When the Spirit Says Do

Summer in a Unitarian Universalist (U.U.) Church is a fairly quiet but unique time to visit. It’s pretty informal, with services that are low key or have a strong artistic bent. In the summer, it’s customary that U.U. ministers take a sabbatical; they go to the General Assembly, take classes, go on retreats and recharge. We fill our summer months with mostly “Lay Led” services (services led by the congregants). It’s a great time for folks who have wanted to try leading a service, to do it for the first time, or for us to use more experimental styles of delivering our message.

As member of the Worship Committee at First Parish of Plymouth in Massachusetts, I help coordinate, plan and prep for services on Sundays year round and every summer lead a service or two. While I always hope to inspire in my services, the real challenging services are led by our minister; little did I know when I took responsibility for the July 5th service that I would prepare to challenge us all to look at our ‘white’ privilege, and what that charges us to do, through interracial poetry and music.

Having come to be known for a level of theatricality to my services, I was asked months before if I would organize a service whose central message is delivered through a choral reading of something.

“Something” became “Something for Independence Day”, as I took on the July 5 service. It’s been such a tumultuous year for Liberty and Justice; I knew it should laud the ideals of America, (what is a Sunday service without hope?) but it would have to highlight how we are going wrong; the working title became “An Unfinished Democracy”. I found Langston Hughes’ poetry pretty early in the game, but felt, to be honest, intimidated. I wanted to balance the service, feature songs and poetry that represent the struggles of the Black Community, Women and LBGT Folks. I moved away from Hughes, at least for the time being… then, I woke up on June 18 and saw the news.

As the report of the the mass shooting of 9 Black congregants of The Mother Emanuel Church by a 21 year old White Supremacist sunk in, I understood; intersectionality and inclusiveness was put aside, the Ladies could wait, the LGBT folks would have to as well, and as for Mr. Hughes, he got my full attention. I pulled up all his poetry up on the laptop and started reading; any anxiety about Hughes’ very direct, unapologetic anger evaporated, with the news playing and the ping of social media messages in the background.

I still wondered if it was the right thing to do, not because of the tender feelings of ‘white’ people, but because the choral readers would be chosen from my essentially all ‘white’ church. Would it be ludicrous and inappropriate for possibly 4 ‘white’ people to stand up and read the impassioned words of the Black Experience? Would it be considered appropriation and offensive? But a call to arms came via social media, specifically to ‘white’ friends and family. For me, this came from my high school friend, Fanshen. That was all the greenlight I needed….

The Call to Worship was a reminder that Service is a promise we make every Sunday in our covenant that is spelled out in our 7 Principles; it is not just the belief in the inherent worth and dignity of all people, but to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of all people, along with justice, equity and democracy. And that We. Have. Work. To. Do.

After we are called to worship, and light our chalice as we intone our covenant, “Love is the spirit of this church, and service is its law; this is our great covenant: to dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in freedom, to speak the truth in love and to help one another.” We then take the offering and take a moment to share any Joys & Sorrows, and the congregants and guests are invited to come up and either light a candle or, as we did in this service, place a stone in a basin of water. A stone was placed for Mother Emanuel and each of the other churches that were victim to Terror.

We sang hymns, peppered through the service, about building a just and equitable land, the fire of commitment, and that none are free if some are not. We also sang, “If the Spirit Says Do,” an African American Spiritual, and folk activist song “If I Had A Hammer,” which was the last song of the morning. Let me say this about UU and hymns: there a UU joke along the lines of, we can’t sing our hymns loud and proud because we are always too busy reading ahead to see if we agree with the lyrics… but I have to say, these hymns COOKED!

I then shared an excerpt from the A More Perfect Union Speech by then Presidential Hopeful, Barack Obama,

“In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination — and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past — are real and must be addressed, not just with words, but with deeds, by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams…”

The three Langston Hughes poems we recited included, “I Continue to Dream,” “Let America Be America Again” and, my favorite, “Freedom’s Plow” (the one my husband, Chuck, and I cry during our practice readings, one or the others’ voice would break a bit while reading and then would set the other off.) I asked our fantastic musical director, Niles to read with us, as long as he wouldn’t feel like the token POC, and fellow Worship committee and choir member, Linda, to round out our four readers.

At a summer Sunday, services are small, people are on vacations, and what have you. We had 26 congregants and visitors with us on this day, and wonderfully, we had an African American couple just drop in, looking for a progressive church to worship at while visiting the area for the Fourth of July weekend from California (they were a same-sex couple). I didn’t see them right away, being so involved in all the moving parts of the service, but soon I was in the message of the service, in the middle of a reading and I looked up into the congregation and saw them; their eyes were closed, listening deeply, I think I grew three inches taller. When the service ended, we hugged and introduced ourselves; they couldn’t believe that they just happened upon this particular service.

For the benediction the congregation stood and recited in unison from the Declaration,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Then I closed the service with, “In every community, there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart, there is the power to do it.” ~Marianne Williamson

I am, perhaps, guilty of some ageism; As it’s an older congregation, I wondered if a generation gap would become apparent for people who were a part of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s. Perhaps I’d be called out as a whipper-snapper telling them to do more; would certain words and phrases bring out defensiveness in these liberal activists or former activists? After all, this is a church that has a reading group who chose The New Jim Crow as one of their books, and led a local Black Lives Matter march… I want to motivate, inspire, move, not discount nor offend but definitely press

I am proud of my “basically all ‘white’ congregation” for its awareness. Everyone who came up to talk to us after the service told us they were inspired, they cried, they appreciated it’s timeliness, they did not find it hard to speak about White Privilege, or to say the words White Supremacy.

I want this to lead to more, to action; I am joining the Social Action Committee this fall with a couple others, who want to deal with racial issues head on. Our current Social Action committee, do wonderful work, but shy away from controversy. I hope we can shake things up a bit, because we are out of time, people are dying and if what is right is controversial, than that is what we need to be. I think the mindset of our faith community is on track, but we need to create point-by-point actions for those who want to do, but are overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems we are facing. I am at the very beginnings of planning a march from our church (with an invitation out to other places of worship to join us) to the local AME Church, for the fall. Not only to show solidarity but to press our local justice department to address bias. With so much to do, it’s a start.

