Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, 11/21/18
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I have a lot to be thankful for. My kids and husband are healthy and happy enough. Our parents are still with us. I have a job that I really like and work hard at. I have good benefits and a regular paycheck that lets me pays the bills. I have enough spare time to do things that are important to me. Tomorrow we will enjoy the company of family without having to worry about being hungry or cold. We will each have a place to go to sleep at the end of the day. I have more than enough and I am grateful.
Much of my good fortune is due to an accident of birth. I was born into a white, middle-class family in a suburban, non-diverse, New England town in the richest country in the world. My parents valued education and hard work. My father was a public school teacher who worked a couple of extra jobs to make sure all five of us kids had a comfortable life. My siblings and I have never experienced living someplace where the majority of people didn’t look or sound like us. None of us has ever had to fear persecution or violence because of what we look like, what we sound like, or where we come from. We are lucky that we will get to spend this holiday as a family that is intact and prosperous.
As I think about the bounty my family will share this Thanksgiving, I am reminded of what I know about this holiday from my grade school days. Generally, school children in the U.S. learn that the tradition of Thanksgiving began with a harvest festival in 1621. At this event, the native Wampanoag people came together with the immigrants who left England to create a settlement called Plymouth. The two groups shared the custom of giving thanks for good fortune and in that year they celebrated and gave thanks for a bountiful harvest after surviving a time of sickness and scarcity.
The pilgrims who founded Plymouth were refugees fleeing religious persecution in their native England. They faced hardships as they began to build a new life in the Americas. This group of immigrants along with many others before and after them found their way to the shores of this resource-rich land and began to create a new home. This is how the United States began, many different kinds of people left their lands of origin to escape difficult times and find new opportunities.
Not always told in the history books, is the story of what happened to the original settlers of these lands. The colonists from Europe began to migrate west and eventually drove the indigenous people out of grounds they had been living on peacefully well before the settlers came. Native Americans were killed or forced onto smaller tracts of land. Colonists in the Americas also took part in the slave trade, stealing humans from their homes across the sea and bringing them here to toil away as the property of other people. We have a long history of treating others badly (think about Japanese internment camps, McCarthyism, the Tuskegee syphilis study, the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, never passing the Equal Rights Amendment, and so many other examples).
I’d like to think that we learn and grow from our mistakes, both as individuals and as a nation, but I’m not sure this is true. Sometimes it feels like our development takes two steps forward and one step back (sometimes many steps back). Currently, we seem to be in the midst of a pretty big backslide. Despite the fact that many of the people in this nation have ancestors who came here to find a better life or to flee a situation that was unsafe, we are seeing a resurgence of “us vs. them” thinking. These flames are fanned by the caustic political rhetoric that I mainly see coming from the President’s right-wing base.
Personally, I have a hard time imagining that the group of mothers and their children who are trying to seek refuge in the U.S. pose a threat to our national security. I don’t see peril when a transgender person heads into a bathroom. Men and women who wear head coverings are not scary to me and I don’t cross the street when I see a group of teens with brown skin sharing my path. Despite my non-diverse upbringing, I’ve sought out opportunities to understand cultures that are different from my own. I’ve built relationships with people from a variety of backgrounds. That does not mean that I always say the right thing or stand up for people when I should. I mess up a lot but I own that and keep trying to do better.
As we give thanks for our bounty tomorrow, l will ask my family to take a moment to consider those who don’t have all the material things that we do, who may be fleeing violence in their countries, who live in constant fear that their Black sons will be shot by police, who are being targeted because they speak a language other than English, or worship a god that is not Christian. I’ll ask them to carry on this new tradition of acknowledging others’ experiences and then I’ll ask them to pass the gravy.
Channeling anger as a woman
Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, 10/17/18
I’ve been contemplating this month’s column for a while, going back and forth in my head trying to decide whether I can write about what has really been on my mind. I’ve been struggling with the suitability of writing about anger, particularly women’s anger.
An unscientific survey of many of the women in my life indicates that we are mad as hell much of the time and it’s exhausting. This is the reality I’ve been living with and yet I struggled with the idea of writing about it.
This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who is female. By and large the world has a hard time dealing with women’s anger. We’ve been socialized to “play nice,” to “calm down,” because our anger makes us seem “hysterical” or “bitchy.” None of us wants to be stereotyped in these ways. This is why when I started thinking about writing about anger I had to overcome my own socialization to feel like it was OK to write about it publicly. I had to get past my own question, “How will people judge me if they read about my struggles with anger?”
Men have been socialized to display anger. As boys, they are often encouraged to work out their anger by expressing it with fists or harsh words. No one tells them not to get angry and even if their outlets for anger are not always productive, they are at least accustomed to focusing their anger externally.
Girls and women, on the other hand, have been socialized to suppress their anger, lest they seem unfeminine. When we internalize our anger it often ends up hurting us. Better that, I guess, than inconveniencing someone else with it. What do we do with our anger when we can’t figure out how to make it productive? We overeat, we drink more than we should, we get anxious and depressed, we yell at our kids. Anger is making many of us sick.
A 1993 study by psychologist Sandra Thomas investigated the origins of women’s anger and found three common sources: “powerlessness, injustice and the irresponsibility of other people.” This study may be 25 years old but its results still ring true. When I think about the current state of U.S. politics, much of what I see is injustice and the irresponsibility of other people (particularly the President and the older, white, male senators who saw fit to confirm a new Supreme Court Justice who was accused of sexual assault while completely dismissing the claims of the woman who was assaulted).
Our status as women makes it hard for us to express anger because not only are we told, “Don’t be angry!” but we are also told that our anger is not justified. Anger is even more hazardous for women of color who are afforded even less power, and experience more injustice than white women but who are NEVER allowed to get away with expressing anger. The stereotype of the angry black woman is powerful in the way it silences women who speak up for themselves – just ask Serena Williams.
Typically I have a call to action at the end of my columns but I am at a loss here. I want to say that we don’t have to be ashamed of our anger, that it is justified, that we can and should express it, process it, and use it to make change. The problem is that because most of the things we are angry at are so much bigger than we are as individuals, we have to find ways to channel our anger into collective actions – voting and urging others to vote, speaking up for each other, standing up for what we know to be just. We can work these things but many of us are so tired and demoralized from the constant onslaught of the injustices and irresponsibility of our “leaders” that it leaves us with little energy left to organize.
The other night I found myself singing along to Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.” As I listened to it, I could feel the raw anger in her voice. Of course I had noticed this before but this time it resonated with me more than it had before. It wasn’t so much the song’s lyrics that got me – it’s been a long time since I was pissed off about a breakup – but her palpable emotion as she told off her ex in that song. It felt liberating. Hearing her express that anger made me feel fantastic and almost energized. Find your song and sing it loud, then get out and make some noise for a cause that you care about.