Raising White Children

A friend sent me a link to this blog post about queer parents raising white children. He was curious to hear my thoughts about it. It's a long post with a lot packed into it, and I thought I'd answer him on my blog because that way maybe three people will read my thoughts instead of just one and the work of reading and writing will feel more worthwhile.

First, I'll say that my experience as a queer parent is very different from Susan Raffo's. (OMG, I just realized, looking at Raffo's picture, that I am pretty sure I once shared a hotel room with her at OutWrite, the Gay and Lesbian Writing Conference, a long long long time ago. We had a mutual friend who set it up. It didn't go at all well. It was a formative experience for me: I am now almost completely unwilling to share rooms with people I don't know at conferences. Small world. Edited to add: Raffo probably feels the same way. We were the bad fit to end all bad fits.)

OK, back to the point: the reason our experience is so different is that, while I am just as queer as Raffo, I'm in an opposite-sex relationship. My kids have a mom and a dad. So some of the experiences her daughter has, my kids don't. We enjoy heterosexual privilege because, unless we make a big point of mentioning we're queer, folks make assumptions. And who can blame them? It's a whole different flavor of queerness.

Overall, though, I'd say Raffo has a way of writing about white privilege that doesn't resonate with me. For instance, she writes:

My Susanbrain knows that everything that Luca gets, all of that support and nurturance that I want to give her, exists on the backs of other children - either directly through their labor or indirectly through their lack of access. Too many of the basic aspects of our lives - the chocolate treats at holidays, the educational toys, the cheap kids clothes at Target - are themselves manufactured or harvested by children.

I disagree. I think this is an overstatement of the realities of the world, a kind of careless oversimplification that guilty white liberals seem to love to embrace. I am concerned about conditions for kids (and other people) and about equality, both within the US and worldwide. But child labor in factories, for instance, is still uncommon enough (and in China, during its liberalizing period, getting even more uncommon) that, when somebody points to a t-shirt or a pair of shoes and says that a child working in a sweatshirt made that item, they're probably wrong. I did a big reading project on globalization a couple of years ago, and it convinced me that things are not as bad as my white liberal friends liked to tell me, and a whole heck of a lot more complicated. I reject this notion that there's somehow a one-to-one correspondence between my children's comfort and some other child's suffering.

Once I got past that section of the entry, though, I appreciated Raffo's thoughtfulness about talking about race with her daughter. I've been reading more and more about the idea that what we nice white parents tend to like to do is not talk about race, or talk about it in these really abstract ways like, "Everyone is equal, honey, nobody is better than anybody else." (I just read a really good article about this, but now I can't find the link--I'll add it if I come across it later.) But because of the ways kids are developing, working on categorizing themselves and other people, they will end up developing racial categories on their own, putting some people into their own group and some people into another one. I've actually started noticing Carl doing this; recently we were driving and he saw a Black toddler walking with her mother, and said, "Look, it's one of Yehva's kind!" Clearly he didn't mean this in a way that excluded Yehva from the family, or in any mean-spirited way. He seemed more excited about it, to see another little girl who resembled Yehva. But I thought it was a good example of what I've been hearing about, that the children of well-intentioned parents who are too silent or too abstract on the subject of race will nonetheless construct racial categories. And, left to do it on their own, they'll probably do it badly.

I really liked the way Raffo describes talking to her daughter about things like, "Who is here? Who's not here? Why might that be?" I'm 100% not into guilt, and haven't wanted to talk to my kids about race and class in a way that would make them feel there was something wrong with them for being born or adopted into our family, which, like Raffo's, is educated, home-owning, professional. But Raffo's approach, of helping her daughter learn to recognize patterns in the culture around her, and her place within those patters, seems really productive to me.

My friend was especially interested in my response to this post as a parent who is raising a black child as well as two white children. One response I have (not very deeply thought out yet) is that it's much the same, in the sense that the conversations that I think need to happen about race and class seem pretty much the same for all my children. The kind of analytical thinking about race that Raffo is trying to do with her daughter would look much the same for all three of my kids.

It reminds me of something I've been meaning to write about, actually, the idea that, as people used to say to me so often, I have a responsibility to keep Yehva in touch with "her" culture. For about the first year of her life, people were always saying to me, "Of course, you'll help her develop a sense of her culture," and I would kind of say, "Oh, hmm, yes," but I really had no idea what anybody meant by that. Then I decided that the next time somebody said that to me, I would ask them what they thought they meant by "her" culture or "Black" culture. And of course nobody ever said it to me again. So I still don't know what they thought they were talking about.

