A Death In Our Family

So here we are again - communities enraged and demanding action, tweeted sentiments from the famous folks, eloquent words from our nation's Commander in Chief, and the dueling camps shouting "Black Lives Matter"/"Blue Lives Matter"/"All Lives Matter" while television cameras stand poised and waiting for the balloon of frustration to pop and set our streets on fire. But all I feel is sympathy for two families grieving the wasted lives of two black men who made a difference every day in the lives of their families, their friends and their communities. Five little children will wake up every day for the rest of their lives knowing that their daddy is gone and will never return. A young woman will never be able to close her eyes at night without seeing her boyfriend killed before her eyes. Two men died, and though they were not related to me by blood or by marriage it still feels as if there has been a death in the family.

A look through my Facebook posts showed me that I wasn't alone in this sense of communal grief. One of my friends, who is white, told me that he felt ashamed to face his friends who are black. What he might not have guessed, though, was that I, too, felt ashamed of my own inaction and fear. I have consciously chosen to stay out of tough conversations regarding race and racial violence out of a sense of self-preservation. In college, black student enrollment on my campus hovered around 20-30 students out of 1100 students total. What this meant in practical terms was that acts of racism on campus went unanswered.

My graduate school career was almost the exact opposite - no racist jokes or overt acts of racism - but there was a pressure to conform to a certain flatness of being that de-gendered, un-raced, and erased cultural and sexual forms of self-expression that might mar the soup of inclusivity. In this pre-NPR StoryCorps framework, one could talk about racism and sexism and any other "-ism" as if they happened outside of ourselves. This approach allowed us to dissect and discuss and dialog (used here as a verb) in a way that allowed everyone to fully engage without being labeled as victim or aggressor. Yet, even in this environment I was uncomfortable with sharing just how uncomfortable this process made me feel.  To share my experiences would mean that I would have to share my own feelings of helplessness and fear and anger and once you go there it's difficult for people to un-see it. But, that's what happens when we grieve - the masks come off and we're face to face with the rawness of sorrow, and sorrow is what I feel right now, and it's really what we all feel, isn't it?

Let's unmask ourselves and look at a world whose face is contorted in sorrow. Sorrow for the deaths of these two black men and the thousands of others killed in this country; sorrow for the thousands of people slaughtered in acts of terrorism; sorrow for the mothers, sisters, daughters and aunts who are raped and murdered; sorrow for the military families whose loved ones are not coming home; sorrow for the scores of refugees who, right now, are braving oceans with their babies and belongings strapped on their backs looking for a safe place; and yes, even the sorrow of a law enforcement officer who has taken someone's life and is beginning to question how it all got so out of hand so quickly.

I thought that I was creating a safe space for myself where I could hold the sorrow at bay. I used anger and sarcasm - every weapon I had at my disposal to distance myself from my feelings. But, there is no such thing as a safe space. The barriers we erect can and will be breached because sorrow has no gender, race, religion or nationality. Growing up Roman Catholic, I remembered the nuns teaching us about the saints and what was called the "gift of tears" - a way that the Holy Spirit manifested itself through their tears during times of distress. Pope Francis has spoken several times about the "gift of tears":

We are a society that has forgotten the experience of weeping, of 'suffering with'. 
-Pope Francis, Excerpt from homily delivered in Lampedusa, Italy July 2013

On the day that we buried my father, I let go of all dignity and decorum and collapsed weeping into the arms of my friends who had come to mourn with me.  They held me up and my sorrow became our sorrow. And so we all mourn together, now - black people, brown people, white people, men, women, transgender, cisgender, lesbian, gay, straight, questioning - because there has been a death in our family.

Microphone Check: On NPR, Race, and Code-Switching

When my husband emailed the link to an NPR news story last week, I rolled my eyes, as I usually do when he shares all things NPR with me. I'm not a fan of NPR. And it's not because I worked on commercial radio in a market where the local NPR station was competition for us. OK, it's not just because of that. No, NPR has always irritated me because of the vocal delivery of the on-air hosts and reporters. Their measured, vibrato-less speech, the vocal equivalent of wrapping oneself in a warm, but not too warm, blanket for a nap in your perfectly shabby-chic fixer Craftsman house with the assurance that everything is alright. The NPR voice has always been, for me, the voice of smugness. And so, I've rejected the NPR worldview as they report from war-torn ports of call around the globe while putting a reassuring hand on your tummy, rubbing gently and cooing, "There, there. It's OK."

