Tag Archives: dysfunction

My $.64 on that lady that needn’t be named

Today some crazy racist terrorist went into a Black church, prayed with some people then shot them. That’s real. In a state with no hate crime laws. That’s real. Will they fly their Confederate flag at half-mast? Real question. So let’s put this silly bitch to bed. I’d written it a few days ago for this website, but today it just seems silly. & I’m so tired. Here you go:

Everything’s fun and games until Rachel Dolezal gives an interview on the Today show.

Look, I had as much fun as anyone last weekend playing #AskRachel. As a black lady, I needed to laugh to keep from crying about seeing a little girl with her braids pulled, face pushed in the dirt with a cop’s knee in her back cause she wanted to swim in what was obviously the wrong neighborhood. I couldn’t even watch that video (haven’t is more accurate). Then came this silly bitch.

And that’s just it. She’s not stupid, not in the least. But race shit has driven her crazy. Well, welcome to the fucking club. Race is a terrible construct created for money, power and control. It has no redeeming features at all. It’s made up. Even my black self would be a bunch of different races based on where I am in the world. But regardless, I can’t tell anyone “I identify as white”.

But here’s the difference, I wouldn’t want to. I’ve been having my own race musings since moving to England particularly and having race conversations with my brown father in law who identifies as colored.

But what is it exactly that makes me want to choke the shit out of Rachel?

The fact that she can identify as black as much as she wants, but at any moment she can “decide” to become a white lady again.

Being black is more than a whipped do and some self-tanning cream. And her doing her social justice work is excellent, I just don’t know why she couldn’t do it in the skin she’s in.

More importantly is the fact that dumb ass Matt Lauer told her she’s begun a very important conversation on race. See, she still is in full usage of her white privilege. Blacks have been having this conversation since before Plessey, but now she get’s “outed” as white and quits her job at the NAACP. If she were really in it for social justice, she wouldn’t have put that branch of that organization in peril.

And who were the people who knew she was white and went along with her foolishness? This is where we get into socially constructed race. She looks like mothers and grandmothers of my friends (which says something else since she’s not an old woman, but lies will make your black crack, apparently). She looks like women and men I knew, in my family, all around me. My mother and I still argue about my 6^th grade teacher Mrs. Jones who I say was white and mom says was black. Race is made up. And made up of the skin tones of Africans + every other person on the planet. Period.

But you know who doesn’t give a fuck about Rachel and this stupid conversation? The Dominicans of Haitian decent who are getting deported back to HAITI this week. To the girl’s family in Baltimore who doesn’t get to tell anyone what she identifies as because she was raped and murdered. To that baby who was thrown to the ground like a ragdoll by an out of control cop at the behest of some white ladies who began a fight with children over a swimming pool.

This world is nauseating. Oh, and has Nestle pulled all of the water out of California yet, or that community that needs to water their golf course, how are they doin?

But Rachel, who sued our mutual alma mater Howard University, for racial discrimination against her when she was still white (oh wait, she’s been identifying as black since she was 5…her story is a narcissistic web of lies) now gets to go on The Today Show because I helped her trend on Twitter. Here comes the book, the tour, the movie and I helped, because sometimes you gotta laugh to keep from crying. I knew this would happen, and she’s gonna do it. She’s gonna Sarah Palin her way into hearts and minds.

We laughed last weekend. Now we need to pay very special attention to this conversation, because it’s going to turn really bad, really soon. We’re talking about identity and racial identity and there are few things more fragile in the world of social media.

Aw Shit, I shouldn’t have answered the phone

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So I’m sitting watching Cadillac Records with Leslie and my mom calls. I’ve also just painted my fingernails purple. I had to file them down because I scratched my face like a baby, and they’re still wet. I’m holding the phone precariously to my ear.
I answer cheerfully, as I always do and tell her what I’m doing, and she says, this’ll be quick. Of course it will because I just told you I’m watching a movie and poisoning myself inhaling paint fumes (which isn’t as bad as people say). She asks “do you know what I was doing 23 years ago today? Getting high.”

I thought, that’s funny, I just got high too. Then she asked what she was doing 23 years ago tomorrow- not getting high. I was thinking, where’s my pot? “And,” she continued, “and it was all because of my baby.” That baby would be me and that’s not a kid’s responsibility. I told her well, congratulations.

