My White Supremacist Mom, The End

 

Seriously get this book!

 

“God.” She said defiantly.

 

Mom said that the reason the country was so far astray (besides, presumably, Socialism) was that we’re “no longer” a Christian nation. (I remember seeing this “One nation under God” idea in second-cousiny Facebook feeds before I blocked them, but the violence of the sentiment never truly hit me until I started writing this.) I wish I had said something coherent about the founders or the Liberty Bell or Catholicism under Hitler, but I did not. I wish I’d said that forcing everyone into the same religion was not only counter to the values of Christianity (well.) but part of the very definition of fascism.

 

So that was the conversation that finally propelled us out the door. On the way out, I told mom not to contact me, not to send cards or anything, a directive that she (vexingly and also sort of touchingly) has ignored. In the car, I horror-movie screamed. Back in the Nineties, I was in a housefire and the small comfort of that day was that I got the line “Screaming like a David Lynch movie” on the news. This wasn’t that, wasn’t any aesthetically tortured wail, it was full horror. It was a scream of a lifetime of religious oppression, of standing in front of police cars, of friends boxed into riots when the street-fires were starting. It was a scream for the then-200,000 dead and those who were vicious and scared and stupid enough to deny the loss. Because it was a scream, I’m embarrassed and ashamed, but I can’t actually think of a more rational response.

 

As Sweetie (Never, anymore, afraid of a panic) drove us down the country roads to my sister’s, I did that five senses thing to quell the panic: I see mailboxes, road, a sparrow, a yellow stripe, my purse. I hear the car, my voice, Sweetie’s voice, my breath. I can touch the door, my scarf, my jeans. I can smell coffee and peach-pear fizzy water. I can taste gum.

 

By some miracle of compartmentalization, a skill that has never come naturally to me, we spent a lovely day with the niece and nephews. Our regular comic shop was closed, but we did thoroughly enjoy our traditional thrift store run. I bought way too many random things.

 

By the time Sweetie and I were picking up road trip coffee in our nearby old hometown (SO many feelings of love and beauty and loss there) I was posting through my feelings and starting to make estrangement official. I told my sister, brother, and dad the next day that I would be avoiding all mom-related activities for the foreseeable future.

 

For now, it’s not so bad, except those nauseating prayer cards on which I need to remember to write “refused”. I run the family Zooms and the Liberal Cousins Side Convo has been great at keeping in touch. I’ll feel guilty adding extra logistics to the family routine, but I’ll figure it out as I go.

 

I’ve never understood how people with Trumpian relatives can feel safe around them, even pre-Covid. I don’t know how anyone avoids feeling the violence of their beliefs all the way in their bones. Do they think that the violence the seditionists marinate in won’t come for them? Do they interpret violent beliefs toward black and brown and queer bodies as somehow not a real threat?  Or are they just too scared to do something about it? At any rate, I’m glad of these miserable years of trying to do something about it, even when that something is only to try and get myself safe.

I Miss My White Supremacist Mom, Part One

 

I know this is off-topic for the Kitten Calendar and I’m in the middle of some much cuter threads, but I need a place to process this without any family readers and without asking any activist friends to any extra emotional labor. So if you’re reading, thanks! I owe you some fun later on?

 

What do I do with a mother-daughter relationship after mom has informed me that “Reparations would be horrifying” because reports about slavery were exaggerated? Fully, teeth-grindingly estranged, is where. I don’t know what my family life will look like past the protective barriers of Zoom, guess I’d better figure it out. Let’s try to see how we got here.

 

There was a day I’ve already written about some, a day last June when I lost all of my plucky good citizenship and determination. Even my badass block-a-cop-car protester courage was eluding me. The city was under police and military siege, there was still a curfew/quarantine combo making me jump out of my skin, and on top of that a big rainstorm knocked the power out in a way that seemed (but wasn’t, of course) permanent.

 

I went to Sweetie’s to use her Wi-fi for work and ended up breaking down crying because she had neither ground beans nor a scoop to make coffee. I was out of everything that kept me a decent, functioning human, like my own power was out. It was a time I could have used a mom who checks in to see if I’m okay. Sweetie has those kind of parents! Though they are conservative Texans, they do tend to ask after her safety whenever the National Guard is in town (So often it seems like!) and never discourage her from protesting or assume she is a fire-setting looter. They just, you know, parent! Even though she is fifty and really tough!

 

I’m 46 and really tough, and my mom spent all of her energy writing facebook comments about how she “thought I believed in peace” and defending white people in general and her own white-supremacist-leaning (Well, I THOUGHT they were just leaning but it seems they are marching with the Proud Boys tomorrow…) sisters. So many comments until I blocked her, having tried every strategy for years to bring her around. Sometimes I just want to say, fuck off, SURJ, I fucking TRIED.

