I picked up some ironing today from my former housekeeper B., a black woman who grew up in the south. She hated ironing but liked me enough to do it for me, and now that she's retired and scraping by, it's a way for us to have a visit and for her to make a little extra cash.
I've hear a lot of tales of woe from her. Just now Social Security cut her off for two months because they overpaid her some, and she's worried about paying the rent. I'll never forget the story she told about one of her wealthy clients who gave her a ride down to some poor part of town, and parked to drop B. off. The woman noticed that she was in a red zone and said she should move, but B. said to her, "It''s okay, they don't give white people tickets." B. Said I should have seen the look on the woman;'s face--we had a good chuckle over that.
Lately I've been hearing that two of her great grand children were sleeping over at her house sometimes. I had thought that it was to keep B. from being alone too much, but today the real story came out. Their mother lives about an hour east towards Sacramento, and she gets up at 3:00 AM to drive them to B.'s place, arriving around 4:30. They sleep a couple of hours and then go off to school, while the mom drives over to San Francisco to work. The town where they come from is pretty redneck, and one of the boys was being beat up by the white boys, and the schools were poor. Now they go to schools in Berkeley and the boy who was being bullied has improved his grades quite a lot.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Public Transportation
Nothing like getting on public transportation to reaffirm my faith in people. That's not always easy for someone who grew up a a shy, small, lonely, and not the least bit tough little boy. For instance, today I had to take BART to San Francisco to see a specialist. I've been bed all week with bronchitis, and wasn't really sure if I could tolerate standing up for the 25 minute ride in my weakened state. With that anxiety in mind, the train I got on was fully packed and I steeled myself for a long, hard trip. The shy part of me thought, "No one will give me a seat, I'll just have to suffer." At the first stop, someone got off right in front of me and a woman and I both started to move, and I said, "Do you mind, I'm really feeling sick today," and she said sure, no problem. At the end of the ride, when we both got off in downtown San Francisco, I thanked her and she in turn said, "I hope you feel better, and I have to sit all day anyway." Of course: show people some basic respect and courtesy, and they will return it. It took me from feeling worried and alone to feeling safe and belonging. Isn't that what community is about?
About ten years ago I was in Paris in December--really cold--is there a translation for The Hawk? (when I lived in Chicago, that was what people called the cold wind that blew off of Lake Michigan.) I decided to go see the Bastille--there is a Metro stop there, so I was sure it was close by. I didn't know it had been demolished in 1789. So I'm riding along on the Metro, and I slide over to make room for a burly, taciturn man, and across from us across from us was a man with a small bundled child in a backpack carrier.
About ten years ago I was in Paris in December--really cold--is there a translation for The Hawk? (when I lived in Chicago, that was what people called the cold wind that blew off of Lake Michigan.) I decided to go see the Bastille--there is a Metro stop there, so I was sure it was close by. I didn't know it had been demolished in 1789. So I'm riding along on the Metro, and I slide over to make room for a burly, taciturn man, and across from us across from us was a man with a small bundled child in a backpack carrier.
When he got ready to get off, preparing to exit, he balanced the carrier on the back of his seat while he awkwardly pivoted around and tried to get it on his back. I was watching, thinking I would help if need be. Suddenly the backpack tottered just a little and started to slip--maybe one millimeter--and instantly the taciturn man and two other men sprang forward to help. I wish I could have thanked them in their language.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Exploration
I never know where curiosity will take me. For instance, last September I was up at Pyramid Lake, a large lake in the high Nevada desert, on a Paiute Indian reservation. Conditions are dry at the end of the summer, there wasn't much to see. But I found a small canyon I hadn't explored before, and started going deeper. There's a shrub called rabbit brush that for some reason blooms in the fall, a rich orange-yellow, and there was lots of it.
But mostly, the canyon was dry and barren and I walked along a long ways with nothing much to see. Then, around a bend, out of nowhere, a bush of showy penstemon, a brilliant blue as blue as the sky above the canyon walls, the first wildflower I'd seen. Spectacular, this burst of life in the midst of a parched canyon. Something inspiring wonder: THIS flower in THIS dry place.
