Peter's Cross Station

Blessings and Curses

Two annoying phrases in the media regarding the Obama-Wright controversy have been bouncing around my brain lately.  The first is "should Obama be judged by the company he keeps?" (via Salon) and the second is "Is Jeremiah Wright 'typical' of Black preachers?" (via NPR).

To the first, I say heartily, "absolutely!" by which formula Obama's association with Wright boosts him in my esteem.  To the second I say "what?"

It reminds me of a piece NPR did when I was living in D.C. called "The Other Side of the River" which was a multiple-installment report on the Anacostia neighborhood of D.C.  In typical white-liberal fashion, the report assumed the listener lived on "this" side of the river.  Much as within white supremacy, all "people" are white until marked otherwise, the river's "other" side was of course, the Black neighborhood.

NPR assumes its listeners are a bunch of white liberals who now have cause to worry about what Black People Are Saying in Church.  Just like there's not one "Black Family" which all us white transracial adopters need to emulate to do right by our children, there is more than one Black Church.  And anyway, Wright isn't even part of a traditionally Black denomination!  The UCC is mostly white.  His church, as he explains in the Moyers interview (I'm gonna keep hounding you until you've all watched it and reported back to me) was planted on the south side of Chicago by white liberals imagining an integrated church.  But no white people really ever showed up, so the church decided to give up and embrace its Blackness.

I dare you to find a "typical" Black preacher any quicker than you can find a typical white one.  Is John Hagee one?

My ambivalence about the democratic primary race evaporated the second the Clinton campaign (and/or its surrogates) started playing the race card.  I was done with Clinton as soon as Gloria Steinem and Geraldine Ferraro started hinting around that Obama was an unqualified affirmative-action case.  I was beyond done when this Jeremiah Wright stuff started.  Because, as the signs say, Wright is right.  And Wright's use of the spotlight to draw more attention to the issues about which he so deeply cares is nothing but spiritual opportunism at its best, if you ask me.

Wright got in trouble for suggesting that God may not bless "America" when it takes actions contrary to justice.  So, how do those who couldn't handle Wright's words manage to digest this:

"Then he looked up at his disciples and said:
‘Blessed are you who are poor,
   for yours is the kingdom of God.
‘Blessed are you who are hungry now,
   for you will be filled.
‘Blessed are you who weep now,
   for you will laugh.

‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you* on account of the Son of Man.  Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

‘But woe to you who are rich,
   for you have received your consolation.
‘Woe to you who are full now,
   for you will be hungry.
‘Woe to you who are laughing now,
   for you will mourn and weep.

‘Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.*

Jesus preached that.  But then, Jesus wasn't really very typical was he?

If some white Christians aren't hearing this Word in their churches, maybe they need to go visit Wright's church, or one like it.  Because they are missing half of the story if they stop with the blessings.

* Luke 6:20-26

Why We're "Mostly" Vegetarians

We are omnivores over here, but we eat very little meat. We simply can't afford to eat it more than about once a week, because we only eat expensive, locally, organically raised meat. When this news came down on Wednesday, I wasn't exactly shocked:

"The current industrial farm animal production system often poses unacceptable risks to public health, the environment and the welfare of the animals themselves, according to an extensive 2½-year examination conducted by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production..."

This video is a great 20-minute documentary which highlights a piece of the problem and impressively addresses the environmental racism that is often overlooked when people discuss this topic:

I Still Like Jeremiah Wright

Politics as usual. Obama himself is backing away. But he has to. I don't. I am not running for president.

I can't believe the press is acting like Jeremiah Wright has somehow created a race problem that otherwise wouldn't have existed here in post-race (ha) U.S. America.

Daniel Schorr, who I usually applaud heartily when I hear him on NPR, said that he knew young Black men who had never heard of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments which ended in 1972, but (said Schorr in a chastening tone) Wright talks about it as if they happened yesterday. Well, 1972 wasn't exactly ancient history, now was it? That would be 8 years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It would be 4 years after the assasination of Martin Luther King Jr. If young Black men of Daniel Shore's acquaintance haven't ever heard of it, that's a travesty of miseducation. Gee, that sounds like something Jeremiah Wright would say...

The claim that without Wright's corrupting influence, Obama could have somehow "transcended race" (as Shore put it) or that "we" as U.S. citizens have "gotten past" ugly racism just rings absolutely insincere to me. How could anyone with eyes and ears--let alone professional journalists--fail to notice that race hasn't gone away in this country?

I implore you, if you have not already done so, to go and watch, listen or read that Moyers interview I posted about last week. Don't just take the word of public radio on this one. They are wrong. Wright is correct. Racism is alive and well in the United States and it affects people's lives every single day.

An Obama presidency will doubtlessly do very little to change that. But Obama's candidacy should not be sunk by hysteria over someone preaching the Gospel even if it is hard to hear.

Jeremiah Wright on Bill Moyers Journal Tonight

Don't know if you saw it, but...wow!  Jeremiah Wright is smart, kind and good-looking.  He didn't say a single word I disagree with.  Moyers also played longer clips of the sermons that were cut to meaningless shreds for anti-Obama hysteria purposes.  I was standing up in my living room shouting Amen, and so was Cole and she's an atheist.  David Brooks said tonight on the News Hour that Wright should just keep his mouth shut if he wants to help Obama.  He couldn't have been more wrong.

Check out the interview here.

So Many Posts, So Little Time...

I am strapped for blogging time this month. If I had time, here's what I'd be telling you about:

1. Stuff White People Think is Funny (or not) and Why (or not). (Topic requested by reader and jewelry patron, Martha.)

2. Lazy Home-Made Baby Food Shortcuts Discovered by Shannon the Second Time Around

3. Interesting Ways in which Nat is Beginning to Express Growing Understandings of Her Adoption

4. Cute Things the Sisters Are up to These Days

5. Pics of Nat's Birthday (more than a month later!)

6. More about the Big Freelance Writing Job and Why I am Asking for Your Help and Whose Help I'd Like Next

7. A Roundup of Books I've Been Reading Lately on the Topics of Race and Homeschooling (but not both together in one book)

8. Other (specify)

Please vote for your favorite! I'll try to get them out in order of popularity within the next month.

Air kisses!

Sometimes Patriotism Looks Anti-American

I have been so upset about the goings on in the democratic primary lately that I have tried not to let myself hear any news. I don't want to hear any more about how Clinton surrogates are suggesting Obama is an undeserving affirmative action case. I don't want to hear any more about how unacceptable it is for Obama to be friends with a passionate critic of the U.S. government. But after pestering me and pestering me about it, Cole finally got me to watch Obama's Big Race Speech. If anything, he was too conciliatory for my taste, though he was politically just about as perfect as I can imagine anyone being on the subject. And wow, the media has been talking about the possibility that Black people and white people aren't completely honest about their feelings about race to each other's faces. That alone is a major rhetorical Obama victory as far as I'm concerned.

It's just really hard for someone who has studied a lot of nineteenth century American history (okay, me) to listen to white people complain that Black people aren't patriotic enough or are "anti-American" when they criticize the country. (Yeah, yeah, I know the whole Rev. Wright thing is all crazy-beyond-the-pale, but whatever. I am not shocked by it. I'm shocked that more people don't talk like that more often, frankly. People in general--especially non-white and otherwise less than perfectly privileged people--are far less angry and suspicious of the government than they ought to be, in my opinion.)

Anyway, the whole Obama thing has been steeping in my subconcious for a couple of days and then I watched the first two installments of HBO's John Adams mini-series and suddenly the light bulb went off and I realized what I wanted to tell you all. I wanted to tell you that one of the greatest orators in U.S. history had some "Anti-American"-but-patriotic things to say in his time, and his tireless leadership made America more American for the generations after him. Please take a minute and read one of my favorite things ever written by one of my favorite Dead American Heroes:

What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" by Frederick Douglass, 1852.

I also wanted to tell ya'll why Hillary Clinton needs to bone up on her early suffragette history, but anovelista did it so beautifully (including most excellent references), that I see no reason to waste my time doing it a tenth as well.

Amen

In case you haven't seen it yet, here's Obama's speech.