 

I should have fully blocked her (not just facebook blocked her) back in March 2020 when she started circulating anti-mask disinfo! Or maybe way back in 2016 when she told me I was manifesting rape culture by thinking about it too much. Possibly, I should never have tried to be friends or “friends” with my mom at all, but I kept trying. I still kind of want to try, it’s so hard to stop myself. Psychologists tell that story about the mother who set her son on fire, how he still asked for her.

 

After I ruined Thanksgiving 2016, (which, sorry niece and nephews, NEEDED to be ruined) I eventually responded to mom’s efforts to stay close. (That Christmas, though, I must’ve really given the UPS man a sense of futility when I took mom’s yearly wreath right down to the curb.) Mom’s love language for me is jewelry. If a bracelet broke, I sent her the beads for her jewelry supplies. She repaired all my necklaces for me over the last four years, both ones she designed and ones she hadn’t. I did a very good job of extending and reciprocating love. I’m proud of us both.

 

But my (our) deep wish to be connected was no match for the powerful pull of the Trump/Russia internet (I can just hear her huffing in disbelief, Ugh, Russia, like I made up the Mueller Report) and my conservative aunts, especially as the four of them were still mourning the loss of my Grandmom from summer 2019.

 

This is the story of how helpless I felt, how there was absolutely nothing more I could do, as my mom was swept away. Or maybe she was always that far away to begin with.

(Curfew Has Lifted) Postscript: Quarantine Crush

It’s been such a hard couple of weeks, even here in my relatively un-police-terrorized neighborhood. My city was one of the ones with the curfews, with the police brutality toward protesters, with the military occupation. We’ve had so many victories, too, but I still really struggle to put the experience into words. Mostly I’ve just been repeating it over and over, like I did that time in the Nineties when my house burned down. Only everything is burning down and building up all at the same time.

On Saturday the 30^th, Sweetie an I were in a big protest (I’m so fucking SICK of the phrase “peaceful protest” because of its respectability politics implications, but it did start out that way.) and we got separated from our friends (twenty- somethings who referred to us as “protest moms”) just before the first fire started. (“Tear gas is an accelerant,” my young friend later pointed out, not sure it wasn’t the police who set their own car ablaze.) My friends were boxed in by the police and I was just outside the crowd. Sweetie, panicking because she struggles with wearing a mask for very long, had gone to get the car. I stood there feeling like the very epitome of a dumb white lady, filming and sobbing, while my stuck-in-the-crowd friends texted periodic updates so I’d know they were alive.

My friend in the crowd texted “Walk, don’t run, north.” I followed her instructions and picked a place for Sweetie to meet me with the car. I sat in some grass on a quiet corner, took off my mask to breathe a little better, and snapped a selfie, mostly so I would know I was alive. My regular check-in-buddy, my extremely mild-mannered neighbor in charge of feeding the cats if Sweetie and I ever get hurt or arrested, had never received this upsetting of updates. I hoped I wasn’t scaring her. I wanted to text Quarantine Crush but I knew that made no sense. I was relieved when his facebook reactions showed me he was out there rooting for me.

Sweetie and I were waiting in the car when our friends finally unstuck themselves from the crowd and started making their way towards us. They texted that they were almost run over by a police car in an intersection. (They later clarified that it was THREE police cars that went ahead and drove into the crossing protesters. May Heather Heyer haunt those police bitterly for the rest of their lives.) I got out of the car and waked toward my friends and though our county was still in the red zone, quarantine-wise, we definitely did hugging.

Though it was the police and not the protesters instigating and cultivating the violence and fear, our mayor put our town on curfew after that day. I did activism from home most of that time, but many people I cared about were still out in the now-also-military-occupied streets. I joined the protest watch group on Facebook, so I knew when my friends had to close the windows of their homes to keep the teargas out. I knew when the police were dropping teargas bombs from helicopters. Like everyone else with a heart, mine was petrified, breaking, and proud all at once. I took roll calls every morning so I’d know my friends had survived. So far, they have.

One night, after days and nights of terror, once I finished posting my phone number for the however manyth time in case there were emergencies in the night, I RSVPed yes to Quarantine Crush and Adorable Co-Host’s poetry reading, figuring I needed any comfort I could get. Figuring that things were now so life-or-death (I know! They seemed super life-or-death before!) that heartbreak and longing couldn’t possibly be factors any more.

Oh, Adorable Co-Host. Perhaps the person who hung up on me because I was talking too much about U.S. imperialism after 9/11 wasn’t the person to go to for comfort in this particular week. I feel like an actual crazy person for having thought so.

