It Ain't What You Don't Know...

by Mona Shaw

Mark Twain once said, “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”

That was me in 2003. I had just survived a total disillusionment after being brutalized by liberal Democrats in New York for telling the truth. I was a well-paid human rights executive who was suddenly homeless.

I didn’t know what to believe at that point. I had just enough to move back to Iowa and forced to abandon all my worldly belongings but for a few boxes I UPSed. I rented a room from a friend with my unemployment compensation.

After a few weeks of self-pity and wound-licking. I knew one thing. I wanted to know the truth. I didn’t care if that led me to become an ultra-conservative Republican. I just wanted to know the truth.

I began to read. I read so many things by so many authors of every political stripe you can name. I watched Fox News and MSNBC and listened to NPR and conservative talk radio. Information on the Internet was still sparse. However, living in Iowa City, gave me access to great libraries. I took advantage of that. I read a lot of books on economics history. I haven’t stopped reading.

I had more disillusionments to endure that would make the experience in New York look like time in a spa. I would learn from those too.

For example, I learned that there was not an epidemic of teen pregnancies. That, in fact, that teen pregnancies had been steadily declining since the 1950s. Sex education has worked.

I had to shift so many paradigms and altered my previous beliefs non-stop. 

By, 2007, I was still learning, but I knew this for sure.  The American Dream is a myth. It’s a big, fat lie.  From our nation’s inception, our economy was constructed by wealthy, white men who only wanted wealthy, white men to be citizens.  Everyone else would have to give their blood for to not be their servants. While, it’s loosely true that anyone can make it in America, not everyone can.  You have a better chance at winning the lottery than dying in a higher economic stratum than the one you were born in.  Sometimes people do win the lottery.

So, when folks respond with the old six-pack of canards that’ve bought at a very high price from Plutocrats who want to maintain the status quo, I know they don’t know as much as I do. Otherwise, they’d offer something original and thoughtful. Supporting those tropes with the first thing they find on Google that agrees doesn’t make this better. Even worse is thinking that anecdotal experiences is empirical evidence. E.g. “I saw a woman buying steak with food stamps!”

That’s all I want to say for now.

P.S. Just because there are employment growth areas doesn’t mean there are enough good-paying jobs for everyone.

Plain Truth

by Mona Shaw

Without Thomas Paine, there would have been no American Revolution. Until Paine’s pamphlet, “Common Sense,” the drive for independence was not a popular one. Originally titled, “Plain Truth,” Paine’s treatise made a case for how independence would benefit the common people. He attacked the monarchy in terms far harsher and damning than Jefferson. He spoke of human rights as not the province of birthright or property but as an innate entitlement.

His words were so compelling and convincing that John Adams allowed, “Without the pen of the author of ‘Common Sense,’ the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”

Thomas Paine was a staunch abolitionist, and a strong advocate for workers’ rights. He proposed a system in which workers had ownership in their labor. He was a loud supporter of the French Revolution because that revolution was led by the common people, while our Founding Fathers were suspicious of it for the same reason.

While the heralded of our founding fathers were happy to exploit the outcome of Paine’s text, they were equally loathsome to adopt many of the ideas within it.  They were quick to condemn Paine and any suggestion that common people should have rights equal to those of the landed gentry. The promotion of abolitionism was particularly taboo and regarded as political poison. Even Benjamin Franklin, who had come to abolitionism late, refused to argue for it during the founding of the nation. These founding fathers were among the elite, and they envisioned a nation ruled by the elite. Citizenship and codified rights for anyone who was not rich, and male, would come slowly in the new nation and only through the sweat and blood of those affected by this slight.

Paine persisted in his call and wrote many subsequent works that outlined the notion that “all are created equal.” He became ignominious for this and was slandered and persecuted by the same founders who had momentarily praised him.  He was so reviled that he died in poverty. Only six people attended his funeral. Three of them were Black. The other three was a woman and her two sons that he had saved from persecution in England. Our Founders would describe him as a man who did a little good, but much more harm to the nation. Even his remains were treated with commensurate disrespect. It was impossible to find a cemetery in which he could be buried. And his bones were exhumed so passed around so many times, they were eventually lost.

Ironically, it is Paine’s vision that prevails as the myth of the Founding of America, when it was anything but.

Paine understood that advancing human rights involved two essential things: Education and Agitation. He was an unthwartable practitioner of that truth. He gave his life and everything he had.

