Fire and ICE

by Mona Shaw

The latest ICE raid on May 8 happened 18 miles from my front door. It also reminded me of how I lost faith in Democrats.  I know some think this came about when I flew off the handle one day in some purist tantrum.  It didn’t happen that way at all.  The truth is much more embarrassing.

My disenchantment with Democrats began during the Clinton administration.  After a spate of unconscionable legislation and policies, from GATT to NAFTA to DOMA to DADT, the 1996 Welfare Reform Act horrified me most of all.  I was so fed up that I voted for Monica Moorehead of the Workers World Party for president that year.

But I waffled in my resolve.  I waffled a lot.  I still thought there was value in working for local candidates, and I volunteered for them and cut them checks.  I even voted for John Kerry in 2004, because George W. Bush for an unabashed war criminal, and I was still beguiled into believing that Democrats were against war for profit. I couldn’t envision a 2018 when G.W. would be considered an affable teddy bear by the party.

Indeed, Democratic candidates were a consistent presence at peace festivals and rallies during all the Bush administration.  They often spoke and held their peace signs high. It was at one such gathering that I met Dave Loebsack.  You could always count on him being there.  The first time I met Dave, I mispronounced his last name.  He was more than a little piqued at my mistake and corrected me in a patently snotty tone.  I was quite embarrassed and apologized profusely.  He didn’t accept my apology and just glared at me and walked away.

“People are touchy about their name,” I rationalized.

I swept it under the rug and volunteered for his campaign just the same.

The day he was elected I made phone calls on his behalf until the polls closed.  I was thrilled he was elected.  As Republicans go, Jim Leach had been a very moderate one and voted like a Democrat as often as not.  I knew it would be even better. 

I was excited in early January, 2007, when I learned that he was going to hold a town hall meeting a block from the mobile home park where I lived. I was the first to arrive.

He was still giddy about his win and talked about watching “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”  (He has yet to participate in a filibuster.)  He eschewed suggestions that G.W. Bush should be impeached for his war crimes.

“Do you want Dick Cheney for president,” he asked.

“Impeach him too,” I suggested. 

He told me to “Get serious,” and shot me that look he’d given me at the festival.

I was embarrassed and intimidated and decided to move to safer ground and ask a soft ball question.

“What are you thinking about the ICE raid in Marshalltown last month?” I asked.

“I don’t know anything about it,” he said.

My response was a reflex, and my surprise was real.  The Swift raid had been on the front page of the Des Moines Register for weeks and had received national news.  I thought everyone knew about it.

“Really?” I asked.

“I’ve been a little busy,” he said.

His tone was so hostile that others noticed and became quiet.

He gave a nervous laugh and said, “I guess I don’t suffer fools and trouble-makers gladly.”

The subject was abruptly changed.  All but one or two present continued to fawn over him.

I checked out mentally after that.  I was too worried.  It wasn’t that he didn’t know, though that was sad.  It was that he didn’t care that he didn’t know.

His response disillusioned me.  Not because he was rude to me, but because he had exposed to me his modus operandi for dealing with statements he didn’t like.  His M.O. was to shame and discredit the person who asked or said those things.

I also knew that it wasn’t in his instinctive repertoire to care about the families that had been destroyed by the raid.  He didn’t know an Esperanza or a Jorge or a Consuelo or any of the other Latinos who comprised a good third of my trailer park. My neighbors were devastated and now being terrorized.  He had not seen them weeping while shoveling their walk.  He not driven slowly by my trailer to read the sign I’d put in my front window condemning the raid.  I had to do that.  I wanted them to know that this white neighbor was on their side.  He didn’t see Jorge shovel my walk after that.

“Do any of these upper middle-class Democrats really care about the folks?” I had to wonder.

Or, do they just adopt “positions” that are quickly minimized when the rubber hits the road?

I had to pay closer attention. He had stoked my belly’s fire for the truth.  My disappointing discoveries were many and profound.  The rug became very lumpy.

Thank you, Martin

 by Mona Shaw

Martin Luther King, Jr. is personal for me.  He is my teacher, my mentor, and my friend. He changed my life, forever.  He led me to the defining moment of my life.

