Big Boy woke me up at 5:30am. We went downstairs and I made him oatmeal. Towards the end of the bowl, he started putting his fingers in the bowl to scoop the oatmeal. I told him to stop and he did not, so I took the bowl.

He gave me such a look, like really if looks could kill…

And then promptly fell right out of his chair.

And all I could think was…”See, God don’t like ugly…”
LOL

Part of a short email I wrote to a classmate with whom I am taking a grad class on race and ethnicity in institutions:

Second, I wanted to speak to your want for the class to go deeper. I often feel the same way. For a topic that is so personal to who I am, I find it very difficult to separate me, the black woman and black mother of two black kids, from Gradmommy, the sociologist-in-training. While on the one hand, I wish I could talk about my experience as a black person in America, in the various places that I’ve found myself, on the other hand I don’t think that would be welcome in this class. For I have to admit, when a white person starts talking about, “well, where I grew up…” I want to just stop listening. So I can understand why personal anecdote is frowned upon in a class like this. Because if I have to hear a white person say, “Well, I don’t think that’s about race” because blah, blah, blah… I just might scream.

But just like I can’t separate my personal black self from my black professional self, I doubt many other people can either. And talking about the high theory and abstract concepts doesn’t tell me anything more about race in America because I live it everyday and I interact with people who live it everyday and I’m trying to raise kids who live it everyday. I find it frustrating to talk about separating race and ethnicity when we as everyday people don’t do that. I find it frustrating to talk about separating race and culture when we as everyday people don’t do that.

The issue with this class is that it could take two different paths. One path, which is the one we are on, tries to discuss race in theory without discussing race in everyday reality. And I understand why. I think my subjective experience of race from the viewpoint of being who I am is more valid than a white person’s subjective experience of race from the viewpoint of who they are. And ain’t right but that’s where I am and that’s my bias. And the other path is just that, talking anecdotally and trying to learn from each other’s experiences. But that’s not what we are doing here.

But this issue speaks to my issue as a gradmommy studying race and culture and law and wondering what kind of sociologist I want to be. Some part of me feel comforted that I have an option of being totally separated from my work, and can shield my emotions as a person from those of a professional. But another part says that’s not how I want to live my life and it pisses me off that these topics have to be so painful for me and not for anyone else. And that I have to find a way to make this sort of okay (cause it is never okay) for my two little children who are black and growing up in this world that is better than it was but not as good as it should be. And i’m having a really hard time doing this and I wish there was some sort of institutional support that recognized the extra burden of being black. But I guess that’s just part of it, huh?

For those of you with two children of different ages, do you ever feel like the second one really gets the short end of the attention stick? The first baby is an only child for a while, but the second is always a part of a pair. In fact, many times we say that we have the second child to keep the first one company. The second baby never gets the feeling of being the only one.

I feel this way about my second baby. I have a lot of guilt when it comes to her. Big Boy had a big baby shower, and his own little nursery with brand new everything. With Big Boy, the grandparents were all down the hall in the hospital as I gave birth to him in the wee hours of the morning. I stayed home with Big Boy for three months, and worked from home on Fridays in order to be with him. The time he was not with me, he was with his grandmother. On the weekends, the other grandma demanded time with him. He was an extremely loved and doted on baby.

Baby Girl, on the other hand, was born thousands of miles from her grandparents, although one grandma saw her the next day. She had me for only four weeks, and they were a very stressed four weeks adjusting to a new place and looking for work and handling a toddler. She didn’t get her own room with new furniture, although she did get new clothes. Grandma came for a few weeks, but after that, she went to the home of a stranger. A stranger who has become a part of our family, but a stranger nevertheless. Someone we pay to take care of her.  I don’t spend nearly as much time with her as I did Big Boy at her age, but that was because there was only one of him and now there are two of them. Also Big Boy can conversate (I know that’s not a word, but bear with me) and Baby Girl really can’t. So he ends up filling a lot of the kid “space” of our life. She got weaned from breastfeeding earlier, and even got kicked out of the bed earlier too.

On the bright side, she’s definitely been a “baby” a lot longer than Big Boy. She still uses a bottle, where Big Boy was solidly in sippy cups by now. She is a lot less disciplined, maybe because we don’t still have the fear that if we don’t get behavior under control now we are screwed for life. And she is just so cute in a comparative sort of way that we didn’t have with Big Boy. She definitely benefits from Hubby learning about babies with Big Boy. He’s an old pro with her.

