PART ONE:
THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACK CHILD
I spend two days in the NICU unit at a city hospital, visiting my newborn adoptive son, preparing to take him home to the small, Progressive town I have recently moved to in New England. I am not surprised that I am the only white parent there, as my baby is Black and I assume the other babies are too. There is a mother being taught how to store breast milk for her baby, so her mother can feed him when she goes back to her job at Walmart. There is a young father cuddling and playing with and talking to his baby boy. One father is distressed because he has had a hard time convincing the staff to let him in to see his baby girl. At one point I stand up and look at the babies in their cribs. Three-quarters of them are white. Their parents are nowhere to be found.
Before the Fall
I am walking down a city street in Kerala, India, when I see a small boy, about four, running and darting through the crowd in front of us. I notice him immediately because he is white with straight blond hair, and I have never seen a white child running through a street in India. As I get closer to him I am shocked to see that he is not only barefoot but has sores on his legs, even though both are very common in Indian children. A few minutes later I see where he is going. There is a group of maybe twenty white people sitting in the middle of the street together. They are laughing and talking loudly. They are also quite dirty and dressed in rags. I feel a rush of horror, as though the world has been turned upside down. Then as I get closer I see that they are not white, but a group of Indian albinos. Everything goes back to making sense again.
I am standing on the corner of West 11th and 6th Avenue in Manhattan with my ex-husband and a friend. Our friend is looking north. He says, “After everything we’ve done to Black people, everything we’re doing to them, I don’t understand why they don’t rise up and kill us all. I just don’t understand it.” I think that things can’t be that bad here. Our friend is originally from Rhodesia, after all.
I have just finished reading Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz.” I say to my brother, “How could people in Germany have let this happen?” He says, “Well, what do you think people will say in fifty years about what we’re doing to Black people here right now?” I have never thought of this before.
The Garden of Eden
I’m standing in my kitchen. I’ve just hung up the phone. It’s winter. The night before I had looked at my baby’s hair after I took off his hat when I brought him home from daycare. His hair had never been cut, and now it is all shorn off. The next morning I call the daycare director and tell her what has happened. She calls me back after speaking with the two women who have been caring for my son two days a week. They did not cut it, she says. She is full of sympathy. She says she can imagine how I must feel, thinking that they had. But they did not cut it. I have a moment where I come the closest to believing that I have gone mad that I have ever experienced. I am frightened because I wonder how I am going to take care of my baby if I have gone crazy. I give him a bath and carefully wash the hair he has left. Then I dry and comb it, take a picture, and compare the picture to one I had taken the previous week right after washing his hair. It is now two inches shorter, a little crew cut. I e-mail both pictures to the daycare director. I call her. Yes, she says, I saw the pictures. They cut his hair. I say I will have to pull him out of her daycare. She begins to cry, which confuses me. Why is she crying? She says she will get back to me shortly. After several days of not hearing from her I e-mail her. She
responds noncommittally, saying only that she is unconcerned about the whole thing. I realize that other than this I have nothing in writing from her.
I go with my son to visit a private elementary school that has recently started a preschool, with its own director. It is quite large, with at least 50 children. I had made an appointment the day before for us to visit. All the children at the preschool are white. The school’s new principal, with whom I’m chatting, seems to notice this for the first time. “We do have several African-American children in the elementary school,” she says. The kids are standing in a group, listening to a teacher talk, and my son goes over and joins them. He has a habit, because at three he is already so tall, of bending down so that his face is level with the faces of other children. He does this now, peering into the eyes of another little boy. “Please don’t do that,” the preschool’s director says, pulling my son back. “You’re making him uncomfortable.” Later, when I express interest in signing my son up for the school, she says, “Oh! I’m afraid we just gave away our last slot.”
I am sitting on a couch at noon on a visit to my son’s classroom at the preschool I have finally found that will take him. The four and five-year-olds come in from the playground. There are two big wooden tables where they all sit and eat lunch together, and another small table where they put their lunches on their trays before sitting down. There are about twenty of them. They are all white except for my son. As they take their seats I notice, off to one side, a fourth tiny table, where my son goes to sit by himself. The other children talk quietly to each other. It is March, and I realize my son has been eating at a separate table all year.
