Christmas Wishes and Presents for My Father

This Christmas my siblings and I are getting together for the first time in over a year, but not to celebrate the season like past years. This year, we're moving our dad into a home. Technically, he's been in a facility in his little home town in the Midwest for a few months, but once we were able to shift our focus away from him and his health we started noticing the decline that our mother had been hiding behind her role as caregiver. So, for her sake as well as Dad's my sister has graciously arranged for a home for Dad in her city, and a place for Mom in her home, until she can't meet Mom's needs anymore. 

It's a really strange time for us all, particularly because the three of us siblings have never had a good relationship with our father. I remember when my wife still hadn't met my folks after we got engaged, and she thought maybe they were super racist or that there was some other dark reason why I hadn't formally introduced them. It really wasn't that at all. I told her it was because they were older and lived so far away, but that wasn't entirely true. The uncomplicated truth was that I was embarrassed, especially of my father. And it wasn't that I was embarrassed that he would say something racist, even though micro-aggressions were not off the table. No, I was just embarrassed of ... him. It felt stupid at the time, like some teenage angst that I really should have gotten over already, but I've learned that two seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time: that my embarrassment can be perfectly legitimate, and that I shouldn't allow it to hold me back from being honest. Basically, my father was a genius at bad decisions. It's like whatever situation he found himself in, he discovered inventive and previously unfathomed ways of choosing the worst possible route out of it.

Honestly, everything I learned from my dad, about manhood, about parenting, about life, I learned through negative example. In the days leading up to this trip, my brother and sister and I have been talking more frankly about our upbringing and how we learned, and unlearned, some bad habits and negative ways of being.

So, this is the best I can do to share the wisdom I've gained from my father, the top three lessons I learned in reverse.

Lesson One: Take care of yourself, or else someone else will have to.

Some people think I'm obsessed with the gym and eating right. Mostly my wife. Pretty much mainly my wife thinks that. But the thing is, I watched my dad retire before he even turned sixty-five and then just ... quit. He had saved enough to get by for the rest of his life, he thought, in his tiny home town where houses, even today, cost less than $60,000 for three bedrooms. After that, he maintained some rental properties for a while, did odd jobs for a few years, and then just kind of settled. He decided that he was retired and he didn't have to do anything he didn't want to. That included anything difficult like exercise or reading books. He's ninety-one now, so nobody expects him to be in peak shape, but, really, he's been more or less like this, lethargic, forgetful, uninterested, and inactive, for as long as I can remember. And for everything that he gave up doing for himself, someone else - my mother, my sister, the community - picked up the slack and did for him. I might be a gym rat, and I might be obsessed with reading books and playing games and taking classes, but one thing I'm not doing is giving up and decaying. At some point, I'm sure I'll need help. We all do at some point, with all our different abilities and disabilities. But what I'm not doing is treating life like some cosmic trust fall test to see if my loved ones will catch me when I let go.

Lesson Two: Put family first.

This has been a hard one to balance, because I've also swerved too hard in the opposite direction by failing to set boundaries and read people who don't have the best intentions. Still, I can look back over my childhood at so many times where my father put himself ahead of the family. I don't know if was just his personality or part of some macho biblical manhood thing, but it was as if our well-being never counted for much. We never knew when he was going to make some crazy decision and change our lives overnight. And when he wasn't putting himself first, he was putting strangers first. I can remember so many times when he would go out of his way to help some stranger or community member and completely wreck our home in the process. From the outside, I'd bet people thought he was so generous, but from the inside, it was just chaos. I've had to work so hard to be the kind of husband and father who's present and available and contributing in the home, and not just present on the couch. At the same time, I have my own goals to pursue, so in some seasons it's like a tightrope walk, trying to balance on that thin line between being good to my wife and kids and being good to myself. One thing I can say, it's made me great at tracking time, because I've learned that every minute I spend on myself or my work is a minute that I could devote to my family.

Lesson Three: Let go of things more easily.

As we're cleaning out our parents' house, and by "we" I mean mainly my sister and her husband, since they're actually doing most of the work, we're finding so much junk. For instance, there were about twelve hundred vinyl records in the house, stacks and stacks of them. I remember my dad having records when we were growing up, some Perry Como and Dean Martin, and a whole bunch of cowboy songs. Once, when Dad was out, which was pretty frequent, I even tried using the old wooden record player in the living room to scratch like Jam Master Jay. It wasn't very effective. I'm not sure if the failure was caused by the ancient technology or my lack of skill or the fact that I was using a Bing Crosby record, but it killed my burgeoning DJ career. Obviously, my dad had very specific musical tastes, so imagine my surprise when my sister says that his collection included not only Stevie Nicks (I can sort of see it), Whitney Houston (shocker, but ok), and KISS (which I was never into, but was clearly told was satanic). I don't know if he bought these records thinking they would be worth thousands one day (perhaps a peek into my dad's decision-making) or if he just didn't know what he was buying. What I do know is that all those records sold to a vintage music store for exactly $56.30, while the bins used to carry them out of the house cost about $150. The kicker? These records and other items were the prized possessions that he couldn't possibly leave behind when we tried to get my parents to move back down near us so they could spend more of their declining years with their grandkids. I don't want to have any books, cars, game systems, clothes, or any other possessions that either prevent me from loving my kids and grandkids or become a burden to them when I do finally leave them behind.

Since it's the season of wishes, I wish I could say I had some pearls of wisdom from my dad. I wish I had stories to tell my kids and grandkids about his brave exploits and all the fun times we spent together, but the truth is, the more I find out about him, the more I realize I barely knew him when I was a kid. I wish I had a happier post for this Christmas, but this is what I'm doing with my break, and we're not sure that it won't be the last Christmas with dad. 

But one other thing I learned from my dad is that wishing for something doesn't do much. My Christmas present to my dad is helping, in whatever small way I can, to make sure that he's in the best place he needs to be. But my Christmas present, every Christmas, to my wife, kids, and grandkids is myself. It may not always be what they expect, but it's the best thing I have, and I'm working on making it better as much as I can.

Trolley Cars and Twitter Troubles

Most people know about the trolley car thought experiment that forces us to consider ethics in an almost impossible situation. If you haven't heard of it, the gist is that you're the operator on a trolley car with no brakes headed directly at five people stuck on the track somehow. If you leave the trolley alone, all five die, but you do have a brief opportunity to change the track to one where only one person is stuck and sure to die if you pull that lever. It's supposed to create conversations about the ethics of action versus inaction and how to think about what beliefs would make either choice the better one. I remember one of the greatest television shows, The Good Place, dramatizing the thought experiment by putting the characters on the actual trolley and plowing through human after human. The show is set in the afterlife, so no actual humans were harmed in the process, but the characters themselves were, justifiably, pretty shaken up by the experience. I think their reaction represents the part of the experiment nobody ever talks about, what comes after the decision. How do you go forward after making a no-win, better-of-two-evils decision? It's not like the imaginary trolley operator chose to be in that dilemma, so in some ways they're a victim as well.

Photo by Alexey Komissarov on Unsplash

But what would you think of the trolley operator who makes either decision and then celebrates it like a win? What does it say about their character if they jump off the trolley and dance around the decimated corpses of the people they ran over?

So, again, not sure if everybody knows, but there was a huge election recently. Afterwards, I'm hearing a lot of responses from a lot of people I know, in real life and in the fake life we call social media, and some in both. I know this election was a difficult election for all of us. Some people I know had real reservations about Harris, based on their priorities and moral beliefs, and not because of some information. Some people I know had major issues against Trump, again for very valid reasons. Some voted on the issue of abortion alone, on both sides, and that's their right. I'm not worried about any of them.

However, some of the people I know who voted for Trump, fellow Christians mostly, told me they couldn't stand the man, but they supported his policies. They told me they didn't like the way he talked about Mexicans and other Latinos, but that we really do need to do something about the border. They told me that they knew that he was no Christian, that he had no personal compunctions about abortion, and had changed his position on the issue at least three times, but that he was still the best candidate for that particular policy. Basically, they lamented to me how much they hated being forced into making what amounted to a better-of-two-evils decision, where either way, they had to choose a candidate that offended their sensibilities. 

Imagine my surprise and disappointment when they hopped right off that trolley as soon as it screeched to a stop, pointed in the faces of the people they had run over, and started doing the YMCA. Imagine my confusion and repulsion when some of those same people who told me before the election that they were "holding their noses" and voting for Trump, let go of those same noses and started typing things like "cope and seethe" and "liberal tears" along with all kinds of hateful, celebratory memes.

