Detroit History; Black Boys in Public Schools; the TBR pile

I've got a couple of books going at the moment. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas J. Sugrue has been such a mix of what I already knew and what has completely taken me by surprise. The influx of Black people during WWII was not a surprise to me; I knew that bit of history. It was likewise not exactly a shocking revelation to me that that they were often shunted to the most dangerous, filthy jobs--one that was described in pretty graphic detail was a job workers called the "mankiller," in which the worker had to lift a heavy white-hot spring coil off a fabricating machine, to chest height, and then submerse it in a cooling bath, all within a few seconds.

I was disturbed by how deliberate the maintenance of black ghettos was, even as they were increasingly overcrowded and underserved by public works. That Cobo Arena is named for the mayor who pretty much devoted himself to maintaining a segregated city and blocking the construction of affordable public housing for black people makes me want to vow never to go there again. Well, maybe once. To spit on it.

What surprised me is that I had (from my own narcissistic perspective, I guess--did anything that happened before you were aware of it really matter?) always imagined that Detroit had a kind of Golden Age that stretched from World War II until the deep recession of 1981/82, when I was in high school.

But in fact, Detroit had something more like a Golden Blip during and for a couple of years after WWII. By 1950, there were no more parcels of land near railroad tracks that were big enough for manufacturing plants, so development within the city came to a standstill. Automakers had to build new plants someplace, so they build them in Ohio, in the South, in California--places with weak unions, lower taxes, and vast tracts of undeveloped land.

I was amazed to learn that Detroit lost 70,000 jobs in the decade of the 50s. Jobs were lost to automation (no more "mankiller" once a machine could do it...but then, no more job, either), to companies' shifting of manufacturing to other locations, and by the weeding out of the many auto companies and related industries that had sprung up during the Blip and later failed.

By the end of the 60s, the city had lost a total of 130,000 jobs. When the book was written in 1996, the author was able to say that Detroit had sustained a steady decline in jobs for over 40 years. Who knew?

After WWII, companies like Lockheed stayed in the defense business, but in Detroit, auto companies couldn't re-tool factories and get car production up and running fast enough, in anticipation of high demand as soldiers came home, got married, bought houses, had families.

But putting so many of its eggs into auto production made Detroit perpetually vulnerable. New cars are one of the first things people put off buying in an economic downturn, even a small one. So, rather than being the powerhouse I imagined it to be, Detroit spent most of the 20th century limping along, booming and busting, struggling with race relations and economic downturns and business failures.

I'm not done with the book; I'm in 1960, where:

Only 15 years after World War II, Detroit's landscape was dominated by rotting hulks of factory buildings, closed and abandoned, surrounded by blocks of boarded up stores and restaurants. Older neighborhoods, whose streets were lined with the proud homes that middle-class and working-class Detroiters had constructed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were now pockmarked with the shells of burned-out and empty buildings, lying among rubbish-strewn vacant lots. (pp. 147-148)

That is not the image I would have come up with for Detroit in that era. The first Detroit history I was aware of were the late-60s race riots, and white flight (my mother says that white people from Detroit used to drive out to South Lyon, where we lived when I was very young, and knock on doors in our neighborhood, offering to buy houses that weren't even on the market). I always thought of that as a kind of sudden explosion, but it had been simmering for 25 years.

This may be the kind of academic book I don't end up finishing; I'm interested, but not sure how much tolerance I have for year-by-year analyses of housing patterns broken down by race--though there's a chapter coming up about how class divisions within the black community created conflict in the 60s and 70s that looks pretty good.

Mostly, it's a sad, sad story. And I'd like to warn any of my Black friends away from reading it, the same way I'd warn a rape victim not to rent I Spit on Your Grave because--well, because it seems like the history of Detroit from 1944 to 1996 is pretty much a 50-year parade of white people fucking Black people over on purpose, viciously, humiliatingly, and with malice aforethought. I know Detroit is not alone in this by any means. But you probably don't need to hear it again.

I'm also reading Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity by Ann Arnett Ferguson. It's a meaty book, written by a sociologist using participant-observer techniques. Since it was a dissertation, it's perhaps a bit heavy on jargon ("This can be understood as a transgressive act...[that] can be seen as redressing a fundamental social lack.") though readable enough overall. What I am finding especially interesting--as I did when I read Literacy With an Attitude: Educating Working Class Children in Their Own Self-Interest--is how people who not only don't intend to stereotype children, but in fact may see themselves as deliberately doing the opposite, nonetheless manage to conspire with other factors in children's lives to push them into predetermined roles. (On the other hand, an administrator in the school introduces the author to a 10-year-old boy with the words, "There's a jail cell out there with that boy's name on it," so it's not all about damaged institutions overriding individual good intentions.)

The author of Bad Boys is also interested in the narratives educators tell themselves about why children are the way they are (family factors are a common one), and in the ways that classroom misbehavior and deliberate challenges to authority can become adaptive responses for Black boys, a source of self-esteem and peer respect.