The Serpent and the Tree of Knowledge
I am scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed when I see a post from a white mother of two biracial children in my town. Why, she asks, do the worst-behaved children on the playground always look like mine?
I find a new daycare, at a liberal Christian college that has an opening. My son is almost two and is not with me when I visit. The week he begins going there I am relieved to notice that the blonde director of the preschool has a Black daughter. I chat with the director about our children. She had adopted her child, who is nine, from foster care a few years earlier. She mentions that her daughter enjoys playing with my son. “I don’t know why,” she says. “She likes to play with Black children. I guess it must be a genetic thing.”
I am trying to talk to a friend about what is happening to my son in the town where we live. We are walking on a path by the lake. She mentions an interracial couple she knows who have a biracial child. “They never have any issues with racism here” she says. “I wonder how they do it? I’ll ask them.” A few weeks later the white mother publishes a blog post in which she writes that in her eleven years of marriage to her husband, and with a child together, she has never encountered any racism, but that “maybe I am just not looking for it.” Someone writes in to congratulate her on the blog post, and she responds, “If you look for something, you’ll find it. I truly believe that, in my heart.”
Thrown into the River
I am sitting in the car with my son, who is four, in the parking lot outside the YMCA. We have just come from a swim lesson. I tell him he is learning to swim quickly, that he is doing really well. He asks me why. I say, “Because you’re smart.” He says, “Oh, no, Mama. Black kids aren’t smart. My best friend at preschool told me so.”
I am tucking my little boy into bed. He asks me when he is going to become white.
Exodus
I am in the hallway of my son’s preschool. I have just spent an hour sitting there with him while the other children nap together. The assistant teacher who usually stays with him is on vacation and the principal has told me he cannot come to school unless they have extra help, so I say I will come and fill in. He rests and then we whisper and play together. At the end of nap time he is allowed back in the room. The principal walks up to me. She says that this is not working out. He will have to stay home. I am baffled. “What is he doing wrong?” I ask her. She looks at me in astonishment. “You mean you can’t SEE it?” she says.
PART TWO:
WHY ARE PROGRESSIVES SO RACIST?
I sometimes thought, back when I was still there, before I sold the house, packed my things, and moved south, that moving to Burlington, Vermont was like moving to a town in Germany in the early Thirties to escape the rise of Nazism, only to find myself in a place that, while perfectly virtuous in all other respects, had forgotten one important aspect of liberalism and instead managed to enthusiastically embrace anti-Semitism. Only, in this place and time, the enthusiastically embraced creed was racism. What, I wondered, would be the legacy of such a place after the Holocaust, with the benefit of hindsight? Probably entirely forgotten, swept into a muddle of German behavior defined by its hatred of Jews. On the wrong side of history.
This scenario is not that far fetched when you look a little closer at German cultural history. Thinkers who helped provide the foundation for the Progressive movement today (Rudolph Steiner, Carl Jung, and as an aside, Hans Asperger) all did in their work what I have just described. Steiner, founder of the popular Waldorf school movement, believed that black people were the lowest form of humanity, one from which with dutiful good works the transcending soul could be reborn into the white race. Jung’s thinking embraced the German race as people of the earth, in opposition to the inferior Wandering Jew. And Asperger, revered by Progressives for his recognition of those unfortunate children whom he diagnosed as seeming normal on the surface, but who in fact were mere imitations of human beings, lacking the empathy that would allow their social skills to develop naturally, was recently discovered to have colluded in sending numbers of children with his diagnosis to their deaths in WWII.
