Estrangement, Politics, and Anti-Black racism

A Tale Of Two Rallies

They say, don’t break family ties over politics.

Why else are folks breaking ties?

Because even if ties don’t break over Politics, there are politics over broken ties.

I moved back to the Bay Area in 2007, on purpose, to be closer to family. If I was to marry, I thought, it would be better to meet someone here, and settle down near my people (immediate and extended family. It would be great, I thought, to finally have community.)

It was not great.

Despite coming from them, they turned out not to be my people.

It was not because of politics. It was not not about politics.

“The personal is political,” wrote Kate Millet, pioneer feminist scholar, author of the classic: “Sexual Politics,” and the kind of broad my dad hated.

Imagine a conservative Republican Italian-American man with swarthy good looks and a little roughness around the right edges married to a beautiful, redheaded, Stanford-educated progressive Democrat. Both of them are practicing attorneys. They marry during the height of American prosperity in the middle class: 1970, a time when this would have happened (also: the year “Sexual Politics” was published. ) They are eleven years apart in age, vastly different in their backgrounds, but they are both single with children from previous marriages.

They met on opposite sides of a divorce case, and I’m really not kidding: she represented the woman and he the man. He “liked the way she handled herself in court,” and when she needed a new job, she gave him, the owner of a building and a group practice, a call. He was happy to hire another lawyer to do divorce law: ever since Reagan signed the No Fault Family Law Act into California law in 1969, divorce litigation was no longer fun for Pop. If you didn’t have to prove someone did something wrong, then what was the point?

Her job interview was also apparently a girlfriend interview, which she passed. They started working together and married quickly. She was on oral contraceptives, or the Pill, which had been introduced in 1960. One day, birth control pills give her a bad, scary migraine during a court appearance. She went off the oral contraceptives briefly, or so she thought, to try some medication for the headaches and to consider an IUD (probably the Dalkon Shield, which was very popular but ended up causing many cases of pelvic inflammatory disease, sepsis, and sometimes death, causing the device to be suspended by the FDA in 1974. Ten years later, the resulting lawsuits bankrupted the company.)

In that span of time between ceasing oral contraceptives and getting to her IUD appointment, I was conceived.

My birth came in November; at the cold, rainy end of 1972: a year that proved to be a tipping point for so many things. The people of the world saw the first image of earth from space, the famous “Blue Marble” photo taken from Apollo. Roe v. Wade passed giving women the right to healthcare procedures that terminates pregnancy. The Civil Rights Act-and the end of Jim Crow-had only passed eight years earlier. The ERA passed that year, before dying a sabotaged death eight years later. Watergate happened. Everything back then was political. I’m guessing underneath it all, everything was still personal.

Just like now.

I don’t know how Mom got past Pop’s casual chauvinism and Pop her seething feminism. I’m sure their six month courtship-to-marriage timeline and them not wanting to be single parents anymore helped them look past their differences.

One day in 1972, my father drove his car— I imagine it as a white Cadillac, but he’s had a lot of different cars—up to the curb at la Plaza de Cesar Chavez downtown-back before it was la Plaza de Cesar Chavez—actually, probably around the time Cesar Chavez was jailed for continuing a boycott. My father stopped at this curb on that day because he saw my mother attending an Angela Davis rally held there.

While researching this piece, I found this amazing footage of the rally that I believe my mom attended, by searching for “Free Angela Davis rally San Jose 1972.” What looks like a few hundred people, most of them Black, marched from the county courthouse to the criminal courthouse on Hedding, right by the jail, the same jail that Pop would take me to on the Saturdays I got stuck with him when he was working. I believe they then returned to the plaza to rally.

Angela was in the jail during the march and rally. She could hear the people cheering for her protection and safety.

• * * *

Lately, I’ve seen a lot of writing in the anti-racism sphere about who gets protected, who gets to be delicate and who gets to be rescued, and how Black women get left out of the narrative. This story by B.A. Parker on NPR’s Code Switch is about how American girlhood is represented by Taylor Swift’s image. Parker cites a study by Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality which found that Black girls, especially between 5 and 14, “are perceived as less innocent and more adult-like” than their white age-mate peers.

Parker’s guest, Leah Donella, says that the study “also found that compared to white girls of the same age, survey participants perceive that Black girls need less nurturing. Black girls need less protection. Black girls need to be supported less. Black girls need to be comforted less. Black girls are more independent. Black girls know more about adult topics. And Black girls know more about sex. And that brings us back to how Taylor Swift is perceived,” which is, she argues, part of “this special, protected group” of white women that includes, say, Taylor Swift, but not a pre-weight loss Adele, and definitely not Megan Thee Stallion, who is younger than Swift and was involved in a court case at the same time as Swift, and even though her body was harmed by a gun, was treated very differently in the media.

• * *

Fifty years ago, the Bay Area Black community showed up to protect Angela.