Poems:

http://allpoetry.com/I-Continue-To-Dream

http://allpoetry.com/Let-America-Be-America-Again

http://allpoetry.com/Freedom’s-Plow

Songs:

If I Had a Hammer www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaWl2lA7968

When The Spirit Says Do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OszKIhFRsQ

The Fire of Commitment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYKPtFPMf7A


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Jenn Kanze-Eaton lives by the sea in Plymouth Massachusetts with her husband, incredible teenage daughter’s and three cats, who spent the last 18 years raising her girls, tending her gardens and making old stuff into new stuff. She is an artist, activist,tree hugging dirt worshiper, sci-fi geek and mermaid in disguise.


Blended Families

What does it mean to call a family blended? The term still refers to families formed after divorce and remarriage—step-parents and step-children and step-siblings pieced together in new patterns. The term can also encompass families that are interracial; in these families, blending takes on additional permutations that certainly have puzzled some throughout history.

Like other interracial families, those that are also blended through remarriage contend with external assumptions and judgments—the confused looks and questioning glances, the “ah-ha” moments or oblivious denial. When I was married to my daughter’s father—who, like me, has both a black and a white parent—I slipped into the ease of relative inconspicuousness for the first time in my life. Raised with my white mother, I had experienced the questions about whether I was adopted and had felt defensive about my own belonging. In my marriage, though, I was able to take for granted that others saw and accepted where I belonged. Releasing the guardedness I felt when I needed to defend my familial place, I nevertheless felt an alternative defensiveness that many “blended” families and people of color feel in mainly white communities.

Now that I’m divorced and partnered with a white man, I feel the return of my childhood alertness to others’ assumptions about my family. Blessedly, our society in general and our community in particular do seem to have come a long way since Loving v. Virginia, but none of us can believe that racism is eradicated or that interracial unions are always accepted with open arms and open minds. My partner and I have had only one obviously racist experience in our two years together, and thankfully it was subtle, but I don’t kid myself that the obvious incident we experienced was all we’ll ever encounter.

As we slowly blend our families, I’m watchful of additional experiences we might have—of hostile or benign racism—and how our children might be affected. Of course, I also must ask myself if my very watchfulness amplifies negative experiences or even turns neutral ones into negative. On one occasion when my partner took my daughter out for ice cream, a woman asked him if my daughter was his, noting his whiteness and her brownness. “Sadly, no,” he replied smiling, meaning that he would be proud to be her biological father in addition to feeling like a parent to her. The woman then proceeded to comment on how lovely my daughter looks, how “Indian.” Hmm.

I wonder, too, the experiences I might have on occasions when I’m with his twins, one of whom is a freckled, blue-eyed, red-headed beauty and the other an as-yet smaller version of his imposing father. Will people assume I’m a nanny? Hmm.

I wonder in which configurations we’ll have our familial status silently questioned or vocally challenged. When David is with my daughter, will his belonging somehow be allowed, if not assumed, due to his whiteness and maleness? Will my belonging be overlooked when I’m with his children because of my brown femaleness? And when the five of us are together, what will people see? What, if anything, will they say?

Ever the optimist, I’m hoping people will see a happy family, not unlike most other families, regardless of race or marital history. It’s a utopian vision, surely, but I also hope people will allow us to reflect back to them a certain level of social awareness, acceptance, growth. Blended families really aren’t such a novelty, and ultimately it’s that simple fact I hope people see.


IMG_4147_2Tru Leverette works as an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Florida where she teaches African-American literature and serves as director of African-American/African Diaspora Studies. Her research interests broadly include race and gender in literature and culture, and she focuses specifically on critical mixed race studies. Her most recent work has been published in Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora and the edited collections Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speaking Out and The Search for Wholeness and Diaspora Literacy in Contemporary African-American Literature. She served as a Fulbright Scholar at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, during the Winter 2013 term.


Meat Curry Recipe

Meat curry is a staple around our house. Every time I tell my husband I’m making Indian food he asks, “Is it meat curry?”

I was asking him this week to tell me a story about India and he had the perfect one to go with this recipe.

“Every time I would visit Ummamma and Thathya in India I would go out and get fresh spices for the meals. Outside of the bungalow they were staying in, there was a chinta chiguru plant (tamarind plant). When it would blossom the kids and I would climb the tree and each gather an arm full of the tamarind plant. We would rush it back to Ummamma and she would make the best chinta chiguru mamsam. To this day it is still one of my favorite recipes.”

Chinta chiguru mamsam is a fancy meat curry. Today I want to show you all a basic meat curry that is just a delicious!

Ingredients:

1 tbs oil
1 tbs butter
1 tbs ginger garlic paste
1 green chili
½-1 tsp chili powder (this depends on your spice tolerance)
1 lb beef stew meat (lamb and goat)
1 cup spinach
1 tsp turmeric
1/2 chopped onion
1/2 tbs ground coriander powder
1/2 cup water
2 chopped tomatoes
1 tsp salt to taste

Directions:

Heat your pan over medium/low heat. When the pan is warm, add in your butter, and onions. When your onions are translucent, add in your ginger garlic and spices. Heat for 2-3 minutes. (Cooking the spices takes away the raw taste from them).

Add in your stew meat and cook for 15 minutes. Pour in water and tomatoes. Cook until the meat is tender for about 20 minutes. When the meat is just about done, add in your spinach and let the spinach wilt. Add in your salt and serve it with rice or naan.


almostindianwife@gmail.comBrittany Muddamalle is the mother of three boys under four years old. She has been in an intercultural marriage for six years. Her and her husband are currently raising their children in American and East Indian culture. She is also the writer of The Almost Indian Wife blog. Her hope is to make a change by sharing her experiences with her own intercultural marriage and raising biracial children.

Check out her blog: The Almost Indian Wife                                                      Facebook Twitter Google+ 


Teaching Children to be Proud of their Cultures

I’m realizing more and more how much we all want to blend in. We like the idea of being unique and one of a kind, but we also want to be accepted by social standards. A little unique is ok, but too much is just weird.

Schools are even starting to feed into this “let’s all be the same” philosophy. They don’t want people to stand out as being the best or the worst at anything. I’ve even seen schools that give out medals to everyone on a sports team so no one feels like they didn’t do a good job. What about the person that did the best?

People are scared to let kids feel different. They want them all to feel the same so they don’t risk the child that doesn’t feel like they fit in.

My husband and I don’t want to teach this to our children. They are different. They aren’t like all the kids around them. They are unique. They are biracial. They are Indian and Caucasian.

This “let’s all be the same” mentality teaches kids to stifle what makes them special. I want my kids to celebrate what makes them unique. I want them to be so proud of these differences that they share it with all their friends.

