Rebecca Morean's Open Salon Blog

Pacifiers and Hoodies

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:03:24 -0400

Last month, in Complicity, I wrote how infuriated I became when confronted with a white woman who shared with me her unsolicited world view: “They can’t follow instructions….Black people.” The second to last paragraph garnered angry letters and comments. I concluded the piece by writing about our family’s move just a mile outside our integrated town to an all white, rural street.

"When I moved several months ago, a mile from our old home, to just outside Yellow Springs, I ran around and introduced myself to my neighbors, who are now all white, casually mentioning my younger daughter is Korean and my son African American, and that he often forgets his house key, so please don’t shoot him if you see him prowling around the house and breaking in through a window. This was offered with a smile and a plate of cookies my son made. "

I was accused of over reaction. That I was a “white racist.” That I was painting white folks in rural communities with a kind of NASCAR-NRA-shoot-first-ask-questions-later brush.

The issues, however, are far more nuanced. If the problem could be that easily identified, Trayvon Martin would not be dead.

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell illustrates the neuroscience of racism in the second half of his book on decisions we make in nanoseconds. From trusting “intuition,” to make rock solid conclusions, correctly identifying a forged piece of art for example, he then moves to explain the downside of snap decisions and racism reigns at the forefront of that discussion. He even explains how, even though he is half African American, his response time associating positive qualifiers to people of color was slower than when he associated these same qualifiers for white people.

I get this. I get ingrained stereotypes and how people fight them everyday in small and large ways. That there are covert forms of racism and prejudice.

What is undeniable is the fact Trayvon Martin was not shot in a blink of an eye, or because of the horrid tragedy of our own horrid history lying latent in someone’s mind. As tragic and inexcusable as that set of circumstances would be, his death is even more horrific. And jaw dropping baffling his killer walks free.

Trayvon is dead because of the potent and deadly cocktail of fear and racism chased with expansive gun rights and a grandiose cowboy mentality. This in a country which consistently finds suspicion with intellectuals and finds resonance with brutality and force and, ironically, the "rights" of the individual.

As a white parent of a black child, I watch daily how everything I understood intellectually, is now punishing my heart and generating real fear for my son. As he has grown, my fear has grown visceral.

When John was little, everyone, even strangers were supportive and sweet and kind. He was adorable—wispy down soft hair, burbling giving away to soft babbling and then to speech. Now, at 13, he stands in the mirror looking twice Trayvon’s age, perfecting the teenage blank stare, hoodie up. He does not understand how some people will think that stare is a threat to their life.

Two months ago, I left the movie theater with my two youngest. Walking across the parking lot, John started rough housing with this sister. There was grabbing and squealing. She’s tiny and cute, and impossibly loud. I saw four people get out of their cars and watch him. Hoodie up, they could not have seen his face, which was full of younger brother glee. I walked fast to catch him and put my arm around his shoulders and then behind closed car doors, I lectured them both for the millionth time about the dangers of acting out in public and not to do it. I never had this talk with my two older white children. There was not the fear one of them would be shot.

I am plagued with a recurring nightmare that burrowed its way into my psyche after Ohio passed its conceal and carry law. I am sitting in a parked car. John is grown, big, tall, his face wildly expressive and he is laughing really hard, head thrown back, and then I start to tickle him and he me. We are laughing and tackling each other. Suddenly we are showered in bullets, the windshield exploding. He is dead, covered in blood. I am screaming. White people surround the car and ask if I am all right. They do not understand he is my son. They are convinced he was hurting me. They won’t let me touch him. I can’t speak.

I’ve had this dream four times and I never have nightmares.

John will stand close to seven feet tall. When I first heard this from the pediatrician, I knew his manners would have to be impeccable. His mere presence will be seen as a threat. I will fear for him the rest of my life.

Complicity

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 13:02:37 -0500

Those people. Them. They.

Mob mentality is viscerally frightening. Even if played out on the flat surface of the television, the sight of people running amok, smashing windows, storefronts, setting buildings, cars, themselves sometimes on fire, is enough to set my fight or flight response into action.