It's not that I didn't expect celebration. A win is a win, after all. It's not even that I didn't expect some ugliness and wickedness from some of team Trump, especially the "your body, my choice" faction. But for those people I know personally who told me that they were grieved about their decision and that they didn't support his attitude, his anger, his divisiveness, or his hateful speech, for those people to shed their ashes and sackcloth the morning after the election and start imitating his same attitude, anger, and speech - that's really got me praying for peace and forgiveness this week.

I'm also seeing a lot of anger on the Harris side, and a lot of disappointment and sadness and fear as well. I get it. I'm seeing people saying they're opting out of community with Trump voters, and don't come recruiting them for any more issues. I see people unfollowing and unfriending Trump voters en masse on their social media channels. Listen, through his example, Trump has given a lot of people permission to be their worst selves. Do what you have to do to have a good day, uninterrupted by the ugliness of others. I hear some of my people saying that God is still on his throne, and I'm absolutely sure of that, but that doesn't mean He doesn't let us do the stupidest things and then suffer the consequences of them.

For myself, I've unfollowed a few people myself, not because they voted for Trump, but because they either lied to me about their reasons for doing so and because their behavior after the election reveals that I may not have known them very well, and shouldn't have followed them to begin with. My comments section might have a little spice, but I made a decision a few years ago to keep it hate-free, and since then, while I hate to brag, I've earned a black belt in block fu.

I Voted! Now Leave Me Alone.

I voted today. In fact, I feel very blessed about it, because it was so easy, in some ways. No lines, more volunteers than voters, and every machine in perfect working order. I felt privileged, because I know it's not like that in every district. I remember living in North Miami, where the poll workers were always great, but the machines and polling places were fewer and the lines sometimes lasted an hour or more.

My people, please understand, I won't even wait in line for Space Mountain if the number above the entrance exceeds sixty minutes, and I love Space Mountain. Hope that adds some needed context, in case any part of this rant has people thinking I don't care about voting.

My point is that I want this all to be over with. I don't want to see the tribalism any more, the twisting of figures and coloring of facts, all to prop up a beloved candidate that is clearly flawed. Just vote for who you like, who you think is best, and be honest about it. I don't remember ever feeling this much exhaustion and hopelessness over elections as I have over the last eight years, and, despite my youthful demeanor, I've been voting for a long time.

I've been voting in presidential elections since 1992, and, for those of us who remember, that was a wild year to be a first-time voter. If you had just started paying attention to national politics, as I had, you would have thought that it was perfectly normal for Yosemite Sam to jump on stage at debates and start shouting at the candidates. 

I distinctly remember the 2000 elections, and I don't remember it being as terrifying as people try to make it seem when they compare that outcome to January 6, 2021. Exciting? Absolutely. It was a nail-biter, wondering if that count would ever be verified, learning all about the possible orientations of chads, and also what a chad is, exactly. But at no time did I get the sense that the fate of the democracy teetered on the edge of the cliff, the way some people talk about it. They counted, recounted, recounted the recount, went to court, and then Gore conceded and we all got on with our lives, for better or for worse. 

I'm even old enough to remember John McCain, God rest him, actually defending his opponent, Barak Obama, from accusations of being a Muslim or a terrorist or whatever. That seems like a dream now, the leader of the Republican party saying positive things, and, more importantly, true things, about the Democratic candidate. It was such a different time.

I guess that's why I've always been an independent. These days, I'd say I'm even the independest of the independents, because I'm just so joining-averse that the more either side tries to force me to label myself, the more I resist signing up for either. The way I grew up voting, there was debates to watch, platforms to consider, characters to weigh, and then you made your choice. A lot of people voted straight party tickets, and I remember the church having a clear bias for conservatives and Republicans, but I don't remember being told that it was a requisite for salvation or that voting for a Democrat was a disqualifier for the kingdom.

I don't remember people talking about civil war either, unless it was in history class.

And this is what has me so exhausted. I love to hear political debate, I just hate hearing lies and attacks, especially against people I know and love. I was born and raised in South Florida, and, to me, it's a culture that I've never seen replicated anywhere else. I often say I'll never move away from here, because where else can my family go where we'll feel as safe and understood? Where else will our mix of ethnicities and languages and experiences be not only tolerated, but celebrated and loved? What kills me about the last decade of politics is what it's done to that space. I love the streets I grew up on, but it's as if the edges of our world have tightened, as if the circle of protection around us has shrunk, until it starts to feel constricting, as if one day we'll have to stand on tiptoes to stay inside the one place that feels like home.

I've been looking forward to voting for months now, partly because I really do take pride in my part in the system, but also because I've wanted this to be over for so long. And yet, even though election day is just a week away, even though in a few days all the debating will be over and only the counting should matter, I'm concerned that it won't be over, that it will flare up and boil over even more. There have been so many accusations and lies, and so many people to believe them, no matter how ridiculous they sound, that there's bound to be some unrest, regardless of how the election goes.

So here's my plea. Argue, debate, vote, and then get back to your lives. That's what I plan to do. I'm not joining any party that doesn't do the Cha-Cha Slide or the Cupid Shuffle. I'm not wearing any of your hats, I'm not buying any of your merch, and I'm not waving any of your flags, so keep me and mine out of your squabbles. I just want to nurture my family, write my stories, and love my neighbor and community with the love of Christ. If that means I have to shout sometimes about something important, about some injustice I see around me, then I'm going to do that, but I could not care less about your clubs, cliques, and cults. If you see me wearing any shirt with somebody's face on it, with red or blue coloring, with some kind of slogan or whatever, then be certain, on my mama, on my hood, it's only going to be Spider-Man.

N'ap Boule

What's happening?

My heart is so heavy in the last week. I may be biased, but there's been such a hopeful energy in this election term recently, despite the fact that I'm very independent and sort of politically homeless in a two-party system, despite the fact that there's been so much more divisive rhetoric on (one of) my formerly favorite social apps, despite all the bad things happening around the country, and despite the fact that it's somehow still a very close race. 

Watching the debate, I shook my head and smirked when Trump talked about the dogs and cats and pets, just like Kamala did, because he says wild stuff like that all the time. I was cheering for the moderators when they fact-checked him on it, although I wish that Harris had done more to set it straight as well.

Then, the issue blew up. Talk about Haitians eating pets and geese, racist enough on its own, turned into talk about voodoo and crime and savagery. And all this from people who claim to be Christians. Outrageous lies and the most specious stories got elevated to the level of a presidential debate, and while some on the right have either qualified the claims or outright apologized and condemned them, most have gone out of their way to perpetuate these vicious attacks. 

I grew up in the 80s in North Miami, when the neighborhood was changing. Caribbeans of all sorts were moving in, and other families were moving out. On our block, close to 135th Street, a kind of cultural thoroughfare in the city (you had to be there), the school buses started picking up a lot more kids from Jamaica and Haiti and other islands, until I was one of the few white kids on the bus to North Miami Senior High. There were two old white ladies on the same side of the street with us, who'd lived there for almost thirty years and both buried husbands in that neighborhood. When they died and their kids sold their houses. Two new Haitian families moved in, and there were a few more kids on the block to ride with on weekdays and run with on Saturdays. 

I don't know why my parents didn't move out when other families did. I don't know if it was financial or political or just stubborn. It could have been a mix of both, or it could have been that they didn't care. We never talked about it. All I knew was that there were a lot of kids with hyphenated last names like Jean-Baptiste and Jean-Pierre, and Saint-Fleur at my school. And I got an education that, apparently, a lot of people outside of our neighborhood. It was a time when these same slurs about voodoo and foods were rampant.

Now, in retrospect, I know that a lot of that was just regular racism, coupled with that "wet foot, dry foot" campaign to let more white Cubans into the country, while turning away Black Haitians by the droves, even though both groups were, ostensibly, leaving the same types of poverty and political violence. At the time, all I knew was that people were saying nasty things, things I didn't understand, about people who were so tidy they insisted I take my shoes off in their house, even when the parents weren't home because they either ran a business, had two jobs, or worked and went to college at the same time.  All I knew was that they were so Christian that they could rarely come out to the park to play ball after school, because they were in church four times a week, for a couple of hours each time. My own parents had no such rules about keeping their floors clean, and we thought we were super-religious because we went to church on Sunday morning AND Wednesday night. All I knew was that the people saying all these nasty things couldn't possibly know my friends, zanmi mwen yo.

Obviously, another part of my education was learning a little Kreyol, partly because I needed it to order food from the trucks and the corner store, partly because we used it to call plays when I played basketball (poorly) on the Optimist team in Pepper Park, and partly because some of those Haitian girls at school were beautiful. What I lacked in looks, I tried to make up in charm and guile by speaking a little Kreyol. It was not very effective. 