Instead of asking ourselves, “How can we make sure our kids fit in?” let’s ask ourselves, “How can we help our kids to be proud of who they are?”

My husband’s cousin taught me this lesson a few years ago. He had been teased in his elementary school about being different. His friends were teasing him because his mother came to school in Indian clothes. He had a choice right then. He had the choice to be embarrassed and hope his friends would forget about the incident or he could stand up for himself.

Can you guess what he chose to do?

He went home that night and told his mom that he needed to wear Indian clothes to school the next day! His friends were pointing out a huge difference in his life. His mother is East Indian, which means he is different than his friends at school. He is Caucasian and East Indian. He had piles of Indian clothes for all of his Indian events. He, by no means, needed to do anything. He could have ignored them. Instead he decided to take pride and show off something special to him.

The next day at school, he wore his handsome Indian clothes. Instead of being mocked by his friends, they all surrounded him and said how cool he looked!

So what did his parents do? How in the world did they raise their child to be proud of his heritage?

They made sure both cultures were present in his life on a daily basis.

If you want a child to be proud of their culture, they first have to understand it. You need to teach them the values and traditions of both cultures in their life.

My husband’s aunt and uncle taught their child what type of Indian clothes to wear to different events, how to eat Indian food with his hands, the correct Indian/American names to call relatives, American/Indian holidays, famous food from both cultures, Telugu/English, and so much more.

As he learned about both cultures, he started to understand what made them special.

They shared what they love about both cultures. 

He also learned what made each culture special to his parents.

His mom shared memories she had from growing up in India. She was able to bring it to life when she took him to India and gave him hands on experience. It wasn’t just a story for him; he was able to see the mango trees from her childhood, taste the food, ride in a rickshaw with his whole family, nap in the middle of the day due to the heat, and attempt to speak Telugu to his new friends.

His dad has also been able to bring him back to his home-town. While there he has shown him his favorite places to eat, schools he attended as a child, his family home, and meet his friends.

As his parents have shared their childhood and cultures with him, he has been able to experience them both first hand. Those memories turn into his own passion for not only their culture, but his.

As a child starts to fall in love with their culture, they start to realize how special it makes them. They are able to take something their parents hold dear to them and see what it means to them. They start to see how their cultures have made them into the person they are becoming.

How have you taught your child to be proud of their culture?


almostindianwife@gmail.comBrittany Muddamalle is the mother of three boys under four years old. She has been in an intercultural marriage for six years. Her and her husband are currently raising their children in American and East Indian culture. She is also the writer of The Almost Indian Wife blog. Her hope is to make a change by sharing her experiences with her own intercultural marriage and raising biracial children.

Check out her blog: The Almost Indian Wife                                                      Facebook Twitter Google+ 


Chicken Tikka Masala

My husband and I are coming up on our six year anniversary. It’s been a whirlwind for us. In the last six years we have moved to two different states, had three boys, and daily attempt to navigate our family through two cultures. I’m a Whitey from the Pacific Northwest and my husband is an East Indian from Chicago.

We have a few things that make up our foundation and helps to hold us together. Two of those things are our love of food and family. This is one of the things I love about Indian culture. It’s all about both of those things!

My husband and I love sharing Indian dishes with my side of the family. It’s a simple way we can teach them about a culture other than their own.

The first dish we showed my family was Chicken Tikka Masala. I haven’t met anyone that doesn’t like this dish! It’s incredibly easy to make. It just takes a little love and a few hours in the kitchen. When my family tried it, we took it a step further and taught them how to eat with their hands!

 

Ingredients:

  1. 1 lb of diced chicken breasts
  2. 2 small cans of tomato paste
  3. 2 garlic cloves
  4. 2-3 tbs olive oil or ghee
  5. 1 Shan chicken tikka bbq packet
  6. 1 tbs methi leaves
  7. 1-2 tsp chili powder
  8. 1-2 cups of plain yogurt
  9. 1/2 quart heavy whipping cream
  10. optional- extra yogurt, basmati rice, naan

 

Directions:

  1. Dice up the chicken and combine it with the Shan mix and yogurt in a bowl. Marinate it for 3 hours or overnight.
  2. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Put your chicken on a deep cookie sheet and bake it until your chicken is cooked through.
  3. Heat a pan on medium low heat. Add in the olive oil and diced garlic. After about 5 minutes, add in the tomato paste, methi leaves, and chili powder. Cook for about 10 minutes.
  4. Slowly add in the heavy cream, while stirring. Turn the sauce to the lowest setting. When the chicken is done, add it to your sauce.

 

A little family secret, just for you. You can add the extra liquid on the cookie sheet to the sauce and chicken mixture or keep it in a small bowl for people that like the heat to add to their dish. We call it “man sauce” in our house.

Serve this with rice and or naan.

 


almostindianwife@gmail.comBrittany Muddamalle is the mother of three boys under four years old. She has been in an intercultural marriage for six years. Her and her husband are currently raising their children in American and East Indian culture. She is also the writer of The Almost Indian Wife blog. Her hope is to make a change by sharing her experiences with her own intercultural marriage and raising biracial children.

Check out her blog: The Almost Indian Wife                                                      Facebook Twitter Google+ 


Is It Possible to Balance Two Cultures Perfectly?

I met my husband in California during a program with our church. We were just two young kids falling in love. We were lost in our own world. The scope of our differences didn’t really come out until we were engaged. We decided to have a half Indian and half American wedding. We had this grand idea of a perfectly blended wedding, which would lead to a perfectly blended life.

We did pretty well bringing both cultures in, but the more we strived for perfection, the further away it got. I finally got to the point during all of my wedding planning where I decided to just let the pieces fall where they may. It ended up being just what we needed.

Our wedding was beautiful. I married my best friend. Afterwards, I sat there, during the reception, holding my husband’s hand. We were watching two cultures collide beautifully. Americans and Indians were dancing together to Bollywood and American music, wedding traditions from both sides were coming together smoothly, and everyone was having a great time celebrating.

Then I realized that perfection didn’t matter. All that mattered was my husband and I were bringing two cultures together into one family.

Fast forward almost six years later and we’re still using what we learned during our wedding. We now have three little boys. We have often felt pressured to raise them with one racial identity. Instead, we want them to know how special they are to be raised in two cultures.

Sharing both cultures with our boys has been hard. We both want to share our traditions and values, but choosing what tradition to follow can be difficult. It requires a lot of communication, open mindedness, and grace for my husband and I. As we are faced with decisions, my husband and I have to decide together what’s best for our family. Often times, this means choosing which culture’s way of doing it works best for that situation.