Tears and Teaching

Nicole commented below:

There is a story (more of an image, or maybe several stories packed into the image) that you've told quite a few times about your (privileged, white) students "with tears in their eyes" demanding that you tell them what they can do about racism when they first confront racial guilt during one of your classes.

That image/story/moment seems to be something of a touchstone for you, but also it seems that you find the experience(s?) exasperating.

Is that accurate, the observation of your exasperation? And if so, what's exasperating you? Some sense that these kids should have clued in to this reality way before they got to your classroom? Or with being annoyed that they are making a gigantic, drama-filled deal out of "discovering" said reality?

And, exasperated or not, what does this experience of the crying students mean for you as a teacher? Does it/did it significantly change your teaching style?

Also, Jody asked for my thoughts on online adjunct teaching.

I'll try to hit both here.

First, tears and exasperation.

I will answer the first part of the question last, about teaching style. Because my teaching style probably makes room for tears in a way other teaching styles wouldn't. The kids I'm thinking of who have cried (and otherwise emoted quite passionately on this topic) have been first-year students in a required composition class.

The way I taught composition at that time was to hit on about six challenging social topics that I thought would inspire my students to get all riled up and interested in sharing their opinions and thus in learning to write a strong rhetorical essay. In class we did debates and heated discussions and theatre exercises and group writing and all kinds of fun things to get the students intellectually, socially and emotionally involved with each other, the class and the material they were reading/watching. I also always took my first-year students on a field trip to the Smithsonian National Zoo early in the semester. It's an old habit from my preschool teaching days. I wanted them to see pandas while they could, since pandas probably won't be on the planet by the time they have kids of their own. I wanted to give them non-alcoholic options for entertaining themselves and I wanted to force them to learn to use the Metro. The field trip was always outside of class time and voluntary, but usually at least half of them would come.

In short, I paid attention to building trust and intimacy in my classroom because we were going to be talking about difficult things they had all been taught not to discuss in polite company.

So sometimes I got tears as a result of their learning about some of the history of the U.S government and American Indians, or about Christopher Columbus and what he did to the indigenous people on the islands he landed on, or about lynching (including the carnivalesque, celebratory atmosphere so many lynchings had). I think their tears and other dramatic displays were about their own exasperation at having never learned about this stuff before, and shock at discovering what they considered themselves to be heirs to.

I didn't find them exasperating at all. I expect the first response of basically good people (ie: my students) to be horror and maybe even guilt at these parts of history. They were just 18 and learning for the first time. But I was certainly exasperated along with them that they had no idea about any of it before they took my class. As one kid told me "I've learned more American history in this English class than I learned in AP American history last year!" They were horrified to learn about Columbus chopping off people's hands because they failed to bring in their daily quota of gold, I was horrified to learn that their fancy schools--public or private--hadn't taught them about it earlier. Teaching these kids fresh out of hoity-toity high schools from suburban New York, Boston, DC, Philadelphia, San Diego, Denver, etc. laid bare for me just what and how they had been taught previously to think about the world and their place in it and how hard the systems they came from had worked to miseducate them so as not to see problems with something that was clearly working in their favor.

If they started with teary guilt, I tried to get them around to seeing that guilt wasn't helpful, but perhaps a sense of responsibility was in fact, quite called for and then kind of leave them to decide how they wanted to take responsibility. Most times, they would ask me what they should do. I would give them some ideas, but tell them that was really their business. And since so many of them wanted to go into politics or public service, they really did have some concrete options for making real changes in their career paths that might address their concerns.

So tears are a repeating story for me when I think about teaching Race in the U.S. 101 because they are a dramatic illustration of the work that's been done to erase certain things for certain people and the work that needs to be done to recover the palimpsest behind AP American History. A few teary students suddenly re-evaluating their whole (okay, only 18-year-long) lives is a moving thing to encounter as a teacher. I tend to love my students dearly and think the very best of them. One of the reasons I teach is because it turns me into a better person. I tend to be quite annoyed with the general run of humanity much of the time, but hand me a classroom of bushy-tailed (or even cynically posing) young adults and I am Mother Teresa.

Funny story. One time, after teaching "How Capitalism Works 101" and an Andre Codrescu essay about the incompatibility of capitalism and democracy, a student blurted out, "What am I going to do? My father is a corporate lawyer!" No kidding, that really happened. I told her to settle down, stop fretting and use his money to fund the revolution.

Another student whose father was law school buddies with dubya (again, no kidding) called him up and said, "Dad how can you be a [you guessed it] corporate lawyer, if you were a philosophy major in college? Philosophy is about seeking the Truth!"

See? Aren't they adorable?

So the tears don't bother me except as they reveal the shortcomings of U.S. education. Then yes, I am definitely exasperated. And it is a touchstone. When I start to get annoyed at someone's ignorance about race, I think of those tears and figure a whole bushel of people never took a class like that one and so haven't have their big breakthrough about white privilege yet.*

How does this relate to online teaching?

It's a whole other ballgame, exasperating for its own reasons.

Online teaching per se is not the greatest gig I ever had. The technology is annoying and the support is not great and the syllabus is set in stone and written by someone other than me several years ago when the book we use for the class (that I am required to use) was in its first edition, rather than its second. So half the material for the class (again, not generated by me) is inaccurate. And they won't let me fix it. That is, I fix it every single semester by tweaking the syllabus as necessary, but they won't let me do a grand redesign of the class. I think it's because I'm a peon or something. But in the world of online teaching everyone is a peon. And anyway, fine, so don't let me redesign the class, but have someone do it! But no. So that's really a pain.

The students I teach online are pretty much a total demographic opposite of those kids in DC. Most of my students are African American (possibly because I am teaching African American literature, but I do think the school--brick and mortar and online--is majority African American anyway). Most of them are adults with kids, maybe partners, usually full-time jobs and many of them are military or military spouses. Over the summer I had a single mom of three who had three weeks' notice that she was going back to Afghanistan (again) and had to relocate her kids out of state with relatives on that short notice.

Some of my students are quite dazzlingly talented. They're keen readers and great writers. But some are honestly what I'd call barely literate. And it's awfully hard to do well in a class whose format is exclusively writing when you aren't sure what makes for a complete sentence. Most students fall between the extremes. But the ones at the low end exasperate me for the same reasons the tears exasperate me. These students are often quite sharp at picking up on concepts and themes in the literature we're reading. They "get it" right away even if they can't write a clear essay about it. They've been miseducated not to be able to express themselves.

(I have a real sense of where they come from, too, because the high school where I taught in DC sent many kids on to the school whose online program I am teaching for. I can picture them. I saw a lot of kids leave that school with HS diplomas who couldn't make sense of their own horoscope in the daily newspaper. I use that example because every day, I had kids asking me to explain their horoscope to them. The school got free papers. After a few requests of this sort, I started using the horoscopes to teach them reading comprehension and vocabulary on the sly. By the way, for a while there, I was teaching at the high school during the day while also teaching an evening class at the university. Talk about the social bends.)

Mind you, I don't think there's a smoke-filled room where bald white guys are saying "keep lynching out of AP history and make sure the poor Black kids don't have enough books." But there kind of almost is.

They don't pay me enough to work as hard as I'd need to work to get the low-end students up to snuff. But I do focus very much on writing, and I give them many opportunities to workshop drafts with me and other students and I try really hard to teach them at least one or two basic principals of writing they can take with them into other classes or work, or where ever.

I am somewhat torn about online teaching because it's just not that great for me or for my students. But it's accessible in a way that other education options are not. And many of my students--probably the majority of them--couldn't finish their degrees without doing at least some of the work online. So I am exploited labor and in a way, the students are cash-cows for the school (though I do think the program I teach for is as good as online education can get) and you can only do so much for the ones who are slipping through the cracks, but in another way, I get to work with a population who I really care about and want to see educated and getting better jobs and more respect and other things a degree can help bring.