At the school she studied, she was also interested to discover that the room where kids served in-school detentions was essentially hidden from the rest of the school; it couldn't be reached from the school's interior, but only through an exterior door that let onto the playground, the windows were arranged in such a way that people couldn't see inside; the children serving detention had playground and lunch times separately from the rest of the children in the school. Not only would it be almost impossible to stumble upon this room, she could barely find it after she'd been given directions.

Her sense that problem Black children were being hidden away led to her exploring, and finding evidence for, the theory that one of the school's agendas was to hide problems in the school from white families, for fear they would exercise their options to take their children elsewhere to be educated.

I don't always love the author--her analytic sections seem very good to me, as do her descriptions of what she observes in the school. But memoirish "field notes" sections between chapters seem a little precious and self-indulgent to me, and I have taken to skipping them, mostly. I hope her next, post-dissertation book won't read quite so much like she's trying to impress her committee with her grasp of theory and jargon. I may get worn out and come to feel I've learned as much as I need to know about how Black boys get shafted in school--especially since it's really no surprise to anybody that they do. So this is another one that has felt worthwhile but that I might not read every page of.

On the other hand, I have just learned that the publication of One Was a Soldier, the new Clare Ferguson/ Russ Van Alstyne mystery, has been pushed back to March of 2011, so I may read every single page of both these books, including the footnotes, because what else am I going to have to do?

In my to-be-read pile:

Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say): Reflections on Literature and Faith by Frederich Buechner

Claiming Abraham: Reading the Qur'an and the Bible Side by Side by Michael Lodahl

Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time by Sarah Ruden

Walt Whitman's Song of Myself: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition by Ezra Greenspan, which I really want to dive into in the next 10 days because I am leading my workshop on Song of Myself at the summer gathering and I always like to know something about the poem that I didn't know before when I teach it.

I also have an annotated edition of Song of Myself (published just a few months ago) to take along. Very excited about that. We can look stuff up!

Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love: Race, Class, and Gender in US Adoption by Christine Ward Gailey. This one may end up back in the library bag unread; it's possible I've read so much about race etc. in US adoption that the marginal utility of reading another 200-page book on the subject is approaching the vanishing point. Though the class and gender stuff could be new and interesting.

The Preaching Life by Barbara Brown Taylor. I've started this several times and not finished it because it's so good I want to be able to really take it in and digest it and never feel like I have time to do it justice.

Liturgies of Quakerism by Ben Pink Dandelion. I paid a lot of money for this last year at the summer gathering, after considering it for several years, and I have tried several times to get through it. Here's what I said last time I attempted it, in September:

I’m not sure I’ll ever get through The Liturgies of Quakerism. This is an import from Britain, and it cost $35. I’d been looking at it in the bookstore catalog, and at the Gathering bookstore for a couple years, and thinking, “That’s a lot of money for a book.” Finally this summer, I decided to buy it. I am very interested in this notion that Quakers have a liturgy and curious about what that might mean.

However, this is my third attempt at the book since I bought it, and I have yet to make it past page 2, “The liturgy functions as a hermeneutic of sorts that, through its ordo, helps to make sense of numinous experiences,” or page 3’s “A rhetorical transaction, therefore, may be best understood as operating at some point on a continuum of conscious choice-making on the receiver’s part.”

It’s not that I’m not equipped to read this sort of thing; a graduate degree in Political Philosophy and two years of graduate work in literature render it all very familiar. It’s just that one of the consolations of having dropped out of grad school eight years ago when Eric was born was the freedom to never have to read about hermeneutics or rhetorical transactions or “the artificial tensions and releases created by consonance and dissonance” or how the Quietist experience is “inherently related to a realized eschatology” or the “de-coupling of a sense of end-time and a sense of intimacy.”

I think there’s a lot of good stuff in this book. I just don’t know that I have the intellectual energy to cope with the language. On the other hand, I paid $35 for the damn thing. I suppose if I were to add up all the $10 words I would see that I was getting much more than my money’s worth.

Broke, But Not Really

I know I talk about this a lot, and while I suppose that will fade in time, I also think that our custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather will remain one of the defining events of my life.

One of the ways it's the gift that keeps on giving right now is that, 14 months after the appeals court finally ruled in our favor, we're still paying the bills. Lots and lots of bills.

Some of our debt pre-dates the adoption, but most of the debt we're carrying is from the fairly modest amount we borrowed to pay adoption agency fees and then, when C. showed up, to pay the lawyer. And then borrowed again to pay the lawyer again. And then borrowed again to pay the lawyer again. And then, finally, when she called to say the birthfather had filed an appeal, to not borrow any more because we couldn't--we were tapped out. I told the lawyer then, "I don't know how we'll pay for this, or when. But I promise we will."

We initially thought this adoption would cost about $14,000. That was revised upward by a couple thou after we paid birthmother expenses for a woman who decided to parent. And a little bit more when problems with our home study stranded me and Yehva in Illinois while we got them fixed. But still in the range of about $18,000--a lot of money, but nothing to panic about.

Until the custody fight, and the endless months of our lawyer filing papers and responding to the other side's filed papers and attending hearings.

By the time the dust settled, the adoption had cost us something close to $65,000. A number that makes me either laugh or cry every time I say it out loud. I laugh because it is so completely ridiculous and unbelievable, or I cry because the effect on our family of incurring that kind of debt could so easily have been catastrophic.