But last summer, I couldn’t flee. I fought.

It wasn’t physical mob mentality. Not a mob in the sense of hundreds or thousands of people pushing and shoving and shouting and cursing for some cause I do or do not agree with. This was an invisible mob, a kind of silent, insidious, but massive wave of mob mentality whose squalid birthplace lay 150 years ago when one person could still own another. And it happened at 4-H.

I was asked to judge the creative writing competition, and so I arrive at the large assembly hall at the Greene County fairgrounds with my stack of writing samples. I sit at my table and I watch as the hall fills with families, the young and the old, brothers and sisters, mothers father grandparents, aunts and uncles, all bright and scrubbed ready to talk about their projects in sewing, cooking, drawing… the list is really dizzying.

And every face is white.

At lunch I chat with a few of the older volunteers. We talk about the buildings, how much closer the community seemed to be back when, how they’ve had a drop off in participation and then I ask about diversity. The woman I am speaking with is gray haired, plump, someone’s grandmother no doubt. She speaks of when things were different—the sense of community, the buildings, rebuilt in 2000 after the tornado had torn down the older ones. There is a lack of community now, she says, and she wouldn’t let her kids roam between buildings today like she did with her son. And then I bite into my overstuffed turkey sandwich and toss out what I think is a pretty obvious question: “How come there is no ethnic diversity here?”

Without missing a beat, without a thought, without a moment’s hesitation she includes me in her worldview: “Because they can’t follow instructions.”

My mind sings with a kind of monotonous high pitched white noise and I feel myself rising somewhere above my body, a near out of body experience. “Who do you mean by ‘they’?”

She sets down her slushy soda cup and looks directly at me. “Black people.”

Now my body rises to meet wherever my conscious mind floated to. I am going to escape. But for once, for some unheard of reason, I have my teeth in place and my jaw is not resting on the floor. “This conversation is over. My son is black.” I take my hemp bag and leave.

Walking around in 100 degree heat I try to find the 4-H director, Alice, a friend of mine. I have to get this woman volunteer fired. It is my sole purpose in life. After a fruitless fifteen minutes I am told Alice is at the commissary—right back where I started. Alice was originally hired as diversity coordinator. The office used to have eight full time employees. Now she is the only one left and she works an eighty hour week. Diversity is dream she had to let go of. As I march up to the low, flat building, careful to stay on the concrete sidewalk and not step on the grass, the woman appears, coming out. We are destined to pass each other.

As she approaches, her face softens and she lays a hand on my arm. “I’m so sorry dear, did I offend you?”

For once in my life, I am crystal clear and words actually form in real time and not hours later: “No. You did not offend me. What you said was offensive. There’s a difference. Do you judge children?”

“What?”

“Do you judge children?”

“No. I coordinate volunteers.”

“Good, because you should never ever be allowed to judge children. Ever.” I am actually pointing in her face. I know the extra “ever” is melodramatic. Can’t help myself.

“I said I was sorry,” she begins again, taking a step back. “I didn’t know, I couldn’t tell that your son was black—“

“Why? Because I’m white? It doesn’t make any difference what color my son is—what you said is offensive.”

This sends her off in a different direction. “We used to have an all black chapter—“

“You are not worth one more minute of my time.” The words fly out without thought. I have never spoken like this, but when your hand touches a flame, the receptors only go as far as the gray matter in your spine and the flinch response originates there, not in the brain. This is my verbal recoil. Instantaneous, unconscious, and instinctive.

I move past her, and open the door. There stands Alice. She takes one look at my face. “What’s wrong?”

“Who is that woman?” I point and see how my hand shakes.

“Betty Williams.”

I can see the other volunteers eating at the tables. Out of frustration I raise my voice. Loud. “Betty Williams is a fucking racist.”

Forks drop. A few people look up. I, unfortunately and to my horror, burst into tears.

