chink Easter Bunny, ready to hit the warpath just like General Sherman on his march to Atlanta.

What could be more American than that?

When life overflows, you write.

Many people, most of them white, would probably say that I'm hypersensitive when it comes to race. Being complimented on my mastery of the English language has sortof lead to me feeling that, well, my race in fact does matter. But why should I get so prickly about getting compliments for goodness sake? The fact that English is my native language might have just a little to do with it. When I'm feeling extra pissy I might want to point out that my verbal score on the GRE was 98th percentile.

This is the sort of maddening thing that always seems to happen to me when I'm teaching: the very concepts I'm teaching my students just fly back at me. They don't haunt me. Rather, the smack me upside the head and leave me reeling. So what am I teaching this semester: my introductory level race class and children and childhood. Strangely -- or even perhaps, predictably -- it is both my child and my children and childhood class that have smacked me upside the head with racial dilemmas.

The first was, if anything, ridiculously, depressingly stereotypical. I'd asked the students in my children and childhood class to get out and observe children and well, the one black man in the class just couldn't do it. It wasn't that he didn't want to. No, the problem was that every time he parked himself near a playground to observe some kids in action, some parent would come up to him and tell him to get lost. In a class of nearly 25 students, he was the only one to be told not once but FOUR times, to leave where he was at. I was revolted by the racism inherent in these interactions, and felt guilty for having in essence thrown him to the wolves.

My self indulgent self flagellation was (thankfully) interrupted by my getting myself into a tangle about race at my daughter's school. She goes to school in one of those school districts where people move and pay WAY too much for their houses for the privilege of getting their kids into a 'good' school district. The student population is wonderfully diverse racially and ethnically and even economically (to a degree). For my white and chinese and black daughter, it's a wonderfully diverse place, at least in terms of skin tones and backgrounds.

She came home the other day describing a lunar new year celebration that made me more than a little edgy. In her version, kids of Japanese and Korean and Chinese descent were trotted out to say 'gung hay fat choy' to the rest of the school and then bow to them. She told me that she was among them, although someone had to check her records to see that she was indeed part Chinese before being included in the event. Not only that, but she overheard someone saying "why is that Black girl up there?" Turns out her version strayed rather significantly from the truth since she hadn't participated in it and it's unlikely that anyone actually checked her records or other kids made that comment.

But imagine me hearing her version. OK, I'm trying to be not too crazily upset by the whole image of a bunch of Asian kids standing in front of the rest of the school bowing and speaking in foreign languages and wearing exotic clothing and otherwise being on display. So I ask to speak to the principal, hoping to find out more about the event, to see what had happened. "What is this about?" the secretary asks when I call. So I tell her, rather vaguely. She tells me I need to speak with the classroom teacher which frankly doesn't make sense to me since this wasn't a classroom event and besides, aren't Principals supposed to be available to parents? Because I'm sometimes or even often a bit bratty when being told what to do, being told I cannot speak to the principal just lights my fire. Fuck this, I think, I'll just send her an email.

So I send an email, describe what my kid has told me, while including what I think are indications that I'm not taking everything she says at face value but the thing that is just staring me in the face is that her story tells me this: regardless of what did or didn't happen, she's feeling more than a little on the spot about who she is, racially speaking, and negotiating this at school is a bit difficult for her.

The principal tries to call me back and now, as of this moment, I wish I'd been able to answer the phone instead of at pilates working my abs. It probably would have cleared things up relatively easily and in a way that didn't challenge white cluelessness unduly.

I want to say I'm sorry for saying something like "white cluelessness," but having experienced it really pretty much every day of my life, I'm not sure why I should be apologizing for white people being clueless.

Here's how the event went. On Friday mornings at the school there is an outdoor assembly complete with the pledge of allegiance and announcements over a crap sound system. A Korean parent asked if it would be OK to have some Korean kids do something, wearing Korean dress. So they gave a greeting (or something) and there was a discussion or quick explanation of the lunar new year and this was described to me as cultural pride and sharing.

(Here are questions I have: what other activities was the school doing to recognize and celebrate the lunar new year, given its importance to a large proportion of school families? what I read in my daughter's imaginative retelling of the story is, in part, a desire to have been included in such celebration, since it's part of her heritage, too.)

There is no doubt that my first email to the school principal was -- ooooh, how do I say it just right -- it wasn't hot and out of control, but it didn't pull punches either. Very specifically, I voiced a concern that the structure of the event put a particular bunch of kids on display for the other kids, and that many of those other kids (and the white ones specifically) would never go on display under similar circumstances.

This is, of course, the whole lie of whiteness: that it is nothing. It's nothing to worry about, nothing to get upset about, and nothing to talk about. For me to raise the issue as problematic that Asian children are on display, complete with exotic clothing, language and behaviors, and that white kids are not going to be in similar positions, that makes me an oversensitive and hypercritical person who is just chomping at the bit for the opportunity to cry "Racism!" at every opportunity.

Perhaps it was just my bad luck that my student had just happened to have been chased out of four playgrounds that same week, because with that little incident buzzing around my head, the whole lunar new year thing didn't seem so sweet, no matter whose idea it was.

The truly amazing thing has been that the principal of my daughter's school handily turned the whole thing around so that my daughter is a liar who has implicated others in things they did not do and that what I should do about all of this is school her in the importance of telling the truth. I haven't been on the receiving end of one of these sleight of hand moves in quite some time. I was also invited to make an appointment if I have concerns about any school personnel.

At the moment I'm trying to dream up the appropriately tart, ironic, and double-voiced response, something along the lines of well, you know, I see now that really there's nothing to talk about and thank you so much for responding to me because it's been so helpful to me in allowing me to understand the the circumstances that were giving me concern. You know, a message that says, basically: Oh yes I understand there's really nothing to talk about because it's clear that the nub of what is driving me crazy here is totally my fault as far as you are concerned and that in fact is really helpful to know because it basically just confirms to me what I have already known and learned from and endless, endless number of people before you: that being called to the carpet on 'meaningless' incidents that have racist undertones will not be acknowledged; that racism is my problem and not yours; and that the lies you live are ones you get to tell whenever you want but when my daughter tries to name them, she becomes a liar. And, thank you so much for responding to my concerns with aggressive self protection, which is what I must say I always hope for from the people who are in charge of educating my child.

Oh excuse me, it that over the top? The problem is this: the line between let's celebrate and let's kick the black guy out of the playground because he makes us uncomfortable is straight and true and it cuts like a knife. People might want to deny the connection, but as they say, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Not until we get to see a bunch of white kids wearing their cultural clothes and performing their cultural behaviors for others to celebrate will I ever believe otherwise.