There's a word in Kreyol that a lot of Haitians use to refer to their countrymen - zoe. The word itself means "bone," but in this context, it means a lot more, depending on who you ask. When you're a zoe, you're hard as bone, tough to break, but able to heal from the worst destruction. Or it can mean something like "bone of my bone," brethren, the same through and through. Either way, it's a word I'm using in all my prayers for my Haitian friends these days, past, present, and future. I pray that you remain strong as bone, hard to break and hard-hitting as well.

Romance without Finance, and Other Pressures on Marriage

This Labor Day weekend, I had my oldest daughter watch all of my younger kids, as well as her kids, in my house so my wife and I could get away for the weekend. We spent three night at a Disney resort, savored the Epcot Food and Wine Festival, and enjoyed the comforts of expensive resort restaurants and extravagant resort king size beds. It was glorious. Three nights with no responsibilities except what we owe each other, three mornings with no reasons to get up early and no interlopers sneaking into our bed, and three dinners with grown-up food and nobody making a mess. Except for that one time, but that bread was really buttery and my wife gets tipsy with even one drink.

Photo by John McArthur on Unsplash

The trip probably boosted the bonds of our marriage more in three days than three months of therapy could. Just the freedom to focus on each other as grownups, as partners and lovers, and still know that our kids were safe and entertained by their big sister. For any marriage, in any state, at any time, I recommend a weekend getaway for rejuvenating the spirit of the relationship.

But it costs money.

Luckily, we're at a place where money is no longer the stressor that it used to be. We both have good incomes and we keep expenses low, just so we can do these types of things when we want to. But I remember when things were different. I remember times in our marriage when the little kids were even littler, babies that had round the clock needs, and no trusted adults close enough to even babysit for date night, let alone overnight trips out of town. That feeling of pressure, like the scene in Temple of Doom when the spiked walls are closing in on Indy and Short Round and vicious bugs are underfoot everywhere, was sometimes an accurate description of the way the house felt. No escaping the responsibilities of parenthood, no time to focus on each other, no conversation except about bills that needed to pay, or hadn't been paid, or what sacrifices we'd have to make this month to pay them. Every day was like the day before, waking up to financial and personal stresses in the morning and begging for sleep at night to escape them for a few hours.

Poor people don't go on marriage retreats. They just work more and harder to keep all the plates spinning, find joy in each other in the fleeting moments when they all spin flat and fast, and try not to curse each other when one falls and breaks. They might want to take vacations, family vacations to delight the kids and bond the entire family together, or couples vacations to keep the fires of love and romance burning, anything to escape the pressures of suburban struggle and poverty.

But it costs money.

Compared to the way I grew up, even the hardest, most financially delicate times in my marriage have been like a glow up. I don't remember any actual family vacations growing up, except maybe to visit grandma or other family. Even those were days-long road trips fraught with fights about fast food orders and vehicle breakdowns in the worst, most remote places in the country. There may have been some bonding once we got to grandma's house, for sure, but it came at the cost of a nearly perilous journey, with the dread of a return trip hanging over our heads the entire time. I remember one cross-country trip when the Volkswagen van broke down and, instead of fixing it, our dad had the brilliant idea of push starting it the rest of the way. Brilliant idea, I know, except that Mom had no idea how to pop a clutch, so she and I had to push that van up to fifteen miles an hour so Dad could start it, and then run alongside to catch up.

After. Every. Single. Stop.

Maybe this is why I put so much effort and emphasis into vacations for my family today, and why I'm so glad to finally be in a position where I can take short retreats with my bride. It gives me so much joy to see everybody - wife, kids, and grandkids - all loving each other and exploring new places and activities. It renews my faith in my marriage to spend that kind of alone time with my wife - without responsibilities to make us nag at each other or distractions to make us neglect each other.

But it costs money.

While we were away, I was already planning the next trip, reading articles about travel tips and ways to save money and still vacation like rich people. One thread I came across on Twitter talked about a father hiring a nanny for the kids while on vacation, and what a game-changer it was to be able to break off from the kids at any time and trust them to professional care, to be able to switch modes from parents to lovers at any time on the vacation. He made it sound so good. Still, I couldn't get my mind off of two considerations. First, when am I ever going to have enough money to pay for five days of round-the-clock professional child care, even at the lowest rates going? And second, when does the nanny go on vacation? What happens to her marriage while she's babysitting my kids in some luxury resort so I can spend too much money on some surf and turf? What do her kids do for fun while she's on vacation with me? 

I'm just grateful that our crazy, mixed and blended family provides us with the support system to spend some time away. We can keep the grandkids for days while my daughter takes a break, albeit a single mom hustle style break, or catches up on school work or cleaning. My daughter can give us a regular date night, something we haven't been able to do for years since we married, because hiring a babysitter means spending at least $50 on a romantic evening even before you walk out the door, not to mention the pressure of getting home on time because the babysitter can't just sleep over like my daughter can. I almost want to say that I don't know how poor people do it, how they navigate the pressures of marriage, but the truth is that I do know, because I've been there. They fight. They get fed up with poverty and take their stresses out on each other. They grow further and further apart with fewer and fewer opportunities for bonding. And sometimes they divorce.

And ironically, that, too, costs money.

Top 5 Tips for New Mixed Couples

Recently, a close friend asked if my wife and I would be interested in having dinner with some friends of his, a young interracial couple looking to get married. Of course, I agreed, after I confirmed that free food was involved - I am, after all both a teacher and a struggling writer. But then the more I thought about it, I really had to ask myself what I would say to them, what kind of advice I would give. I'm not some marriage expert. I've read dozens of books about good marriages, but mostly because I'm always feeling like I'm not doing it right. And as for interracial marriage, I might write about it and talk about it a lot, and think about it even more, but I still have a lot more questions than answers. So, since I committed to this face-to-face, I've been trying to come up with, if not definitive answers or professional counsel, at least some lessons I've learned, mostly the hard way. Here's the top five tips that came from blindsides, mistakes, and recoveries.

1) You really are marrying the whole family.

You can say all you want that it doesn't matter what your folks think, or your siblings or aunties or cousins or whoever, but the truth is that it does. You enter a marriage with a tribe, and the ideal outcome would be to ally or even combine those tribes in your love and union. But that doesn't always happen. If your people are against the marriage for honest and legitimate reasons - age and maturity differences, hints of violence or infidelity, disparate goals - then you should probably listen and keep those eyes open before you marry, because your tribe might be trying to protect you from some dangers that your love-spelled eyes can't see. But with a mixed couple, sometimes all those "reasons" are really just coded coverups for racism. It is entirely possible that if you've never had conversations about race with your folks, because your people don't "see color" or because they don't talk about such things, then the day you bring home a partner of another race is the day you find out a whole lot of new information about your mom or dad, or some other beloved members of the family. Then what? You get left with a choice between repeatedly placing your spouse's head in the guillotine at every family event or just cutting off your family entirely. Neither choice is desirable, but I've seen both happen, and it's just one more special burden on the mixed marriage.

On the other hand, someone else would tell you stories about how the mixed marriage changed their relative's view on marriage, especially when the children enter the picture. For sure, I've seen grandpa's dead set in their bigoted ways go from Archie Bunker to Tim Walz over the love of grandkids. This sounds like a dream, a Disney movie, a very special episode. You love to see it happen, but just consider, this kind of change is a slow process, and if you're depending on the kids to bring the older generation along, you have to know that some damage is going to be done to their psyche before grandpa and grandma make their heartwarming conversion in act three. I'm not saying that this is a dealbreaker for mixed couples, just something you need to be aware of before you commit to the journey.

2) It matters where you live.

My wife and I live in South Florida. We've lived in Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, and Hollywood, and everywhere we go, we're reasonable certain that we're going to be in an area that is culturally and ethnically diverse. In other words, mixed couples are a thing down here, so much so that it doesn't even cause a blip on most people's radar.

That said, we (and by we, I mean she) still encounter racism in different ways, but that's for another blog.

Our bubble is as safe as we could reasonably expect, because we have curated our lives to maximize our comfort and the safety of our kids. Still, we live in Florida, so whenever we travel a little too far north or south, we have become aware that the protection afforded us by our culture and geography only extends so far. In other parts of the state, and the country, we get the looks, sometimes even the thinly veiled comments, and other times, the poor service or treatment that we strongly sense has a racist underpinning. One thing to think about if you're a mixed couple approaching a life commitment is where you're going to live. How much racism are you willing to tolerate if you can avoid it by moving someplace else? There is the idea among some about sticking around and using your love and commitment to bring about change in the community. If that's your goal, then you're doing the Lord's work. Also, you're better than me, because I tend not to go where me and mine aren't wanted, so long as I can avoid it. There isn't a coffee shop in existence that will get my money in return for poor service and degradation. Not a city either, for that matter. 

3) But what about the kids?

