Being an Honorary Black Woman

Being an Honorary Black Woman

 

This letter was written to a school presenter who, over the course of several meetings, challenged our staff of over 100 teachers to rethink our racism - not to rethink if we were racists or not, but to accept the simple premise that we WERE racists in our own ways and to change our views.  I couldn't accept his basic premise or his specific vocabulary and related definitions and created this response to share with him.

 

Dear Dr. Marks,

Although I wholeheartedly applaud the effort to remove the situation relating to low-performing students, I have conflicting thoughts when I read the book Courageous Conversations.  My thoughts are probably not the norm, but I thought I’d share them with you.

Good luck and God speed in helping the world achieve your stated goal.

  

Thoughts on Race from an Honorary Black Woman

            Although I agree in a broad sense with the intentions of the Courageous Conversations program, I find that there are many definitions and assumptions that I am uncomfortable accepting because they don’t align at all with my person experiences with race throughout my life.  Perhaps my life is more “interesting” than most, because the sweeping generalities used in the book don’t really resonate with me.

            Now I’m not going to make any claim to know how any group of people, White or Black, have lived their lives.  I wouldn’t even begin to try to sum up the racial experiences of the people that I’ve personally known for decades.  For myself, I believe that race consciousness, in all of its problematic and negative connotations, is a learned response, and I have never accepted that race consciousness is a particularly good thing.  I don’t refer to myself as White and I’ve only met one Black man in my life, and he was truly a purple-black hue, not that the distinction is important.  I believe that so many aspects of race are distorted and mishandled to the point of it becoming a topic of linguistic landmines and emotional hand grenades by the very nature of the commonly accepted vocabulary. 

            I consider myself peachy-tan, and being a fine artist well familiar with painting portraits, I consider my students of “Color” to have a bit more umber in their complexion or perhaps a more yellow ocher hue.

            I have never met a white person, although I have certainly met people who have embraced what I would call the White Culture perspective of life.

            I have never met a yellow person.

            I have never met a red person, at least not a lasting red person, although I’ve seen some people very sunburned.  That was only a temporary state.

            As an artist, I find it mind-boggling that a caramel-colored person can call themselves Black when speaking about a Latino who is considered Brown, all the while referencing a White man and the dominance that his race gives him, when examples of all three supposed races can be found of almost exactly the same skin color.  It would not be particularly difficult to find a deeply tanned White man and stand them next to a Latino of the same shade, along with a Black man who is nowhere near black in color.

            If I had the time and I thought that anyone would read it, I’d now make a list of the MILLIONS of ways that all of the supposed races are equal and the same in terms of physiology, all the way down to the number of nerves and atoms in the body.

            I believe that when people banter the word race about, they are actually referring to the adopted concept of culture. 

            Race is something a person is born with, and there’s no real changing it.  It is genetic and tied to biological heritage, and it links the owner to a place and DNA grouping.  As we grow up, we are all exposed to the mindset of the culture that we are immersed in.  I agree that the mindset of various cultures have created certain negative attitudes and expectations relating to other cultures.  Unfortunately, the human condition makes us predisposed to favor “us” over “them,” and that condition of self-importance and other-prejudice extends to every aspect of life, from differences between men and women, to supporting different sports teams, to different political views, to different religions, and this predisposition makes it possible to devalue the “not us” group, for whatever reason we choose at that moment in time.

            Although I’m only halfway through the book, I hope that Courageous Conversations also focuses deeper, on the real nature of the problem between people.  What I have read is certainly a valid starting point, but in my experience, the book hasn’t yet looked deep enough, to the heart of the problem.  It becomes bogged down in the upper strata of the argument. 

            The problem is that there is a group of students who are low-performing and we all wish to help them. 

            The argument is that by focusing upon race and our own racial biases, we can supposedly better understand ourselves, and then we will be better able to walk in another person’s pair of racial shoes.

            As I see it, this is a noble start, but by no means the end of the journey because it focuses on, and actually GROWS the mislabeled issue of race (my personal perspective and I mean no disrespect) when it should be focusing upon how the culture that we’ve adopted or grown up within gives people different expectations for their daily experience with the “others” in the world.

