[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img]
I was a chatty kid. Once I started talking as a toddler, I never stopped. Ask my mother. Better yet, ask my husband. If I’m quiet for more than a minute or two, he takes my pulse, literally. He believes I’ll stop talking when I’m dead.
Mrs. Filippi, my first grade Catholic schoolteacher , had two long tables of students – the good kids and the bad kids. The good kids were smart, performed well on tests, and were cited for good behavior, like keeping quiet. The bad kids did not conform to these standards. They could not behave and did not get it. School, I got. No problem. The quiet part – well, not so much. I was enthralled with the idea of talking to so many people all day. I never stopped, and I remember being forever banished to the table of bad kids when Mrs. Filippi was describing characteristics of boats – stem, stern, starboard and port – and I was chatting away, blithely ignoring her. I never was any good at sailing.
Little black kids, especially, should be quiet. The adult women in my life taught me this lesson early – though not early enough to excel in first grade citizenship. Whether the lesson was hissed or whispered or accompanied a pinch (with a twist for good measure), its dictates were clear. To fit in, or at least keep out of trouble, I was not to be loud or call attention to myself. Schools will expel you. Police will shoot you. Eventually, I got it, and a quieter child evolved.
Fast forward five years. I relocated from urban private schools to suburban white schools. My otherness was not due to my chattiness. It was due to my color. I was subject to intense scrutiny, direct questions, and a number of racially charged slights.
Can You Answer the Question?
At first, I was flabbergasted, and . . . speechless. Who knew what to say? Sure, life is diverse New York City was different. Questions like “What are you?” dominated my first few years of school, but once I gave a response, it didn’t come up again. You knew who was West Indian or (like me) just plain black, who was Puerto Rican, Italian, Greek or Jewish, and – stereotypes notwithstanding – you moved on.
This was not the case in suburban Connecticut.
But as George Will continues to express so inarticulately in these last few months, white people need to feel good about themselves. And despite continued evidence to the contrary, they all want to believe that they are tolerant, embrace diversity – even watch Oprah. Every time someone points out that a white person is not behaving in a very accepting manner, (“Really, you will not get killed if you drive through my neighborhood”), or that a white person is not embracing diversity (such as the oft heard desire to “expose” their kids to diversity, while running away from truly diverse neighborhood schools to those that are 98 percent white (all- white would be too easy a target), they balk.
In elementary school, I was ostracized for speaking out – for talking back. No slumber or birthday parties for me. In middle school, I was villainized. There was nothing like being an ‘other’ during the hormone raging years. In high school, I ate lunch alone. Or with one of the other two percent “other.”
A Tissue for You — and for You, Too
Then, in college, they cried. Every time I pointed out the fundamental bias and bigotry of something that someone said, there would be a cryfest. At some point during my junior year, I considered carrying a full size box of 220 tissues in my backpack to try and stem the tide of the flood. Consequently, most of my friends were “ethnic” whites and minorities from New York City or minorities from California. The “real” whites (like John McCain’s “real” Americans), just did not understand why they were so misunderstood.
Sometime during graduate school, I made the conscious decision not to do it any more. I let ignorant comments roll right over me. If no one had set them straight in 25 years, what in the heck did I think I could do? My social life was surely different. WASPs did not treat me like a pariah. To paraphrase Ralph Ellison, I became invisible. But social inclusion was not, I decided after a few months, a good tradeoff for telling the truth. So I began speaking my mind again, with a vengeance. I graduated with few friends and a greater number of enemies.
For all my talking, I suppose that some might say I lack tact. I imagine tact is the middle ground between telling it like it is and staying silent. I have more of an on/off switch, with none of the gradation or subtlety of a dimmer switch. My husband insists I would attract more flies with honey than with vinegar. But then I remind him I don’t like flies.
But He Is So Tall for a Jew
“Off” seemed appropriate when one former boss marveled at the idea of a non-Jewish colleague attending a bar mitvah, and another said that she couldn’t imagine singer Josh Groban as tall because a tall Jew was an oxymoron for her. “Off” kept my job when the same counsel kept mistaking one Korean lawyer for another – although the two colleagues to whom she referred could have starred in a sequel of “Twins.” I did not even say a word when she treated me and my black legal assistant as though we were interchangeable.
“Off” is the setting when going out with some of my husband’s colleagues or friends. I do not imagine his colleagues would be as supportive after a scolding from his wife. Nor do I think he would keep his lifelong friends if I took them to task for their aspirations to live in all white — ahem, 98 percent white — zip codes.
I have been thinking about how to deal with these situations for a long time. Speaking out is alienating, and keeping quiet will eat you from the inside out. My response, except with people in a professional context, is to dissociate myself. Given the precious few years I have to enjoy my life on earth, I try not to waste any time with people who offend me or would rather not be around people like me. Living in Los Angeles, this is generally pretty easy. In terms of my husband’s colleagues and friends, I limit my contact with those who I know are likely to offend. Negotiations in the Middle East have nothing on the negotiations between us to get me to a party with these people. My rule is that I get to leave as soon as they say something offensive – and if I cannot find the “off” switch, well, then all bets are off.
Elitism, Then and Now
The mantra in this country – until the critics of Sen. Barack Obama’s “elitism” spoke – has been to rise up, achieve and succeed. I guess ambition and success are bad when delivered in a black wrapper. Sometimes it seems that way from the inside as well. For unfortunately, there are many blacks like me, for whom “success” has left us isolated in jobs and schools and neighborhoods where most of the people do not look like us, have no desire to get to really know us, and either pat themselves on the back for living near one of us or worry that more of us are going to move in – or both. I have no desire to teach those around me to reach for their better selves. I don’t know whose job that is, but it’s not mine. Still, I’m happy to chat about it.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, "Law School Supports Drug Use"—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. She's a reformed lawyer, and full time novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course.This will mark the debut of our newest, and perhaps most charismatic, weekly essayist. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday.
