Not a Woman with Hoodie Wandering without ID

I received a voice mail the other day that ended with, “Thank you for being a champion for human rights.”  I didn’t know that anything had been won.  It doesn’t even appear that we are in the first division or even in the playoffs.  I don’t see the championship.

For a brief half century, we enjoyed a period in our country’s history where, even against a cultural backdrop of resistance, we thought of the constitution as something to affirm, expand and ensure civil rights and liberties.  Today, that respect for rights, through constitutional measures, the law, or cultural attitudes seems to show up for corporations more often than for most of us.

I am not surprised that there is enough steam to put a statement in our state’s constitution that says we are against men marrying men and women marrying women.  The constitution is supposed to be a document that makes statements about who we are as a people and what rights we have as citizens.  With all the ungodly things that happen today in the context of legal marriages, we somehow have decided to bring up measures related to legal marriage against the population that has not even had the chance to screw it up like the straight population.

I am not surprised that, even though our country has a four-and-a-half century history of terror legislators feel the need to enact laws that will protect the “rights” of George Zimmerman and anyone who wants to enforce the lingering and pervasive terror against which we have little other protection: certainly not from police culture.

I am not surprised that men who do not even have or acknowledge sexual partners and do not have anything to do with a woman’s reproductive health are trying to decide what women should do or have access to with regard to their bodies.  I am not surprised that more men, especially conservative men, are not standing up to say that they do not want the government in the private, sexual parts of their wives–places that they believed were to be exclusively known by them as a right of marriage–and not equally uncomfortable with the government doing the same things with their daughters.

I am also not surprised that there is an effort afoot to prevent hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans from legitimately exercising their basic voting rights, and will quite pointedly hurt voting access to the populations elderly, students, and people who move with greater frequency than other populations (eg. the poor, racial minorities, women fleeing abusers, and anyone else who regularly flees oppression or the difficult situations imposed on them by the social and economic dysfunction protected by current "rights" campaigns), in order to prevent a mostly non-existent fraud that is less effective, more costly and less efficient than most legal, legitimate means to influence elections and get votes for the candidate you want.  I guess this right TO vote, a right for which many have died and were tortured and for which many still fight needs to be curbed by the arbitrary possession of a state ID.  It seems we don’t need to poll tax or poll “test” or land-ownership requirement to pre-determine the outcome of elections.

I expect that I will have a valid ID with me this upcoming election, as I expect that I will in several upcoming elections.  I did run out the door without my ID one election day, several years ago.  That was just once.
I expect that I will not start wearing hoodies.  Not my style.  No need to mess up my hair even more than the ill-quaffed doo that I have been urged to groom with more attention.  It is also a nice spring, so I guess I will not need it.

I do not expect that I will ever want to marry a man.  Even though it might help me get better health coverage, make it easier on my mom if something happens to me and someone has to make decisions about my care, maybe make it easier to inherit something in my later years, and I know that, if we made enough money, we would qualify for one of the Bush tax breaks.

I do not expect that I will grow a uterus any time soon, nor to I expect to gain the perspective to be given the primary responsibility that gives me the right to make ultimate decisions about one.

So, why am I writing about these other people?  It is obvious: I look enough like them to know that I am them.  I know enough about history, mine and those who came before me, to make me afraid of all the things that, as a boy, I thought I would not have to suffer because those things that were so awful were exposed and could not possibly continue–because they were so awful.

So, I stood in the Marriage Equity subcaucus at my Senate District convention two Sundays ago.  I comment on the fate of all our Trayvon Martins.  I remember the people who died, mostly in the south, and where tortured just because they wanted to vote.  But I don’t feel like a champion standing up for rights.  I don’t even feel like I  am in the game, hiding from the men with guns who have historically wanted and still today want the excuse to shoot me or take away my “reproductive” capacity.  I breath a sigh when I see those men and realize I do have my “documentation” with me.  I am no where near a place where I will be married.  Just sitting in the stands.