And it's a convenient job. My teaching is all asynchronous because students can literally be scattered across the globe (I had a Navy guy on a ship in the Mediterranean once), so I check in at my convenience and I can take the job anywhere there's a $t@bucks with wireless access. I took it to Hawaii last summer. And there are five semesters a year in the is program so I can pick up a job almost anytime and get some spare cash. I took the summer job at the last minute after we were matched with Ivy last summer, so we could pay her living expenses. So it's a handy job to have. I suppose I'd recommend it for limited income, keeping your toe in the door of academia (maybe just a toenail, really) and meeting some interesting people. And it is the Way of the Future when it comes to higher education. It's so "cost effective" that universities can't resist it. Having some experience in it is probably an asset to a real academic resume (I go back and forth sometimes about whether it's an asset or a liability--probably depends on your field. Snobby English? Mostly liability I guess.)

And now I am going to end this tome wihtout a pithy conclusion. Again, I'm posting every day, what more do you want?

*Which reminds me of something that happened at the adoption conference that I need to blog about.

More About Diversity or Lack Thereof

Allie comments:

"One of my concerns about seeking diversity is always that I don't want anyone to feel like I'm 'using' friendship or acquaintance with them as some sort of lesson for my kids. I know how that feels and I don't like it when it is done to me..."

And it's really high time I addressed that here, because some version or other of that concern pops up a lot when I start talking about this in various contexts.

I'm going to start with how I feel when I get the idea that I'm someone's token lesbian friend. For the most part, I don't really mind as long as I really am a friend and not a colorful entertainment or the repressed object of some closet case's desire. (That can happen a lot with lesbians who wear their outness on their sleeves. The not-so-out can become hangers-on. That's emotionally taxing and often truly problematic in many ways.)

But if I just "happen" to be someone's only lesbian friend, that's not a big problem for me, nor is it a problem when or if that person wants to "use" my family as a example to teach her children something (or enlighten herself, for that matter). I prefer honest questions to ignorant silence every time. And I'm all in favor of the children of straight people learning about lesbian families, and happy to be of service--again, as long as it is rooted in genuine friendship. (And you never know which kids are going to grow up to be queer. I feel an obligation to all children to show them that it's a perfectly fine thing to grow up to be.)

I mostly feel the same way about adoption and about race in our adoption, though I'm getting more cautious of how I talk around the kids themselves. I'm pretty happy to answer almost any question, honestly asked for the purposes of better understanding (and certainly for purposes of adoption research) when my kids aren't around. I think I have a pretty good radar for knowing when the questioners are just prurient curiosity seekers. For one thing, they tend to out themselves by starting to tell me some third-hand adoption horror story. Major red flag.

And I never want my children themselves to be "used" as diversity for other children. If we happen to be real friends, that's fine. But I would be livid if a school separated my child from the only other Black child in the grade so that each classroom could have a token Black kid, for example (a real-life scenario some friends went through).

On to how I feel about seeking out relationships with people of color so that my children will have peers and adults in their lives who look like them and can give them an "indigineous" sense (if you will) of what their own Blackness (or other minority identity, but I will use Blackness as shorthand here since it's our main concern) means to them and how they "live" it in their daily lives.

This is the thing I most often hear anxiety about from would-be transracially adoptive parents. Some version of "Won't I look like a phony, obviously only making overtures of friendship because I have a Black kid?" My answer to that is, "maybe." And also, "so what?"

This question is absolutely loaded with an anxiety born of resting on white privilege. And I will explain at length, because I have a feeling that to a person, the people expressing this concern very much mean well. But it's a privilege not having to move beyond your racial comfort zone if you don't want to; a privilege to appear to be "neutral" (that is, having no "vested interest" because white isn't a thing with interest attached) and therefor more trustworthy on issues of race; a privilege to call yourself "not racist" while not knowing a single non-white person with whom you might exchange more than surface pleasantries.

Here's an illustrative tale from real life:

On Nat's first Fourth of July, we were in Washington, D.C.. The best place to watch the fireworks in D.C. is from a hilltop parking lot of a church in Anacostia. (For those who don't know, Anacostia is a very nearly 100% African American, very poor quarter of D.C. When you hear about the D.C. murder rate, about 90% of those murders are in Anacostia. The rest of the city is mostly murder-free.) I knew about this parking lot because a (white) friend of mine--a retired Episcopal priest--used to serve a church in Anacostia. Also, Anacostia is where the Frederick Douglass House is, and that's also on a hill with a nice view and it's one of my favorite "tourist" sites in D.C.. (Never mind that most tour guides don't even mention it, because the neighborhood is not exactly Our Nation's Pride. In fact, Cole, seeing it for the first time called it "U.S. Apartheid.")

Anyway, up the hill we went to watch the fireworks. My retired priest friend, Cole, me and baby Nat all wrapped in her baby carrier, but with her little brown arms and legs dangling out. And I spent an inordinant amount of time worrying that everyone there (we were the only white people in a crowd of about 500) would think we were only there because of Nat, when in fact, by golly, I had gone there long before considering parenthood or adoption and I wanted "credit" for that!

In short, those little brown dangling appendages took away my White Liberal Prestige. Another white privilege lost. I got over it, of course.

When it comes to making overtures of friendship towards Black people that are at least partly "for" my children, well, we do a lot for our children that requires sacrifice or causes us discomfort. If I make someone mad or annoy someone or someone says something that hurts my feelings or wounds my pride, in the process of this reaching out, I can deal with that. I'm a big girl. Discomfort is part of parenthood in all kinds of ways.

But as it happens, no one has ever responded that way. Not a stranger on the street, not a friend, not a professional acquaintance. Whatever might be said behind our backs, our children are embraced with warmth and love and an insider "nod" by Black people 100% so far. And even if only for the children's sake, those adults treat us kindly too. I have no qualms about walking my white self with my Black children into an all-Black space and being read as the lady who is only here because of her kids (even if it isn't always true--sometimes it is!). If that's what it takes to do what I consider to be the perhaps number one most important thing I can do for my children, I'll do it.

I realize that there's a big difference between being white, raising Black kids and needing to cross these uncomfortable boundaries and being white with white kids trying to do the same. And I can't speak to that. But I do think that overall, if you truly care about this stuff and you truly want to make a real effort to give your children experiences that will allow them to grow up and build a more racially just world* you just have to suck it up and be willing to have a Black Person Be Mad At You. I know, that's a white liberal's biggest fear. But oh well.

And like I said, more often thatn not, your fears are probably unfounded.

Now do please continue to leave excellent comments or write your own posts because I am really enjoying the discussion.

* "Race" standing in here, for all kinds of justice, really.

Belated Response

A long time ago, at my request, hydrogeek left a question for future blogging. I haven't answered it yet, because it's a stumper, but here goes my lame attempt. The question was:

"I live in a very small town with little in the way of diversity of any sort. I would like to raise my daughter in such a way to help her keep racism and sexism at bay in her mind and in her life. Do you have any things that you say, or little reinforcements that can help with the overall sense of self worth? I've tried to be very sensitive to praise her trying and working hard, rather than just telling her how pretty she is all the time, but I'm pretty sure at 8 months old this is only going to get harder. Do you have a few rules of thumb? A bullet point list? A how-to guide on raising an open-minded hard working girl in a mostly privileged white atmosphere?"

See what I mean about it being a stumper? Because nobody died and made me the expert on these things, you know? It's very hard for me to approach this because my strong belief is that people learn through experience, and without the experience of being among many people who are different from yourself, and being with them in a deep and meaningful way, I honestly don't know if I think much more than a theoretical opposition to racism or sexist or whatever is actually possible.

But, I suppose a theoretical opposition isn't a terrible place to start out as a young adult entering a world more diverse than the one of your childhood, so I'm not saying it isn't worth a try.

I saw a book recently that I didn't buy, but think I'm going to because the book I did buy on that same trip mentions it as a good resource for someone in hydrogeek's exact circumstances. The book is What if All the Kids are White? Anti-Bias, Multicultural Education with Young Children and Families. I didn't buy it because it doesn't speak directly to anything I need right now, though I did find the whole idea interesting, if also really sad. The book is aimed at teachers and the title pretty much announces school integration to be dead and buried (yes, I know your school is a wonderful, high-quality one full of beautiful rainbows of diversity, but it is the exception, gentle reader). One reason I didn't take the book home is my denial about that or my refusal to accept it, or something. I really want to work at school integration, at quality education for all children, not accept where we are and try to work with it. Of course, that would be the practical thing to do, as things are not going to change fast enough for kids who are in school right now. Still, there just seems to be something in that book's title that admits defeat.

