From The Lou and I’m Proud by Zinn Adeline
“with the reactions to the shooting of Mike Brown. I was outraged”
+++
He’s black, but he’s like a white black guy. This is what I always told my friends at church or from my club softball team when I started dating a new one. “Dating,” for me in high school, consisted of getting codes on my pager all week until we finally made it to the party on Friday night to flirt and possibly make out. Me, a jock, arriving late to the party because I had to go home and shower after the game. Me arriving at the same time as the other athletes. Them showered and cologned, drink in hand. Or, a few of them, the ones that had been paging me all week, pipe in hand. The only black guys at our school who were invited to parties were the star athletes. And they were the ones who brought the pipes.
I’m mostly a dyke, but I didn’t know it yet. I was looking for my sexuality and the only place I knew to look was in the male gaze. It wasn’t that white guys didn’t notice my muscular legs and tight round ass. They told plenty of jokes about my body. Called my ass, “the transmission.” But they weren’t into the bodies of strong female athletes who paired Nikes with Homecoming dresses. And if they were, it was in a closet or a dark basement or a car. After their girlfriends, the pretty feminine girls, the good girls who refused to give them head, went home to rest their dainty bodies.
+ + +
Instead of going to college when I graduated high school, I left my St. Louis suburb and went to work in a bar downtown. Me and other white chicks took orders and carried the food to tables. Black guys cooked the food. Black guys mopped the floors. Those black guys got my friends high too, so we drove them around after work and sang hip hop together: I’m from the Lou and I’m proud. Nelly had just made it big and we were proud. That song was our anthem and we all sang it together.
Until the black guy who came in early in the morning to clean the floors stole all the loose change in my apron and the designer eyeglasses I had left out on the bar overnight. I didn’t care that he had two little kids at home he was trying to feed. I didn’t care that their mother was incarcerated or in a psych ward or on the corner—we had heard so many versions of the same story. I didn’t care that it was just some loose change and glasses I didn’t really need and that I was making at least three times as much money as him working in the same bar. I didn’t want him smoking with us anymore because he was a thief.
One lonely friend objected. I laughed her off. Of course I wasn’t a racist. I still dated black guys sometimes. In fact, I would probably hook up with a black rugby player in his Jeep Wrangler later that night. After his game. After he went out with his friends who work with him at the advertising firm. After his white girlfriend was asleep. See, I liked black people, just not thieves.
+ + +
I was about to turn 25 when I finally quit bars and started at a private liberal arts college in a suburb of St. Louis. My advisor randomly placed me in a women’s studies class. The teacher talked about Critical Race Theory. She assigned Peggy Mackintosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”
My invisible bag that I had carried to my middle-class public school everyday, the one with the Deseg program, the one that taught me to be proud of bussing them in, letting them come to our schools, giving them their bootstraps (unless they steal, then cut those bootstraps right the fuck off) suddenly became very, very heavy. The bag was as full of shit as I was. Overflowing with institutionalized racism.
I unpacked the language I was taught was not only acceptable but good. We, us. They, them. Let. Our. Chance. Proud.
+ + +
My partner (finally!) and I were cozied up in a little liberal nest, on a mixed street in the city of St. Louis when we decided to have a baby. The donor we picked was half Nigerian, half Scottish: the prefect mix of really black and really white. What if the baby is a male? We can’t possibly bring another white male into this world, we joked with our friends. Be the change you want to see, we thought. We wanted to help change what family looked like. And we were pregnant and proud.
The minute I got caught up in pride I stopped unpacking.
+ + +
I had been so curious to know what my baby was going to look like while it was growing inside my body for nine months. It was a rough delivery. I held him for about ten seconds before they whisked him away. Apparently, I immediately looked to my partner and asked if he looked like Mike Tyson. And he did, a little, but when his face recovered from the fight it had with my birth canal, he was better.