The aftermath of this is unsatisfying. After writing a three page report, after Alice writes her two page report, after an hour and fifteen minute talk with the director of 4-H for the entire state of Ohio, Betty is not fired from her volunteer position. Instead, diversity training will be offered to all volunteers. Better to keep “them” close is the reason.

Since this episode last summer, my son has grown five inches, walks around with 180 pounds of pure muscle, likes to wear a hoodie, is perfecting his version of the teenage stare down, and looks 26, not 13. He has dealt with racist teachers, referees, and yet lives in a town six miles from Wilberforce University—the first college for blacks. Our town has been featured on NOVA as one of the most integrated places to live and a perfect place to raise a multiracial family. My neighbors, both black and white, have similar stories: they grow up here, move away, and return, never finding anything quite like Yellow Springs. My son is fortunate to be raised here, but he does not understand what the rest of the state and country is like. The fairgrounds where 4-H meets are six miles south of my town in Xenia, Ohio.

When I moved several months ago, a mile from our old home, and just outside Yellow Springs, I ran around and introduced myself to my neighbors, who are now all white, casually mentioning my youngest daughter is Korean and my son African American, and that he often forgets his house key, so please don’t shoot him if you see him prowling around the house and breaking in through a window. This was offered with a smile and a plate of cookies my son made.

The head of 4-H for the state of Ohio, the man I spoke with for an hour and fifteen minutes is African American. I’ve learned to be direct. I can’t afford to be polite. If I am, chances are I will be made complicit in a worldview set with racism as the default.

Good Catch Mom

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:01:43 -0500

So I have rabies. My children are probably rabid as well. At least this is what everyone, and I mean everyone, has told me. This is the problem with having too much information—the ability to assess risk goes out the window and you find yourself weighing matters in fiscal terms you thought only Tea Partiers were capable of. And, yes, you too join the ranks of the paranoid.

Four weeks ago my sleepy thirteen year-old man child son stumbled into my bedroom at 6:30 am with, “There’s a bat in my bedroom.”

This one tiny statement sparked as catalyst to a series of events crystallizing the issues surrounding the abysmal state of health care in this country.

Because I devour science and nature articles at an admittedly alarming rate, I knew the formula: sleeping child + bat = rabies risk (though miniscule). But I also knew bat populations are being decimated by white nose fungus. So when I knocked the little brown bat from his happy perch on the window trim into the pile of dirty clothes on the floor, and he displayed his entire wing span of about five inches and opened his tiny mouth, I only thought of the lack of white fungus. Lifting him out the window in the pile of dirty clothes to freedom was my first mistake.

My second was calling the county health department.

I will not bore you with a transcript of the three days of telephone calls it took for me to determine who, if any member of our family, should receive the rabies shots or how and where I should go to actually get the shots. Oh, and how to finance them. I did call county health a total of eleven times, my own doctor five times, the state of Ohio six times and our local country hospital eight times within the first two days. I do have a job by the way—I just so happened to be on winter break from teaching so I had nothing better to do that research a potentially fatal disease.

The end result? Four shots were required at about $700.00 apiece. All three of us (myself, Cora, 17, and John, 13) would receive them. Luckily, my insurance would pay everything and all I was responsible for was a $25.00 co-pay for each shot—a total of $300.00 for all of us. Pricey, putting a dent in monthly bills, but the alternative? Foaming at the mouth, paralysis, and a horrible death.

Here’s the irony. My physician doesn’t stock or order the injections because they are so expensive. I then called county health again to make certain they did not offer the series. They don’t because 1) the expense is “prohibitive” and 2) they are off on the weekends and the injection regime requires a strict schedule of 0, 3, 7 and 14 day intervals and, well, this might land on a Saturday or Sunday. Public health rests on the weekend I guess.

I geared up and called 22 local physicians in my health care plan in my area. All refused to stock the injections—I might not show up for the full series was the excuse. I assume they thought I might feel a little foaming at the mouth was acceptable.