The one question I always got when before I married, especially from all those well-meaning, but secretly racist relatives, was "But what about the children?" "They won't know what they are," they said, "Both sides will reject them," and other nonsense. For one, when someone tells you that if you have mixed kids, then "both sides will reject them," they actually just told you that they will reject your kids, and you should believe them. But the idea that mixed kids won't know who they are will only be true if you fail to teach them. They need to grow up in a home where it's understood that they are many things, that all those things are wonderful, and that they can slide in and out of the many facets of their identity without accepting the criticism that they are "turning Black."

It's true that society will see biracial kids as Black first, and sometimes Black only, but there are two reasons for that. First, because American society has been steeped in a "one-drop"rule that very few want to talk about. But second, for better or for worse, African Americans have a far stronger understanding of their culture and place in society, because they had to, just to survive. Unfortunately, many white Americans have allowed their cultural heritage to be subsumed in whiteness because of the privilege it afforded and because American society has such an us/them mindset. Now may be the time to get back in touch with your Irish, Italian, English, Slavic or whatever roots. The kids will be fine if they understand who they are, and that understanding and confidence will flow from their parents' attitude and teaching.

4) Ask questions.

Sometimes I hear about interracial couples who say the secret to their getting along is that they "don't see race," or "it just never comes up." If it's working for them, then mazel, but it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up whenever I hear it. It always sounds to me like a house in which the problems of one or both lovers are unspeakable, and that doesn't sit right to me. Maybe they don't talk about those things because they're painful, and there's still a little reservation about sharing that with someone of another race, even a lover. Maybe they don't talk about it because they don't know how, how to bring it up, how to keep it, relatively, impersonal. But maybe they don't talk about it because one party just doesn't want to hear it. Doesn't want to hear that the community they love doesn't love their partner in the same way. Doesn't want to hear that some things are more difficult for their wife or husband, specifically because of racism.

Doesn't want to hear that they need to have a serious talk with their mama about racism.

Part of the joy, the beauty, the delight of interracial marriage is late night conversations about race. Propping your head up in the darkness and asking the soul-baring questions like, "Why do white people do that?" and "Why is it so doggone expensive to get your hair done?" Just this week, I watched a TikTok reel (I do not accept your judgment) about a Black woman discussing how certain white women either refuse to believe that Black women can be beautiful or get very offended when Black women get attention for their beauty. The woman in the reel was talking about an experience on a European vacation, and with such insight into the psychology and culture of the matter that I was intrigued. I brought it up to my wife, who is not only beautiful but also far more well-traveled than I. My questions were, have you ever observed this dynamic, white women either surprised or offended that people find you beautiful, and is it true that women in Europe really dress up to go anywhere. The response was yes on both counts.

Just think - a conversation like that not only educates me about racial dynamics and gives me some context to apply to some of our future (maybe even past) interactions with people, but it also brings us closer as a couple. Just asking an intimate question like that allows me to step, carefully, into the most delicate rooms of my wife's house of memories. And racial questions are very intimate, which is why we're often so afraid to ask them. 

5) Protect each other.

At some point, when you get married, it really is just the two of you against the world. When your mother is running down your husband, you have to stand up for him - where he can see you do it. When your cousin is assaulting your wife with racist comments at Thanksgiving and repeating those talking points he heard on Fox News, you have to get involved, in front of everyone, and firmly, so that nobody gets up the nerve to do it ever again. My sisters, nothing will inspire your man to fidelity and affection more than seeing you take his side. My brothers, nothing will secure your woman's love and encouragement than watching you rush to her defense. For the men, especially, I'm not advocating violence,  but let's just say it may become necessary to use your strongest body language when Cousin Eddy passes his place with your beloved wife. There is no upside to protecting the peace or allowing Cousin Eddy to save face if it means you go home to a partner who no longer believes that you will protect and defend them.

This is so much more impactful when the issue is racism. Having had a couple of conversations with Black folks, I can say with confidence that the majority are very used to loving white "allies" only to be abandoned to their own defense at the first sign of tension or conflict. They are very accustomed to lots of talk about race behind closed doors, only to find out that their friend is more concerned about his family's dignity than theirs. It's always "But I don't think she meant it like that," or "Don't you think you're being too sensitive," or, worst of all, "Mom's just been having a stressful week, don't take any of that seriously." Conflict, especially family conflict, is intimidating, awkward, stressful, and downright scary, but so many good things can come from standing up for your partner in those moments. Your family will be far less likely to get out of pocket ever again. Your partner will trust you more than ever. And you will experience a little bit of what your partner goes through, and even take the burden of defending themselves off their shoulders for once. Conversely, look at it from the other side. If you couldn't depend on your partner to protect you in those types of conflicts, could you trust them to have your back at all? In any difficult situation?

This is a long one, I know, and if you got this far, I hope you got something worthwhile out of it. Like I said, I'm no expert, no counselor, and I'm sure I've made my own mistakes. That's also part of marriage, especially interracial marriage. The thing is, while it poses unique problems, it also offers unique opportunities for closeness and personal growth. I guess my suggestion to this couple would be to think about interracial marriage before doing it, and then commit to the interracial part just as much as the marriage part.

DEI: Where Do You Belong?

 There's been a lot of controversy over the NABJ interview of former president Trump on their convention stage. Most everyone agrees that the man showed his behind, starting the interview openly hostile and insulting to the three Black women on stage and failing to answer a single question, choosing instead to launch into racially charged rants and attacks on Harris's ethnicity, so his poor performance is not at issue. What's mostly debated is whether he should have been there in the first place. Some say that it was a unique opportunity for Black journalists to question him frankly and follow up aggressively in a way that we don't often see on network news. Certainly, the journalists involved did a spectacular job of that, and he exposed his incompetence and bigotry as a result. On the other hand, some say that the convention is supposed to be a protected space where Black journalists can discuss matters important to their in-group, without having to filter or water down their thoughts - without having to code-switch, in a way, which is another item to add to Team Trump's long list of TIL issues, right after "some people are mixed."

I can definitely see both sides, and I'm very comfortable with the idea that two opposing ideas can both have merit. The thing about the performance and the controversy that I love is that we're finally having a conversation that involves thinking about spaces where Trump might just not belong.

It feels like we've been talking about places where Kamala Harris belongs for months now, ever since the first inklings that she might someday run for president started tickling the Republican hive mind. Those discussions have ramped up to a frenzy since she's become the presumptive nominee, sort of tapping in to the fight like a WWE wrestler energizing the crowd. Republican legislators, and a few people I know personally, have called her a DEI hire, despite the fact that nobody hired her to most of the positions she's held throughout her career. The fact that she ran for them and got elected doesn't seem to enter the equation for them. 

Rep. Tim Burchett called her a DEI hire and insisted that "...when you go down that route, you take mediocrity." I heard the same thing from other Republicans, from a coworker, a family member, and others, unfortunately. In their minds, places of power, skill, and authority are just places where Black folks, and especially Black women, belong. Just like Charlie Kirk freaking out like that old Twilight Zone episode when he sees a Black pilot, they can't imagine that a person could be both Black and qualified, over-qualified even, so they assume mediocrity.

But let's think about it. Is it mediocre to complete a Juris Doctor degree at 25 and then get hired as a prosecutor in the district attorney's office at 26? And then get elected District Attorney in 2003 and again in 2007? She ran for and won the Attorney General office in the largest state in the country, and then got reelected for another term. Was that mediocre? Or was her senate run the mediocre one, the one where she won in a landslide? The truth is, none of these credentials matter to some people. They see her as Black (or newly turned Black, it's very confusing), and that's the only credential that counts to them.

If you think I'm wrong, then look at who they support over her. Trump started his path to presidency as a failed businessman, in my opinion. Now, that's debatable, I know, but hard to prove since he won't show his tax records like other candidates. Then, what? Reality TV star? Movie and commercial cameo? Then president? The president who presided over the Covid disaster? And I'm supposed to believe that his path is somehow distinguished with merit and hers is "mediocre"? Look, it's okay to debate her policies, her opinions, and her senate votes. That's what we do when we prepare to vote. You can dislike her stance on whatever your most pressing issues are, but you can't discount her achievement and experience ... unless, there's really only one qualification that counts. Unless you're willing to admit that only a white man can go from one failed business after another to reality TV personality to literally the highest office in the country, without having his credentials questioned or being called mediocre.

In addition, it wasn't lost on me that in the same NABJ interview, Trump fumbled a question about Sonya Massey. Right now, there are two Black women whose stories dominate my Twitter feed, and she's the other one. She was murdered in her home by a police officer, in a way that seemed almost premeditated to me, and the most Trump could say about it when questioned was "It didn't look good to me" and "I didn't like it." To give some context, this was right after he admitted that he didn't know much about it and right before he pivoted back to the talking point about police officers needing respect and dignity. In fact, his whole attitude concerning the discussion of Massey's murder was nonchalant, disaffected even. 