When I was 16, I believed then, as I do now, that he was fighting for me and all the poor people who lived in Flint Hills Manor, a neighborhood of dilapidated cinder-block row houses, where the poorest of the poor lived in Burlington, Iowa. I had heard the “I have a dream” speech while perusing used comic books in Susie Alvine’s corner store, and I was instantly and solidly on board.  When he said, “Justice and equality for all, I just assumed my people were included in the “all.”  He was like church.  When I heard his voice, I felt loved.

Life was hard for me then.  At school, I was mocked and taunted because of my

Neighbor kids in the Manor

address.  I ate my lunch alone in the hall instead of the cafeteria to avoid the abuse.  My father and step-mother were in a very dark and angry place at the time.  At home I felt the end of a leather belt most days for anything and nothing.

“You left the light on in your room while going to the bathroom!” 

“The way you breathe is disgusting!”

My feet were like blocks of lead when I forced myself to carry myself to either destination.  My soul was even heavier.  But, I had Dr. King.  I also had my church.

Flint Hills Church of the Nazarene was my refuge.  They saved me body and soul.  They told me I was special, that I was smart and a beautiful child of God. They loved me, and I loved them back.  I felt joy in church.  I laughed in church.  I prayed and sang until my spirit soared.  They taught me the Gospels and how to stand up for your convictions in the face of adversity. 

I had come to that church the way most children did, by crawling onto a blue Sunday School bus when it drove through our neighborhood every Sunday morning.  They welcomed every child, no matter how they were dressed, with or without shoes, and they loved us all. I could endure whatever came my way, because Sunday was coming.

When I showed up with belt marks on my face or arms or legs.  People in the church tried to do something.  The pastor at the time mucked this up horribly, but they were the only ones who tried.

They didn’t talk about racism in church, but, because they taught us to sing, “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the word, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight,” I assumed they were against it.

I believed King’s speeches were the 20^th Century gospel.  I thought the Vietnam War might be wrong. When he said it was, I knew it.  His words about poverty and income equality were like drops of water on a scorched spirit.

I learned that Dr. King had been murdered in the same place, but not in the same way, as I learned about the assassination of JFK.  They didn’t announce it over the loud speaker, and they didn’t send us home.  I heard a teacher say, “Someone finally killed that trouble-making nigger.”  I wanted, I prayed earnestly that it was not him, but it was.  I was flattened. And, no one comforted me.

My father did have his kind moments and was patient with my devastation.  He tolerated it when I cut photo after photo of Dr. King and Coretta Scott King behind her black veil from the local newspaper and taped them to my bedroom wall.  I would pray and sob to those photos at night, “Please come back.  Please.  Like Lazarus.  We need you.”

After a few weeks of listening to and watching me, my father did say, “You know you’re not a Negro, don’t you?”  Still, he let me be with my photos and my mourning.

My parents didn’t go to church.  Just the same, every week a “witness” would visit our home, pray with them and try to convince them to save their souls and join us.

One week it was Brother Hartzell.  Now, born-again Christians love talking about

Mug shot of King

the crucifixion more than anything else.  It is an effective topic to elicit agreement.  Brother Hartzell began to agonize with sweat and tears over the mistreatment of Jesus, carrying the cross, the whip, the nailing to the cross, the piercing of his side, and the vinegar shoved to his lips.  He closed his mini-sermon with this.

“That nigger last week got a better funeral than Jesus.”                        

Brother Hartzell left.  My belly burned, literally.  Bile rushed to my throat with an equal scalding.  I swallowed and swallowed to keep it down.  I tried to convince myself that I’d not heard what I heard.  But, I had.  My father couldn’t resist a taunt.

“Well, it looks like your church doesn’t love your guy as much as you do.”

My misery only increased over the following days.  I finally ran to my pastor’s house and poured out my heart and confusion.  The pastor and his wife were loving and concerned.

“You have to understand, “Brother Smith said, “Some people believe the negro is inferior, and some don’t.  We have respect both views. And, even though Brother Hartzell was clumsy in his statement. He is technically right. Hang on to that, Mona.”

Flint Hills Church of the Nazarene

I did not respect both views; I did not want to hang on to that, and explained my position.  Sister Smith took my hand and spoke.

