A PRAGMATIC FAITH IN LOVE

LIVING FOR THE WEEKEND - DADDY AND DAUGHTER

I eavesdrop on a male co-worker. There's no way not to listen, so I listen well when his tone is pleasant.

Sue me.

Nearly every single day, he says to his wife, who I always imagine holding or beaming at their toddler, "Where are you?" or "What are you doing?" And every single day he ends with "You guys have fun."

He is generous and kind. I know this first hand. He trained me. That’s I know he is extremely patient as well. He lives to go home to them at the end of the day and works at the crack of dawn so he can spend time with them while the baby is still awake. I can't imagine a love that sounds like that ending. It seems impossible. When I think of his little starter family, I smile because he seems too mature and balanced to let anything happen to it. Ever.

But then the practical voice cuts in, like a demon on my shoulder. And it says to me:

Can she take care of herself and her child?

Did she get married without getting her degree first?

Did she get herself married then decide to get pregnant before she established herself in a career --in case she needs to go back to it?

Will she ever be at the mercy of some dude who thinks he should have the right to count every nickel she spends on herself because he's paying some paltry sum or a mint in child support once a month that won't cover half of what Junior really needs despite what a court might say?

But my co-worker friend is not "some dude."

He says "What are you guys going to do today" and "Have fun!" almost every day. There's no faking that kind of commitment to another. He works to support his family financially and in every other way.

Other men, literally millions of other men have done this. But what happens to some of these men when they decide they don't love their wife anymore?

What kind of thought process goes on where a man thinks all the money was always his money and that the labor he supplied to the family unit was the only labor that truly counted, a gift that he should be able to take away entirely from his child OR his wife?

What kind of heart process thinks the wife -- that he agreed should be the one to stay home instead of him, the one clearly had the most rewarding job, wasn't doing a job? How does such a heart think that the wife wasn't sacrificing a career and earning potential every single day she was that she was enjoying the day to day, hands on raising of their child?

Can any man turn into the selfish fiend I've described?

I don't believe my co-worker/friend can. I don't believe that particular thing is possible. And, if he eventually calls his wife "a gold-digging harlot" one day, I'll probably believe him because I know him and not her. And because I heard him love her daily as he worked a wage-job so she could have most of the reward of growing their child to adulthood a little bit at a time

But...

Can she take care of herself and her child?

Did she get married without getting her degree first?

Did she get herself married and pregnant before she established herself in a career --in case she needs to go back to it?

Will she be at the mercy of some dude who thinks he should have the right to count every nickel she spends because he's paying some paltry sum or a mint in child support once a month that won't cover half of what Junior REALLY needs despite what a court might say?

How does one raise a child in a world where real love fails and morphs into an unbelievable selfishness half the time?

How is it I still find the love more believable than anything else?

I wonder what he'll say to her tomorrow?

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(For the record, on the rare occasion of bickering, I move away. I'm not that bad...yet?)

CHOOSING BLACK LOVE

"Because race is no more than a construction, wanting to experience love with another Black person stems not from skin color, but from a resistance to the belief that what is non-white is unworthy of love. I have always been able to find men of every race physically beautiful.

Certainly, though, I have a preference for culture

that resists White Supremacy, and by definition that is not a culture that most white people (and, admittedly, most people of color as well) know fully.


Most importantly, I envision myself in a relationship where home is as safe a space as it can be, and where a mutual love of our struggle is what keeps us safe. In a world where pro-Blackness is constantly questioned to the point of exhaustion, if not attacked outright, I know I cannot always be educating my partner about racial injustices and retain my emotional stability.

In fact, sometimes I will need him to educate me...





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Excerpt from


CHOOSING BLACK LOVE:  WHY I'M UNLIKELY
TO SPEND MY LIFE  WITH A WHITE PERSON
by Hari Ziyad 

at  BLACK GIRL DANGEROUS


Read More - http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2015/03/choosing-black-love-why-im-unlikely-to-spend-my-life-with-a-white-person/



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This is probably the best piece I've read on the likelihood, and only the likelihood, of an individual choosing in favor of safety and understanding using race as a guide, when choosing a mate...rather than against someone based on something as simple skin-color difference.