It's been hard. We have so many payments that by the time I pay the bills, and we put gas in the cars, and we buy groceries, it's pretty common for us to have almost nothing left to get through the week. I can't tell you how many times I've cried when I thought I had the pay period all figured out and then was reminded that we had a $40 prescription to refill, or opened the mail to find a bill I hadn't expected, or had a sick cat, or something broken on the car.

I never thought I'd pay my mortgage late. I can't tell you how many times I've paid my mortgage late over the last three years. A year ago, we took a forbearance for 90 days because we got behind and realized we would never be able to catch up.

I've needed a new pair of sneakers for six months, and every month I say I'm going to get them, but by the time I sort out the more urgent bills and set aside the mortgage money, there never seems to be any extra. I'm still wearing my post-surgical bras from my breast reduction last November because there are always better things to spend my cash on than new bras--though we're getting close to the crisis point, undergarment-wise, and it will have to be a priority soon enough. The kids' birthday presents come from craigslist and the local consignment shops; David and I just didn't give each other presents for birthdays or Christmas last year.

I had promised myself a new dress for Joann and Carolyn's wedding in May. Back in January, I was sure that sometime in the next three or four months, there'd be a little extra for me. But as the date approached, it became clear that there was not going to be any extra, and I would not be able to buy a dress. (Let alone the new bras, dress, slip, and shoes I had originally envisioned. What was I thinking? I pay the bills. I know where the money goes and exactly how much is left every week.)

And this is where my story turns happy. Because I e-mailed my friends Adrianne and Carla, and asked if I could root around in their closets for something to wear to the wedding. They both dress professionally for jobs, and I was sure I'd be able to put together some flowing pants and a dressy top, maybe not a perfect fit, maybe not in my colors, but nice. Good. More than good enough.

But they e-mailed me back and said they had talked it over and, while they'd be happy to let me into their closets, they wanted to buy me a dress instead.

So I had a beautiful new red dress for the wedding, because my friends bought it for me. (I wore an old bra, no slip, and old shoes...it doesn't seem to have ruined the wedding.)

Our version of broke is a pretty good one. We've never been without food, only, sometimes, without a favorite or a treat. We've more than once eaten the pantry and freezer to the bare walls while waiting for a paycheck, but we've always had the pantry and freezer to turn to. David doesn't have an Xbox 360, and I don't have an iPod Touch, and Yehva won't go to preschool this fall even though I know she would love it, and Eric doesn't get to take a summer class at the science museum this year, and Carl...well, I can't think of anything Carl wants and doesn't have right now. Carl's good.

We're all good. The stuff we do without is stuff most people do just fine without anyway.

And there's a lot of stuff we haven't had to do without, and I want to say why. It's because so many other people have been pouring money into our household. Not just the hundred dollars for a dress. The kids and I haven't missed a summer gathering, because my monthly meeting pays for the kids to go, and FGC itself gives me scholarship funds, and FLGBTQC helps out with travel funds. This winter, we were able to attend the FLGBTQC midwinter gathering because one friend just flat out wrote me a check for half the kids' cost, and the friend we traveled with paid for gas and our meals (though writing that I am reminded that I still owe her for hotels). Just last week, I got to go out for a really nice dinner with a fancy appetizer, because a friend treated me. Friends have treated me a lot. Adrianne even invited me and all three of my kids out to dinner the other week, which has got to be the very picture of generosity.

Two families in my monthly meeting, independently, were led to send us $1000 each to help with lawyer bills, "or for any need," as one put it. My monthly meeting helped us through the Fund for Sufferings, as did FLGBTQC. My parents lent us $10,000 and then forgave the debt, and then a year later sent us a check for another $10,000 when the birthfather appealed. Without my parents' generosity, I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say we would have had to choose between paying the lawyer and keeping our house.

I'm thinking of all this now, because I just asked my monthly meeting to help with travel expenses for the summer gathering. I didn't think I'd have to--between my discount for leading a workshop, and my meeting's Connecting Kids to Quakers money for Eric, Carl, and Yehva, and the gathering being only two hours from my house, I only needed to come up with $307 plus two tanks of gas. I was sure I could do this. I even have an excel spreadsheet showing that, on paper at least, that money could be squeezed out of the budget.

But it turns out that, like the money for my dress and the money for Yehva's preschool and the money for every other thing I thought we'd surely be able to pay for in another few months, that $307 doesn't exist. So somebody else is picking up the slack for me, one more time.

There is an endpoint: in June of 2011, we pay off a loan whose payment is $525 a month. And then the rest of them drop like dominoes month by month, until (knocking wood) by the end of 2011 we have somewhere between $950 and $1100 every month that we don't have right now. When I look ahead, I'm amazed by how suddenly we're free of the whole thing: a matter of a few months. Like snapping your fingers, once we get there.

And then, as I e-mailed some friends this morning, we'll be wallowing in money like pigs in shit, frolicking through meadows tossing dollar bills like rose petals, lighting our cigars with $20 bills.