Anyway, I digress, but I do plan to read the book in the near future. Maybe it's got some brilliant ideas for hydrogeek and all of us.

Meanwhile, in a very general sense, here are some bullet-points about what we do with our kids:

- because our children are African American (and yes, biracial counts) we do give straight-up ordinary "you're beautiful"-type compliments a lot. I blogged about that to some readers' initial dismay here (read through it, it's got a lot of other stuff, too) and in follow-up here When it boils right down to it, Alfie Kohn can jump in a lake. My children don't get pummeled with a thousand messages a day that they're beautiful and capable people, so I pummel them as much as I can myself. A sense of ontological worth is a good thing for any Black girl or woman to have.

- but we do the Kohn-approved kind of praise too. I spend a lot of time encouraging Nat to "keep trying" telling her that the tasks she is working on are difficult and require a lot of effort and that her effort is admirable and that she will be able to do it someday if she keeps trying and practicing. If she succeeds at something after a lot of effort, I say "wow you worked really hard, you tried and tried and you did it!"

- we try to educate for compassion in a general sense. I always encourage Nat to view smaller, weaker creatures than herself with kindness and care. Before she had a baby sister (who makes for excellent practice on this all day long) I was constantly saying things to her like "be gentle with the plant. The plant needs its leaves to be healthy. We have to take care of the plant because it's a living things, and we have to take care of living things." Nat feeds the cats every morning with Uncle David. And I always exhort her to appreciate how "cute" and "tiny" bugs are and to be very gentle with them because they're very fragile. Now mind you, I'm no Buddhist. I'm not above killing certain bugs. But I do think at Nat's age, distinguishing when to squash something and when not to (baby sisters, for example) is over her head, so we are just focusing on care and compassion.

- And in keeping with that, I try not to pass my own prejudices on to my kids. Not just about people or whatever (duh!) but about everything--foods that are yummy or yucky, things that are pretty or ugly, animals that are cute or creepy, etc. I want them to be as free as possible to develop and express their own feelings and opinions about things.

These are pretty vague and don't directly address "diversity" or lack of it but it's been interesting to call to mind these little things that I do without much thinking that probably illustrate some of our values and how we pass them to our children. But for that diversity stuff, nothing beats real life people who are different from you. And in the smallest town there is always going to be someone who fills that bill. Meet and befriend her!

A Language Joint

Reader Mary emailed a question I thought I'd answer here:

… Linguists have been teaching that AAE is a language separate from English, with a completely different grammatical structure.

... As a PhD in English and a mother of African American children, I wonder what your thoughts on this issue are.

I’m not a linguist, so I’m not going to quibble about the official definition of a separate language. But in my personal experience, I always say that if I understood it, it was English, because English is the only language in which I’m fluent. I’ve always just considered English to be a good deal broader than many people consider and to include multiple grammars. If these are considered separate languages by linguists then, yea! I am multi-lingual and didn’t know it.

Do you plan to expose Nat and Selina to AAE, or are they already exposed to this? Do your adult African American friends speak AAE around you or when talking among other African Americans?

Since I’m not sure what the boundaries are of some officially separate African American English, I can’t really say. I will say that various non-standard English dialects are spoken around my children on a regular basis, including African American patterns, working-class white patterns, southern white/Black (they overlap mostly) patterns, etc.

If your girls' birth families speak AAE and they remain in contact with them, how will you teach them to view this? Nat, being the language genius that she is/will be, may recognize their speech patterns as wrong and incorrect, a view commonly held by Standard English speakers.

How will you teach her about the different languages? Will you be open to Nat speaking AAE when she is in the AA community as long as she can code-switch when in a formal setting?

See, I don’t anticipate this ever being an issue. We don’t view varying ways to speak English as wrong, so it’s not likely she’d necessarily see it this way. Standard English will be her mother tongue, but she has lots of exposure to other types of language as well.

But when I was teaching English in a public school in DC, I used to deal with this quedtion every day. I wanted my students not just to know Standard English, but to know when and where to use it, without disrespecting their mother tongue versions of English. It’s not easy to teach Standard English without seeming to negatively judge other forms, but I did the very best I could.

Sometimes I used “the way I talk” as a stand-in for “standard” with my students. For example, one day I was having a discussion with a boy about whether or not it was safe for me to leave my bag in my room unattended. He insisted, “You can’t trust nobody, Miss Lady!”

I said, “you mean, you can’t trust anybody, Jose?”

“That’s right, Miss Lady, you can’t trust nobody!”

“But how would I say that, Jose?” I asked again.

“Oh!” he answered, getting it, “you can’t trust anybody!”

He knew the difference. I didn’t need to teach him the standard version. I just needed to help cultivate his awareness of when to switch forms (at school with an English teacher, for example).

When I did lessons for kids about common mistakes in beginning essay writing, I included things like mismatched number between pronouns and antecedents (eg: “someone might want their daughter to grow up to be president”). I would describe this as something you hear a lot in speech that is not the best way to write for school papers. I’d invite students to give different examples from their own lives of how different people say the same things. Then I would tell them that what most of their teachers want them to write in school, or lots of employers want to hear in a job interview is called “Standard English.” We’d talk about how people like me (Miss Lady!) talk, versus how their grandmother from the Dominican Republic talks versus how their uncle from Georgia talks, etc. etc.

I know it’s not possible to teach Standard English without raising the spectre of “correct” and “incorrect” but I never use those words when I teach it. I just talk about different ways to talk to different people in different contexts.

Another way I’d teach vocabulary for things like SATs would be to offer them three words, and ask them to give me back three words. I’d give them three “SAT” words to look up, define and use in a sentence, then I’d ask them to give me three words not found in the dictionary (or not found with their definition), but in common use among them and their peers or relatives, ask them to write their own definitions and give me a sample sentence. One example I got was “joint” used to mean “thing” or “event” (And this is how dumb I was at the time—I had a lightbulb moment of realizing what “A Spike Lee Joint” meant.)

If you study English long enough, you realize that it is constantly changing and has drastically changed from its early forms. Old and Middle English require translation skills, and can’t be read by a modern English speaker. (Believe me, I spent many miserable nights translating them during the nasty cold, dark, Hillary Term in Oxford.) Shakespeare, whose English was modern English, just like ours, wrote in a way that many people these days have trouble understanding. Spelling was not standardized until dictionaries became common in the nineteenth century and educated, upper-class men like Thomas Jefferson might well spell the same word in different ways in the same document and not be thought to have made a mistake. The same is true for rules of capitalization, punctuation and for quite a bit of grammar.

I grew up being told that “ain’t” was improper English and shouldn’t be used. That is completely untrue. “Ain’t” is a perfectly legitimate contraction for “is not” used by Elizabethan writers and speakers all the time (Shakespeare again, for example). That word, along with “yonder,” “ya’ll” and other words and expressions survived years of linguistic change in the isolated Appalachian region and later, when other places with more cultural capital had stopped using those expressions they became associated with poor, uneducated people. My southern family didn’t want their offspring speaking in that way. But it’s just good old Shakespeare’s English.

I have every hope that my daughters will be multilingual across languages as well as within English, across its forms. Whether those forms constitute separate languages is not for me to say, but I believe the more ways you can say or write something, the more ways you can think, so we will cultivate knowledge of languages and their appropriate contexts in every possible way in our family.

4th

One of my favorites.

But...

Now I feel I must respond to your concerns over my feelings about the Duke Lacrosse thing.

I pounded that out this morning thinking "folks will say stuff about this and I can then clarify later." Which is lazy writing--blogging or otherwise.

But here's some clarification. It doesn't so much matter to me about the specific guilt or innocence of the boys in question (or their accuser for that matter). What I am troubled by is the quick and easy recourse people had in that case to leap to available discourses of gender and race and guilt and innocence and how ugly a lot of that talk was/is.