Most of us know by now that race isn't simply skin-color or ethnicity. And we know it isn't genetics either. Race is a social construct. A lot of us know that too. But some think "social construct" is less real than other bases of difference. But the social construct of race is very, very real in that it has real impact....on the education you're likely to receive, income, poverty, affluence, and going to jail for things the dominant white culture can just laugh off.*
 
The social construct of race, in this country, includes the presence and absence of white supremacy. The lack of awareness of that white supremacy, the embracing of that supremacy as "normal," the use of it unconsciously --at least as unconscious as our lungs using oxygen minute to minute in order to keep our bodies alive-- matters to some more than others when choosing a life partner.

In other words, some people of color find it impossible to be with someone who can't see, hear, and smell the obvious because it seems so normal to that someone. I've noticed, with white women in particular, that the awareness leaps into their consciousness the second they give birth to a dark-skinned child. This tells me that when somebody you care about is at risk? You'll sit up and take notice by choice. 

All this ought to be understandable --when explained-- to anyone who decides to be identified as "anti-racist" but that's not always so. 

"In fact, sometimes I will need him to educate me..."

Ain't that the truth? Ain't that the most important truth?

As black people we hear so much about what "black people are like" from people not-black that we have to repeat to one another our own genuine stories so that we do not forget what's real. All of us may NOT need to be in a same-race or same-ethnicity space in order to hear ourselves think or feel our own feelings, un-judged. But many of us sure might as sh*t need our own spaces for education (HBCUs) and healing (within locations to be specified later) at some point in our individual lifetimes. 

Until images must like the one above seem common place to a heck of a lot more of us,  all I can say is "I feel ya" to the author of this piece. 



By The Way
That  #CrimingWhileWhite twitter rage a while back was very
illuminating...even though I've lived in white dominated neighborhoods.  Very.

And #CrimingWhileWhite should also demonstrate why white people are needed inside the anti-racism community

Gratitude For The New Normal that Feminism Wrought

                                  

Last year or the year before that someone on the news announced that Rhoda was dying of brain cancer. I hadn't thought of Rhoda (played by Valerie Harper) in years, decades maybe. I couldn't believe it when they said she was over 70 years old, well over. That brought me back to thinking about my own age.

Couldn't believe that either.

All this inability to believe started me thinking about how MANY things that I now consider "normal" simply WEREN'T when I was born. Forget the internet, GPS, and microwaves. Bump all that! I re-realized that I was born a decade BEFORE women could easily get credit in their own name!!! 

When I was a kid, I heard about this new law that made women able to get credit on their own. I can just barely remember thinking, "Well yeeeaah....of course!"  I also remember being shocked that an actual law had to be written to ensure this.  I also remember being desperately glad that I hadn't been born a few decades earlier.

It's not so surprising that I thought this way, I suppose. I grew up watching and listening to feminism in what I considered "common sense" slogans as well as slices of speeches from Angela Davis, Gloria Steinem etc.  I thought all this "common sense" already existed.  I guess I knew but I didn't REALLY know this "common sense" was...


in the process of being born,

in the process of being fought for, of being protected

...and voted on. 

I didn't know my "normal" was being created and then reinforced by Mary Tyler Moore and Sally Struthers,' Gloria,  of  'All In The Family' fame.  I simply didn't know that they were representative of a new way of life for women, a new option. 

I didn't know women making their own money, working at a career, and making decisions that a WHOLE person with equal rights tends to make, sometimes looking for another WHOLE person (a man) to walk through life with - was new.  After all, my Mom did it for a few years before she married.

But Mary Tyler Moore's job was not a pit stop before marriage. Her job was important to her. She wanted to be good at it and succeed at it.  All her energy was not focused on getting a husband. That was a very different choice to have, one that wasn't there for women of my mother's generation.   Or if it was, it was seen as failure. Career as consolation prize? 


