In Title, In Deed

I WAS TALKING or reading, or “conversing” on Twitter this morning and someone (@theapants? @newdemographic?) some friends, that is, were talking about entitlement. The feeling of entitlement, the sense of entitlement. And they struck on something I’ve been thinking of a lot lately myself. How the attitudes and viewpoints of those who raised me—two white people, one of them my biological parent—were given to me. Of course. I mean, of course you take on your parents attitudes to some degree. We were talking specifically about how People of Color being raised my whites, people who are mixed being raised by whites, produces a particular phenomenon. Results in attitudes of certain entitlement, and further, that when feels entitled, one generally gets more of what one wants. Granted, someone who has an entitled attitude in any area can be terribly annoying, too. And the discussion can, should, and does include the many harms this can result in. But welcome to the US, which feels entitled to everything on the planet. And acts on that. We do, for the most part, too, echo the chamber within which we are born. In sound, function, and in form.

But we also take on our own path. And part of that is thinking about these things, and determining how much can be kept, how much discarded, how much is valid and how much is destructive.

I think it was @theapants who said to me “It’s hard to admit privilege, as a mixie POC!” and I replied something about how it’s hard for anyone. We shouldn’t expect much less from power; all power seeks to increase and intensify, never wane.

But the truth is, it is not “hard” for me to admit this at all. Why would it be? It is not some kind of crime to have a feeling of entitlement! It is not some moral failing to have power. It is how you use it of course. And for me, the shame or the “hard” part would be in never examining yourself. In any area, not just in terms of identity or power or role in a culture. And I’ve been examining myself all my life, and will always do so. It’s not hard. It’s part of who I am.

I was glad to hear the discussion, at a time when it is in my own mind so prominently. I’ve been thinking about the attitudes I took from those who raised me.

My mother was a blonde (her hair darkened as she became an adult), blue-eyed Jewish girl in New York City school. She was (is!) a very smart person, and the daughter of a well-off man.

Of course she abdicated that family role and flew in the face of all her father’s wishes by getting knocked up by a Mexican cat in college—a college she attended very young after graduating valedictorian. But this was the late 1960s, and hers was the generation to spit in the face of the Establishment. What better way, hey? And thus, me. (Though I do think this pregnancy was not planned!) And my young life which had everything to do with 70s counterculture and rebellious reaction, and nothing to do with my grandfather’s modest amount of money (faded quickly, he wasn’t that well-off, just average doing Okay, really), nothing to do with his Republican/Reaganite politics, nothing to do with his conservatism.

My mother would tell me about her school days. That stuck with me. She told the stories from the vantage point of a very smart woman who found that as long as she got As, nobody in the school (administration-wise/authority-wise) could touch her. And she graduated that way. And she passed that on to me. And it always made a lot of sense to me. As long as I can accomplish and bring my intelligence to bear, nobody can complain and I need not feel shame. She never said it that way, but that was what I learned, I think. Of course she didn’t teach me about culture or race or the power structures in place, or the history of Jews or New York City, or any of that. So I never figured in those things. And I never realized, either, that people might react differently to a mixed/POC male with the same attitude that New York City schools would give to a blonde, young, smart, pretty Jewish girl. But they will.

From my adoptive father (and I don’t like to call him my “stepfather” because I was legally adopted and all my papers changed forever and a “stepfather” only marries your mother, doesn’t siphon up your state-sanctioned identity), I gained a different kind of entitlement. His was the entitlement of a young, white (Irish Catholic) male who lost his family young (11) and survived the Bronx mostly on his own. Daniel Day O’Lewis in Gangs of New York (or in There Will Be Blood) reminds me of him so much. Not just his looks, but his philosophy and rage. He was an artist, but crazy, and he made his way through society with a fury that threatened to burn holes in anyone who opposed him. Gearheart would rush forward into any fight as if packing heat. But he never (rarely?) had a weapon on him. I grew up watching him—although it would have been easier if I had only been a spectator rather than part of the Them that he opposed—take his fight to all of Them. I discarded many bigoted/racist lessons that were unwittingly handed to me immediately upon observing them (such as his fiercely homophobic nature) as I found those loathsome and needed no context or instruction to do so. The very way he reacted cast his view in a suspect light. Or something.

But in all that, he taught me many positive things, too, despite being the aggressor in my family and eventually being banished from our lives by each one of us. Personally, I find it important to untangle what was useful from what was not…and unhealthy and unrealistic to try and imagine any person as one-dimensional embodiments of our own demons and fears. But it takes time….

Why do our school books and mainstream culture revere the pioneers and the US settlers in our historical lore? I would whisper to you that the reason is the same reason that violence like my adoptive father’s can blossom in our culture, often unimpeded. Power respects power. Power respects gain. Power respects ground taken. Power respects efficiency and victory. Power would rather stand in a pool of blood and shout to the sky than listen to empathetic handwringing and reasonable explanations of justice or loss. (Which is why today’s maniac GOP are the true descendants of the US settlers; not the Liberals. Which is why the Democrats never win. Just ask yourself…is not allowing Indian reservations and borderwalls to stand very much like blaming women for being beat in their own homes? Think about it.)

So those were the lessons he gave me. That’s what he had to give.

Power may respect power, but it also has an appetite that only grows greater when it dines on respect. And it must be tempered with knowledge, with heart, with suffering. Those things I found not only in my own home, but very much along the way, on the path out of my house at 15 and on the road to Here & Now.

My Mexican family was different. In the much less amount of time I had with them, they were much, much different. Humbler. No purer, perhaps…but not infused with these senses of power, with some gushing of ambition, with an everpresent voracious appetite for gain. (Or maybe I wasn’t around enough to sense it.) Yet even later when I spoke to my father, he was always so much more careful, quieter, apologetic, unsure. His feelings were kept in, kept back, smiled over. Was that method or way of being The Answer? Perhaps he made less pockmarks in the heart of the world…but he took them into himself. In all his backing up, I think he almost walked off a cliff. It took my father years and years to finally shatter and begin to bellow out with his internal emotion, which he had been denied. By himself? By the culture? By the space we allow people of color? Very likely. And it was a space I never learned to cede.

Obama shows the danger of people of color raised by whites with this power infused in his mind, with the privilege imbued in his climb. With the lens of conservative and mainstream US, he tells people of color to Try Harder and Work Harder. To Stop Being Lazy and Irresponsible. He talks to us like racism and oppression is not historically imbued in our world and even our US lens on the world; as if it is not systemic; as if he is white.

It’s okay to have a sense of power and use it. But it is not okay to not be aware where you got it, what it models, what it seeks to attain, and then who you are talking to. Just because an eagle is raised by owls does not make it wise.

I fall into an odd space, I know. I wrote this in my early writings here. Back at El Grito, when I was a bit more rough around the edges, newer to the awarenesses I’ve nurtured here, a bit less sure, and probably louder. But even then, I knew what it was that created the confrontational and unusual mix that informs my voice here. I wrote of how I was the white racists’ worse nightmare. With the vocabulary and ease of English and cocky belief in my right to express and claim it all that a white American has; but with the agenda and heart and memory of the Indian.

I, too, seek and delight in power. As all energy-consuming organisms will. Here is my solution: Not to be part of the silence smothered over people of color, shoved into their lungs and making us to die, buried under ground so often stolen. But to use any and all powers and privilege in the struggle to bring justice to bear for all.

Power is not truly inherited, and rarely “deserved.” Power is taken. And yet, power is not a goal; it is but a way.