“I know this is hard.  I have trouble with that thinking too, but we must still love each other.  Though I do believe mixed marriages are a sin.”

I was even more confused and tormented and a bit derailed.

“Why is mixed marriage a sin?  Aren’t their children precious? And what about…?  And what about…?  And what about…?”

Dr. King had taught me well.  Brother and Sister Smith finally cut me off and told me that I needed to go home and pray about it.  They said if I prayed in truth, God would explain it to my heart.

“Jesus loves the little children.  All the children of the world.  Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight.  Jesus love the little children of the world.”

Throughout the night, the singing became gently louder and more beautiful, until it sounded like a choir of angels.

Eventually, I heard bird song and saw light coming through my bedroom window.  I stood and tore some loose skin from my knees blistered by the hardwood floors.  I looked at the photo of Dr. King’s photo on the wall and whispered to my soul with a conviction I had never know until then.

“They’re wrong.”

The following Sunday evening, I preached the first, if not the only, anti-racism sermon in Flint Hills Church of the Nazarene to our youth group.  Sister Smith was not amused.  She took me aside.

“Don’t ever do that again.”

“I won’t,” I promised, “because I’m not coming back.”

I believed this was a test of who I would be, and that my soul would perish if I did not follow it.  I kept my promise, never went back, and never regretted it, but I missed them. I wept about this many times.  The community, the singing, the love, the refuge were gone for good.

Fifty years later, I still miss them.  Every time I pass the church, a part of me wants to go inside, see the pews, smell the smell of hymnals, and look at the light that comes through the stained-glass windows.  But, I cannot go backward.  Still, I cannot but love them for what they gave me when they did.

I didn’t know what to do with my new knowledge, but I kept walking in it.  In the summer, kids in the Manor and I built tents in our backyards and put signs on the tents that said, “Resurrection City.”  The newspaper came and took a photo.  It was something.

Things at school improved dramatically. It turned out most of the teachers did get it, and they said so and organized the first of MLK events sweeping the nation.  The Black kids and poor kids at school suddenly became cause celebre. I had friends.  I would learn these friendships were superficial, and we were fundamentally a do-gooder project. Still, the persecution stopped. They even hired a Black teacher the following year.  I took his class.  I had fun in school for the first time.

Fifty years have passed. I have witnessed many things. My activism increased and became more radical as did my experiences with betrayal and disillusionment.  Dr. King’s life has been sanitized by the dominant culture. The have fashioned his memory to suit their self-interests. Progress in racism, let alone militarism and poverty, has been painful and slow and is far from achieved. Rarely is it mentioned that his mother, Alberta, was also assassinated while sitting in church six years later. He was far more radical and far more of a socialist than most people realize. Please read his work.  His widow, Coretta, lived on for many years to support equality for women and the rights of lesbian and gay people.

The writing of Martin Luther King, Jr. has sustained me through it all.  When I fall flat, and I have many times, and have no hope, eventually I will pull out “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” and it will lift me to my feet. 

Here and there, someone will point out to me the flaws of Dr. King.  These flaws are undeniable.  I also know this.  We all miss part of the truth.  That’s why we all need to preach it.  And, Dr. King never preached anything but the Truth. And, he absolutely lived and put his life on the line for the Truth he preached. For me, that distinguishes him, forever.

I, too, believe that we will get to the Mountain Top.  I, too, believe “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  I’ve now entered old age, so like Dr. King, I know I may not get there with you.  But, I know completely and absolutely that justice is inevitable.  Keep reading his truths.  Keep walking.

Thank you, Martin.

Gram

by Mona Shaw

I don’t have a chip on my shoulder.  I have an entire forest.  The resentments I have from witnessing the mistreatment of the poor are rooted through the bone. 

Whenever I hear a rich person say, “I worked hard for what I have.”  It takes all the self-control I have to not go ballistic.

My grandmother worked hard.

Cora Victoria Riddle was born on February 19, 1914.  She was the kindest and most generous person I’ve ever known.  She was also the wittiest.  I never knew anyone to spend fifteen minutes with her not left laughing until their sides hurt.  When she wanted to compliment me most, she would tell me I was “somethin’.”