I have a theory.

People like him get very upset, enraged and offended even, at the idea of a Black woman in a position of power and authority, because, to them, that woman is a DEI hire, not worthy of that place by virtue of her race or ethnicity, despite what qualifications she might actually have. To them, she doesn't belong there. A Black woman victimized and murdered by police, however, doesn't raise an eyebrow, doesn't inspire a rant, because that is where they think she belongs. They will refuse to do any research or even listen to a long list of credentials for a Black Vice President, or even a Black pilot, immediately dismissing them as mediocre. But when a Black person, Sonya Massey in this case, is clearly the victim of not only civil rights violations but also murder, they're willing to scour the earth for any information that might let them believe that crouching on the floor of her kitchen is exactly where she belonged. 

Yes, And Kids

My eleven-year-old daughter is a drama queen, in the sense that she loves the stage, the dramatic arts, and she's very good at it. She can be a little shy in person, but she seems to embrace being in front of the crowd, which is something that amazes me, since I don't like being in front of large groups of people, or small groups of people. Any people, really. 

A few days ago, I caught her doing something with her little sister that I never noticed before. We were all in the living room, and the five-year-old begging for attention, as usual, trying to get someone to join in her play fantasies. She'd come up to her sister, saying, "Pretend you're a big, bad, wolf." Without hesitation, the older sister would respond with something like, "I'm a big, bad wolf, and I'm going to eat your feet off!" Then she'd chase after her giggling little sister and try to snack on her toes. Or maybe the little one would say, "Pretend you're the queen," and the older sister would respond, "I'm the queen, and I hereby banish you to the dungeon." But then the little one would say, "No, you're a good queen, not an evil queen." Immediately, the older sister would say, "Down to the dungeon, Princess, and release all of the prisoners in time for the royal birthday party!"

I loved the way she would join in her little sister's games so passionately, especially because it meant that, for a while, anyway, I didn't have to play. But the pattern is what struck me, and I realized that she was doing the same "Yes, And" techniques that she had learned in her drama classes. No matter what her little sister asked for, no matter how silly or impossible the game, she'd respond with immediate affirmation and even add to the game with some kind of twist of her own. 

Photo by Michèle Eckert on Unsplash

I got so impressed by the interaction that I started looking for it, and apparently, this is a thing between them, as well as the other littles, the grandkids. Granted, over time I also noticed that sometimes only the pattern stayed the same, even if the passion had gone out of the responses. Sometimes, big sister would sit on the couch, in the perfect preteen imitation of Ennui from Inside Out 2, and instead of joining in with excitement, she'd just say the words in that flat, bored tone, tinged with just a soupçon of sarcasm.

"Pretend you're a scary lion."

"Oh, no," without moving an inch or changing the inflection in her voice at all, "I'm a scary lion and I'm going to eat you."

She wouldn't move, but the effect was pretty much the same, with one exception. The little sister would run off giggling, but, this time, without anyone chasing her.

I loved the dynamic so much that I started doing it with the littles myself - responding to whatever game they wanted to play with "yes, and" energy. Sometimes, if I'm busy, I take another page out of my actress daughter's script and use the "and" to my own selfish ends.

"Daddy, pretend you're a supervillain."

"I'm Doctor Octopus, and I just need to type in the last lines of code to my evil computer so I can take over the city's water system and flood all the streets."

I'd been "yes, and-ing" for a couple of weeks when the time came for our planned summer vacation to Disney World. This was a unique trip - just me and my oldest daughter as the only adults, and all three of the littles, not one of them over five. Normally, I have everything planned down to the minute on these trips, meal reservations, ride itineraries, and firm showtime deadlines all set up in advance. This time, however, I decided to "yes, and" the whole trip. You want to keep riding and stop for food later? Absolutely, and the line for Dumbo is only ten minutes right now. You want chicken tenders and fries for the third day in a row? Of course, and I'm eating a salad in Magic Kingdom, because, why not? You want to leave the park at one in the afternoon, without even getting on Guardians of the Galaxy, because you're tired and "parked out"? 

Okay, this I take umbrage with, but, fine, I guess. Back to the hotel.

The thing is, even without doing every single thing that I wanted to do, the trip was one of the best I've been on. There was a marked decrease in arguments, because the littles were pretty much getting what they wanted, as much as I could safely make it happen. One five-year-old got onto the Avatar ride for the first time, while the other one got kicked off by the height police. She screamed through the entire thing - not happy screams, more like night-terror screams - but she tried it, and one good thing that came of it was that some other rides that would have scared her before, now felt to her like a slow crawl through "It's a Small World" by comparison. Conversely, the other five-year-old, Auntie Shorty, got on every ride with a fast track or a huge drop or splash, and loved all of them. She even wanted to get on Guardians, and this is after watching the ride video to see what she was getting into, but she didn't get the chance, due the the unpleasantness mentioned above.

I don't remember who came up with it, some really smart psychologist, probably, but there's a similar principle in parenting, and one I've also applied for years to teaching as well. The idea is that, as parents, we want to look for every opportunity to say "yes," every chance to be affirmative and encouraging, because the world forces us to say "no" so much of the time. There are things we cannot bend on. "No', you can't jump off the top bunk," and "No, you can't eat the half a candy bar you found on the seat on the rollercoaster." There are just some "No's" that have to be said, but a lot fewer than we think, and if we look for every opportunity to say not only "yes," but "yes, and," every opportunity to not only affirm our kids, but jump in with them, then our "No's" are a lot easier to take. 

Like I said, I've adapted this for the classroom as well, looking for every opportunity to say yes to a student. I had an epiphany many years ago, more than I'd like to count, where my technology failed or I was otherwise unable to proceed with a lesson, and I just got so frustrated and angry trying to keep a classroom full of sophomores absolutely silent that I couldn't even focus on fixing or circumventing the problem. It was one of those out-of-body experiences where you watch yourself doing something so stupid that you want to slap yourself, but, alas, you're disembodied. I didn't come across the "yes, and" principle of parenting until later, but I learned instead to just say, "This isn't working right. Talk amongst yourselves while I get this back online, and be ready to get started when I figure it out." It worked wonders. The kids talked, but they understood the assignment and kept it down, and I had prepared them for the moment when I would signal that we're getting back to work. It wasn't perfect, but life had intervened, and instead of fighting it, I "yes, and-ed." I felt the same way on this recent trip. We're on vacation for only five days, and it's supposed to be fun. Does every meal really have to have all four food groups properly represented, or can the kids eat what they want for once in their lives? Does each kid have to ride something they don't want to, just because someone else does, or can we take turns and let everyone do something they love, even if it means splitting up or waiting a little for someone else? Do we have to stay in the park from sun-up to sundown, just to "get our money's worth," even if the last four or five hours are, frankly, miserable, or can we just call it a day and take advantage of the pool, the arcade, the restaurant, and (thank God) the air conditioning back at the resort? 

Yes, and ... we had a great time, didn't have to hustle to get packed on the last day, and had zero meltdowns.

Except for that Avatar ride.

Crossing the “Is It Mine” Field: White Authors and Character Diversity

I have a novel that I wrote last summer that takes place mostly in an abandoned theme park. It's a really rough early draft that I'm still working on, but it's one I love and hope to publish one day. The themes and characters are close to my own heart and family, including concepts like interracial families, passing, generational lies, and the burdens of the past. Still, as much as I love it, and as much as it's grown from my own sense of family, I'm struggling with whether or not it's my story to tell. 

There's an issue out there in the world of writing and publication. Okay, a lot of issues, actually. It's basically a mine field of issues where the mines are all covered in smaller mines, but the issue I'm concerned with in this project is the idea of white authors writing characters of color. As a white author, I certainly want to write a diverse cast of characters, and sometimes even center Black characters who flow from my family experiences, based on the needs of the story. What I don't want to do is create a tangled mess of racial stereotypes. There have been so many missteps and offensive books that have been published in the last few years that have caused uproar, and rightfully so, among the writing and reading community. One that always pops up in the discussion is The Help, which gets plenty of well-deserved criticism for not only centering the white character as a savior in the context of the civil rights movement in America, but also making a caricature or stereotype of the Black characters. 