Progressivism has drawn on this vein of German thinking in other ways as well. The Sixties saw a movement of back-to-the-landers who embraced the German concept of the Volk, the People. The People's Movement advocated peace and believed that the real People lived off the land, in rural areas. Many of them moved, in the Sixties, from the cities to the country and to towns in predominately rural areas, including Vermont, where I was growing up at the time. This migration, in hindsight, had curious parallels with the White Flight movement from the inner cities to the suburbs. I recall as a teenager watching a piece by my still-beloved Bread and Puppet Theater in which paper flames engulfed the paper city at the end, and noting in confusion the reaction of the parent I was with, who exclaimed angrily that the piece had given the message that the inner cities should all just burn down.
Burlington is one of many small- to medium-sized cities around the U.S. that have developed since the civil rights movement as exemplars of the Progressive brand. Before I moved there, but after I had visited, I spent a weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia. I was thinking of moving to Burlington, and the woman I was staying with had lived there for many years before moving to Charlottesville for the warmer weather. I remember walking through the town’s pedestrian-only downtown and realizing that the two places were essentially identical: liberal, pretty university towns, originally colonized by sixties hippies, now bastions of Progressivism. It did not surprise me when the events in Charlottesville unfolded some years later. Portland, Maine; Portland, Oregon; Austin, Texas; Seattle, Washington; San Francisco; so many cities evolved in a similar manner and serve as havens for Progressives like me.
These observations are made not to suggest that the Progressive movement in the U.S. is quietly but consciously racist, but rather that in its insularity and isolation it has been able to drop any pretense towards integration, both by drawing on traditions that are anti-integrationist, and by creating communities in which getting away with racism is the easiest thing in the world. Progressives are racist insofar as they live in almost entirely white communities in which people
can routinely behave in racist ways because no one will stop them. I am a white Progressive, and this criticism is coming from the inside. But if the unexamined life is not worth living, the unexamined movement is not worth following.
So I moved to Burlington after twenty-five years in polyglot New York City. A year and a half later I adopted my newborn Black son, and my disillusionment began. I am used to being white, which means I am used to experiencing white people the way white people do. I expect to be treated as an equal, just as I treat others. I expect to be safe in a white environment. I expect the social contract to be upheld. I expect that people will try to be basically truthful, because the consequences for not behaving reasonably well are too great. I did not know what it was like to live in a place where there would be no consequences for behavior that was extraordinarily outside the norm, because I had always lived in a situation where if a white person claimed that the police, say, were following them home, stalking them, pulling them over in their car for no reason, trying to kill them, that person would, quite rightly, be considered paranoid and delusional. That scenario, for white people, and myriad other situations less dangerous but similarly unnerving, simply didn't happen. But in New York City, it was well-known as something that happened to Black people. I remember my astonishment when at a restorative justice meeting my first year in Burlington I raised the question of how the process should take into account the possibility that in any given incident the police might not tell the truth. “But why on earth would the police ever do something like that?” was the response.
The effect of these assumptions is that when people do start behaving in ways that break that social contract, the person towards whom that behavior is directed questions their own sanity, and the people around them question that person’s sanity, or at least their accuracy, too. Aspergers is the diagnosis my son was given. Perhaps he has it. Perhaps, as a diagnosis, it doesn't exist. In any case, it is a diagnosis that many people fervently believe in, and it has the ability to cause people to behave exactly as if they were fervent racists, because they are now justified in thinking that childish behavior is a sign of an “other” who is not like us, although he may imitate our ways. This child then becomes someone who, for his own sake, but also, of course, to protect the “normal” children, must be sent to a separate school or if, after a year of this, his mother resists and finally gets him admitted to a regular preschool, must be accompanied at all times by an aide; must arrive after the other parents have dropped off their children and be picked up before the other parents pick up their children, so that the other parents never see him; must sit at a separate table from the other children; must nap in the hallway, away from the other children; must not play ball on the playground with the other children. And there is nothing his mother can do about this except take him, leave, and never come back. Which is, perhaps, exactly what the town wanted her to do in the first place. And so my child, one of the few Black children in the city, ended up, via a diagnosis of Aspergers and a resulting Special Ed designation, being treated in a manner almost indistinguishable from the stories I have heard about the first Black children to try to integrate the school systems in places like Alabama in the fifties.
