1. APPLE PICKING! 2. Seeing the President and Vice President—WITH THE ROOTS! 3. My new book came out and I got to co-feature with my pressmate Mike O’Hara at The Fuze. 4. The Night Kite Revival Tour refreshed my soul. 5. Visiting my childhood home and finding it still fairly wooded. 6. Featuring Apiary/Light of Unity at the Fuze. 7. Spending a wonderful Saturday afternoon writing in The Last Drop Café. 8. Getting obsessed with Veronica Mars. 9. Settling in at my wonderful library job. 10. Reading/workshopping at Courtney Bambrick’s East Falls Poetry Festival. 11. Leafing to Lancaster. 12. Making our “It Gets Better” video and wing-womaning for a newly out pal. 13. Giving up some bad connections. 14. Getting Turtle Ink books in at Jean-Jaques Gallery, a wonderfully artsy boutique. 15. Sometimes getting a handle on Intermediate Algebra feels so good. 16. Joining a Small Group Ministry at church with my pal Sarah. 17. Discovering a cool East Falls art spot: Tattoo Gallery Café. 18. Doing yoga for the first time in months—welcome back, Chi! 19. The Peculiar Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender. Last Night at Chateau Marmont, by Lauren Weisberger. Gunn’s Golden Rules, by Tim Gunn. 20. Of course! Getting drunk on civility and signage at the Rally to restore sanity.
In a rally to support the Democratic candidates in the upcoming midterm election, yesterday The Roots opened for the President and Vice President right behind our house, in the playground of the school where I worked when we first moved to Philly. I’m not quite over the shock, still, of living someplace where such a thing could happen.
I’d originally planned to go to church and then join Amy in line, but I got antsy when I started seeing families getting in line with families of folding chairs already at 10:30 am (doors were at 3), so I went home and tried to get cute while Amy made us some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Yesterday was the most out that Amy and I have ever been here in our superchurchy neighborhood. Going to line up for a Democratic rally, it seemed more okay to hold hands than it usually does. We were also happy to sort of snuggle up in a sleepy way in the sun during the four hour wait.
The wait wasn’t too bad. We both brought reading material and were entertained by a the very excited group in front of us first naming TV shows and then having an awesome, awesome sing along.
Of course we signed up, in a wave of 2008 hopeandchange nostalgia, for some campaign work this month. (Politics, like baseball, are something I tend to mostly only notice in October…)
I liked how, when we got to the gate, the security guard was splitting people up by “families” to go in, whether they were actually families or not.
We found a spot about 30 feet from the stage where we could clearly see both the podium and The Roots’s instruments. After a few minutes, who should come over and stand in front of us but one Mr. Mark A, my favorite student from when I worked at Fulton. He was with two young family members who I think may’ve been dressed in purple for tolerance.
Ending up behind them, out of all the 18,000 people, made me feel like the Universe was telling me I’m forgiven for the past two years’ teaching mistakes, and am now free and clear to make some more.
After this amazing kid’s rendition of The Star Spangled banner, a DJ who played such crowd pleasers as “It Takes Two” and “Poison” (Not to mention line dances we gamely tried to execute, despite the smooshed lack of space), here came The Roots.
They were amazing, of course, though I wish the crowd had been a little more willing to go bonkers with them.(Gratuitous aside: I never realized how hot The Roots are. Usually my Sunday forays into my hetero side begin and end with Mad Men…) Amy and I had debated whether “Dear God” was a politic song for them to sing…Amy won, I guess, cause they sang it. I was happy to sing “Why do haters separate us like we Siamese?” and the original Monsters of Folk lyrics: “I know I’m thinkin’ aloud, /But if your love’s still around/Why do we suffer?” along with 18,000 people. Pretty much makes up for missing church.
After The Roots and the actual 2010 candidates, Joe Biden introduced the President. They hugged for such a long time before the president began speaking.
The last time we saw Barack Obama speak, it was also right by my house—in Vernon Park on October 11, 2008, a few weeks before he won the election. It was a beautiful day then, too, and they kept playing that U2 “Beautiful Day” song that I begrudgingly ended up liking because it reminds me of campaign fun. I was in the middle of a race and class-struggle awakening and I really felt all the hopeandchange. I was pretty much drunk on it. We still have the flyer from that day along with other campaign ephemera on the wall.