I kept going and never saw another one. I kept going past meanders and narrows where the canyon cut through harder strata, and some dry waterfalls I scrambled over until I got to a dry waterfall 12 feet high, impossible to climb over. So I turned back to a fork in the canyon and proceeded up that, and came to the remains of a deer that had fallen into the canyon. It had been pretty well cleaned off except for tough skin, and a little ways further I found a skull--clearly carnivore--with criss-crossing fangs, mostly likely a coyote. I never did find a spring like I have in several of the canyons, but I found things I never expected. And on the way back, from time to time I could see the blue of the lake and the distant mountains. I can't wait to get back there.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
I can walk into the exam room and tell who has older siblings.
I have a lovely picture of one of my families: a one year old boy is held by his mom with his 12 year old sister on one, side and a 10 year old sister, herself holding a six year old sister, on the other side. A little child, or a young person as I like to say, surrounded by love and attention. It's like having another set of parents, almost, except they're a lot younger and have just learned all this stuff about living not so long ago.
I've gotten to where I can walk into an exam room and tell that an infant has caring older siblings, or sometimes a father who is very involved with his children. I can tell because these infants are relaxed, curious, and much less wary of me, compared to others. I can tell with the older children because they are more articulate and mature and have ideas about their future.
There is a wonderful book called Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee, a story of growing up in rural England in the 1920s, and the opening scene of the book captures the spirit of what I'm talking about. While moving to a new house, Laurie gets lost in a thicket of tall weeds, and he is rescued by his sisters:
From this daylight nightmare I was awakened, as from many another, by the appearance of my sisters. They came scrambling and calling up the steep rough bank, and parting the long grass found me. Faces of rose, familiar, living; huge shining faces hung up like shields between me and the sky; faces with grins and white teeth (some broken) to be conjured like genii with a howl, brushing off terror with their broad scoldings and affection. They leaned over me -one, two, three- their mouths smeared with red currants and their hands dripping with juice.
Thanks to Penguin Press 1959
I've gotten to where I can walk into an exam room and tell that an infant has caring older siblings, or sometimes a father who is very involved with his children. I can tell because these infants are relaxed, curious, and much less wary of me, compared to others. I can tell with the older children because they are more articulate and mature and have ideas about their future.
There is a wonderful book called Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee, a story of growing up in rural England in the 1920s, and the opening scene of the book captures the spirit of what I'm talking about. While moving to a new house, Laurie gets lost in a thicket of tall weeds, and he is rescued by his sisters:
From this daylight nightmare I was awakened, as from many another, by the appearance of my sisters. They came scrambling and calling up the steep rough bank, and parting the long grass found me. Faces of rose, familiar, living; huge shining faces hung up like shields between me and the sky; faces with grins and white teeth (some broken) to be conjured like genii with a howl, brushing off terror with their broad scoldings and affection. They leaned over me -one, two, three- their mouths smeared with red currants and their hands dripping with juice.
Thanks to Penguin Press 1959
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
When Racism Masquerades as Something Else
This was forwarded to me by an old friend: one of the first black students at Duke University in 1967.
Don't let the virulent hatred of Obama's presidency - veiled in "policy differences" - fool you. Just ask someone raised around bigotry.
Carlos Dews is an author, a professor of English literature, and chairman of the Department of English Language and Literature at John Cabot University in Rome.
‘'The nigger show."
I first heard this expression used to describe the Obama administration during a visit to my hometown in East Texas during the early summer of 2009. I understood what the epithet meant: Our minds are made up, the president lacks legitimacy, and there is nothing he can do that we will support. I was not surprised to hear such a phrase.
I grew up in the 1960s during the ragged end of the Jim Crow era, where many of the books in my school library were stamped Colored School, meaning they had been brought to the white school when the town was forced to integrate the public school system. I recall my parents had instructed me, before my first day of elementary school, not to sit in a chair where a black child had sat. And I remember my sister joked that her yearbook, when it appeared at the end of her first year of integrated high school, was in "black and white."
The outward signs of racism of my home state have now disappeared, but racial hatred remains. My father and his friends still use the word nigger to refer to all black people, and the people of my hometown don't hesitate to spout their racist rhetoric to my face, assuming I agree with them. I hold my tongue for the sake of having continued access to this kind of truth I learned long ago how not to accept the hatred I was being taught and how to survive not having done so. More recently, I realized that I also learned another lesson: how to recognize racism when it masquerades as something else.
More than 40 years after my first experiences with racism, I am thousands of miles away in Rome, but surrounded by ghosts. Last year, I received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for a community program called the Big Read, which sponsors activities to encourage communities to come together to read and discuss a single book. I chose Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, in part because I thought that some of the most salient issues in the novel - racism, classism, xenophobia, the Jim Crow era - were perhaps relevant to an increasingly diverse, contemporary Italy.
