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Room for Another?

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Where does the craving to care for something or someone come from?

When I was around ten or so I remember specifically playing with one of my many baby dolls and being struck suddenly with the feeling that this whole situation was not a coincidence. I suddenly thought to myself that this whole baby doll rocking thing was preparation for the real thing. My reaction was nausea. The idea that a baby might be 100% reliant on me made me a bit sick. It was a short and fleeting moment but I remember it very well. My mind made the connection between play and a possible reality and I was a momentarily panicked little girl.

I’m always ready for play. Taking care of another person or thing besides myself? Not so much. But recently, I’ll say in the last two or three years, the need to love, to care for someone other than me has surfaced in my odd, aloof, anti-clingy sensibility. And it’s weird for me.

When I was a girl we had a cat that mostly my parents took care of and my brother and I played with. When she died as the result of a freak accident, my reaction was complete denial. My brother was way more emotional than I was. I kind of just couldn’t handle my feelings and sort of chose not to express them. When I think about it, that cat’s death was the first death I ever experienced in my family. I know a lot of people don’t take pets seriously or take them too seriously or hate people who take them too seriously or not seriously enough. We all have different feelings about it. But the fact is all pets are forms of life you take care of. Plants are forms of life you take care of. You benefit or don’t benefit from their being around in one way or another. But if you care you have to make room. You have to pay attention.You have to make time.

I have a plant, a plant I inherited from a co-worker who passed away years ago. And I was worried I wouldn’t be able to take care of it. I don’t even know what kind of plant it is, but I liked the look of it and it absolutely flourishes in my care. I water it once a week as directed, play music around it and occasionally talk to it and always take notice of its progress. I don’t have a green thumb. I don’t know if I would have this kind of patience with any other plant, just this one. I just happened to bond with it. There’s a plant someone dumped on me at work many years ago which I neglect shamelessly all the time. It’s sitting on my counter now as I write this.

Okay, I’ll water you today. Jeez.

All this is to say that yesterday, when my supervisor told me about a cat she took in to her home over the weekend, something about the way she described her just got me all emotional and choked up and not just because I’m a cat person. Apparently this is a domesticated cat that the owner or owners abandoned in the street. That broke my heart.  UGH! Just thinking about it now bothers me. My husband and I have also both been wanting a pet for ages. He loves animals! But like the prospect of having a baby, we’re both are in agreement that we need way more space first. But what if space isn’t really as necessary as we think for a pet or a baby? What if a pet is just a starter baby?

Sigh…

I want a cat.

I want a baby.

I want a cat baby. LOL!

What is “The Black Experience?”

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I was never “Black” enough for the Black kids in my high school for whom society and dominate culture media would deem examples of “The Black Experience.” If a reporter came to my home looking for examples of the stereotypical “Black Experience” they would have found, lots of Tofu, whole grains, Golden Legacy Comic Books, handmade Christmas Ornaments, yearly PBS “Eyes on the Prize” viewings, in house play dates with the only Caribbean family that lived in our neighborhood, weekly trips to the Union Square Farmers Market, and the Food Coop in Brooklyn where my mom has been a member for years. They would have found me reading and journal writing obsessively while staring out the window of a large bedroom at a guy who I had a crush on who incidentally was probably living the life most likely to be voted as the “Black Experience” at least from the outside.

I used to buy into that bullshit too. I was as scared of outspoken, rambunctious, healthy black males in high school as any latently racist white person crossing the street to avoid them. Classism breeds these kind of destructive notions. They thought I was an “Oreo,” that I didn’t speak “Black,” that I thought I was all that. I thought they were too loud, disrespectful, “Ghetto,” mean and scary. None of us went any deeper than that until after a few years and even then, it’s taken me several High School reunions and a series of enriching friendships with people from different backgrounds to really appreciate the fact that among people of color, there is no “Black Experience.” What the fuck is that anyway? I never hear critics review movies with all white casts using words like “a slice of the White experience.” I do understand the need for the term in the Black community but from the mouths of White people it just exposes the usual narrow-minded ignorance that makes the daily news.

People of all colors, cultures and backgrounds have a human experience. Media sells us these categories to perpetuate a sense of classification, which unfortunately raises the constructed experiences of “Whiteness” to the level of sought after preference while it devalues, dehumanizes, denigrates, marginalizes and falsifies the experiences of people of color.

The funny thing about “Whiteness” though is that most everything they promote is stolen from an historic ethnic and or urban culture to be appropriated and repackaged on White faces and constructed White lifestyles. Am I saying that White people have no culture of their own?

I’ll go even further and say this.

Whiteness doesn’t really exist, just like “The Black Experience” doesn’t exist. Think about the definitions of each given to us in the media and really think about if you believe it’s true. The reality of what Black people experience in America as they navigate the odds of systematic racial profiling, poverty, bogus drug wars and a racist educational system is not “The Black Experience.” But it is the experience of a lot of Blacks.