But I am speaking from a quite theoretical place where language and the histories it evokes matter as much or even more than specific events. And that's what I was getting at when I said that while legal and economic and social circumstances change, this psychic thing in the U.S. imagination remains a constant. And that is what troubles me.

As for black men killing each other, I'll tell you what I told my students when I compared the high numbers of black male deaths to homocide with lynching. They said: "but this is black men killing each other and that's not racism." I told them that I firmly believe that if it weren't for white supremacy, black men would not be killing each other in such numbers. There is a long, complex history behind black-on-black violence. And however more common it is than police brutality, police brutality is still a reality for black men--as is less dramatic police harassment.

I have a (black male) friend who teaches at Duke and he felt completely silenced during the whole lacrosse team bruhaha. There was no room, he felt, to even raise these kinds of issues in the atmosphere of "our boys are innocent" bracelets, etc. And whatever the outcome of the case, these issues--easy racist and misogynist rhetoric--were (are) reality.

I still feel awful about the whole Duke thing. Some of the things people said in the course of this certainly merit some discussion.

And are not "innocent."

Thank You, Don Imus

Cole said watching (her old acquaintance) Vivian Stringer, Rutgers' women's basketball coach made her cry this morning. Nat was watching with her and Cole just told her "look at that beautiful, smart woman on t.v.!"

What luck to have a two year-old with whom we can address the whole thing this way.

But what makes me cry is the rumor that tomorrow, all charges will be dropped against all the white boys from Duke who allegedly assaulted a young Black woman last year (and whom this article just calls "a stripper" in its introductory paragraph).

There are 'hos and there are ho's. right? The clean-cut girls shooting hoops don't deserve to be mistreated, but the clean-cut boys of Duke? They have the right to mistreat someone more sexually marginal. She was "asking for it." Her skirt was too short. She shouldn't have been in that neighborhood. She shouldn't have taken that job. She should have done what she was paid to do and not complained.

I am guessing you know where I'm going with this, right? These girls--basketball players, sex-workers and my daughter have something in common. They have bodies that speak a 300 year-history (at least) of "rapability." When the American colonist court declared that the "condition of the child shall follow that of the mother" it made Black enslaved women a rapable class of people. The clean-cut sons of white slave owners could have their way with these women and turn around and reap the profits from selling their children nine months later.

Little has changed since then. Legally? Sure. Economically. Yes. Socially? Somewhat. On the psychic level? Almost nothing.

Imus's un-P.C. slip (if it was indeed "just" a slip) gives those of us who watch the media with race in mind something concrete to show for our claims that racist misogyny hasn't gone anywhere and won't be eradicated anytime soon. If he had thought before he spoke (if indeed, he didn't), we would be left without an example of how all these women--the basketball players, the Duke survivor, my baby girl--are related in the psyche of an America that assumes a female body with brown skin=slut, whore, ugly, criminal, drug-addict, unfit mother and on and on and on.

I'm sorry for my harsh language. Ugly, isn't it? No wonder it made Cole cry to watch that with Nat on her lap.

But thanks to Imus, we can have this conversation. Thanks to Imus, folks who usually have the privilege of ignoring this problem have to make decisions about what to do about it. Thanks to Imus, some fabulous girls are being given a national forum (even if it does use that tired old adjective, "angry" to describe women who speak things people don't want to hear) in which to address a hurt that goes back 300 years and needs to stop.

It won't stop until it's addressed. And thanks to a foolish, thoughtless (if he was indeed being thoughtless) man, we're addressing it.

Perfect Timing

Coincidentally, today my guest column in Literary Mama is out!

By the way, if you'd like to subscribe to Literary Mama's e-zine, and receive once weekly updates of what's new on the site, with easy-click-through links (and no spam, we promise!) you can do so here. I'm the newsletter coeditor and we just got a beautiful new system for the e-zine!

Mamaversary

I have been a parent for two years today. This is the day we met Nat.

Sometimes, it seems strange that her birthday comes before the day we met her. I think a lot about her three days in the hospital nursery without a parent, and I've become certain she wouldn't have been released if she or Rose had had medical insurance. It's probably just as well that I didn't know it at the time, but Nat's weight was borderline for low birth weight (some books say it is, some say an ounce less is the line, but she was well below both by three days old). And judging by her first year of development, I think she was closer to five weeks than three weeks early as the doctors speculated. I think if she were my birth child, she'd have been watched a bit until her weight came up some.

But I didn't know anything about newborns except apgars then, and Nat didn't have any apgars, because she was born en route to the hospital.

Nat was born precipitously 20 minute's after Rose's water broke. She was born as Rose crossed her front porch to get to the car of a friend waiting outside at 3 am. So Nat went from 99-degree water to Chicago February with nothing but a pair of sweatpants between her and the icy blast of winter. Later that week, when she'd be asleep in my arms, clearly having tiny nightmares--squishing up her face and shaking her fists and murmuring discontentedly--Cole asked "what could she possibly be having nightmares about? And I said "getting born!"

Nat's first night home, she didn't sleep well. She didn't like the crib (we quickly obtained the Amby hammock and she was fine ever after) and I was up rocking her after her 3 am feeding--her birth hour--and I said, "you are four days old now. You seem to want me to hold you all night while you sleep. That's okay. When you're four days old, you can have anything you want" and I rocked her all night.

The next day someone asked if I thought I'd regret not giving birth myself. I looked at Nat and said "I dont' know how my body could possibly do a better job than that!" and it was true. I haven't given pregnancy or birth a thought since Nat arrived, though a mere week before, I'd turned 35 and heard a biological clock make the teeniest "tick" for the first time in my life. I had scrounged up a possible sperm donor just in case I changed my mind or somehow adoption didn't work out, but as it did, potential sperm donor became godfather and unlike a child born to me would have had, Nat has just his dark skin and dark eyes, as fate would have it.

Mama Rose has not been in our lives to the extent we had hoped. So far we're still waiting to hear from her. We haven't given up hope though--we've heard from all kinds of people who ought to know, that sometimes, first mothers take some time before leaping into regular contact. So we honor her photo, hanging over Nat's bed, we keep her in the bedtime prayers, write the updates we promised and save them for her.

I still get agitated when I read certain things about adoption and how it could be better for first mothers. I think I am starting to put my finger on it, having just finished the book I told you about the other day. it's a book about China adoption. But the analysis is about larger political concerns. And it helped me realize that it isn't that I'm against most of the adoption reforms I read about--longer revocation periods, legally binding openness agreements, first mother hospital rights/respect--it's that these all seem so individual and private when the issues that haunt (in Dorow's terms) our adoption are so much more systemic. Mama Rose didn't need a longer revocation period (in her particular crisis, she needed to be able to place her baby with a permanent family as soon as possible), Mama Rose didn't need a nicer hospital birth experience. She needed health insurance that would have given her access to the care that would have prevented a pregnancy she didn't want in the first place (much as she loves Nat--she told us so). Mama Rose personally doesn't need a legally binding openness agreement--we're willing to go well beyond the openness we agreed to extralegally. She needs to have heard of open adoption before she walked into the agency. She needed to have been able to tell her family that adoption didn't have to mean losing their sibling, grandchild, niece, that we could still be family.

Again, I'm completely in favor of all those reforms. I'd vote to make them global tomorrow if I could. but as with questions of adopters' culpability in the injustices that make some children commodities and their mothers expendable labor, I think the problems predate and go beyond adoption so far that these little reforms would just be a tiny drop in the sea of need for change. These reforms would help some of the more privileged first mothers out there have a better chance at making a choice they could live with. But so many mothers have no choices of any kind from beginning to end. So many women have no choice about whether to become mothers or under what circumstances. Many others have no choice to parent the children born to them, though with some support, they could do it. I told a friend yesterday, "we don't need 'adoption reform,' we need to take to the streets with pitchforks!"

The question is, how did I end up in a position to adopt and how did Rose and so many women like her, end up in a position not to be able to keep their babies (or to be able to prevent having them in the first place if they choose)? I do think that in a considerably more "perfect world" there might very well still sometimes be women who become pregnant and yet just simply don't want to be parents. There might be orphans whose parents have died. There might be women who want to parent with people not genetically kin to their children. So sure, there would be adoption in that world. But there would not be such disparity of privilege--race, class, cultural and national privilege--that render some women adopters and some women first mothers automatically, almost as if stamped on their heads at birth.

