Salon.com > Debra J. Dickerson

Don’t be black on my account

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 12:00:00 +0000

Out of the blue last week my son, who is 5, asked me if I'd ever been "burned." I thought he was referring to the tattoos that I always tell him and his sister are boo-boos (how else to justify voluntary scarring when I won't even let them use a butter knife?), so I repeated my usual lie and added that "Mommy would never play with fire." I thought this was a safety discussion. He looked confused.

"Oh. I thought that was why you were brown."

My biracial, white-looking baby is discovering race. Granted, both of my children think my nappy, unprocessed, Sideshow Bob hair looks that way simply to entertain them, and never understand why everyone asks if I'm their nanny. I can't say I wasn't on notice. But I'd envied them their racial innocence. Too bad them days are over.

My son first brought up the subject of race two months ago. I took him and his 3-year-old sister to a concert at an inner-city elementary school right before Christmas. There were lots of cornrowed kids singing "Jingle Bells." My own child, as he sat fidgeting in my lap, stared at the crowd around him goggle-eyed and perplexed.

It’s hard out here for an entourage

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 12:31:00 +0000

Every awards season, we're treated to waves of bawling starlets, foreheads immovably Botox'd, clutching figurines and sputtering out their interminable thanks to the overpaid teams of lackeys and hangers-on who keep them airbrushed and opiated to perfection. At last weekend's Grammys, Tony Bennett pushed this icky envelope to a new extreme by thanking "Target, the best sponsor I ever worked for in my life." Mary J. Blige had to be surgically removed from the Grammys stage, she weepily thanked so many folks. They almost had to break out an oompah band to shut up the Queen of Pain. Next week's Oscars may well last till the next Super Bowl if this over-the-top, overdone gratitude continues.

Like clockwork, every awards season, we snicker at these narcissistic "shout-outs" to rent-a-friends and engage in vigorous eyeball rolling at the climate-controlled money-fame bubble these celebrity androids must inhabit. "I'd like to thank my attorney," indeed. How about a standing ovation on behalf of all A-list felons for the entire criminal defense bar of Los Angeles County?

Colorblind

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 13:35:00 +0000

I am confident that I have held out longer than any other pundit to weigh in on both the phenomenon that is Barack Obama and the question of whether race will trump gender as America looks toward election 2008.

I had irritably avoided columnizing on these crucial topics (though I have been quoted by others) for several, somewhat unorthodox, reasons. First, because the Clinton-Obama stand-off has been more than well-covered -- and in an overly simplistic, insubstantial, annoyingly celebritized way. (Horrors, Obama smokes! But isn't he hot in his swim trunks?) I was waiting for the discussion to get serious and, at last, it has. Finally, we're asking the tough questions; instead of just crowing that he's raised $20 million, we're starting to wonder where it came from and what will be asked for in return for that much sugar. Why is the supposedly eco-friendly New Age senator supporting coal, however liquefied, as a way to wean ourselves off foreign oil? Wouldn't be his home state's powerful coal lobby, would it? And then there's his support for ethanol, which, strangely enough, comes mainly from corn-rich Iowa -- site of the first presidential caucus, if I'm not mistaken. All much more important than why he doesn't wear a tie.

To grandmother Pelosi’s house we go

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 13:40:00 +0000

It is unsurprising that the two most potent acts of political symbolism during last week's official Democratic takeover of Capitol Hill came from a white woman and a black man. Nancy Pelosi, first woman speaker of the House and, as Wonkette so perfectly put it, a mere two indictments away from the Oval Office, filled the well of the Congress with children. If congressional kids are anything like mine, members will be finding Hot Wheels, snotty Kleenex and half-gnawed pb&j's in their overcoat pockets for weeks. Still, whether it's true that it was an impromptu "Italian grandma" gesture in response to repeated squeals to touch the honored speaker's gavel, or a canny, cynical political stunt, it doesn't matter. It was perfect.