She was born to a Swedish father, an affable and charming drunk, and a Chickasaw mother on an Indian Reservation in Ada, Oklahoma.  Unlike her darker and younger sisters, she had fair skin, crystal blue eyes, and hair the color of butter.  Because of this, my great-grandmother doted on her.

When she was a child, she contracted malaria which morphed into St. Vitus’s Dance.  Her tremors were so violent, my great-grandmother had to tie her to a chair and spoon-feed her. Because of this, she had spotty formal schooling and knew what she knew by teaching herself.  For whatever reason—Gram attributed it to a chiropractor—she had healed by the time she was about 15.  My great-aunts complained that now that she was well, she still didn’t have to help with housework.  My great-grandmother told them, “All Cory has to do is be able to sit still and look pretty.”

She began dating a man named Bill Johns when she was 16. 

After I was grown, Gram would tell me things, always in voce sotto, not exactly a whisper, but quiet enough that anyone in another room couldn’t hear her.

“I was so damn dumb,” she told me once.  “Bill asked why I was taking Lydia Pinkham pills so much.  I told him that I hadn’t bled in three months, and I was anemic.  He said, ‘You’re not anemic, Cory, you’re pregnant.’”

Gram and Bill, about 1930

They married in 1932. The baby was stillborn. Three more children arrived each successive year.  My mother, born in 1933, was the first of those.  All were delivered at home by a neighbor or midwife.  She told me when the youngest was born, the midwife left her and said she’d be back later.  Gram begged her to wait just a little longer.  “Well,” Gram told me, “When she got back, there was Bunt bawling in the bed.”

Bill beat her, viciously.  She put up with it.  We were all told my biological grandfather died of a brain tumor.  He did not.  The day after my 21^st birthday, we were sitting in her kitchen, Bill's name came up, and Gram began talking in voce sotto, looking not at me, but into the past.  “I’d look up, and he’d be staring at me with crazy eyes.  He’s whisper, “I’m gonna kill you Cory.”  One time after he almost did, I had to have him committed. He might hurt the kids.  I just had to.”

He died, not from a brain tumor, but from an interaction with another inmate in which he was murdered.

Becoming a widow with three toddlers is never easy. In the early 1930s, it was impossible. The America's Great Depression was full-on, and as she said, “Men couldn’t even get jobs, let alone a woman.”

She fed her children and her charming ne’er do well father by doing anything that translated into money.  She confessed to me once of being frustrated with her father for not helping.  “I’d say, ‘Daddy, what if you drink yourself to death?  How will I pay for your funeral?’”

“’Oh, Cory,’ he’d say, ‘Just throw me to the hogs.’”

She sewed buttons on cards, not as an employee but piece work, for a button factory—one dime for a hundred cards of four.  She was fast and guessed she made about 15-cents an hour. Until the day she died, she still had scars on her finger-tips from those needles and thread. She ironed other people’s clothes.  She did their laundry and cleaned their houses.  Their diet was mostly biscuits and gravy, pork backfat, and the green beans she somehow found time to plant in the back yard.

“Green beans make their own seeds,” she explained to me once.  “And you can trust them to come up.  Anything else was too expensive and too risky, even tomatoes.  Don’t even think about carrots.”

Remembering one of those days always caused her to tremble.  A social worker knocked on the door and tried to convince her to allow the children to be temporarily placed in better homes until she got on her feet.  

"At least let me take the baby," the woman said.

Gram smelled a rat.  She splayed herself in front of the screen door, raised her fist and seethed, "You'll get my kids over my dead body!"

It was a common practice for parents to agree to this, only to later learn the paper work they'd signed meant they'd given them up for adoption.  Most never saw their children again.  The social worker never came back.  Though Gram said her heart pounded for years whenever she heard a knock on the door.

They survived.

Gram and Bamp, about 1970.

In 1942, she married Arthur “Jake” Nelson, the only man I would know as my grandfather.  His heart and soul matched hers.  They were deeply in love until the day he died.  Bamp, as we called him, is the only man I ever considered a saint.  He was the prototype of what a man should be.  Things were better.