Growing up, I didn’t experience poverty, drive by shootings, violence, a one parent household, or living in the projects. In fact, now when I think of it, I can see how specific incidents in my childhood communicated to me demonstrably, that people who did experience these things were not as valuable as me. For instance, growing up in Brooklyn my brother and I were strictly forbidden to run the streets with the kids in the neighborhood. I remember the strange tension I would feel climbing down a stoop with my brother and parents through a gauntlet of stoop sitters from the building and the neighborhood. They looked up at us with judgment. And we made sure to be friendly without really engaging. We made our way through to go off to some cultural and our extracurricular activity and we never really connected with these people. I never played hopscotch or double-dutch or handclapping games with the girls on my block. No time was spent on hot Brooklyn Summers running through illegally opened fire hydrant floods. Mine was not the Spike Lee directed Brooklyn “Black Experience.” I was pulling up weeds in the Children’s Garden, making Kachina dolls at the Brooklyn Museum and filling my head with stories at the RIF club in the Brooklyn Public Library.

But I remember those hopscotch and double-dutch, hand-clapping girls. I wanted to double-dutch. I still thrill at the skill of double-dutch. I still don’t know how to do it. I used to mimic their movements as a girl at home when I was alone. I guess we all miss out on experiences we wanted to have because of invisible gaps and lines we didn’t draw and don’t understand the meaning of.

I just know I don’t want anyone defining my experiences for me but me. When I wore apparel in High School that said, “It’s a Black thing, you wouldn’t understand.” It was in response to a dominant White culture that told me my experience wasn’t as important, valuable or significant because I lived in Black skin. That’s the reason I chose to start my locs in high school. I wanted to be an example to Black girls my age that being natural was okay too, that it was in fact just as good as straightening or relaxing, or hair extensions all of which I had done to my hair as well. But I was also told by some of my Black peers that my experience wasn’t shit to them because it wasn’t “Black” enough. That confused and angered me. I guess it still does. But as an adult, I’m very careful not to respond to those kinds of one-dimensional assessments by being one-dimensional myself. I know that as people of color, our experiences are broad, complex, diverse and ridiculously untold by popular media and culture that would have the world believe that the “Black Experience” is the single story and that the experience of those who define themselves as White is just the human experience.

That Wrap Life

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Back in the 90s when Brand Nubians, Neo Souls and the Zulu Nation were emerging, my BFF and I started rocking our newly started locs and mudcloth headwraps in high school and to date that is the last time I can remember wearing them. I do wear one to bed but that’s just to protect my locs from damage and dryness and to lock in conditioning treatments.

All my life I’ve seen many woman of color rock some fly ass head wraps both in cultural and casual contexts but I have never had the confidence to try it myself using the Ankara print fabrics. Plus I was never very imaginative with mudcloth. I basically just wrapped it around my head like a wide band that pulled my hair back. There was no real art to it.

I really love the way these tutorials from Wrap Life make make the process of head wrapping more accessible and less intimidating. As much as I love to be creative and make things by hand, I’ve never been able to figure out how African women are able to create these amazing shapes around the head with these large beautiful pieces of fabric, but these fun videos are inspiring me to give it a try.

When we Think of Segregation Part 2

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So at some point I was hanging out in the Stevenson Library at Bard College with my White Jewish friend, I’ll call her Abbey, who loved the way I used Ebonic vernacular and was very excited about playing RUN-DMC for me in her car. She convinced me to ask the vice president of the BBSO if she could join and in my ignorant, “We are the World”, “Hands Across America” glow I floated off to another floor where he was sitting at his Senior desk doing important Senior work.  I consider myself very lucky that he didn’t curse me out because he would have had every right to. When I look back on it now, I realize that he was very patient with me when he said in so many words and in no uncertain terms that there was no way he would accept my friend into BBSO.  He was very unwavering in his ideas about race relations, at least with regards to racism on the Bard College Campus. He was always butting heads with white Dorm monitors and seeking out all the events that supported people of color on campus. He was a proactive organizer when it came to supporting these events and I really admired him for it.

Me. I had other things on my mind and couldn’t see that I was a Black girl in a microcosmic, hippified utopia. I would not have even understood what that meant. I did know that sought to connect with any Black or Brown face I saw not that I was in the “minority.” I had fled what I felt was oppression from my own people in High School  for not being “Black” enough and ran right into a situation where I was often the first Black person that many white students had ever met. It was culture shock for sure. But nothing was more unsettling than the conversation I had with Abbey one day, also at the Stevenson Library where she asked me to compare my friendship with her to the close friendship I had with my Black High School BFF, Janet.

I talked about Janet a lot as was normal for many of us to do about close friends at home, particularly when feeling homesick and longing for something or someone familiar to relate to. Janet and I share a very tight bond to this day and until this talk with Abbey, I had never thought of the part race might play in it. I mean I knew we were both Black but I I never thought of myself as someone who formed relationships based on race. Oh I was in a bubble.