Another effect of the diagnosis on me was that it provided an alternative explanation for the way my son was treated by white adults when I took him out. The playgrounds we went to didn't empty out because he was Black. Parents grabbed their children and left because he had autism and while I just couldn't see it they could, so they wanted to keep their children away from him. The scene seared into my memory of him, at three, toddling after a little girl who was being pulled away by her father and crying out, “Please don't leave. I just want to be your friend,” was not the result of racism, but of his poor social skills. As to why people would behave like this, on the playground or at the preschool, the answer to my mind is because they know they can get away with it. I expected, when I adopted my son, that if and when I encountered racism, the Progressive community around me would help me. Instead, the people in the community around me, unable to conceive that their own might be in the wrong, backed slowly and carefully away.
I remember conversations I had with one of my closest friends about our shared astonishment at the phenomenon of genocide. How could this possibly happen, ever?, we wondered. After my experience in Burlington, I no longer wonder. The experience of going against the perceptions of a dominant group to which you yourself belong is terrifying, and the resultant punishments, the ostracism and gaslighting, are real. With few exceptions, the one overriding response I got when I tried to talk about what was happening to other people in Burlington was silence. Unanswered messages, awkward changes of subject, aided by a generally repressive culture that fetishizes pleasantness and not making waves, an avoidance of the negative except as something that happens elsewhere, out of which has arisen a slew of prohibitions on how to talk about race that have made the subject itself dangerous to even bring up. It wasn't until I took my son on a trip to DC and NYC that people spoke to me. “That child does not have autism!” “What are they putting in the water up there?”
In David Brooks’ “Bobos in Paradise,” he describes a shelf in a Burlington bookstore that is stocked almost entirely with books on social justice issues for white people. The appropriation of the civil rights movement’s techniques and tactics to advance the cause of the white oppressed is now largely complete. It was with very mixed feelings that, as a lifelong feminist, I watched the #metoo movement take the concept, to use one example, that Black activists had given them of not dismissing the experiences of black friends and acquaintances, and morph it into “Believe All Women,” and to see the plea of Black activists to not make them explain and reference what they were saying over and over turned into outraged attacks on men for not “doing their homework,” especially when it was white women who in their roles as teachers and helpers were cruelest to my child. That it was white women perpetrating racism was of course simply because those jobs are still largely underpaid and reserved for women. There is no question in my mind that white men would have done the same had they been the ones present. But it still made me angry. How we went from championing the rights of people whom we ourselves, as a group, were abusing, to championing our own rights as victims is intriguing. Women are oppressed, as are LGBTQ white people. For Black people, however, things are even worse. Intersectionality is supposed to be at the forefront of social justice, yet somehow the rights of Black people are still viewed as the rights of “other” people, while the rights of women and gays, most of whom are white in the U.S., are viewed as “us,” even when “we” are neither women nor gay ourselves.
Every time I think I have learned not to mention that I left Burlington because of racism, I find myself doing it again. Every time I do it again, I find that the response is, “But Vermont is so Progressive. Although I guess the locals must be pretty racist.” It wasn't the locals, though. It was the Progressives. When Bernie Sanders, one of my favorite politicians, made his bid for the presidency in 2016, he had been living in Vermont, to which he had made his way from Brooklyn in the Sixties, for many years. It affected him. To his great credit, when two young Black women activists seized the microphone at one of his rallies and were jeered and shouted down by the crowd of white Progressives there to hear him speak, he listened and changed his campaign. But by then it was too late. He never got the Black vote, and he lost the nomination. Because how can you win the Democratic vote in America if you completely ignore the real and pressing problems of the most unfailingly liberal bloc of liberal voters in the country? If he, belatedly, got the message, his supporters never did. So an overt racist won, but I hold the covert racists, even the ones who either just don't care, or if they do care, just won't act, responsible for that travesty as well. Racists are no more “other” than Black people are.
“You! hypocrite lecture! —mon semblable,—mon frere!”
”J’accuse.”