In addition to being drunks, my mother also likey-ed the cocaine. I guess it was called crack if that’s still the same as freebasing, but since we were in a different tax bracket and she actually bought powder and cooked it up herself, I guess we’re safe on the freebasing. She worked for Amtrak and ran the line from Chicago to NY to LA and San Francisco. They partied on those trains like it was actually 1999, so she got all the best drugs (and records) from all over the country.

I remember walking into the kitchen one day and it’s covered in all kinds of bowls, butane, what looked like metal medical supplies and shit I’d never seen in the fucking kitchen before. Besides the fact my mom was the worst cook ever and when trying to make me biscuits invented “breakfast cookies”, so much seeming activity in the kitchen surprised me. I asked what all this stuff was and she said, “Something I don’t ever want you to do”. Well, that was clear I knew she smoked pot, but I assumed everyone smoked pot. She smoked pot with her dad, so why would I think it’s strange. And she drank, but everybody drank. I didn’t see anything wrong with the way we lived. . I didn’t really understand about the drugs until she went into rehab.

23 years ago today I suppose. I do remember it was the end of school. The sixth grade. It had been a tough year for everybody and I was one worn out 12 year old. My mother had abandoned me in France. I don’t mean she left me to fend for myself in the French/ Swiss Alps, but she didn’t send me any letters or call. No one in my family did. It was so bad they called my house so I could talk to someone and no one was home. I wrote every day at first, then every other day, and then I just stopped. Later she told me, all fucked up, that she’d sent me a huge care package with all of the newspapers of the important events I’d missed in the mountains. Like, the Bears winning the Super Bowl and Challenger blowing up. She also sent some Championship t-shirts and hats, she said.

Then, my Granny had died. She’d been sick while I was gone and my Granddad says that she waited for me to get home safely before she died. I wasn’t home two weeks. I was on some Brownie trip that day. It was Presidents Day. Michelle had on too much of her mom’s perfume. (I don’t know the name of it, but whenever I get a sniff of it in my nose I think of this time and want to throw up.) Granddad had dropped me off for it before he headed to the hospital because my mom was M.I.A, California run. I’d barely seen her since I got home. I was staying upstairs with my other Grandma, Granny’s daughter, and my Aunt Donna. Uncle Sidney was around but he was so strung out and evil I didn’t miss him. And Uncle Torry was sitting around smoking cigarettes and looking maudlin as usual. Aunt Donna was also on a tear and Grandma was waist deep in Crown Royal and black assed days.

From February through June it was just Granddad and me. He was about 76 then and still took me everywhere I needed to go. I got cookbooks to learn how to take care of us. Even though everybody was around, except of course for my mom, nobody was really there.
In March I got my period and didn’t have anyone to go through the talk with me or go get me pads or rejoice in my becoming a woman. So I scavenged through my mom’s stuff and found this long pad that needed a belt and stuffed it in my panties. Luckily that first one was only a little spotting and only lasted a day.

At school it was tough too. I was awkward and too smart and my boobs were getting gigantic. I was also becoming chubbier because I was trying to feed my grandpa and myself and didn’t know what I was doing. And my Grandma was dead and no one would talk to me about it. I was pulling stuff out of the pantry that had been in there for years. I made egg foo young and we ate a lot of Vienna sausages. I was also nervous about boys and had a crush on Chris Fryison who was also chubby but had a great smile and made me laugh and bought me Chinese jacks in the 3rd grade. But since I was getting busty, the 8th grade boys started paying attention to me. I was still an early hip hop tomboy wearing bandana’s around my knees, plastic bangles that later had to be cut off, one earring like Janet Jackson and tons of neon pink and green. I had no female adult supervision so I looked a mess. And I had a curl.

One day in June, after my mother had been gone for weeks we were in the bathroom together in my Grandpa’s house. I was sitting on the toilet and she was in the mirror behind the sink. We were facing each other. I remember that part, but then I don’t remember the part of the mythology where I say “Mommy, what’s wrong with you?” I’m afraid that sounds a little too naïve for a girl who’d just told her uncle that he wasn’t coming in her house to look in the safe. My Uncle Sidney was a junkie and a thief and had Drunk Eric from down the street with him. He’s already broken into the safe and stole all the silver dollars and coins Granddad and I had been collecting my whole life. I stood myself in the doorway and told him he was coming in over my dead body and to get the fuck off of my front porch. Which is, ironically, the same thing I said to all the ladies who started bringing my Granddad cakes after Gram died.)