And in the mean time, I don’t care if the Major League pitcher had an affair with a guy when he was a teenager–much less what anyone did or did not do in high school.  It is none of my business what is happening with the insides of a woman I do not love.  Whether you look nice in the photo on your ID will not make you a better citizen or vote right, in my opinion.   And I still know with that of all the things the Bible says about marriage, none of them are part of the (im)moral right’s assertions of how the institution should be defined.

But some people have taken it upon themselves to “care.”  I don’t feel like a champion because they are winning.  One day, maybe it won’t be that way.

(Please comments at: http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/not-a-woman-with-hoodie-wandering-without-id/)

Swallow

Many things have crossed my mind this week. Some of them, I am still not sure are worthy of the space they might take up here or your time. Or this may be a Minnesotan excuse not to share. Or maybe the best ideas came to me on the edge of sleep and I neglected to keep my journal by my bed and they have since been forgotten.

One thing I remember from the past week is meeting writer Patricia Anita Young. We met at an informational meeting about a writers' retreat and workshop to which we are both applying. We are writers, so I guess we talked about stories. Our stories. Stories of our people.

I don't know how we got on the topic, but we spoke of the stories of the civil rights era. She talked about her mother and relatives who lived through the Jim Crow south, and her visits there as a young adult. She talked about the difference between the “Colored” restroom and the “White” one. Not equal, she said. Just like everything else.

She talked about how the common story of discrimination and segregation was not one all African Americans wanted to speak. She said that one of her elder's favorite words was “swallow.”

“Favorite.” So many of us are required to shut up. Pat spoke of a relative who was raped by a white cab driver with whom she had to work each day. When a white man raped a black woman, what gets said? What could she say? It was a generation and a half ago, in the segregated South. What could she say today? Who would listen? Who would be on trial? Or would her plaint even register as a sound on the tin ear drums of racial and gender injustice with which we still live?

Her family elder had words. Not just words, but a scream. I suspect that they were just left as tears on a pillow or a boiling blood rage in a night that had to be turned down in the light of the day in front of the ruling class—in front of the man whose privilege allowed him to touch her most sacred places, a place that is only for her to decide who goes in, not him, not her priest, not a law, not anyone. Allowed him to do it with absolute impunity.

She could not say. She had no voice. She had the words, emotions, understanding of what happened to her, what happened to that space that she might share with a love or at least someone with whom she consented to share, what happened to her body, what happened to any sense of safety or security she might have each day when she went to work. Instead, her words were swallowed.

But we swallow everyday. Some of us more than others. We talked about another local African American writer who had a book published a decade and a half ago about her experiences working in a very male, white dominated occupation, as a “lineman” for the phone company. It was supposed to be one of those what-it's-like-to-be-black-and-female-in-America stories that tells it like it is. Instead, every time she got to one of those places where it need to be acknowledged that what described what we face and how and why it is hurtful and destructive, she would pull her punch. She would say, well, it wasn't so bad. That it was just an interesting, funny story, ironic and silly, maybe even absurd. But not speak to the substance of what we live day to day that has left us with a caste, apartheid system enforced with terror.

She swallowed, just like we do so often. Whose comfort was she protecting? Who do we protect?

We swallow, because the hurt and anger of our speaking would hurt those to whom we direct our words that must be said. We swallow, not out of compassion, but for the knowledge of the consequences of speaking that is feeling that rage powerful enough to create that terror and apartheid.

We are trained to swallow that mouth full of dirt, instead of spitting it out back to the place from where it came. I do it every day. So do most women and most people of color. And those who will not be quiet often do not survive long, even doing so in the name of justice and self respect.

Maybe as we write, Patricia and I will spit out the words that we've swallowed for so long, that our foremothers and fathers swallowed, words that we swallow and words that we hope our daughters and sons will not swallow in the future. And maybe the people who care, care about us and care about our society, will get to hear the stories they have longed for.

