Behind the Eight Ball
| Printer-friendly format | |
| Share This Story Comment On This Story All Volume 002 Stories About IKR IKR Authors | |
April 2006
When I was a kid, my mother and stepfather assured me that race wouldn?t matter when I grew up. That was back in the ?70s. They were clearly in denial?not only about race, but also about class. Their wishful thinking set the tone for my experiences in post Civil Rights-era America. I naively bumbled and stumbled my way through many landmines, internalizing each and every misstep.
Mom was the daughter of a first-generation Irish woman hell bent on achieving the American dream. Grandmother came of age in depression-era Hell?s Kitchen, with a mother who spoke with a heavy brogue. By marrying granddad (a hardworking German boy from Queens), she escaped to Astoria and the cookie cutter, working-class suburb of Massapequa Park.
I tracked my biological dad down when I was 27. We met in the East Village, walked west to 8th Street, and I bought him coffee because he didn?t have cash. The father I fantasized about was a heroin addict who still relied on his Teamster-secretary father for food and shelter. He was the son of South Georgia sharecroppers who moved north in the 1940s, settling in the projects in Harlem. My paternal grandmother was mentally ill, and my paternal grandfather left the family when my dad was 16, remarried a younger woman, and raised a second family on suburban Long Island. My father was the first in his family to attend college?he got caught smoking pot with white boys and was thrown out.
My parents believed they could escape their backgrounds simply by leaving home. But race and class were nipping at their heels. After dropping out of college, my mother found herself penniless in New York City, estranged from her parents, forced to work as an artist?s nude. Her beauty brought suitors?who paid for food and rent?but her self-destructiveness attracted troubled men. My biological father, according to my aunt, loved white women. But after hearing about how he beat my mother, I know that wasn?t true. I think he just loved?and despised?what they represented. He believed, he told me, that my mother was from a wealthy family. My maternal grandmother would have been proud.
My mother convinced my stepfather to marry her. She was an unwed mother, with a black child, and her parents had disowned her. She couldn?t cope. I think my mother believed my stepfather had connections?he knew playwrights, actors, rich folks?but I suspect they kept him around for amusement. The son of coalminers, he was the first person in his family to leave Appalachia. He hitchhiked his way from Southwest Virginia to California (he worked in factories along the way), where he hoped to become an actor. His headshots scream James Dean.
When my stepfather had the opportunity to move us out of Alphabet City (I now had a half sister), he took it. He played guitar for an experimental theater group that rented a farm in the Poconos for a summer. At the end of the summer, the troupe went back to New York?we stayed. Thus began a decade and a half of welfare, drugs, hippies, infidelity, spousal and child abuse, and the birth of two more children. There were good times?my stepfather, with the help of friends, farmed, built windmills and wine cellars, and grew acres of weed. But when I was10, we were evicted by an honest-to-god sea of cops, rifles at the ready. The locals were more than happy to see the dirty hippies go. For two years, we were on the road.
It?s still hard for me to believe my parents? audacity. I chalk it up to denial, drugs, working-class guff, youth, and general insanity. But payback was a bitch. Because of their refusal to ?work for the man,? we lived in humiliating, abject poverty, on the fringes of extravagant wealth. We always seemed to land in wealthy hot spots, filled with the glamorous folk (biggies in music, theater, arts) my parents aspired to be.
My parents took me out of school in the beginning of third grade. I was relieved. My teacher was openly hostile and the other kids, who had been friendly in first grade, began to notice I was black. I missed out on four grades, and was ill prepared when I reentered school in junior high. I was placed in slow classes in math and science, and my teachers did not expect more from me.
High school in the early ?80s was torture. I was one of six black kids in a school of 1,000. The school was a mix of redneck kids, IBM kids, and rich kids from the local arts colony. I was a nervous wreck, overweight, not used to being around my peers. For the first time, I experienced vicious racism. I didn?t have the right clothes for school and my hair was wrong. The shame I felt was all encompassing. I?m embarrassed about how hard I tried to appear middle class, knowing how ridiculous I must have seemed.
My mother had no time for my woes. She lashed out with words, fists, and constant emotional abuse. She compared me to my blonde, blue-eyed sister who was able to ?pass? as a normal teenager. I was the target of abuse in the family, the cipher. I don?t know how I survived.
Some poor white kids have a chance, especially if they?re smart and good-looking. Teachers who gave me an A, but were emotionally distant, took the time to visit my sister at home because they worried about her. Local families included her in their lives, and she spent most of her time away from home. A woman in our hometown pushed her to go to a Seven Sisters College, and she received a scholarship from the Daughters of the American Revolution at graduation.