So, back to the link forwarded to me by my husband. Well, the title sounded promising - "Challenging the Whiteness of Public Radio".  The author, Chenjerai Kumanyika, an African American man who is an assistant professor at Clemson University, had been putting the finishing touches on the script for a piece he'd done about fishermen, but as he was doing a final review of the piece before he recorded it, the only voice he could hear internally was what he considered to be the kind of white voice typically heard on public radio: "Without being directly told, people like me learn that our way of speaking isn't professional. And you start to imitate the standard or even hide the distinctive features of your own voice."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Throughout my life, I've been ridiculed by other African Americans for "talking white." My mom had always "talked proper", which I think was code back in the day for "talking white." Mom had been a studious child, and a voracious reader at one of the top schools in the area during segregation. Mom had occupied the hours of her childhood taking piano lessons, and watching great Hollywood movies, or visiting with her school teacher aunt who loved reading out loud. By second grade, I had transferred to a predominately white school and was also spending my free time at the piano, reading, and watching old movies with my grandmother. And so like other children, my vocal patterns mimicked my environment. 

So I wasn't aware that there was a problem until high school. My high school was about 70 percent African American. This was the first time since first grade that I was in an environment where most of the people looked like me. But, not everybody sounded like me, and so I learned that this could be a problem. I became socially isolated. It was a small school so you knew everybody, but friendships were rare for me. Mom was still over-protective and I wasn't allowed to socialize with anyone beyond the school day. So no parties, no Friday nights at the movies with my girlfriends, and definitely no sleepovers. I was missing out on first-person interactions with black culture. I relied on cable TV to educate me, with shows like "Rap City" and "Yo!MTV Raps." There were the trips to the beauty parlor and the ready supply of Ebony, Jet, Essence and Black Enterprise magazines. But even among the black women gathered for our relaxers and press and curls, my manner of speaking was either cause for laughter or alarm, though they all seemed to excuse me when they saw one of my textbooks tucked under my plastic cape, and then they'd all cluck that I was getting my education and so "talking white" was just a way of getting by and getting ahead. 

By the time I'd made it to undergrad, at another predominately white school where I was a super-minority, my fluidity in "talking white" was more muscle memory and no one made mention of it, not even the ladies at the hairdresser. All was well until just a few years after grad school when I took a job at a classical music radio station and listened to my voice on my first aircheck tape. In my head, my voice sounded deep and assertive but on-tape, it sounded leaden and overly formal. My boss coached me to smile more, get conversational and more friendly, to sound like the other women DJs on my station. Did I mention that those other women were white? What he failed to understand was that part of my on-air problem was a continual inner dialogue on race that I was having every time I opened the mic: Did I sound too black? Would the white listeners reject me for sounding black? And so I dug in, trying to hone my voice into a listener-friendly level of whiteness. This, in the days before we talked about things like code-switching. 

In the end, I failed. Anonymous listeners posted nasty comments about me, wondering if I was black and, if I was, what I was doing on a classical music station. The constant anxiety of trying to keep my black from showing distracted me from loving my job. Scrubbing every script so that my cultural references weren't too...exotic. Carefully crafting on-air smalltalk that embodied the smug familiarity of public radio. I had enough!
I remember one conversation with my former boss before we called it a day, where he was critiquing my on-air performance. He wanted me to get more comfortable, more relatable, to share my authentic self with the listeners. I didn't have an answer for him that day, but I do now. It's hard to give your authentic self when you've been suppressing so much of it for so long. I don't actually know what I really sound like. Writing this makes me so sad because that part of me - my voice - is gone and I can never reclaim it. Maybe that's why I don't listen to NPR. Maybe it's the realization that one of those highly-educated people of color reporting across the airwaves had to black-check themselves before they did their job. Maybe it's knowing that there is a cost to that behavior. 

Black-Shaming: Standing Up for Standing Out

"You's a fool!" "You're simple!" "You so crazy!" "You're stupid!" If you think these sound like insults, then you don't know black people, or maybe you do. These phrases are often thrown around as humorous descriptions of a person who has a different take on reality. As a black person myself, these phrases astound me and offend me, mostly because other black people have directed them at me. "Shannon, you're simple!" "Girl, you a fool!" And while they say it with laughter, usually after I've made them laugh, I've never been able to figure out the unholy mystery of why people of my own race would engage with me using words that used to describe those who were mentally impaired.  

That my awareness of All Things Black is spotty, to say the least, shouldn't be a surprise. I've always existed around the fringes of Popular Black Culture (PBC), starting from childhood and my over-protective mother. I know, it's unfair to call on Dr. Freud, but this really is Mom's fault! Mom grew up in that mythical "village" that Hillary Clinton made popular years ago. Mom's village was a small town, just on the DC/Maryland line, where it seemed a relative of hers lived on virtually every street, and her elementary school and high school classmates were also her cousins. It was small town USA in a segregated America and the only people Mom saw were also the only people Mom trusted. For her, Hippies were what you saw on the news, and the March on Washington was in a land far away, even though it was only a few miles from her home! There were no giant afros (though she did have an afro wig that she'd occasionally sport at parties), and Black Power meant they had paid the electric bill on time!

