Aunt Jemima and Me–and Race

When I was a kid, I had a lot of aunts: my mother’s sisters, Aunt Grace, Aunt Millie, Aunt Bonnie, Aunt Leona; her brother’s wives, Aunt Florence, Aunt Helen, Aunt Viola, Aunt Eunice; my father’s sister and sister-in-law, Aunt Agnes and Aunt Shirley; and some grand-aunts whom I met and knew, Aunt Kate, Aunt Maggie, Aunt Jennie, Aunt Jule, Aunt Helen, and others I knew of. My perception of “aunt” was this: a woman I am related to, who has her own children (except for one), and whom I can go to if I need help.

So I saw Aunt Jemima, whose picture was on our pancake mix box, as the same kind of person. She was also like Betty Crocker, whose picture was on other packages, but who was not an aunt-type person.

I had a lively imaginary life when I was quite young. (Truth be told, for quite a few years after that, too.) My mother was a loving person, but my brother was born when I was only 11 months old, so her attention was divided. By the time I was 6, she had three more pregnancies, with none of the babies, all born early, living more than a few hours. These were not easy pregnancies for her, and we moved countless times, as my father, an electrician, followed where the work was. (Back and forth: four different places, I think, in Storm Lake, Iowa, my birthplace; Des Moines a time or two; Spencer, Iowa, once; Cherokee, Iowa, twice; East St. Louis, Ilinois, once; finally to Garden Grove California, when I was almost 7.)

It’s not hard to see why I had imaginary friends. Susie and Atinia (I have no idea where that name came from) were girls more or less my age, who could move when we moved, And then there was Aunt Jemima. Yes, she was in my imaginary life. She wasn’t a servant or “mammy,” concepts I didn’t have at that age. She was my aunt. She wasn’t my primary caregiver—that was always my mother—but she was someone I could go to when my mother wasn’t fully available to me.

My mother may have picked up on my liking for Aunt Jemima. Dennis (my brother) and I didn’t get many toys, and almost never if not for a birthday or Christmas, but Mom sent for these dolls, premiums from Aunt Jemima pancake mix. I no longer have them, but here is a picture:

and I want you to notice something: this is an intact family: mother, father, and two kids (a boy and a girl, just like my brother and me). Yes, there are some patches, but my mother mended our clothes, too. I was probably then 3 or 4, and I saw in the dolls nothing “different” from me and my family.

Then when I was 5, on one of our stays in Des Moines, I started kindergarten. Iowa was the first state to desegregate public schools, in 1868, and I went to public school. I quickly found two “best” friends and two “second-best” friends, and one of each was black and one white.

The only one whose name I remember is Karen, my best friend who was Black. Of all my friends, all the girls in my class, she was the one I saw as most “like” me. Lots of little girls around us had her or my skin color, my or her hair color, eye color. But only Karen was as tall as I was. Only with Karen could we look straight into each other’s eyes when playing “London Bridge.” Standing in line, she was the only girl whose head I couldn’t see over. All the way through graduation from high school, I would never again have a female classmate as tall as I was.

I probably was aware—I really don’t remember—that Karen was what polite people referred to then as “Negro.” But that was of no more significance than that my other best friend (whose name I don’t remember) was called “blonde.” Lots of girls were in those groups. But only Karen and I were “the tallest.”

Those experiences formed the basis for my personal feelings about race. Because I was one of those kids who learned to read early and then literally read everything I could get my hands on, I soon discovered that other people had very different ideas. I learned when quite young about racism, slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, lynching, all of it. I never had to go to a segregated school (although in the Catholic schools I attended for 12 years in California, students who weren’t white were mostly Mexican American and Filipino American, with only a few Black students), and as I recall my textbooks, they were a bit more realistic about the history of the US than the books mandated for public schools.

