This morning, I woke up and remembered it was Martin Luther King Day. While I’ve always worked for a company that’s given the holiday, because I work in finance and tax, I have never actually been able to take the holiday. Today isn’t different; it’s just that I have chosen to spend a part of today reflecting on the struggle of persons of color in this country.
The next thought that went through my head was “What am I celebrating today?” When I think of Christmas or New Year’s, or the Fourth of July, I know what I’m celebrating, but growing up in my house, I would never have been allowed to celebrate the birth of a man who was murdered because he had a dream that Black and white people could sit down at the table as brothers and sisters in equality. Even though I was a Black and white person in my own body and being raised in a white household.
The reality of me would sound like the fulfillment of that dream, but my adoptive mother believed that any Black person who protested was a terrorist. So, outside of the fact that in 1963, the University of Idaho first allowed Black people to attend, and this integration resulted in my existence, I grew up ignorant of so much that Black people were doing to better their circumstance. I was not allowed to speak out about the racism in my house, among the people of my church – that was directed at me when they wouldn’t let their sons date me or wouldn’t let me rent their rental property – or was directed generally at Black people. Instead, I was told to turn the other cheek (to be assaulted again), and reminded that God’s way was perfect, even though His children were not.
What I did learn, then, was to hide in my own skin, to give grace at every possible moment, and to be perfect so that no one would say that my failures were because I was Black.
In a way, outside my house, I perhaps succeeded too much. Last year, I went out with a friend from Jamaica and she asked me, “Where is the Black in you?” Some of my Black friends cannot see it if they look at me, until they look at me in a photo with my white family members, or my Black family members. Another person I know suggested that I might have body dysmorphia.
Recently, I was introduced on a podcast as a person who “presents as white”. Okay, I had to go look this up. According to Reddit, people who “pass” for white claim to be white to obtain benefits, while people who “present” as white appear to others as white but do not mislead or claim to be white. Whew.
What is it about me that says, I am not both? I think that the truth of the matter is that I reflect in my body that race and skin color as the exemplification of race are false constructs. The trajectory of my life, however, was forever altered when one or both of my birth grandparents told my birthmother that she could not bring a Black baby into their family.
So, what am I celebrating today? I’m celebrating the birth of a man who was willing to risk his life for the benefit of his community, his people. He knew he had entered the valley of the shadow of death, yet he walked on. He wasn’t a perfect man, he was a human, with fears and weaknesses like all of us. His body was broken by hatred, but his spirit lives on to encourage us to dream and to keep fighting for what is right.
I’m celebrating the man who wanted his children to be judged by their character, not the color of their skin.
Unfortunately, today, this is still not the case, and people must continue to fight for this dream. Until the struggle is won, people with darker skin will still be left behind in their choices for jobs, housing, schooling, and, even worse, they will remain unsafe from murderous cops who don’t look at people with brown skin as human, and trigger-happy gun-owners who use their guns to kill Black people for jogging in “their” neighborhoods, asking for help, or simply existing. This includes the so-called “Karens” who call the police on people for just being Black.
What else am I celebrating today? The rise in people whose births cross boundaries of culture, religion, country. Here, I deliberately don’t use the word “race” because that is a made-up concept that was used in America to justify the enslavement of people who were not “white.” The more that people exist who defy these sharp delineations, the more I hope these old racist ideas and treatment of people will die.
No one should ever look at a person and judge who they are, or what they can do by the color of their skin. Unfortunately, many in our society only apply that maxim to you if you present as white. One cannot look at my blonde daughter and know that she is Black and white. Our society has a long way to go to apply this to people whose skin is black or brown.
We know that this issue is broader than the U.S. – look at the brown people being slaughtered today in Palestine, the people dying in wars in Africa that our media doesn’t inform us of, the millions of formerly untouchables in India struggling upward, shaking off the shackles of an unjust system that prevented them from pursuing their dreams because of the color of their skin.
So, today, I’m thinking of Martin Luther King Jr. and his actions and his marches, his speeches, the things that he and all the other people around him did to bring about the Civil Rights Act. I’m thinking about the fact that he died for this, and so did many others.