Since that day, I’ve gotten more reticent and measured about working for change, and the nation and the president have been through a whole lot of shit. His voice has a nice pissed-off edge. He called out the Republicans on their nay-saying, rich people funding, education fucking-over: it was the most calling out that I have ever heard a democrat do.
If that speech that moved me so much in Vernon Park was the Meet the Beatles with all that exuberance, newness, and revelation, then the speech I heard yesterday is somewhere between Revolver and Abbey Road—edged, complex, and a little heartbroken. I loved it.
I didn’t love his getting-the-car-out-of-a-ditch metaphor, though. It reminded me of this household’s hopeless car years. Can’t argue with his “You put a car in “D” to move forward, in “R” to go backward” joke, though.
I can’t say that I fully believe in elections anymore. Ever since I found out that some of my students saw 2008 as a black versus white election, I’ve felt like things are so many years away from true justice and peace. But I do look forward to working on the Democrats' campaign this month. It just comes down to; it’s more fun than helplessness.
“And why do haters separate us like we Siamese?” –The Roots
Being racist against myself might not seem like an ideal topic for a happiness blog, but if I can learn to write about it, it’ll lift a great big weight off my shoulders and help me feel more confident about my point of view.
I’m trusting you to understand that:
1. I understand that I am privileged.
2. I hate all kinds of prejudice so, so much. I am prejudiced against prejudice.
Before I came to Philadelphia and became an AmeriCorps member working in the Philadelphia public school system, I mainly thought of racism in the abstract. I was raised to believe it was wrong to discriminate, and I thought that was the norm in professional settings, at least in terms of race. I also thought of integration as something everyone agreed was good. This is a story about how I was naïve.
On the first day of AmeriCorps training, the director gave us a talk called “The Big Picture” but it might as well have been called “Poor People are Fucked.” She showed us the Philadelphia numbers that proved how much the school system is letting down African-American children. The numbers she gave us were from the school I’d be working in, and that solidified my determination and excitement about actually getting to work for change. (It was the Fall of 2008. Everyone was drunk on hopeandchange and I was no exception.)
It didn’t seem like a big deal to me that I was one of very few white people in the company until the second day of training, when one of the staff members (a charming Latina with whom I later became friends) stood up in Classroom Management training and said ”Caucasian people cannot do discipline. They can’t control a classroom.” I was absolutely shocked that no one thought to question that statement or offer a counter- opinion. Because I have this annoying tendency to believe what people say about me, that comment cast a shadow over my whole learning process. Unfortunately, those comments were the norm.
(So wait—before this, did I think only white people were racist? Maybe! That’s racist!)
As The White Lady, I caught a TINY glimpse of what it’s like to be a racial minority, to feel trapped in someone’s expectations of you, to be frustrated and held back by stereotypes. I was treated with fear and suspicion that was made worse by the fact that I’m an out bi person. (Are schools ever not homophobic?) For two years, I was talked down to, accused of being snooty, accused of “thinking I’m Gandhi” because I was enthusiastic. (BTW a Gandhi quote was the slogan of the camp, but I never quite made it to being the change I wished to see. Still working on it.)
The worst part was learning how far we are from actual integration. I felt so deeply unwelcome that I stopped being able to imagine a peaceful future.
On Inauguration Day, when the students I loved so much were celebrating the fact that Obama would “stop the white people” and a coworker told the kids I was “from a separate culture and “probably a Republican,” (!!!) something inside me just cracked. (I wanted to be all whiny, like “Hey, I phonebanked!” but that seemed kind of wrong.)
I was having a deep, awful epiphany and I felt like I had no right to write about it. I knew I would sound whiny and privileged, especially in a poetry slam situation. I wrote a lot less than usual, and after a while I couldn’t stand the sound of my voice, so I stopped performing. I lost my point of view.
Now that I’m in more loving situations, I’m grateful for my time as The White Lady—it gives me maybe more compassion and even more of a drive to work for integration and, yes! Hopeandchange.
So I’ve opened a memoir folder on the desktop marked “White Lady Issues.” Maybe I’ll share the happy parts here!