But I actually have several responses to the question now:

• The Cynical Response: "Her" culture? The one she'd have been raised in if her birthmother hadn't placed her for adoption? The one where sexual and romantic relationships are fluid and provisional, where children are raised by their grandmothers or end up in foster care because their mothers are too unstable to care for them, where babies are born drug-addicted and people all-too-commonly reach adulthood without becoming so much as basically literate? Is that the culture I'm supposed to make sure she doesn't lose touch with?
• The "I'm-As-Liberal-As-The-Next-Person-But-I-Get-So-Tired-Of-Thinking-About-It" Response: Is there any meaningful way in which Yehva, having been adopted by us, can have an authentic connection to black culture and community? Or, is it just more true to say, that having been adopted by us, our culture becomes her culture by default, that whatever efforts we make--celebrating Kwanzaa, taking her to Black cultural events in Lansing, enrolling her in stepping class--will be partial at best, a kind of camouflage we can point to, that paints over the complicated and sometimes painful reality that, most likely, no matter what we do, she is going to grow up brown-skinned but culturally assimilated into middle-class white culture and values.
• The "How Is That Different From What We All Ought to Be Doing With Our White Children Anyway?" Response: I have always assumed that I would try to show my kids a story about their nation that includes its painful racial history, as well as the glorious energy of the Civil Rights movement and the Black History Month boosterism of Ten Notable Black Americans. I have always seen the history of Black Americans as part of the history of America, my America, and therefore my children's America. I don't know what I might tell Yehva about Black history, Black culture, the past and current state of race and race relations in the US, that I wouldn't also have wanted my sons to hear, even if they never had a black sister.

And this brings me back to Raffo, I think. I don't like her rhetoric all the time, I find a certain kind of liberal language about race and privilege...not useful. But I admire her commitment to not shying away from those things with her daughter, which I think is something I've been guilty of. I have not had a third of the conversations with my kids about race and class that I think need to happen; in some ways, I've shied away from it because I'm a big fan of the happy childhood and I have not wanted to be the one to introduce my children to painful truths. But even before reading Raffo, I've been re-thinking that, realizing that I need to get more active about addressing these things while my kids are still young, and Raffo offers what seems to me like a useful, experience-based way of framing those conversations. She wants to "make whiteness visible" for her daughter, so that it isn't just the water she's swimming in. It seems like she's doing a good job of it.

In My Mother's Voice

It's a truism you hear a lot when you become a parent, that at some point you will hear yourself speaking in your mother's voice. Usually this means saying something that you found hurtful as a child and swore you would never say to your own kids. But for me, it took a very different form recently.

My mom grew up rural working poor. Feedsack dresses, her mother killing chickens for dinner, two bedrooms for eight or more people, three kids per bed, something like 15 kids in her grade at school. Some of her childhood stories are like something out of Little House on the Prairie: two walnuts, an orange, and a pencil in each kid's Christmas stocking. Maybe a new penny in the toe. Maybe I made up the penny.

And every year, one pair of shoes. They ordered them from a catalog; it was some kind of program to provide shoes to poor children. Every year, the shoes were too big the first half of the year, and too small the rest of the year, and they probably didn't get worn at all around home in the summer (Do I really remember my mother telling me something when I was a kid about how good warm manure felt between your toes on a chilly morning...and thinking, "Oh, god, ewww, I'm so glad Dad is an engineer at GM and there are no cows here"?).

Anyway, the catalog shoes were never great. Whatever passed for fashionable footwear among 9-year-old girls in South Lyon, Michigan, in 1942, you can be sure that the best the catalog had to offer was not it. But there was this one year that the shoes my mom picked had run out by the time her family's order was processed, and the company sent The Most Hideous Shoes In The History of the World in their place. I don't know how many details my mother really gave me, and how much I made up a picture in my head, but they were black, and thick-soled, and they came up over her ankles, and they were heavy and hard to walk in. And she had no choice but to wear them, too big the first half of the year and too small the second half, because those were the shoes there were and there was no way to get another pair.

My mom is a good storyteller. She can tell stories from her family that will simultaneously break your heart and have you laughing so hard the tears roll down your face. She has this amazing gift for seeing the humor in a situation while it's happening. Those thing that happen where people say, "Someday we'll laugh about this"? She starts laughing right in the middle of it.

But she has told me the story of these shoes many times, and there is never anything funny about them. They were horrible for her, a daily humiliation, and I think a symbol of everything that was hard and painful about her life growing up. Even in her 70s, when she tells this story, you can see how hurt she still is for the little girl she was.

So, the other week I take Carl over to Playmakers to get a new pair of sneakers because he has worn his old pair to treadless rags. The clerk measures his feet, and he chooses a few pairs to try on, and after running around in various shoes for a few minutes, he finds some he likes, that don't slip off his heels when he runs, and he says he'd like to take that pair home.

OK, I say. We'll take these.

The clerk says, "Would you like to go up a half-size, so he can get more wear out of them?"

And I say, not sharply but more firmly than I mean to, "Absolutely not. Children should have shoes that fit properly."

The clerk holds up her hands placatingly, "OK, OK, that's fine. It's just a lot of parents like to do that..."

I say, "How can he run in shoes that don't fit right? If he outgrows them halfway through the summer, we'll buy another pair."