The biggest thing that helps our family is encouraging our children to fall in love with both cultures. Looking to see why we love both cultures helps us make our decisions. One reason we love Indian culture is because of its emphasis on family. That means if a decision comes up about family, we know right away what we would do.

Indian culture has taught us that we should always step up when our family is in need. When my husband was little, his mom was in nursing school. She had recently moved to the US with her husband, who was working full time. She needed help and her parents immediately stepped in. They raised my husband in India for two years, while she finished school. A few years later, his mom was pregnant with twins. She had a rough pregnancy and was put on bed rest. Her sister stopped everything in her own life and moved in with them to help. Indian culture shows us that family needs to be one of the most important things in our lives.

American culture is around my family daily. Our children are able to learn about it every day by just walking out the front door. In addition to traditional American values that they are exposed to daily, my husband and I go out of our way to share my family’s traditions and values with them as well. One value I have been able to share with my children from my culture is independence. My mother was single for half of my childhood. Being raised by a single mother taught me the importance of independence. While this can be a conflicting value at times with Indian culture, I think it can be a big benefit as well. My children are able to learn how to take care of themselves and those around them.

The values of each culture helps to lead us in our decision-making. The worst thing you can do is to make it about an “even trade.” We do this for my culture and this for yours. If you make it about being even with your culture, it turns into a competition.

Blending cultures perfectly is impossible. It’s the wrong thing to pursue. All you can do is take it one situation at a time and do what’s best for your family. The more our kids fall in love with both cultures, the more they naturally make decisions based on both.


almostindianwife@gmail.comBrittany Muddamalle is the mother of three boys under four years old. She has been in an intercultural marriage for six years. Her and her husband are currently raising their children in American and East Indian culture. She is also the writer of The Almost Indian Wife blog. Her hope is to make a change by sharing her experiences with her own intercultural marriage and raising biracial children.

Check out her blog: The Almost Indian Wife                                                      Facebook Twitter Google+

 


Oh, Shoot! We’re the Grown People!

My mother was 20 when she gave birth to me. She was a single white woman holding her newborn brown baby at St. Mary’s Hospital, and I don’t really know what she was feeling at the time because I haven’t thought to ask her before now. I wonder, though, how her singleness, her age, and her race colored her experience of welcoming me into the world. Did my mother endure criticism because she was a young, unwed Catholic woman, just a couple of years past high school? Did she face a similar situation to the one Rebecca Walker describes in her memoir Black, White, Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self? Walker writes of reading the one-word question “Correct?” next to her parents’ races on her birth certificate, as if someone couldn’t fathom the possibility that a black and white union was not a mistake. I imagine—and like to think—my mother didn’t consider her status or age or race at all; instead I picture her overcome by sentiments new mothers typically feel—joy and relief and exhaustion, untainted by the world outside of the space between her eyes and mine.

I’ve also not thought to ask my mother how the social considerations of marital status, age, and race affected her as I grew older and as she mothered me in various contexts through the stages of my life. As a child, I thought nothing of the fact that my mother was unmarried, and I remember telling a playmate that I had no dad—really believing that I had no father, that my mother had sprouted me the way a plant shoots out a rhizome. I thought it was cool that my mother was so beautiful, strong, and younger than all the other mothers. And race? I didn’t know a thing about it for a long time. Not surprisingly, my first knowledge of it came through the issue of color. Still, my mother’s color in relation to mine never crossed my mind. My first awareness of color was of my color, perhaps because my mother’s was the same as the majority of people I knew, growing up in white communities as I did. So, in my childhood eyes, I was the different one. And for most of my childhood, I felt special in that difference rather than peculiar.

On a few occasions, though, people would ask me if I were adopted, and at those times I felt very peculiar—both unmoored and confused. Could they not see my mother in me? My upturned nose just like hers? The same crooked canine tooth? Our similar voices and mannerisms? And now I wonder, did my mother face similar questions? Did she encounter people who questioned her relationship to me, either benignly or aggressively? Were people ever hostile toward her when it became clear that she, a white woman, had paired with a black man? And what were the challenges she faced, both race-related and otherwise, as a young single parent?

These questions have only just begun to occur to me since I have become a mother. Unlike my own mother, I was married and in my 30s when I had my daughter. Also, my daughter and I share brown skin and therefore don’t face external questions about who belongs with whom. (In fact, at her school orientation, when I entered the room where my daughter was playing, another child turned to her and said, “Hey, brown girl, your mother is here.” Nope, no confusion there. Yes, I’m being both straightforward and ironic.) I am still challenged by motherhood and curious about my own mother’s experience and the way singleness, age, and race affected it. What I know is this: mothering is tough; single mothering tougher still. And here’s how I know:

It’s 5:00AM on a Tuesday morning, and my daughter calls to me from her bedroom. “Mom, I don’t feel well!” I leap out of bed, bang my foot on the nightstand, and limp across the house to her room. With one hand on her forehead, I know the deal: fever, sick day, no school for her…and no work for me. After the thermometer, the cool washcloth, the lullabies, she’s sleeping soundly again, but I know I won’t be able as the sun inches its way toward day. I sit before my computer and email all the necessary parties: her school, my students, the administrative assistant in the department where I teach. Then, I need to pore over my syllabi, making sure I can squeeze back in the work that will be missed today.

How much of this is familiar to you, women of the world? Whether you’re like me, a now-single mother, or whether you have a partner, most women with children are familiar with the scenario I describe. Historically, women have raised children. Women have been responsible for their feeding, for their entertainment, for their care when they’re sick. Across generations, across cultures, across races. Even when we work. We know this. And even the television commercials remind and train us in our role so that—often unthinkingly—we assume our place in the familial scheme.

I recall a particularly telling moment after my daughter’s father and I were separated but before we were divorced. Our child was visiting him for the night, and he called me (5:00AM again) to let me know that she was sick. “I’ll drop her off before I go to work,” he told me. What?! “Wait a minute,” I balked. “I teach today…”

But that wasn’t really an issue to him, and even I felt conflicted about my duties. I want to excel in my career and, in fact, I love my time in the classroom. I take my students and our plans seriously and don’t cancel classes lightly. At the same time, I strive to be an exceptional mother (don’t we all?), and I feel there’s no better place for my daughter to be than with me, especially when she’s sick.

“She’s sick. She needs to be with you,” he added, and this “compliment” was so well aligned with our cultural expectations, with my expectations of myself, that I quickly relented any opposition I might have entertained. Yes, I’m her mother; she’s my priority, I understood. “Bring her back,” I told him.