I called the hospital again to find out what I would have to pay out of pocket for each injection—it took two days to get an answer: somewhere between $500.00 and $700.00 a pop—they couldn’t really pin a dollar figure down for me. Kinda like gasoline prices, it could fluctuate by the hour the nurse happily told me. I just had to wait for the bill. My family deductible is $800.00 and out of pocket $4,000—at $2800 apiece, I was looking at maxing out all totals with the very slim chance one of us came in contact with rabies.

I contacted the state again to determine exactly the risk of rabies (very minor—only 6% of bats carry rabies). I called Ohio State University’s veterinary program (all vets are inoculated) and asked who their vendor was – if I could locate that clutch of syringe wielding doctors then I could fall back to the $25.00 copay. OSU stated they could not release the name of their inoculation source. I called the hospital at OSU—they don’t even stock the injections and they had no way (read: no field box in their software program) to transfer inoculations from the vet school to the hospital. Yet, everyone concurred that this was a serious problem and we all better get on a schedule within a day or two.

So I called the state rabies program again and spoke to Dr. Smith, (her real name) a lead scientist and head of the rabies program in Ohio who assured me that just my son needed the vaccine—good news! The charges dropped from $8,400 back down to $2,800. But we needed to hurry. After all, it’s lethal. But a 6% chance? I had just downsized to a new home and with moving, had no money.

The people who ultimately helped with risk assessment were veterinarians at three different practices who all confirmed that yes, bat rabies was in the area and the Ohio Public Health state map on the web depicting one case in Green and Montgomery Counties was completely wrong.

After more calls to the doctor and the hospital folks, I was directed to enter the hospital through different doors: either ambulatory care or the emergency room. Each entry point impacts the fees, the amount my insurance will pay and the duration of time actually spent getting the shot.

On day three, John and I enter the ER. Five hours later we leave.The scenario in the ER was as follows:

1. Check in –15 minutes, nice smiling receptionist, no eye contact. Makes two copies of my insurance card. I sign six sheets of paper and they ask John if has fallen down recently.

2. Put in a room after waiting 30 minutes.

3. 30 more minutes roll by because they cannot find the injection. Pharmacy sent it down, we are reassured, but they don’t know what happened to it after that.

4. Another hour rolls by. John is offered turkey sandwiches and soda. Finally serum is found!

5. Nurse does not know how to reconstitute injection and pours over the four point font type trying to figure this out at the nurses’ station. She keeps telling those around her that she’s “got this.”

6. A physicians’ assistant comes in after two and a half hours and tells us our use of the emergency ward is abusive and we should have gone to ambulatory care. I explain I was informed the nurses are sent home when they are finished at ambulatory care and that can be anytime between 1:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon. My son, after all, is in school.

7. The nurse appears with the syringe. The shot in the arm takes a second at the most. Now we wait for 30 minutes to see John has an allergic reaction. There is none.

8. Nurse checks vitals, hands me a CDC sheet (which I had read on line before), complete with a cartoon bat and a raccoon and something catches my eye….the first shot must be accompanied with human rabies gamma globulin.

9. Nurse reads sheet, steps into hall and confers with another nurse.

10. She calls from the hall: “Good catch Mom.”

At this point we have spent four hours in the ER. Even though I have remained very calm and respectful, a nurse dressed like an attorney comes in to listen to my frustration over the series of unfortunate events. I leave to have a hissy phone conversation in the bathroom with my best friend in New Jersey. Upon my return to the cramped ER room, I find John was asked how much he weighed because the dose of gamma globulin is based on weight. Now, at 13, my son is a bright boy. But he cannot hang on to a single pair of socks, his lunch bag, or a winter coat and he certainly has no idea what he weighs. I suggest they actually weigh him.

Just a mere 25 pounds off.

We wait some more while they find the gamma globulin and then he has four more shots one in each thigh and cheek. And we have to wait another half hour in case of a dire reaction. We came in at 4:00 right after school and we left at 9:15 to receive a shot I had called ahead to say we were coming for. A shot that is considered a public health imperative. A shot that everyone was just adamant we get. A shot no one would help us with. The second and third injections took no less than two hours each in the ER and the fourth a mere hour at Ambulatory Care (I pulled John from school early).

