The Myth of "Post-Racial" America

If you think we, here in the early years of the second decade of the 21st century, have transcended race and are now officially Post-Racial, here's what I want you to do. Go into your kitchen and get a tall glass. Fill it with ice and cold water and swirl it around. Listen to the ice cubes making that lovely little clinking sound. Take a cool, refreshing sip.

Ahhhhhh.

Now dump the rest of it over your head and wake up.

While there may be pockets of extreme tolerance and amicability and enough inter-racial breeding, like that in the Zachery Family, to make people feel all warm and fuzzy and hopeful, race has not gone away. It hasn't ceased being an issue, and I don't think it ever will. Even when we all have interbred enough so that we're so thoroughly mixed that racially identifying labels of any kind are about as useful as "quadroon" and "octaroon," there will still be people for whom that One Drop of Blood will matter. I can go along, blithely thinking things have really changed, and then something will hit me upside the head with such force that it takes my breath away. I'm left gasping this morning.

I'll try to make this short, so there won't be a lot of tedious details.

As y'all know, The EGE is a big fan of country dance music. Not the new-fangled kind, but the old kind--Bob Wills, Hank Williams the Daddy, Merle Haggard. Stuff like that. He made sure I could do the two-step, the waltz, the Cotton-Eyed Joe, the schottische, the polka, and the Western Swing before he ever took me on a date. Over the many years we've been dancing together, we've met some wonderful people and some real jerks. We've been welcomed at places I, on my own, would have avoided, and we have hurried away from other places, once with me holding my gun in my lap lest we were overtaken and assaulted by that crowd of people chanting The N-Word at us.

For the last couple years we've been going to dances hosted by a couple of dance groups here in Midland, most often at St. Stephen's Catholic Church, which has two huge rooms--a gym and a ballroom--that can host two dances at the same time. Sometimes we get invitations to dances, and sometimes we don't hear about them until later when someone at Starbucks will ask us where we were and why we weren't there. Last New Year's Eve I tried, with no luck, to find out if there were a dance, and where, but I couldn't. It had been suggested, long ago, that we join, and last month I tried to find out how to do that so we would know when dances were going to happen. No luck.

But we did get an email invitation to a dance last night, and we went. And we were sitting at a table talking to a friend, and I mentioned that we might as well just go ahead and join so we wouldn't miss out. And he looked at me funny and said something to the effect of, "You haven't heard, have you?" And told me the story.

After we'd gone to a couple of the dances, some of the men said something to the board about how if we were going to come, someone had to tell me not to dress "so provocatively." You've seen what I wear to dances:

The top under the sweater is a halter top (garage sale, 50 cents). Sometimes I wear just that. Sometimes I wear my Oleg Cassini beaded velvet bustier. I can't find a photo of it, but here's another one. Well, two actually--a black velvet one over a red lace one:

Yes, my arms and chest are exposed. No, there is no cleavage. Is there on other women at these dances? Oh, please. There was, our friend tells us, some mention that The Petroleum Club, where some of the dances are held, doesn't even allow spaghetti straps. I find this hard to believe, given that many ball gowns are strapless. Keep in mind that, below the top, I'm covered in layers of billowing fabric to my ankles.

Actually, though, you'll see, as you read on, that this is just a convenient red herring.

These guys said that if we were going to continue attending, someone would have to talk to me about what I wear. And, rightly, our friend and several other members called them on it, telling them it wasn't about me and the way I dressed; it was about The EGE. And instead of arguing and trying to deny that, the guy said the most amazing thing I've heard in years, something I really can't believe anyone would let come out of his mouth in a public place. He said, "Well, what if he joins and brings more of his kind?"

Let's pause for moment while that sinks in. This is Midland, Texas, one of the wealthiest places in the US, in the year 2011. The EGE has lived here his entire life and, before so many people started moving here because of the oil boom, knew most of the people in town. We are not trying to join either of the country clubs, nor do we want to join the Petroleum Club. We want to join a couple of dance clubs, the members of which are mostly retired and not even close to being The Country Club Set, whoever those people are. We don't want to come to their houses or sit on their board; all we want to do is know when the dances are so we can go and dance. We don't drink, we don't flirt, we don't eat their food. We go, we dance almost every dance, and when we're not dancing, we're sitting at a table with people who have invited us to sit with them. We do not, in short, push ourselves on anyone. And yet these old men don't want us to join because The EGE might bring more of His Kind with him.