So today, when V. awoke feverish and needy, I knew I was expected to email her father and let him know her condition. I’m obliged to keep him apprised of her health when it’s abnormal, of unexpected visits to the doctor, of diagnoses that are made. Dashing off a business-like email to him, I felt highly conflicted about my position. Yes, I want to care for my daughter. No, it’s not right for me to hold the sole responsibility for her care, whether this responsibility has been imposed on me, assumed by me, or a little of both. I felt the itch of resentment, thought he should at least offer to take her to the doctor, if necessary, so that I could teach my classes today. Still, I didn’t really expect him to offer. I am her mother; she is in my care.

Now, I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I’m not suggesting, nor do I believe, that there aren’t plenty of balanced, mature, nurturing men in the world. Many of these are the hard working, committed partners of hard-working women; others are the often culturally forgotten single dads who work as hard as single mothers. I know many very committed and caring men who are admirable fathers and equitable partners.

Nevertheless, we can recognize that historically childrearing was women’s work, and in many cases it still is. And I’m not denigrating this task in the least. I know mothers do some of the hardest work that is ever done and surely the most primary, if not the most important (though I would throw my hat into that argument any day). And we know well the gains that the second wave of feminism offered in giving women choices regarding motherhood and career. Additionally, as third wave feminist Rebecca Walker has pointed out, while the second wave gave the following generation the choice, the third wave recognized that it was perfectly acceptable for a woman to choose motherhood over career if that was personally most fitting for her.

The third wave also allows us to recognize, though, that often the either/or choice is not the one that is made; many times, we women still want it all. I, for one, want to teach, research, publish AND I want to be the main caregiver of my daughter, have a from-scratch meal on the table for her every night, and keep the house pristine. Women like me are trying to embody what Michelle Wallace called in the 1970s the “myth of the superwoman,” and we’re suffering for it.

How? Well, I return to that internal struggle I feel about the care of my daughter when she’s sick. I sincerely want to be with her, and I recognize that I have a job to do. As the breadwinner, my job puts the food on the table; it is a fundamental resource in the very care I take of her. If I were to request that her father take her for the day while I work, I might suffer, however irrationally, a sense of inadequacy, as if I can’t do without him after all—and believe me, I’m not one to suggest that. Or as if I am somehow less of a mother if my care isn’t focused squarely on nurturing—on the cooking of chicken soup, tucking in of covers, and signing of songs.

Clearly, there are some problems with these nagging thoughts of mine, but am I alone in thinking them? I doubt it. Yet this self-awareness is useful. First of all, I’m coming to recognize the importance of support (Really? you ask me. You’re just now figuring this out, Superwoman?). Whether I want to accept her father’s support or not (and whether or not he would offer it), I am realizing that I do need others to have my back as I raise my daughter. That old cliché is true: it does take a village. I recall my own childhood again, and my maternal grandmother coming to live with my mother and me when I was six. She picked me up from school, cooked our meals, cleaned the house; in a way, my mother did have a parenting partner, and all three of us benefitted greatly. Considering this, I’m grateful for close friends in my life, for the welcoming school my daughter attends, for family a phone call away.

The second problem is a bit harder to rationalize my way out of, as motherhood has been so linked with nurturing. Whether my idealization of the mother care-taker is culturally conditioned or biologically inherent isn’t really the issue for me; rather, I recognize that, as her mother, I love to nurture my daughter, and I believe the sense of maternal security I provide can and hopefully will be an imprint that sustains her as she grows into a woman capable of mothering herself.

Speaking of mothering the self, I’m reminded of a scene in one of my favorite novels, Toni Morrison’s Jazz. After Violet’s husband has an affair, she and Alice converse about womanhood, life choices, and maturity.

Violet says, “We women, me and you. Tell me something real. Don’t just say I’m grown and ought to know. I don’t. I’m fifty and I don’t know nothing. What about it? Do I stay with him? I want to, I think. I want…well, I didn’t always…now I want. I want some fat in this life.”

Alice replies, “Wake up. Fat or lean, you got just one. This is it.”

“You don’t know either, do you?” Violet challenges her.

“I know enough to know how to behave.”

“Is that it? Is that all it is?” Violet is forced to ask.

“Is that all what is?”

And then Violet jumps in with my favorite line: “Oh shoot! Where the grown people? Is it us?”

“Oh, Mama.” Alice utters.

I love that exchange; it’s poignant and it’s real. How many of us, despite motherhood and seeming maturity, still don’t feel old enough or wise enough or capable enough to mother? We wonder if we’re mothering “right.” We wonder if we’re there for our children enough, if we’re teaching them well, if we’re guiding them wisely toward emotional intelligence and five fruits and veggies a day. Many of us look to our mothers, as I do, imagining they had all the answers by the ripe old age of 35. Like Violet and Alice, we look around and wonder where the real grown ups are and then sit back, stunned, calling for Mama when we realize we’re the grown people, even when we feel like imposters.

Perhaps we should take some comfort in that fact, in the realization that all of us—and our mothers, too—feel like imposters from time to time, but that’s only because we haven’t been down before whatever road it is we’re traveling. We haven’t yet encountered whatever challenges—in relationship, in age, in cultural codes, in you-name-it—that are still coming down the pike. That’s the point, though, right? We keep the growing edge of ourselves alive; we keep living and learning, trying and failing or succeeding, always facing the new questions that arise. As Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “There are years that ask questions and years that give answers.” So even when we have to live the questions for longer than we’d like, perhaps we can comfort ourselves with the fact that, eventually, we will live ourselves right into the answers.

It seems to me my mother did. And I’ll be sure to ask her.

 

By: Tru Leverette, PhD.


[rescue_column size=”one-fourth” position=”first”]IMG_3976[/rescue_column] Tru Leverette works as an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Florida where she teaches African-American literature and serves as director of African-American/African Diaspora Studies. Her research interests broadly include race and gender in literature and culture, and she focuses specifically on critical mixed race studies. Her most recent work has been published in Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora and the edited collections Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speaking Out and The Search for Wholeness and Diaspora Literacy in Contemporary African-American Literature. She served as a Fulbright Scholar at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, during the Winter 2013 term.


Switching it Up: Mixing Identities Over Time

I couldn’t understand why my mother was so outraged. I was eight, perhaps nine, and my great-aunt – my mother’s aunt – had just graced me with what she clearly thought was a compliment: “She could pass for Spanish!”

