Morgan Freeman told NPR yesterday that while Barack Obama is the nation’s first mixed-race president, he doesn’t feel that Barack Obama is truly a Black man. Newser offers this quote:

“First thing that always pops into my head regarding our president is that all of the people who are setting up this barrier for him … they just conveniently forget that Barack had a mama, and she was white — very white American, Kansas, middle of America. There was no argument about who he is or what he is. America’s first black president hasn’t arisen yet. He’s not America’s first black president—he’s America’s first mixed-race president.”

Freeman’s interview touches on many other subjects, and Freeman is a supporter of President Obama’s, but the race issue he discussed raises a big question about identity.

What does it mean to be a Black man? If you’re raised by white parents, are you less Black?

If strangers perceive you as Black, is that enough to make you Black?

AP Photo

This is a comment by Justin Cascio on the post “The Difference between ‘white people’ and ‘White People’“.

“It kind of sounds like the White person that your friends complain about doesn’t exist, because finding that actual white person who is responsible, the American Hitler of slavery and racism, is a matter of finding a symbol: a scapegoat. When we take it out on each other, we know that we’re standing in for some larger whole, an identity group, and for history and the acts of people who are long dead. How to deal justly with one another, now?

“Talking with a white friend last week, we spoke as we often do about race and what our responsibility is as white men. I say it’s to take whatever capital we’ve got and use it to change the system for greater justice. My friend was saying that his peers, when asked to talk about their racial identity and pride, don’t have an identity: all they have is shame. The white people he’s gone to school with aren’t White; they don’t have any racial identity; they don’t have ceremonies, foods, holidays, ways of addressing elders, and the like, that they associate with being White. I know what he’s talking about; so many times, a conversation about whiteness gets derailed in a denial of whiteness: my white friends will tell me they’re Jewish, they’re ‘beige,’ anything to distinguish themselves from the alpha white male.

“The other half of the time, the problem is that they don’t see what’s theirs as unique; they think their culture is ‘everybody’s.’ White people can only seem to figure out what’s uniquely White by comparing it with minority cultures, because mainstream culture is White. The differences between ourselves and that alpha model make us antsy; how are we failing at being White? It’s this nature of the difference between our relationships to that mainstream, alpha white guy that remains the difference between being White and being Black. It’s White people’s responsibility to figure out what White is, not so we can be proud of our heritage, but to get past the shame, know ourselves, and from there, finally begin the journey to compassion.”

More Comments of the Day

Read our commenting policy.

Photo credit: Flickr / garbocselle

Lola Rainey joins two septuagenarian relatives for a Texas road trip through a vanishing America.

Editor’s note: This is the first in a three part series.  

Author’s note: A road trip with my two old guys, my 77-year old father and 74-year old uncle, opened my eyes to a disappearing piece of Americana. Rural black America with its communities of farmers, businessmen, tradesmen, laborers and families flourished on the peripheries of small towns across this nation. These rural black communities were vibrant, active cultural hubs peopled by men and women marginalized in one world but held in high regard in their own.  As we drove through dusty, desert towns and congested cities on our journey east to Texas (where my father and uncle spent their childhood), I listened to poignant stories about life in an America that has all but disappeared. Sadly, this rich, colorful world is unknown to most white Americans and is fading away unnoticed by many Black Americans.

When Uncle Bennie received a inquiry from a timber speculator about land my deceased grandfather owned in East Texas, it came as a surprise to him. He’s the family historian, the possibility that something as big as “a secret  land inheritance” had only now come to light was both annoying and intriguing. A couple of long, telephone conversations with the glib East Texas landman convinced Uncle Bennie it was worth taking a trip back to the old family homestead to determine whether my grandfather owned land there.

The plan was to take a “Texas road trip”; it was the most economical way for a senior on a fixed-income to travel. Unfortunately, Uncle Bennie suffers from a debilitating form of arthritis. He needed help with the driving so he persuaded my very skeptical father to join him. I was recruited as a road dog for one reason: I’m a lawyer and they thought it’d be nice to have me tag along—just in case.

My father often talked about his childhood.  His parents were sharecroppers so he experienced all the deprivations poor black children living under the yoke of Jim Crow in the south would be expected to. Some of the stories he told are seared into my memory. I used them as inspiration for my first novel,  “Havasu Means Blue Water”, which deals with the issues of racial identity and injustice.  One of his most memorable stories was retold in a book trailer I made:

My father escaped poverty and marginalization by joining the military. He left home and never came back. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if he hadn’t left. I shudder at the thought. Everything I knew about East Texas at the start of our road trip convinced me it was a place seething with racial hatred and intolerance, a place where people cling to their guns and religion in a bad way.

On a cool, sunny day in December 2012, my father and uncle picked me up in a rental car and off we went. As we turned onto Interstate 10 headed toward New Mexico, it occurred to me this would likely be the last road trip my father and uncle made. The thought frightened me. These two old men are my rock. I couldn’t imagine life without either one of them. Uncle Bennie slid an old school R&B disk into the car’s CD player. I sat in the backseat listening to the two of them talk; it was an easy, relaxed back and forth. My father and uncle aren’t just brothers, they’re best friends, too. It didn’t bother me that I was the unofficial third wheel in their “bromance.” I stretched out and got comfortable; it wasn’t long before I drifted off to sleep.

Read part two of The Invisible World of Rural Black America here.

Image credit: TexasExplorer98/Flickr

Dr. Jennifer Ho felt a little sick after reading about controversial “Tiger Mom” Amy Chua’s most recent book.

A few years ago, when the fervor and controversy and outrage over Chua’s so-called parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother had just about waned, I reluctantly ordered a copy for my Kindle and sat down to read it. A student of mine was thinking about writing her senior thesis on Chinese American mother figures and thought Chua’s screed would be an interesting counter-point to other memoirs. I sped through the book in a single sitting, admittedly skimming over parts of it because, let’s just say Chua’s no Chang-rae Lee, and her prose does not sing. However, what I do recall from reading Battle Hymn was that the furor over the labeling of her book—as memoir, as parenting guide, as racist tract—was all wrong. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother should be required reading for all first year psych students and for medical students going into psychiatry because it provides a rich first-person account of narcissism disorder. It is an in-depth case study through the perspective of the patient herself of what someone who is truly suffering from narcissism looks, acts, and sounds like.

Imagine my non-surprise to learn, this past week, that Chua had published what I can only imagine should be considered part 2 of her narcissism disorder case study: The Triple Package. Like most of the semi-tech savvy people in my age range I have a Facebook account and thus saw various links to the New York Post’s early review for Triple Package. Reading it in a feverish haze (I had come down with the flu and was running a temperature of 103 degrees, which may explain what happened next) I felt myself grow nauseous upon reading that “Chua and her husband, co-author Jed Rubenfeld, gather some specious stats and anecdotal evidence to argue that some groups are just superior to others and everyone else is contributing to the downfall of America.” In fact, I may have thrown up a little in my mouth reading through that article, which seems an appropriate response to have when hearing someone make a case for ethnic/racial superiority in the 21^st century.