I scan the footage intensely, looking for my mother, hoping-but-not-hoping to see a capture of my father pulling her away, kind of the way you hope you see a ghost but also would be scared to actually see evidence of one. I don’t see my parents.

What I do see is a lot of strong Black people, united. When was the last time that happened in this city? My former A & E editor Mike tells me the city doesn’t make an effort to support small performance venues that bring mid-tier and up-and-coming hip hop acts to town. Is that why? Fear of a Black Planet? Or, fear of seeing a bunch of proud African Americans assembled in a group, raising their fists, standing up for themselves and each other?

Why is that scary? It didn’t scare my mom. It did scare my pop. And then she went with him..because he scared her?

It’s only scary if you think Black people in power would treat us the way we have treated them.

Angela Davis was born in Alabama, studied at Brandeis, Frankfurt, UCLA, San Diego and Berlin. She became engaged in far-left politics from her studies, and was fired from UCLA for being a Communist, and when she was reinstated because the firing was found illegal, was fired again for “inflammatory language.” In 1970, guns belonging to her were used in an armed takeover of a Marin County Courtroom, in which people were killed. She was prosecuted for three felonies and held in jail over a year and was acquitted in 1972.

The day my mom attended the protest, Ms. Davis was in jail here in San José where her trial was moved to and where she was acquitted by a jury and freed. The movement to support her was called the “Free Angela Davis” movement.

I imagine a beautiful woman among the white people dotting the crowd, with red hair and cool clothes.

I imagine Pop driving by the protest, simultaneously shaking his head and condemning the politics while checking out numerous fine Black women. That would be when he saw Mom, parked, got out, marched up and yanked her by the arm. He pulled her into the car, away from the Free Angela Davis rally. “What do you think you’re doing? People I know will see you!” he fumed, incredulous.

The day Mom told me that story was the day I realized that anti-Black racism is at the core of conservative politics, though I would not be able to articulate it that way for years to come. Now, the anti-Black racism in conservative politics is so obvious that it hits anyone with sense over the head.

But, the political is personal, right Kate Millet? And my father was a criminal defense attorney, a Nixon guy, and a lawyer for Mafia guys. I’m guessing the South Bay Italian mafia and the Black Panthers were at odds in 1972. Plus, my father did say that around that time he had FBI guys watching him because of those Mafia men.

Not only that, but my father’s livelihood as a criminal defense attorney depended on the existence of the carceral state, which provided a steady stream of Black and non-Black men of color, plus white bikers and white-collar criminals, and the woman trafficked by all of those men who were then passed around between the back seats of cop cars to jail cells.

So I can only guess that Pop’s urgency to get my mom out of there was intense.

Up until now, I have thought about that story in terms of my father not letting her be there, not seeing I was buying into the idea that he owned her. Lately I’ve been thinking about how she chose to leave the rally rather than stay and stand up for Angela Davis, and that she had this choice. As a white feminist, her life was not on the line.

• * *

Growing up around smart, educated people, I became interested in history and current events. Learning about them caused me to take after Mom. I leaned left. Pop blamed Mom, the State of California, and public schools.

I don’t even remember talking to him about issues, or how he found out what I thought about politics, or history, or civil rights. It almost feels like he assigned me the role. But it fit.

“You can’t really help being a bleeding heart,” he would reason, “they teach you that in school.”

Maybe that’s true. I did feel good when my second grade teacher played “Free to Be You and Me.”

I did pay attention in American history and feel horrified by learning of the genocide of Native Americans and of the slave trade and the history of enslaved Africans in the US.

But I never even talked about that to him. I knew it needed to be secret. How did he know how I felt or what I thought? He didn’t ask me.

After middle school it got even worse. So much later, I learned what set him off.

In 1984 or ’85, when I was in middle school, my mom gave me permission to go to a program celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, with my friend Minoo, on the Freedom Train from San Jose to Oakland on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. (Reagan had signed into law the act that made MLK Jr.’s birthday a holiday.) It was a lovely day. I felt so grown up riding the train. As we lined up at the Caltrain station, a motherly, mayoral Black woman came up to us and said, “Thank you so much for coming,” in a power move that both made us feel welcome and let us know we were guests in their space. It was instructive to be the only white person (Minoo was a non-Black brown girl) in our train car. The speeches were poignant; the music, good. It was a good day that put me on a road that kept myself trying to get on the right side of history.

I had no idea I made Pop mad.

Mom called me thirty years later on MLK’s birthday to tell me that my father had been incensed about it at the time. Apparently, I had come home and told him all about how great the day was, and all of the things I learned in the program. He was utterly silent and stone faced, which made me really uncomfortable, so I probably moved on or left the room.

“You knew about this?” was all he would say, to my mother, in the privacy of their room later that night. “You let her do this?”

Kind of like, “People I know could have seen you!”

Never saying the quiet part out loud.

After that, my father became more combative, and less protective, toward me.

Thirty years later, on Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, Mom was gleeful on that phone call. I don’t know why she waited so long to tell me.

To Be Continued………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………