My great-aunt thought I could “pass for Spanish,” and that was enough to make my mother invite her own aunt to leave our house. I was young and probably even more naïve than some of my peers and had no idea what “pass” meant or why it would make my mother so angry. It was obviously a bad thing – I sure never wanted to pass, whatever that was! I didn’t see much of my great-aunt after that, though my mother fumed about that comment from time to time for years after.

Let me give you some background. I have two families of origin. I’ll talk about the second one first because it is the most important. I was adopted as an infant by what some would label “light-skinned” African American people and I was raised as Black. I was seven when my first adoptive mother died, my father remarried soon thereafter – again to a light-skinned, African American woman. But here’s where it started to get complicated. I learned I was adopted when my first adoptive mother died. The shock of that still echoes five decades later. I remember clearly that I desperately wanted to understand my story. My WHOLE story, not just what happened after my first few months in a Chicago orphanage. This is not a comfortable conversation for most adoptive parents, especially those who adopted in the 1950’s when birth parents were erased from birth certificates and new parents were assured that, through the miracle of careful matching, no one need ever know that their child wasn’t born to them, that their adopted child could pass as a birth child. But my place in the world had suddenly changed very painfully, my anchors ripped away, what I knew to be true turned into lies, two mothers lost before I was a decade old. And I needed to put the pieces together.

My new mom – who will just be called my mother from here – didn’t know much about my story. I heard several variations of my origins; my favorite was that my parents had met as college students; my birth mother was white and my birth father a student from Africa. He was Black, of course. Clearly that could never have worked out so I was placed for adoption. Even within the variations, the races remained the same and, suddenly, I was a mixed race person. My mom was mixed, too, with Caucasian, Creek and African American heritage, but she was raised and identified as black so, when I tried to talk about this new revelation and my identity with my equally mixed new cousins, I was informed by my mother to drop that, I was Black and that was that. My new family primarily identified as black, even though I know that they were sometimes perceived as perhaps of another background. No one thought about passing, as far as I know. We were proud of being black. So, I never brought it up again, though I frequently wondered about that missing mom, the first mom, the one who’d carried and birthed me and then gave me to another family.

I secretly tried on this mysterious identity. But I didn’t know anyone who identified as mixed; there were no popular figures, no classmates, no characters in the many books I read, who called themselves mixed. So, without some model as to what that identity meant and looked like, that youthful flirtation with a different racial identity did not have any way to take root.

Two decades or so passed. When my first child was born one of my first thoughts was that here was the first person I knew who was related to me by blood. We try to pretend that it’s not, but blood is important in American culture. Adoption is outside our norm and often not even on our social radar. People who didn’t know otherwise, always saw a resemblance between me and my adoptive family – I’d hear, “you look like your cousin,” “you’re tall like your dad,” or “you have your mom’s hair.” The miracle of careful matching. I recall once having to do a biology assignment in which we had to trace a specific inheritable physical trait through our family tree – I never knew if the teacher realized that I made all of my information up, or if she guessed that I or someone else in my family had been adopted. Even my mother would occasionally use the phrase, “Blood is thicker than water,” to stress how family should stick together. I don’t think she ever realized the irony.

After having a child, I decided to find my roots, if I could. I had been grafted onto another tree – a wonderful, welcoming, hospitable tree, but nevertheless, not the place I’d started. The saga of my search is a long story in itself so we’ll skip to the happy ending – I found my maternal side, the long-lost womb and first love. I was extremely fortunate that I was welcomed into the family with wide open arms as if I’d only been away for a while. Suddenly this only child had siblings, a host of new cousins, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles. It was overwhelming and wonderful and mostly white. My two (older) half siblings were also mixed and there were other family members who were people of color, all welcomed in the family, but still very much a minority.

My birthmother and I were pretty taken with each other and that meant, for me, finding an identity that included her. It was easy to start calling myself mixed then. My older sister, who had grown up with our shared mother, identified as mixed – check both boxes or check other, don’t let yourself be forced to choose. We weren’t white and didn’t want to be or to try to pass as such, but we both embraced the mixed heritage that contributed to who we were. I reveled in this new identity because it gave me a connection that I had never experienced before. I gleefully checked both boxes when that pesky demographic question showed up. Not, as my mother had feared, because I wanted to be less black, but because I wanted to connect to my biological family.

Fast forward again to today. My connection to my first family of origin is solid. We see each other from time to time, talk on the phone, send cards, share via Facebook. And my identity has drifted back. I now check one box, Black/African American. It’s not because it’s what people see when they look at me, but because it’s who I feel I am. Maybe it’s because of the identity that I lived with for so long, but I feel that I can be a Black person of mixed roots, retain that solid personal connection with both my birth and adoptive families, and embrace all of the history that make me the person I am today.

Out of curiosity, I recently tried the DNA test offered by Ancestry.com. It returned my genetic background as 61% European. In the Ancestry.com world, that means Caucasian. Africa contributed 38% of my DNA with the negligible remainder, traces of West Asia. This is interesting, I suppose, and if the demographic questions that come up on studies or surveys asked for my genetic identity, I would give a different answer. But, for now, I’m African American. It’s the identity that shaped my life and experiences in America. And it’s the one I’m happy with. For now. Check back in another 20 years.

By: Darlene Nichols


 

[rescue_column size=”one-third” position=”first”]20150213_092521-1[/rescue_column] Darlene is a proud Midwesterner born and raised, mother of two talented musical sons, librarian extraordinaire, and advocate for diversity and inclusion. Not only does she have a mixed race heritage, she is married interracially and has biracial children so issues relate to mixed identity, acceptance, role models, etc., have been of long interest. She has been a librarian at the University of Michigan for almost thirty years and, growing out of that role, co-edited a readers’ and researchers’ guide to finding information on mixed race people entitled Multiracial America: a resource guide on the history and literature of interracial issues. She lives in Ann Arbor with her husband and Sheltie and, occasionally, sons.


Claiming Race, Identity and a Right to Education

 It is my job to think about school. Everyday, I read, write, and speak about education. I ask, and often try to answer, the big questions. Like, why do we have schools? Or, what is the purpose of education? Even more specifically, how do I make sure all kids get the education they deserve? Since I now have my own children, these questions have taken on new meaning in my life. They have become personal. More than I expected, they have become questions that challenge who we are; who I am and who my children will become.