I am not colorblind, and I doubt those who say they are. I can’t imagine what kind of bubble one would have to live in to be able to “ignore” race. But I have always been grateful to the universe for giving me the experiences I had, which gave me my personal feelings about race. My feelings are what I live with, are what combine with my thoughts to produce my actions. My thoughts can be mistaken, my actions poorly chosen, and I try to accept informed criticism of them. But I don’t think any errors in thought or action will come from those feelings.

The Battles We FIght

One person can have both an acute and a chronic condition. Perhaps someone with diabetes (chronic) has a heart attack (acute), or someone with lupus (chronic) has a broken back (acute). Any of these conditions, untreated, can kill the person. The person may have a primary care physician for the chronic condition but go to the emergency room for the acute condition. Treating one or the other condition does not mean the other doesn’t matter, nor does it mean that the person won’t die of the one left untreated.

I have long seen this as a metaphor for social ills. Like any metaphor, it is not flawless, but I find it useful. Please take it as a metaphor, not a literal statement.

Consider, for just one example, sexual assault. Think of it, for this discussion, as the chronic condition, and sexual assault on women by men the acute condition. If one could eliminate the acute condition, that would be a good thing, but the chronic condition would still be present in society—women assaulting men, men assaulting men, women assaulting women. All of these exist now and would continue to exist.

This can be applied to any number of other general conditions in society. As I see it, in every case, both the “acute” and the “chronic” conditions must be “treated,” for society to survive as a healthy place for all. That is, both the overall problem and the specific instances must be addressed.

I have no argument against—and have not been presented with any persuasive argument against—someone battling either the acute OR the chronic presentation of a societal problem. Few among us have the resources (energy, financial, time) to battle everything that is wrong with our society today.

Nor do I have any argument with those who make different choices about what they consider “acute”—necessary to be given priority. Each of us lives our own life, faces our own challenges (and demons), has our own circle of care, has our own resources, sees our own possibilities for action.

I do have an argument with those who claim that because the overall problem exists, battling a specific example is pointless, or who claim that because a specific problem is so serious, no overall problem needs attention. This touches on the black lives matter/all lives matter issue. If people truly believed that ALL lives matter, there would be no need for action to support specific lives. But society is structured so that—and apparently far too many people believe that—Black lives, as well as lives of other POC, poor people, homeless people, people with disabilities, and other groups, are not part of “ALL.”

Of course some of these lives matter more than others on a personal basis. As I mentioned above, we each have our own circle of care: immediate family, extended family, chosen family, friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and many more, in whatever order. But on a societal basis, when we look at the way our society values lives, treats lives, all lives must matter equally, and if they don’t, those that don’t matter as much need special attention and protection.

The world has enough injustice, enough unfairness, enough pain and suffering that we all have to pick our battles. That I am fighting certain battles does not mean the others don’t matter, or that they don’t matter to me. And I will not presume that about you regarding the battles you fight.

I Wonder… (COVID-19 Diary Entry 1)

Just for escapism, I am sitting in a recliner near the front window, where the sun is shining through and around white clouds onto small succulents, some of my favorite plants, on the table under the window. I am reading a mystery set in the southwestern desert, my favorite place. I am listening to a classical music playlist, which just finished Pachelbel’s Canon, my single favorite piece of music. I am drinking good sustainably sourced coffee. And as so often in moments like this, I wonder.

Why is the beauty of the natural world not enough to motivate people to preserve it? Why do some look at a mountain or a canyon or a forest and see only whatever fuel or metal or “product” it holds, which they can turn into riches for themselves?

How can some humans create the beauty of music–classical or whatever you favor–or write words that entertain, inspire, amuse, inform, while others stifle those voices, hide that beauty? They do it not just by censorship but by not supporting the production and dissemination of beauty, or by taking it for their own, or by using their power to persuade people that other things are more important–maybe more bombs, grander buildings supposedly to praise some deity, anything that means power and riches rather than beauty.

I have wondered since I was very young about the whys and hows of greed–for money beyond mere comfort/security, for status among those one doesn’t care about, for power to be used only to acquire more money, status, and power. I have wondered how a human being can look at another human being and not see “like me.” I look at those who do that, and I still see them as “like me” in some essential sense, and I wonder how and why they can’t see it.

