In Full Color Page 20
And, of course, Izaiah and I had The Talk. I sat him down and explained the concept of DWB—Driving While Black—and the many other perceived “offenses” Black boys and Black men in the United States commit simply by being themselves. The list of things they can’t do without attracting the attention of the police or “concerned citizens” is shocking and embarrassing and sad. For Amadou Diallo, it was pulling out his wallet in response to the police’s request to show them his identification in front of his Bronx, New York, apartment building in 1999; he died after the police shot him forty-one times. For Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., it was entering his own home just a few blocks from Harvard Square on July 16, 2009; when Sergeant Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department said he didn’t believe Gates lived there and Gates protested, Crowley charged him with disorderly conduct. And for Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old high school student, it was carrying candy while walking through a gated community in Sanford, Florida, on February 26, 2012; he died after George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch coordinator, confronted Martin and shot him in the chest.
When Trayvon Martin was shot—and even more so when George Zimmerman was later acquitted—mothers of Black boys nationwide went into a state of emergency, and I was no different. Izaiah was the same age, height, and weight Trayvon was when he was killed. For all intents and purposes, he was Trayvon. They even enjoyed the same candy. When he was shot, Trayvon was carrying a bag of Skittles, and in the wake of his death that candy took on new meaning, highlighting his youth and innocence and becoming a symbol of racial injustice. Feeling compelled to protest this senseless death, I designed two commemorative hoodies. One read, “Got Skittles? Never forget Trayvon Martin,” and the other, “Am I . . . Suspicious?” To get the sweatshirts made, I invested about a thousand dollars of my own money—money that, as someone who’d never made more than $37,000 a year, I couldn’t spare—and then distributed them at local protests and rallies. Some people paid for them at cost, but I gave most of them away and ended up losing money on the deal. I didn’t care. This wasn’t business. It was activism.
Trayvon Martin’s death had another unfortunate result. While Uncle Dan, his partner Vern, and I had always found common ground as pariahs of the Doležal family, we didn’t see eye to eye about everything, and racial justice activism was one of those things. Vern didn’t get why I’d made the hoodies in Trayvon’s honor. Having been raised in North Idaho, he didn’t understand that much about Black consciousness or Black culture. As the mother of two Black sons, I felt the urgency. Vern did not. He attacked me on Facebook. Upset, I blocked him. I stopped speaking to the uncles. My family grew even smaller.
That love and support, even from close family members, is often conditional has been a difficult realization for me and led to a succession of unfortunate breakups in my life, but some good has come from these rifts. Rather than dwell on them and allow them to cause me additional pain, I’ve come to see them as a series of moments that ultimately led to my liberation—from patriarchy, religion, white authority, and fear—and this freedom has allowed me to provide a safe and nurturing environment for those who need it. My family may have been growing smaller, but that only made those who remained that much more important to me.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Third Strike
IZAIAH STARTED GOING TO LAKE CITY HIGH SCHOOL in Coeur d’Alene when he was sixteen, and, as one of the few Black students in a predominantly white high school, ignorance and harassment followed him everywhere he went. He couldn’t walk down the hall without getting a racial epithet slung at him. As he was putting his books in his locker one day, a white male student pointed at Izaiah’s brand-new Air Jordans and said, “Those are some real nigger shoes.” What was most disturbing about this incident was that it wasn’t an aberration but a regular occurrence.
As much as I hated hearing about these ugly encounters, I had to walk a fine line, making sure Izaiah was safe while at the same time letting him decide the most socially beneficial way to handle each situation. As much as I wanted to intervene and fight every battle for him, I knew that I also needed to let him stand up for himself and develop healthy conflict resolution skills. He was too old for me to run to the principal’s office every time he got picked on. Even doing that himself had consequences. Unless schools exercise a zero-tolerance policy for harassment of any kind, the kids who report it are the only ones who ever really get punished. They get called “snitches” (and worse), and their social lives are forever tainted by the stigma that they’re somehow cowardly and weak.
Izaiah had read many of the books about Black history I had on my bookshelf, and we’d watched films on the subject together, so he understood the history of the Struggle and the good judgment that successful solutions required. But one day he told me he’d had enough. “I need you to buy me some headphones,” he said. “I hear the N-word in the hallway every day, and I’m getting to the point where I’m afraid I’m going to hurt somebody.”
I understood his anger and felt his request was not only reasonable but wise. That night, I drove to the closest entertainment store and bought him a pair of headphones. As clever as Izaiah’s response to the problem was, he also seemed to understand that it didn’t fix the core issue or provide any sort of systemic solution. Toward the end of his sophomore year, he adopted a new strategy—killing them with kindness. He’d always been a good-natured kid, but now he was Mr. Congeniality. He went out of his way to be polite and friendly to his teachers and developed the ability to strike up a conversation with just about any student from any clique, whether it was a cheerleader, a geek, a jock, or an emo kid. It was a successful campaign. By the end of his junior year, everyone at his school knew him by name and nearly all of them liked him, which, considering this is high school we’re talking about, is saying a lot.