Education and Agitation are equally essential. No progress toward human rights has been realized without both.  Still, and even today, it can be difficult to find those who realize this.  Most people don’t want to do anything. They want to be consumer citizens who shop the ideas of others and opine or vote for the ones the like best, or, in modern times, for the things they hate the least.

The few who are willing to act tend to fall into two camps. Those who want to agitate and those who want to educate. The Educators tend to believe we can do this nicely and win through reason alone. The Agitators just want to shake things up and believe the populace will understand what they’re doing through osmosis or something.

I’ve witnessed this in my own puny efforts for justice. Those few who find reason to praise me often look to the times I’ve been in the streets or in handcuffs. They don’t see me sleeping less than four hours a night for years while I was up writing pamphlets for our cause. They don’t see me passing a hat and spending money I didn’t have to get them printed or the hours I spent on street corners and in government buildings distributing them. I have memorized for all time the click a windshield wiper makes when you stuff propaganda beneath it and pray the rain holds off until the driver returns to that car.  I’ve spent far more time submitting op ed columns and letters to the editor than I have at demonstrations. And, yes, there are some who praise my prose while condemning my disrupting public events.

The people never mobilize until they know the reason to mobilize. They must be told those reasons again and again and again.  Concurrently, the people will never mobilize until the see others putting their bodies on the line for that cause in public again and again and again.

People remember King for being in jail and giving eloquent speeches. (Speeches primarily written by a gay man few remember.) They don’t remember the countless teaching sessions held in countless churches and homes of those affected by racism. King could only be in one place at a time. Thousands of visionaries gave their all in all the others.

And there is something else. There is no glory in this work. You don’t get a community award for telling truths people don’t want to hear or stirring some pot. It’s hard and dirty and more apt to leave you in poverty and reviled or even killed. It will leave your body exhausted and your spirit wounded.  King knew this. Paine knew this. Every single soul who has ever gotten traction for justice knows this. None were revered until they were dead. And, most not even then. Their living bodies were subjected to death threats and public condemnation.

My working-class father often said to me, “You’re going to get yourself killed one of these days.”

I would say, “Oh, God, Dad, if only what I do or say ever has that much influence.  I’m pretty your daughter is safe.”

I’m an anonymous barely perceptible cog in the wheel with a lot of other cogs who will never be remembered at all. We are fine with this. The struggle for justice is not a do-gooder activity.  It is a call. Those who have this call know what I’m talking about. Those who don’t just don’t.  Those called are flawed and common human beings, usually broken in some way. Justice is not won by those we coddle or praise into it. It’s won by those you can’t talk out of it. We can’t even talk ourselves out of it. It’s like breathing. It’s a reflex, even in your darkest moments, something will speak to your soul and before you even think, you’ll find yourself going after that something.

May we honor the ghost of Thomas Paine and continue to educate and agitate.

Don't Persecute Hope

by Mona Shaw

You can be certain of this. We will never get traction on the road to justice until we address class as a cultural construction in the United States

Classism in this nation is so prevalent and so insidious that we don’t see it for the most part.

It emerges in countless ways. It’s there when a social justice activist adds their Ivy League  or academic credentials to their activist resumes—as if those credentials are germane. It’s present when a parent brags about their child getting into Harvard.  It’s the primary driver in making fun of Country Music or overweight people who wear tight clothes. It takes place every single time stories of “success” are predicated on accomplishments that involve economic gain or status.

The purpose of classism is to identify an “unworthy other.” It selects a population that is worthy of ridicule and contempt. It delights in blaming this population for everything worthy of disdain.  

This is no more apparent than in images and memes that are employed that mock these people. There are entire websites with the sole purpose of humiliating these people. People of Walmart is one.

The past three years it has become tragically popular to construct memes of poor people who support Trump. These memes are almost always Photoshopped by someone who doesn’t the know the person in the meme. They just know the person is missing teeth or overweight or wearing stereotypical underclass clothing.

By choosing these people for these memes, they target anyone for persecution that may resemble these people.  They suggest there is something inherently “bad” about people missing teeth or have other attributes of people who are impoverished.

If this weren’t the intent, we would see more anti-Trump memes featuring the wealthy class playing golf with Trump at Maralago, but that doesn't happen. Of course this plays right into Trumpish hands.  It leads to the condemnation of the poor and takes it away from the abuses of the wealthy where it belongs. Since the poor have no institutional power whatsoever, choosing them as culpable for Trump is astonishingly short-sighted.