Reflections on Parenting

Someone famous once said that “life is what happens to you while you’re doing something else.” That’s the one that keeps biting me on the butt. I tried very hard, for example, to live in the moment with my kids, experiencing who they are at each stage. I’ve tried to live in consciousness of Emerson’s words: “The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing,
and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.” But still I found myself frequently wishing for the kids to move on, out of needing to be changed and fed and tended constantly, out of needing to be watched constantly, out of needing homework help every night and transportation everywhere and clothes bought and washed and put away, out of needing me-me-me.

And they did move on, in a heartbeat, in a blink, faster than I could have imagined when I was mired in their constant needs. Each one of their days brought me the gift of who they were that day, and if I didn’t see it as a gift, I lost it. But Emerson has words for that, too, and if I had to state my philosophy of life, I’d choose this–indeed, my LJ, Blunders and Absurdities, was named from it (just as this blog is named for an Emerson quote):

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; Forget them as soon as you can.

“Tomorrow is a new day; Begin it well and serenely And with too high a spirit To be encumbered with your old nonsense.

“This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, To waste a moment on yesterdays.”

Serious Literature and Me

The older I get, the more difficult it is for me to read “serious literature”–nongenre fiction. I find it full of people whose problems seem to me ones that could be easily solved by a bit of rationality, a soupçon of imagination or thinking outside whatever box society or they themselves have put them in, and application of the maxim “It’s not all about you.”

I have always been interested in psychology, and quite good at it in an amateur way, but I would be a terrible therapist. After two or three sessions, all my professional knowledge probably could not keep me from slapping the client upside the head, and, like Cher’s character in Moonstruck, shouting, “Snap out of it!” Here’s your problem, here’s what you can do about it, now go and do it or not, but don’t come back to me.

Or maybe not. I’m usually able not to do that to my friends and acquaintances who confide in me. And they do confide. When I was 14, my boyfriend said, “If everyone was a body part, you’d be a shoulder”–because everyone, even my mother, leaned on me and cried on me. (My mother told me when I was an adult, regarding this, “You were always such a certain little thing.”) I have a strong component of what some women complain is a male characteristic: tell me a problem and I immediately start trying to solve it. I try to control that since becoming aware that some people just want to be listened to, but for myself I have usually not told people my problems unless I would welcome their suggestions.

My spouse and I are far from perfect people and we have flaws and problems like most, but we often agree that people make things unnecessarily hard on themselves, and others, by failure to use the three tools listed in my first paragraph (rationality, imagination, it’s not all about you, repeat as needed). We humans are puny little creatures, and the universe has so many ways to make us suffer, to kill us–why do we do it to each other?

So when I try to read nongenre fiction, I often want to throw the book across the room–the reading equivalent of Cher’s slap–by the third chapter. Yes, these books often reveal the human condition, near-universal truths about us puny creatures, and that’s why I can’t read them. At least with real humans, should the right situation arise, I can say some kinder version of “Snap out of it!”

 

Bisexuality

Partly because I have some bisexual friends, I have been seeing posts on Facebook and elsewhere, both from them and with links to others, about “bisexual erasure.” (If you don’t know what it is, please use Google.) This erasure comes, it seems, from both heterosexual and homosexual people.

I just can’t wrap my head around the idea–which seems to be the basis here–that EVERYONE is either gay or straight and that there is no way for a person to be honestly attracted, romantically, sexually, or both, to people of both genders, all genders, no gender, or all of the above. In other words, no way for a person to be attracted to, y’know, other individual humans and not to a specific configuration of genitals.

I have never been romantically or sexually attracted to another woman, even though when I was not monogamously partnered I was open to the possibility. There have been a few women about whom I have thought/felt, yes, she has the characteristics of someone I could have a relationship with–IF I felt a romantic/sexual attraction, but I didn’t. I suspect pheromones, but who knows.