            I am in no way trying to ignore or gloss over the negative pressures and near-constant disrespect that various people have experienced throughout their lives.  What I am saying is that to assume that it’s all about race is simplistic, because it isn’t.  Self-importance at the cost of others happens under EVERY conceivable circumstance, so my assertion is that shining a spotlight on the problem and just calling it race won’t make the dramatic change that the world actually needs today as it grows.

            Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asked ME, in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech to get to a place where I can judge all those around me based upon the quality of their character, and not upon the color of their skin. 

            “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

            Unfortunately, far too often, when I ask a student to consider the quality of their character and their choices, they react as if I am speaking of other things that are not a part of the conversation and that is a distracting problem, and I am purposely NOT referring to any specific race when I use this example.  To one degree or another, ALL human beings are tempted to latch onto some “spin” in a situation that diverts attention and responsibility from a core truth.  The easier the spin, the more effective the diversion of attention, and I have seen some students who consistently defer back to the same overused spin, to the point where it becomes a sort of theme to how they see the world.  Before someone automatically assumes that I am speaking about race, my first mental example is actually about a young woman who was sexually abused as a child and who used the “I was sexually abused as a child” card every time things went awry.  Before it appears that I am callous to the young lady’s circumstance, I add that I was sexually molested by my mother up until the age of eight.  As an adult, I left that guilt behind, to be owned by her, along with the spin excuse.

            I AM NOT WHAT I HAVE EXPERIENCED, NOR WHAT HAS BEEN DONE TO ME!  I AM the person that I choose to be, despite what I have experienced or what has been done to me – and I highly recommend that other people reach for the same uplifting statement, instead of a spin excuse.

            Several years ago, we had an assembly at the school where a generally disaffected student decided that he wished to be a little bit of a spectacle by shouting out “I LOVE this school!” and “I LOVE assemblies!” during the program.  I watched as the administration faced the problem of whether to remove this student or not, because if suspended for disruptive behavior, the report would have to indicate that they were shouting out things in support of the school.

            The report itself would make a good defense in arguing that any punishment was unreasonable.

            This student was cunning, as in intelligent in self-serving ways.  He knew exactly what he was doing.  The real core of the problem was not that he was making outbursts during the assembly.  The real core of the problem was that he owned a shriveled character, not that such things can be discussed openly in the school setting today. 

            I wonder what Dr. King would’ve said to the fellow had he been in charge of the assembly.

            I suspect that Dr. King would’ve tried to improve the quality of this fellow’s character, no matter how politically incorrect that discussion might’ve been.

            As for my own racial history, after reading the examples in the book, Courageous Conversations, I couldn’t help but notice how mine was unlike either that I read, although the book presents the White and Black experiences in a way that implies predictability and a degree of universality.

            First off, my family nickname while growing up was “Nigger.”

            My brother is two years younger than I, and from the time he was old enough to talk and learn the meaning of hatefulness and jealousy, he named me Nigger.  When passing in the hallway or whenever I wasn’t aware of his presence, he would hit me in the back of the head and proudly announce my nickname.  He grew up to be a man consumed with prejudice and disrespect for every shade of skin color that didn’t match his own.  If Courageous Conversations was written to strike a heart chord in people like my brother, then it never had a chance, for he would prefer to burn the book rather than honor it by reading it.

            If the Black experience involves being publicly demeaned and called Nigger, then I have some tiny frame of reference.

            My family lived in a little 900 square foot house in suburbia and my stepfather was a carpenter.  My father left when I was five and I come from two violently-broken alcoholic homes.  As I said earlier, I am not making any comparison of the specifics of my life to the typical White or Black experience.  This is just MY experience.  In retrospect, I suppose we were poor.  My young sister, my brother and I never received an allowance.  In elementary school I used to sell drawings of Snoopy characters to a girl in class for a nickel.  She seemed rich to me.  Although I didn’t know it at the time, we ate whatever was on sale at the store.  When I first met my wife, she explained to me that real hamburger wasn’t mostly off-white and that quality hot dogs don’t leave a thick layer of scum in the pot when boiled.  I used to be jealous of my friends who had comic books in numerical order with their covers still on them.  My comic collection mostly came from discount bags sold at the corner store for a quarter.  My first real job was making fishing lures for the family of a schoolmate who owned a local tackle shop.  I was eight years old.  Around that time my stepfather decided to make a bedroom for me in the unheated basement.  It was about 6’ x 11’ and at night I would wake up and brush the centipedes off of the wall next to my bed, hoping that they didn’t fall down into the covers.  At Christmas, our presents came from toy surplus stores and it was a waste of time to ask for a brand name toy because they were never on sale at the surplus stores.