To address the obvious classism in these memes leads to a convoluted and exhausting discussion that employs the least creative tactics of apologists of bigotry of all kinds.

“That’s not what I meant by that.”

“I’m poor, and it doesn’t bother me.”

“A lot of poor people are like that.”

“Stop being self-righteous.” Or “condescending,” “purist,” etc.

“You lose any point you may have had by your attitude, how you brought this up, when you brought this up, where you brought this up, etc.”

“This is an example of ‘political correctness’ going too far.”

Just insert “person of color,” “LGBT person,” or “woman,” and this will become familiar.

There is no oppression that is more difficult to discuss than classism. Too many see it as a “detail” rather than a serious and deadly oppression. No one is perfect, after all. And classism is the oppression we are most inclined to give a pass.

Calling out classism is the oppression that incurs accusations of minimizing other oppressions simply by bringing it up. This is a preposterous fear because objecting to any oppression can only serve to diminish any other oppression.  It is self-defeating given that other oppressed groups are more vulnerable to class oppression as well.

In this culture we have constructed a culture in which we base our worth as it compares to the worth of another.  We find it immensely difficult to interact without knowing each other’s social class. We have many social clues for this. How someone talks. How they dress. Where they work. Our ingrained interest in and deference to celebrities. Our admiration of the customs of the affluent from how they set a table, where they vacation, what they eat, or how they decorate their homes.

We don’t know how to have an identity or value unless we can look down on those who do these things “wrong.”

I left an “Occupy” event in Washington D.C. in 2011, after I witnessed two things.

The first was when “core” organizers were protective of Ralph Nader when he visited our camp. His celebrity warranted special treatment and not allowing the proletariat too close for too long.

The second was when “core” organizers determined that we should allow homeless folks in the neighborhood to eat at the camp food tent. 

“We need this food for us.” they said.

I knew then I didn’t belong there. I was not one the “us.”

I agree with Eugene V. Debs.

“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

You don’t build solidarity by mocking the targets of class oppression. They are our hope. The effective justice movement can only be led by the “least of these” in society. It will be led by a toothless fat woman in tight, stained, stretch pants.  I’m ready to follow her. I’m certainly not going to mock her.

Norman Lear Is a Liar

by Mona Shaw

Whether witting or not, Norman Lear is a liar. He has done more damage toward the mobilization of oppressed people than anyone in entertainment.

Had Lear told the truth, Archibald Bunker would have been a Wall Street executive, and Maude would have worked as a hotel maid. After all, the authors of bigotry and the greatest executor of its evil are wealthy.

By making the face of bigotry a working-class man, Lear reinforced class bigotry and effected a lasting and pervasive act of blaming the victim. On the heels of the assassination of Martin Luther King, jr., the U.S. was at a pivotal juncture for acknowledging its racism. Lear exploited that by pointing a large arm at men in hard hats and screaming, “It’s their fault!”

You could write volumes on the damage done by this.  From the endless cartoons that showed some guy in hard hat saying something racist, sexist, or homophobic to portraying the women who loved these men as feckless and dimwitted.

“Right-on” Maude on the other hand was affluent and had her own sassy maid. Her husband and friends were other affluent people and they went to symphony concerts and the thee-ah-ter and made fun of Country music.

In the early 90s, I was a member of group who called ourselves “promo-homos.” We were LGBT people who would go to college classes, Rotary Club meetings and other venues so people could meet a real live queer. One invitation was from the UI College of Medicine. Two gay men in our group were construction workers. Every year an organizer from the College would show a slide of a construction worker making a homophobic joke.  Every year these men would object to that. Every year they were ignored, and the slide was shown again.  The message was obvious. If you’re homophobic, you’re part of the underclass, and no one wants that.

Thanks to Lear making fun of men in hard hats was considered an act of anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-homophobic.  It may be a little rude at worst, but hadn’t these men asked for it?  It certainly wasn’t understood to be the egregious class bigotry that it was. My own father wore a hard hat to work. He was a rock crusher in a quarry.

Every aspect of poor and working-class culture became fodder for derisive jokes. Their music, their dancing, their speech, their personalities, their clothes or the fibers of those clothes, their televisions in their living rooms, their food, or their beer. The laugher and ridicule were over the top if they lived in a mobile home. The mores of the poor and working class were suspect as well. It was assumed they were lazy, stupid, more apt to lie and steal, and have sex with their siblings and children.