Since there are people who have taken to twitter and other social media outlets to slam Chua, and since the New York Post review did such a good job of skewering her claims, I can only add that since I am not a first year psych student nor involved in the field of psychiatry I am not going to read Chua’s book. One could argue that it’s always good to know where the enemy stands—friends of mine watch Fox News for that very reason. However, I don’t need to read this book to know what Chua and her husband are doing: they are trying to make a lot of money. Controversy sells, and narcissists are smart people. I also don’t think Chua is the enemy. She is a misguided and sick person who is trying to make a buck, perhaps to fund her daughters’ future therapy sessions, which they undoubtedly will need growing up in a family such as theirs. I suppose we could say she is the enemy to common sense and anti-racism…except I think that’s giving her too much credit. Chua isn’t race baiting because she believes in race baiting—I think she’s doing this because she is a narcissist who wants to be in the limelight. And lets face it, academics don’t find themselves in the limelight unless they say or do dumbass things—hence narcissism case study #2: The Triple Package.

Finally, one thing that has always bugged me about Chua is her adamant avowals to being Chinese and her disavowal of being Filipino. In Battle Hymn she talks about her grandparents immigrating from China to the Philippines—both her parents were born in the Philippines, and it would seem that they are, technically speaking, Filipino. Yet Chua never claims any Filipino influence in her family—all “credit” if you will, goes to the Chinese. This strikes me as the strangest omission. It is as if Chua wants to erase all traces of Filipino cultural influence from her life. Which makes me wonder, even more, if this is all just about racial pandering—of Chua trying to cash in on the yellow peril threat that the specter of all things Chinese raise. However, regardless of whether Chua is or should be considered Chinese, Filipino, American, or all of the above, one thing is certain: we should not buy or read her book. Life is too short to spend with bad prose, and you don’t need to buy or read her book to know that her theories are crap—the debunking of the 1920s eugenics movement proved that. Instead, I’d recommend everyone go out and pick up a copy of Ruth Ozeki’s latest novel, A Tale for the Time Being—it is luminous; it is thoughtful; it is a page turner from start to finish. Ozeki is the anti-Chua, which is the highest compliment I can think to give her right now.

The post Why I Am Not Reading Amy Chua’s Book, ‘The Triple Package’ appeared first on The Good Men Project.

The post “Mom, Why is Everyone Here White?” What My Son Knows About Race That I Didn’t appeared first on The Good Men Project.

Mike Heenan reflects on his mixed-race heritage and wonders how his daughters’ ethnicity will affect their futures.

—

There is an elephant in the room at our house and that is not a self-deprecating fat joke.

The elephant is race, and I find myself thinking a great deal these days about its connotations and its future effects on my daughters. In a month where Donald Sterling became just the latest, outed, vitriolic and bigoted Fred Phelps, my mind is painting vivid impressions of the future my daughters will occupy and wondering whether their ethnicity, perceived or actual, will be irrelevant, or uplift them to ceilingless heights of self-worth and achievement, or beat them into the earth all together.

It was Mother’s Day last week and like usual I did NOT write that cathartic be-all/end-all prose piece about my relationship with mine (or lack thereof). Instead, I just put my daughter, J, to bed. Prior to that, I supervised her bath time, shampooed her hair, and sat with her on her bedroom floor kneading Mixed Chicks® into the uncooperative knots of her otherwise soft and sweeping curls.

See, I am mixed, and I don’t love that moniker, but use it sometimes for its succinctness. In circles I’ve frequented throughout my life, it has meant, merely, my African-American/Irish-American ethnicity. Today there are a bevy of terms for the myriad multi-ethnic makeups. Mixed, bi-racial, interracial, half and half, what have you. I can’t keep up with what is or isn’t PC at any given moment, nor do I care to. Regardless, I spent the greater part of my youth in an ethnicity conundrum.

I cut my identity-teeth growing up in a Northern Virginia suburb. A part of the Commonwealth kissed by urban sprawl from the neighboring Nation’s Capital, but still, regularly, bitten in the ass by a Southern segregationist and racist past.

I was told that I am too black, not black enough, and that, “In America, you will never be anything but black,” by friends and family, alike. Conversely, I was told that I am too white, not white enough, and incapable of being anything but white. You get the frustrated, fractured, and fragmented picture.

See a third-grade me, sprinting home from the bus stop at which I was dropped off, daily, by the wards of an out-of-town, bullshit, school for the “gifted.” When my sprinting proved insufficient, see me clawing my way up through a dog-pile of neighborhood bullies, dodging fisticuffs and epithets. (To this day, I don’t know if the racism was overt or more of a convenience for mean kids, but it taught me to hold my own, physically and verbally, early and often, and for that I am thankful.)

Fortunately, by high school, I learned to embrace my inner melting pot. I championed my unique cultural constitution, often to the point of buffoonery, taking the stage at parties to rap as M.C. Oreo, an oft-used, disparaging slur, the Uncle Tom denotations of which were lost on me, in favor of some core need for popular attention that it fed, readily.

By senior year, I was a scholar of my heritage, likening myself to the noble and rebellious peoples of the Ashanti Empire on Africa’s Gold Coast or Ireland’s plentiful heroes and saints. I’d like to think I gave ethnicity a slightly better-educated treatment in lyrics that I wrote in those days, including these rap lyrics as I performed them, ironically enough, during my school’s Black History Month Assembly.

Whether white, Puerto Rican, Filipino or Jew / you’re not black, you’re another, but I call the others brothers too
And like the Digables I stick to my task / and stay peace like that… ‘cause I’m mixed like that
Half black, half white, the interracial kid / and I’m not still mad at what my mother’s father did…

I digress, but I will say that, in various educational institutions and throughout my community, I can vividly recall being used by both “sides” as a pawn, in actions that I didn’t quite find affirmative.

So, in a one-bedroom apartment a few miles south of the house that we live in now, my Italian-American wife and I effed around and created a veritable United Colors of Benetton when our daughters were born. This article was supposed to be about them. Sorry for the lengthy back story.

While I was on J’s floor, doing her hair before bedtime, she says to me, “Dada, remember that Dada and his daughter brushing their teeth?!” I know immediately that she means this giant image plastered onto a Walgreens window downtown.

I tell her that I do, in fact, remember, and that’s when she says, “Dada, that Dada and his daughter look JUST. LIKE. US!” A curious thing for a loose-curled toddler with a complexion the color of December’s last remembrance of a summer tan to say about herself and her olive-skinned old man. A poignant example of the pristine spirit of an untainted mind that doesn’t see, or sees through, skin color? I can’t say for certain. More likely than not, it was an innocent expression of her memories of countless times like these:

Either way, it makes me wonder what the world will make of them, in time. They are fortunate, in many ways, to be growing up, here, in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region that supports diversity and champions tolerance. I forget which author said something to the effect of,

“I was surprised to discover, upon leaving San Francisco, that the rest of the world was not like this.”

What will they make of a world where racism flourishes, both institutionalized and overt, yet that world is growing more heterogeneous by the day, as attitudes and latitudes change and the Fred Phelpses leave it to face their makers and the Donald Sterlings get caught red-tongued and, gradually, fade away? How will they identify themselves in a world that seemingly demands that one picks teams and befouls demographics surveys with a category called “other.”