But that’s the story she likes to tell because it makes me her conscience. She needs me to be her mirror, but I can’t anymore because it’s too heavy. I can’t be the perfect reflection of her good intentions.

We got off the phone quickly. I hung up and harrumphed. Leslie looked in my direction and I picked up my pipe. Bouncy was screeching in the background and I just looked at him and took a hit. He asked what? And I answered, “nothin’, bullshit.”
That Beyonce sho cain’t sing.

Did I ever tell you about the one when I was growing up?

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When I was a kid I lived in a house full of drunks. Not run of the mill drunks, I mean drunks that had doilies on tables and dusted every inch of the house until it was spotless. These were people who used to pick cotton and were terribly ashamed of it. I remember the one and only time I found a book on the top of my grandmother’s ivory wardrobe. It had numbers and names and was ancient. When I found it I took it to my great-grandpa cause he always told me the truth. And then the truth only needed to be that I was loved and adored and there was no other little girl in the world and beautiful and good as me.

When my Granny, his wife, saw that he was explaining the book to me she went ballistic. I never understood why because to me I had history in my hands. My granddad was explaining that this was the book they kept their sharecropping records in.

Anyway, these people drank and drank a lot. My Granny, had my Grandma, when she was 14 years old and Granddad was 21. These weren’t mature people. And they were suddenly in the north with a new set of rules and regulations and Chicago in the 30’s was almost as bad as Jackson, Mississippi- well I guess at anytime by my reckoning. So they drank and had fun (as far as I could see) and lived it up with the relatively few minor freedoms they got to have in the north. Like buying a house in what was previously a majority white neighborhood that would eventually become the murder capital of the city in the next 50 years.

What I realize now is that they were depressed and sad and living unfulfilled lives. They also didn’t know how to nurture us. They didn’t know how to nurture themselves; they hadn’t come from a nurturing environment. The legacy of The South still complicates the lives of those who escaped its horrors. I still live with the legacy of Jim Crow because Jim Crow people raised me. People who now theoretically had more freedoms, but also knew that Chicago’s Jim Crow could be worse. So what do they do with this baby born in the 1970’s without any knowledge of the systems they needed to survive? They teach her the same rules while telling her to fly away, but not too high. And not too fast.

The shames and inadequacies they felt when sober came out in a wale when they were tight. You could hear it in their laughter, the freedom of it. I guess that’s why I always thought they were having such a good time. I rarely saw them this free. But that freedom came with a cost, because as I’m learning in my life, you pay for that freedom the next morning with guilt and more shame. Living a whole life embarrassed and not wanting to pass that embarrassment to your children. It’s living in the fear that a misplaced word will display the short educations prescribed to children who had to work. Not wanting to pass on a shame that you don’t even have the language to denounce. It’s just a feeling.

It feels like sinking. It felt like my body was actually sinking and drowning. My chest would tighten, my skin would go prickly cold and my throat would go dry. Like all of my moisture was evaporating and I was becoming like stone. And then I would turn off. The messages getting yelled at me were getting through, but how I felt about them never really developed past that sense of dread. I get that feeling less often now, but when I was a kid it was constantly overwhelming.

Seeing that book was one of those times that I was conscience that the wrath I was getting had nothing to do with me. It was embarrassment on my Grandma’s part because she was almost hysterical. She told my Grandpa he had no right to show me this book and it was hers. He explained what he was doing, but the reason Grandpa and I had so much time to discuss the book was because she was off taking a nip. I’m sure she fully expected to come back in the room and watch one of her stories, but instead she sees the proof that she picked cotton in the south and whatever that entailed on the lap of her great granddaughter.

The great granddaughter that was going to be proof that they were all okay. She was going to rise above her roots and make everyone so proud. But I didn’t understand that either. I didn’t know there was anything in our lives to be ashamed of (except for the drinking part- that got complicated for me to beg off friends visits).