I'm trying to remember why I wanted to write a blog post about this, other than to invite others to boggle at the numbers, to laugh or cry with me about it as led. Or to get my perpetual fretting about money out of my head and onto paper so I could let go of it for awhile. Or to explain to the world why I asked my Friends meeting for $200--again!--to do something as arguably self-indulgent as attend the gathering. Or to remind myself to stop complaining because we really have nothing to complain about.

Oh, I remember--I think it's worth knowing, for those of you who haven't been through anything catastrophic like this, that when push comes to shove you have a lot more to rely on than just your own resources. That people love to help. That sometimes they act like you're doing them a favor by letting them write you a check. That they can surprise you by choosing compassion over judgment. I used to hate to ask for help, and usually turned it down when it was offered. Turns out, it's not so bad, being humbled. It's been one of the unexpected gifts of the custody fight, this whole mess of help coming our way, when we asked for it and when we didn't ask for it, whether we wanted it or not.

We're so damn broke. But so much goodness came to us out of this mess that I honestly would not wish for it to be different.

I kid you not, come January 2012, I'm lighting a cigar with a $20 bill. And then we're re-starting our savings, and catching up all the deferred maintenance on the house, and giving money to charity again, and, yes, buying poor David his Xbox 360. And looking around for opportunities to pass on a little of what we've been given in such abundance.

A couple of more things about my meeting

I am loving how many comments I've gotten on my last post, and a few private e-mails as well. I want to be clear about something, though, which is that my monthly meeting is actually a splendid one. We are very good at listening to each other and holding our differences lovingly. For instance, year before last the Adult Religious Ed committee held a retreat at which we talked about our different relationships to Quakerism. It began in the morning with a panel of Friends describing their paths, and in the afternoon we did this great exercise where the leader would read a statement, such as, "I have a personal relationship with God," and then we would place ourselves along a continuum based on how true it felt for us.

The discussions then of why people places themselves where they did were deep, loving, and at times hilarious. Sometimes a person listening to someone else speak would move a few places down the continuum; once the people on the opposite ends of the continuum decided that they were talking about exactly the same thing using different words and that we should more properly therefore form a circle. It was great.

And I want to say, too, that during our almost-two-year custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather, my meeting's support for us was incredible. The meeting helped us financially through the fund for sufferings; two different families in the meeting were independently led to send us large checks to help out with legal fees; the meeting convened a support committee for us; and, more than any of that, I could feel how deeply people in the meeting were entering with us into our fear of losing her and our deep love for her. People's sympathy for our situation seemed to go so deep that I felt like some members of the meeting, at least--and not always the people I'd had the closest or best relationships with--were feeling it all with us.

That my hiatus from meeting began only two months after the appeals court finally settled the case in our favor once and for all sometimes makes me feel, as I told David recently, like the guy whose wife puts him through med school, and then he dumps her for a younger woman right after graduation.

But, you know, it is what it is. God told me to leave my meeting for awhile, in one of the clearest messages I've ever gotten in meeting for worship. I'm just a little cranky that the next step hasn't been made so clear.

Still Thinking About My Quaker Meeting & Me

A few months ago, our Ministry & Outreach committee was working on a pamphlet that might give a brief introduction to Quaker faith & practice to people attending an open house at our new meetinghouse. They brought a draft to business meeting that included something like our usual, "Quakers believe in that of God or Spirit in everyone." We usually say "or Spirit" because some people aren't comfortable with the word "God," and treating "God" and "Spirit" as roughly equivalent is something we've gotten used to over time.

This draft pamphlet, though, added "or goodness" as a third option. This was the first time I'd ever seen "goodness" used in this context, although, interestingly, I have seen it again since then on some Quaker blogs.

I've been struggling with my meeting for a couple of years now, and although I have been making efforts to return in recent weeks, have been on hiatus--not attending worship--since May of 09. Every week lately, as I've been trying to return, there has been some barrier to me attending meeting for worship, either at home or at the meetinghouse: I've been sick, the aforementioned patchouli-drenched hippy has sat down near me and I've had to leave the room, I'm so raw that a minor crankiness between me and a beloved Friend has led to a big emotional explosion on my part, or Yehva has fussed so persistently that I've decided to take her home.

I think most of these things would hardly be obstacles if I were more sure about my need and desire to be there. I think it is a sign of how fragile my intention is that a pebble in my path ends up feeling more like a military roadblock, complete with snarling dogs, circling helicopters with searchlights, and sarcastic immigration officers sneering, "And just what brings you to this part of town, girly?"

So, anyway, the committee brings this pamphlet draft that says Quakers believe in "that of God, or Spirit, or goodness, in everyone," and my heart sinks. One of my struggles with Quakerism is what I see as its secularization; I want to be part of a religion, not an affiliation of nice people with good intentions. The person presenting the draft asked the meeting for approval to print the pamphlet, and the immediate response was a number of voices saying, "Go ahead!" and "Good job!" and "Roll the presses!" and such like.

I thought that if it was really OK with my meeting to have a pamphlet published that equated "God" and "goodness," then I was definitely in the wrong place. And I also felt that I did not have it in me to be the lone voice of dissent; I really, in that moment, intended to let them go ahead and publish that pamphlet. And then, I thought, I would go home and write my letter withdrawing my membership.