            Viewed from the outside of the house, our family probably wouldn’t have registered in anyone’s mind as poor, but inside the house, my mother was hoarding every penny she could get in order to reach a point where she could boot my stepfather and declare her liberation.

            Contrary to the rest of my family, my stepfather being a drunk and an occasional wife-beater, my mother being generally hostile to the world and its inhabitants, my brother being a skilled “finder of wallets and other valuable things” and my younger sister sneaking out through her bedroom window at night to drink and get high, I was the white sheep of the family and I went to school in an effort to become the best person that I could be.

            As for the racial experience, I never met any other races at school, really.  While in Boy Scouts, our troop went to a jamboree in Metamora Michigan the same weekend as all of the Boy Scout troops from Detroit.  I saw a lot of Black fellows then, hundreds and hundreds of them, but our cabin was broken into while our troop was on a hike and all of our valuables left there were stolen, so we cooked all of our perishable food and left for home a day early.  I noticed that the scoutmaster lumped all of the Detroit scouts together in his angry comments about our loss, but I knew that thieves are individuals, and not predetermined qualities of huge groups of people. 

            A few people without character caused us to leave early.

            When I was older and driving I got lost on the far side of Detroit.  I stopped at an abandoned gas station and asked the elderly Black gentleman sitting in front if he could kindly direct me back to the freeway.  I found his look very puzzling because he didn’t seem to know exactly how to react to me.  I had addressed him as respectfully as I knew how, like I was talking to my own grandfather, and that seemed to confuse him. 

            He finally walked a few steps closer to me and said, “Boy, are you crazy?  Get out of here.  The freeway’s back that way!” 

            I thanked him and left, a bit concerned about the danger to myself that I had heard in his voice that I hadn’t expected or suspected when I had driven up.   

            I got a job running a large auditorium in Macomb County and the school decided to outsource the maintenance staff.  I ended up becoming friends with a young Black fellow who was assigned to clean the auditorium wing.  After a while, he would come and eat his lunch in the manager’s office with me, feeling a bit uncomfortable around the other custodians in the workroom.  He told me how hard he was working in order to get things for his wife and daughter.  At that time, it was a symbol of status amongst high school students to have a pair of the latest designer tennis shoes.  He told me how little he was being paid and how much the shoes cost.  I told him that I had a half-brother who worked managing a Footlocker across town and that maybe I could get a decent pair of shoes for his daughter.  I went to the local Footlocker at Eastland with my half-brother’s discount code to get the shoes.  When I got there, I tried to talk to a Black salesperson and explain to him that I was there to buy a pair of shoes for a young Black girl going to school in Detroit.  I knew how brutal kids were to each other about wearing the wrong thing and I didn’t want my stupidity about current footwear styles to become a reason for embarrassment for the young lady I was buying the shoes for. 

            The salesman never heard what I was asking him, probably because it was at odds with all of his racial assumptions.  His look became angry and he stormed off.  I heard him ask a White salesman colleague to come and deal with me – the racist!

            I bought the shoes and gave them to the custodian.  He even brought his mother and daughter over to my house to say thank you, but I will never be able to forget the loathing that I saw in the salesman’s eye.  I have no idea what he thought I was asking him, but it certainly wasn’t what I was actually asking him, and his hatred was intense.

            After that, I slowly became aware of people working at checkout lines who wouldn’t look at my face or who refused to put change into my open hand.  They made it clear that they didn’t wish to touch me, and it disturbed me that I was being casually treated as if I had offended them in some way.

            When I became an art teacher here in Troy at Boulan Park, I once called home on a young man because of his unacceptable behavior in class.  That the boy was Black made no particular difference to me.  All I could see was a character fault that needed addressing.  The father lit into me with an angry tone vaguely similar to the anger that I had experienced with the shoe salesman.  He accused me of being a racist and for my racism being the reason for the call home.  I indicated that I didn’t care if his son was purple or plaid, and that the call was because his son’s classroom behavior was unacceptable.  Just as the father began interrogating me about what great Black leaders I knew from history, I asked him:

            “Sir, have you ever lived with a White person before?”