Dear J and N,
You are NOT “Other.” You are J and N. You are American, until, when, and if, you choose otherwise. Your rich and diverse cultural heritage makes you no better and no worse than anyone else who gets to grace this ever-shrinking globe for a while. Your one true measure will be your actions, and how they affect the people that cross your path. You do NOT belong to a group called “other.” You belong to a group called “humanity.” If anything, you are “All.” Just like your Dada.
Love,
Dada
(Mike)

♦◊♦

At what age did your children become aware of true or perceived ethnic differences? If you have “mixed” kids, how do they identify themselves? It’d be an honor to hear your comments.

♦◊♦

Originally appeared on AtHomeDadMatters.com; Images courtesy of the author

The post Some Preliminary Thoughts on My Daughters and Race: You Are Not “Other” appeared first on The Good Men Project.

Morgan Freeman told NPR yesterday that while Barack Obama is the nation’s first mixed-race president, he doesn’t feel that Barack Obama is truly a Black man. Newser offers this quote:

“First thing that always pops into my head regarding our president is that all of the people who are setting up this barrier for him … they just conveniently forget that Barack had a mama, and she was white — very white American, Kansas, middle of America. There was no argument about who he is or what he is. America’s first black president hasn’t arisen yet. He’s not America’s first black president—he’s America’s first mixed-race president.”

Freeman’s interview touches on many other subjects, and Freeman is a supporter of President Obama’s, but the race issue he discussed raises a big question about identity.

What does it mean to be a Black man? If you’re raised by white parents, are you less Black?

If strangers perceive you as Black, is that enough to make you Black?

AP Photo

The post Is Obama a Black Man? Morgan Freeman Says No appeared first on The Good Men Project.

This is a comment by Justin Cascio on the post “The Difference between ‘white people’ and ‘White People’“.

“It kind of sounds like the White person that your friends complain about doesn’t exist, because finding that actual white person who is responsible, the American Hitler of slavery and racism, is a matter of finding a symbol: a scapegoat. When we take it out on each other, we know that we’re standing in for some larger whole, an identity group, and for history and the acts of people who are long dead. How to deal justly with one another, now?

“Talking with a white friend last week, we spoke as we often do about race and what our responsibility is as white men. I say it’s to take whatever capital we’ve got and use it to change the system for greater justice. My friend was saying that his peers, when asked to talk about their racial identity and pride, don’t have an identity: all they have is shame. The white people he’s gone to school with aren’t White; they don’t have any racial identity; they don’t have ceremonies, foods, holidays, ways of addressing elders, and the like, that they associate with being White. I know what he’s talking about; so many times, a conversation about whiteness gets derailed in a denial of whiteness: my white friends will tell me they’re Jewish, they’re ‘beige,’ anything to distinguish themselves from the alpha white male.

“The other half of the time, the problem is that they don’t see what’s theirs as unique; they think their culture is ‘everybody’s.’ White people can only seem to figure out what’s uniquely White by comparing it with minority cultures, because mainstream culture is White. The differences between ourselves and that alpha model make us antsy; how are we failing at being White? It’s this nature of the difference between our relationships to that mainstream, alpha white guy that remains the difference between being White and being Black. It’s White people’s responsibility to figure out what White is, not so we can be proud of our heritage, but to get past the shame, know ourselves, and from there, finally begin the journey to compassion.”

More Comments of the Day

Read our commenting policy.

Photo credit: Flickr / garbocselle

The post “When white people are asked to talk about their racial identity and pride, all they have is shame.” appeared first on The Good Men Project.

Lola Rainey joins two septuagenarian relatives for a Texas road trip through a vanishing America.

Editor’s note: This is the first in a three part series.  

Author’s note: A road trip with my two old guys, my 77-year old father and 74-year old uncle, opened my eyes to a disappearing piece of Americana. Rural black America with its communities of farmers, businessmen, tradesmen, laborers and families flourished on the peripheries of small towns across this nation. These rural black communities were vibrant, active cultural hubs peopled by men and women marginalized in one world but held in high regard in their own.  As we drove through dusty, desert towns and congested cities on our journey east to Texas (where my father and uncle spent their childhood), I listened to poignant stories about life in an America that has all but disappeared. Sadly, this rich, colorful world is unknown to most white Americans and is fading away unnoticed by many Black Americans.

When Uncle Bennie received a inquiry from a timber speculator about land my deceased grandfather owned in East Texas, it came as a surprise to him. He’s the family historian, the possibility that something as big as “a secret  land inheritance” had only now come to light was both annoying and intriguing. A couple of long, telephone conversations with the glib East Texas landman convinced Uncle Bennie it was worth taking a trip back to the old family homestead to determine whether my grandfather owned land there.

The plan was to take a “Texas road trip”; it was the most economical way for a senior on a fixed-income to travel. Unfortunately, Uncle Bennie suffers from a debilitating form of arthritis. He needed help with the driving so he persuaded my very skeptical father to join him. I was recruited as a road dog for one reason: I’m a lawyer and they thought it’d be nice to have me tag along—just in case.

My father often talked about his childhood.  His parents were sharecroppers so he experienced all the deprivations poor black children living under the yoke of Jim Crow in the south would be expected to. Some of the stories he told are seared into my memory. I used them as inspiration for my first novel,  “Havasu Means Blue Water”, which deals with the issues of racial identity and injustice.  One of his most memorable stories was retold in a book trailer I made:

My father escaped poverty and marginalization by joining the military. He left home and never came back. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if he hadn’t left. I shudder at the thought. Everything I knew about East Texas at the start of our road trip convinced me it was a place seething with racial hatred and intolerance, a place where people cling to their guns and religion in a bad way.

On a cool, sunny day in December 2012, my father and uncle picked me up in a rental car and off we went. As we turned onto Interstate 10 headed toward New Mexico, it occurred to me this would likely be the last road trip my father and uncle made. The thought frightened me. These two old men are my rock. I couldn’t imagine life without either one of them. Uncle Bennie slid an old school R&B disk into the car’s CD player. I sat in the backseat listening to the two of them talk; it was an easy, relaxed back and forth. My father and uncle aren’t just brothers, they’re best friends, too. It didn’t bother me that I was the unofficial third wheel in their “bromance.” I stretched out and got comfortable; it wasn’t long before I drifted off to sleep.

Read part two of The Invisible World of Rural Black America here.

Image credit: TexasExplorer98/Flickr

The post The Invisible World of Rural Black America appeared first on The Good Men Project.

Dr. Jennifer Ho felt a little sick after reading about controversial “Tiger Mom” Amy Chua’s most recent book.

A few years ago, when the fervor and controversy and outrage over Chua’s so-called parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother had just about waned, I reluctantly ordered a copy for my Kindle and sat down to read it. A student of mine was thinking about writing her senior thesis on Chinese American mother figures and thought Chua’s screed would be an interesting counter-point to other memoirs. I sped through the book in a single sitting, admittedly skimming over parts of it because, let’s just say Chua’s no Chang-rae Lee, and her prose does not sing. However, what I do recall from reading Battle Hymn was that the furor over the labeling of her book—as memoir, as parenting guide, as racist tract—was all wrong. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother should be required reading for all first year psych students and for medical students going into psychiatry because it provides a rich first-person account of narcissism disorder. It is an in-depth case study through the perspective of the patient herself of what someone who is truly suffering from narcissism looks, acts, and sounds like.

