Kizzy has had an extremely tough week. I'm going to write about the whole thing on BlogHer and will add a link here when I do. The good news is he is recuperating and so far hasn't had complications and can take the cone off hopefully Monday.
Note: I wrote this on the plane on the way to #BlogHer15, so this post is already ten days old. After consulting some friends, I decided to publish it anyway. I don't really care if it doesn't win me any popularity contests. This post was springing from my fingers as I was still reading Coates' book, and that hasn't happened to me in a long time.
I didn't know President Obama planned to speak today. I flipped to NPR out of boredom during the hour-long ride to the airport.
Obama talked about a deal America had forged with our "allies and partners" -- I assume "partner" in this sense is less romantic than what some of my friends call their lovers -- in order to keep Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.
I gripped the wheel tighter as my default inner voice asked, "Why shouldn't they have one when we do?"
Because, removing all nationalism from the equation, this hardly seems fair.
Stay with me a moment.
The more I learn about our brains from scientists and our souls from writers and artists, the more I realize what I grew up accepting to be true is a rationalization to benefit whoever is telling the story. They weren't evil in telling it, either -- it's what they were taught or came to believe.
In sitting with my own feelings, I now believe there are no universal truths or common histories, there are only the stories we tell ourselves. Which, in and of themselves, are so divergent no two people witnessing an event ever agree on all the details.
All we can do is take the information, go forward, and try to be a good human.
I got to the airport and started reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME. It's an extended letter to his son about living in America as a black man, but maybe more importantly, it's about how we came to the concept of "black" in the first place.
This book is perhaps one of the best explanations of white privilege I've seen, but Coates doesn't call it that. He calls it "The Dream."
To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.
The Dream tells white people that when black boys are killed by the police, they must have done something to deserve it, because otherwise holy shit, what kind of police academies are we funding here to pull people over or frisk them or God forbid shoot them for something as antiquated as skin color?
The Dream tells white people that the default of beauty is blonde and blue-eyed and there must be something not good about an all-black school.
The Dream ignores Howard University, where Coates found his Mecca.
I understood The Dream. I've equated the scales falling from my eyes to the moment when the red pill is swallowed in The Matrix. I don't want the world to be stupid or ugly. The Dream can hide that for me, for my white family.
The Dream is tempting for those who can afford to believe in it. As Coates points out, believing you should be able to take without regard has nonracial applications.
The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos.
Coates admits he himself imagines a world where he has The Dream, then realizes he has unintentionally also marginalized others. That helps me believe other white people ensconced in The Dream might be able to let Coates in. We have this thing in common, you see: the human desire to dominate those around us. Having that desire in our bodies doesn't make us bad.
Acting on it makes us bad.
Acting on it brought whites to decimate Native Americans, colonize Africa, sell black bodies as property.
How did we do it? By convincing our white selves that our fellow people were not human. How can we do that? Maybe if they had some identifying characteristic ...
Perhaps being named "black" had nothing to do with any of this, perhaps being named "black" was just someone's name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah.
What is "race"? It used to matter what kind of European you were ...
But a great number of "black" people are already beige. And the history of civilization is littered with dead races (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose -- the organization of people beneath and beyond the umbrella of rights.
Separating the concept of black and white from American, my mind wandered back to Obama's press conference.
Ignore Obama's race. He's the Commander-in-Chief right now. He's 'Merica. And he's forged an agreement with our allies and partners that say we, America, and they, have the right to make decisions about who should and shouldn't have nuclear weapons.
I'm not going to debate whether Iran is a problem or even whether America is a problem. We're all problems to people who don't agree with us.
The question is how do we make our decisions, which ultimately are made with emotion more often than reason?
We make ourselves, Americans, freedom fighters and protectors of the world when we need to in order to justify our own decisions.
We make ourselves white when we want to live The Dream.
In everything when we find ourselves falling back on a default explanation for the way things are -- we should question that.
