Brown White Black Read online

  The truth is, there are people out there who get it, even though they don’t have black sons. There are people who feel our terror at the specific threats the world holds for black men and boys, even though they know they don’t experience it. The people who understand that “praying for healing” is not good enough, who realize that white guilt is really just indulgent privilege and doesn’t do shit to change anything anyway. The people who think to send notes of solidarity, who understood why I showed up at work during much of August 2016 with eyes glazed over and dazed from staring at #MikeBrown and #Ferguson tweets all night because I couldn’t bear to look away, because it was only my privilege that allowed me to be a spectator that night.

  For Shiv’s first Christmas, we took him to see Santa twice: the first Santa was white, the second was black. We were prompted to make the second visit by a black friend of ours, who gently informed us where we might find a Santa who looked like our son at a local art gallery that features work by African American artists. I debated briefly whether we should make a point of taking Shiv to see a Santa of color. On the one hand, of course we should, but on the other hand, it felt so antithetical to the way I’d been raised as the child of immigrants: to conform to the white experience.

  But that was precisely the point. When we became Shiv’s parents, we promised that we would push ourselves to be thoughtful about our choices, to remain open to learning and growth, even—or especially—when that learning challenged our preconceptions or pushed us to do things that made us uncomfortable but were clearly best for Shiv. In the end, I figured a second visit to Santa would be a fun way to spend a Saturday morning, and we’d get some cute pictures out of the bargain. Which we did, which we then posted on Facebook.

  “I loved his picture with black Santa!” our white friends said, immediately confirming to me that going had been the right choice. The color of the Santa whose lap your child sits in might not seem to matter, but when the dominant image of male blackness in this country is of the dangerous, violent “thug,” a gentle, smiling Santa is like a revelation. Because when our friends said “black Santa” instead of just “Santa,” they meant that Santa, like Jesus and all powerful good men, is by default white.

  One of the realities I’ve had to confront as Shiv’s parent is the fact that, for many people, he represents an innocent incarnation of male blackness that people take great pains to affirm and admire: the good, safe, right kind. There is often a transactional twinge to it all, as if loving on my sweet little black son now somehow assuages the guilt of future judgment of him when he is big and tall and strong and eighteen and they will cross the street to avoid him, or post on Nextdoor when he lingers in front of their yard, or clutch their purses a little tighter when he enters an elevator.

  When he was first born, mothers of the students I teach would stop me in the halls and demand to see pictures, peering at my phone with their faces already broken open into wide-mouthed smiles. They had heard from their children that my baby is cute, but their kids have been so well trained that they never mentioned my son is black. The moms would see his face on the screen and their mouths would stay open just a fraction too long, because they didn’t want to betray their surprise or say something stupid. “Oh, he’s so cute!” they would say, meaning it, but then it would quickly start to cross the line into overpraise, as if they were going out of their way to comment on his handsomeness to assuage themselves of their shock. “Where’d you get him from?” they would ask, as if inquiring after a pair of shoes.

  PART FOUR: MORE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES IN ORDER TO LIVE

  When I was growing up, my mom used to tell me that to parent meant to constantly worry. “You just wait,” she’d say. “Someday, when you’re a mom, you’ll understand.” Except that my mom had very little to worry about as far as my physical well-being was concerned; I was never actually in any real danger. I grew up in a ridiculously safe suburb made possible by a degree of economic privilege that, statistically, made me one of the safest children on the planet. My son is growing up inside a similar kind of privilege, but it will not have a similar impact on his statistical safety. Because he is a black male living in America, the threat of violence looms no matter what we do.

  All parents have to face the reality that we are not ultimately in control of what happens to our children. Despite the statistical improbability of misfortune, my mother’s worry about me wasn’t completely unfounded. Accidents happen. People get sick. The world can be a scary place. But it feels very different to know that because of the color of my son’s skin, the world is a different kind of scary for him. A parent’s job is ostensibly to protect, but can I really protect Shiv when I also need to prepare him for the reality he will soon face?

  * * *

  I spend most of my thirty-second birthday inside the bubble of my middle-class, professional privilege. I go to work, where my (mostly white) students are extra-sweet to me and assure me I’m “not that” old even though I’m twice as old as them. I hear from friends and family throughout the day on Facebook, via email, in text messages. I teach class, grade papers, plan my family’s Thanksgiving menu, go to meetings, and head home to spend time with my two-and-a-half-year-old before Jill and I head out for a nice birthday dinner. We drop our son off at his grandmother’s and head out to enjoy wine and four-cheese pizza topped with locally sourced prosciutto, talking in that luxurious way that comes when you find yourself across the table from your spouse of a dozen years, without your toddler in tow.