"I'll stand aside," I said, which, many of you know, is that a Quaker does when she cannot unite with a decision of the meeting but recognizes that the meeting is otherwise in unity.

And the clerk accepted that. She was ready to move on, except that over the next couple of minutes, other people raised concerns as well. I don't remember about what, exactly; not the same as mine, I don't think. The M&O committee felt time pressure; they needed to get a pamphlet approved in time to have it printed for the open house. And the clerk, I think, felt time pressure, too--we used to have business meeting before our 12:30 p.m. meeting for worship, and that created a fixed end time. This was, if I recall correctly, our first business meeting in the new meetinghouse, and our first one on the new schedule: starting business meeting at 12:30 or so, after morning worship and the social hour, with nothing to force an ending on us if we ran long. And we were running long. Oh, so long.

Time pressure has got to be the number one cause of bad practice among Friends.

So, a few people raised concerns, but the clerk tried to move us along. "I heard a lot of approval in the room," she said, "and Su has agreed to stand aside..."

And damn if God didn't give me a word to speak in that moment.

I don't remember it very well--I often find that when what I have said is spirit-led is that I don't remember much of it afterward. But I said, "I may have been hasty," and then I went on to say something about "goodness" being a weak word, a word that seems to me to be almost completely about a human quality. God is not all about goodness, I said. God is a big dark hard mystery that we wrestle with, and it is a disservice to reduce God to this single quality. I said...I don't know what I said. But I was eloquent! Damn. And I felt as I said it that I was saying exactly what I meant, exactly what I needed to say. And I felt that it came inwardly from God.

We went on to have a good discussion. A couple of non-theist Friends spoke, and in hearing them I found raised up in me a concern for non-theist Friends in my meeting. I found myself wondering whether "we believe in that of God in everyone" has become an empty phrase we mouth, if half of us don't even believe in God; I found myself concerned that we were asking non-theist Friends to accommodate themselves too much; I went away musing about why we continue, as our first answer to the question of what Quakers are, to assert a question of belief as a defining thing when Quakers do not in fact share a unifying belief; and then I found myself wondering what, if not a belief in That of God in Everyone, does make us Quakers.

We were eventually able to unify around language for the pamphlet, much to the relief of the M&O committee. The woman who had presented it thanked us, and said, "I move every time we have this conversation," which felt true to me as well. This, to me, is the thing Quakers do better than anybody else I've ever encountered, this deep listening to each other (and, yes, to the Divine), and coming to a decision that respects all those voices. I felt pretty good after that meeting, actually, which was quite a change from "the first thing I'm going to do when I get home is write my anti-membership letter!"

And since then... *sigh.*

Yesterday I was at the meetinghouse for a committee meeting, and I found myself standing on the porch gazing at our sign, which is leaning against the wall there. "Red Cedar Friends Meeting," it says, and then the Quaker testimonies, based on the SPICE acronym: Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality.

I have always hated that acronym, without really thinking about why, beyond, "Oh, isn't that adorable, how my whole big messy deep religion can be summed up a cute little five-letter word?" (But I just googled for the SPICE acronym and found that I am not the only Quaker who doesn't love it.)

Yesterday, that word "integrity" really jumped out at me. This is a word we use in place of Truth, as in Publishers of Truth, the term early Quakers used to describe themselves. What truth? God's truth, as revealed to Quakerism's founder, George Fox.

Now, Quakers don't necessarily think there's one Truth for everybody (two people praying about whether they should take a certain action may well get different answers) and we have never claimed to posses the whole Truth. And some of what God revealed to Fox seems downright nutty to us now. But we have believed that seeking the Truth would lead to an increased measure of it, and that as our measures grew, we would find ourselves more and more in accord with each other. (Big generalizations there, many of which could be contested. It will do for now.)

"Integrity," though--there's another one of those human words. For a person to have integrity, her words and actions should be in accord with each other. But integrity does not require a person's words and actions to be in accord with God's will as they understand it.

Truth, on the other hand, calls us to consider not only our own human wishes and actions but God's. A person of integrity is not necessarily a person of God. A good person is not necessarily a person of God.

I want to be a person of God. I want my faith community to aid me in becoming a person of God. I want, in my faith community, to be able to use the word "God" without someone immediately following up with a comment about how uncomfortable they are with that word.

I do not like listing our testimonies as a way of defining ourselves. I don't like the SPICE acronym. And I don't like suggesting that what we strive for is personal integrity rather than Truth. Might as well put up a sign, I thought, reading: "Red Cedar Friends Meeting: We're Nice People."

Now, I recognize first, that this is getting really long and probably nobody is going to read it. But second, I recognize that there is probably no congregation of any religious body anywhere in which everybody is all heated up about discussing God and God's will. When my friend Julie and I were at the Festival of Faith & Writing in April, we both talked about how good it felt to be among people who wanted to wrestle with the questions we like to wrestle with. That festival draws on people from all kinds of Christian denominations, probably most of whom also don't have a whole lot people in their home church who meet their need for questioning and examining every last little thing. If we all had that at home, there'd be no need for the conference.