I am lucky. I don’t work an hourly job where that five hours might mean the difference between making it for the month or not. I have health insurance, though I don’t think it’s going to end up paying for much of the $2,800. Bills take months to get and are inscrutable to read. I am not afraid to ask questions or speak up. And yet, I was stonewalled at every juncture. Those people who want to get rid of what little health care coverage we have are the same people who are going to need it—they’ve just been lucky so far. But they will get sick, have an accident....or wake to a sleeping bat.

Me foaming at the mouth? You bet, but not from rabies.

Touchdown Strippers

Mon, 5 Sep 2011 00:09:05 -0400

Irony is a bitch. Or maybe, after all, it’s the male equivalent.

In mid August I took my two youngest children 17 and 13 to Disney World for two days and then on to my cousin’s house in Boca Raton. Many of my friends who don’t own televisions were appalled I would take my children to a mouse driven icon of materialism. I think these people must fly. A lot. Because, clearly, if they had driven they would have identified a more potent danger than the allure of gift shops, sanitized streets and exhausted families.

We packed the car and drove from Yellow Springs, Ohio to Orlando in 18 hours. I had to drive because plane tickets were out of the question: $1800 for the three of us to fly and that was more than my budget for the entire week away. I drove because I am a single mom with diminishing income every child’s eighteenth birthday. I drove because, after the launch of the two older children, I can’t sell the four bedroom albatross I no longer need but used to require. I drove because my kids are good at road trips and I always stop for bathroom breaks. Plus they get snacks I don’t usually buy.

So we drove south. Into the South. I, a northerner all my life, living in California then Vermont, was only once in Arkansas, with my (then) husband to adopt our son. I stayed two weeks, just little John and me and Star Trek Next Generation. I remember people there were all so nice, and the frozen yogurt, tasty. But I flew that time.

Being in a car, you get to see gas stations, small towns and billboards. And there are many, many billboards along Interstate 75 South. Among them: Get the Progressives Out of Office, Vote. Take Back Our Country, and Get Liberals Out of the White House.

These were not yard signs. These were giant billboards, bigger than my kitchen, lining Interstate 75. Though privately outraged and fantasizing about gasoline cans and matches, I understood some rich person with a bizarrely atrophied sense of social responsibility had invested in his or her right to free speech. Fine.

But it didn’t end there. Tennessee, Georgia and even northern Florida turned out to be shamelessly checkered with billboards so wrung with irony my brain numbed. There was the pregnant woman, head bent down in shame and in the foreground, a muscular old white man with a flowing snowy beard and hair pointing at her. Below this echoed: "I knew You Before I Made You in the Womb"—God. As if this were a direct quote.

Then we passed a second one of a cute burbling baby with a bow on her head: My heartbeat began at 18 days. The kicker was that sandwiched between the two, not thirty feet apart was a billboard proclaiming Strippers: Need We Say More? Or how about Asia Pen, an establishment offering 100% Asian girls?

Cora, my 17 year old, who is Korean, sat in the car, mute, furious. I suggested she write the good Governor of Georgia a letter and ask if it would be dandy if billboards offered 100% African Girls, or 100% Jewish Girls, or 100% Swedish Girls, just like some of the restaurant billboards offered 100% Angus burgers. Instead, she took a picture. My son, thankfully, slept through most of Georgia.

It was all a bizarre sex sandwich—the tease of strip joints wedged between no choice outcomes. And this, not in privacy of a bedroom laptop or on in back of Hustler. No. All on a strip of asphalt, an Interstate, mind you, our taxes support. We counted 46 billboards in Georgia alone, neatly halved between bawdy calls for strip joints and rallying cries for anti-choice.

Hell, yes, you need to say more.

God zapped our famous Ohio touchdown Jesus a year ago. Those billboards better be next.