Not in my backyard, either

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 13:00:00 +0000

Sixteen months after Hurricane Katrina opened America's eyes about just how fragile the poor are and just how black and brown poverty remains, it's hard to figure out what the public thinks about the hundreds of thousands of victims who are still displaced. It's hard for me to figure what I think. Two different story lines battle it out in the media. One is about the hardships the New Orleans exiles face, the other is about the hardships the refugees themselves are inflicting on the cities where they now live.

These largely poor, largely black refugees face the end of free housing and other post-disaster public assistance. At the same time, they are being blamed for crime and social dysfunction in their new homes. Just as unsurprising as the racist fables about bestial black hordes running amok in the SuperDome after the storm are the more recent stories from Houston, where 100,000 refugees have worn out their welcome.

Raising Cain

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 12:01:00 +0000

When I was pregnant with my first child, who is now 5, I was ecstatic to learn he was a boy. This was odd, since I did not much like those of the male gender. Little boys even less, because I'd seen the center-of-the-universe process by which they become men.

I might have been equally happy to learn he was a girl (as I was with my second, who is 3). I was just plain happy to know more, anything, about this mysterious new presence that was dismantling my carefully constructed life. Yet, from the beginning, I wondered how I would reconcile my feminism with raising a son. How could I do it without becoming either a castrating mother straight out of O'Neill or an ovo-hypocrite who talks woman power but raises her own precious boy to be no more enlightened, and no less entitled, than any Promise Keeper?

Black people always demand that I focus only on the holy calling of raising a black man, period. But it seems to me that if I get the manhood part right, the black part will take care of itself. If he earns my respect by becoming a moral, hardworking, courageous humanist who shoulders his responsibilities, he can be as 'incognegro' as Wayne Brady. Race schmace: His blackness is his to define. My dilemma is raising a man when he's the only one of his gender to whom I give the benefit of the doubt.

Race matters

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 13:05:00 +0000

When you're as neurotic as I am, it's important to plan ahead for things to worry about. That's why Thanksgiving found me obsessing over Black History Month. You see, it's early December, and no one's asked me yet to come and be black for them in February.

Just as all professors yearn to be stand-up comedians, those of us who eke out a living writing in our basements long to be highly paid blowhards on the lecture circuit where, if you're shameless enough, you can make serious dough for just a few hours' work. If you're black, February is the optimal time to cash in. All the lucrative keynotes and fancy book clubs sign their speakers six to 12 months in advance, so I was pitifully late in the all too obvious realization that I had been passed over. Still, I got to thinking. Even if I had been invited somewhere, I wouldn't have the least notion what to say about the role of race in modern life, except that I'm pissed only to be asked the question once a year. The irony of Black History Month is that it makes life a bitch for blacks. All that pesky thinking about how to take advantage of an opportunity that's condescending, if well-intentioned, at its core.

Souls on ice

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Since we'll all no doubt be parsing the meaning of the 2006 midterms till kingdom come, it's time to tackle the area of discussion most likely to lead us all to hell and damnation: religion. Black religion, specifically. Is it just me, or did we learn an awful lot of things we'd all much rather we not have about the black view of religion and its role in society in the last election cycle? Raised a Southern Baptist in a home so pious that I could play neither cards (tools of the devil) nor games with dice in them (see: Monopoly), I thought I knew a thing or two about fire, brimstone and all the many reasons I'd be looking for asbestos panties when the bacon fat and Marlboro Lights finally call me home, but even I was taken aback by the bitch-slapping that the black clergy gave America, courtesy of a determined GOP.

I was even more surprised by how cowed America remained when doused in bigotry and anti-intellectualism by the group known worldwide as "the conscience of America." Since it's unlikely that a beast as well-fed as the black religious right has lately been is going to quietly go back on the calorie-restricted diet of irrelevance it has long subsisted on, how long will it be, I wonder, before America, guilty as it still rightfully is over its racism, finds its backbone and calls bullshit on the brothers.