So although I'd vote for adoption reform, and I'll keep talking about that to people who ask us questions on the playground (etc.), I also need to feel that I am doing something to spit against the hurricane of political forces that keep moving us further and further in the direction of injustice, as the gap between rich and poor in the U.S. grows, as race not only doesn't become less of a problem but looks about the same rhetorically here in 2007 as it looked in 1850. And to be honest, I don't feel I am doing much in that department. I'll keep working on it though.

To Another Googler

The dire predicitons about "crack babies" didn't come true. As it turns out, in-utero cocaine exposure is not nearly as devestating to a child as originally hyped by the Reagan administration. It was mostly racist politics. Here is an article that gives a good overview of the real findings and real outcomes of real medical research into the issue. To quote from it:

The "crack baby" on which drug policy is increasingly based does not exist. Crack babies are like Max Headroom and reincarnations of Elvis ... a media creation. . . . babies exposed to [cocaine] prenatally do not exhibit symptoms of drug withdrawal.
Other symptoms of drug dependence --such as "craving" and "compulsion"-- cannot be detected in [cocaine exposed] babies. In fact, without knowing that cocaine was used by their mothers, clinicians could not distinguish so-called crack-addicted babies from babies born to comparable mothers who had never used cocaine or crack.

Here are some more articles about the myth of the "crack baby."

This might be useful to consider as you decide who and how to adopt. Best wishes.

P.S.
What a cool website! Check it out, everyone.

Update: 26 march 2007

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has published a metastudy of the various outcomes studies for children born exposed to cocaine. The upshot? Cocaine is not the culprit in many of the effects seen in exposed children. The culprit? Perfectly legal (and highly profitable) cigarettes, for one. Here's a quote from the editor's commentary on the piece in JAMA:

At the end of their effort, Frank et al conclude that crack/cocaine exposure in utero has not been demonstrated to affect physical growth; that it does not appear to independently affect developmental scores in the first 6 years (although there are insufficient data to assess this for infants born preterm); that findings are mixed regarding early motor development but any effect appears to be transient and may, in fact, reflect tobacco exposure; and that exposure may be associated with modest alterations of certain physiological responses to behavioral stimuli that are of unknown clinical importance. In sum, the data are not persuasive that in utero exposure to cocaine has major adverse developmental consequences in early childhood— and certainly not ones separable from those associated with other exposures and environmental risks. Since many cocaine users also use other illegal drugs, drink alcohol, and smoke cigarettes, it is methodologically daunting to sort out consequences attributable to cocaine alone. Frank et al conclude that even those studies best designed to tackle this challenge fail to demonstrate that cocaine use by pregnant women leads to childhood devastation.

The editor's commentary goes on to discuss the devestating effects on women and children that the "crack baby" myth has had, from incarceration of pregnant women (not treatment for the disease of addiction) to routine placement of infants in state custody upon birth (if they did that to babies whose mothers smoked cigarettes during pregnancy, how do you suppose the tobacco compaines would respond?), to surveys of elementary school teachers saying their worst nightmare would be to have "crack children" in their classrooms (even as many do and don't know it.) The JAMA article identifies stigma placed on children and punitive measures against women who need medical help as the real public health crisis regarding cocaine use during pregnancy.

Case in Point:

To the person who googled her/his way to this blog with the question:

"Is it okay to lighten a child's skin?"

Here's my 2 cents:

Why on earth would you want to?

Some Introductory Books about Black American Women's History

Several people expressed shock or dismay about the skin-bleaching mentioned in the film I linked the other day. Ever since Madam C.J. Walker became the first female millionaire, beauty products to lighten skin and straighten hair have been big business. You can see the complexity raised by this, given the many good, positive things Walker's company wrought for Black women, while at the same time, trading on racist beauty standards. (Skin bleaching and hair straightening pre-date Walker, of course, but she developed a national company from these kinds of things, among others.)

If you would like to begin exploring Black American women's history, here are some favorites of mine. I teach these books often, as well.

Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis. I think this is the place where I first read about the hi-jacking of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's sufferage movement by white supremacy. There's a strong case to be made that U.S. women got the vote earlier than most other first-world women because of white fear of Black men (which, sad to say, Anthony and Stanton took advantage of).

When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America by Paula Giddings. This is a basic history of the U.S. which takes Black women as the subjects at its center, instead of white men. It's going to tell you what your high school (and college, for that matter) text books left out.

The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom by Herbert Gutman. A nice correction if all you know about the Black family in the U.S. came from the Moynihan Report.

More about Race, Beauty and Transracial Parenting

Beate said:

I see a dilemma here: The need to counter society's negative messages with positive ones of your own conflicts, to my mind, with the risk that constant judgment of ANY kind will generate insecurities. I'm following the logic of Alfie Kohn's "Unconditional Parenting" when I say that the constant affirmation of Nat's intelligence may some day raise the question (from her or others) of why you're not just taking for granted that she's smart. And yet I see why it's necessary to counter outsiders' negative input. Frankly, I have no idea how I would handle this dilemma. It's a tough one.

Sara said:

I think that the right amount of affirmation is hugely helpful, but too much praise reeks of insincerity.

Sadly, one's mother's view of one's beauty is probably the message least valued by just about any child over the age of 10 ... I think that making sure that the message is reinforced from other directions might be really helpful.

I appreciate Beate's recognition of the dilemma. It's definitely a dilemma, and as Nat has grown older and has started getting wiser to the world around her, our handling of that dilemma has shifted. No doubt it will keep shifting as the need arises.

The bottom line is, there's no right answer to the problem, because it's a problem rooted in and expressed through white supremacy and racism, plain and simple. There's no antidote to racism that any one parent or any one family can achieve on its own. When Sara suggests the need to reinforce family opinion with outside opinion, she couldn't have hit the target any squarer. The trouble is, where do we find that outside opinion? Look around. Where are girls and women who look like Nat represented as intelligent and beautiful? (For extra credit, compile a list of places where they're represented as inherently ugly, stupid, behavior problems, sexually loose and/or rapable, poor, drug-addicted, and otherwise undesirable and pathological.)

The only place I've found reinforcement of positive images of dark-skinned, kinky-haired girls and women is in strong Black neighborhoods in major cities: On the street in DC or Chicago where Nat is set upon at every turn by gushing Black adults telling her she's gorgeous, at the Black feminist bookstore (alas the passing of Sister Space in DC when U Street gentrified and their rent got raised), in the natural hair salon like the one we visited with Uncle Wayne in Seattle, where I met a wonderful woman who works with One Church, One Child and talked with me about the value of homeschooling Black children. And so our goal is to live in a place like that sometime soon and be sure Nat is surrounded by a real community of real people who love her and value her.

Meanwhile, our little commnunity such as it is does its best. Much of our decision-making about taking Nat consciously to the mirror and pointing out her beauty in the specificity of her features comes through earnest conversations with Black parents who do this with their own children, and whose parents did it for them. "Direct socialization" as one mother of daughters put it for me, is almost the only tool we have to combat the negative messages that our children are bombarded with through indirect socialization. Telling my daughter her brown skin is beautiful does feel awkward to me. But that is the price of raising a Black daughter in the 21st century U.S. I don't have the luxury of following the no doubt good advice of child development experts that too much praise can be harmful. (I read that in Einstein Didn't Use Flashcards myself, and thought, "where the heck does that leave our family?" with our commensurate need to give Nat some kind of counter-message from a popular culture that tells her she can never be beautiful and she's unlikely to succeed educationally.

It leaves our family where Black families have always been in this country. It's another moment of realizing that we have lost some white privilege we didn't know we had.

The reason I'm writing this follow up is because I think many of my white readers have probably not thought of it that way. I know that before I was Nat's mother, the idea of making such a big deal out of a child's beauty and/or intelligence would have rung artifical to me too. But how do you think those little girls in that film came to see those white dolls as "nice" or "pretty" or otherwise desirable? And what can I, as a mere individual mother, do to combat that? This is one of the few tools I have with a child not yet 2 years old.