That there is racism in Italy is obvious to anyone who pays attention to current affairs. In fact, during the first week of the Big Read Rome, a story in one of Italy's national newspapers detailed the experience of a Nigerian woman being called sporca nera (essentially, dirty nigger) by two women she asked to stop smoking on a Roman bus.
But I never imagined that consideration of the novel would prove so relevant to a country that had just elected its first black president. Ironically, until the election of Barack Obama, my discussions of racism in the United States seemed historical. I felt that with the passage of the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s, the country had turned a corner, that the slow evaporation of overt racism was perhaps inevitable. Now, my personal experience of Southern racism feels current and all too familiar. A news story about the Big Read that appeared in La Repubblica on Sept. 20 (unaware that my grant was awarded during the Bush administration), presciently brought Rome, Obama, To Kill a Mockingbird, and racism together in its headline: "Obama brings antiracist book to Rome."
Jimmy Carter was lambasted for having recently explained that the vehemence with which many Americans resist Obama's presidency is an expression of racism. Carter was accused of fanning the flames of racial misunderstanding by labeling as "racist" what on the surface could be perceived as legitimate policy differences. Like Carter, as a white Southern man, I can see beyond the seemingly legitimate rhetoric to discern what is festering behind much of the opposition to Obama and to his administration's policy initiatives. I also have access, via the racist world from which I came, direct confirmation of the racial hatred toward Obama.
The veiled racism I sense in the United States today is couched, in public discourse at least, in terms that allow for plausible deniability of racist intent. And those who resist any policy initiative from the Obama administration engage in a scorched-earth policy that reminds me of the self-centered white flight, the abandonment of public schools, and the proliferation of private schools, that followed the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools. The very people, like my own rural, working-class family back in East Texas, who stand to gain from the efforts of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are, because of their racism, willing to oppose policies that would benefit them the most. Their racism outweighs their own self-interest.
Unfortunately, racists in the United States have learned one valuable lesson since the 1960s: They cannot express their racism directly. In public, they must veil their racial hatred behind policy differences. This obfuscation makes direct confrontation difficult. Anyone pointing out their racist motivations runs the risk of unfairly playing "the race card." But I know what members of my family mean when they say - as so many said during the town hall meetings in August - that they "want their country back." They want it back, safely, in the hands of someone like them, a white person. They feel that a black man has no right to be the president of their country.
During a phone conversation a few weeks after Obama's election, my father lamented that he and my mother might have to stop visiting the casinos in Shreveport, La.: Given Obama's election, "the niggers are already walking around like they own the place. They won't even give up their seats for white women anymore. I don't know what we're going to do with 'em."
My students often ask me how I managed to avoid accepting the lesson in racism offered by my family. From the time I was 4 or 5 years old - roughly the same age as Scout Finch, the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird - I recall knowing that I didn't agree with racism More important, my paternal grandmother provided me with the encouragement that I could ignore what I was being taught. She provided me with the courage to resist.
My grandmother hoped that my father and his father represented the last generations of the type of Southern man that had shaped her life - virulently racist, prone to violence, proud of their ignorance, and self-defeatingly stubborn. It was a type of Southern man that she hoped and prayed I could avoid becoming.
However, my father and his father were not the last of their kind; their racial hatred has been passed on. My grandmother, if she were alive, would recognize the same tendencies among many of the people who shout down politicians and bring guns to public rallies. She would also see how the only change they have made is to replace overt racist epithets with more euphemistic language.
Rather than seeing my home state and its racist attitudes, slowly, over time, pulled in the direction of more acceptance, the country as a whole has become more like the South, the racial or cultural equivalent of what is called the Walmartization of American retail.
It might be easy to see literature as impotent in the face of the persistence and adaptability of racism. But I continue to believe in the transformative potential of literature and its ability to provide an alternative view of the world. And for children who are not lucky enough to have grandmothers like mine, I believe that books like To Kill a Mockingbird can provide inoculation against the virus that is racism.
![]()
Don't let the virulent hatred of Obama's presidency - veiled in "policy differences" - fool you. Just ask someone raised around bigotry.
Carlos Dews is an author, a professor of English literature, and chairman of the Department of English Language and Literature at John Cabot University in Rome.
‘'The nigger show."
I first heard this expression used to describe the Obama administration during a visit to my hometown in East Texas during the early summer of 2009. I understood what the epithet meant: Our minds are made up, the president lacks legitimacy, and there is nothing he can do that we will support. I was not surprised to hear such a phrase.