Imagine my non-surprise to learn, this past week, that Chua had published what I can only imagine should be considered part 2 of her narcissism disorder case study: The Triple Package. Like most of the semi-tech savvy people in my age range I have a Facebook account and thus saw various links to the New York Post’s early review for Triple Package. Reading it in a feverish haze (I had come down with the flu and was running a temperature of 103 degrees, which may explain what happened next) I felt myself grow nauseous upon reading that “Chua and her husband, co-author Jed Rubenfeld, gather some specious stats and anecdotal evidence to argue that some groups are just superior to others and everyone else is contributing to the downfall of America.” In fact, I may have thrown up a little in my mouth reading through that article, which seems an appropriate response to have when hearing someone make a case for ethnic/racial superiority in the 21^st century.

Since there are people who have taken to twitter and other social media outlets to slam Chua, and since the New York Post review did such a good job of skewering her claims, I can only add that since I am not a first year psych student nor involved in the field of psychiatry I am not going to read Chua’s book. One could argue that it’s always good to know where the enemy stands—friends of mine watch Fox News for that very reason. However, I don’t need to read this book to know what Chua and her husband are doing: they are trying to make a lot of money. Controversy sells, and narcissists are smart people. I also don’t think Chua is the enemy. She is a misguided and sick person who is trying to make a buck, perhaps to fund her daughters’ future therapy sessions, which they undoubtedly will need growing up in a family such as theirs. I suppose we could say she is the enemy to common sense and anti-racism…except I think that’s giving her too much credit. Chua isn’t race baiting because she believes in race baiting—I think she’s doing this because she is a narcissist who wants to be in the limelight. And lets face it, academics don’t find themselves in the limelight unless they say or do dumbass things—hence narcissism case study #2: The Triple Package.

Finally, one thing that has always bugged me about Chua is her adamant avowals to being Chinese and her disavowal of being Filipino. In Battle Hymn she talks about her grandparents immigrating from China to the Philippines—both her parents were born in the Philippines, and it would seem that they are, technically speaking, Filipino. Yet Chua never claims any Filipino influence in her family—all “credit” if you will, goes to the Chinese. This strikes me as the strangest omission. It is as if Chua wants to erase all traces of Filipino cultural influence from her life. Which makes me wonder, even more, if this is all just about racial pandering—of Chua trying to cash in on the yellow peril threat that the specter of all things Chinese raise. However, regardless of whether Chua is or should be considered Chinese, Filipino, American, or all of the above, one thing is certain: we should not buy or read her book. Life is too short to spend with bad prose, and you don’t need to buy or read her book to know that her theories are crap—the debunking of the 1920s eugenics movement proved that. Instead, I’d recommend everyone go out and pick up a copy of Ruth Ozeki’s latest novel, A Tale for the Time Being—it is luminous; it is thoughtful; it is a page turner from start to finish. Ozeki is the anti-Chua, which is the highest compliment I can think to give her right now.

The post Why I Am Not Reading Amy Chua’s Book, ‘The Triple Package’ appeared first on The Good Men Project.

The post “Mom, Why is Everyone Here White?” What My Son Knows About Race That I Didn’t appeared first on The Good Men Project.

Mike Heenan reflects on his mixed-race heritage and wonders how his daughters’ ethnicity will affect their futures.

—

There is an elephant in the room at our house and that is not a self-deprecating fat joke.

The elephant is race, and I find myself thinking a great deal these days about its connotations and its future effects on my daughters. In a month where Donald Sterling became just the latest, outed, vitriolic and bigoted Fred Phelps, my mind is painting vivid impressions of the future my daughters will occupy and wondering whether their ethnicity, perceived or actual, will be irrelevant, or uplift them to ceilingless heights of self-worth and achievement, or beat them into the earth all together.

It was Mother’s Day last week and like usual I did NOT write that cathartic be-all/end-all prose piece about my relationship with mine (or lack thereof). Instead, I just put my daughter, J, to bed. Prior to that, I supervised her bath time, shampooed her hair, and sat with her on her bedroom floor kneading Mixed Chicks® into the uncooperative knots of her otherwise soft and sweeping curls.

See, I am mixed, and I don’t love that moniker, but use it sometimes for its succinctness. In circles I’ve frequented throughout my life, it has meant, merely, my African-American/Irish-American ethnicity. Today there are a bevy of terms for the myriad multi-ethnic makeups. Mixed, bi-racial, interracial, half and half, what have you. I can’t keep up with what is or isn’t PC at any given moment, nor do I care to. Regardless, I spent the greater part of my youth in an ethnicity conundrum.

I cut my identity-teeth growing up in a Northern Virginia suburb. A part of the Commonwealth kissed by urban sprawl from the neighboring Nation’s Capital, but still, regularly, bitten in the ass by a Southern segregationist and racist past.

I was told that I am too black, not black enough, and that, “In America, you will never be anything but black,” by friends and family, alike. Conversely, I was told that I am too white, not white enough, and incapable of being anything but white. You get the frustrated, fractured, and fragmented picture.

See a third-grade me, sprinting home from the bus stop at which I was dropped off, daily, by the wards of an out-of-town, bullshit, school for the “gifted.” When my sprinting proved insufficient, see me clawing my way up through a dog-pile of neighborhood bullies, dodging fisticuffs and epithets. (To this day, I don’t know if the racism was overt or more of a convenience for mean kids, but it taught me to hold my own, physically and verbally, early and often, and for that I am thankful.)

Fortunately, by high school, I learned to embrace my inner melting pot. I championed my unique cultural constitution, often to the point of buffoonery, taking the stage at parties to rap as M.C. Oreo, an oft-used, disparaging slur, the Uncle Tom denotations of which were lost on me, in favor of some core need for popular attention that it fed, readily.

By senior year, I was a scholar of my heritage, likening myself to the noble and rebellious peoples of the Ashanti Empire on Africa’s Gold Coast or Ireland’s plentiful heroes and saints. I’d like to think I gave ethnicity a slightly better-educated treatment in lyrics that I wrote in those days, including these rap lyrics as I performed them, ironically enough, during my school’s Black History Month Assembly.

Whether white, Puerto Rican, Filipino or Jew / you’re not black, you’re another, but I call the others brothers too
And like the Digables I stick to my task / and stay peace like that… ‘cause I’m mixed like that
Half black, half white, the interracial kid / and I’m not still mad at what my mother’s father did…

I digress, but I will say that, in various educational institutions and throughout my community, I can vividly recall being used by both “sides” as a pawn, in actions that I didn’t quite find affirmative.

So, in a one-bedroom apartment a few miles south of the house that we live in now, my Italian-American wife and I effed around and created a veritable United Colors of Benetton when our daughters were born. This article was supposed to be about them. Sorry for the lengthy back story.

