The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round: Internalized Racism
I am what is known as a weekender. That is also something I haven’t admitted on this blog, like HD’s career. Because I am caring less and less about what people know about me, because I have off-loaded heaps of shame. I don’t care if you bloggy-world know that I am a weekender. That means I am one of those douche-bags that heads out of the city most weekends to escape the hustle and bustle in my wine country, zona de la rosa. Which trust me, sounds way more fancy than it is,but still, relaxing, fun, I get to garden and not be molested by the desperate, too much. We also have a t.v. there.
I stopped driving though so I take a bus. It is a long ass bus trip. Breaking my norm, I sat in the very back row. There was a toothless hill-billy working on his home-made jewelery sitting next to a guy on the floor, since I love people making shit, I thought, this is who I want to sit next to, plus hello he had a spider-man cap on. So I did, and we talked and he is awesome. I gave him all kinds of business advice because I am super good at that, and love to help. I removed his obstacles and he was one of the fabulous who actually wants his obstacles removed. He told me how people with education and status think, I said, “I so know that because I have that,but here you can do this…” I handed him my business card. ”Can I call you?” he asked, “To ask for free business advice yes!” I answered because so do not want to date him, but am such a repository for sound practical advice. “When I started my business, I bounced a check for $40.00 to buy business cards.
True story, I was living in a garage and bounced a check for $40.00 on purpose because I did not have $40.00 to my name. I don’t live in a garage anymore. It was a nice garage because I hung the dry-wall, I laid the floor,I painted it robin’s egg blue and Chinese red, I hung the molding.
But so I am on the bus, jewlerey guy leaves other people get on. A woman older than me sits on the opposite side, about 15 years older than me so about 55. She is fat and drunk . She has a Foster’s with a straw. A young kid gets on and sits in the about middle seat between us. Drunk lady is talking a lot, so I ask kid about his shirt. He says it is because he goes to Tam high school. I roll my eyes. ” I went to college with a lot of kids from Tam” because I did. The most interesting thing anyone ever did from Tam was shimmy up a flag-pole and steal a McDonalds flag.
So the kid I am talking to is black. He starts telling me how he gets all As, he just moved here from Kansas City, I ask him KS side or MO side. He says KS side. I think, “Yeah, so you are good at jumping when they circle the cherry?” because straight As are a dark mark to me. But I try to keep little charge to it, because that is super-important to me with young people. They look to older people for recognition,respect, a sign they are on the right path. I don’t know the right-path. I was so misguided and harmed by my elders. So I just say “yeah” all blase’ faire.
Then he starts telling me a different story,about Marin City,about his dad getting jumped, about his dad’s car being set on fire. I lazily say “Yeah” to that as well, because I do know about all that stuff. Because I do want this kid to have space in which he can explore his own space and experience. By this point our lady of leisure had off-loaded the bus and we were joined by a 14 year-old, also black. “Oh I heard about this” he said. Because every world is a small world, they know some of the same people,they heard differing versions. Interestingly, they both get back to middle-aged white-lady me, with this idea they can impress me with their good behavior.
They had made an impression on me. I was impressed by the lack of protection they had. I was impressed by the difficulties they faced. The kid next to me in the Tam shirt talked on and on about his father. He seemed to have some real hero-worship going on. He was a handsome if slight kid. I always think of that, how being a slight male must be hard at that age. I am very non-creeper fond of young-men, teenage boys because I raised one. When I look at them I think of false bravado in a culture that doesn’t offer much comfort, I think of Tom-tom and his sensitivity to the culturally accepted prejudice against teenagers.
He didn’t understand it. It is ignorance and cruelty I would explain. Which those of you that know me, know I can forgive you for being ignorant OR cruel, but not both. Teenagers are incredibly idealistic, they remind me of toddlers when with their peers, toddlers who can do the side by side play but are lacking the skills to really interact. Cute still new people, going through puberty, wanting to make things right, idealistic, often in impossible settings, like High School, where their peers will eat the flesh from their bones and most adults look at them as if they have already committed a crime. That is the crime. They have lovely energy that they so want to be harnessed.
Case in point. In grade 7, I shit you not, I had a teacher named Ms. Dick. That was her real name, I can see her in my mind’s eye today, in her lovely plaid skirts and wool sweaters, her lightly freckled black-skin. We loved her, we never made fun of her name even though her name was asking for it more than a drunk woman in a mini-skirt. She treated us with respect, like we were interesting. We compared a fellow teacher, whose name didn’t lend itself to humiliation to Hitler, because he followed the cultural norm of treating us tender youngsters with enough to deal with, with entitled disgust, because we were young.
We were interesting, we were young and we had information about how the world was changing in a way that the entrenched cannot. So did these boys, they did not disappoint. I seriously do not think I have ever met a teenager I didn’t like, except when I was one. I am always amazed as an older person, how much they want to open up themselves to an older person,while they slip back and forth between childhood, sexuality, adult problems, and try to navigate a system that serves most sorta alright, but none completely.