I grew up in the 1960s during the ragged end of the Jim Crow era, where many of the books in my school library were stamped Colored School, meaning they had been brought to the white school when the town was forced to integrate the public school system. I recall my parents had instructed me, before my first day of elementary school, not to sit in a chair where a black child had sat. And I remember my sister joked that her yearbook, when it appeared at the end of her first year of integrated high school, was in "black and white."
The outward signs of racism of my home state have now disappeared, but racial hatred remains. My father and his friends still use the word nigger to refer to all black people, and the people of my hometown don't hesitate to spout their racist rhetoric to my face, assuming I agree with them. I hold my tongue for the sake of having continued access to this kind of truth I learned long ago how not to accept the hatred I was being taught and how to survive not having done so. More recently, I realized that I also learned another lesson: how to recognize racism when it masquerades as something else.
More than 40 years after my first experiences with racism, I am thousands of miles away in Rome, but surrounded by ghosts. Last year, I received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for a community program called the Big Read, which sponsors activities to encourage communities to come together to read and discuss a single book. I chose Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, in part because I thought that some of the most salient issues in the novel - racism, classism, xenophobia, the Jim Crow era - were perhaps relevant to an increasingly diverse, contemporary Italy.
That there is racism in Italy is obvious to anyone who pays attention to current affairs. In fact, during the first week of the Big Read Rome, a story in one of Italy's national newspapers detailed the experience of a Nigerian woman being called sporca nera (essentially, dirty nigger) by two women she asked to stop smoking on a Roman bus.
But I never imagined that consideration of the novel would prove so relevant to a country that had just elected its first black president. Ironically, until the election of Barack Obama, my discussions of racism in the United States seemed historical. I felt that with the passage of the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s, the country had turned a corner, that the slow evaporation of overt racism was perhaps inevitable. Now, my personal experience of Southern racism feels current and all too familiar. A news story about the Big Read that appeared in La Repubblica on Sept. 20 (unaware that my grant was awarded during the Bush administration), presciently brought Rome, Obama, To Kill a Mockingbird, and racism together in its headline: "Obama brings antiracist book to Rome."
Jimmy Carter was lambasted for having recently explained that the vehemence with which many Americans resist Obama's presidency is an expression of racism. Carter was accused of fanning the flames of racial misunderstanding by labeling as "racist" what on the surface could be perceived as legitimate policy differences. Like Carter, as a white Southern man, I can see beyond the seemingly legitimate rhetoric to discern what is festering behind much of the opposition to Obama and to his administration's policy initiatives. I also have access, via the racist world from which I came, direct confirmation of the racial hatred toward Obama.
The veiled racism I sense in the United States today is couched, in public discourse at least, in terms that allow for plausible deniability of racist intent. And those who resist any policy initiative from the Obama administration engage in a scorched-earth policy that reminds me of the self-centered white flight, the abandonment of public schools, and the proliferation of private schools, that followed the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools. The very people, like my own rural, working-class family back in East Texas, who stand to gain from the efforts of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are, because of their racism, willing to oppose policies that would benefit them the most. Their racism outweighs their own self-interest.
Unfortunately, racists in the United States have learned one valuable lesson since the 1960s: They cannot express their racism directly. In public, they must veil their racial hatred behind policy differences. This obfuscation makes direct confrontation difficult. Anyone pointing out their racist motivations runs the risk of unfairly playing "the race card." But I know what members of my family mean when they say - as so many said during the town hall meetings in August - that they "want their country back." They want it back, safely, in the hands of someone like them, a white person. They feel that a black man has no right to be the president of their country.
During a phone conversation a few weeks after Obama's election, my father lamented that he and my mother might have to stop visiting the casinos in Shreveport, La.: Given Obama's election, "the niggers are already walking around like they own the place. They won't even give up their seats for white women anymore. I don't know what we're going to do with 'em."
My students often ask me how I managed to avoid accepting the lesson in racism offered by my family. From the time I was 4 or 5 years old - roughly the same age as Scout Finch, the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird - I recall knowing that I didn't agree with racism More important, my paternal grandmother provided me with the encouragement that I could ignore what I was being taught. She provided me with the courage to resist.
My grandmother hoped that my father and his father represented the last generations of the type of Southern man that had shaped her life - virulently racist, prone to violence, proud of their ignorance, and self-defeatingly stubborn. It was a type of Southern man that she hoped and prayed I could avoid becoming.