Living Out Loud

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 15:06:15 -0400

I am constantly trying to suppress a genetic predisposition. Not to alcoholism or drug or gambling addiction (thank god). My grandmother only smoked or drank during bridge parties and my mom quit smoking by simply dumping the rest of the carton of Kents into the trash can and stockpiling boxes of graham crackers for a few weeks. No. My trouble is with the worry-wart gene. In my family it runs long and deep on my mother’s side, and I can trace its roots to my grandfather and his two sisters, Myrl and Faye, down through my mother, to me. There it festers, and while I try to carry on as if I am a normal person, I am not. Therein is my secret.

In advanced years, my mother has totally succumbed to her genetic map. Her last visit was full of horror stories, from families winning houses and dying of carbon monoxide poisoning (and where was our alarm?), to the need for colonoscopies (the trick is to drink that stuff fast, and when is your next appointment?), the longevity of our dogs (don’t mixed breeds live longer?), to global warming (won’t Ohio flood?), to stabbing an unwanted finger at a freckle on my wrist (I don’t remember that—get it checked out), and being unable to walk down town with me because I had final grades due the following day (just take me home and do them, and then I can relax). Nearly every sentence began: I am worried about… It was the worst…. You won’t believe… etc. She is the human conduit for every issue of Time magazine and as the bar for shocking or alarmist writing is raised in the news media, so rises her anxiety. I hid Time.

Now, because I profess to be a perceptive person (not brilliant mind you, merely aware), I realize the bizarre impact of this heritage, even as a small child. When my brother and I visited our two great aunts in Alton, Missouri, we were not allowed to play on the porch because it was determined we might fall off and break an arm. We were 11 and 7—the porch , maybe three feet high. When my brother came down with a stomach ache, they both fluttered around uttering dire diagnoses: an appendix (ruptured), influenza (24 hour killer type), spleen (diseased), mosquito bite (meningitis—isn’t that how it started out the Benedict girl? The one who died?).

My grandfather worried about every “what if” possible: driving (never do it—car accidents), flying (plane crashes—rather drive), storms (a tree will fall on the house), every mole, lump, crack, pain (death is right around the corner, literally), the future (idiot republicans will run this nation into the ground and we’ll all have to migrate to Canada—in the car, of course). Ironically, no one in my family ever worried about money, which was perfect because our family never had any. I guess that meant our priorities were straight.

So. In order to be a thoughtful parent and learn lessons from my elders, I profess not to worry, because I am trying, earnestly, consciously, to suppress that worry gene. I am left mouthing how my children should be able to play and explore the natural world without the guidance and supervision of adults. How yes, I love to fly and see my friends and family, how horrible the state of the nation and the world is—but be part of the solution not the problem and do something about it. I drive and fly and send out my protest letters. I refuse to be a helicopter parent. I quell fears when my children become ill or I find an irregular mole or lump where it shouldn’t be. I have made remaining positive an art form….but all those parenthetical statements above live inside me, trapped by a person who refuses to give them a voice. But I still feel them, and it is a heroic effort to keep them buried.

I refuse to pass this gene on. And it remains a struggle. When my eldest, Sarah, talked about going for a run in Belize in a field later found to be writhing with Fer-de-Lance snakes, I smiled—“how exciting.” When she talked about swimming in a river with alligators resting on the opposite side, I made a joke: “Are you sure you’re not related to Jeff Corwin?” These are the comments released from my lips.

Yet, every day I am challenged. When my son, David, decided to join Sarah at the Mayan dig site this summer, I called from home to the airport to just remind him to keep his mouth shut when he swam in the lakes and rivers there. That was all I said. I suppressed the litany about parasites--creepy things infesting nervous tissue leaving you paralyzed or dead--out of the conversation, pretending the flood of worry wasn’t there. Oh, but it was.

Unfortunately, my heroic efforts went unnoticed. “Yeah, I know mom. Don’t worry. And no peeing in the water either.”

“Don’t worry.” That was the phrase I struggled so long not to be identified with.

Later, that night, I went on line to find out what the hell could crawl up your penis—and added another horrid fact for the parenthesis.