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When I think back to my earliest years of schooling, I can’t pinpoint a specific moment when I knew that I was getting a different education that my friends. I grew up in urban public schools, not unlike the one my own kids attend today. I LOVED SCHOOL. I mean, LOVED it. All parts. Carrying the milk crate for snack, practicing handwriting, chasing friends on the playground. Later, the love grew to encompass algebra and writing, student council and more writing… I was good at school and that made every moment satisfying and fulfilling.

At some point, I began to realize that I got more credit than I deserved. It wasn’t just that I was good at what I did. Maybe, I thought, it wasn’t even that I was better than anyone else at school, at all. It did have something to do with having blond hair and blue eyes. It had to do with feeling free in a place that didn’t criminalize me. It had to do with looking white.

I am, perhaps, one of the more stereotypical American multiracial blends, one that connotes the taboo of race-mixing specific to slavery in this country. My mother is white and my father is Black, though his heritage includes European & American Indian and is evidenced by a “high yellow” complexion and wavy black hair. What is less stereotypical about my multiracial identity is that I look white, especially to most white people. And the result is that I benefit from white privilege.

As a young student, I don’t think I had any inkling of what white privilege was or what it meant for my freedom to think, learn, and do. I am well into my thirties now and I am still coming to terms with it. Being multiracial in a family that valued our mixed heritage, I wasn’t raised to think that my identity presented any contradiction to societal norms. Looking white, I also wasn’t confronted with the same degree of racism or prejudice that my father, or even my friends, experienced. It was easy for me to say I was mixed, to feel mixed, to be mixed; but that didn’t mean I had a personal understanding of what it meant to be a person of color.

We moved, when I was entering 7th grade, into a new urban district. When my mom went to register us at school, all three of us school-aged children, she was required to fill out a multitude of paperwork that included demographic information. She proceeded to fill out all of the corresponding bubbles for each of us. One sheet at a time, she shaded the Black bubble, then the white, then the American Indian. The administrator leaned over to her, this white woman with a racially ambiguous baby on her hip, and said,

“You can’t do that, ma’am.”

“Do what?” said my mama.

“Do that,” said the other woman, eyeing the paper. “It says, ‘Choose one.’”

“But my children are mixed,” said my mama.

The woman looked at my mother and looked at us. “Choose one,” she said.

My mom paused for a moment, looking the woman directly in her eyes. I watched her erase some bubbles and fill others in. I couldn’t believe what she was doing. Looking at each paper, I realized she had followed the woman’s instructions. The Black bubble was shaded in next to my name. Next to my brother’s, the American Indian bubble. For my sister, the white one. My mother handed the perplexed administrator the papers and walked us out of the office and back into the last moments of summer sun.

Despite my mother’s resistance to a monoracial system, it didn’t change the fact that I looked white to many teachers and peers. I want to think that if I had been browner or had coarser hair (which, as a child, I often prayed to God to be and have), the encouragement, support, and freedom that I received as a student would have been unchanged. But I know better. Then, as now, I see black and brown students, whether identified as multiracial or not, marginalized by a quickly evolving education system. If you live in Chicago right now, you know that Chicago Public Schools are under constant fire for the overall inability to adequately educate students, particularly students of color. If you are a multiracial parent, or the parent of a multiracial child, your child is perhaps included in the 4,202 students (1.1%) that make up CPS as of 2014. Or, like many other parents, you may have “labeled” your child as their predominant racial category. (No judgment: the pressure to label at all could be an entirely different blog post). What can be said for sure, is that if your child is not categorized as white, he is part of a 90% majority in Chicago Public Schools: people of color.

I bring up these statistics not to question the validity of reported racial demographics, but to highlight the increasing importance of our power and solidarity as people of color, regardless of who we appear to be. We ARE the Chicago Public Schools. Similar to most other urban areas in the United States, we are fast becoming the majority, even in areas like Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, where students of color have climbed to a 75% majority in public schools. If you are multiracial, chances are you grew up in a mororacial suburb or neighborhood, or attended a minimally diverse school. Maybe you were one of a few multiracial students in your class. In Chicago, many neighborhoods and schools remain segregated along lines of race, giving the illusion that multiracial students remain somewhat invisible in often homogenous populations. However, multiracial students are not invisible in data. Our children are included in the achievement and suspension demographics. They are part of the “Black and brown” student population that is “at risk” for failure, according to statistical reports and analyses.

But we are missing the reality. We ARE the Chicago Public Schools. As families of color, we constitute the mass. We get to make the demands. We get to shape the educational opportunities for our children.

My appearance and my multiracial identity have become even more salient as my children have reached school age. I can’t really describe what it feels like to prepare your first kid for her first day of school. You won’t know this feeling until you have a little of your own, or maybe one that you are lucky enough to care for at the start of the school day. But, for someone who loved school as much as I did, this preparation was both magical and terrifying. Buying all of the school supplies, which is equal parts fun and exasperating; making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the shape of a heart to put in her lunch box; laying out school clothes for the big day. Holding her tiny hand in yours while you walk to school and letting it go as she runs, faster than you are ready, to stand in line with her class.

She is older now, this oldest daughter. She is 11, but she looks 17. She is tall and confident and the color of a caramel latte, or a new autumn leaf. She is smarter than I ever was and she knows it, I think. Like Omilaju Miranda’s daughter, she is teaching me what race means to her. What it means to be multiracial. What it means to be a person of color. She knows in ways I don’t; in ways I can’t.

Last year, I joined the Local School Council, an elected parent-school-community council, for my daughter. She doesn’t know it yet, but people will question her identity. They will try to put her in a bubble. I am there to make sure she never sees the need to fit inside it.

By: Briellen Griffin

 


[rescue_column size=”one-third” position=”first”]IMG_1381 [/rescue_column] Briellen Griffin is currently a doctoral student of sociology in Cultural and Educational Policy Studies at Loyola University Chicago. With a team of faculty and graduate researchers, she is currently studying the civic experiences of students in Chicago Public Schools as they navigate the competitive citywide high school admissions process. Brie has spent the last several years in Minneapolis, working as a school social worker in the public schools, helping to create quality learning opportunities for all students, and serving as a liaison for students, families, and teachers. Her current research interests are concentrated on educational access and equity for communities of color, developing socially just and community-grown models of teaching, and improving school-community relationships. She currently lives in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago with her husband and three kids, who attend their neighborhood school.


Skin

“I wish I had white skin,” my three year-old daughter said, swinging breezily at the park.

Gulp. “Why do you say that, Sweetheart?” I asked, outwardly calm but inwardly exclaiming, Shit! What do I do with this?