So I know that it is unreasonable for me to expect my monthly meeting to meet my every religious need, and I don't expect that. And I know that when I speak honestly about my concerns and interests there, I am heard with sympathy and respect. And I take very much to heart Friend Martin Kelly's point in the blog post I linked to above, that "comfort is not necessarily what God has in mind for us," so I wince when I hear myself wanting to be more comfortable in my monthly meeting.

And yet...

I thought it was time for me to go back to worship, but every time I go to the meetinghouse, there's a pebble in my way that feels like a wall.

More About, Of All Things, Perfume And Race. Ranty!

My friend Julie commented in my post about the Black student who was removed from her class by a teacher because of the hair products she was using and I wrote such a long ranty and profane reply I decided to edit it for profanity and turn it into its own post. (Profanity not aimed at Julie...more about strength of feeling).

Here's what Julie, very reasonably, said about a time some years ago at a Quaker conference when I did not move my seat when a Black man wearing cologne sat down next to me, for fear of him thinking I had moved because he was Black:

My two cents is, just move when you have to move, and don't worry about what anyone else is thinking. You're responsible for taking care of your needs, not their potential or imagined reaction.

Julie is not wrong. But this is what I found myself writing in response:

The "just move" thing is a little hard for me, Julie. There are very few Black people at FGC Gathering most years, and I have heard some Black men in particular tell stories about women clutching purses or otherwise seeming wary when a Black man comes into the room or gets behind them in line at the cafeteria. I don't know how much of that is perception and how much is reality. I'm not a big fan of mind-reading in general, assuming you know somebody's motive, so when I hear "this white woman clutched her purse because she was afraid of me," I reserve judgment. I don't assume that's an accurate perception of what that woman did and why. On the other hand, I would like the Gathering to be a place where people of color feel welcome, like a part of the community. And having heard those stories, I just wasn't easy standing up and walking away.

As far as telling the man why I was moving--it can be so hard. One thing that happens with a perfume exposure, for me, is emotionality--I think emotion welling up is part of my body's response to the chemicals or whatever I'm reactive to, and part of it is just plain old weary, "I just want to sit here and worship God and all you damn people coming to morning worship straight from your showers with your hair still stinking-shampoo wet and your lotion freshly applied and your hairspray and deodorant are making it really hard for me to do that." So it's easy to imagine, sitting here, a really calm and rational response (and I have gotten better at this with practice, to be sure, because it's been a lot of years now) but it can be well-nigh impossible to do in the moment, especially if I forgot to be prepared for the possibility and am taken by surprise.

Perfume exposures in worship are about the worst for me. Not only do they mean that I have to get up and leave worship but I've of course been sitting there trying to get as open as possible. It's hard to open yourself up to Spirit while simultaneously keeping your guard up against the possibility of some patchouli-loving hippy sitting down in the next seat and wrecking half your week.

Here's an experience I had once with a Black woman at the downtown post office in Lansing, probably close to 20 years ago now. I was waiting in a long slow line, and this woman a couple of people ahead of me was wearing a really beautiful dress that just draped on her wonderfully. She was about my size, and I was lost in a reverie of thinking about how beautiful she looked and idly wondering how a dress like that might look on me.

And all of a sudden, she flew out at me. "What the fuck are you looking at? You got a problem with Black people? You got a problem with me?" I was so taken aback I couldn't say anything, let alone tell her that I hadn't meant to be staring at her but if I was it was because I thought she was beautiful.

That idea just doesn't seem to have been available to her, that a strange white woman in a public place would be staring at her in absent-minded admiration.

Sometimes I have an over-strong reaction to somebody wearing perfume not just because they're wearing perfume but because they're the 100th damn person this week who has made me give up a good seat in a movie theater or leave a restaurant before my dessert or drop out of the line at the grocery store or walk out of a kitschy little shop I wanted to browse in for awhile longer or go home and change my clothes even though my shirt was clean out of the wash two hours ago because the damn stink is all over me now just from standing five feet away in an aisle at Target. Or go back into my own house and close the windows instead of enjoying my yard because the neighbor's dryer sheets are so toxic and the wind is blowing my way. Or get out of the shower half-rinsed and run down the hall to my dorm room mostly naked because the person who just got into the shower next to me apparently doesn't understand what it means to agree to room on a fragrance-free floor and I value my ability to keep breathing over being clean and maintaining my dignity.

I told David the other day that I've had so many little aggravations lately that it's like I'm carrying this "Fuck you" around inside me right now and it's going to pop out at some, I don't know, perfectly nice lady at the grocery store who's doing nothing worse than moving too slow in the pasta aisle when all I need to do is dash in there and grab a box of rotini. That's how I feel if I've had a lot of perfume exposures, too, like I could just strangle some poor woman emitting a light and airy citrus scent because it's not just the light and airy citrus scent, it's that the light and airy citrus scent is the straw, baby, and citrus woman is the camel's back and I am so gonna break her.

So, this man who sat next to me was the metaphorical citrus woman, you see? And in the post office, I was the citrus woman. But I did not want to be the 100th person that week to do something that might or might not be a racist reaction to a Black man coming into the room or joining the line or sitting down to worship. I did not want to be his citrus woman. I wanted to be his Friend.