On the other hand, I'm seeing white authors who seem to understand the inherent complications in writing characters of color and not only avoid them, but write spectacular stories in their genre that include either a diverse cast of characters, or completely center the characters of color. Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country is, to me, a perfect example of this. I started reading it recently because I loved the Netflix series adapted from the first novel, and was sad to see the second season cancelled. While I was watching it, I had no idea that the writer of the original material wasn't Black. The setting, the rich background knowledge of the time period, and the uniquely believable characters gave me nothing but green flags. I wanted to read the first novel, the one the series is adapted from, to get a sense of how different the two versions are (not much, in a good way), and to see if the Black artists involved had to do much cultural repair to the original. Surprisingly, the original is a perfect example of a white author faithfully depicting Black characters, much like the series. One little touch, among many, that caught my eye is that the neighborhood that some of the characters move into in the second part is Woodlawn, the same neighborhood in Chicago where Lorraine Hansberry's family moved into in the 1940's, and which became the subject of the Supreme Court case, led by her father, which struck down (sort of) the neighborhood covenants that kept Black families from moving into white neighborhoods. 

It's touches like this that make Lovecraft Country the kind of work that I want to emulate with this novel, and really several of my other novels as well. I'm committed to writing about interracial families, because that's what I know and live, and I'm blessed to have family members around me to help guide me as I navigate some of these issues that can be fraught with the possibility of harm. The novel I'm discussing here involves a brother and sister, twins, growing up with an abusive grandfather as their only caretaker. Their mother died of an illness, but also of a broken heart over their father, who also died before they were born. One of the revelations (spoiler alert) of the novel is that part of the reason the grandfather dislikes them so much is because they're mixed, although they don't know it, never having known their father. Also, because he's just a horrible person, it's complicated. There's generations of family on both sides, with vastly different experiences in this country, which have culminated in the lives of these two young people, and they're on the verge of discovering how to not necessarily reconcile or solve all these problems, but to pull all that history together within themselves and make peace with both of their parents, through some supernatural means, because that's kind of my thing.

In writing, and now revising and rewriting, this novel, I'm trying to take some lessons from those who have failed to hit the target in the past, either through negligence or just oversight, as well as those who have done it well. One resource I found to help me was Mya Nunnally's article on Book Riot from 2018. You all remember 2018? Such a simpler time, right? In the article, she gives "7 Casually Racist Things That White Authors Do." It's a great resource for me and any white author trying to write characters of color, and I'd like to think about a positive for each of her points, kind of a do for each of her don'ts.

Her first don't is having zero characters of color in the story. It reminds me of the sitcom Friends (which I never found funny, don't @ me), which I'd like to think takes place in an alternate universe where Reconstruction in the South went so well, and reparations were made so completely and promptly, that the Great Migration simply never happened, and Black folks never moved into the northern cities in great numbers. I'd like to think that, but I know it's more likely that the show just didn't want to hire Black writers, let alone Black actors. So the do to this don't is to write the characters we see around us. That might require expanding our circles of friends (no pun intended) and learning more about other cultures, especially those of the people in our own neighborhoods, whom we should be getting to know anyway.

In fact, another of her points is the failure of white authors to do research on the cultures they write about. Think about all the nuances of culture, from language to food to clothing and every other aspect of life. Our characters shouldn't be based on other stories and shows, but real people. Sensitivity readers can help with this, but by the time they see the novel, a lot of it has been set in stone, if not at the publisher then at least in the writer's mind. It's better to run ideas by trusted sources, those who are willing to do the work, during the drafting process. And as with any work, compensate your beta and sensitivity readers, either through bartering or straight up currency. 

The lack of authenticity in the drafting process results in stereotypes, another of Nunnally's points of contention. The problem with writing characters based on the characters you've already seen in other media is that they're likely to be stereotypes, caricatures of people that are often limited and offensive. Even if your character is modeled after another one who seems unique and vibrant, consider that all you're doing is appealing to another trend instead of creating a realistic and fleshed-out person in your story. 

Nunnally makes several great points in her article, but the last one might be the most prevalent - the white savior. This really is a complicated issue. There's been story after story, movie after movie, where the subject is civil rights or racism, but the focus is on the white protagonist's struggle to create change, or their discovery of the true nature of society and subsequent indignation. Again, don't @ me, but To Kill a Mockingbird comes to mind. This approach robs the characters of color of any agency, and reduces them to something like children or underlings, completely helpless in their struggles to free themselves. A cursory look at history, in the United States and around the world, shows that in every situation of colonialism, slavery, and oppression were the subjects of racism and abuse just helpless victims waiting for a savior. Revolt and resistance were not only always the norm, but they also make for great stories. 

However, here's the rub. Let's say I want to write about a particular revolt of enslaved people in America. There's no question that I'm going to do the research and talk to the right people to get perspective on the matter and inspiration for creating the characters. But that still doesn't mean that it's my story to tell, and while I might become very caught up in an idea for a story, I probably have to tread very carefully when it comes to this matter. To return to Ruff's Lovecraft Country, he's done a masterful job of approaching the 1950's, with very realistic and frank depictions of racism, but without centering a white character, much less a savior, and without trying to Forrest Gump his way through the time period either, highlighting all the major events of the time. Instead, he's writing a horror story set in that time period, and it works so beautifully because it seems to make the point that racism is at least as horrific as any of the Lovecraftian monsters we could imagine. In fact the two horrors are so intertwined as to be inseparable, and the fact that he's chosen Lovecraft as a focal point is even more ironic, given that writer's known racism, which is also addressed and deconstructed in the novel.

So, I'm still working on my novel, which is set in two time periods, the 1980's when I was a kid, and the 1960s when the protagonists' parents were falling in love, despite all the obstacles of racism and segregation. I'm threading in my own experiences and those of all my family members as inspiration and a sort of historical mooring. And as I'm writing and refining it, hopefully I'm making it not only my story, but one that belongs to my whole family.

Dilbert Edward Ignatious, Ruiner of Nations

 A relative recently asked my opinion about a speech going around about race and the church, and sharing my opinion opened a whole discussion about DEI and how, in their opinion, it's one strand of the woke rope that's currently strangling our nation to death. 

I get this a lot, for some reason.

It's not the first time a family event has devolved into a heated discussion of DEI or CRT or whatever letters are scaring people these days. In this case, it's the deep concern about what we used to call reverse racism, but what some people today are calling "the only real racism." It's the kind of fear-mongering that happens when people like Charlie Kirk say that they get scared for their lives when they see a Black pilot on their flight, because of their deeply held racism.

No, wait, sorry, I meant, because of their deeply held fears about the effects of DEI on society. Kirk is scared of Black pilots because of that, not the other thing. Apologies.

Whenever this discussion comes up, I'm usually certain that the person just doesn't know what DEI is. They say we fear what we don't understand, and I suppose it's true that DEI could be scary to those who don't understand it. If you think that DEI is just grabbing a random Black person off the street and being like, "Hey, you wanna fly a Boeing 747? Maybe do some surgery later?" then, yes, that might be frightening. That's why, in these arguments, my response is usually to propose three scenarios that a DEI initiative would actually produce in the real world, and ask the uncle or cousin which ones they would disagree with the most.

Scenario 1:

You become the CEO of a large corporation, one that operates in a very stable and lucrative field, with lots of high-paying, probably STEM jobs. Upon taking over, you realize, if you didn't already, that your corporation has a decades-long practice of discriminating against Black applicants. Very few of the employees are people of color, and none of them in those higher-paying, more prestigious positions. Historically, Black candidates have been refused even an interview, and usually their application process ends when HR reads their name on the resume.

You feel strongly that this racist practice should end under your leadership, but, aside from firing the entire HR department, you don't know what to do. You hire a DEI consultant, who advises retraining for all HR employees, as well as a directive that ten of the twenty new employees that the company hires in those coveted positions this year should be Black or persons of color (with proper qualifications, of course, because we're still running a business here). This would bring the percentage of Black employees up to 2% by the end of the year, which is nowhere near 10%, which is the percentage of Black residents in your city, but a move in the right direction.

By the end of the year, it's become harder than you thought to find qualified Black applicants, at least partly because the word has gotten around about your company's past discrimination, so maybe to get the last two positions filled, you send recruiters to nearby universities to repair that reputation and encourage more people of color to apply.

Any objections? 

Scenario 2:

You've been CEO of the company now for several years, and while hiring Black employees or people of color has never been a problem, getting them to stay with the company long-term is. After noticing this, you ask HR for a report, which reveals that while the overall turnover rate and self-reported satisfaction of your employees is above normal, both of those measures are abysmal when accounting only for minorities. In their exit interviews, many Black employees have reported micro-aggressions (whatever those are, amirite?) and hostility as their reasons for leaving, along with the perceived lack of advancement opportunity. You get personally involved, interviewing some of the departing employees yourself, and get an earful of their complaints firsthand. Furthermore, whatever initiatives you might have set into place for increasing diversity and atoning for the company's prior discriminatory practices.