I’m also thinking of all the things people are doing today to tear down that Act and to make sure that Dr. King’s dream does not come true.
The word slavery is being sanitized out of our children’s lexicon. A slave is not the same as a refugee, and “enforced relocation,” which is horrific and applies to Native Americans and refugees of war, also needs to be addressed, is not slavery. The kidnapping and forced work camps (plantations), the theft of wages, the treatment and trafficking of humans as property, the separation of families through the sale of their bodies, the profit of slave owners who raped their enslaved persons and sold those children for profit, is slavery.
Students are not allowed to learn the history of Black people in their schools. Even I could not do this in my day because Black History was taught at the same time as Honors English, so I had to make the choice between learning about Black History or preparing for college. This should not be a choice.
In parts of the country, school libraries which would give access to children of color to learn about their history are being removed and replaced with discipline rooms.[1] Laws are being proposed to prevent people from talking about racism.[2] Young poets are being silenced as their works are banned in schools.[3]
I realize that I have work to do. Like the subject of adoption, addressing racism is difficult and often traumatizing to the person who is trying to talk about it. Most people don’t want to hear about it. They don’t want to know about it, they don’t want to think that it’s that bad, they want to ignore it. Most of all, however, they want to deny it hurts the person to whom it’s being applied.
For example, when I wrote about my grandmother never acknowledging me, and me being adopted out of the family because I was biracial, someone who read my piece said I was being severe to my grandmother.
I mean, really, in ordinary circumstances, all humanity, and the animal kingdom, if you wish to separate us, is conditioned to love babies. Think of what we will do to save a drowning puppy, pull a bunch of ducklings out of a drain, rescue a crying kitten from a tree. I even pulled a drowning baby opossum out of the pool one day with my pool net and went looking for its mother. When I watched the baby climb into the mother’s pouch, that’s the first time I knew something in North America was a marsupial – who knew?
But, I digress. Why do we not care that a white person disavowed their daughter’s daughter, and say that the granddaughter’s feelings are overblown? And lest you think that this is something that just happened in the forties, fifties or sixties, I’m sorry to say that on my bike trip up the California coast in the summer of 2022, I met a mother of two biracial children. Her boys had just graduated from college. Upright, good young men, productive, and hopeful for the future. These boys, both in their twenties, had never met their grandparents because this white woman’s parents refused to acknowledge their existence because their father was Black. It was also a rough day for that mother because one of those boys had been called a racial epithet on the freeway that day.
Why do we give people a pass for being cruel and inhumane?
Our grandparents are the stand-ins, many times the parents, who take in an orphan when a child’s parents have died. What would have happened to me in this circumstance? What would have happened to these two young men? I suppose it’s a good thing that the parents who adopted me just wanted a baby. They would just raise me to be white. But there was hardly a time when I was a small child that I wasn’t introduced as the mulatto child they had adopted. Every time this happened, the difference between us was highlighted, illuminated, drove a wedge between us.
Many people say they don’t see color, but any person who’s ever driven down a street and locked their car door because a Black man is walking by is not color blind. By the way, that Black man can hear that door lock and it cuts him to the heart.
The neighbor at the end of my block says that Black people should “expect that treatment, because they’ve chosen to be criminals.” This after she tells me that she treats everyone the same.
Any person who’s ever five-finger discounted an item, taken an illicit drug, drunk alcohol while under age, driven under the influence, exceeded the speed limit, cheated on their taxes, lied or given away assets to get government assistance, is a criminal, whether convicted or not, and that pretty much might encompass all of the human race. We all, then, have chosen a life of crime, and, in this neighbor’s reasoning, we should all lock our doors against each other.
But, to deal with crimes committed against Black people, in today’s society, if a person has ever denied someone else service, or a job, or not accepted them as a renter, or denied them a loan for a mortgage, or undervalued their assets because of their skin color, that person who committed those acts may have violated federal and state laws. Whether that person is caught or not, has paid a civil or criminal penalty or not, that person is a lawbreaker.