While I was on J’s floor, doing her hair before bedtime, she says to me, “Dada, remember that Dada and his daughter brushing their teeth?!” I know immediately that she means this giant image plastered onto a Walgreens window downtown.

I tell her that I do, in fact, remember, and that’s when she says, “Dada, that Dada and his daughter look JUST. LIKE. US!” A curious thing for a loose-curled toddler with a complexion the color of December’s last remembrance of a summer tan to say about herself and her olive-skinned old man. A poignant example of the pristine spirit of an untainted mind that doesn’t see, or sees through, skin color? I can’t say for certain. More likely than not, it was an innocent expression of her memories of countless times like these:

Either way, it makes me wonder what the world will make of them, in time. They are fortunate, in many ways, to be growing up, here, in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region that supports diversity and champions tolerance. I forget which author said something to the effect of,

“I was surprised to discover, upon leaving San Francisco, that the rest of the world was not like this.”

What will they make of a world where racism flourishes, both institutionalized and overt, yet that world is growing more heterogeneous by the day, as attitudes and latitudes change and the Fred Phelpses leave it to face their makers and the Donald Sterlings get caught red-tongued and, gradually, fade away? How will they identify themselves in a world that seemingly demands that one picks teams and befouls demographics surveys with a category called “other.”

Dear J and N,
You are NOT “Other.” You are J and N. You are American, until, when, and if, you choose otherwise. Your rich and diverse cultural heritage makes you no better and no worse than anyone else who gets to grace this ever-shrinking globe for a while. Your one true measure will be your actions, and how they affect the people that cross your path. You do NOT belong to a group called “other.” You belong to a group called “humanity.” If anything, you are “All.” Just like your Dada.
Love,
Dada
(Mike)

♦◊♦

At what age did your children become aware of true or perceived ethnic differences? If you have “mixed” kids, how do they identify themselves? It’d be an honor to hear your comments.

♦◊♦

Originally appeared on AtHomeDadMatters.com; Images courtesy of the author

The post Some Preliminary Thoughts on My Daughters and Race: You Are Not “Other” appeared first on The Good Men Project.

Written by Elom & Wisdom Amouzou

Performed at The Manual Writing Center’s event: Stand Together, Break The Silence

18 percent of black people, 29 percent Latin Americans, 42 percent of women, 81 percent of white evangelicals, 61 percent Mormons, 56 percent who attend worship services once a week…What do they all have in common?

Yes, they voted for Trump. What we’d like to do is reflect and identify those parts of ourselves that might have voted for Trump. Those parts of ourselves that might hate ourselves. So, in the same vein as Malcolm X, we’d like to ask…

Who Taught You To Hate Yourself?

I was a 9 year-old black boy when I lost my African accent.

I was sitting in the back of the semicircle in that classroom when the teacher called on me to read out loud.

I was the only African student in the classroom and the second black boy in that room.

I could not wrap my pink tongue around those words fast enough to sound like their normal.

I was just a shy little boy scared of hearing my African accent echo within the walls of that classroom.

Now, when I reflect, I think of that moment as the first moment when my accent was slowly drowned out in the waves of their laughter.

If that 9 year old little black boy could talk to me today and hear me. I think he would look me straight in the eyes and I think he would ask…

Who Taught You To Hate Yourself?

Let me speak to former me’s, any Eloms that may have or may still stand for what the candidacy of Donald Trump has stood for.

They said make those naps manageable, and you said why not? Well my head is not a corporation and these follicles don’t need a manager.

Who taught me to hate the hair on my head, or the hair that used to be on my head?

Who taught me to see a pair of legs, and a set of thighs? Limbs to be picked like so much options from a menu? Bodies never moving apologetically enough.

Who taught me to think hope as submission? Who taught us to hate that which forms the rest of the world, not us?

Who taught me to see ripples of hatred bubbling through slanted words as illegitimate?

Who taught me to hear explosions of freedom crying manifested as strained vocal chords and contorted eyes twisting in this scorched climate? Who taught me to hear them? Who taught us to hear one another?

Who Taught You To Hate Yourself?

I was an eleven year-old black boy sitting on the bathroom floor with my mother’s hands in my hair.

I was staring at that ugly cracked out tile watching the spiders crawl when the foul smell hit me.

I almost puked at the weird smell in that white creamy greasy mixture.

I read the label…SODIUM HYDROXIDE.

I wondered how smooth I’d look as the Lye was breaking down the bonds of my kinky hair.

I clenched my jaw, tightened my fists, and tried to think of anything but the stinging scorpions changing the texture of my hair.

I wondered for a brief moment if my head would catch on fire. I ran head first under the faucet.

I thought I was bald. I couldn’t feel my curls and had never felt my hair laid down flat. Dead on my scalp.

I rushed to the mirror, removed the towel, and ran hands through that fine…good hair.

If I could look at that 11 year-old black boy in the face today, I think I would ask him…

Who Taught You To Hate Yourself?

Hey Elom! Who told you a future is bought at the price of silence before slaughter? Who said you could say ‘There’ without moving through the ‘they’ of here!

Who taught you to seek refuge in cages, the same ones that bent their steel bars around your torso till you felt your clavicle bend and break?

Hey Elom! They said she walked like she was supposed to be somebody. And you laughed. They didn’t know her walk was a battle cry for a body liberated, each step forward a thunderous clap against a world built to deny her dignity, each head roll a lightning strike against misogynoir.

Who told you laughter couldn’t be poison to be swallowed as your head convulses in fits of merriment? Who told you ‘Ha’ couldn’t also mean ‘Die’?

Hey hey, wait a second, breathe easy.

Take a slice of that air, and let each second of that 21 percent oxygen cradle the edges of your respiratory system. And remember! That air…that 21 percent oxygen? You bought at the price of a second offered in wait…in wait of that which we will build.

So breathe and breathe again until your breaths can no longer contain the body as it lunges somewhere, somewhere, free from where we are, where we learned the hate we were breathing.

Say There! Say Ha, say Die, then breathe and remember to clear the rubble, the hate withers, and in the remains build that ‘there’ where we will…where we could…where we might….simply be!

Who Taught You To Hate Yourself?

I was an 18 year-old black boy at the University of Colorado at Boulder studying Chemical & Biological Engineering.

I was one of maybe 50 students of color in the whole college of Engineering.

I fell in love with a girl we can call her Valentina (not the hot sauce). She was Mexican-American and I was 19 years-old when Valentina taught me a lesson I’ll never forget. She taught me the answer to the question: “What is the most dangerous force on earth?”

I got very close to Valentina. We talking stay up ‘til 4 in the morning eating late night Mickey D’s close.

I was over at her house in the basement the night it happened. I looked into her eyes. She looked back into mine and said words I will never forget…“Wisdom, if only you had blonde hair and blue eyes…”

I felt ugly. It took me years to figure it out and then finally I learned that she did not hate me.

I wish I could go back in time to the moment she finished that sentence and ask Valentina…

Who Taught You To Hate Yourself?

The most dangerous force on this earth is unhealed pain/trauma. Nearly half of all children under 5 right now are so-called minorities. 50 years from now, it won’t matter if we and this system teach them to hate themselves and their cultures.