Again, out of a desire to solve this clear problem with morale and company reputation, you hire a DEI consultant, who runs a company-wide study and training program for all employees. This program seems to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, the idea being that nobody was intentionally trying to alienate or antagonize anyone else, but the changing make-up of the constituency has created the need for more sensitivity in the way we talk to each other and hear each other. Black employees feel more supported, and white employees (hopefully) feel supported as well, knowing how to navigate this new situation.

Any objections?

Scenario 3:

That first initiative is really revealing some discomforting things about the city and state where your company is headquartered. One of the reasons that HR is having a hard time finding enough qualified Black applicants to achieve this directive (again, aside from the fact that a lot of Black folks don't want to work for a company with a known history of discrimination and a ton of negative reviews from former Black employees) is that the high schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods in your area are woefully underfunded. Most students leaving those schools have never seen the inside of a proper science lab, let alone had the opportunity to participate in a robotics team or coding club. The facilities and tools just don't exist for them. The Black students at mostly white schools, on the other hand, enjoy campuses with much better equipment, but don't always get into the advanced classes because of educator bias. This causes a real lack of Black university students seeking STEM degrees, which it turn affects how many Black applicants your company sees.

Once again, you have your assistant arrange a meeting with the DEI consultant, who suggests that you take a portion of the charitable funds already in your company's budget and invest them in updating the labs, equipment, and faculty of the schools in the majority Black neighborhoods in your city. This has the double advantage of helping your company achieve its diversity goals and atone for it's past discrimination, as well as creating some positive media buzz. Heck, the consultant even suggests that some of your current employees visit the schools to oversee the updates and mentor some of the students - while wearing their company polos and followed by a photographer, of course. After all, we are running a business here.

Of course, during the planning meeting, one of your executives complains. He asks the consultant why everything has to be about race, and why only the Black schools are getting the money, and why can't we just divide up the money evenly among all the local schools, and don't all schools matter. Ever the professional, the consultant calmly reminds them that the donations are intended to bring the under-funded schools up to the same level as their peers, and that spreading money around evenly wouldn't solve the problem of inequity in STEM opportunities.

Any objections?

If you're trying this with your uncle or cousin, maybe they're still worried about quotas and hiring unqualified pilots or whatever. Maybe they're still convinced that they lost their job at the factory because of some DEI initiative, and not because they got consistently negative evaluations over the last five years.  In that case, please ask them to consider the following:

In the case of our semi-fictional corporation above, having a quota for hiring Black employees is nothing new. The company is not starting a quota in their hiring; they've always had a quota. To emphasize, for decades, the company has always had a set number of Black employees that it hired, it's just that the number was zero. Or maybe one, so they could have someone around to add some color to the company photo so they don't look egregiously racist. 

In addition, the objection that "we should only be hiring the best applicants" is a great idea, but a little disingenuous. Our fictional company never had that as its hiring practice before, so why start now? The rule for hiring at our fictional firm was never to hire the best applicants, but to hire the best white applicants ... maybe, unless the boss had a nephew who needed a job or a favor owed to some other rich person with a knucklehead for a relative. It seems odd that now that our fictional CEO is interested in correcting the discriminatory hiring practices of the past, suddenly several people want to use merit as the sole measurement for hiring a person.

Furthermore, what does "hiring the best" even mean? I know that there are social and psychological reasons why Charlie Kirk hyperventilates when he sees a Black person in a cockpit, but what does he think is happening when he sees a white man in that seat? Does he really think that pilot is the "Best"? That out of all the pilots and all the airlines in America, that he lucked out and got the "Very Best Pilot" in the world to fly his non-stop from St. Louis to Minneapolis? Or is it enough that the pilot is competent, ready to deal with whatever emergencies might arise during the flight, because he or she has the proper training and is approved by not only the flight school that trained them and the airline that hired them, but also the FAA, which regulates these matters? It seems as if Kirk just assumes the competency of any white person he sees wearing the wings, and only questions the competency of Black pilots. Surely, even your uncle can see how that comes across as a little bit racist.

Library Kids and Adults Unite

    When I was growing up in North Miami, there were two places I knew I was always welcome, even if I didn't have money, which was all the time. Both of them were on Stickball Ave., down the street from the high school where I would later graduate. On one side of the street was the public pool, and on the other was the City of North Miami library. As a upper poor kid with lower middle class dreams, I learned how to do two things really well - swim and read. Both had strong programs for neighborhood kids, with lessons, events, and even job opportunities once we got old enough.

    The public pool was where I learned to face my fears and dive off the twenty foot platform. The library was where I learned to face other fears and read the novels on the five foot shelves, out of reach for me at the time.

    The pool is gone now, filled in, dug under, and replaced with the football field and track for the new high school. But the library is still there, and still serving the kids, and adults, of the community. It looks different now, with glass-walled study rooms, a cafe, and rows of computers that were just a sci-fi dream when I was a kid, but there's still reading tutors every day after school and all weekend, writing programs during summer, and librarians willing to help you find a book just a little outside of your range. Even when I still lived in North Miami as an adult, it was where I voted and where I spent hours every day during summer vacation writing in the quiet room.

    So, when I saw Mychal Threets on my Instagram feed, gushing about his love for the local library, I got it. I had forgotten how much that place used to mean to me, and how much it meant to my own kids when the library was often the only place I could afford to take them for some fun, or at least the only place without slides and swings and blazing Miami heat. Mychal reminded me that my younger kids don't go to the library as often as the older ones did, and that since we had moved on up, we had traded colorful displays of books and reading circles for tablets, ebooks, and Amazon deliveries. It's not the same.

    Another thing that struck me about Mychal is how much he reminds me of my son. Similar in age, complexion, with that same curl in his hair and that same love of books. He gets that from me - the love of books, that is, definitely not the curl. He's also a little awkward and has to try a little harder to make friends. He gets that from me as well. 

    Mychal was a blessing to my social media, a rare oasis of joy and goodness in a teeming ocean of trolls and vicious debates and scams. He was an inspiration to kids like mine, mixed kids with limited funds, looking for places in this world where they can be themselves and be welcome.

    And then he was gone. Because he was joyful, they called him weird. Because he was passionate about kids reading and finding community, they called him suspect. And while all of that is terrible, I have to wonder what they called him because he's mixed, African-American and Mexican.

    They hounded him online until he quit, and not just the media campaign, but the library that he loved and loved him back. The same forces that want to take the books about race or racism out of the school libraries and the novels by authors of color off the library shelves attacked a man who outshined every booktoker on the clock app. In my state, there's a particularly virulent effort to kill everything that young readers of color might use to lift their spirits and inform their futures. Back in the 1960s that so many red hats pine for, just a four-hour drive up the coast, they poured acid in the pool rather than desegregate it. It's a different kind of acid they use today, but it works about the same. They flood the school board meetings with it, storm the libraries with it, and drown social media with it, usually using anonymous accounts to hide their faces like a digital hood. The goal seems to be to get rid of every library book like Beloved, and every library worker like Mychal.

    So what can we do? My plan is to continue teaching a diverse group of novels and handling the complaints with patience and advocacy. I'm also trying to write the books that center families like mine. This summer, my youngest kids, and my grandkids, if I can handle it, will be in the library where we live now, as well as the local pool taking swim lessons. The more that we use these resources, the more they get funded. In addition, we can support our libraries with donations and deal with the trolls with whatever means are safest for us, whether those are words or blocks or violation reports. Most of all, we all have elections coming in a few months, and, at least in my state, these issues are on the ballot. Vote for the candidates who are going to protect our books and our librarians instead of running them out of town.

It's time for library adults to stand up for library kids.

Shooting the Canon

In a class I'm taking on writing, the discussion of the literary canon came up, and the idea that classics are classics because they have stood the test of time with their superior craft and universal characters and themes. As an English teacher for over twenty-five years, it's been a constant struggle to diversify the curriculum and get authorization to assign readings, especially novels, that aren't the "canonical" white male authors. Even when I've taught in schools where the majority of students were of color, there's always some pushback. To be sure, some of it is just resistance to change, as well as a concern for the maturity of the content and themes that young students read. That's always been an issue, and even more now that parents, and somehow non-parents alike, are storming school board meetings across the country to challenge texts they don't like. At best, the argument usually relies on the fact that the old reliables like The Scarlet Letter are already proven to be superior examples of writing and have been tested for content by years of students reading them, where a novel like Beloved is considered less worthy because it's style is "modern" and full of "slang," and contains subjects that parents might not want their children exposed to, like slavery and sexuality.

But the reality is that no matter how good the writing or how "safe" the content, novels by authors of color still tend to get rejected. One argument I had to personally deal with is that we don't have time to read everything, and while it would be nice to diversify the curriculum, these "classics" are too important to get bumped for what amounts to an interesting beach read. Aside from discussing how important representation is, the fact that my students and my own children need to see themselves in positives roles in novels in order to become lifelong readers, I'd like to make the case that classics like The Scarlet Letter are neither as innocent nor as well-written as we'd like to think.