Unfortunately, the racism that was so prevalent at Lake City High didn’t magically disappear. It continued to be directed at other kids of color. Out of the roughly 1,600 students who attended Izaiah’s high school, only about fifty of them were Black, and, just as Franklin had once observed about the two biracial girls in his third-grade class, most of the Black students didn’t know they were Black. Izaiah on the other hand most certainly did, wearing his identity like a badge of honor, speaking up in classroom discussions when the Black perspective was missing or misrepresented in history or literature, proudly displaying his hair texture with fresh bald fades and edgy lineups, and wearing spotless kicks from his extensive collection that always matched whatever shirt he was wearing.
Izaiah’s classmate Julian also ran counter to the norm. Julian’s family had moved to Coeur d’Alene from Virginia, and both of his parents were Black. Being from the East Coast, he wasn’t used to the demographics of Idaho, and he certainly wasn’t used to white students freely issuing disrespect. As he was walking down the hall one day, a white male jock called him the N-word, and Julian wheeled around and punched him in the jaw. A fight broke out, with both kids landing punches, but Julian was held solely responsible. He was suspended for “violent and aggressive behavior,” while the white kid and those who’d cheered him on suffered no consequences.
When Izaiah told me about this incident, I remembered something the Reverend Jesse Jackson once said before he spoke at the University of Idaho in 2011. I’d been included among the local dignitaries selected to have dinner with him before he delivered his speech, and what he had to say about diversity education—that it was not only for white students but that it was especially for white students—had stuck with me. He explained that most Black people were already very adept at interacting in multicultural settings—going from their homes to school or work and back each day, for example—but many white people who lived in predominantly white areas like Idaho simply didn’t have the experience, training, or skills to know how to appropriately interact with people from other cultures.
With this in mind, I pitched an idea to the administrators at Izaiah’s school. Wh
en racist incidents or harassment went unpunished, I explained to them, it was not only an injustice to the Black students but to the white ones as well. Because the jock who’d called Julian the N-word hadn’t been punished, he’d effectively been taught that what he’d done constituted acceptable behavior, so he was likely to do it again. If the jock did the same thing as an adult, he could get sent to prison for as long as five years, even if the person he’d directed the slur at responded by punching him in the face. In states like Idaho where malicious harassment is a felony offense, a racial slur is considered violent and aggressive behavior, essentially the first punch thrown in a fight. Certainly, the parents of the school’s white students didn’t want their children to grow up to be criminals, did they? What if the entire incoming freshman class each year could get a “vaccine” that would prevent the diseases of racism and bullying from spreading through the school?
My idea didn’t gain any traction with the school administration until Izaiah’s senior year, after he made a video about online bullying for his capstone research project. Filled with interviews with kids from his school telling it like it really was, his video gained a lot of attention. An article about the issue made it onto the front page of the local newspaper and featured a quote from Izaiah and a photo of him talking to other students about his project. When word of it reached the administrators, they said they were shocked to learn about the many hurtful ways students had been treated on social media and at school, and they gave Izaiah and me the green light to put on a joint presentation about diversity training as part of freshmen orientation. Izaiah opened the event with his video and a brief talk that challenged the incoming freshmen to embrace all their peers as if they were part of “a four-year family.” I followed with a lecture about the need for reducing prejudice, highlighting the practical benefits of doing it and revealing ways in which intercultural sensitivity would help them in various careers as well as life in general.
Izaiah’s video and capstone project were just a few of the many achievements he enjoyed at Lake City High. When I got custody of him, his GPA had nearly hit rock bottom, but by the time he’d graduated he’d raised it high enough to obtain a college scholarship. In addition to Best Dressed, he was also named Homecoming Royalty and Prom Prince his senior year, and when the principal handed him his diploma and hugged him, tears welled in her eyes. He definitely left his mark on that campus. Watching from the bleachers in the sweltering gymnasium packed with white families, I smiled at Albert and squeezed Franklin’s hand as Izaiah raised his diploma with an ear-to-ear smile. As his mother, I couldn’t have been any prouder.
Izaiah’s graduation coincided with Franklin’s graduation from elementary school. With both of them slated to change schools in the fall, I was presented an opportunity to do something I’d wanted to do for a while—move back to Spokane, this time for good. While it certainly wasn’t New York or Paris, Spokane was a real city in ways that a tourist town like Coeur d’Alene was not. It had six times as many people as Coeur d’Alene, an international airport, and, with four universities, far more opportunities in the world of academia.
I’d always liked teaching at EWU (and Whitworth University, which was also in Spokane) more than at North Idaho College, but I hated the long commute from Idaho. The move solved that problem. I stopped teaching at NIC, where my focus had always been art, and took on more work at EWU, where my focus was Black studies. At EWU, my academic life and my activist life began to come together as one. In some of the classes I taught, such as African American Culture, Research Methods in Race and Culture Studies, and Black Women and Hair, I was able to discuss issues that had an immediate visceral impact on my students’ lives. I didn’t just make them read about Brown v. Board of Education in a textbook; I had them go to a local high school and tutor twelve students of color who weren’t on track to graduate on time, eight of whom graduated that year as a result.