“Do you think that you and I could ever be as close as you and Janet?” Abbey asked.

First of all, I was very wary of the fact that she was even asking the question. I registered this as a sign of very low confidence on her end and I found it unattractive. I told her that that she and Janet were two different people and that there was no way I could be close to both of them in the same ways. This is when Abbey started to get emotional. She started crying. UGH! What was happening?

“Do you think of being Black as a quality?” She asked

What? Who asks a question like that? I was stumped. I had never thought about it. And whenever I think back to that conversation, I realize what an important question it is despite the fact that she was baiting me indirectly. Is race a quality?

In that moment of pause I was aware of a couple of things. I would never be as close to Abbey as she wanted me to be because although I wasn’t sure if I thought Blackness was a quality, it was quite obvious that she did. And I couldn’t be close to anyone who tokenized my race unconsciously or otherwise. She also engaged with her body (She was a plus size girl who was not happy about it) in a negative way and was uncomfortably envious of my stick thin physique at the time so nothing about this relationship was promising to me as having potential for deeper bonding. It all turned me off.

“Yes,” I said. “I think race is a quality.

Tears. Audible sobbing, gushing tears. In the library,

UGH! What the hell man?

Playing Nice: Part 1

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I used to want to be liked by everyone. I thought that was the logical goal for me as a home schooled vegan entering Jr. High School for the first time. I was dead set on doing my best impression of a girl from the era of “Little House on the Prairie” aka a polite little white girl. Who would hate that?

Answer: A lot of people. A lot of teenagers in a alternative public school in Spanish Harlem hated that. I was not a little white girl, nice or otherwise. And by the way, I am not a white woman.

For a while I blamed other people, thinking they were rude, and mean to me for no reason. And some of them were mean and rude. But I was no angel either. I just read too much Judy Blume in my formative pre-teen years. I thought I should be nice because that’s the way people should be right? But in fact, it’s not really the way that I am. I’m not really that nice. I’m reserved, detached, serious, aloof, private, as well as engaging, sarcastic (by way of defense mostly) snarky, opinionated, talkative sensitive, and playful. Niceness was just something I put on as a young woman to protect myself from confronting my true nature. I realize now that I feared my true self was completely out of alignment with the easy breezy, poetic narratives of the YA novels about white girls that I devoured in lieu of regular social interaction. Did I mention I was home schooled? I was also an introvert.

As women, the messages we receive from the media about who and how we should be are so subtle and powerful that they can sneak in through the crevices of the even the tightest most loving and progressive foundation laid down by parental guidance. For me these messages leaked in through literature and television. Clearly I was heavily influenced by “Little House on The Prairie” although now when I think of it, Laura Ingalls, the main character was a rebel by nature and not at all an example of a passive, submissive nice girl. She was my favorite character. But everyone, her family, her church, her teachers, were always telling her to be “nice” and to try and get along with peers whom she constantly butted head with.  It was what was expected of decent, respectable women then and as much as we like to believe that’s changed, it’s still expected now. But as Life as I know it mentioned to me in a conversation we had recently, the same has never been expected from men.

Catching more flies with honey than vinegar is a term more often directed at women as a way to point out that asking for what you want is not enough. You have to do it with a smile and a sing song voice otherwise you are thought to be cold and unyielding. But in men this is a quality that signifies strength.

How many times in the workplace are women expected to do the kind of things a wife would do for a husband and children with no complaint or argument? Some time ago I out-rightly refused to take on “pantry duty” in my office. I didn’t sign on for that. I am not a domestic worker. But for many this kind of refusal in a woman is a red flag. It is often interpreted as meaning, she’s not nice. She doesn’t want to help. She’s not a team player. But that’s not true.

I’ll play on the team I want to play on.

From the heart

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I was walking back to the office from having lunch in the park yesterday and approaching the street where the building I work in lives when I heard “I like your hair.” On my left side and older gentlemen who appeared to be of Latin descent had fallen in step next to me. He was wearing a uniform, the company label printed on his shirt I could not recall and he had a slight accent.

“Thank you.” I said smiling. He then gestured toward his chest and said “That’s from the heart.”

“Thank you.” I said smiling more and looking at him. “I really appreciate it.” I kept walking at the same pace. He was still walking next to me yet not really with me. I let our paths separate naturally and never felt the need to speed up or say anything more. I walked into the midtown office building feeling pretty nice.

I didn’t want that moment ruined by thinking too much about it but clearly I thought about it. Not about how nice it was to get a compliment, and not about how I had been obsessing over how my hair (I have locs that I recently had colored several weeks ago) looked all day, but about how no stranger had ever complimented me before and added that it was from the heart. A man? No “what’s your number, you gotta man?” follow up? I think I was touched. He took a bit of a risk there and I felt it.

Risks are important. I think maybe if we take enough risks it might seem less like an opportunity for rejection and more like…you know…connecting, living.