And maybe some of those words will be worth your time. Some day, if not now. Some how. I hope so. 

LEAVE COMMENTS AT http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/swallow/ 

Chicken Along the Mason-Dixon Line

I had a deja vu moment this morning as I bit into a piece of chicken that was left over from last night's dinner.

The bite of chicken was a memory flash as brilliant as the memories invoked by our sense of smell. It was a memory from childhood and like so many, it was fond, but the realities behind it are less pleasant.

At first taste, I was brought back to a two-lane highway, somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line on a very hot summer day when all of us, the whole family of six, were glad to be out of the confined quarters of the station wagon, even to be baked by the sun at the picnic table of a wayside rest.

Years ago, I had the opportunity to spend some time in my son's fourth grade class. One day, I pulled read-out-loud-to-the-class duty. The book was The Watsons go to Birmingham—1963 (Bantam, Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers, 1995) by Christopher Paul Curtis. I read the scene of the Watsons' trip south to visit grandparents. As I read, I felt as if I were reading the story of the trips that our family took most summers of my childhood to New Orleans.

The Watsons took cold fried chicken with them. They ate out of their cooler. Not in restaurants.

Most African Americans of a certain age whose families traveled know this drill. Cold fried chicken, because it will keep for the long haul. It is cheaper than most other things that could be packed and much cheaper than buying meals on the road. On a hot summer day, with a can of soda to chase it down, it is delightful passing the lips. We didn't know—or care that other people were stopping into a local diner to be served their bite to eat.

As kids, we didn't really know that those road-side diners existed because my father was not going to bring his family into one, especially one south the the Mason-Dixon.

When we, or most other African American families, traveled, we packed provisions because there was no guarantee that we would be welcome in any establishment; that basket of chicken was vital. So were the wayside rests where we knew we could stop. Regardless of whether other people were happy we were there, they had little authority to tell us to leave.

Even today—especially today, people take for granted public accommodations. (Certain political ideologies are not keep on paying for them, those most associated with dispositions that will have little trouble being welcome at every place to eat.) Some of us know that there are just places we cannot go, are not allowed or where we must at least endure the hot glares on the backs of our necks in order to do things as simple as use a restroom or eat at a restaurant. There are places in this country that are tacitly declared off limits. Those places are closer and far more numerous than most of us, even I, are willing to admit.

Our trips to New Orleans were to visit grandma and grandpa. On most of our trips to the south, we stopped in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. It was close to the midway on the two-day trip to the Mississippi delta. There was a more important reason for stopping there for the night. Past this point, we were entering the American South, where we could not be sure which establishments would “have a vacancy” for US. Would mother and father be able to find a place that would welcome our patronage?

We were kids. We looked forward to the hotel stay. We looked forward to Cape Girardeau, where we knew we would get our treat, a motel stay almost as wonderful as the two or three weeks we would spend at grandma and grandpa's. The stories of danger and trepidation that lie just off the thoroughfare were just stories that were tucked neatly in a package of lore that we should not forget, cautionary tales to be heeded by little black children, but that we should not fret about, because we were just children and we were on vacation to grandma and grandpa's.

Meanwhile, my father worried, only slightly as a wise and brave protector. My mother worried, because that is the job of mothers. We set worry aside, opened the cooler and pulled out the cold fried chicken and maybe potato salad. We jumped from bed to bed until mother said, “You kids are driving me crazy,” and “Get in the tub,” and wondered when the motel staff would bring the folding bed for the younger siblings.

Soon, we would be in New Orleans. We would eat well and mostly forget how wonderful the cold chicken seemed. We would have a mountain of red soda (or cold drink, as they called it) that grandma tried to make as big as her of love that could more than fill the Gulf of Mexico. We ran around in the sweltering heat of the city, again only slightly aware of the dangers that lurked in the craziness of that place and which mother and father tucked away in their own childhood memories.