Growing up, I knew Mom and Dad were counter-cultural. Mom would rock her short natural/no make-up look while the other black moms had relaxed their hair and put on Jordache Jeans, and Dad would pick us up in whatever wheezing hooptie he'd found in someone's backyard, or in one of his vans. The only labeled clothing I wore back in those days were Sears Toughskins! While my high school classmates were experimenting with hair color, multiple piercings, and expensive designer clothing and handbags and car dates with boys, I was taking piano lessons and reading and fantasizing about what the world outside of my alternate reality was really like.

I got a taste of that world in college and in graduate school, but, I took a most decidedly non-PBC course - no HBCUs or black sororities. I went where the scholarships took me and I pledged a sorority of women who were my friends, although we were more Benetton ad than "A Different World." The visits home during those college and grad school years were a series of awkward pauses. Because I really wasn't allowed to socialize during high school, I had no basis for developing friendships and extending those into adulthood. I had never developed the standardized frame of reference regarding Popular Black Culture, and I became alien, which, I guess, makes me a fool/simple/crazy/stupid? 

I don't know, but I do know that there's a bit of whiplash that you develop when you're straddling the race and class lines. It's like you have levels of awareness that allow you to exist both inside and outside of an experience. It's an explosion of dozens of frames of reference, causing me to see things and evaluate situations in a myriad of different ways simultaneously. It is the source of my humor but it can also be a source of despair. I don't think this makes me unique. I think all people do this, but they choose to ignore it and opt for what's comfortable or most expedient. Right now, the world is mourning the loss of a man who thought outside of what was comfortable and did what was right. There's nothing simple about that.

Spike Lee vs. Madea

If you find it impossible to keep track of all of the celebrity feuds, let me draw your attention to one that's gained my attention - that between director Spike Lee and Madea, actually the creative spirit behind Madea, actor/director/empire builder Tyler Perry. Spike Lee has accused Tyler Perry of peddling the worst in racist stereotypes of African American culture, calling Perry's Madea movies tantamount to the old "Amos and Andy" routines. And at a recent press conference to promote the latest installment of Madea's misadventures, when asked about the criticisms leveled against him by Lee, Perry answered, "Spike can go straight to hell!!" Not the level of discourse you'd expect from a man who has Oprah on speed dial!

The war of words between the two directors has placed many people on the fence. As the box office receipts tell it, audiences have a soft spot for Tyler Perry's movies. His films have grossed half a billion dollars, a testament to the loyal, mostly African American audience who flock to his films. But while Perry spins hard knocks inside of sentimental sweetness, Spike Lee has always been more art-house in his approach to the dilemmas of everyday existence for African Americans. Perry will give you a lump in your throat, but Lee will give you a bump on your head. Tyler Perry writes in the language of R&B, while Lee gives you a symphonic tone poem fused with Charlie Mingus.

I grew up watching Spike Lee's films. They were events and my generation remembers the day that we waited in line to see Do the Right Thing, School Daze, and Jungle Fever. His films made us angry, yes, but they also made us think about race in a way that was different from how our parents thought of it. He managed to make poetry out of the violence and frustration of a generation. When you left the theater after a Spike Lee movie, you felt introspective and reflective. There was no happy Hollywood ending, there was only the beginning of a new day. We'd spend hours in the dorms dissecting his films, looking for the moral and ethical threads that tied the characters together, and confronting the myriad ambiguities that Lee seemed to throw in our path at every turn.

I first learned about Tyler Perry at the hair salon when someone popped in a bootlegged performance of one of his stage plays (back in the days before camera phones and YouTube, the bootlegged concert tape was how things went viral!). The whole shop erupted in squeals of laughter and "oh no he didn'ts".  Tuning in to Black radio stations, I'd hear the commercials blaring the upcoming performances of the latest Tyler Perry production, but I was resistant to his charms. I held out until 2001 when Diary of a Mad Black Woman hit theaters and my mother insisted that I see it with her, my sister, and the aunties. It was the craziest roller coaster I'd ever ridden, from a pot-smoking, gun-toting, mumu-wearing six-feet-tall transvestite named Madea to the final scene ripped straight out of An Officer and a Gentleman, with the Richard Gere character swapped out for the hunky Shemar Moore. I was hooked - but I had to keep my affections on the down-low.

Both of these men tell the truth about the African American experience because there isn't just one Black experience. If the British, with their nobility, can still make room for the low-budget sci-fi world of Doctor Who and the dirty-minded slapstick of Benny Hill, then why can't I have my Spike Lee and my Tyler Perry? If the French, with their haute couture and haute cuisine can barely suppress a chuckle when confronted with the antics of Jerry Lewis, then why can't I have a little Brooklyn and the ATL?? And if Utah's biggest export of Donnie and Marie can be both a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll, then I declare that both Mr. Lee and Mr. Perry have dual citizenship in my heart and head. There - case closed! I'm just saying:)