I hadn't realized I had such a strong opinion about Shoes, For Children, Importance of Proper Fit Thereof. But it turns out I do, and it's because I've heard this story from my mom so many times, starting when I was probably three and most recently at the age of 42 or 43. I don't really care that some parents buy shoes a half-size up, and I doubt it would scar Carl for life if I'd done that with his new sneakers. But my mom, or the humiliated little girl with horrible shoes that she was almost 70 years ago, cares. She'd have loved to choose her own shoes, to have someone measure her feet to make sure they fit properly. She got catalog shoes instead, and no sympathy at all.

I think it might have been her voice speaking through me at Playmakers. That girl my mother was. Carl, cheerful, oblivious, accustomed his whole life to shoes he likes that fit him: he doesn't need an advocate. But he has one anyway.

Sara Zarr: My New Favorite YA Author

Last week I spent three days at the Festival of Faith & Writing. One of the great discoveries of the conference for me was Sara Zarr, a young adult novelist I had heard of vaguely (I think Story of a Girl blipped onto my radar when it was a National Book Award finalist a few years ago, but I hadn't read it). I almost didn't attend Zarr's talk; the description in the program said she would "discuss the usefulness of examining the pain of the transition from childhood to adulthood, with particular attention to how this fits in for writers of faith."

I wasn't so sure I wanted to hear a talk about pain. But nothing else in that time slot jumped out at me, and my friend Julie was going to Zarr's session, so I tagged along.

I'm so glad I did.

Zarr writes young adult novels, and she is interested in the transition from childhood to adulthood that adolescents are engaged in. She says (I'm paraphrasing from memory and certainly won't do her argument justice, so if it sounds dumb, blame me, because Zarr was amazingly articulate) that adolescents are wrestling with big truths about life: that some mistakes can't be undone; that people aren't always what you thought they were; that pain cannot be avoided, but is part of life. This wrestling is what she's interested in writing about, and she wants to write truthfully for young adults about how complicated and unresolved it can all be. She says, "If you get to the end of the book and she's got the car and the boy, and her skin has cleared up, you've entered the realm of fantasy, of wish-fulfillment. You've stopped respecting your readers and they will know it and they will stop respecting you."

It's a very interesting position for a Christian writer to take, but it makes her the kind of Christian I like, the kind that recognizes that faith doesn't remove the problems from your life, but gives you a framework for wrestling with them.

I read Story of a Girl while I was at the conference, and was very impressed with it. It's the story of a girl (is there any other way to start this sentence? I think not.) whose father catches her having sex with a 17-year-old boy when she is 13 years old. In the three years since, he has not really looked at her or talked to her. Meanwhile, the boy in question has told so many stories about her that her whole life is affected by people's perception that she is a particularly slutty slut.

That's a big problem to give a teenager, and when the book starts, Deanna Lambert has been carrying it for three years. Zarr is interested in how such a problem can be dealt with, but she doesn't offer any easy resolution. Nothing magical happens to lift Deanna out of the pain of her life. For instance, her older brother wants her to save the money she earns at a summer job to go to college, it's not at all clear that Deanna thinks such a thing is possible. She and the boy she had sex with three years earlier encounter each other unexpectedly, and they do manage to work some things out, but by the end of the book Deanna and her father have managed only one very tentative normal conversation.

Zarr said, "I like there to be some momentum," and there definitely is: that one tentative conversation between Deanna and her father is a big deal after three years of cold. But there's not the kind of "I've always loved you, Muffin," conversation that resolves so many parent-child misunderstandings in books. After listening to Zarr speak, when I read Story of a Girl I thought about how many YA books I read about working-class or poor kids with potential that had some kind of magical event solve their problems: a teacher, say, who takes a special interest and applies for a college scholarship for the kid without telling her, and she wins it!

Nobody's fixing things for Deanna. Her mother pretends everything is OK. Her boss at the pizza parlor is a confidante and helpful advisor, but he doesn't do more than offer a sympathetic ear and the occasional ride home. Deanna has a fantasy that she will move out of the house with her brother and his girlfriend when they have saved enough to get their own place. Her brother squashes that notion. He's not unsympathetic, but he says, "You have to find your own way out of here." That sentence could be the thesis of the book: it really is up to Deanna.

I could imagine some teens not wanting to read a book like this. There is something to be said for escaping into wish-fulfillment--when I was a kid, I loved books in which a child who had somehow ended up living with the wrong people, was discovered to actually belong elsewhere, where she was fully loved and valued. It's a very common trope in children's literature, so I was well-supplied with stories even in the days before Harry Potter got an Owl from Hogwarts and was rescued from his Muggle relations.

Some kids might prefer the story that ends with the car, the boy, the college scholarship, the clear skin, over a book that says, "Things do get better, but the change is often as much inside you as outside, and you have to work for it, and it may never be as good as you hope." And some parents might prefer books in which 13-year-olds never have sex and nobody swears. But Zarr's novel is full of compassion for her protagonist; she's neither a writer who avoids truthiness nor one who throws in sordid details for the heck of it. She likes protagonists who are in really tough situations, facing hard questions, and need to find their way out, and she likes to give them one or two hints and a nudge in the right direction. I liked her, and I liked her book.