“Jake made $10 a week,” Gram giggled once, “Me and the kids were living on $10 a month.  I thought he was rich.”

Of course, they were still poor.  Yet, they were content. As both often told me, “We didn’t have a lot, but we had enough.”

They scraped enough together to buy a house on a five-year contract.  They loved the house and put a lot into it.  My grandmother painted the kitchen white with red trim and hung red and white gingham curtains.  They were giddy the day the last payment came due.  A house, a real house, would be theirs at last.  When Gram arrived at the wealthy man’s house to give him that last payment. He asked her to wait until the next day.  Something unexpected had come up, and he couldn’t do the paperwork until then.

Early the next morning, the sheriff was at their door, serving them with a notice of eviction.  They were told that because their payment was late, the rich man had the legal right to take back the house.  He did.  They had to move so quickly that she forgot the kitchen curtains.

“Oh, I probably wouldn’t have a place to hang them anyway,” she thought.

They moved into The Manor.  The Manor or Flint Hills Manor, is where poor people, i.e. “white trash” lived in Burlington, Iowa.  It still is, but it's more racially integrated.  The Manor was built during World War II as temporary housing for workers at the ammunition plant, 5 miles from Burlington.  It was mostly cinder-block four- and six-plexes, but there was a small section of red brick buildings for more important plant employees. 

After the war, the buildings were sold piece-meal to various slum-lords. The buildings deteriorated quickly.  The streets were never repaired by the City.  The stigma of living there was solid and the fodder for many derogatory local jokes.  The red-brick buildings were slightly more expensive in rent.  Gram and Bamp moved into the cinder-block section.  This was the same section in which I grew up and didn’t leave until I was 18 and after I graduated from high school.

It should be noted that not as many poor people live in The Manor now.  In 2006, the City of Burlington evicted hundreds of residents under eminent domain.  They City razed about half of the buildings to please an investor who was going to revitalize the property.  Many found themselves homeless.  The investors backed out of the deal.  The property sat empty for eleven years.  Some of those evicted never recovered. The buildings still standing are now federally subsidized housing.

Bamp and Gram had moved from The Manor by the time I was born.  Bamp had taught himself to be a mechanic. He was one of the most popular in town.  He still didn't make much because he'd fix your car whether you could afford it or not.  He'd have the customer write down the amount they still owed, put the tab into a cigar box and tell them to pay him as they could. Bamp was always giving out something to someone.  His son criticized him once for giving $20, a sizable amount at the time, to a stranger.

"The man told me he needed $20. I had $20, so I gave it to him. Now be still about it."

They somehow managed to buy a large garage in the middle of town on an alley.  There was no house.  They fashioned a section of the garage into a tiny 500 square-foot apartment.  Gram had a job at Kresge’s dime store.  As far as they were concerned, life was now good.  They lived there until he died.

My favorite childhood memories are visiting Gram at Kresege’s.  The other workers knew who I was and ala “Cheers” would holler my name when I walked in. I never stopped being thrilled at that.  I remember, before the store had air conditioning, hot summers when the store’s lights were dimmed, and the ceiling fans roared at top-speed to give some relief from the heat.  I remember Gram using her employee discount to buy me a snow cone.  I can still remember the ice shavings escaping from the machine as it ground huge chunks of ice into snow.  Sometimes Gram’s boss would buy me the snow cone.  He adored Gram and always told me so.  “She’s the best worker we’ve ever had,” he would say.  Twice Gram won the award of Burlington’s favorite employee, a contest the local newspaper, “The Burlington Hawkeye,” used to sponsor. Both times Kresge’s put a full-page ad in the paper after she won, with her photograph, declaring themselves to be “the friendliest store in town.”

She didn’t see it coming, when she found a pink slip on her time card two weeks before her pension was vested.  She wasn’t the only one.  It was widespread practice then by the S.S. Kresge Company, later known as the Kmart Corporation, and even a later a division of Sears.

My memories of Gram as a child are a mobius loop of joy.  One afternoon we were snapping green beans while sitting in the swing, when she abruptly stood up and slipped her lithe frame into a pair of Bamp’s overalls on the clothes line and waited for him to come home. Another time she put on a convincing “proper” act for my boyfriend then flipped him the bird after he teased her, shocking him down to his socks.  

