Families

The gradual shifting of who my family is has been completing for years now. I've left my childhood home and married my husband. We have our kids and we've moved away.

Now we head our own household. The bonds that tethered us to our parents and siblings were still strong in the beginnings of the founding of our new family. We wanted to rely on whom we've always had for decades out of habit and familiarity.

Negotiating new relationships and traditions seemed to a bother and a hassle for little return. Yet we slowly found reward in our perseverance.

I think now we're finding our own rhythms and pulses in our lives. I wonder how our children will reflect back on this time.

When Will I Feel I'm Home

I'm an alien in a strange land. This is not where I belong. I'm on a journey to my home; every day I make a step closer to that rest, that promise.

My extended family on my mother's side has been here for seven or so generations. Yet I don't feel this country is truly our home. If I saw on the news that a bill had been passed and that our family had to pack up and go because of whatever loophole the government or whoever made up, I wouldn't be surprised.

I bet we'd go, too. And without a fight. This doesn't feel like our home. We're tolerated here. Allowed. Not welcomed, not accepted. How can this be our home? When can we go home?

New Adventure

I've been wrestling with something lately (well, something new), and I think I've been worn down enough to accept what I need to do.

The only problem is this seems like a lead thing, rather than a follow thing. I don't do so good with leading. No one wants to follow me, for one. And I actually want this cause to be furthered, for two. I don't think I'd make much progress by myself. And the thing is I think I'll be by myself for much of this. That's a big part of why this is a problem I feel I've been led to tackle.

I'm so scared. Mostly that nothing will come of this, and I'll know that nothing can be done about the problem even though there are solutions. Easy ones.

An adventure...and a long road ahead.

Double Standards

I think about things a little differently than most. I used to believe that my perspective was common, but when I spout off my ideas, the people around me look at me as if I'm a one of those homeless people who are slowly leaking crazy all over the floor, and why won't they quit babbling?

When it comes to ideas about women's rights and feminism, I'm ambivalent. That's a weird thing coming from a woman, I know, but hear me out. Top tier for me are human rights. Is this woman being treated fairly and rightfully as a human being? Are there some human beings receiving rights and benefits that she is not? Why?

I don't care that the answer is because she is a woman. I only care that she is treated fairly. How she is treated should have nothing to do with her gender (or sex--but that's a whole 'nother can of bananas). Yet some people make women's rights not about equaling up the playing field, but about women getting what they deserve.

It ends up with this weird mixture of regression and spite. For example, people behaving as if women should be the ones deciding if what's happening to them is fair or not. However, how is that different from our current system in which mostly men (of a certain demographic) decide the rightness of a situation?

I despise double standards. When the implications of a societal norm are not thought out, it leaves everyone hurt. Take, for instance, the issue of physical threats. We're in a bar. It's night and the place is crowded and boisterous. A man laughs loudly with his friends, making large gestures with his arms as he tells a grand story. He steps back in his reenactment and bumps into a woman behind him and spills her drink onto her blouse. "Sorry," he says. In response, the woman dashes the contents of her glass in the man's face. The man shoves the woman lightly.

In most cases, the man will be bounced or have the cops called on him. What happens to the woman? Oh well, you see...physical disparities. Well, let's change the woman to a scrawny twenty-one year old dude. What happens in this scenario? Why is it different? Oh, still a strength discrepancy? Let's make the man who spills the drink a linebacker. Well, the young guy should know better than to throw a drink in man's face when he has no chance of defending himself.

And a woman shouldn't? But, someone will think, the man shouldn't be resorting to physical violence at all. And the woman should? Throwing her drink in his face is an assault, no doubt about it. Oh, it burns me. I've read too many stories in which a man is maimed by some woman and she isn't even called out on it, let alone punished. I seem to be the only reader who is disturbed. This is an ideal situation? Why is this acceptable?

Why are rights treated as if they were non-replenishable and scarce resources? Giving women more rights doesn't mean they have to be taken away from men. Just because some men oppress doesn't mean that they are all inferior.

It will take a lot of relearning on all sides for gender relationships to become truly equalized. If no one is superior to the other, then no one should be treated as superior. That's a roundabout statement and not an obvious one at that. We women can sometimes demand contrary things. We won't our dinners paid for and our doors held open, but we don't want to pay for a man's dinner or open his door. No, we'd rather just pay for our own meals and open our own doors if everyone's going to get touchy about it. Remember this anniversary, we demand. Yet the things that are important to the guy we deem unimportant and fail to remember.