However, my father and his father were not the last of their kind; their racial hatred has been passed on. My grandmother, if she were alive, would recognize the same tendencies among many of the people who shout down politicians and bring guns to public rallies. She would also see how the only change they have made is to replace overt racist epithets with more euphemistic language.
Rather than seeing my home state and its racist attitudes, slowly, over time, pulled in the direction of more acceptance, the country as a whole has become more like the South, the racial or cultural equivalent of what is called the Walmartization of American retail.
It might be easy to see literature as impotent in the face of the persistence and adaptability of racism. But I continue to believe in the transformative potential of literature and its ability to provide an alternative view of the world. And for children who are not lucky enough to have grandmothers like mine, I believe that books like To Kill a Mockingbird can provide inoculation against the virus that is racism.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Gratitude and Generosity
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| Nature's beauty is generous |
A few years ago I was in a checkout line at the local Safeway. There was an older fellow in front of me. He was buying just a few things and some cookies. He wanted to get a second box of cookies but I could tell he didn't have enough money, because he put some money down, counted his coins, and shook his head and looked downcast. He wasn't exactly disheveled, but he wasn't wearing designer jeans either. After a quick moment of realizing he was a retiree on a fixed income, I stepped up, put a few dollars down and told him to enjoy both boxes or something like that. He gave a surprised look, then pleased, and went on his way. Many's the time over the years has some stranger been generous or helpful to me, so here was a chance to pay back a little.
I've had this idea for years of doing a book called "50 Ways to be Generous." We're born with it, but we also need to be shown how to do it. My parents were good providers but we didn't have a home with emotional generosity. They didn't draw me out so I could give to others. Most of what I know about being generous I've learned from watching other people. I remember when a dear friend of mine was diagnosed with leukemia her friends rallied around her and organized blood donations, rides to the hospital, food for the icebox, baby sitting .... It was beautiful to see. Generosity is also something as simple as someone letting me cut into a long line of traffic or holding the door open.
I've been lucky to work for years with Latino culture. I don't think a week goes by without a potluck or baby shower. People are always looking for a chance to share and celebrate. So I try to remember, when I'm feeling hassled and worried about something, I try to rise above myself, and do something generous for someone else, even if it's small. Any comments about generosity are very welcome.
Labyrinths
Yesterday I was hiking up in the Oakland Hills and took a photo of a labyrinth constructed by anonymous folks over the years. It reminded me of our so called health care 'system' that Tea Party folks say they don't want taken away. What system? The one that tens of millions don't have? The one that's like a labyrinth with obstacles at every turn?
Let me tell you a sad story, one that should never have happened. I'm going to disguise a few details for confidentiality reasons. A few years ago a young adult in his mid 20s--we'll call him W--a very ethical person, eking out a living as meditation teacher, someone who ate thoughtfully, and who like many his age had no health insurance, began to have intermittent fevers and some transitory, mysterious symptoms and joint pains. He also had some chronic dental problems. After a couple of months and some more testing, one day he received a call from his clinic saying that he had a positive blood culture, that it could be dangerous, and that he should go to the hospital immediately. As it happened an MD friend was there and W played the message for him. The MD reinforced that he should go to the hospital urgently, that the infection could spread to different places. W said he would think about it, try to get things together, and maybe go the next day. He wasn't seen again for two or three days, and people assumed that he had was in the hospital. Then a friend from work came over saying that the hadn't been around. The friend and a roommate went back to his room and found him semiconscious on the floor and paralyzed on one side. The bacteria had formed a small clot on a heart valve which broke loose and blocked an artery in the brain, and he had a stroke. I'm sure that had he not been worried about the expenses of the hospital and and about losing his meagre wages, he would have gone to the hospital and likely have avoided the stroke.
Think of all those people with jobs that don't have benefits: the waitress at your favorite restaurant, the guy at the 7-11 or the gas station, the clerk at the photo shop. Regular people who deserve better. I've worked 35 years in the current so called 'system' and it doesn't work that well for a lot of people with insurance, let alone those without. I'm sure you all know someone with a 'preexisting condition' who can't get health insurance because of it--or who has to pay exorbitant rates. We need a single payer system and universal coverage. All of the industrialized countries have some version of it, and none is perfect; but none of them has the disgrace of millions of citizens without insurance. Checkout Physicians for a National Health Plan--a lot of good information there, and you can find out ways to get involved.
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