Some things would hit her serious side.  Once when I was about 8, we were taking a walk.  There were several signs in a front yard the all read, “For Sale.  Only to colored people.”

I said something about it being nice they would sell to colored people.  Gram was vociferously anti-racist, an unusual thing in the 1950s, and she set me straight. She explained the owners had gotten some raw deal from their neighbors, were being forced to sell their home, and the signs were payback.  She told me to sit on the curb and knocked on the door.  She went inside for a while.  Then she and a woman came out.  They began taking down the signs.  “Colored people are as good of folks as white people,” I heard her tell the woman, “They don’t deserve to live next to these assholes.”  The woman laughed.

She could even make you laugh at a funeral.  When her father died penniless, I wondered how she’d manage his funeral.  “I’m just gonna throw him to the hogs,” she said. She paid for his funeral over time.

After being fired from Kresge’s, she took a job as a pants presser for a local dry-cleaner.  I went in there once, the temperature was well over 100, and there was only one little fan on the floor.  I caught her once putting Vaseline on a burn. I noticed more gray patches on her forearms. She cautioned me to not tell Bamp.  “I'm fine, and it'll just make him worry.”

She talked about the job as if it were a lark and kept us in stitches.  I remember a story about a co-worker who kept singing the same phrase from the same song over and over and over.  She’d mimic it, “I shot a man in Reno, just to see him die!  She has a damned fine voice, but Jesus Christ.”

The job took a toll on her just the same.  When I was 15, she collapsed at work and had to have a pace-maker.  Bamp was terrified.  He’d phone me in tears and say, “I can’t live without her.  I can’t.”

One day he phoned and simply said, “I’m coming over to pick you up. We’re gonna paint the kitchen.  Cory’s gonna come home to a painted kitchen.”

We painted the kitchen red and white.  There was only one window in the kitchen, but we bought a yard of red and white gingham.  I made the curtain, and we hung it there.  And, yes, she was thrilled to tears.

Bamp never had to live without her.  He died in 1972, she was devastated, but stoic.  He died from arteriosclerosis.  He was diagnosed too late for any treatment.  Old Doc Patterson had treated him for arthritis for years.  They amputated one leg and were going to amputate the other, when they determined there was no point.  He had been admitted to the “poor people’s” ward at University of Iowa Hospitals.  They don’t have those anymore, but they did then.  He was on ward C23, an enormous hall with about 50 beds lined up on each side.   It was not uncommon to see filled urinals left on bedside tables for hours.  I would surreptitiously empty his and give it to a nurse. After, I learned he wouldn’t make it.  I began to sneak him cigarettes.  The attending resident told the nurses to leave us alone and just brought us an ashtray.  We sat and smoked and talked.  He would stop to writhe in pain and apologize for the interruption.  He passed from this world in absolute agony.  In pain so abject he no longer knew I was there.  I will never forget his screams of pain at the end, while trying to stifle his screams, then whisper, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

A University of Iowa professor Ken Amada, once bragged to me about how he had been admitted to the VIP section of University Hospital.  “The rooms have mahogany paneling,” he told me, “and the food is made by a certified chef!”  This professor neglected and sexually harassed his students and cut gay men from faculty searches.  I wanted to hit him.  I regret that I didn’t.

Gram dressed him in a brown, second-hand suit he had never worn, and a brand new pink dress shirt. No tie. They must have had an inside joke about the pink shirt, because she’d snicker every time this came up.  If there was, she never told me. His best friend, a Black man also with the name Jake Nelson, was a pall bearer at his funeral.

I stayed with Gram for a few days after Bamp’s funeral.  She had things for me to do.  One was to burn the receipts in the old cigar box of money people still owed him.  Even though she would now live on only her Social Security, she was clear about this. She feared someone might try to collect those debts to help her.  “I know they mean well,” she said as we watched them turn to ashes, “But Jake didn’t believe in dunning people.” I still regard this as the most empowering moment of my life.