If you didn’t want to be a bigot or any of these other things attributed to poor and working-class culture. Archie Bunker was not your role model in any kind of way. Maude was. Maude kept her television in the den.  Maude used pretty dishes and flatware that matched, preferably imported from Italy.  Maude wore flowing natural fibers. You certainly never saw her in a windbreaker with a union logo on it, and she spoke in grammatically correct English. She hired interior decorators and didn’t clean her own home.

Internalized oppression is a very real thing. Targets of oppression often come to believe the lies told about them. They believe they’re exception in their own culture. They convinced me for awhile. Like others, I believed that if I educated myself, if I learn how to dress like them, talk like them, went to their events and became fluent in all things upper class, I would be accepted by them. I believed it was my fault I’d been rejected. I simply needed to change my “white trash” ways. I read the dictionary like it was a novel and grew an impressive vocabulary. I memorized the Chicago Manual of Style. My diction and grammar were close to perfect.  I read all the self-help books including “Dress for Success.” I put my television in my bedroom and lined my place with shelves of books that I had actually read. I used to steal the syllabus on the first day of classes at the university that I couldn’t afford to attend, so I would be conversant in those subjects.

You can pass for a while. You have to lie a lot, but you can. At some point, though, you’ll be found out. And you’ll be regarded differently from that point on, or worse you’ll be praised for rejecting your roots. Or, you’ll hear one too many lies about your people to bear, and you’ll never see them the same way again.  Both happened for me.

I remember one such moment for me. I was at a gathering of opera aficionados. A woman said, she saw me the day before having lunch with a woman that looked familiar. I told her I had been having lunch with my mother.

“Well,” she said, “It couldn’t have been the woman I knew. She was a girl I knew in high school. Her name was Marlene. She was totally white trash and ended up having a bunch of kids and working in a factory.”

“You knew my mother,” I told her and waited.

“How did you rise above such a station?!” she exclaimed.

I had had it.

“I didn’t rise above it,” I told her, “I still aspire to it. My mother single-handedly organized a union in that factory and has organized hundreds of factories and workplaces since. I can only hope to be so noble.”

Coming out as working poor is a lot like coming out as a lesbian. It never stops. You are constantly correcting people who make the wrong assumption.  This almost always happens after someone has made a slur about your people.  The reaction is usually much the same as the woman at the opera meeting. After observing that you “don’t look or act like them,” they slink away and go discuss you in a corner.  You never run out of people who’ll make excuses for their slur and explain how we all have difficulty in life. The problem is my inability to see what “they” meant by the dig, not the fact that they made it.  They will become outraged at any suggestion they’ve been a bigot and manipulate the situation to where you owe them an apology for objecting.

Every time I see Norman Lear praised; I think about how much harder he has made life on people like mine. I wish he’d never been given a contract. Someone might want to inform Lear that underclass people have a better chance of winning the lottery than “moving on up to a high-rise apartment in the sky” thanks in no small part to his class bigotry.

Homophobia in the News

by Mona Shaw

In October, 2018, I wrote WHBF-TV (a CBS affiliate for the Quad-Cities in Iowa and Illinois) meteorologist Ashe Simpson about his chronic promotion of Chick-filet-A and explained how Chick-Filet-A persecutes LGBT people. He said he was sorry it caused me pain, but he liked their food.

I didn’t ask Ashe to stop shopping at Chick-Filet-A. I just wanted him to stop hurting LGBT people. Instead he chose to double-down, promoting the company more often and remarking, “No one is going to stop me from talking about Chick-Filet-A.”

I then posted several examples on the WHBF Facebook page of the harm the company causes LGBT people. I was ignored.

Then on August 12, 2018 I heard a mocking tone and giggling that reinforced the callous attitude toward this pain.  Not only did Ashe and anchor Redrick Terry promote the company. They punctuated their support with these remarks.

“Amen and Hallelujah.”

“Chick-Filet-A can’t do anything wrong.”

“Amen and Hallelujah.”

Chick-fil-A does great wrong that should not be praised.

Chick-fil-A is a Georgia-based fast food restaurant that opened in suburban Atlanta in 1967. The operations of the chain reflect the religious values of Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer S. Truett Cathy, whose biography notes that he has “built his life and business based on hard work, humility and biblical principles.” Chick-fil-A lives these “biblical principles” through its WinShape Foundation, a charitable endeavor founded by S. Truett Cathy and his wife, Jeanette, by donating millions of dollars to groups with anti-gay agendas. In particular, they seek to reverse the 2015 Supreme Court decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, that made equal marriage the law of the nation.