  When we get home, I check Twitter and find that the grand jury in Ferguson has made the decision not to send Darren Wilson to trial. Once again, I watch my feed bloom and ripen with photos and Vines of protesters and police on West Florissant, broken glass, tear gas, and the desperate anger I feel with them: my heart a bruised, deep purple anguish. In that moment, I am glad that our son is sleeping elsewhere, because I know I would risk waking him just to slip into his room and see him, tangled in his big-boy bed, one hand clutching his beloved puppy, breathing even and rhythmic. I know that I would want to touch him, to feel his realness, to imagine how I could ever stand upright again if someone were to take him from me. I tell myself that I will be able to find a way to keep him safe, that I am giving him things that will protect him. I tell myself these things even though I know they are lies.

  Working the Trap

  Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive—recurrent, eddying, troublant.… Keenly, it is relational and strange.

  —EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK

  Reading before bedtime is a sacred ritual in our house; our son has two educators for parents, so books have been a part of his life since day one. When he was still tiny we could make it through one or two board books in the rocking chair before he started to get sleepy. As he grew, he became more and more engaged, picking out the books he wanted, going through phases of favorites, pointing to and identifying objects and animals in the illustrations as he learned the words for them. These days, he is big enough to sleep on the bottom bunk of a “big-kid bed,” and that bottom bunk is big enough to hold our entire family—two moms, one child, and two dogs—during bedtime stories. An old, battery-operated lantern that used to be reserved for hurricane season provides the light that we read by, and Shiv is allowed to pick three books every night. (He often begs for more, so we sometimes relent and read four.)

  One of the books in his regular rotation is And Tango Makes Three, which tells the true story of two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who spend all of their time together, show each other affection, and sleep next to each other every night. When these penguins (Roy and Silo) see the other (opposite sex) penguin couples caring for an egg in their nests, they use a rock as a stand-in for an egg and take turns tending their own “nest,” even though it produces no baby. After the human penguin keeper observes this, he decides to bring the couple an egg in need of raising. And so the first same-sex, adoptive penguin family is born.

  As in most children’s books, th
e allegory here is anything but subtle—gay people love each other the way straight people do and they want to be parents just as badly, and when they are given an “egg” to raise, they do so carefully and lovingly. (It was this very didactic rhetoric that moved many to ban the book from library shelves and schools.) The narrative is compelling; I cried the first time I read the book aloud to Shiv, both the ache of wanting to be a parent and the joy of finally becoming one translating perfectly across species. But the book’s intent to normalize families like mine—conveyed via the phrase “just like,” which is repeated half a dozen times throughout the book (“just like the other couples,” “just like the other families”)—makes me a little bit itchy.

  Gay families! They’re just like us! reminds me of the Stars! They’re just like us! features in gossip magazines, with photos of celebrities doing “normal” human activities such as walking dogs, exercising, getting ice cream with their kids, strolling down the street wearing sunglasses, and the like. Isn’t it amazing? the copy notes. What’s amazing is the idea that you could ever compare the experience of someone whose candid photograph is routinely sold to and printed in magazines with mine. These magazine features serve only to further highlight the degree to which celebrities’ lives are decidedly not like ours.

  In similar fashion, the overarching rhetoric around LGBTQ acceptance has insisted on sameness, both stated and implied. But this insistence rounds off the sharp edges of differences that should not be ignored. There is clearly still a divide if you can walk into any bookstore in the country and find dozens of books about families with a mother and father, but in order to read books that deal with families who look like mine, you have to track down the handful of titles and special order them; if you have to routinely edit paperwork, crossing out “Father’s Name” on medical forms and school forms; if your friends have to edit store-bought cards, moving the apostrophe to say Happy Mothers’ Day for the plural possessive; if you didn’t get to take your boyfriend or girlfriend to prom; if coming out still carries real risks to your relationship to your family, your safety, your employment; if your same-sex family is still not guaranteed all the same legal rights as straight families; if you once again find yourself correcting a stranger (the receptionist, or the insurance broker) who assumes that because you checked the “Married” box, you have a husband—you are reminded, over and over again, that you are not like everybody else.

  Is my family “just like” straight families that we know? In some ways, yes. We love, play, worry, frustrate each other, create weird little rituals, snuggle in the bed on weekends. But I don’t want my worthiness to be judged on the basis of whether I live up to someone else’s default standard, whether I “do family” in ways that straight people can recognize or approve of. As Rumaan Alam, author and member of a two-dad, tricolor family, wrote in a 2016 New York Times op-ed, “Respect should not be reserved for those who adhere to some notion of convention.” I want to be respected even when I don’t play by everyone else’s rules.

  The “just like everyone else” trope was a key hinge in the pro-marriage equality argument; heck, it was the pro-marriage equality argument in its essence. Hath not a Queer eyes? If you prick us, do we not bleed? This kind of rhetoric has a long history of softening hostile majority groups enough to allow minority groups to make important gains; it becomes a kind of “shame into tolerance” strategy. The problem, of course, with a moral argument predicated on sameness is that it does not necessarily force anyone to work through the fear of difference at the root of their intolerance. I see a similar limitation in the “born this way” insistence on homosexuality not being a choice. If our acceptance is contingent upon our being unable to help how we are, what we earn is pity for being the way we are, not necessarily the right to be that way, whether we chose it or not.