Brother Cornel West says “To niggerize a people is to make them afraid and ashamed, scared and intimidated so that they are deferential to the powers that be.”

If we wish to transform our world, we must first be brave enough to ask ourselves “Who taught you to hate yourself?” And then we have to develop and solidify an unending love of ourselves and we have to be able to build a deep deep respect for what our respective people represent and be willing to fight for our freedom.

—

Photo: Getty Images

The post Who Taught You to Hate Yourself? appeared first on The Good Men Project.

Morgan Freeman told NPR yesterday that while Barack Obama is the nation’s first mixed-race president, he doesn’t feel that Barack Obama is truly a Black man. Newser offers this quote:

“First thing that always pops into my head regarding our president is that all of the people who are setting up this barrier for him … they just conveniently forget that Barack had a mama, and she was white — very white American, Kansas, middle of America. There was no argument about who he is or what he is. America’s first black president hasn’t arisen yet. He’s not America’s first black president—he’s America’s first mixed-race president.”

Freeman’s interview touches on many other subjects, and Freeman is a supporter of President Obama’s, but the race issue he discussed raises a big question about identity.

What does it mean to be a Black man? If you’re raised by white parents, are you less Black?

If strangers perceive you as Black, is that enough to make you Black?

AP Photo

The post Is Obama a Black Man? Morgan Freeman Says No appeared first on The Good Men Project.

This is a comment by Justin Cascio on the post “The Difference between ‘white people’ and ‘White People’“.

“It kind of sounds like the White person that your friends complain about doesn’t exist, because finding that actual white person who is responsible, the American Hitler of slavery and racism, is a matter of finding a symbol: a scapegoat. When we take it out on each other, we know that we’re standing in for some larger whole, an identity group, and for history and the acts of people who are long dead. How to deal justly with one another, now?

“Talking with a white friend last week, we spoke as we often do about race and what our responsibility is as white men. I say it’s to take whatever capital we’ve got and use it to change the system for greater justice. My friend was saying that his peers, when asked to talk about their racial identity and pride, don’t have an identity: all they have is shame. The white people he’s gone to school with aren’t White; they don’t have any racial identity; they don’t have ceremonies, foods, holidays, ways of addressing elders, and the like, that they associate with being White. I know what he’s talking about; so many times, a conversation about whiteness gets derailed in a denial of whiteness: my white friends will tell me they’re Jewish, they’re ‘beige,’ anything to distinguish themselves from the alpha white male.

“The other half of the time, the problem is that they don’t see what’s theirs as unique; they think their culture is ‘everybody’s.’ White people can only seem to figure out what’s uniquely White by comparing it with minority cultures, because mainstream culture is White. The differences between ourselves and that alpha model make us antsy; how are we failing at being White? It’s this nature of the difference between our relationships to that mainstream, alpha white guy that remains the difference between being White and being Black. It’s White people’s responsibility to figure out what White is, not so we can be proud of our heritage, but to get past the shame, know ourselves, and from there, finally begin the journey to compassion.”

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Photo credit: Flickr / garbocselle

The post “When white people are asked to talk about their racial identity and pride, all they have is shame.” appeared first on The Good Men Project.

Lola Rainey joins two septuagenarian relatives for a Texas road trip through a vanishing America.

Editor’s note: This is the first in a three part series.  

Author’s note: A road trip with my two old guys, my 77-year old father and 74-year old uncle, opened my eyes to a disappearing piece of Americana. Rural black America with its communities of farmers, businessmen, tradesmen, laborers and families flourished on the peripheries of small towns across this nation. These rural black communities were vibrant, active cultural hubs peopled by men and women marginalized in one world but held in high regard in their own.  As we drove through dusty, desert towns and congested cities on our journey east to Texas (where my father and uncle spent their childhood), I listened to poignant stories about life in an America that has all but disappeared. Sadly, this rich, colorful world is unknown to most white Americans and is fading away unnoticed by many Black Americans.

When Uncle Bennie received a inquiry from a timber speculator about land my deceased grandfather owned in East Texas, it came as a surprise to him. He’s the family historian, the possibility that something as big as “a secret  land inheritance” had only now come to light was both annoying and intriguing. A couple of long, telephone conversations with the glib East Texas landman convinced Uncle Bennie it was worth taking a trip back to the old family homestead to determine whether my grandfather owned land there.

The plan was to take a “Texas road trip”; it was the most economical way for a senior on a fixed-income to travel. Unfortunately, Uncle Bennie suffers from a debilitating form of arthritis. He needed help with the driving so he persuaded my very skeptical father to join him. I was recruited as a road dog for one reason: I’m a lawyer and they thought it’d be nice to have me tag along—just in case.

My father often talked about his childhood.  His parents were sharecroppers so he experienced all the deprivations poor black children living under the yoke of Jim Crow in the south would be expected to. Some of the stories he told are seared into my memory. I used them as inspiration for my first novel,  “Havasu Means Blue Water”, which deals with the issues of racial identity and injustice.  One of his most memorable stories was retold in a book trailer I made:

My father escaped poverty and marginalization by joining the military. He left home and never came back. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if he hadn’t left. I shudder at the thought. Everything I knew about East Texas at the start of our road trip convinced me it was a place seething with racial hatred and intolerance, a place where people cling to their guns and religion in a bad way.

On a cool, sunny day in December 2012, my father and uncle picked me up in a rental car and off we went. As we turned onto Interstate 10 headed toward New Mexico, it occurred to me this would likely be the last road trip my father and uncle made. The thought frightened me. These two old men are my rock. I couldn’t imagine life without either one of them. Uncle Bennie slid an old school R&B disk into the car’s CD player. I sat in the backseat listening to the two of them talk; it was an easy, relaxed back and forth. My father and uncle aren’t just brothers, they’re best friends, too. It didn’t bother me that I was the unofficial third wheel in their “bromance.” I stretched out and got comfortable; it wasn’t long before I drifted off to sleep.

Read part two of The Invisible World of Rural Black America here.

Image credit: TexasExplorer98/Flickr

The post The Invisible World of Rural Black America appeared first on The Good Men Project.

Dr. Jennifer Ho felt a little sick after reading about controversial “Tiger Mom” Amy Chua’s most recent book.

A few years ago, when the fervor and controversy and outrage over Chua’s so-called parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother had just about waned, I reluctantly ordered a copy for my Kindle and sat down to read it. A student of mine was thinking about writing her senior thesis on Chinese American mother figures and thought Chua’s screed would be an interesting counter-point to other memoirs. I sped through the book in a single sitting, admittedly skimming over parts of it because, let’s just say Chua’s no Chang-rae Lee, and her prose does not sing. However, what I do recall from reading Battle Hymn was that the furor over the labeling of her book—as memoir, as parenting guide, as racist tract—was all wrong. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother should be required reading for all first year psych students and for medical students going into psychiatry because it provides a rich first-person account of narcissism disorder. It is an in-depth case study through the perspective of the patient herself of what someone who is truly suffering from narcissism looks, acts, and sounds like.