“Because all of the friends at school have white skin.” Very matter-of-factly.

***

I think about race a lot, both professionally and personally, and perhaps more than the average person. I work as a professor teaching race-related literature classes and grew up as a “brown-skinned white girl,” as France Winddance Twine has called mixed race girls raised in white households and predominantly white communities. I remember as a preschooler myself in the 1970s telling my teacher that I wished I had long, blonde hair (and presumably pale skin) and, though I’m embarrassed to admit this deep-seated desire I held at the time, pastel underwear. So I wasn’t entirely surprised that my daughter, the beautifully brown-skinned child of her mixed race father and I, would develop feelings similar to those I’d had as a child, given the predominantly white school she attended.

But so soon? And how did she internalize the idea that dark skin is undesirable when she hasn’t been a TV watcher and has been celebrated with Doc McStuffins and brown baby dolls?

Fast forward to five:

“I love my brown skin,” she tells her gymnastics teacher one day, but on another day this boisterous girl turns timid around her brown paternal grandfather and great grandmother. Or she hides behind her father’s back when she meets other brown skinned kids at the park. He tells me she seems afraid of black people and that she needs to know she “comes from this,” as well as from whiteness.

I’m feeling defensive, like my choice to live in the town I chose and have my daughter attend a Catholic school is being called into question because it effectively surrounds her with whiteness. And the cultural critic in me is nagging behind this more visceral maternal response. “Wait a minute. What do you mean, ‘She needs to know she comes from this’?” Not until later, when my maternal angst is temporarily calmed, can I tease out the implications of this remark. No, I don’t want to raise my daughter to believe she “comes from blackness and whiteness” as if they are some geographical location we can visit in time and space, as if they are a location where all of this cultural coding and conditioning just is and therefore makes sense, as if this ephemeral blackness and whiteness she “contains” could be pinned down to the pseudo-science of racialized blood or moral character.

What I want her to know is that she comes from people. These people love her and she needn’t be afraid of them because of the various colors of their skin. By extension, she needn’t fear people she meets in the world simply because of their skin; if there are people to fear in the world—and there certainly are—it’s because of their actions, not their appearance.

When I talked to her about “black people” after talking to her father, she stopped me. “Black people?” she asked, and I knew she was imagining someone the color of her tennis shoes or the car ahead of us. Having preferred more literalness with descriptions of people, I’ve always talked to my daughter about our brown skin and others with brown skin; even white people aren’t the color of notebook paper but more variations of sand and tan. I’ve challenged her when she describes the peach colored crayon as “skin color,” and I’ve asked her to hand me a skin colored crayon, holding out my hand to indicate I mean a certain shade of brown. I point out the people she considers having “white skin” don’t look like that peach-colored crayon or summer day clouds.

To her question, I replied, “I think that’s a confusing term, too, but that’s a term used for people who look like your Grappa and even your dad and me.” Although many people find my daughter hard to peg, usually asking if she’s from India, I’m sure there will be times when she’ll be called black as well.

We know racialized terms are used to classify people; unfortunately, these terms are also used to define and often limit people. We know white power and privilege exist. We know racism exists. We know unspeakable things have been done in the name of these realities. We know, too, that black triumph against these atrocities also exists. Black people have done amazing things throughout history. So have white people. Black people have also done some terrible things, as white people have, and in these statements, I’m not forgetting the power that’s coextensive with whiteness in the United States and elsewhere. Still, these terrible acts that have been (and continue to be) done are the acts of people, performed in the name and game of race, even when their ideologies become institutionalized to the point that we forget their original presence at the root of injustice.

I would rather my daughter come to the realization that race is an imperfect and often detrimental way of talking about perceived differences, whether these are biological (like skin color) or socio-cultural (like language use) and that these differences don’t map neatly onto so-called racial lines. Nor can these differences be equated with anything inherent, including a person’s worth, potential, intelligence, character, behavior, or proclivity for violence and therefore worthiness of our fear.

So the conversation will continue. I don’t want V. to be afraid of her family or to internalize this culture’s racism, which is certainly what’s happening when she shies away from other brown skinned kids on the playground or her own grandfather when she hasn’t seen him in a year. I don’t want her to grow up thinking that she’s somehow diminished because of her skin or, conversely, more special because of it. Given the sometimes subtle yet pervasive negative associations our culture makes with dark skin, and given the predominantly white community in which I’m raising my daughter, I want to normalize skin color difference, to help her see skin’s “meaning” as equivalent to that of hair or eye color, hair texture or eye shape—in other words, in itself meaningless though laden with historical baggage she needn’t help tote.

This past Christmas, V. was visited by an “Elf on the Shelf,” and, significantly, hers was brown with a short pixie cut that favored her own. When she first noticed it sitting on the bookshelf, V. morphed into a human pogo-stick, bouncing up and down like our floor was a trampoline: “I got my very own elf!!! And she looks like me!!!” A few days later, we found The Gabby Douglas Story on Netflix; since V. enjoys gymnastics and I’m pointing to positive images of black people, we watched it. Early in the movie, she noticed the family.

“They look like me, ” she remarked, smiling.

“Yes,” I affirmed, “they look like us.”

I’m comforted at this stage to know she’s seeing these affirmations of brownness and that, by extension, she can feel affirmed not just in our home but hopefully in the world as well.

Still, I wonder whose responsibility is it to affirm children’s worth? Surely the parents are primarily influential in this regard, but are we alone in valuing our children? What role do schools play? What role does culture? I’m not trying to reinforce the current cultural climate of over-affirming children to the point of narcissism, but children do deserve to have their worth and potential affirmed and encouraged, respectively. Given my daughter’s sometimes negative responses to her skin, I’d say schools and culture are clearly influential. This influence should not be taken lightly but consciously crafted so that socially we can move away from images and ideologies that suggest singular notions of beauty or worth. In so doing, we can move toward a time when individuals such as my daughter won’t look at their skin in order to define themselves or determine their value in the world.

By: Guest Blogger Tru Leverette, PhD


 

[rescue_column size=”one-third” position=”first”]adrap_logo [/rescue_column]Tru Leverette works as an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Florida where she teaches African-American literature and serves as director of African-American/African Diaspora Studies. Her research interests broadly include race and gender in literature and culture, and she focuses specifically on critical mixed race studies. Her most recent work has been published in Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora and the edited collections Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speaking Out and The Search for Wholeness and Diaspora Literacy in Contemporary African-American Literature. She served as a Fulbright Scholar at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, during the Winter 2013 term.