And when it came time to teach my students about “white privilege”—the idea that white people enjoy “an invisible package of unearned assets” compared to people of color—I didn’t simply have them read Peggy McIntosh’s essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” and call it a day. We did exercises in class that made it easier for them to visualize this somewhat abstract concept. One of the exercises was called the “privilege walk.” All my students started out at the back of the room, and if a certain privilege, such as being white or male or straight, applied to them, they would take one step forward. Along these same lines we developed a “privilege scorecard,” awarding one point to all the historically dominant groups in the main seven categories that shape identity: gender, race, class, sexual orientation, religion, disability, and age. You got a perfect seven—the numerical equivalent of an extremely privileged life—if you were a straight, Christian, white man between the age of twenty-one and forty with no disabilities who had enough or more than enough resources growing up. Any Muslim Black women over the age of forty who grew up poor, had a disability, and were bisexual weren’t so lucky. Getting a low privilege score meant the person receiving it would likely have a far more challenging life than those with higher scores.
When teaching classes where most of the students were white, I often heard some very passionate opposition to the notion of white privilege. This sort of resistance is common in our society. There are actually people who talk about “Black privilege,” as if a program such as affirmative action overly compensates for the horrors of slavery, the legally entrenched injustice of the Jim Crow era, and the inequitable treatment of Black people that continues to this day. White students who grew up poor were usually the biggest critics of white privilege. Exercises like the privilege scorecard were helpful in acknowledging the challenges that poverty brings, regardless of other demographic factors.
My empathy for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds came from a very personal place. Despite picking up several new classes at EWU, I was still struggling just to get by. The house Franklin, Izaiah, and I moved into in Spokane was a rental, and it only had two bedrooms. We knew it was going to be tight, but we also knew Izaiah would be leaving for the University of Idaho in the fall, so we were prepared to make it work. What we hadn’t foreseen was the addition of another family member.
When Esther completed her senior year at Shiloh Christian Children’s Ranch in May 2013, Larry and Ruthanne signed her out and brought her back to Montana. In the five years she’d spent in Missouri, I was never allowed to talk to her on the phone and I’d only seen her in person once. I was able to visit her for Christmas in Montana the year before but only under the supervision of Larry and Ruthanne. Whenever I tried to contact Esther on my own, they intervened to block my efforts. The one time they relented proved to be a disaster. With their permission, I purchased a plane ticket so I could visit her at the ranch and braid her hair, but the day before the flight they changed their minds and said I couldn’t see her, forcing me to eat my nonrefundable ticket.
Now that Esther was home and free to do as she pleased, I reached out to her online to see how she was doing and what she planned to do next. She told me she wanted to get out of there ASAP and would love my help. I was delighted that she trusted me enough to seek my help and that our relationship remained just as strong as it had been when I’d last seen her. (Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for my relationship with Ezra and Zach, from whom I’d grown distant after they kept posting what I viewed as racist images on their Facebook pages, including Confederate flags and President Obama as a monkey.) When Esther came to Coeur d’Alene with Larry and Zach, while Zach was looking into a wrestling opportunity at NIC, she asked me if I could help her move out of Larry and Ruthanne’s house, assuring me she wasn’t going to be telling them about her imminent departure. The following week, I drove to Larry and Ruthanne’s, knocked on the door, and announced I was there to pick up Esther. They couldn’t stop her from leaving now that she was eighteen, but Ruthanne’s steely glares and Larr
y’s game of Twenty Questions made their unhappiness with the situation clear. Esther and I shoved all her belongings—except her baby book, which Ruthanne refused to let her take—into large trash bags, loaded the bags into my Pontiac Vibe, and raced back to Spokane.
On the drive home, I noticed how damaged Esther’s hair was. During my holiday visit with her the previous year, I’d done her hair in microbraids, hoping they would last a while, but the Shiloh staff had cut the braids out well before the end of their lifespan. Such braids were considered to be extravagant and violated the group home’s modesty policies. The home also didn’t have a single Black hair care product available the entire time she was there, and using Ivory soap and Dove shampoo had left her hair so dry that most of it had broken off. Before I’d graduated from college, I had continued to do her hair every time I came home, but I hadn’t seen her more than twice since she’d gone to and returned from South Africa, and the long healthy head of hair she’d once had was now all but gone.
As damaged as her hair was, it was a problem that could be fixed with time, attention, and a little TLC. I was glad to help, as my doing Esther’s hair had always been an integral part of our relationship. In fact, the first memory both of us have of each other includes me braiding her hair. The first week she stayed with me I deep-conditioned, hot-oiled, masqued, and hydrated her hair until it was finally able to hold a good braid. Working in a spiral pattern, I braided her hair into one long cornrow, sewed on a weave net, and gave her a nice weave in a style she’d picked out. Over the course of the next year I moisturized and styled her hair, from weave to box braids to cornrow up-dos, to encourage it to return to its healthy state. Within eighteen months, she had about eight inches of healthy new growth, and each time I did her hair she would run to the mirror after I unbraided it and shriek with excitement, “It’s so long!” as she stretched it out.