FGC First-Timer's Tips for Parents

Last year, a couple of moms from my monthly meeting went to FGC Gathering with their kids for the first time. I take my kids most years, and these moms kept saying to me, tiredly, "How do you do this?" and suggesting I write up tips telling moms how to make it look easy and fun, like I apparently do. This year, the Gathering is a mere two hours from us, and I hope and expect more families will take advantage of that to attend, so I thought I maybe I would try to write something.

Sadly, I'm not sure that what works for me and my kids, and makes Gathering one of our favorite parts of the year, applies to anyone else. For instance, I had attended Yearly Meeting, FGC Gathering, and FLGBTQC events for years before I started having kids. This meant that by the time Eric and I attended Gathering together when he was about 14 months old, I had many friends and acquaintances. For me, having lots of people to say hello to, even just passing on the path, means I don't end up feeling isolated because caring for kids keeps me away from some activities.

Having attended in the past means that not only do you know people, but you know the Gathering, its basic offerings and schedule, and don't have to waste energy on figuring out how it works. Your kids, having been there several times, also know the check-in routine, and they know how much they have to look forward to, which makes the dull arrival-check-in-and-unpacking part more manageable for them. So my first piece of advice would be, "Go back in time and attend on your own a half-dozen times first; it really helps."

If that's not practical, there are usually many Red Cedar Friends around. So the first piece of advice I would give any parent attending for this first time is: Don't be afraid to ask for help. People from my meeting have sometimes watched my kids for an hour or two so I can grab a nap, or helped the kids fetch their food at meals (the cafeteria can be the most challenging part of the Gathering), or invited my kids to their table so I can eat my lunch in peace.

I have gotten so good at asking for help that, especially in the cafeteria, I have almost no qualms about asking complete strangers for small favors. Friendly strangers have refilled our drink glasses, sat with one kid while I ran another to the bathroom, and bussed our table. Usually they seem happy to be asked, and to help. Only once did the person I asked seem the least bit taken aback, but even that person collected himself and said he was more than happy.

I had to learn the asking-for-help lesson the hard way over several years--I used to be so invested in seeming capable I would say "No, thank you" even when I was juggling two cafeteria trays, my toddler had just disappeared behind the drinks station, and my older kid was sitting cross-legged in the line of traffic declaring that he would not eat anything at all if they didn't have grilled cheese sandwiches. The day Carl threw up on me in a very crowded and public place got me over my misplaced sense of self-sufficiency, but you don't need to wait for that extreme. Don't make things harder for yourself than they have to be, please. Ask for help with small things before you even think you need it, and it will help preserve your energy and sanity.

You will be housed near other families with kids, and can request to be near families you know from home. Even if you don't know the parents nearby, be friendly and get to know them. Leave the door to your room open and say hello when they pass by. If you and your kids are going out to ride bikes or throw a ball around after lunch, invite the kids from down the hall, too. Then, when that family is playing frisbee the next day, they'll invite your kids, and you can have a little quiet, or take a nap.

My third piece of advice would be to take your kids' needs, and yours, seriously. Until this last year, we missed a lot of activities because too much time with people can just be overwhelming for Eric the Introvert, and so we usually chose to spend our afternoons either quietly in our room or doing something together just as a family, like taking a walk or riding bikes. We missed out on Family Center activities like story time, we never got to play capture the flag, and we've never been on a field trip. But we didn't go insane from over-scheduling, which is important for us. (Last year, eight-year-old Eric surprised me by being much better able to handle the groups, and choosing to spend even our available free time with his friends instead of having down time.)

We also usually prioritize getting enough sleep, which means that no matter how interested I am in the plenaries, I probably can't hope to get to more than one, or at the very most two. This was true even before I had kids, and is even more true now that I do.

I'm also the person who, last year, rolled my own fridge into the dorm on a hand truck, and I'll do it again this year, because being able to have an occasional lunch in our room instead of going to the cafeteria can give us a really welcome break. This is how seriously I take the idea of making sure we can get our needs met. (Also, having a cold can of sparkling water to offer other moms near the end of the their rope does wonders for building relationships.)

My third piece of advice applies to anyone, really, and it is: Accept that you can't do everything. There is great stuff happening at the Gathering starting with 7 a.m. yoga and ending with contra dancing until midnight. It helps me to start thinking even before I arrive about what I want to prioritize. This year, I'm leading a workshop, so being fresh for that is important, and that probably means no late nights. There's a field trip I'd like to take the kids on, so that may mean planning a quiet afternoon the day before so they're up for it. I used to try always to attend FLGBTQC worship, but it ends at 5:30. Last summer I discovered that if the kids and I go to dinner when the cafeteria first opens at 5, it's much less crowded and we cope much better. (Not everyone is as bothered by the cafeteria as we are; as a group, we're awfully sensitive to noise and crowds.) So getting to the cafeteria at 5 became a higher priority for me than worship, at least on most days.