He had little squinty eyes. And jaundice so his skin was really yellow. Several people, even our nurse, asked us if we had a Mexican donor. That was after they asked my partner if she was excited to be a grandma. He doesn’t look very Mexican anymore. Many people assume Italian, as most days he just looks really tan. It is when he gets a lot of sun and starts to brown that we get the most questions. Can I ask what his heritage is? Does he always look like that or did you just get back from vacation? What country did you get him from? The fucking questions people ask are unbelievable. If one more person asks us that, my partner said, I’m going to tell them we got him from the country of YOUR VAGINA. Then we’ll see what questions they have.
Our child was beautiful. And we wanted to protect our beautiful child from the questions. From the assumptions. From the ignorance. From the judgement.
+ + +
We took our beautiful baby away from St. Louis. He is mixed and has two moms, they would have killed him there, I joked with people we met in Portland—our new city where nobody asks us ridiculous questions. I used to say that sentence and laugh. I used to say that without the guilt of the incredible privilege my tan baby has sneaking in and making my voice shake. Now I know I should never say St. Louis would kill him again. Now I’m wondering what I have done. Why did I bother to have a brown baby if I was going to move him to a white city and surround him with privilege. Now I’m wondering where I am really from and how I could have ever been proud of it. And then, if I’m still proud that I left. If I have anything to be proud of. If I even want to be proud.
The Census Bureau says the city of Portland, Oregon is 76.1% white and 6.3% black.
If we would have raised him in St. Louis, he might have been uncomfortable, frustrated by the questions and judgements, sure. But he would be safe. He can pass. He wears clothes from J Crew. He has never eaten fast food. He is four years old but talks with an “advanced vocabulary.” He can run from a cop or buy Skittles in a hoodie or pick up a play gun in Walmart and be safe. The clerk at the store in the suburbs of St. Louis may refer to his other mom as his grandma, but the clerk is most likely not going to shoot him.
+ + +
The week before Mike Brown was shot we were back in St. Louis visiting. Driving through the city we used to live in, when we were taking a stand against white flight, we couldn’t stop talking about what a dump it was. How glad we were we didn’t live there anymore. Sarcastic jokes about the lack of stray bullets in Northwest Portland. We talked about how crazy it is anyone still believes in the American Dream. How we wanted to drag them all out of their safe suburbs by their privileged white necks and force them to see the way people live. To see that these kids don’t have a chance. Not even a tiny fucking chance.
Our baby will have plenty of chances. We talked about them as we drove out of our old city. We talked about the private school he was to start in the fall, and how it costs more than what most of the people that live in the city of St. Louis make. About how it is easy to recognize his privileges but not easy to deny him them. We were going to give him the very best we could. Because we could. We admitted this, covered it in sarcasm, and let that be enough to let ourselves off the hook. I vowed not to wallow in my white-privilege-guilt and boarded the plane home.
+ + +
We were back in our white, gentrified city for less than a week when my news feed, still full of people posting from St. Louis, started to antagonize me with the reactions to the shooting of Mike Brown. I was outraged. Embarrassed by their ignorance. Their racist comments. Took it as an opportunity to remind myself again that I was glad I got the hell out of there. I was ready to de-friend all of them, and then I remembered how proud I was of St. Louis at one time. How proud I was to be like them—a learned racist who was also taught I was not racist. I remembered all of the ways I convinced myself and others that I liked black people. As long as they acted like white people. And then I remembered that I once believed in change. So much so that I purposefully conceived a mixed child, but that my brownish-tan baby goes through most days without seeing a person of color. I remembered that I left. That I was the epitome of white flight. I left the Lou and I’m proud doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
So much privilege, so much pride, and I stopped unpacking.
Someday my tan teenage baby’s date might tell their friends they are dating someone who is part black, and then assure them not to worry because he is definitely a really white-brownish-tan guy.
I have to keep my knapsack open. Teach my baby to see how it is continually refilled. We will never be done unpacking.
+ + +
Header image courtesy of Julien Pacaud . To view a gallery of his collage, go here.
+ + +
Zinn grew up as Emily Wozniak—a patriotic, rule following, confused-softball-playing-straight-christian-girl—in St. Louis, MO. She is currently peeling back the layers and regenerating as Zinnia Love Adeline in Portland, Oregon, where she lives and loves out loud with her primary partner and their fiery little human Blaze. She is writing about this process and pursuing an MFA at Eastern Oregon University.