This isn’t petty, nor is it simply a matter of liking a tasty sandwich. Chick-fil-A is reasonably accused of acts of terrorism against LGBT families. If they have their way, loving families would be destroyed, and these families stand to lose benefits and protections that could cost them and their children their lives.

The First Amendment gives everyone the right to be as racist, heterosexist, sexist, ableist, etc. as they the like. It also gives freedom fighters the right to object.

Still, there seems to be confusion about when things are the same and when they are different. Objecting to oppression is not the same thing as perpetuating oppression. Objecting to the destruction of LBGT families is not doing the same thing. The same thing would be if LGBT were attempting to destroy heterosexual families. No one is trying to stop Ashe from marrying his fiancé or to take away legal protections for his family.

We now witness the tragic resurgence of blunt expressions of bigotry.  Mass shootings by white supremacists and homophobes are the outcome of that resurgence.  It is a terrifying time for people of color and LGBT citizens. I have personally stood over the graves of dozens of LGBT people who were murdered by homophobia.  Each death was hooked to a public event in which a prominent person belittled LGBT people.  When you mock someone, you make them a target for those who will use violence against them.

Moreover, heterosexism is unavoidably racist.  LGBT people of color suffer most violently from this oppression. Indeed, the 15 transwomen who have been brutally murdered this year were all Black.

Bigotry isn’t merely a personal belief. It’s a system that has been institutionalized in our societal fabric. This is settled law.  The Supreme Court has legalized Equal Marriage. The states of Iowa and Illinois have added sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes. These laws obligate anyone who does business with the public to scrub institutionalized bigotry from their institutions regardless of personal beliefs.   If not the letter, WHBT breaks the spirit of the law every time staff promote Chick-Filet-A. Each instance creates a hostile environment for LGBT families.

It’s not as if they’re giving equal time to those wounded by this. Perhaps, I missed it, but I’ve also not seen Pride Groups or Events, on “Living Local,” a program about area happenings which Ashe co-hosts. Though evangelical churches get plenty of play. This is not an issue upon which reasonable people can disagree. Reasonable people don’t persecute others based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.

The most egregious aspect of this is that WHBF is hurting innocent people. Worse, they’ve allowed it to be fodder for humor.  Millions of American Christians do not share this cruel and narrow view. WHBF could learn from them.

Picket Lines

by Mona Shaw

I don’t cross picket lines.

This has irritated folks I was with more than once. Often someone is misinformed enough to say to me. “But you don’t know both sides.”

I always answer, “There’s a picket line for workers. That’s all I need to know.”

This is not simply a political or moral position. Although it is both. It’s also based on my personal witness of the struggle for workers’ rights.

My mother, Marlene Johns Shaw Gerst, was a labor organizer. She began this fight for justice in 1960. She was a line worker at Champion Spark Plug in Burlington, Iowa. She was only 26. After witnessing one too many atrocities toward workers at the plant, she came home one night, kicked her purse across the living room floor, and said. “That goddamned plant needs a union, and it going to get one!”

It did. She called on the UAW. She passed out cards. She talked to workers without ceasing. She went to their homes, stopped them at their cars and in supermarkets. She convinced men and women to join her at a time when this was not seen as a woman’s role, even by the union. She was threatened with violence and blackballing, but she was not deterred.

This eventually led to an election. The Union won the election, but it was not over. The Company refused to negotiate a contract. After no small amount of agonizing, the workers decided to strike. Calling a strike is a courageous and dangerous thing to do. The consequences can be more than Draconian. We knew this firsthand. My father was the first union person in our family. He was a baker at K & R Bakery in Burlington. Some called him the most talented cake decorator in town. He attempted to organize a union there. He was fired and blackballed. He never worked as a baker again. They took the risk.

My brother Mark and I have clear memories of walking the picket line. We took turns between walking the line and watching our pre-school sister in the strike kitchen. Our baby sister stayed with an aunt. The loose pebbles and cracked asphalt beneath our feet. The smell of chili being cooked in the strike kitchen. I was only 10, but I still remember the recipe for that chili. The stale donuts and jugs of water and coffee on a card table. Those who have never taken risks for justice don’t know how empowering it is to stand up to tyranny. It’s a feeling that you never forget. It was the first of a few defining moments I would have in my life.

On a day, that I stayed home to watch the girls and clean house, Mark ran into the living room crying, “The Union won! The Union won!” We all rejoiced.