My fourth piece of advice is to not be too discouraged by the rough moments. I have learned, from many years now of traveling with my kids to the yearly meeting, FLGBTQC Midwinters, and the summer gathering, that a low point for me is right after arrival time, when the kids are wired and wild from being in the car, and I'm worn out from driving, and the unloading seems impossible. It is very common for me to think, "Why did we come? This is not going to be any fun at all. I don't know why I put us through this year after year." Your moments of discouragement may be different, but it's a long conference and there are likely to be low points. Don't make too much of them, and ask for help when they come along.

Just in case anybody thinks I'm super-good at this and never lose it, I'll tell a story from the Gathering in 2008. Yehva was not quite a year old, and it was my first Gathering with all three kids. The cafeteria at that Gathering was the worst ever in terms of crowding, noise, and horrible traffic flow between the six different stations you had to go to for the various parts of your meal (I saw a woman from my meeting who didn't even have kids almost reduced to tears by that cafeteria, if that tells you anything). In addition, I'd injured my knee and couldn't walk distances. Was that also the year I'd had emergency oral surgery the day before we left? Yes, I think it was. So...challenging.

The dorm they put FLGBTQC folks in was charming--one of the best we've had for group hanging-out space close to the bedrooms, so parents could put kids to bed and then go down and visit with grownups. But the walls were like paper--you could hear conversations two rooms away as if the people were standing next to you. Since all the families with kids were in one hallway, this made getting your kids settled challenging.

One day, about halfway through the week, I was trying to do something impossible like get Yehva down for a nap, and Eric was "stuck." When Eric gets stuck, it means that none of the available options are acceptable to him, and he can't accept new ideas. He has lost all flexibility and is demanding, loud, whiny, weepy. I was tired, cranky, out of clever peaceful parenting ideas, and right on the verge of losing it, when there was a knock on our door. It was our friend Jude, from a few rooms down the hall. "Hi!" she said. "The girls and I were just thinking of taking a walk and wondered if Eric and Carl wanted to come with us!" "Yes! Yes, they do!" I said, and pushed them firmly out the door.

I don't know for sure whether Jude and her daughters were really just thinking of going for a walk and thought the boys might like to go along, or whether she heard the escalating noise and thought, "I'd better get in there right now, or Su's going to end up smacking one of those kids," but either way, she saved me from a regrettable thing. Single-parenting your kids at the Gathering is not the easiest thing you'll ever do, perhaps. But, for us, it's always been worth it, and we always want to go back.

Which brings me to my final piece of advice: Make a habit of it if you can. For me, the Gathering got better and better the more times I went; my first Gathering was only OK, and wouldn't have been compelling to me if I hadn't happened to be in a workshop that was a very good fit for me and from which I was learning many exciting new things. But over the years, for me, more and more pieces of it are worthwhile. Two years ago was the first time I had a workshop that just didn't speak to me, but it was more than made up for by the great time I had with kids that year (not just my own), and with my adult friends, and singing Sacred Harp.

For the boys, too, attending over the years has made the Gathering better. They are used to the things that are hard or tiring about it, and ever-more-excited about the stuff they like. They have old friends both among the adults and the kids, though especially among the kids, and both Carl and Eric will talk excitedly about looking forward to seeing certain friends again.

I know the Gathering is expensive; if it weren't so close to home, and if I weren't getting a cost reduction for leading a workshop, and if my Quaker meeting weren't contributing $720 for my kids to attend, we wouldn't be able to go this year. We'd go a lot less often if I weren't a stay-at-home mom, but had a job with limited vacation time, or if we had family out-of-state and needed to save vacation time and money for visiting them, as I know some families in our meeting do.

But it is worth it, in my experience. As well as deepening your own relationship to Quakerism, exposing you to Quakers from outside your own monthly meeting with all their quirks and different points of view, and giving you the opportunity to get together with possibly the only 12 liberal unprogrammed Friends who share some interest or concern with you, getting your children out into the wider Quaker world can be life-changing for them.

Edited to add:

Don't be shy about asking for financial help. Even though FGC does everything they can to keep costs down, like offering a family rate for registrations, letting the little kids eat for free, this year even experimenting with making the Gathering one day shorter, the cost really adds up. Your monthly meeting may have travel funds, and FGC offers scholarship assistance. The last couple of years, our family has been experiencing tight cash flow, and we've been helped by FGC scholarship funds. Don't be shy about asking for it; that's what it's there for. Someday when you have a little extra, you can offer it to the scholarship fund as a contribution when you register. This year, I didn't need to ask for scholarship help; next year, I hope we can contribute a little to the fund when we register.