Our friend says he asked the man, "'His kind'? You mean people who were born and raised in Midland, put themselves through college, spent their entire careers teaching Midland students in the public schools, have been married for 40 years [he was slightly off; we're not as old as he thinks we are], and has never been unfaithful to his wife? That kind?"

And then, he tells us, a bunch of people resigned their membership and quit going to the dances. Membership dropped by 50%, he said, and people have only recently started going back because he was elected president of the board for 2012 so he could change the by-laws that say one negative vote on membership will bar someone from joining. He wants to change to it a majority vote before they put our names up as prospective members.

We had no hint of any of this. Our friend couldn't believe we hadn't heard--it was a huge deal, he said.

Imagine how this feels, if you can. I was actually surprised how hurtful it was. I felt like crying, which I never do.

For one thing, no one is allowed to be rude to my husband or try to hurt him. Not my parents, when we first got married, not any of my relatives, most of whom I haven't seen since 1976. Not coaches who wanted to harass him or mall cops who were hateful to him. Nobody. The guy who said this is someone we know--or, rather, someone The EGE knows. I would love to have a conversation with him, but that should probably not happen for several months.

For another, we decided early on that we would go where we wanted to go and do what we wanted to do. You know the saying that women have to do everything twice as well to be considered equal? We knew from the beginning that people in Midland would always be watching us to see how we act. This wasn't a problem for us because we were both raised by parents with high standards for behavior, so we were never the kind of people who fought in bars or showed up drunk at The Dreaded Wal-Mart. I've always known, though, that even a heated argument in the soup aisle about whether or not the claims of "low sodium" were, in fact, legitimate was sure to make onlookers smirk knowingly. We have always been mindful of that, but it doesn't matter. People still look at us and think what they want to think, never mind how we conduct ourselves.

But here's what really irritates me. When I left college to come home and marry The EGE, my roommate said I was going to end up fat and toothless, with a bunch of kids, living in a trailer (my roommate, an accidental placement and not someone I had known beforehand, secretly lusted after black men but wouldn't be seen with them in public). I realized that her attitude wasn't all that rare: white women who marry black men are scorned for many reasons and thought to be all sorts of trash. And no matter that I'm 55 years old, with multiple college degrees and a happy 35-year marriage, that I've Made Something Of My Life--none of that matters to these people. To them, I'm a white woman married to a black man, and that defines me. They can use the way I look as an excuse for their racism because the way I look reinforces their contention that I must be trash of the lowest sort. And the truth is that it wouldn't matter if I still looked the way I looked when I was 30, with no tattoos and long brown hair and trying-to-fit-in clothes. I was trash then, and I'm trash now, and no matter what I do with my life, I'll always be trash to these people, a fair target for their bigotry.

Now, you can say that it doesn't matter and wonder why we'd want to join a group with members like these people, but here's the deal: there are a lot of really nice people there, as well, people who hug us and welcome us every time we show up. And it's the only--the ONLY--way for The EGE to get to dance. The dance clubs are full of drunk people and smoke, and the country dance clubs play New Country, which he loathes. The Stardust, which was where we went dancing for years, has closed. The few other places we could go are scary even to me--The VFW has country dances, but the only time we went there was as guests, with people we knew, and even then it was uncomfortable. While I said that we'll go wherever we want, the truth is that there are dark little enclaves where I'm not about to show up on a Saturday evening when all the good old boys have been drinking beer since mid-afternoon.

The other thing is that, no matter how I try to think of Midland as home, since it is, truly, the only home I've ever had, it often feels as foreign to me as a land where I don't speak the language. I've tried to fit in as much as I could over the 42 years I've lived here, teaching at the college and subbing in the public schools and working for the city government, but it hasn't worked. I don't think about it much, but when I do, it sometimes feels like walking among a tribe of people whose mores are unfamiliar to you. That look that passes between them might mean anything, anything at all. You never know, but you're always aware that if you stumble, they might try to eat you.

So that's life. In some parts of the world, maybe things have changed. In other parts, it *seems* things have changed, but only on the surface. We go along all happily, assuming that everyone is getting along fine and everything is fair and just and right, believing the world has progressed to the point where race--and gender, and sexual orientation--just don't matter any more.

We are wrong, and having been blind to the racism and sexism and homophobia only makes it all the more painful when it slaps you in the face.