My last night there before I went back to college in Iowa City, she had been quiet for a while, then spoke abruptly, not in voce sotto.  “I just gotta say this,” she paused, “He was a good man.  He was a very good man.  He didn’t deserve to die in all that pain.  I’m mad as hell about that.”

My uncle Bernard, her older son, would die soon after that from a brain aneurysm. He was too young.  It was the only time I ever saw her cry.  “It’s mean,” she confided in me.  “It’s mean.

She would make do.  She would even feed me when I stayed with her one summer between college terms.  The University had been dismissed early that year because of anti-war protests. I was in the middle of it, and she knew it.  I half expected her to object, but she didn’t, except to say, “I admit I worry about you getting hurt.”  Later she added, “Daddy always did say it was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.  He had to have been right about something.”

She began to date and then married Lew Ebey, a widower she’d known for 40 years.  She moved to live with him in Macomb, Illinois.  They had a modest but comfortable house.  She planted a huge garden with green beans and tomatoes, and even carrots.

Gram died February 27, 1989.  She was 75.  I borrowed a car to go to her funeral. After a post-funeral dinner in a hall that was filled to maximum capacity, Lew took me aside.  “She so loved you,” he said, “Not a day went by when she didn’t tell me you were somethin’.”

The memory of Gram that haunts me the most took place that summer I stayed with her.  I turned 21 that summer, and she drove me to the store to legally buy a quart of cold beer.  She laughed when I insisted the clerk card me. We were laughing, and I was regaling her with all the ways I was going to change the world with my college degree.  Poverty and classism would prevent my ever getting that degree, but I didn’t know that yet.  I said, “Hey Gram, maybe you should go back to school.  They might write a story about you!”

She grinned and said, “Mon’ Lynne, ain’t nobody ever gonna write a story about me.Hell, after they cut out the dirty jokes and cuss words, there wouldn't be nothing to write. I ain’t never gonna be no rags to riches story. That’s okay, most poor folks ain’t.”

The Problem with Whiteness: a Christmas Message

by Mona Shaw

Note:  I have friends (decent white men all) who are troubled by a college course titled, "The Problem with Whiteness."  They believe the title is "race-baiting" and discriminating against white people on the basis of race.  This is my response.

Fred (not his real name) says he’s not comparing apples and oranges.  He insists there is a moral and actual equivalent between a white man robbed by a Black thinking all Black men are criminals, and a person of color thinking all white people are racist. I.e. he says one is as bad as the other.  That, frankly, blows my mind out of the stratosphere.

First, let me point out, there is empirical data that shows Black men are far less likely to rob someone than white men.  So, the only reason for that assumption can be racism.  (That, and the fact that Hollywood, etc. have so prolifically portrayed the criminal as Black and more recently middle-eastern).

On the other hand, people of color have endured more than 400 years of abject torture, persecution, and oppression on U.S. soil.  They have endured not just wage slavery, but actual chattel slavery, been slaughtered and forced onto reservations, covered in Small Pox blankets, kidnapped, beaten, and murdered to this day for simply not being white.  After 250 years of chattel slavery (which really didn’t end until 1945), they’ve been though cross-burnings, churches bombed, lynching, Jim Crow, their children kidnapped, forced sterilization, job discrimination (which didn’t become illegal until the 1970s), police murder and brutality, mass incarceration, and medical experiments that would make a Nazi wince.  (E.g. the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, in which Black men were intentionally infected with syphilis to study treatment of the disease. The study was conducted without the benefit of patients' informed consent and didn’t end until I was 21-years-old.)  Even in 2015, you can be at a prayer meeting in church and have someone walk in shoot you dead just because you are Black. The reason we have Black Lives Matter is that too damned many still don’t believe that black lives matter.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, but let’s talk about the “good” white people.  Those who believe racism is wrong, those who agree there is still white supremacy out there. (Both assumptions leave me responding, “Duh,” by the way.) 

White people who perpetuate racism aren’t only those who see people of color as inferior or wish them ill. 

White people who perpetuate racism aren’t only those who see people of color as inferior or wish them ill. 

White people who perpetuate racism aren’t only those who see people of color as inferior or wish them ill.  (I repeated this on purpose.)