I went to a local state school and then transferred to a better state school. College freed me. I lost weight, my chronic asthma disappeared, and I was finally one of the ?cool kids.? But I was racially isolated, never dated, and distanced myself from the working-class black kids from New York City. After graduation, I was lost. I had no career goals, no prospects, no help from home. I had never figured out what I should do?survival seemed enough?and I was far more concerned with fitting in with the artsy crowd. I was finally the child my mother wanted me to be. But without the financial support, guidance, or knowledge of the adult working world that my white friends had, I was on the road to nowhere.
I moved to New York City, and thus began almost a decade of minimum wage jobs. I worked for an Ivy League university for two years, for a professor who openly despised me. I now believe it was because she could not figure me out?mixed race (which she commented on), college educated, but at an inferior college (which she told me point blank), a secretary who didn?t fit the idea she had of what a young black woman should be. In the interview, she asked me if I had children. I felt like an unwed mother from the projects. I felt ashamed.
I did not have the confidence to apply for career-track jobs. I did not know how to ask for help?I knew nothing about mentors or old boy/girl networks. I didn?t have the confidence middle-class black kids had, and I didn?t know how to cope with racism. At times I felt absolutely alone in the world. My half sister was in college at this point, friends with shockingly rich people, and seemingly at home in that world. I felt a complete failure.
And then, at age 27, I was accepted into a graduate African American studies program at an elite university. I had finally made it. Or not. Race, according to my professors, was a social construct that had no real meaning. Class, as a white student explained to a dark-skinned, working class student, was based on what you liked. I knew I could not survive in this world. And I sabotaged myself by not completing my assignments and focusing my energy on a guy who wanted nothing to do with me. Familial habits die hard.
In my 30?s, I soldiered on. I took secretarial jobs that paid the rent and began writing. I?ve never had a real career, and I owe that Ivy League university a load of money. Like my parents, I sometimes dream of striking it rich. Unlike them, I do realize that dreaming doesn?t pay the rent or solve social inequality. Today my mother and stepfather are both mentally unstable and living in the desert outside of Palm Springs. My mother, in her dementia, has become a virulent racist. I haven?t seen her in more than 20 years. My stepfather still rants about ?the system,? while still asking for and taking handouts. Theirs is a painful legacy to shoulder.
I often wonder what would have happened to me if I?d been born in the late 1980s or the 1990s. I?m pretty sure I would be screwed. I probably would have been placed in the foster-care system, I wouldn?t have had access to higher education, and I would have been prey to all the ills that consume poor?and sometimes minorities from the lower and middle classes?kids.
Although my life has been a struggle, I?ve had advantages. I grew up in a friendlier social climate, I received a good liberal arts education, and I was exposed to a few progressive adults, black and white, who believed in me. And no matter how I feel on the inside, I?m an educated, light-skinned black woman who can pass for middle class.
Race and class matter a lot right now. Our society worships money, power, celebrity, fantasy, and the quick fix. Affirmative action and scholarships for folks who come from generations of poverty are supposed to level the playing field. If you?re a minority from a middle-class family, there?s a good chance you know the rules of the game. But if you?re from the underclass, it?s almost as if you?re set up to fail.
My youngest white half sister, despite a stellar boarding school education (a philanthropist paid for her education) and a full scholarship to a top-tier school, could never shake off the memories of a traumatic childhood, which included the heroin death of my half brother. She dropped out of school, began hanging out with kids who?d experienced the same sort of trauma she?d grown up with, and eventually found herself in jail.
Many working-class kids aspire to a fantasy world that celebrates fast money and fast living?and accepts death, despair, and disenfranchisement as a fact of life. I wonder if their parents try to school them about race and class or if they?re too busy working?or too blown out by their own private despair to even care.
I have read hundreds of books on class, race, and self-esteem and am a sucker for every kind of new-age healing experience. And yet I continue to feel unmoored and unanchored, as if I don?t have an identity, beyond the color of my skin, my educated accent, and my achievements. What I crave is family?not the one given to me, but an imagined one that would have helped me navigate these landmines. I sometimes think that desegregation truly eviscerated the black community. My own black family is far more concerned with Escalades, social status, and their ministers than with their neighbors.
I can only imagine the dilemmas faced by the last two generations of a rapidly deteriorating black, Hispanic, and white working class: poverty, domestic violence, single-parent households surviving on a dime, incarceration, AIDS, and homelessness. Today?s kids are being raised by parents even more destitute and despairing than my own?they need a village, and they need it fast.