  I have noticed that straight allies tend to trot out the “they can’t help it” argument more than most queer people I know, who understand sexuality as being a little bit more complicated. But allies of all stripes eat up sound bites, stand stubbornly by black-and-white declarations that allow them to come across as morally righteous. And straight people love being allies, or thinking of themselves as allies, changing their Facebook profile picture to glow with that special rainbow overlay. After Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized gay marriage nationwide, they showed up at Pride in droves to bask in a victory that wasn’t about them, ally babies in tow. Straight people love going to Pride in much the same way I think they love going to New Orleans: because it’s fun as shit, is a little bit transgressive, and comes with a tourist’s day pass into a culture they find fascinating and “exotic.”

  I sound bitter, I know. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the support of so many real people in my life who truly care about the legal rights and well-being of my family. But I do resent being expected to appreciate shows of support that are mostly, well, for show: for the coolness points and the “right side of history” points and the “pat yourself on the back” points, without any real knowledge of the issues at stake. There is little risk, at this point, for straight white liberals to identify as LGBTQ allies, which is I guess why I’m not necessarily impressed when they do it.

  Queerness isn’t something you can put on or take off, not a magic kingdom you can visit for a day and then leave, taking your rainbow souvenir back home like some kind of trophy rewarding you for your open mind. The problem with the “just like us”/shared humanity argument is that it fails to go far enough past polite acceptance into the radical kind. And I worry that our emphasis on sameness has lessened our ability to tolerate difference. It has become startlingly clear in this country that respectability is no guarantee; just because you can get married or drink out of the same water fountain as everybody else doesn’t mean that deep-seated cultural disgust has been erased. And disgust is rooted in the very fact of our difference, the fact that we live inside of a society that was not built with us in mind and does not know what to do with us, except to tell us to be “just like” them.

  When my wife’s cousin came out to his mother decades ago, she told him, “Be gay like Jill.” Jill has a good job. Jill has a long-term partner. Jill lives in the suburbs and pays her taxes and buys her jeans at Gap and doesn’t shove her gayness in anyone’s face. She doesn’t wear it on her sleeve. The way she expresses her sexuality allows you to forget that she’s different.

  Of course, even if you sometimes forget that we’re not straight, we don’t. We can’t. We are constantly being reminded that to say too much or do too much may cost us our jobs or our business or even our safety. I can think of two or three times (in fifteen years) that Jill and I have held hands in public. I once had a colleague tell me that I was “taking it too far” by mentioning my partner in candidate interviews we were doing as part of a search committee. “You could really turn someone off of coming to the school, doing that.” Several of my (straight) colleagues had also spoken about their spouses in the same interview sessions. I work for a school with “sexual orientation” in its nondiscrimination policy (a deliberate choice), but parents still complained that it was “too much” for sixth-grade students to hear me mention my female partner’s name or see her photograph on my desk. After two years, I was moved up to teach eighth grade, where ostensibly it was less potentially scarring for students who already knew I was gay to be reminded of my gayness.

  That’s always the message: You can be gay as long as you aren’t too gay. Or you can be gay in private. We’ll let you stay if you live a compartmentalized life; keep the freaky stuff where we can’t see it. I used to be abashed by flamboyance when I first came out, not sure that I wanted to claim everything that came with the community I would now be identified with. Growing up brown gave me a lot of facility in trafficking in the model minority mythology: how you can gain what feels like real acceptance by presenting yourself as the exception to just enough of the rules, letting those around you think of themselves as accepting without the burden of having to be in
convenienced. In high school, while I spoke to the administration privately about what it felt like to be queer inside those hallways, I did not push for a change in the rules so that I could bring my girlfriend to prom, as my straight classmates urged me to. I went to Memphis Area Gay Youth meetings, which were private and confidential, but did not march with them in the Pride Parade, which in that city at that time was still much more transgressive than cool. Queer pride, according to scholar and poet Maggie Nelson, is “a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you.” I wasn’t there yet.

  It was, to be quite honest and at the risk of sounding daft, love that pushed me to realize that my reservations were a product of revulsion, of internalized homophobia and expectations around gender performance. I fell deeply in love with Jill but still struggled with bringing her home to preppy-as-hell Memphis because she was not the superfeminine lesbian who would have fit more easily into the space of my hometown’s expectations. So shamed by being ashamed of her, I faked at not giving a fuck for long enough that the defiance started to feel like my own. Then, for years afterward, I deliberately chose not to vocalize my “from afar” attraction to butch women, trans men, and genderqueer bois because I worried about getting pigeonholed both ways—straight people who would perpetuate a stereotypical understanding of same-sex relationships as being “imitative” of opposite-sex ones, gay people who would erase the complexity of my attraction in order to place me in a particular category. This changed when I came to love and care for friends who were transitioning or reconstructing their gender identity and were hungry for the very affirmation I was holding back. I am forever grateful to the queer community in Tucson, Arizona, who welcomed me as a young graduate student, cared for me as I grieved for my father, and taught me that my freedom is dependent upon the degree to which I can confront my own discomfort about the broader society’s perception of me.