The contract gave the workers more humane working conditions, higher wages, and completely paid family health insurance. Upon its signing hundreds of lives changed dramatically for the better.

UAW Local 1237 prevailed, and it still exists. My mother’s efforts were so highly regarded that she was elected vice-president. She told me later with pride, “They wanted to elect me president, but you can’t have a woman president.”

My mother’s gift for organizing did not go unnoticed by the national. UAW secured a proviso that my mother could be pulled from the line at any time to help with other organizing throughout the nation. Eventually, the UAW brought her on full-time. By the time she retired in 1994, she had improved the lives of literally thousands of workers. She was given the Walter P. Reuther Award. When she died last year, Champion Spark Plug hung up a tribute to her and flew their flag at half mast.

My mother wasn’t the only one who made monumental sacrifices. She was gone a lot. My younger siblings lost years with their mother. My brother and I lost our childhood as we were given adult assignments to keep our family going. Her absence combined with other tragedies would tear apart my parents’ marriage. They divorced in 1966. Then and now I feel no resentment for those sacrifices despite their profound damage. We had a higher calling. We were saving the lives of thousands of workers so they could have the benefits that we enjoyed. The biggest benefit may be that my parents never again had to worry about cost when we needed to see a doctor. They could just take us. In more than one instance it’s reasonable to believe this saved our lives.

I remain keenly aware that our sacrifice paled against the sacrifices of the likes of Mother Jones, Sacco and Vanzetti, Lucy Parsons, Cesar Chavez, Eugene V. Debs, and the Hay Market Square martyrs. The history of workers’ rights dates back to the beginning of the nation and includes a cast of millions.

So. When you cross a picket line, or criticize or disrespect striking workers, you not only dishonor my mother’s legacy, you dishonor my entire family. You also dishonor the memory of anyone who’s given their lives for this right. That’s just how it is.

Schooled

by Mona Shaw

I don’t see teachers as saints. As a child who lived on the wrong side of the tracks, teachers, for the most part, were among those I had to overcome.

I grew up in the poor section of the poorest neighborhood in Burlington, Iowa. It was named Flint Hills Manor, but locals called it “The Manor” with no small amount of derision toward its residents.

I started noticing I was treated differently in first grade, but I couldn’t figure out why.  By, second grade, the reason became clear.  When I would raise my hand, my teacher would tell me to put my hand down.

“You live in The Manor,” she said, “You don’t know the answer. You’re slow.”

There were teachers who were exceptions, but exceptions they were. Mrs. Chant, my fifth-grade was one. She called on me even though I no longer bothered to raise my hand.

“You’re bright. You’re very bright,” she said with authority, “Don’t you let anyone tell you that you’re not.”

She saved me. My entire world opened after that. I drank in learning like someone who’d been crawling in the desert. I won spelling bee after spelling bee and every essay contest. I wrote poems, and Mrs. Chant would read them to the class and tell others she had friends in college without the skill to write such a poem. I was happy and at the top of my game. I naively believed I’d proven the teachers who didn’t believe in me wrong--until that day.

That day I had won another contest. My reward was to hang student art work in the hall, and I was doing that.  Two teachers began to discuss my brother and I as if I weren’t there. Mark and I had scored extremely high on a Basic Skills test. They were bothered by this.

“Those minds in those children,” one said to the other, “What a waste!”

They went on to berate my father.

“They are so hopeless. We called the parents, and the father just said, ‘I know my kids are smart. I’m glad you all finally figured it out,’ and then he hung up on us!”

Something snapped in me that day, and it defined me for the rest of my life. I had come to accept by then that there were many things of which I was not worthy. I was not worthy of nice clothes or to live in a nice house and ride in a nice car or even to be friends of children who did not live in The Manor. I certainly wasn’t worthy to expect teachers to assume I wasn’t “slow.”  I had to prove myself in ways others didn’t.

“But,” I thought in defiance, “But, I am certainly worthy of my very own mind.”

I glared at them. They didn’t notice.

“I’ll show you,” I thought, “I’ll show you my mind is not wasted in me!”

Now, I can’t say that I’ve done that, but my life isn’t over yet.  Still, I’m grateful that ten-year-old little girl had that thought instead of the endless self-destructive thoughts she might have had.

I’m certain without Mrs. Chant I wouldn’t have had such a thought.  The soaking in self-worth she had given me had freed me more than likely either of us knew. Mrs. Chant gave me something else, something subversive and dangerous. She told me how to get a library card at the Burlington Public Library.