At 11 years of age, I hadn't grasped the fact that I wasn't considered as capable as or as equal to a male child either. (Well...most of the time I didn't) But somehow, I DID know that I was considered less-than as a person because of my black skin...by the majority of people in the country. This, somehow, I knew this practically from birth.  Sheltered as my parents tried to make me, I had eyes. Newspaper headlines shouted white supremacy at me daily too. And I couldn't walk past a television, without seeing a white cop sic a big dog with huge teeth on black people or take a fire hose to them. 

And those are the images that flashed in my head the day Show-and-Tell featured a white police officer talking about how  'a policeman is your friend'  ('oooh no-No-NO! not MY friend!!!')



Whatever. The racism-sexism knowledge gap (read: chasm) is another train wreck for another time.


But as a girl-child born in the land of the free and the equal, I thought Mary Tyler Moore and the rest of these characters were representing "normal" people with "normal" desires. And I think a lot of people came to see them that way...having laughed a little by the end of each episode.


Maybe the writing was special, like some like to believe it was. "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" made the new, more feminist(?) world seem mundane. I can't remember and rehash something I really didn't notice to begin with.


But when I heard that Rhoda was sick? Maybe dying? That was when I remembered that women didn't always have...

• the same ability as men to get
   
• the same ability to keep a job.  A woman in her 20s could be fired because it was assumed she'd want to have a baby...soon or within a few years.
  
  
• and before that - the same ability to get credit,  and before that - the same ability to own property
  
  
• and before that - the same right to vote.

So then I considered that these changes didn't just change by magic. It wasn't  the "something special in the writing" that created these changes in society. The show only reflected what was in the process of happening. But shows like "The Mary Tyler Moore Show"  blew little more air on a fire already burning. That was important. But more important are the women  that sacrificed and died advocating 'for women's rights on the grounds of that women should have political, social, and economic equality to men'--which is THE definition of feminism.


 Did you know that some of the women who started one of the earliest, feminist-by-definition organizations in the country, the National Organization for Women or N.O.W.,  were black?


A number of black women had a meeting after the meeting that was known as "The March On Washington" Why?  Because black female civil rights leaders like Dorothy Height and Diane Nash were not allowed  on stage to speak, deliberately not allowed to speak ...by men I was taught to worship as a child.   



The story goes, having forgotten their be-seen-and-not-heard place,  Gloria Richardson, Rosa Parks and other black female civil rights leaders were sent back to the local hotel in a cab.  And they were in that cab while Martin Luther King was giving his "I Have A Dream" speech. They listened to it on the radio. (It was all Lena Horne's fault.  Earlier in the day she had spent some time trying to introduce Rosa Parks to the foreign press.) http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/27/civil_rights_pioneer_gloria_richardson_91

 So, while too many people have let this word "feminism" be redefined by the status-quo loving / cowering-in-the-face-of-change opposition (and pro-feminist extremists too for that matter) I refuse to let anyone else redefine  "feminism" FOR ME.   I refuse to let them define it as something as silly as who should open the door for who OR something as ass-i-nine as "man-hater." 

-- in much the same way as I refuse to let some white people redefine "African American" as someone who is more loyal to Africa than America simply because the word "Africa" comes first. 

-- in much the same way as I refuse to let some blacks redefine "blackness" as being loyal to anything and anyone in black skin.

 

So I deeply believe in feminism even though:

1) I do not believe in ALL the positions that the official feminist organizations believe in (Abortion as a form of birth control method, is just one example)

2) I do not believe the words "sexual objectification" are meaningless at the very same time that I do know women need more "sexual freedom."3) I know that white feminists have put themselves first at the same rate of speed, or faster, that black anti-racists have put black men first. And in my patriarchy-soaked brain, women are supposed to be "better than that."

4) etc

And even thought I know all this heavy feminism baggage exists, what I ALSO know is that all of us ought to be grateful for "The New Normal." And I mean ALL of us. I know I am.


And I, for one, can't WAIT to see what feminism inspires next!  Can you?

~Deborah Lynn