Comfort and Discomfort in the Spiritual Home

This week, I read big chunks of Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African-Americans, and the Myth of Racial Justice, by Vanessa Julye and Donna McDaniel. This is a huge, carefully-researched history of Quakers' relationship to black people, slavery, racism, abolition, civil rights, education, and more. Julye and McDaniel wrote the book as an antidote to Quakers' partial understanding of our own history; we often point to the fact, for instance, that Quakers stopped owning slaves a good hundred years before the Civil War, without necessarily digging deeply into how complex, fraught, hard-fought, and divisive that decision was. The tone of the book is neutral and factual, the level of detail is impressive bordering on numbing, and it's all in there: everything we got right (freed our slaves! marched on Washingon! Opened a school to meet the needs of black children in Detroit!), everything we got wrong (actively participated in the slave trade! resisted abolition! refused membership requests from exemplary black applicants!). It's a very thorough portrait of a flawed people with a checkered history with regard to race.

The piece that I've been chewing on for a few days, though, is from Vanessa Julye's author's statement, the very first paragraph, in which she writes:

I am one of very few African American Quakers, and I have naturally been drawn into the question of why this is so. I believe that the seeds of this circumstance were planted more than three hundred years ago, that Friends have been plagued by racist attitudes from that time to this day. These attitudes largely account for why our numbers in the Society of Friends have been and continue to be small. (xix)

I've seen this assumption for years: that any organization or institution that is predominantly white is that way because of its racism, or the racism of its members. But I'm not sure. It seems to me that in a society that continues to be as segregated as ours, a specific institution could be segregated for reasons that have little to do with the racist attitudes of its members; in fact, one could argue that Quakerism, for instance, remains predominantly white despite the active anti-racism of many of its members. This is something that I have heard white Quakers talk about with confusion and pain.

In the case of my own meeting, it is easy to imagine outside influences working against racial diversity. For 40 years, the meeting has been located in a city that the census bureau tells me is only 7% black; in a meeting with about 50 members, we would need only 3.5 black people to match our immediate community demographically. Success!

Of course, that's a very partial picture. Our Quaker meeting draws Friends from all over the area, including a city that is 22% black, and the suburb I live in, which is only 4% black. But I wonder if this is part of why it's hard for a Quaker meeting to reflect its area more accurately: most Quaker meetings are the only game in town for Friends. Some people drive half an hour or more to come to worship, and they might not do that if there were another meeting close by. By way of contrast, the ELCA church locator tells me that there are 10 Lutheran churches within 15 miles of my house, and 11 in Lansing proper. How far do people normally go when they're looking for a new church, I wonder? Are there people in Lansing who never find us because when they go church shopping, of the 10 churches in easy travel distance from their home, not one is a Quaker meeting? (And will our racial makeup change now that we've moved from the suburbs to a meetinghouse in Lansing? Will we end up on more people's shopping lists?)

So, on the one hand, I think Julye may be wrong in attributing the overwhelming whiteness of liberal Quakerism primarily to racism within the Religious Society of Friends. It seems to me that societal and structural legacies of racism could be doing the job just fine without much help from us at all.

On the other hand, I wonder how much it takes for a black person who comes to worship to decide it's just not the place for her. I've been thinking a lot about the ideas of comfort and discomfort because sometimes it seems to me that my reasons for taking a break from my meeting are petty and reveal me as a small person: sometimes people say things I disagree with. Or they hurt my feelings.

I have often thought that we place too much emphasis on being comfortable, often couching it in language about "safety." This came up a lot in the years I worked security at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, where many women wanted us to regulate other women's behavior because, they told us, they felt "unsafe" around (pick one): women with certain body modifications; women in leather; women who drink beer and get loud around the campfire at night. For a long time, I was very sympathetic to these complaints, until it dawned on me that "safe" and "comfortable" are not synonyms, and that if someone else's behavior or words make you uncomfortable, that isn't the same as them hurting you or threatening to. And sometimes being made uncomfortable is the first step in growth.

So I have been concerned that, in taking a break from my meeting, I am protecting myself from imaginary threats.

On the other hand...

Some of the things I find hardest about being at my meeting are things I deal with all the time elsewhere. I would like my monthly meeting to be a haven from what is ugly in the world, but it seems like most Quakers don't see some of the ugliness I do, and thoughtlessly recreate it. This means that at my meeting, as much as anyplace else, I get to enjoy hearing women who weigh a hundred pounds less than me complain about how fat they are and how much weight they need to lose. I get to hear moms speak about their children in dismissive, labeling, judgmental ways, or confidently predict the trouble I'm going to have with mine someday. I get to listen to the insights of people who think they understand poverty because they lived on a really tiny stipend while they were in graduate school. I get to hear people who've recently been tourists in third-world countries rave about the spiritual wisdom of the natives there, their deep connection to the earth, their openness and generosity despite their poverty.

And you know what? I get enough of that shit elsewhere. I don't need to come to Quaker meeting for it.

So now I imagine a black person coming to our meeting for the first time. She is likely to be welcomed effusively, as all newcomers are, because we are really nice people at Red Cedar. She may feel there is a slight tinge of "oh, yay, a black person!" in the welcome; she may suspect that, as happy as people are to see her in particular, they are also at least a little happy to think that if she keeps coming, she might improve our demographic profile. She is probably not wrong about that. She has probably experienced this before, and may feel prepared to deal with it. She may like us, and what we do, well enough to come back anyway.