Imagine my non-surprise to learn, this past week, that Chua had published what I can only imagine should be considered part 2 of her narcissism disorder case study: The Triple Package. Like most of the semi-tech savvy people in my age range I have a Facebook account and thus saw various links to the New York Post’s early review for Triple Package. Reading it in a feverish haze (I had come down with the flu and was running a temperature of 103 degrees, which may explain what happened next) I felt myself grow nauseous upon reading that “Chua and her husband, co-author Jed Rubenfeld, gather some specious stats and anecdotal evidence to argue that some groups are just superior to others and everyone else is contributing to the downfall of America.” In fact, I may have thrown up a little in my mouth reading through that article, which seems an appropriate response to have when hearing someone make a case for ethnic/racial superiority in the 21^st century.

Since there are people who have taken to twitter and other social media outlets to slam Chua, and since the New York Post review did such a good job of skewering her claims, I can only add that since I am not a first year psych student nor involved in the field of psychiatry I am not going to read Chua’s book. One could argue that it’s always good to know where the enemy stands—friends of mine watch Fox News for that very reason. However, I don’t need to read this book to know what Chua and her husband are doing: they are trying to make a lot of money. Controversy sells, and narcissists are smart people. I also don’t think Chua is the enemy. She is a misguided and sick person who is trying to make a buck, perhaps to fund her daughters’ future therapy sessions, which they undoubtedly will need growing up in a family such as theirs. I suppose we could say she is the enemy to common sense and anti-racism…except I think that’s giving her too much credit. Chua isn’t race baiting because she believes in race baiting—I think she’s doing this because she is a narcissist who wants to be in the limelight. And lets face it, academics don’t find themselves in the limelight unless they say or do dumbass things—hence narcissism case study #2: The Triple Package.

Finally, one thing that has always bugged me about Chua is her adamant avowals to being Chinese and her disavowal of being Filipino. In Battle Hymn she talks about her grandparents immigrating from China to the Philippines—both her parents were born in the Philippines, and it would seem that they are, technically speaking, Filipino. Yet Chua never claims any Filipino influence in her family—all “credit” if you will, goes to the Chinese. This strikes me as the strangest omission. It is as if Chua wants to erase all traces of Filipino cultural influence from her life. Which makes me wonder, even more, if this is all just about racial pandering—of Chua trying to cash in on the yellow peril threat that the specter of all things Chinese raise. However, regardless of whether Chua is or should be considered Chinese, Filipino, American, or all of the above, one thing is certain: we should not buy or read her book. Life is too short to spend with bad prose, and you don’t need to buy or read her book to know that her theories are crap—the debunking of the 1920s eugenics movement proved that. Instead, I’d recommend everyone go out and pick up a copy of Ruth Ozeki’s latest novel, A Tale for the Time Being—it is luminous; it is thoughtful; it is a page turner from start to finish. Ozeki is the anti-Chua, which is the highest compliment I can think to give her right now.

The post Why I Am Not Reading Amy Chua’s Book, ‘The Triple Package’ appeared first on The Good Men Project.

The post “Mom, Why is Everyone Here White?” What My Son Knows About Race That I Didn’t appeared first on The Good Men Project.

Mike Heenan reflects on his mixed-race heritage and wonders how his daughters’ ethnicity will affect their futures.

—

There is an elephant in the room at our house and that is not a self-deprecating fat joke.

The elephant is race, and I find myself thinking a great deal these days about its connotations and its future effects on my daughters. In a month where Donald Sterling became just the latest, outed, vitriolic and bigoted Fred Phelps, my mind is painting vivid impressions of the future my daughters will occupy and wondering whether their ethnicity, perceived or actual, will be irrelevant, or uplift them to ceilingless heights of self-worth and achievement, or beat them into the earth all together.

It was Mother’s Day last week and like usual I did NOT write that cathartic be-all/end-all prose piece about my relationship with mine (or lack thereof). Instead, I just put my daughter, J, to bed. Prior to that, I supervised her bath time, shampooed her hair, and sat with her on her bedroom floor kneading Mixed Chicks® into the uncooperative knots of her otherwise soft and sweeping curls.

See, I am mixed, and I don’t love that moniker, but use it sometimes for its succinctness. In circles I’ve frequented throughout my life, it has meant, merely, my African-American/Irish-American ethnicity. Today there are a bevy of terms for the myriad multi-ethnic makeups. Mixed, bi-racial, interracial, half and half, what have you. I can’t keep up with what is or isn’t PC at any given moment, nor do I care to. Regardless, I spent the greater part of my youth in an ethnicity conundrum.

I cut my identity-teeth growing up in a Northern Virginia suburb. A part of the Commonwealth kissed by urban sprawl from the neighboring Nation’s Capital, but still, regularly, bitten in the ass by a Southern segregationist and racist past.

I was told that I am too black, not black enough, and that, “In America, you will never be anything but black,” by friends and family, alike. Conversely, I was told that I am too white, not white enough, and incapable of being anything but white. You get the frustrated, fractured, and fragmented picture.

See a third-grade me, sprinting home from the bus stop at which I was dropped off, daily, by the wards of an out-of-town, bullshit, school for the “gifted.” When my sprinting proved insufficient, see me clawing my way up through a dog-pile of neighborhood bullies, dodging fisticuffs and epithets. (To this day, I don’t know if the racism was overt or more of a convenience for mean kids, but it taught me to hold my own, physically and verbally, early and often, and for that I am thankful.)

Fortunately, by high school, I learned to embrace my inner melting pot. I championed my unique cultural constitution, often to the point of buffoonery, taking the stage at parties to rap as M.C. Oreo, an oft-used, disparaging slur, the Uncle Tom denotations of which were lost on me, in favor of some core need for popular attention that it fed, readily.

By senior year, I was a scholar of my heritage, likening myself to the noble and rebellious peoples of the Ashanti Empire on Africa’s Gold Coast or Ireland’s plentiful heroes and saints. I’d like to think I gave ethnicity a slightly better-educated treatment in lyrics that I wrote in those days, including these rap lyrics as I performed them, ironically enough, during my school’s Black History Month Assembly.

Whether white, Puerto Rican, Filipino or Jew / you’re not black, you’re another, but I call the others brothers too
And like the Digables I stick to my task / and stay peace like that… ‘cause I’m mixed like that
Half black, half white, the interracial kid / and I’m not still mad at what my mother’s father did…

I digress, but I will say that, in various educational institutions and throughout my community, I can vividly recall being used by both “sides” as a pawn, in actions that I didn’t quite find affirmative.

So, in a one-bedroom apartment a few miles south of the house that we live in now, my Italian-American wife and I effed around and created a veritable United Colors of Benetton when our daughters were born. This article was supposed to be about them. Sorry for the lengthy back story.

While I was on J’s floor, doing her hair before bedtime, she says to me, “Dada, remember that Dada and his daughter brushing their teeth?!” I know immediately that she means this giant image plastered onto a Walgreens window downtown.