Teachers aren’t saints. Librarians are. No librarian ever told me I was “too slow” to check out or read any book there. They helped me find books on things I wanted to read about. They never questioned why I questioned.  Once one even let me climb onto to the glass floor in the stacks.

“I think you’ve earned that,” she said.

The library wasn’t just magical. It was the place where magic was made. I was passionately in love with everything about it. The smell, the feel of books in my hands. The difference in that feeling whether a book was old or new. The way newspapers hung on their poles. The busts of famous writers perched here and there. I was there as much as my parents would allow. I would do extra chores late into a Friday night to spend all day Saturday there.

I traveled the world in that library. I went to the Louvre in Paris and to the pyramids in Egypt. I boated down the Amazon and walked the paths in Jamestown. Before too long, I became obsessed with oppressors or people who hurt people.  I read everything I could find about Hitler and the Holocaust.  The more stories shook me, the more I read.  Even though many of the horrors I read were far worse than anything I had experienced, these stories gave me an odd sense of solidarity.  I clung to that like a life raft. 

I studied rich people and monarchies. I not only read of their historic atrocities to others like myself, I studied how they lived, their customs, their beliefs, their sense of entitlement. I read everything written by Emily Post twice.

I read about slavery. I read things slaves had said about being slaves, how they lived, how they felt when a child was sold, about the contrast between palatial mansions and dirt floors.  I read about how slavery began, where it began, and who began it. It was rich people wanting to get richer I learned. I began to see a constant connection between wealth and power and the nascence of human cruelty.

Maybe that’s why I believed Martin Luther King, Jr. wasn’t just standing up for race equality, but that he was standing up for poor people too.  I fell in love with him quickly when I began to read his words. For me, they easily translated to my own situation. He gave me hope we could overcome.  I had ongoing imaginary conversations with him when I walked the halls at school. We became close. By, ninth grade I was hanging his photo in my room and in my locker.  In 1966, this was strange to everyone, but me.

I had had also noticed something else.  As I grew older, the Mrs. Chants were fewer. There had been Mr. Rowell in Junior High and Miss Byers and Miss Bauercamper in high school, but that was about it.  Not all, the teachers mistreated me, most simply ignored me.  I was invisible. 

However, I began to consistently see that those teachers who did see me in a positive light were also the ones who did the same with African American students.  I wasn’t sure why, but I decided this probably wasn’t an accident.

This synchronicity became even clearer to me the day Miss Bauercamper told me to read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 before my 11^th grade English class.  Unbeknownst to Miss Bauercamper, I had been taken with this sonnet already to the extent that I’d memorized it. So, without using our text book, I just stood and recited.

“SONNET 116

By William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”

When I finished, Miss Bauercamper was strangely silent for the longest time. I quickly took my seat fearing I’d done something wrong. Maybe I should have read it from the book. She finally stood and faced the class.

“In 20 years,” she said, “Mona is the first of my students who understands this poem. You may want to consider this class, the next time you make fun of her.”

I was over the moon, of course. Boy, had she told them!  They won’t make fun of me now!  I was wrong, as I’d quickly learn right after class.

A group circled me in the hall and began to taunt me.

“You know,” they said, among other cruel things,” that any teacher who thinks white trash and ‘niggers’ know more than us doesn’t know what she’s talking about? She should be fired for saying that to us!”

No matter how much we may believe that cruel words are a lie, there is a tiny wicked voice inside that can still pipe up and whisper, “Maybe they’re right.”

This wicked little voice refused to shut up for the rest of the day. Maybe they were right. Maybe there was something intrinsic to poverty that simply made you inferior in thought and being.  Maybe I just wasn’t smart enough to get it.

The notion was breaking me when they circled me again late in the school day. They didn’t hurl any racial epithets then and were content to just make fun of everything about me. I did nothing but stand there while hot tears squeezed themselves out of my tightly closed eyes on to my cheeks. They made fun of my tears too.

Then something happened that had never happened before in many years of being taunted in school. Not once.  Two students come over and intervened. They had not been in Miss Bauercamper’s class or witnessed the scene after class.  Still, these two brave girls broke into the circle and said.

“Knock it off! Leave her alone! We don’t care what you think!  You’re idiots!”

By some miracle, my tormenters stopped and left. The courage of these girls blew defeat away. Just like that.  Just like that.  They were slight of frame and pretty and very smug with themselves. They were Black.