But what happens on the day that tourist talks during Joys and Sorrows about the happy, enlightened, spiritually advanced poor natives he saw on his trip? What happens if she overhears a white woman making fun of the decor in the home of an African-American family she visited recently*? What happens when somebody refers to a stereotype about black people that they think is harmless because it's a positive stereotype?

How much does it take for a black person to decide we're not worth the trouble?

I want to be clear: I do not subscribe to the idea that all white people are automatically racists. I don't feel guilty about either the color of my skin or my middle-class upbringing. I don't think guilt and self-flagellation are productive.

On the other hand: I want to hold myself and my beloved community of Friends to a high standard of awareness, a high standard of behavior, a high standard of speech. We can be 99% racism-free, but our careless assumptions about who is in the room with us, how much they have in common with us, how universal our experience is, how correct our understanding is--these can be enough to tell a newcomer that he does not belong.

We should be challenging everyone who walks through our doors: challenging them spiritually, challenging them to grow into a deeper understanding of God's Truth, challenging them to join with us in the hard work of becoming the people God calls us to be. To do that, we have to be a place where people can become humble, open, and vulnerable, because it is only in that state that new truths can be heard. If people have to guard themselves against us, they will have to be exceptionally strong to simultaneously open themselves to God.

I imagine Julye must be one such exceptionally strong person, to respond to the racism she experiences in the Religious Society of Friends not by leaving but by giving seven years of her life to research and writing a book of truth about our history. She (and her white co-author) see our impoverishment of spirit and understanding, and respond by giving more of themselves to us. This is not something we can expect of every black person, or every working-class or poor person, or every fat person. We are filled with love for each other--I know that I am beloved in my meeting, sometimes very deeply loved by the same people whose behavior I find most hurtful. What we need to understand is: Love isn't enough.

*I don't make up examples or rely on hearsay. If I describe something in my meeting, it is something I have directly witnessed.

Charles Brockden Brown

I just got an Amazon alert that a new book by Charles Brockden Brown has been published. They think I might be interested because I bought a book by Brockden Brown nine years ago. From this I learn that Amazon never forgets.

The book I bought nine years ago was for a graduate seminar in 19th Century American literature, one of the great disappointments of my academic career. I loved the seminar, loved the prof and wanted him to think well of me, and took the damn class during the last half of the pregnancy from hell; by the time the semester started, I had pretty much lost the capacity for sustained coherent thought. I sat dully through the class meetings, nibbling saltines to keep from heaving, and the papers I wrote--well, I just hope I destroyed all copies. I don't even want to talk about the time this same professor came to observe the creative writing class I was teaching--the day I forgot my book and had to leave the room to throw up halfway through (my students were used to it by then but he seemed a bit taken aback).

Anyway, I loved the class except for the prof's insistence that we read not just one but three novels by Brockden Brown, the worst novelist in American history. This is something I wrote about it at the time:

The novelist I am writing on, Charles Brockden Brown, writes (or rather wrote, two hundred years ago) these long rambling gothic novels full of red herrings, structural breakdowns, introductions of new characters hundreds of pages in, unresolved plot elements, unresolvable contradictions. For 180 years, scholars pretty much had a consensus that he was just a bad writer. But now he's been rehabilitated, and we recognize that he knew exactly what he was doing, which, depending on what critic you read, is either critiquing the new republic (the family whose father spontaneously combusts while in a religious frenzy is a metonymy for America); anticipating Freud by inventing the unconscious; anticipating future novelists by inventing the unreliable narrator; anticipating Derrida by inventing "multivocality" and writing a text which, in its own incomprehensibility, comments on the failure of all texts to communicate or to be controlled; or anticipating feminism by creating a female protagonist whose incoherent narrative represents the struggle between her assigned female role and her desire to take her place in the rational Enlightened male world of the new republic. There we are back at the republic--I'll stop there. These readings are all ways of saying he meant the narrative to be murky, unstructured, and full of internal contradictions.

And I think, "What if he's just a bad writer? Won't we all look silly."

What Else I'm Reading

I don't just have a strange and unQuakerly passion for the British Navy of two centuries ago; I read other stuff, too. I've read a few thought-provoking books lately; thought I'd do some short blurbs. (I don't get as many comments on book posts as I do on others, but I have a couple of readers who say they like them best, so I persist.)

Portfolios of the Poor, by Daryl Collins et al.

Researchers followed families in Bangladesh, South Africa, and India that live on the equivalent of $2 per person per day, or less. Using interviews and detailed financial logs, and following families for periods of a year or more, they were able to build a complex picture of how people with such limited means, and often very unstable incomes, manage their finances using a mix of lending and borrowing from various sources, saving, and pooling of resources. The book is very detailed and ultimately more technical than I needed--it is aimed at helping shape microfinance programs that fit well with how people are already using money--and I ended up skimming the second half, but I learned so much from what I read. One thing that came through very strongly was how smart and knowledgeable people are; reading an interview transcript as a woman talked about how she decided whether to meet an unexpected need for a lump sum by borrowing or by spending down savings, I was struck by how familiar the argument was from my own financial decision-making. One of those books that gives me what feels like a meaningful glimpse into the lives of people I otherwise mostly know only as stereotypes.