The Penn Family Talks about Guns and Babies

I had a nice visit with my parents yesterday; they came to drop off a big cushy recliner my mom isn't using anymore and stayed for several hours, mostly just chatting. My nephew Garrett, who is 14 and much-adored by my kids (and by David and me), came along and spent most of the time running the kids ragged in the backyard.

My mom looks good. She had a cardiac catheterization some weeks ago that showed that she has a fully-blocked artery to her heart, and it can't be repaired, and week before last she had a procedure to clean out her carotid artery. So I have been worrying about her. She seems to be recovering well; I could tell from her voice on the phone when she called to ask if yesterday was a good day for a visit that she was feeling better.

It charms me that Yehva reminds my mother of me as a little girl. "How funny," she said drily, "that you should get a daughter who's smart, outgoing, and headstrong." A little bit of grandmotherly schadenfreude there, I think. There's a famous family story (with picture!) about her finding me standing naked in the bathroom sink when I was about Yehva's age, planning to give myself a bath because I wanted one and she wasn't going to give me one. And another famous story from when I was maybe a late 3, and sang a little song for the church. It was my first time in front of an audience, and apparently it was quite a challenge to get me to yield the stage when I was done. I'd still be up there singing, apparently, if I hadn't been small enough to carry off.

We like smart-baby stories in our family, and my parents told me a good one about my 11-month-old nephew, Oscar. Apparently my sister-in-law got him a jack-in-the-box. She cranked the handle, it played its little tune, and then pop! up came the jack-in-the-box. Oscar liked that! So she did it again. He liked it again!

So she scooted the jack-in-the-box over to him and suggested he crank the handle himself. Oscar looked at it a second, and then reached over and popped open the latch on the lid.

We laughed. We are all familiar--as you probably are, too, if you have kids--with those moments when you are torn between thinking, "Wow, I'm so impressed with this kid," and "Oh, man, I am so doomed." Smart kids, we agree, are both a blessing and a burden.

I told my parents a friend's story about taking her kids to a shooting range as part of Be A Tourist In Your Own Town, an event here in Lansing every year where you buy a passport that gets you into all kinds of attractions free for the day. Her son, almost 8, is interested in target shooting, and my friend asked one of the staff how old kids have to be to take lessons. She figured the answer would be "older than 8" and this would be a backup for her own uncertainty about the idea. The guy answered, "Old enough to do it safely, and to follow the rules. These guys could absolutely do it! We work with beginners one on one until we're confident they can do it."

She should have seen enough lawyer shows by now to know you never ask a question you don't already know the answer to.

That story got us talking about guns in our own families. My mom grew up in a house where guns were propped in the corner in every room, and she was always afraid of them and says she only ever fired one once in her life. My dad had a couple of guns in a rack behind the door in the spare room when I was growing up, but I don't remember him using them (he goes to deer camp every year, but he's the kind of "hunter" who can spend a week at deer camp and not notice he forgot his gun at home). He did hunt when I was younger; I was born in October, and he went hunting soon afterwards. He sent home a postcard with a picture of a deer on it. If I remember it correctly, he wrote "Daddy has not seen any deer yet." He addressed it to my mom and brother, and then squeezed "and Susan" into the margin. That offended me when I was a kid: I was an afterthought! But I'm pretty sure 3-week-old me was not bothered by it.

I mentioned my friend Adrianne's Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol, and my one experience shooting it. My dad said, "I got a concealed carry permit a few years ago."

Me: Oh, yeah? What made you decide to get a concealed carry permit?

My dad: I didn't have one.

Ah.

There was a big locked gun case at my grandparents' house in Gaylord, and men and boys sometimes went shooting when a bunch of us were up there. I shot some, I know; I mostly remember a few times doing target practice in my backyard, shooting paper plates with a gun I only remember as "grandma's deer rifle."

My grandma could shoot a gun; there's a story about her shooting a rabid dog from her back porch when she was eight months pregnant. Though I could be mis-remembering the pregnant part because there's another story about her getting bit by a dog just a few days before my Uncle Charlie was born, and then sometime later my aunt Clara Jean, who was 5 or 6, got bit by a dog and wouldn't stop crying, and when she finally calmed down enough to tell them what was wrong, she said, "I'm too young to have a baby!" An early lesson in correlation v. causation.

On the other hand, my grandma was pregnant six times, so maybe both those things did happen when she was about to have a baby. Just different babies.

My grandpa once shot and killed a rat in the wall of the house. With the expected unpleasant results.

My nephew Garrett seems to be following in my brother's footsteps. He loves dirt bikes and snowmobiles, things with big engines that go fast. He also likes to shoot. His big present from my parents last Christmas was a new rifle he'd been wanting. He's a very good shot, I'm told. My dad said that he is interested in firing "the pistols" but my brother isn't sure about letting him do that. "He's fired a lot of guns, though," my dad said, and rattled off a little list that ended with, "and of course he's fired Gary's machine gun."

Me: Gary has a machine gun?