I worry about not having as good a bond with Baby Girl. Big Boy can kinda understand the Mommy has to do her work, but he doesn’t like it. For her, it’s like me leaving or not being there is normative. I love her so much but I don’t know if psychically she knows that, I mean like muscle memory. And she’s a girl – I want to have a great relationship with my daughter. Just life is so different than it was when I had Big Boy – work started at 8 and ended at 5 and I could do what I needed to do in that time frame. Here works starts and stops at all different times and it never feels done and what is considered “good” work is so subjective so the only way to make yourself feel okay is do your very best which takes a lot of time.

It’s so funny how we worry about having enough love once the second one comes, but now I worry that she doesn’t know how much love I have for her. It also makes me worry about having a third, whenever that time comes. Cause then it feels like you should really have 4, so the middle ones are not alone in the middle.

*Sigh* I am supposed to be working right now, but I think I’ll call it a night. I had some thoughts on oppositional culture and black schooling that I was writing about yesterday and some thoughts on how gender plays into all of this considering black women outnumber black men at ratio of 2:1 and I wanted to write about more than the marriage market but what that means to black politics and overall racial advancement but I’m too tired and too sad.

I’m going to go home and give my Baby Girl a kiss. And of course my Big Boy too. And I guess Hubby while I’m at it.

the other day that I was really smart. She said, “You’re so smart, Gradmommy. Do people tell you that all the time? That you are really smart?” Now, given my past few posts, you might think that I was none to pleased by this sharing of affect. Because we all know that black people, especially those who have attended prestigious white schools for a long time, don’t take too well to being told about how well they speak or how articulate they are.

But it is okay. Actually even better than okay – it was great. Because my advisor is a black woman who studies race, and she quickly followed up with, “Well, you know I don’t mean it like that. Some woman just the other day told me I was hyper-articulate. And you know I was like, ‘What?!?’”

So I know she meant it in the right way. And it made me feel really good. Advisors, tell your students that they are smart sometimes! It may seem like an uneccesary way to make people’s egos a bit bigger, but believe me, we don’t always feel so bright.

Wow, there are so many issues with the “burden of acting white,” and I mean as a concept rather than the issue of there actually being a burden. This is a visceral reaction, so please comment on my own inconsistencies and issues….

I just want to tackle a small part here, as I am reflecting on being an academically successful black student who, as I mentioned in my last post, lived in a black neighborhood and attended both segregated and integrated school and cannot remember even one time being told that I was “acting white.” Anyhow, Fordham and Ogbu (1986) had a huge influence with this paper, and while I think it’s fraught with inconsistencies and theoretical paradoxes, one of my biggest issues is one of interpretation of the qualitative data. This part is about exceptionalism, and a black high school girl talks about taking exception with her being considered exceptional:

An examination of Kaela’s schooling history shows that her problem probably began to develop back in Catholic schools when she started to develop a sense of collective identity. She says that she began to lose interest in her schoolwork after she found that the parochial school administrators were treating her differently from the way they treated other black students, as if she were special. Since she, too, is a black person, she began to seriously limit her school effort and could not be persuaded by her teachers or parents to believe that she was unlike the other black students. Thus, while her teachers insist on treating her as an individual, Kaela sees herself first and foremost as a black person, and it is her growing sense of identity as a black person  which has negatively affected her school performance.

So much is going on here, but I want to focus on the burden of being considered exceptional. This happened to me when I attended my 99% black elementary school. I was considered exceptional. I was pulled out of classes, chosen to represent my school at district-wide events, even received a citation from the city at my fifth-grade graduation. I wrote a poem (that my mother still has) in the fourth grade that won a city-wide poetry contest that was all about my future aspirations. I was the only student at school to do a science fair project, one that I worked on with just my vice-principle in her office. I was in a mentally-gifted program in kindergarten, but my pastor from church would have to take me because I was the only kindergartner in the program and I was too young to ride the school bus.

I say this not to point out my brilliance, but to talk about what exceptionalism does to a child. See, while I was treated as if I was exceptional, I didn’t believe it, and it did make things hard at school. Kids understand and feel when adults privilege someone above them. A “teacher’s pet” is ALWAYS going to bear the burden of teasing and a certain amount of jealousy not because the kid is actually smarter, but because adults treat him differently. Being black had nothing to do with wanting to make myself somehow smaller without compromising my sense of self, because we were all black. The young lady above is not showing symptoms of the burden of “acting white” but the burden of being singled out as exceptional, of being different. Do you know what I call this? It’s the burden of “being black.”

