Estrangement, Politics, and Anti-Black Racism, Part II

Or: Prepare for Litigation by Debating Children. Or: Become a Radical at Breakfast

My mom didn’t wake up to help me get me ready for school most mornings (something that didn’t seem odd until I had my own children.) An early riser, my father would make me eggs and home fries from real potatoes. We read the newspaper over breakfast. He went through the front page, then local, then “Living,” where we would read Ann Landers together. I would start with “Living.”

Pop was eager to discuss the issues of the day. Early-morning arguments, picked with colleagues or loved ones, were his favorite way to warm up for criminal trials. (He was one of those lawyers that loved the courtroom: it was his personal stage. He would have made a fantastic actor, and now that I think of it, I wish he had, because the arts may have had a neutralizing effect on his cruelty and given him a safer supply for his narcissism. Or, maybe he would have been an even bigger monster.)

No wonder Mom preferred to sleep through breakfast. I’ve been a 45-year-old woman for about six years now, and I have to say, I too dislike bullshit in the morning. Still, it’s sobering to think that she had gone from young, promising lawyer at the Free Angela Davis march to depressed, hypersomnic stay-at-home mom in a matter of weeks, months, and years.

Roe v. Wade didn’t pass until January of 1973 (I was incorrect in part one when I said it was ‘72.)  As I was born in November of 1972, this would have meant they could not have legally terminated the pregnancy resulting in my birth. My father did tell me that she has an abortion after I was born, and now, with all that’s happened, I think it’s likely that she would have made that choice about me. But also, I think they probably were sentimental and starry-eyed about each other at the time and thought, why not have a baby that is just from the two of us, free from the complicated entanglements that go with stepchildren?

By the time I was eight or nine, Pop assigned me the role of liberal adversary/debate partner/trial prep. This consisted of him overwhelming me with vitriolic, conservative talking points. My developing brain would scramble while my small body filled with cold, acidic panic. Answers died on my tongue. I’d try to hold my own, but even a smart twelve-year-old is no match for a deeply unhappy fifty-something with narcissistic traits and a law degree.

Having a smart twelve-year-old now has me felling stunned for childhood me: my kid needs a lot of grace, respect and room to express emergent and developing ideals, values and opinions. My father offered me none of that, plus added antagonism, condescension and mockery. He would introduce me to issues far too inappropriate and adult for me to comprehend, and then interject his fucked-up opinions about them before I got to process the idea for myself.

I tried hard not to cry during this, but when I did, he say, by way of apology, that he talked to me this way because I was so smart, “Like steel sharpens steel, the mind sharpens the mind.”

He never told me that wasn’t his quote, but he said it so much and with such flourish that I suspected it wasn’t his. It’s actually from the Bible , and the differences between all of these different translations serves as a great example of why I don’t tend to get life tips from the Bible.

As for the verbal breakfast beat-downs: he would have preferred to wrangle with his wife.

I hated that he just assigned me as the lefty in our non-consensual debates; however, I did take the assignment. And ran with it. I’m lefty as shit. He would say, if you’re not a liberal when you’re young, you don’t have a heart and if you’re not a conservative when you’re old you don’t have a brain. He attributed it to Churchill but I found this little gem in the American Journal of Medicine in all places, that says, among other things, that the quote has been attributed to several people, all with slightly different variations that I would argue subtly change the meaning.

And honestly, the thought of the alternative to my assignment: being steadily indoctrinated into his belief system through the Nixon, Carter and Reagan years, like he did with my sisters, gives me the fucking willies. I would have preferred a loving father, but in lieu of that, I’ll take my scapegoating over their shepherding any day. And maybe that’s a problem, if I’m always identifying as a scapegoat, I can distance myself from when I am being an aggressor.

Today, I’m a walking advertisement for everything the Right hates. Red-state lawmakers are banning books and dismantling public education so people don’t turn out like me: a kid who read about slavery and genocide in school, thought girls were equal, wanted Black liberation, thought gay people should have equal rights, tried to be in touch with my feelings, enjoyed multicultural settings, and the whole sordid list of left-leaning offenses all the way from being too “mouthy” up to becoming a therapist.

But all of us live in a racist society and if you’re actively not trying to be an anti-racist, you contain racist beliefs and perpetuate racist actions, eg, you are one. As a white woman, I benefit in all sorts of ways from a racist society, even when I try to be an anti-racist. You can try to be an anti-racist and still do really fucked-up racist shit out of ignorance, misplaced rage, or destructive urges.

In Kindergarten, I told a little girl who I was playing with that my dad didn’t like Black people and that he called them names. This little girl was Black. Bravely, she told me that that was his opinion, and I felt guilty when she looked sad. I didn’t know why I had said that. I liked this girl. She was a person. She was a child. She was sweet and kind and had never done anything to me. I felt bad. As I should.

This is how guilt is supposed to function. I said a harmful thing, I saw and heard the reaction of the person it harmed, took it in, and in some age-related way understood what I did and why it was wrong.

As an adult I know that at that point in a micro-aggression—nah, let’s just say, an aggression, because it’s not micro to the person on the receiving end—that me the aggressor is supposed to apologize (say what I did wrong, why it was wrong, and announce what I was going to do differently in the future.)

Something Pop taught me had hurt someone. It made me look at him differently. He already made me feel uncomfortable and sometimes scared. This incident opened the way to seeing more of his harm.

I note now that I didn’t call Maya (not her real name) those names. And I didn’t repeat them. I said that he called them names. I knew enough not to say them, if not enough to lay this on another first grade child. When he said those names, especially after this incident, I told him to stop, and he did—around me. Around the same time, my brother Jack came out as gay, and my father’s homophobia came to the fore to temporarily drown out the sounds of his racism.

Please note: I don’t think issues of race or equity for minority people is politics. But the policies and practices used to suppress minorities are political, and that is why I’m discussing anti-Black racism in an essay alongside of politics.

I don’t have a racist bone in my body, I can still hear him say, Half my clients were Black and the other half Mexican!

If he had not been emotionally abusive to me, my mom, and his other kids, would I have seen the racism, noticed it was cruel? Would I have let the racism go? Would I have rolled my eyes and tensely laughed it off, the way my cousins did with their parents? What if he had been one of those men who are very kind and not abusive to everyone in their family and their social circle, but was horrible to minorities? What if he hadn’t profited financially from systems of exploitation that disproportionately affect, criminalize and incarcerate men of color? Did I go against his thinking because my own beliefs made more sense, or because I rebelled? All of us left-leaning white folks like to think we would do the right thing no matter what. But history does not agree.

My own mom got into her husband’s Cadillac, rolled up the window and rode in the passenger seat, away from the Free Angela Davis rally, and from any attempt to liberate Black woman, or Black people, or women, or people, and basically away from any type of grassroots activism whatsoever.

But at twelve, after one too many breakfast litigation warmups with my father, I started listening to my mom more. She told me stories of being sexually harassed in law school, and also that I could be anything I wanted.

Puberty was coming. So were the Mid 1980s. It was a confusing time.

To be continued. Stay tuned for part III.