There were many signs in the pre-Zoom-reading chitchat that should have told me I’d better log out. Someone said “I’m glad *theyre* protesting.” (Emphasis mine.) The apparent queen of this almost-all-white reading piped up in favor of “states’ rights” as if we were in Civil war times. A white guy (possibly the one who said “We’re all in cages now” a few weeks before) used the phrase “identity politics.” I really should have logged out.

“Since we’re not gonna get abolition,” began Up-To-That -Point-Adorable Cohost, “One way to compromise with the police would be…” I tried to push back, but he switched into lecture mode:

“I mean, the police do good things too, like control crowds…”

I stayed for a little while. I read a nice post-protest poem and a not-nice letter to city council. I felt so jagged and broken that it felt like I was shouting Sweetie’s house down. (There was a weather-related power outage at my place, so I camped out with her for a bit.) I heard what the readers had to say, and it was good, as much as I could hear through my humming panic and boiling blood.

Right now, I’m so angry with myself for whatever in my heart and not-okay mind made it seem like this reading would be a place of comfort. I’m so angry at myself for mistaking facebook friends, twenty-years ago friends, for people who would really care about a city so far away, about me.

In the grand scheme of things, micro-abandonments by white and/or not-sufficiently courageous friends, don’t matter so much. I know that. What matters is that the Minneapolis City Council is in favor of defunding the police, that my city, through the efforts of so, SO many may have a chance at defunding as well.

Please, no matter who you are or where you are, go beyond your usual roles. Use every platform you have, not to make a cozy space for hand-wringing moderates, but to work for real change. Sheltering-in-place is not an excuse for sitting by the sidelines, especially not online. Write to your mayor, your city council, your governor, your friends. Please.

Lady Work Crush, 2010: A Story of Cultural (In)competence (Part One)

First, an invitation—as I muddle my way through talking about race in this story, readers of color should please feel encouraged to push back on anything that bothers you. 9/10 of cultural competency is just being ready to say I’m sorry.

In 2008, I moved from a small city to a bigger one, and the new city felt more segregated to me, though I was probably just feeling the shock of a less white-centric existence. Though my defensiveness and self-righteousness wouldn’t have allowed to admit it at the time, I brought entitlement and racism in with me. I’m sure that that informs this story and I hope that I’ve made some progress in the intervening years.

As my AmeriCorps position brought me into situations where I was often the only white person, one thing that I had to get used to was people distrusting me based on my race. It was only a microscopic fraction of what people of color go through, but it hurt and felt frustrating nonetheless. People kept assuming I was a pushover, so I ended up coming across as meaner than I meant to, more forceful. I wanted insta-credit for living in the same neighborhood and for serving the kids—that’s entitlement. When the kids assumed I was voting for McCain over Obama, I was devastated, and I guess I’ve come a little way forward since then because I felt much more empathy and understanding this year when kids assumed I was voting for Trump.

As I was (often poorly) navigating being the only white person, I was also the only out LGBT person in most rooms. The new neighborhood was very religious, both Christian and Muslim, and was much more gender-normative than the hippie neighborhood I’d come from. My wife and I stopped holding hands as we walked down the street, and I don’t think I’ve ever fully acknowledged the loss in that.

The afterschool program I worked in was sexist and homophobic. My supervisor told me that he felt it was men’s duty to “correct” any boys they noticed “acting wrong.” (Meaning gay.) We walked the kids in from school in boy-girl lines. Though I loved leading my group with my sweet and sensitive male teaching partner, the supervisor put a more traditionally masculine man in charge of us because he thought “a male influence would give the kids more structure.” I quit in a blustery huff and moved to another site with a more progressive leader.

I’d only been working with kids for a couple of years at that point, but I’d already decided that it was my duty to be as out as I could with them. I wanted them to know that they knew at least one LGBT person and for any kids who were growing up queer to know they had at least one ally. Even under the progressive boss, I was always getting in trouble for this. There were meetings. When the progressive boss moved to another position, he was replaced by a mean young woman and things got worse.

Once, I showed the kids a picture on my phone of Sweetie and me having bagels with my niece. Meanwhile, my boss had an entire collage of her family life behind her desk for all to see. I was pulled aside at a training by my boss’s boss for a reprimand, and I pushed back against it, saying that I felt unwelcome and unsafe because of the double standard. I was proud that I’d stood up for myself and I hoped that maybe I was heard.

It was into this context that Lady Work Crush arrived. She was beautiful and I felt something spark between us, or at least spark in me. She came across as a little butch and she looked like a goddess to me. We became friends and my heart started to do the yearning thing.