First, all of us have seen the "gotcha" reels where some YouTuber will stun one of the crusaders at the school board. They'll get them monologuing that a book should be pulled from shelves because of some racial, violent, or sexual content, even going so far as to call the writer, teacher, and librarian nasty names. Then they hit the complainer with a passage from the Bible that's far more graphic than the one they want pulled. Invariably, the crusader always fumbles to find a reason why the novel has to go but the Bible has to stay. This is the same argument I see with the classics. Somehow, by virtue of its age or the brilliance of its prose, novels like The Scarlet Letter gets a pass on content. Granted, there are moments of sexuality and violence in Beloved, but they're certainly not graphically depicted. In fact, some go right over the average high school student's head, and many teachers who dare to teach Beloved just watch those scenes fly away without addressing them. Similarly, we somehow find a way to gloss over the fact that The Scarlet Letter is a story about Reverend Dimmesdale grooming, seducing, impregnating, and then abandoning Hester Prynne. 

In terms of writing ability, the assumption by many English teachers and curriculum coordinators is that The Scarlet Letter is an impeccable work of prose (mainly because it's old?) and Beloved is harder to read, what with it's dialect, slang, and "modern" sense of craft. I might just be getting old, but I'm realizing more and more that what passes for craft in the classics often wouldn't make it past the slush pile on the desks of today's literary agents and editors. With so many aspiring writers, the bar for what makes good prose is extremely high these days. Ask me how I know. 

But in fairness, let's compare the first paragraphs of both The Scarlet Letter and Beloved. 

First, The Scarlet Letter:

"A THRONG of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

"The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers[52] of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson’s lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King’s Chapel. Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him."

I'm not saying that the writing is terrible here, although there are parts of the novel that are clunky and confusing. I do enjoy the novel, but the verb phrases are almost all either linking verbs or passive voice. The sentences are very long and flowery, with some strong imagery, but sometimes hard to follow for the same reasons.

One the other hand, consider Beloved's first paragraph:

"124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old--as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the door sill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once--the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn't have a number then, because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them."

The sentence structure is more intentionally varied, with very short sentences giving the reader some rest in between long ones. Even the long ones don't meander the way that Hawthorne's do. The final sentence, one of the longest, uses clear parallelism to hold the reader's attention and make sense of the flow of words. 

These two novels have a lot in common. Both historical novels and both based on an actual person, but fictionalized. Both novels center on a woman struggling with what it means to love her children, to love a man, and to love herself. Both evoke discussions of sex, power, and abuse. Both contain supernatural elements, especially pertaining to children. But because of this idea of the canon, because certain stories are elevated despite the fact its flaws and some are denigrated despite their greatness, one gets taught widely as an exemplar of American lit, and the other is contested as a type of genre fiction at best, and a crime against young readers at worst.

We have to confront the biases that force the one story on our students and relegate the other to the recesses of the library, or maybe the AP Lit classes, if not removed from schools altogether. Granted, any student can choose to read Beloved on their own. But by refusing to teach the novel, and others by minority authors, we're saying that these stories are not worth studying, discussing, and celebrating. In fact, we're saying the same about many of our students' lives and stories.

Homework and the Blended Family

Recently, I had the honor of giving a seminar on implementing a no-homework policy in elementary, middle, and high school classes. It's a policy that took me some time to come to, but one that I can't imagine ever changing now that my eyes have been opened. At the beginning of my teaching career, over twenty-five years ago, I was exactly the opposite - piling on homework in the name of rigor and punishing students who didn't do it. The turning point for me was the realization that there really was no rigor to be found in this approach. I could assign reading, but most students just wouldn't read it. At best, even the smartest would look up summaries and fake it. I could assign writing, but they'd cheat. After some careful consideration, I decided that I couldn't even blame them. Why are they working at home, sometimes harder than they're expected to work in class, without supervision, and often without even knowing what they're doing? After researching the effects of homework, I fully made the switch to no assignments outside of class time.

I don't want this post to get too technical, but in case there are any teachers reading for arguments or support for no-homework policies, or maybe parents looking for ammunition to fire at their local school boards, here are the bullet points of what I shared with my colleagues:

• Homework does not provide the rigor we assume it does, because all the work is unsupervised.
• Homework does not teach students study skills or time management any more than kicking a kid into the deep end of a pool teaches them to swim. At best, it activates survival instincts; at worst, it drowns the student.
• Homework gives students a distorted concept of work-life balance and robs them of positive interactions with family members, often replacing them with very negative ones.
• Homework does not effectively build skill through repetition, because the students who practice correctly every time already have the skills, and the ones who don't already have the skills often repeat and ingrain incorrect practices that then have to be retrained. (See: "Dad said to do it this way.")
• Research that supports the practice of homework is dubious at best, and much of the research shows that homework is ineffective and makes students hate school.
• At best, research shows that 30 minutes or more of homework per school night can increase learning by 4%, at the cost of family harmony, social interaction, leisure time, artistic pursuits, and extracurricular activities.

One quote I found in my research that has really guided my thinking on the subject is from Jackie Glasheen, principal of Kelly Elementary School in 2016. "We really want kids to go home at 4 o'clock, tired," she says. "We want their brain to be tired." Essentially, if your students even have the brain power to do any homework after school, then you probably haven't had them work rigorously enough in the classroom to begin with.

After making the switch to a no-homework policy, I've seen rigor and student skills increase, even though we can't necessarily "cover" everything students previously did for homework. The difference, to me, is that the students really learn what we study in the classroom, and they weren't really learning what we were doing (or not doing, if we're being honest) for homework before.

But one thing that I never considered in my extreme pro-homework days is how homework affects different types of families in different ways. Wealthier families can hire tutors to help with the workload and maintain positive boundaries for parents and children. Middle class families generally have at least one college-educated parent in the home who can assist with the more taxing assignments. But poorer families generally have none of these advantages. The very families who already have the most stressors and the least amount of quality time between parents and children are exactly the ones that the burden of homework hurts the most. 

In addition, before I became a single parent and then a parent in a blended family, I never considered how these dynamics could be exacerbated by the load of homework I assigned. As a single parent, who was also a college graduate and educator, it was often more than I could handle to even enforce quiet time for my kids to do their homework, let alone help them with it. Doors were slammed, tears were shed, and voices were raised, but not a lot of learning happened. I had two kids that were already hurting from the pain of separation and divorce, and instead of spending healing personal time with them, we were fighting over how long it should take to do thirty math problems. 

Then later, as a blended family, we saw that dynamic change even more. Sure, there were more hands and brains in the home to help with homework, but the relationships were new and fragile, and the added stress of homework created even more angst and drama at a time when we could have been bonding as a new blended family. The truth is, homework causes stress, makes kids feel stupid, and complicates the parent/child relationship. What it does to the step-parent/child relationship is absolutely terrible. In a home where remarks like "you're not my mom" and "you can't make me" and "I'm calling my real dad" are still shouted on the regular, the added burden of making a child write an essay or read ten pages of Hatchet can set familial progress back months, or stop it from ever progressing to begin with.

So, here's my advice for teachers: Consider the effects of your homework assignments on the most fragile of your students. The ones who are sailing through your class are probably not benefiting from it at all, but the ones who are struggling, both personally and academically, are possibly seething with animosity towards school and towards the parents and stepparents who are trapped in the role of enforcing the status quo. Consider the cost/benefit analysis of every assignment you send home, and try to imagine what really goes on once your students leave your room.

And my advice for parents: Put the onus for teaching material back on the teacher. I've adopted this policy myself, and it's been difficult, but it's definitely improved my child's stress level and our relationship. Instead of becoming frustrated with her for not understanding an assignment or not getting math problems correct, I simply tell her not to do it. Math, in particular, doesn't come naturally for her, so when she doesn't understand what to do, or asks me to show her how, to essentially teach the material, I just refuse to do it. I tell my child to mark the problem she doesn't know how to do, skip to the next one that she understands, and make sure to be the first to raise her hand in class tomorrow and tell the teacher she needs help with the problem. It's not my job to teach my daughter math. Period.

My job is to encourage her personal, spiritual, and intellectual growth as a father, and to foster goodwill between her and her other parents and stepparents. I only have a few hours on a weeknight to get that job right, and I'm not wasting that time trying to figure out how many hours it takes for Fred's plane to land in Cleveland if the flight leaves forty-five minutes late in ten degree weather with twice the normal load of baggage and one engine operating at eighty-five percent efficiency. Fred's gonna get there when he gets there.