When Nat is older, we'll be able to let her pursue her heart's desires and give her all kinds of complex opportunities to learn to appreciate and love herself in complex ways. It's one reason I want to home school. I want to give her opportunities to have ideas, try them out, succeed and fail on her own terms and learn to try again without feeling defeated by classroom rules or grades.

I have read interviews with adult transracial adoptees who say they felt their parents didn't find them beautiful; that they had no memories of being told they were beautiful and how that messed with their sense of self-worth and how they interpreted it in racial terms. And if the worst thing Nat can tell her therapist about me someday is "my mother told me I was beautiful too much" well, I'll take it.

As Trey points out, there's too little praise and there's too much praise. It's a tough line to walk, but if I have to err, I'd rather err on the side of a child who bats her eyelashes at herself in the mirror and declares "pretty girl" any day of the week.

Random

Scenes from a Wood-Paneled Conference Room

Today, my students and I discussed branding, the difference between public and private space, the shrinking of the former, and if and why we care about that, how capitalism can sometimes look like pre 1989 Romania a la an Andre Codrescu piece we read last week and an anecdote about Walmart censorship in No Logo which we read half of this week. (Those of you following along at home, feel free to get yourself a copy and read to the end for next week.) Summary: my students are jaded cynics who don't believe in social mobility and would rather buy something expensive than something of equal quality but a lower price because "it just doesn't feel the same." Sorry, Stephon, my students and Cole's students all think your shoes are doomed.

Thoughts on the Film Linked Below

It isn't news to me that Black girls have this awful time with beauty standards in the U.S. Heck, every girl has a hard time with beauty standards in the U.S. And Black girls have a worse time, because even if they became anorexically thin, like the models on the billboards, they are still not white, with long, straight hair, like the models on the billboards. And I worry about all aspects of that frequently. I worry about the anorexically thin part and the skin and hair part and I worry about the sexualization of Black women--particularly darker-skinned Black women--in the media and in U.S cultural history and I worry, worry, worry that my daughter--the most beautiful person I've ever met--will fail to fully know just how beautiful she truly is. I know, I know, it's the inner person that matters. But whatever. Nat is beautiful both inside and outside. She just is.

We spend quite a bit of time telling her she's beautiful. I call her "Pretty Girl" or "Beautiful Girl" constantly. I gush about the beauty of her hair while I comb it, however squirmy and unappreciative she might be. And when her hair is finished, we make a special trip to the mirror to go and admire it. "Pretty girl, with pretty brown cheeks and a pretty brown chin and pretty brown eyes and beautiful curly hair" I croon. And she admires herself with real appreciation, almost flirting with her image.

It is certainly not something I would do with a white daughter. I really wouldn't. I would probably not comment on appearance much at all. And with Nat, we do also praise her for being smart, strong, patient, trying hard, practicing, learning, sharing, etc. When she was a baby, I used to sing-song to her "pretty girl, smart girl, sweet girl, big, strong, girl!" and she would break into a huge grin when she heard it.

But I worry about the beauty thing and race. The doll test in the film below is really sad, as many of you pointed out. Clearly school desegregation really had little to do with Black children's view of themselves. But you know what's sadder? I have a heck of a time finding a doll the color of Nat in the first place. I know doll plastic isn't exactly the greatest match for skin in any shade, but the "black" dolls are all several shades lighter than my girl. To me, they look tanned versions of the white dolls. If I tried to say, "the doll has skin like Nat's!" I doubt she'd see the resemblance. And many of the black dolls have curly, but still relaxed hair, compared to Nat's.

As if a doll could solve this problem for my baby. I know that's ridiculous and oversimple. But it is just another example of how the popular culture doesn't value my daughter unless they need a token for a Bennetton or a Baby Gap ad. And I worry that the culture will be more influential than a mother--especially one who has white skin and long, straight hair herself--complimenting her daughter's beauty.

Pregnancy After Infertility: Sensitive Content about Someone's Good News

I have been waiting on pins and needles to tell you that my BFF, who "failed" her second IVF about a year ago, gave up and decided to wait until she was more financially and geographically stable and adopt from China (ironically, she couldn't do it now, under the new regulations), called me in a hotel room while traveling to my in-laws' for the holidays to announce that she just peed on a stick and it was distinctly positive. They weren't trying. It just happened.

This didn't by the way, happen because they decided to adopt. Nor did it happen because they "quit worrying about it and relaxed." Do you have any idea how stressed out some fertile people are? It happened, because when she was doing IVF and responding pretty poorly, she found that only about 1 in 4 or 5 of her eggs was any good. So it took her about 4 or 5 times as long to get pregnant as it might have otherwise. She's had an early ultrasound and all looks great. She says the embryo has officially graduated to fetus and so now I am telling you.

I am so happy for her! And for me, because I get to be an aunt! And I get to be moms together with her!

Now, everyone whisper a prayer, knock wood, or cross your fingers.

P.S.

Oh, and what's your favorite book on toddler adoption?

P.P.S.

I missed the whole blogging for choice thing, but I am pro-choice, because the alternative is the government forcing women to carry and bear children against their will. And that scares me more than abortion, however sad abortion might be.

Seven Minutes of Your Time

Via AntiracistParent, a short film about U.S. beauty standards and Black girls by a Black girl. Particularly shocking is her replication of the doll test used as evidence in Brown v Board of Education.

Many Things

Ejuhmuhkashun

While I was delirious, I re-read Einstein Never Used Flashcards and Teach Your Own and got all revved up again about homeschooling.

I think I am now ready to blog about homeschooling without getting all pissy and defensive. So bring on the questions or comments if you're interested in the topic and I will address them cheerily and with kindness.

I also scribbled out my "Parenting Vision Statement" (a concept which no doubt pre-exists my making it up, but I don't know where), which I decided Cole and I should write out independently and compare. So after she writes hers, I'll publish mine here. We are pretty much always on the same page, but I thought it would be interesting to look at specifics and have something we put together—together—to pull out in the future when things happen and we don't know what to do. We can consult our vision statement to get on track with the big picture. Has anybody else done this? Am I a complete lunatic who overthinks everything? (Nevermind, don't answer that, especially if you know me in the face-to-face world. Yes, I mean you. Shut up. And stop laughing.)

Hair

In the post about books below, Elise asked about why we want to lock Nat's hair. I've been planning a hair post for some time, so I'll start there.

I've always loved locs. I just think they're beautiful. I have never seen a woman with locs who didn't answer to my vision of the Holy Spirit, or if you prefer, some other kind of supreme queen-goddess. And I find men with locs to be more approachable than any other men. Except maybe men with beards. I realize this probably puts me in a small minority of middle-class white American women. But my daddy has a beard, my ex-husband has a beard, many of my closest white male friends have had beards and many of my closest Black male friends have had locs (and/or beards, in fact). So there you are.

That's an aesthetic and otherwise pretty personal reason.

As far as socio-political-values go, locs fall into that framework in our family perfectly. We place high value on natural hair. And we place high value on pride in natural hair. In DC, I met a lot of people with locs and I liked their attitude towards it. I want Nat to have that strong sense of specialness about herself and her hair. Locs are something only someone with Nat's genetic makeup can have. (I know there are white people out there with locs, but personally, I just think they don't look right AT ALL. Sorry if that's you.) In other words, locs are a treasure unique to Nat's racial heritage that we would like to see her cultivate.

I know there is a lot of debate out there about whether it's appropriate to give a child a hairstyle with the serious implications and "permanance" of locs. But we give our children all kinds of markers of our values that they are too young to choose for themselves. We drag them to religious services (or keep them away). We put political tee shirts on them. We make them eat meat or don't let them eat meat. We decide what school they should attend (if any) or we keep them out. Why should hair be a domain any different from these? Locs reflect our family's values about Black hair. They also reflect the values of our Black chosen family members to a large extent. So Nat will have "loc role models" to look to. If she decides she wants to cut them off someday when she's old enough to decide, it will be her decision and it will mean that getting rid of them is important enough to start all over with her hair. Meanwhile, as this mom insists, why should anyone assume she'll want to get rid of them? I expect she'll go through stages of loving them or hating them as she grows up, but if she sticks it out, she'll have the most beautiful hair of the freshman class she enters when she goes to college (or where ever she goes at age 18). I think she'll be thanking us for our foresight.