I love being black. I love all the cultural things that go along with blackness – the food, the music, the clothing, the way of carrying oneself. My classmates never disparaged me because I was smart. What they disparaged was the special way I was treated, the privileges I got that they didn’t. The way it felt like I got all the resources, all the good stuff. Why would teachers want to only treat this young lady as if she’s an individual, but not the rest of the kids? If you are treating me as an individual, pointing out my special skills, why can’t you do that for everyone? Why can I only be an individual if I’m also not black?

Furthermore, the burden of being black is very different from the burden of acting white. Take this interpretation:

Kaela’s views of black Americans’ opportunity structure as being racially biased have contributed to her diminishing interest and effort in school. Her refusal to put forth the necessary effort to do well in school also stems from her growing identification with the problems and concerns of black people. Her growing racial awareness is thus inversely related to her school effort and achievement. It seems that Kaela’s absence from school is one way she tries to cope with the “burden of ‘acting white.”

Her absence has nothing to do with acting white, but everything about being perceived as black. How is it that identifying with the problems of black people mean that you feel a burden of acting white? The point is that even if I do as white folk do, it will not get me the same results. I mean, that is like almost universally accepted among black people, myself included. It is not a growing racial awareness that is inversely related to her school effort, but her growing awareness of racial inequality. Its her growing awareness of the obstacles in front of her because she is black.

I’m reading the Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America’s Selective Colleges and Universities for a class on race and ethnicity in society. In so many ways the book is largely personal, one because the sample consists of freshmen who entered one of these selective colleges the year after I entered Penn (one of the schools surveyed). I’ve only gone through the demographics section of the book so far, but I had to stop and write about what I was feeling.

I remember entering Penn with a certain naivete. I was born and raised in Philadelphia, a city that is 40% black. The neighborhood I’ve lived my whole life in and my parents still live is 95% black and prety solidly working-class/lower-middle-class. My elementary school was 100% black.

But I went to middle and high school at one of the best public schools in the country. My classmates were about 45% both black and white, with the small remainder Asian and a few Latinos (this has changed to being about 60% white). The school was located right next to the central city area, in one of the more affluent areas of the city. My world was pretty diverse, and I had a good sense of many of the paths my life could take.

So when I got to college, I remember being astonished that some of my white classmates had never realy interacted with people unlike themselves before they got to college. I had a full scholarship – room, board, tuition less the $5,000 the government said my parents could pay – and when I found out that some kids, both black and white, had parents that could pay the full price, I was shocked. The things people would say – even though I’d never been out of Philadelphia, the diversity that exists in the city was more of a worldly experience that what a lot of people seemed to get from their trips around the world. I remember being in college and being really angry.

Angry because I was so different, angry because despite all the advantages some kids had, they knew nothing. I’d worked from the time I was 14 and did work-study and another job to have the things I wanted – not because I was poor or came from a family in poverty, but because my parents provided my basic needs and anything extra I wanted – nice clothes, CDs, entertainment – I had to work for it. I was angry because these kids had never needed to work for ANYTHING, even if it was the things they wanted and not the things they needed, and it showed. Angry because they assumed things about me and what I was capable of, angry because they assumed I was there due to affirmative action AND that that was a bad thing. Angry because once they got to know me, I realized that I was considered, by some, to be “exceptional,” “different” in some way from the image of black people that they held prior to college, and still did. Angry because people told me they were intimidated by me, because I didn’t shy away from confronting people about their issues, exposing their prejudices.

In some ways, those feelings of anger are still with me, especially as I find myself now in an even worse situation. At Penn, as an undergrad, I was part of 6%. Here, in graduate school, I am one of 2%. The same people I encountered in 1998 at 17 I encountered in 2007 at 26. The same people who may have world experiences but yet have had the privilege or misfortune of only being around people like them are here in graduate school, and now, instead of being angry the way I was in undergrad, I am now incensed. And I don’t feel as bad about it as I did then, as in guilty. That might be a problem.

1) A mommy that is in the process of switching medications for her various psychological and physical “conditions.”
2) A child whose potty training is more about training the parents than training the kid.
3) A child who at 16 months is old enough to misbehave but not old enough to be disciplined for it.
4) A bowling alley for 3 hours.

But don’t worry, the danger was more for me than for them.

Are you out there, dear reader? The lack of commenting the past few days has me feeling lonely…..I have a feeling that I may have offended some of you with my post about the itching booty, and I apologize if that is the case. But please do come back – even though I’m an introvert, I sure do love my friends!