I do believe Obama and co. questioned the Iran situation and decided the goal is to prevent Iran from getting nuclear bombs, the end. Who cares if it's fair, really? Because, holy shit. Right? Um.
I do not claim to know the answer to this question. I'm just asking it.
I do believe that many white Americans still live in The Dream and believe it's justified and are honestly befuddled with people like Coates.
To acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declared itself and turning toward something murkier and unknown. It is still too difficult for most Americans to do this.
But, Coates points out, we are also befuddled at earthquakes, and so we insist they are the same, race relations and natural disasters -- impossible to control, hard to blame, something that's always been there and that we are helpless to change.
And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of "race," imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgement of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed.
But people are not earthquakes, though we can be disasters. We can wreak havoc. But we also have free will.
People have the capacity to plan for the future and to reflect on the past and to change the present.
In my lifetime, I've watched the majority of American attitudes on LGBT people make, if not a 180, then at least a 120.
Frankly, I'm shocked. Shocked that it happened so fast and shocked that the black/white chasm has yawned in that time, or at least it has yawned more publicly.
I asked myself how the LGBT shift happened. In my summation, it happened through art, literature, movies and television. Storylines emerged on TV shows and in movies. People I knew came out. Commercials showed same-sex couples. YA novels featured LGBT romances and relationships.
We are not at a loss for black art, literature, television and movies.
Why is this so hard for white America?
The Dream.
To move on, we have to be prepared to see the matrix, to wake up, to stop looking the other way.
To shed light.
To not worry what our employers will think if they read our blogs.
To realize that handy identifying characteristic our white ancestors used to dominate others holds no place in modern society. Seeing black skin as anything but black skin kicks back to a dead time, a time we must acknowledge existed and consciously move to work past. We must look slavery in its face and spit.
We must promise to move forward and do no more harm.
We must interrupt the signal consciously, and it must be a constant and conscious override or The Dream will continue to inflict pain on all of us.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an atheist and would not want to be blessed, so I'll call this a salute. His gift for organizing thoughts and studies and history into a slim book so easy to understand should not be underestimated. He could've used that gift to tell any story, but he used it to tell the story of us.
How will we act on it?
Last year, I had the honor of picking up the BlogHer Voices of the Year mantle from my predecessors late in the season. I remember standing backstage and holding my breath as each person read, feeling their excitement and nerves bubbling as they rushed breathlessly on and off, some breaking into tears as they stepped backstage into a line of hugs from a group of recently former strangers.
This year, I went through the entire process soup to nuts. Voices of the Year is so multi-dimensional with so many moving pieces, but it's still magical.
It's magical.
This year was my tenth BlogHer conference and my sixth as a full-time BlogHer (now SheKnows Media) employee. This year we rolled out the video production talent of my colleague Melissa Haggerty and her team. This year we captured not only performance of the written word, but also the many other ways we're expressing ourselves, from Liv's dual-faced make-up GIF of the face of suicide to Samantha's shocking and heartfelt Twinsters video to Feminista's #NMOS14 social impact, as well as the show-stopping readings we expect from VOTY.
The day and night went by in a blur of image checks and confirmations, and afterward I cried for a minute in the restroom because I have so much respect for, well, the office of VOTY that I'd been terrified I would somehow screw it up.
One of the things we learned this year from #BlogHer15 is to own your body of work. I am adding this year's VOTY production to my body of work with a large measure of satisfaction and so much respect for Elisa, Melissa, Jamie, Joy, Lori and all of my other partners in awesome. Thanks for sharing this with me. And congratulations to our 84 2015 Voices of the Year: http://m.blogher.com/introducing-work-2015-voices-year-featured-honorees
(from my phone and my heart)
I'm traveling this week to #BlogHer15 in New York City. Packing always reminds me of the combined apprehension and freedom I feel taking off on my own. Knowing there will be no one to watch your bags while you use the facilities changes your suitcase strategy.