Not a fully-automatic one, I am assured. Those are illegal. It's a Thompson--a Tommy gun! I said delightedly--with that round magazine like the gangsters in Bugs Bunny cartoons carry around. He also has some kind of deadly Eastern European-made not-an-AK47-but-something-like-that. From this I infer that one of the many things I did not know about my brother is that he collects guns. I think it would be interesting if he agreed to show them to me next time I visit.

Sometimes I feel like my family are all very much like each other--they live together on the same piece of land, for crying out loud! I call it The Penn Family Hilltop Compound. It has two houses on it, and two enormous pole barns full of pickup trucks and motorcycles, a race car, a dune buggy, my dad's little bulldozer ("you'd be surprised how many uses you find for it once you have it," we joked yesterday), the almost-bigger-than-my-house RV my parents roam the southwest in every winter, and God only knows what else. I didn't know about the bulldozer or the machine gun; what other surprises might there be?

Very much like each other, I think sometimes, and not so much like me. This is a feeling that was very painful to me as a child and young adult. But I get more and more peaceful with it as I get older, because, you know, I like them. And because it gets easier for me to see the ways we are alike--my parents and I laughed a lot yesterday, because we have the same sense of humor. We like to tell each other stories. I knew they'd like the story about my friend and her kids at the shooting range; they knew I'd like the story about Oscar and the jack-in-the-box. I told stories about Yehva, full of piss and vinegar and always into something, and my mom told stories about me, much the same. It was a good way to spend an afternoon.

I Can See the Other Side

There's a lot of outrage at Racialicious about a teacher who removed a child from the classroom because hair products were making the teacher ill. There are also problems with process--apparently the school moved the girl to another classroom without telling her parents--but the language is really distressing to me. The teacher "claims" the child's hair was making her ill. This is being described as a white teacher "removing a black child from the classroom because of her racially-different hair."

Boy, this pushes a lot of buttons for me.

Because it's not the hair. It's the stinky hair products.

I'm white. I have chemical sensitivities. Perfumes in products (and perfumes are in almost all products) can make me very ill. One bad exposure when I'm vulnerable can lay me out with dizziness and headache and hives that can last for days. Over the years, I've had many painful experiences of being excluded from places I wanted to be because someone was wearing very smelly lotion or had used hair spray recently, or used a smelly conditioner. And I have had more than my share of people denying that this could be a problem. Some people don't believe in chemical sensitivities at all; some are sure their hair gel can't be making me sick because it's "all natural"; some are convinced that what I'm experiencing as a toxic cloud of sick-making poison is "lightly scented" and is therefore OK; and some, to draw on a real experience I've had, just flat-out put their "need" to moisturize their hands right this second above my need to not be in an enclosed car full of perfume.

So one button that was pushed for me was the dismissive language used to describe the teacher's allergy.

But I also had a reaction to the racial element of the story, because I've had my own experiences with that.

For instance, years ago I was at the FGC Gathering, and tried to attend all-gathering worship. I arrived early, and a couple of minutes after I arrived, a white woman who was reeking of shampoo sat next to me. I got up and moved.

A minute later, another white person who had just put on lotion or something sat next to me. I got up and moved.

I moved three or four times. And then a black man dripping cologne sat next to me. I almost burst into tears. But I did not move, because I did not want that man to think even for one moment that a white women had gotten up and changed her seat because a black man sat down next to her.

I paid a pretty high price for that choice.

Right now, I have a black child from down the street coming to my house every day. He uses some kind of grooming product that is very perfumed. I haven't said anything to him, and I won't, because right now it is very important to me for a number of reasons that he feel 100% welcome in my home. We send him home at dinner time, we send him home at bedtime, we send him home if somebody here needs a quiet day. But I never send him home for reasons that have to do with him, because I want him to feel that this is a place where he is accepted. But I pay a price for having perfume in my house every day, too.

The teacher certainly handled things badly. She should have spoken to the girls' parents and kept the focus on the possibility that it was a product being used on the girl's hair causing her nausea, rather than addressing the girl directly and describing the problem as being her hair. I'm not going to let her off the hook for that.

But comments like this:

THIS shit right here pisses me off. I read about it earlier and it rankled me highly. Now that the details have come out, my blood is boiling. Oooh the ugly little savage Negroid is making me uncomfortable with her hair and it’s “smells”.

Yes, "ugly little savage Negroid" is exactly what the teacher said and meant. And by putting "smells" in quotes do you mean to imply that the product used--which lists "fragrance" as one of its ingredients--didn't actually have an odor?

My heart goes out to that little girl and I hope the teacher owns up to her bad handling of a difficult situation. But when I see people making this more racial than it was, imputing language and motives to the teacher that go far beyond what she actually said and did, it frustrates me.

I am grateful to the commenter who said:

I come to racialicious because it’s a safe space, not only for racial minorities but for people with disabilities, and I cannot believe that this possible disability (anaphylactic shock!!) was dismissed so callously and casually.

Other commenters also tried to separate out the teacher's possibly-real sensitivity from her bad handling of the situation. No teacher should publicly shame a student for any reason, and that's worth calling her out, and possibly disciplining her for. But--well, I've been sitting here a bit, and I don't have a good conclusion. Just these thoughts.