The attraction that I have felt to these women is very much like what I have felt for the men I have had romantic/sexual relationships with, but minus the romantic/sexual attraction. So it’s obvious to me bisexuality is possible.

But–as I think we all know well–a lot of people believe that if they don’t experience something, it doesn’t exist. Others feel that if anyone thinks or feels differently than they do, it’s an implicit criticism of their thoughts or feelings. Add those two groups, and it’s a powerful lot of folks who won’t accept thoughts or feelings outside their personal experience.

Their world is so small.

Believing and Me

Everyone who goes online, I think, has heard the line “someone is wrong on the Internet.” I find myself less bothered by those who are wrong (in my opinion) than by those who are absolutely unshakably convinced they are right–even if I agree with them on the point at hand.

I have said many times that I do not BELIEVE anything (or “believe IN anything”). The farthest I will go is “This is what I think, based on information, experience, and observation up to this moment. It is subject to change at any time based on new information, experience, and observation.” This is not just something I say, not some facile description. It is the way I approach the universe at the deepest level I can (“can” literally, “am able to”). It is not always easy not to cling to a viewpoint in the face of new contradictory evidence, but I try my very best not to cling, and I could cite specific cases where I have not. I find it hard to grasp how anyone can claim to be rational and not stand there, yet it seems an uncommon viewpoint on life.

(My favorite biblical scholar, John Dominic Crossan, has written of having a similar viewpoint, and I was intellectually thrilled.)

I one wrote on Facebook that I am seldom _______ enough to satisfy people, except when I am too ________ to satisfy them. I am not a movement-joiner, and those “issue” groups I do join are generally those that offer me opportunities to take action but make no demands that I prove my bona fides: Another Mother for Peace (back in the day), ACLU, Amnesty International.

I am dismayed by the tendency of so many to take a sincere “why?”–trying to discover the basis, the reasons, the reasonING–as opposition or doubt or challenge. And when I generally agree with an opinion or viewpoint, I am particularly dismayed by hostility to my pointing out flaws in its development or expression; I see those flaws as weaknesses that others may exploit to cast doubt on the entirety, and I think they should be fixed. Yes, I am a pain in the ass at times.

What I am not, and doubt that I ever will be, is a True Believer … in anything.

“Agitated with pain”

In conversation with my spouse this weekend, I came up with the word for what I have been feeling.

Distraught: “agitated with doubt or mental conflict or pain” (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary).

Mainly the pain part.

Nearly fifty years ago, when I was wearing my Another Mother for Peace medallion to work every day, writing my antiwar letters to periodicals, and sending cheerful chatty letters and care packages to the guys I knew who were in Vietnam, I thought that Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon were the worst mainstream presidential candidates I would ever see. Now I can only wish that the Republicans would once again give us someone as decent and intelligent.

In my worst nightmares or my wildest imaginings, I did not foresee, could not have foreseen, that nearly half a century later a mainstream presidential candidate–the frontrunner!–would feel free to publicly make racist remarks about Mexicans, Muslims, African Americans, that he would speak favorably of identity badges for members of a religious group and of torture as a tool. That a physician candidate, a highly educated surgeon, would spout anti-scientific nonsense. That a candidate who is the son of an immigrant who fled a repressive regime would oppose allowing in refugees fleeing oppression and war.

How have we come to this? My younger self, who thought my generation (at least parts of it) would lead us to a better world for everyone, who thought that by the time I was almost 70 the U.S. would be living up to the best ideals of every generation from the founders forward, simply could not have believed that we would come to this. I could not have accepted that we would have learned nothing, nothing, from history.

I remember that somewhere in the intervening years, a friend, in speaking of Nazi Germany, challenged me: “You think it can’t happen here.”

“No,” I said. “Not it can’t, but it won’t. We have seen, we have learned.”

And so I am distraught.