I tell her that I do, in fact, remember, and that’s when she says, “Dada, that Dada and his daughter look JUST. LIKE. US!” A curious thing for a loose-curled toddler with a complexion the color of December’s last remembrance of a summer tan to say about herself and her olive-skinned old man. A poignant example of the pristine spirit of an untainted mind that doesn’t see, or sees through, skin color? I can’t say for certain. More likely than not, it was an innocent expression of her memories of countless times like these:

Either way, it makes me wonder what the world will make of them, in time. They are fortunate, in many ways, to be growing up, here, in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region that supports diversity and champions tolerance. I forget which author said something to the effect of,

“I was surprised to discover, upon leaving San Francisco, that the rest of the world was not like this.”

What will they make of a world where racism flourishes, both institutionalized and overt, yet that world is growing more heterogeneous by the day, as attitudes and latitudes change and the Fred Phelpses leave it to face their makers and the Donald Sterlings get caught red-tongued and, gradually, fade away? How will they identify themselves in a world that seemingly demands that one picks teams and befouls demographics surveys with a category called “other.”

Dear J and N,
You are NOT “Other.” You are J and N. You are American, until, when, and if, you choose otherwise. Your rich and diverse cultural heritage makes you no better and no worse than anyone else who gets to grace this ever-shrinking globe for a while. Your one true measure will be your actions, and how they affect the people that cross your path. You do NOT belong to a group called “other.” You belong to a group called “humanity.” If anything, you are “All.” Just like your Dada.
Love,
Dada
(Mike)

♦◊♦

At what age did your children become aware of true or perceived ethnic differences? If you have “mixed” kids, how do they identify themselves? It’d be an honor to hear your comments.

♦◊♦

Originally appeared on AtHomeDadMatters.com; Images courtesy of the author

The post Some Preliminary Thoughts on My Daughters and Race: You Are Not “Other” appeared first on The Good Men Project.

Written by Elom & Wisdom Amouzou

Performed at The Manual Writing Center’s event: Stand Together, Break The Silence

18 percent of black people, 29 percent Latin Americans, 42 percent of women, 81 percent of white evangelicals, 61 percent Mormons, 56 percent who attend worship services once a week…What do they all have in common?

Yes, they voted for Trump. What we’d like to do is reflect and identify those parts of ourselves that might have voted for Trump. Those parts of ourselves that might hate ourselves. So, in the same vein as Malcolm X, we’d like to ask…

Who Taught You To Hate Yourself?

I was a 9 year-old black boy when I lost my African accent.

I was sitting in the back of the semicircle in that classroom when the teacher called on me to read out loud.

I was the only African student in the classroom and the second black boy in that room.

I could not wrap my pink tongue around those words fast enough to sound like their normal.

I was just a shy little boy scared of hearing my African accent echo within the walls of that classroom.

Now, when I reflect, I think of that moment as the first moment when my accent was slowly drowned out in the waves of their laughter.

If that 9 year old little black boy could talk to me today and hear me. I think he would look me straight in the eyes and I think he would ask…

Who Taught You To Hate Yourself?

Let me speak to former me’s, any Eloms that may have or may still stand for what the candidacy of Donald Trump has stood for.

They said make those naps manageable, and you said why not? Well my head is not a corporation and these follicles don’t need a manager.

Who taught me to hate the hair on my head, or the hair that used to be on my head?

Who taught me to see a pair of legs, and a set of thighs? Limbs to be picked like so much options from a menu? Bodies never moving apologetically enough.

Who taught me to think hope as submission? Who taught us to hate that which forms the rest of the world, not us?

Who taught me to see ripples of hatred bubbling through slanted words as illegitimate?

Who taught me to hear explosions of freedom crying manifested as strained vocal chords and contorted eyes twisting in this scorched climate? Who taught me to hear them? Who taught us to hear one another?

Who Taught You To Hate Yourself?

I was an eleven year-old black boy sitting on the bathroom floor with my mother’s hands in my hair.

I was staring at that ugly cracked out tile watching the spiders crawl when the foul smell hit me.

I almost puked at the weird smell in that white creamy greasy mixture.

I read the label…SODIUM HYDROXIDE.

I wondered how smooth I’d look as the Lye was breaking down the bonds of my kinky hair.

I clenched my jaw, tightened my fists, and tried to think of anything but the stinging scorpions changing the texture of my hair.

I wondered for a brief moment if my head would catch on fire. I ran head first under the faucet.

I thought I was bald. I couldn’t feel my curls and had never felt my hair laid down flat. Dead on my scalp.

I rushed to the mirror, removed the towel, and ran hands through that fine…good hair.

If I could look at that 11 year-old black boy in the face today, I think I would ask him…

Who Taught You To Hate Yourself?

Hey Elom! Who told you a future is bought at the price of silence before slaughter? Who said you could say ‘There’ without moving through the ‘they’ of here!

Who taught you to seek refuge in cages, the same ones that bent their steel bars around your torso till you felt your clavicle bend and break?

Hey Elom! They said she walked like she was supposed to be somebody. And you laughed. They didn’t know her walk was a battle cry for a body liberated, each step forward a thunderous clap against a world built to deny her dignity, each head roll a lightning strike against misogynoir.

Who told you laughter couldn’t be poison to be swallowed as your head convulses in fits of merriment? Who told you ‘Ha’ couldn’t also mean ‘Die’?

Hey hey, wait a second, breathe easy.

Take a slice of that air, and let each second of that 21 percent oxygen cradle the edges of your respiratory system. And remember! That air…that 21 percent oxygen? You bought at the price of a second offered in wait…in wait of that which we will build.

So breathe and breathe again until your breaths can no longer contain the body as it lunges somewhere, somewhere, free from where we are, where we learned the hate we were breathing.

Say There! Say Ha, say Die, then breathe and remember to clear the rubble, the hate withers, and in the remains build that ‘there’ where we will…where we could…where we might….simply be!

Who Taught You To Hate Yourself?

I was an 18 year-old black boy at the University of Colorado at Boulder studying Chemical & Biological Engineering.

I was one of maybe 50 students of color in the whole college of Engineering.

I fell in love with a girl we can call her Valentina (not the hot sauce). She was Mexican-American and I was 19 years-old when Valentina taught me a lesson I’ll never forget. She taught me the answer to the question: “What is the most dangerous force on earth?”

I got very close to Valentina. We talking stay up ‘til 4 in the morning eating late night Mickey D’s close.

I was over at her house in the basement the night it happened. I looked into her eyes. She looked back into mine and said words I will never forget…“Wisdom, if only you had blonde hair and blue eyes…”

I felt ugly. It took me years to figure it out and then finally I learned that she did not hate me.

I wish I could go back in time to the moment she finished that sentence and ask Valentina…

Who Taught You To Hate Yourself?

The most dangerous force on this earth is unhealed pain/trauma. Nearly half of all children under 5 right now are so-called minorities. 50 years from now, it won’t matter if we and this system teach them to hate themselves and their cultures.

Brother Cornel West says “To niggerize a people is to make them afraid and ashamed, scared and intimidated so that they are deferential to the powers that be.”

If we wish to transform our world, we must first be brave enough to ask ourselves “Who taught you to hate yourself?” And then we have to develop and solidify an unending love of ourselves and we have to be able to build a deep deep respect for what our respective people represent and be willing to fight for our freedom.

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Photo: Getty Images

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