This culture of treating men as if they were expendable oafs is toxic. No one will win this war.

Chicken & Watermelon

My husband told me something extraordinarily funny: he won't eat watermelon in public. He thinks that  doing so would perpetuate a stereotype. He likes watermelon as well as any other fruit, but that particular one has too much negative meaning.

"Yeah, and then I'll bury my face in a wedge and spit out the seeds like a machine gun." He'd then demonstrate the seed spitting--side to side in an ignorant way. It was a messy eating of a person who doesn't know much. What would always make me laugh was how vehement he would look while doing it. "I's sho duz like me some waddermelons!" he'd say, pumping a fist to the side. Sometimes he'd add an irrelevant "Massah!" for effect.

There's sadness mixed in his portrayal. He can't be who he really is. If he reaches for watermelon, there's all of this judgment and contempt attached to it. It becomes a spectacle. Even if no one else around him would think that and he knew that, he'd know that image was in the collective mind. He wouldn't even eat any at a church friend's home because he said he can't in front of white people. His main problem was that it was still on the rind. It being cubed and in a bowl would have let him keep some dignity, I guess.

The simple act of showing like for a certain piece of food becomes a dilemma. I remember from my high school days an incident that occurred during our lunch. They had cooked too much fried chicken (they usually ran out of food) and since they didn't want to throw it out, they offered more portions to the students. Well, the principal came to the "black tables" first. I don't remember any of us accepting the offer, although some white kids did. We never mentioned what had happened among ourselves either. Why talk about the mundane?

Racism isn't the problem here. It helped to cement those stereotypes we can't quite run from, but that's not what I'm feeling now. It doesn't seem as if we can ever escape the past; we wear it on our backs like dowager humps.

There's all kinds of things that I don't dare do or say around those who aren't my closest friends (some of my closest friends are different ethnicities) because I don't want to be laughed at. I don't want to put an image in someone's head who doesn't know better that they will carry around with them and spread. It's beyond making a fool of me; I'm worried about making a fool of us. I think that's a little of what my husband faces when someone sets a plate of watermelon or fried chicken in front of him.

Just Stop

Please. Just stop.

I don't want to talk about "the election." Stop making this so miserable for me. I do not care who won or how he will ruin this country. I don't care.

You're telling me way too much about yourself. You're telling me what you really think of me, of my family. That isn't a good thing. It hurts my heart and frightens me.

We throw such hate at each other, scooped up from inside of us (don't worry; your supply won't be depleted). You fling it while telling me to get over it. It's just an opinion.

Your opinion stinks. I can't get it out of my clothes and my hair. I'm unallowed by tradition to state mine; this is what you get to dictate. I'd like to change those rules and you hate that. I don't need to know this. I'm trying to be your friend.

So please stop.

A Rose by Any Other Name: The Problem with 'African-American'

How do you know in any given place who are the marginalized, the oppressed, or the minority? Look for the groups who change titles every five to ten years or call themselves something different than what outsiders call them. What does that have to do with anything? The ones in power decide what the ones without power are named.

And that does not even need to be directly. A marginalized or stigmatized group will eventually have its name associated with the negative things people think of that group. It's gonna happen. They're marginalized. No power means that people won't know very much about them. They won't be seen as individuals because they are segregated to their own communities, e.g. mental hospital (In this case, even where they live has a name change). The majority does not have any contact with these people unless one or more of them does something newsworthy, and that usually means something negative. A black man is arrested for drug possession. A special ed child soils himself in class. A mentally ill woman harms someone else. So that's how the entire group is labeled. Addicts. Stupid. Violent.

The Race Card

My husband and I watched The Express over the weekend. It was an okay movie, even though it was a little distant, a little too pat and churned out. I hadn't wanted to see it because it seemed like one of those "racism" movies that have no purpose other than to make me feel angry and depressed. But, like I said, it was an okay movie.

The point of this pointless review is a line from the coach at the end of the movie. He said something about making touchdowns whether in Boston or Mississippi. What was odd to me about his line was that he named a yankee city and a southern state. Yeah, Mississippi is so homogeneously racist that you don't have to name any individual towns or cities because they are all equally bad. Moreover, people in northern states neither are racist nor experience racism.