From a Black man’s perspective, every time they see a white person, they have to worry about their person and getting murdered. Black people are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white people, and unarmed Black people are 5 times more likely to be killed by police than white people. [4] How many times have white women falsely accused Black men of crime? Black people are 7 times more likely to be falsely convicted of a crime than white people.[5] So, all this matters, because this is about judging people by their skin color, and the terrible impact it has on the person whose skin tone is not white.
On a Fourth of July a couple of years ago, my friend and I were in a restaurant in Central California. An older woman, clearly wealthy, keeping herself young with all the face and body lifting she had had done, sat by herself, at the table catty-corner to ours, drinking a gin and tonic while she waited for her food. She interjected herself into our conversation, which at first was fun, asking us what we were doing there. When she found out my friend and I were writers, she told us that she read 52 books a year. Then she asked us what our three favorite books were, and who we were reading now.
I told her that I read in phases, for example, Jewish authors, or French authors, or Arabic diaspora writers. At that moment, I was reading Black authors about Black thought and philosophy.
Placing her gin and tonic in the center of her table, she leaned forward and said, “I’ll have you know, I don’t go in for that racism.”
My body tensed. Here it comes, I thought.
She gave a long monologue about how she had been a seventeen-year-old pregnant girl who had had to get married and fend for herself, and how she had figured it out so she and her husband could become wealthy.
Meanwhile, I was praying for grace, and kindness even as my heart started to pound and I developed a headache.
Answering a question honestly should not have led to a racist attack by a stranger.
“My favorite author is Ayn Rand,” she said. “And I believe in pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.”
The two young girls, one Asian, one Hispanic, who had been sat at the table between us that had had a reserved sign on it, called the waiter over and asked for a new table. They got up and followed the waiter into another room in the restaurant.
I wished I could have left with them. Instead, I kept eating my very expensive but now tasteless pasta as I searched for words to say. What I was thinking is, It’s hard to pull yourself up by the bootstraps when someone’s standing on your neck. I picked up my cloth napkin, wiped my lips, put it back in my lap.
“I am all for hard work, and education,” I said, “but because of my skin color, I see a lot of things that other people don’t see. I hear a lot of things that other people don’t hear. For example, when I worked for one of the major accounting firms, and a Black person interviewed for a job, the people who interviewed him laughed after he left, that he dared to think he could get a job there. That was in the 80s.”
The diner told us about her young son who had a college roommate that he spoke highly of, and who he brought home for Thanksgiving one year. Only then did she find out that the roommate was Black.
I had to think that her son knew of his mother’s prejudices and kept this a secret on purpose.
“That’s wonderful,” I said. “Kids these days are much better at this, and much more open. I’m talking about when I grew up.” The irony, of course, was that I was prevaricating. She had already told us that her son was fifty-nine. At the time of this restaurant dinner, I was fifty-seven. But to give grace, you must always give people an out.
We continued our conversation about books, writers, and readers, and exchanged phone numbers and emails at the end of the meal. The three of us called for our checks and walked out onto the street. The woman drove off in her Mercedes as we got into my friend’s Prius.
Driving away from the restaurant, and toward the fireworks, my friend said, “You handled that well.”
Inside, I didn’t feel I had handled it at all. I hadn’t said anything to make this person change her mind, at least in that moment. My stomach was a mess, my head pounding.
I never heard from that woman again, didn’t expect to. But perhaps I had planted a seed of thought that day.
And I too, have a dream, that one day the two halves of me can be seen (and felt) as a whole.
***
To read or listen the entirety of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech, please click on the following link. This will take you to the transcript of the speech and at the top of the transcript, you can listen to an audio recording of the speech.
[1] One of the Country’s Largest Districts Is Turning School Libraries Into Discipline Rooms (edweek.org)
[2] New Florida Bill To Consider Defamation If Accused of Racism, Sexism, Homophobia and Transphobia (msn.com)
[3] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/amanda-gormans-inauguration-poem-banned-by-florida-school
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/arent-more-white-people-than-black-people-killed-by-police-yes-but-no/
[5] https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Race%20Report%20Preview.pdf
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