Memo to O.J.: Kill yourself

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 11:17:00 +0000

When I first heard of the O.J. saga, it was only the tiny rectangle of news I could make out on my corner news box as I walked to work. I lived in San Francisco in 1994, and I saw the headline about O.J.'s pathetic slow-speed Bronco chase as I dodged North Beach's swarms of fanny-packed tourists and the aggressive, mentally altered panhandlers who screeched in their far-too-generous wake. As a summer associate at a law firm, I spent most of my time hiding from partners bearing last-minute work so that I could party away the weekends with the other overpaid summer associates, as was our divine right. So after that news box glimpse I tried to ignore all things O.J., and the firestorm of attention about him has always been a mystery to me. Squatting and squinting on that North Beach corner, the genius law student solved the case: entitled, famous, paid-to-be-violent bully kills the centerfold ex-wife his power bought for him and the Good Samaritan unlucky enough to be standing there when the testosterone, steroids and male privilege finally hit the fan. What's with all the tsuris?

Old school

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 12:19:00 +0000

Once I turned 47 last year, I contemplated moving every few months so that the AARP storm troopers won't be able to sucker punch me with one of their unavoidable membership packages and assign me my very own congressperson to stalk about Social Security and hip replacement coverage. But I'm thinking now that I'll just pull up a nice rocking chair in the shade and let the wrinkled bastards find me. I'm too tired to be young anymore. It's just too much damn work.

Young people complain about the stranglehold we boomers have on the culture. But being forced to wait until our narcissistic parade passes by isn't half as hard as being forced to march in it, let me tell you. Every month, More, America's only magazine for "mature" women, is chock full of estrogen-fed Amazons in their 50s and 60s who can not only still fit into their Priscilla Presley knockoff wedding dresses but, two husbands later, are still friendly with the fool they married while they were wearing them. I stopped speaking to my husband before the reception was over. I was 40. We have two kids. I didn't fit into my dress during the ceremony.

“Jesus didn’t smoke no weeds!”

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 12:13:00 +0000

Until today, and like most decent people, I had little sympathy for the consultants and K Streeters who earn millions figuring out how to get people to vote their way. Then I tried to convince a 78-year-old Southern Baptist, a former Mississippi sharecropper with an eighth-grade education and the intellect of Thomas Jefferson, to vote to legalize drugs. My mom's a retired manual laborer in Nevada, where there's a ballot initiative aiming to do just that, and she called for help deciphering her absentee ballot.

Voting has always ranked perhaps half a step behind Jesus and fried pork chops with her, and ever since 2000, when "that old Bush stole the election," she has become somewhat deranged on the subject. She spends months at a time on the road visiting her six children, nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, and is convinced that the CIA does little apart from either shredding or altering her absentee ballots, otherwise the Democrats would win. "You can't put nothing past the Republicans, nothing! Deal with the devil for a dollar."

Too damn little, too damn late

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 20:35:00 +0000

You were expecting, maybe, gratitude for your lynching apology? You should live so long. Here are my top 10 reactions to America's latest patronizing attempt to repent its racism:

1. Bite me.

2. Damn right, the least you could do.

3. Mighty white of you.

4. Gee, couldn't you have waited just a little longer -- until even the trees from which the "strange fruit" swung were dead?

5. I'm not impressed, but then, I'm bell-curved. What do I know?

6. Thanks for kicking our asses so hard, and for so long, that we were forced to develop entire art forms around our oppression.

7. Try not to break your arm patting yourselves on the back.

8. Give us back the land, the businesses and the unpaid debts that were the true cause of many lynchings. You sleaze bags!

9. Gee, was there no appropriate Hallmark card? Let a sister help you out:

Sorry I castrated your granddad. My bad.
What's 300 years of raping your ancestors among friends?
Sticks and stones may break your bones ... Oops. They already did.

And my topmost reaction to your lame-ass, late-ass lynching apology:

10. Thanks for absolutely, positively nothing. You feel better. We feel worse. Déjà bloody vu all over again.