A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor.

A reprint of a memoir about the author's soujorns in European monasteries during the years after World War II. I was sometimes irritated by Fermor, sometimes charmed by his descriptions; every once in awhile his tone-deaf reactions to monastic life reminded me of the Humbug in The Phantom Tollbooth, who could swim all day in the sea of knowledge without getting wet. My own experience with monks is of going on retreat at a small monastery, only seven monks, only a few decades old, so I did find his descriptions of visiting larger, more ancient European monasteries very interesting. I think the thing from this book that will stick with me longest is how shocked I was that the monks were not exempt from military service in WWII; when he visited, many of the monks he met had served. I would like to find some writing or memoirs about or by these fighting monks.

Patience With God: Faith for People Who Don't like Religion (or Atheism) by Frank Schaeffer.

Frank Schaeffer is an interesting guy; the son of a well-known evangelical preacher, as a young man he followed in his father's footsteps and was already a nationally-known speaker when he found himself changing in his faith and practice. He's now Catholic. One thing I like about his writing is his insider view of what it's like to be someone like, say, Rick Warren. He has a great passage I wish I'd copied about his belief that a preacher who gets to that top, public, money-rolling-in level simply cannot help but become a hypocrite; it's much deeper and better than that and perhaps someday I'll re-read enough of the book to find it again.

I really enjoyed his humor-filled yet rigorous takedown of the recent Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins style of militant atheism, and the book would have been worth reading just for the kitschy joy of finding out about the gospel walnut, a witnessing tool Schaeffer's mother used to carry and accost people with on subway trains.

The latter part of the book is essays on various writers; I found this section much less interesting. It felt padded, and thematically out of sync with the rest of the book.

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction by Gabor Mate, MD.

Mate (I am ignoring the accent in his name because I don't trust blogger to cope with it) is a doctor who for twenty years has been the house doctor for a residential program for addicts in Vancouver. The interesting and controversial thing about the program is that it's not rehab; it's just a home for people who have nowhere else to live. His book is a surprisingly fast read for all that it is 439 pages long (not counting the appendix and index), and includes stories of his patients, his own theories about addiction and why he has come to believe what he does, and his policy wishes for treatment of drug addicts. Mate discounts the genetic element that may be present in addiction in favor of a belief in the impact of early environment. In addition, he believes that addictions are extremely intractable. For these reasons as well as more pragmatic cost/benefit type reasons, he believes in compassionate care for addicts; he wishes (and I keep saying that because he says right up front he doesn't believe the kinds of programs he would like to say will ever be accepted on a wide scale) for programs that would go beyond even needle exchanges to, say, places where addicts can actually shoot up on site, in clean, sanitary places and with medical support for overdoses nearby. He is a big fan of one such pilot program in Vancouver, which would have been closed down by now except that the BC Supreme Court ruled that it fell under the necessary medical care Canadians are constitutionally entitled to, and of a similar pilot program in England that resulted in dramatic reductions in crime, improved social relations, reduced incidence of injury and disease, and increased housing and job stability among people who nonetheless continued to be addicted to heroin. These programs are examples of the kinds of "harm reduction" programs Mate would like to see become widespread.

Mate advocates for a level of compassion and respect for addicts that most of us would find challenging, especially since he asks us to have that compassion and respect even for addicts who choose to continue using. It's dramatic, really no small thing he's calling for, hard even for someone like me who is pretty good at compassion, I think. Harder still for most; in debates when Mate mentions that the safe injection site program I mentioned above had probably saved 25 lives the previous year through prompt medical attention in the case of overdose, he has regularly gotten the response that saving the lives of addicts is nothing to gloat about, that they are better off dead and we are better off without them. But Mate shows you the full personhood of some of the addicts he's known, the parts of their lives that are worth saving.

I learned a couple of things about drug abuse I hadn't known before. One is that the American War on Drugs has exerted so much pressure on other nations that even countries that used to have more progressive policies have backed off on them (this is apparently especially true in England). Another is that narcotics withdrawal is worse for a developing fetus than it is for a newborn baby; for this reason, Mate and his colleagues often counsel pregnant women who hope to stop using during their pregnancy to stop cocaine and its related drugs, but not to dramatically reduce their intake of narcotics. Usually he tries to switch such women to a methadone program, and then the baby can be withdrawn from drugs after birth. A couple of stories he tell of women who hoped to get off drugs during pregnancy and then keep their babies are heartbreaking.

I don't know how much to believe of Mate's model of addiction, which is very different from the widely-accepted disease model. I am intrigued by a model of treatment that focuses on harm reduction rather than on abstinence. And even though I found Mate grating sometimes, I think anyone who can work with a population this disenfranchised for two decades and maintain his commitment and compassion is worth listening to.