Humans and groups of humans

Those who know me, or who have read much of what I write, know that I don’t “believe.” I distrust the word, because so often once someone says, “I believe,” there is no room for new, and especially contradictory, information. My viewpoint is “This is what I think, based on information, observation, and experience up to now, and subject to change at any time with new information, observation, or experience.” Unwieldy, I know, but there you have it.

But there are things I am pretty close to “believing,” and this is one: humans are humans, subject to their human nature, in every time and every place and under all conditions. Further, humans are each unique. Therefore, in any situation with a sufficient number of humans, there will be those who do good and those who do evil, those who love and those who hate, those who judge by reason and those who judge by emotion, those who lead and those who follow and those who stay out if it, and so on. Take a small enough group, and one can generalize about certain things–particularly regarding the factors that bind them as a group. But as soon as the group is just a little larger, even those things are no longer true of all the members.

To generalize about men or women, about blacks or whites, about Asians or Latinos, about Christians or Muslims, about conservatives or liberals, is meaningless, yet very dangerous. When we do so, we deceive ourselves into believing that we know what we do not know, and from there we judge what we cannot fairly judge. We deceive ourselves into believing that those categories of humans are somehow fundamentally different from each other.

We can and should judge what humans do, but we cannot judge what they are. We can say that members of a group with this characteristic in common have done this thing, individually or in concert, but we cannot say that every human who has that characteristic has done, or would do, this thing.

I would be surprised to learn that there has ever been any human group of any significant size that has not regularly done, individually or in concert, horrible things–to their neighbors, to women, to children, to elders, to those among them who are “different” in some way–being gay, or suspected of witchcraft, or having a disability of some kind, or so many more “differences.” And further, those horrible things have been supported, approved, or at the very least not opposed, by the group as a whole. Perhaps–probably–not by every single member, but by enough members that one might reasonably say “the group.”

Yes, we should condemn the horrible things that groups do, just as we should condemn the horrible things that individuals do. But it is the worst kind of hubris to think that those horrible things make “them” somehow fundamentally different from “us.” Because the next step from there is to believe that what “we” do is automatically right, that we cannot possibly do evil–even when we are doing, or have done, the exact same action as “they” are doing.

Music and Me

I started listening to popular music when my mother played the radio or we watched “Your Hit Parade” on my grandmother’s TV in the early 1950s. I remember “Mockin’ Bird Hill,” “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window,” “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes,” “I Went to Your Wedding,” “Mona Lisa,” “Mule Train,” and one of my mother’s favorites, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” by Nat King Cole.

But in 1956, when I was 9, along came a popular song that spoke to me. It was “The Wayward Wind.” I always loved the wind–I still do today. By then we lived next to the railroad tracks: “I guess the sound of the outward bound / Made me a slave to my wandering ways.” I never took up those wandering ways, but the idea, the draw, the urge has never left me.

Then when I was 12 I discovered American Bandstand on TV and KFWB Channel 98 on the radio, and I found my generation’s music. Here’s a list from that year, 1959; I remember almost every one of these, and can still recite at least a line or two from most of them: http://www.musicoutfitters.com/topsongs/1959.htm

For my 13th birthday, in 1960, I got a transistor radio! And all kinds of music started to speak to me: fast songs, slow songs, instrumentals, pop music, folk music (and later protest songs), country, western … I liked some of just about everything.

A year later I started high school and joined the band. I had a terrible sense of rhythm, so of course I became a percussionist. (I learned much later that I have a pretty good ear and probably could have done fairly well on an instrument that actually produced notes.) For four years of high school and a year and a half of college, the band was my social group, both in and out of school. Every boy I dated was in the band, at my school or another, till I met my first husband when I was 19.

I wonder how my life would have gone differently had I joined the glee club instead of the band. A couple of my friends who were in the glee club urged me to do so. But when I was in grade school, someone told me that I couldn’t sing well–and I believed it. However, it wasn’t true. And in my junior and senior high school years, I sang alto in the church choir.

I have realized in the course of my advanced years that there are at least two areas that had I really gotten into them, would have taken over my life: music and sailing. Either one of those probably would have been my life, given a chance.