            The question caught him off guard and he admitted that he hadn’t.  I then told him how I had been living with a 6’ 8” Black man weighing around 400lbs who used to be a lineman for the Houston Oilers for the past two years, how he was in a relationship with my sister, and how he was the father of one of my nieces.  They were all living in the upstairs apartment in my home.  Thinking back, it was always a surreal experience when Darryl and I would be sitting on the back porch of my house and some coward would yell “Nigger!” from the shadows of the alley.  It would take me a second to realize that the insult hadn’t actually been directed at me. 

            At that point in the conversation with the father, everything changed.  I was no longer a White racist calling to make life more complicated for my Black student.  I had become something akin to extended family in the course of just a couple of sentences over the telephone.

            The father had gone from judging me based upon my race to judging me based upon the quality of my character in record time.  I can’t blame anyone for their social and racial expectations because I haven’t lived their life, but I will admit that it is tedious to be burdened with the mistakes and prejudices of others when those views are not my own.

            I don’t consider myself Color-blind. 

            I consider myself Color-irrelevant when it comes to dealing with others, and so when the book Courageous Conversations stresses race over all other things, I simply can’t adopt that perspective.  I will be the first to note that the ultimate goal of improving relationships, work ethics, and grades has great value.  I’m just saying that in many specifics, the book is referring to perspectives that I haven’t adopted and beliefs, mostly negative, that I personally never had about others.  Now I do appreciate that others have different cultures from my own, but like Dr. King, my personal focus is upon character, and it is in the area of character that I feel that we can make the most beneficial progress.

            And when the next time comes for me to call home on a student, the discussion is going to be, just as it has always been for me, about character. 

            It is my hope that the person on the other end of the phone line will hear what I am saying, and not hear what they ASSUME I’m saying, as evidenced in the Footlocker experience.

            As for being an honorary Black Woman, that award was bestowed upon me by four Black women who were selected to work with me on a project down at Wayne State University.  We worked well together, we joked and sweated together, and there was never any hint of distraction about race or culture because there were four of them and one of me, so I never had any chance of mistakenly trying to unduly influence anything.  I can certainly understand that one Black woman in a group that included four White men would be a potentially different circumstance, so I acknowledge the mistakes and missteps of racial interactions of the past. 

            I think what the ladies learned from me is that not every negative expectation about race deserves a second thought when dealing with a person who has character. 

            What I learned from them is that “goosing” (the rotating of the head and neck while making a point) means “Don’t mess with me about what I’m saying right now!”

            It was completely their idea to make me an Honorary Black Woman, and although it is a title that I share infrequently, it is one that I will always be quite proud of.

            These are just some thoughts for your consideration in your ongoing efforts to bring a little acceptance, tolerance, and understanding to a difficult situation.  If the discussion has to wander through the muddy and stinking metaphoric fields of negative race perceptions to get to a place where character can be addressed, then so be it, but I don’t personally feel that race, economic circumstances, public ridicule, or personal abuse are anywhere near the core problem, having grown up with all of those things myself.

            Like Dr. King, I believe that it’s all about character, and that’s exactly what I would tell a Martian or a Kryptonian if they were misbehaving in my class.

            Sincerely,

Edward L. Paciorek

English Teacher

Troy High School

        

Good Evening Mr. Paciorek!

Thank you for taking the time to share your story and "speak your truth" as it relates to the issue of race and education! Your life experiences have provided you with possibly a unique lens from which to view this work. It has also provided you the frame of reference that you use to form your beliefs. We all use the same source when forming opinions and shaping our beliefs, and that is our experiences (i.e. frames of reference). 

Courageous Conversations is designed to encourage teaching professionals to engage in meaningful dialogue about race and its impact on education. Whether one agrees with the contents of the text is not as important as the conversations that result from reading it. Stay engaged, continue to be reflective, and please, please, please continue to contribute your voice to this conversation. Your perspective is a valued asset as we strive to eliminate the achievement gap.

Thanks again for being courageous enough to contribute to this conversation! Please introduce yourself to me tomorrow...it would be my pleasure to meet the man behind the voice. :-)

Peace & Blessings,

Jay
 

Jay B. Marks, Ph.D.
Educator/Mentor/Facilitator