When I was a senior in high school, I'd sometimes drive the four hours from my hometown to The University of Iowa to visit friends. The closer I got to exit 242, the more nervous I'd get. I'd be lying if I didn't admit on every solo trip I've ever taken, starting then, there's a moment I consider chucking it all and turning around.
After college at Iowa, I moved to Chicago to sublease a room from a friend in an apartment I'd never seen. I thought the slowdown in traffic coming into Chicago proper was caused by an accident. I'd only previously driven into the suburbs by myself when I moved there.
I developed a taste for airplanes after embarking on a series of solo weeklong business trips for my Chicago PR agency job to exciting locales like Cincinnati and Duluth. I starting visiting friends everywhere I could and spent all my money on United Airlines, hoarding the ticket stubs as proof to myself of my ability to deliver on promises I made. Yes, I said. I'll come visit.
The scariest of these trips took me from Omaha to Chicago to LA to Sydney in one heady, 24-hour journey. There was a monitor on the plane that showed the plane relative to land. It was comforting until we passed Hawaii and I learned how big the Pacific Ocean is.
On the day after I returned from Australia, I boarded a plane alone to head to Florida to train for my new job in Kansas City. Jetlagged, I passed out on my backpack in the airport. My new co-workers found me at our agreed-upon meeting spot. Hi! I'm Rita!
I almost missed a flight doing that on one of the legs of my SLEEP IS FOR THE WEEK book tour. I visited most of the cities by myself, hooking up with my contributors at some point. In New York I Pricelined a room in what I thought was a convenient hotel off the east Brooklyn subway. When a cabbie refused to drive me back from a trip to meet a friend at MoMA, I realized once again how naive I am even after wandering so many cities alone. That same trip I also discovered gypsy cabs and had to talk myself down the whole way from my sketchy hotel to the signing while trying to ignore the driver's lack of credentials. In the end, I made him promise to drive me back, remembering the Manhattan cabbie. That night I slept in my ground-floor room with a chair in front of the door.
It was fine.
The most annoying travel hang up happened the night before the little angel's fourth birthday party. My Friday night flight out of Boston for a business trip got cancelled, and I rerouted through St. Louis, certain I could make it. Standing outside waiting for the rental car shuttle at 3 am, I reconsidered my plan and slept four hours at the cheapest airport hotel I could find before speeding four hours home.
I still missed the party. Sometimes my emotions override my reason, especially while traveling.
Now in my forties I understand the world a little better and my iPhone means I no longer carry a compass on my keychain or beg strangers for directions. Still, preparing to get myself halfway across the country on my own brings back that mix of nerves and adrenaline.
What adventures will I have this time?
My daughter is in between needing daycare and being able to get a job during the summer, and we are sort of flummoxed about it. She has alternated between staying with me as I work and attending a parks & rec summer camp that is unfulfilling but what we can afford. We can't afford a nanny. She doesn't need a babysitter.
She's at the age that I remember loving summer the most, when the little kid stuff -- like swingsets and trampolines and splash parks -- is still fun and nostalgic but she doesn't need me hovering around her to enjoy it. She's at the age of flashlight tag and being able to light fireworks and riding your bike to the pool and walking down to the creek to look for frogs alone.
This summer we've patched together help from my parents (bless them), the parks & rec camp, a week of horse camp and a parent or two working from home, but I need a real solution for next summer, the summer of twelve, and the summers afterward until she can get a job. I don't even know how old you have to be to get a job here. I think I had to be sixteen in Iowa, though there was that one sketchy restaurant in town that hired fourteen-year-olds.
What do you do with a summertime middle-schooler? Is camp really the only answer? She's not interested in the parks & rec, she doesn't play sports, and the really cool camps are either too far away to commute to and still get to work on time or cost way more than we can afford to pay.
I'm frustrated. Finding childcare has been really the only part of parenting that I loathe. My daughter is wonderful. I don't want her to dread summer because she hates where she has to spend her days while my husband and I work, but staying home all summer isn't really an option. Why is this so hard?