I told them I had a son more than a few years older than them, I told them what schools I thought were good. The Tam boy really wanted me to think he was a good person. He told me what big-name school he wants to go to. I told him it is not all that, but it can open doors. Because I was trying to leave both doors open, your degree cannot make you smart, it is just a degree. It just says you had opportunity and can follow directions. He told me he wants to “be somebody” I said, ”You already are somebody,you already have a shit-ton of value”
I asked him where his mother was, he briefly told me she chose a man over him and lives in a faraway from KS or CA state. I said, “I know that one” He told me he was okay with that, that she just had other priorities so it didn’t bother him, he was not going to care, his voice cracking. I told him it was okay to care, it was okay to care as long as he wanted and then some. ”Some shit you don’t get over, and that is okay too, don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t have a right to your own grief”
Then the really interesting thing happened, he fell back into impressing the “nice white-lady” not realizing that I too, have been through/seen some toe-curling shit, that so-and-so wasn’t going to make it because he started, “Acting black, stealing shit and disrespecting women”
I said, “Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa?”
He repeated himself. I made the back-up sound that trucks make, “beep-beep-beep, Wait just a minute now son acting what?”
“Black” he this boy who is black and wants me to think he is a good person told me.
If I had a pulpit in my pocket,would have so whipped it out, but I improvised. ”Honey, you have been watching too many Cops episodes, you think white people don’t steal? I have stolen, ( I did I have shop-lifted and also lifted a bag of Hawaiin from some boys that annoyed me, okay it was jr. high,but still) “
“How does he disrespect women?” I asked
“He calls them bitches” he answered.
“I call my best friends bitches, the bitches don’t bother me it is the ‘sluts’ the ownership of women’s sexuality that bothers me” They were stunned. ”That is what leads to violence against women”
The younger boy then told a story about being arrested for spitting on the sidewalk. First I told him, never to spit on the sidewalk, that is disgusting and can spread disease. Then I got super enthusiastic and started shouting, “See! See!” because I know this, all teenage boys are suspect. As I said, I raised one, in a boutique small-northern-cali town, who would go meet his friend after work at OMG 10:00 pm, and be run for warrants by local douchebag cops. The same cops that would help me search for my wayward dog. Because I am nice white-lady. The same cops when they tried to give me a ticket for a California-roll and I told them “What? I pushed on my brakes what more do you want from me?” I did not get a ticket.
I said, “You want to hear about ‘acting black?’ I was at pride a few years ago with some friends, a math teacher,actually AP Calculus,a nurse, and me, math teacher insisted even though it was 10:00 a.m. that we drink beers out of paper bags on the street. We did, we each got two, we drank the first with no problem,the second we got caught. The cops said, ‘Ladies, you know there are no bottles on the street’ so we are going to have to make you drink that up right now.” The cops and they were a full circle surrounded us pumping their fists shouting, “chug-chug-chug” and that was the end of that.
Shit, Tom-tom white as a snow-flake got hassled one year at Pride for walking home with an unopened can of Arizona Ice-Tea. Man-handled, because he was young and male which is apparently against the law, meanwhile his nice-lady white mother can drink with the encouragement of the po-po. Tom-tom, in his own neighborhood, my nmom thought it was because he looks so straight, which made a great joke,”What are you one of them there, HET-EeeRO-Sexuals? We don’t like your kind”
I wasn’t a 14 year-old boy who had no reason to understand the law, I was a totally enfranchised middle-class woman who was very aware. I was the one who wantonly disregarded it, and was rewarded with fun story. You want to tell me who acts “black”?
They listened to me, whether or not they can internalize that or not, Idk. They’ve got some heavy messages to work against and I was at my stop. Do I have the tools to offer them to navigate their way out of that system,no fucking way,since I was a girl I have had my own system that subscribes good qualities to me. That was not a free-ride either, that comes with its dark side too.
It upset me obviously. Our tender young, the messages they get, the information they are giving me like no one else can, sucks. It sucks that in one of the loveliest areas of the country a black kid turns to me and accusingly says someone else is “acting black” This is the best we can do? That is not true. Of course for me it came back to adoption, these kids, with their obvious race-based issues, being raised by their kin, what do transracial adoptees go through?
I don’t know, I can’t know, I do know that my desire is to listen to them and respect them and not ever correct them. I know so well the anguish this has caused me and I did not even lose a county, much less a culture and a language. It frightens me,and I am so disgusted with the blithe way most people deal with this. You may think I am just emo and bitchy, but really it is called being perceptive. Oh God, please stop it, if you want to nurture, there is no lack of opportunity. If you want attention,act like a spaz. But as that great philosopher Susan Porter (?)said, stop the madness.
Just because I find this so soothing to the upset:
This is the kind of song that opens the crown of my head,where all feel is love and connectivity, to everything. But I always come down from that and wonder about things, like the boys that rode on the bus, with its wheels spinning round and round.