Nat's godfather, Uncle Wayne, started his locs about a year ago and they were looking fabulous when we visited recently. We went with him to his salon to see his locktician for a maintenance appointment and took the opportunity to talk to her about Nat's hair.

She asked what we are doing so far, and I gave her our run-down:

1. Wash hair about every ten days or two weeks (depending on how much food she smears on her head in any given week!)

2. Use lots of leave-in conditioner, spray-on detanglers, etc. and comb through carefully

3. Put gentle hairbands in for a few poofs--maybe twist or braid the poofs and tuck them under the hair bands for two-four days at a time, redoing as necessary

4. Taking styling breaks on days we aren't going out anywhere so Nat's hair can rest from the pulling into bands

5. Never pulling the hairline hair into anything--letting it grow strong without being put in any clips or bands (which means her edges always fuzz up, much to some onlookers' dismay in the grocery store--but I stand strong on doing what is actually best for her hair even if it isn't as neat as it would be otherwise)

She gave me an "A+" (her words) and this hair lotion and told me to make Nat silk sheets/pillows (she doesn't use pillows, so sheets it is) to help her back hair grow in without breaking.

She told us she (or another qualified professional) can start locs for Nat at 4 or 5 when her hair is fully grown in and strong enough to loc.

And that was our little hair adventure with Uncle Wayne.

Yesterday I put Nat's hair into two rows of french braids with little clips holding them down in the middle and at the ends. She doesn't have enough back hair to carry it much further than her crown, but it was cute. I discovered that she'll let me play with it if she's standing on her stool at the bathroom sink, being allowed to play in a basin of water and admire herself in the mirror. In a day or two (when I'm feeling better) I'm going to wash and condition it and try four rows of flat twists right after her bath while it's still really soft and wet.

Baby Stuff We Love

Einstein may not have used flashcards, but one trendy, bourgeois parenting fad I absolutely love is ASL for babies/kids. I am not talking about "babysigns" I am talking about real ASL. These videos teach real ASL to children for a variety of reasons from disabilities to second-language opportunities.

We are using them to learn a second language with Nat while she's able to absorb language so easily.

I am loving learning ASL myself. I also found this site (via a forum at signingtime.com, in fact) to try and keep myself ahead of Nat. It's not possible. She learns every sign the first time, thus outpacing me, when I need a bit more practice. I was going to take an in-person intro to ASL at the community college next semester, but I don't think I can manage it while teaching a new class myself. So I'm trying to do the internet free course as often as possible.

I am convinced that it's ASL that has put Nat so ahead of her age group in stuff like letter recognition--not to mention a recognition of the concept behind letters--and counting (and its concept) etc. She gets that some things are signs for other things. Letters are signs for words, which are signs for things or ideas. Somewhere on the website, there's an account of how a mother's cognitively disabled two year-old started sight reading whole words (and understanding them) at age two, several months after learning to sign.

I don't know what it does to her little brain (you can look up the research--also available at the video website) but it clearly does something good.

The problem that sometimes arises is that Nat just understands that everything in the world has a word and a sign. But lots of other people don't know signs. So she will give them signs and get no reinforcement and/or they will accidentally make a sign, Nat will name it enthusiastically, and again, get no reinforcement.

When we were on the plane for 7 hours, a stewardess came up and started playing with Nat on a level that was far beneath her, wiggling her fingers at Nat and saying "fing-ERS!" in a baby-voice. Then she stuck up her thumb and said, "what's this?" to which Nat excitedly declared "ten!" and the stewardess thought she was just babbling. I had to explain that she had inadvertently signed ten. Nat went on to "eleven" and on for a while happily while the stewardess freaked out.

But signing is so worth other people's confusion. Saturday, I was so sick and my throat was so sore that I couldn't talk. I rolled myself out of bed to spend a couple of hours with Nat who had been walking by my bedroom periodically and pounding and begging "mama!" heart-rendingly.

I sat with her and she brought me some of her favorite books. I was able to "read" the books to her by pointing to pictures and making signs while she shouted the words happily. I was able to "talk" to her about what was for dinner and even explain that my throat hurt too much to talk, all in sign.

The only drawback to these particular videos is the expense. But they really are worth it. We have a total of four of them, purchased here and there so as not to impact the budget too hard in any one month, and I plan to get her a couple more as soon as I've cleared all my holiday responsibilities within my budget. (Cole and I have allowances now. I should post more about that. Let me know if you're interested. It's working really well for us.)

If you know anyone who is having or recently had a baby, get them these videos! And check out your local library to see if they have them. If not, request them. I can't enthuse enough about them.

Books for Kids on African American History and Culture

Not my pithiest title, is it? Oh well.

I went through Nat's pile of picture books with tearable pages (still hiding in the closet until she stops eating books) and pulled some of my favorites. Without further ado, here's an annotated bibliography (subject to revision--this is just a start).

For Smaller Children

Shades of Black by Sandra and Miles Pinkney
This is a photo book of Black children with all different shades of skin and eyes and types of hair. The focus is on claiming Black identity regardless of how your body looks. "I am Black, I am unique" is the recurring motif. I bought this book strictly because when I flipped through the pages I saw a child pictured with locs and it's hard to find photos of children with locs (which Nat will have in a couple of years). But I also like the message that Nat has a right to claim her racial heritage even if she has white parents.
Edited to point out that these authors have a number of great books for and about Black children and their families. We have some of their others too.

Visiting Langston by Willie Perdomo
A lovely introduction for a young child to Langston Hughes both as a historical figure and as a poet. Beautiful illustrations accompanied by brief, lovely text make it good for small children.

Nappy by Charisse Carney-Nunes
This is one of two books I got in DC that are autographed (I'm a sucker for collectable books). As the mother combs her daughter's hair, she connects her to Black women's historical experiences through hair. At the end of the book are brief, factual introductory profiles of some important women in Black history.

No Mirrors in My Nana's House by Ysaye M. Barnwell
This is the second of my autographed DC haul. It's a beautifully illustrated rhyming memory of the narrator's grandmother and how she constructed beauty and worth through something other than shallow appearance.

Updated 20 December 2006

We found a couple of wonderful books this weekend at Reading Reptile children's bookstore in Kansas City.

Bintou's Braids by Sylviane Diouf
I generally prefer books about African American culture to books about African culture, but I had to get this one because Bintou's hair is exactly like Nat's: "four little puffs." I also like that because it is set in Africa it assumes Black hair as the norm--not something compared to white hair, but compared to other Black hair. Bintou wants beautiful braids like the older girls and women, but only has little girl hair. It's got highly appealing illustrations, too.

Earth Mother by Ellen Jackson is another book that is really based on African culture, but is presented in this book in a fairly universal way. I used to get Old Turtle for everyone for baby gifts. I still like it, but it has officially been bumped now, in favor of Earth Mother. As Earth Mother walks the world, caring for all its creatures, the Man thanks her for the frogs he eats but complains about the mosquitoes. He suggests the world would be perfect with more frogs and no mosquitoes. Guess what Frog and Mosquito suggest? It's a beautiful image of God and a wise lesson about ecology that does not hammer itself at the reader. Earth Mother just smiles quietly at everyone's suggestions and the reader sees for herself how short sighted her creatures are. It features a beautiful Black woman with dark skin and a soft afro as the Goddess herself. In a world short on beautiful images of women who look like Nat, this is a must-have book not just for my daughter, but for every little girl.

We also found bell hooks' Happy to Be Nappy in board book form (huzzah! for Nat who is tough on books) at the Peace Nook in Columbia, where we stopped for supper on our drive home.

Updated February 2008

Lately, Nat's favorite book is So Much by Trish Cooke and illustrated by Helen Oxenbury. It's the story of a mother and a baby welcoming family members one at a time until Daddy finally arrives for his surpris