I fell into an easy sleep that night feeling more comforted than I have ever felt by someone my own age in the face of such things. My last thought was this.

“Does being picked on make you more compassionate?”

People were more honest about their racism then.  Many openly took pride in it.  And, teacher after teacher who claimed to not be prejudiced would tell us we had to respect the opinion of those who were.

“This is America. People are free to believe ever they choose, and we need to respect that.”

I never had a teacher tell me they had a problem with Jim Crow laws.

I wondered about this and said as much to Grandma Shaw.

She simply replied, “You can believe shit doesn’t stink too, but it does.”

The following spring, everything changed. In April, King was assassinated. I was inconsolable and essentially wallowed in my own private grief. “Who would help me overcome now?”

Most of the people I knew couldn’t stand Dr. King. Even the most generous, said he may mean well, but that he was going about it wrong. “He’d rather make trouble and get attention than do things that could make things better for his people. He makes them all look bad.”

But, now that King was dead, everyone loved him.  There were special assemblies and church services to sing his praises.  It was all very confusing to me, but I was still glad about the change.

The star students in school all suddenly wanted to be friends with the white trash and Black kids.  I was quite happy about this and accepted their friendships gratefully.  They invited me into their homes and to their parties.  Their parents gushed over me.

My working-class father wasn’t buying it.

“You’re a do-gooder project,” he said, “Can’t you see that?  They don’t care about you. They care about making themselves feel good.”

He was wrong, and I knew it, and I told him so.

“Okay,” he said, “Give a party in our home.  I bet no more than two or three will show up.”

“Okay,” I said, “I will. You’ll see!”

Only one student came. I had to listen to my proud father try to convince parents on the phone that their children wouldn’t be in danger in our home. 

“We just can’t risk exposing our children to that kind of environment,” they explained.

Tim McCormally, whose father was the editor and publisher of the Burlington Hawkeye played checkers with my father all evening.  I just stared at them and managed to choke back tears.

My father was not smug. He was sad.

“I’m sorry, Kid,” he said, “I really am. I don’t care if you still want to hang out with them but stop trusting those bastards.”

A teacher I confided in would tell me I was foolish and selfish to not be fine with this.

“People need to do what they believe is best for their families,” she said, “You need to respect that.”

Still, my heart cooled to them. I made excuses to not go to their parties unless they were at the McCormally house.  They didn’t mind I didn’t come.

It is now my inclination to not trust affluent people. A few have proven me wrong in this. Too few to allow me to let down my guard.

I chose to retire in Burlington nine years ago. I live ten blocks from where I was literally born. I expect to die here. Nothing has changed. Class bigotry is as blunt as it ever was. Racism has become more insidious.  The greater sin than being a bigot has become being called a bigot.  People aren’t terribly concerned that their beliefs are racist. They are unabashedly furious at being asked to consider they might be. Without a moment of reflection, they believe they can prove their innocence on a technicality.

“I’m not racist. I don’t hate Black people. I just know they commit more crimes.” (Fact: they don’t.)

Somehow--though I’ve never met them myself--they know a lot of purple and polka-dotted people.

“I don’t care if you’re Black, white or polka-dotted, I think you’re a thug.”

This is only said when they think what they think about a person of color.

However, in my decades of travels I’ve yet to find a place better on these issues than Burlington. I didn’t find it in Iowa City or New York. Burlington is certainly better for oppressed people than the South or Indiana.  There are kind people here, who will give you the shirt off their back.  When someone stole my recycling bin and trashed my yard, folks came with a new bin and cleaned up the mess.

Sure, too many people here believe Black people are more apt to be arrested because they commit more crimes, but so does the sheriff of Johnson County, Iowa. Yet those self-described liberals keep voting for him. (No, the facts haven’t changed in four paragraphs. Black people are less likely to commit crimes than white people.)

Teachers are pretty much the same. From conversations with my grandchildren, I think there may be fewer bigots now, but the ignorant still wield too much influence. It’s still true that a teacher is as apt as not to be among those an oppressed child must overcome.

Working class, working poor, and people of color need to join forces. We could turn the ship of injustice around if we would. White oppressed people will never be free until we end racism, and people of color will never be free until we end classism. Against overwhelming evidence, I still believe that can happen.

There is no safe place on the entire planet against oppression of any kind.  None. I’ve learned that now. If the revolution can’t happen in Burlington, it can’t happen any other place either.

So, I’ll struggle from here. Who will join me?