Now there have been a few white people who have put their bodies on the line to resist the madness of racism, embarrassingly few, but there have been some.  From the early abolitionists to the Quakers who ran the Underground Railroad, to voter registers and marchers in the 1960s.  White people, too, have stood up and even lost their lives trying to change things.  I pray every day to be more like these white people.

But the clear majority of white people did nothing.  We watched it happen and did nothing.  We returned slaves to their masters, because that was the law.  We called the Freedom Riders “trouble makers” who were hurting their cause.  We put up with segregated housing and schools and never challenged it any meaningful way.  Even most of the “non-racist” white people didn’t like Martin Luther King, Jr. until he was murdered.  He was “too radical” and going about it the wrong way.  He hated white people.  Yeah, a lot of “good” people said that.  You didn’t see most “good” white people at anything resembling a civil rights march.

Even though the evidence is clear, many “good” people doubt there is racism in incarceration and want more proof.  (There is a ton of proof, if people care to read it.)  Few of us go to Ferguson or Standing Rock or help others go.  I can probably count on both hands the number of people I know who’ve ever bothered to even write their legislators about any of this.

We don’t quit our jobs when a boss says something racist.  We rarely even confront that boss, except behind his/her back.  We laugh at racist jokes because we “don’t really mean anything by that,” and almost never challenge those jokes.  We drive on roads, ride on trains, and walking through buildings (include the White House) built by slaves and let that fact sink into our souls.  We eat a melon picked by Latinos paid a $1.00/hour and never give that a thought.

Only a tiny minority of us even have several people close to us who are not white.  Talking to your co-worker or being pleasant to store clerk you see most days doesn’t count.  A close friend is someone you’re most apt to go to the movies with, someone you celebrate holidays with, someone who’s slept at your house and you’ve slept at theirs. Someone you know will want to say something at your funeral.

That’s the problem with whiteness.  We think we can know about racism by our “gut.”  We want people of color to act as if there is a level playing field, when there clearly is not.  We say the damnedest, dumbest things like “Why can they say the “n” word, but I can’t.” Or, "I never owned any slaves."

We feel little to no obligation to educate ourselves about it.  We can’t even seriously ask the question, “Why do people of color see this differently?”  What’s our theory about that?  Is every person of color (or white people who agree with them) only seeking attention, trying to get something for nothing, trying to divide us, or playing victim?  Is that your theory?  Because that’s more than a little wacky.  What would be the point of any of that?  Are we projecting, perhaps?

We get pissed at people of color when they don’t teach us, and we get pissed at them when they try.  We have the arrogance to criticize how, where, and or when the say it.  We approach the issue like consumers, “Give us a list, and let us decide what we like.”  When we do on rare occasion show up at a resistance effort, we think we have the right to tell the affected group how to do it.  And when we create movies about racism, we always have some white savior who saves the day.  “Gone with the Wind” was a patently racist movie, some of us are surprised that Black people don’t like it, because Mammy was so cool.  Pro-tip:  To the tiny degree that they have, people of color won own their rights, white people didn’t do it for them.  It's a good thing to learn this.

So, when a person of color thinks I’m racist (it does happen), I don’t say, “How dare you?”  I say, “I don’t blame you.” or "Why wouldn't you?"   Because there more than likely was something racist in something I said or did.  Of course, that would never be my intent.  With every fiber of my being I want everything I do to resist racism not perpetuate it.  But, my intentions (while I think they matter) aren’t nearly as important as my impact. And, I’m white.  I was raised in white culture and exposed to a plethora of racism.  I’m not that special.  There’s simply no reason for me to believe that none of that affected my thinking, assumptions, or perceptions, not to mention my lack of sensitivity about how something I may say or do affects others. Rather than be offended, I have learned to be grateful for having this brought to my attention.

The problem with whiteness is that white people don’t see they’ve been spared the ravages of racism inflicted upon people of color.  They refuse to see the obvious privilege in that and take it for granted. They, outrageously, try to equate some social slight or misunderstanding with the terror of being a person of color in American culture.  It's hard to see racism when you're white, and not seeing the problem with whiteness is the problem with whiteness.

P.S.  Jesus wasn't white.  I'm pretty sure he saw the problem with whiteness.