Tears

OK, I broke down twice this week: first when I heard the Gay Men's chorus sing the National Anthem on the steps of the Supreme Court and secondly (it amazes me to admit) when I just saw Lady Gaga sing it on line at a Gay Pride event in New York, clutching a rainbow flag in her hand.

The Prop 8 and DOMA decisions didn't do what I'd hoped for--a Supreme Court decision as wide as previous decisions on Row v. Wade and in Civil rights cases in the 60's--a decree that made marriage equality the law of the land.

But, given that, the two decisions were stunning and wondrous.

I grew up with a lesbian first-cousin. She was much older than me and is now, sadly, dead, but Sarita and her partner Eloise introduced me to a life that wasn't even spoken about back in the 50's. No one in my father's family ever admitted it because it couldn't be admitted, but there was a lesbian couple in our midst. I loved them both and though I didn't have words to express what I 'knew' about them, I 'knew' it non-the-less.

I remember one day, talking with my father after my mother was dead, so I was in my mid-twenties, and he started talking about how much he liked Sarita and Eloise, how much fun they were. How loving they were with him with my mother died.

"You know they're a couple?" I asked.

He looked confused, shook his head, seemed anxious. "They're roommates," he said.

I pondered that a moment and agreed. "Roommates" I said, knowing how to pick my battles.

They lived in Florida--Sarita and Eloise--and drove to the high school where they both taught in separate cars, never drawing attention to their relationship. How humiliating and wrong that was that they had to 'hide' Who They Were.

Of all my first cousins (and I had over 20) they were my favorite couple. They never, ever had public displays of emotion like the awkward kisses and forced hugs of my heterosexual couples. But I would watch them looking at each other on the edges of things, noticing their smiles and arched eye-brows. They were masters of 'irony', my favorite attitude toward life's ebbs and flows.

I wish Sarita was still alive and I could invite them to Connecticut and preside at their marriage (which my current bishop, unlike the last, would allow).

What amazes me about the GLBT acceptance in society is how fast it happened, while the rights of black and brown minorities still have to be waged. It just goes to show, I believe, that racism is much deeper, much more entrenched, much more DNA deep that homophobia ever was.

I think most people (like my father) who know a gay/lesbian couple are able to love them and, if he had had time, come to accept their love.

Here's how I know racism is deep and murky and hard to admit or dislodge: my son is married to a Taiwanese-American woman. It was a few years after their twins were born that someone said, "you have bi-racial grandchildren" and I realized I'd never thought of them that way. But I know and know fair well, that if Josh had married a Black woman or Hispanic woman, I would think of my grandchildren as bi-racial. Somehow Asians (probably because they are almost always perceived as educated and middle class or above) don't register with me as a 'different race'.

But, I'm sad to admit, Hispanics and African Americans do register on my compass as 'another race'.

So, if I, so Left wing I scare myself, make that distinction, is it any wonder that others, to the far Right of me, don't even recognize their racism?

As I celebrate the rapidly moving 'marriage equality' movement, I am reminded that racial equality has not had such momentum and good luck.

I want, someday soon, to tear up when Immigration Reform (good luck!) is a reality and I hear the National Anthem in Spanish. And I long for the day when African Americans are truly, truly equal and free in the patchwork quilt of ethnicity that is this country.

I long for that--and long for the GLBT community, that has made such advances, to realize that their Hispanic and Black brothers and sisters need their help.....

I really long for that....

it's not over, not by half....

When I was a child in McDowell County, West Virginia, half a century ago, all the black adults in Anawalt (and it was about 50/50 Black/White) called me "Mr. Jimmy". I swear to God that was true. People older than my parents called me "Mr. Jimmy" and I called them by their first names: "Gene and Lauretha and Marcus and Richard and Flo." As a kid, I called a 60 year old woman who worked for my Uncle Russell and Aunt Gladys, "Flo". And she called me, 13 or so at the time, "Mr. Jimmy."

It makes me want to puke. It was just the way it was but I should have realized a lot sooner than I did that it was wrong. Dead wrong. Damn wrong.

So, fast forward to today. Our President is Black. Most of the most wealthy entertainers and professional athletes are Black. Black is beautiful, right? "I want to be like Mike," (meaning Jordan) is the rule, not the exception.

Integration has worked, right?

When I was in college at WVU, I became friends with the first black friend I ever had. Truth was, Ron grew up 8 miles from me and we went to high school about 1/4 mile apart. But we never met. When Ron would introduce me to other black folks, he would say, "Jim and I went to separate high schools together." I thought we were on the cusp of something wondrous and magic. The culture was going to be ONE, finally.

And then I was the priest of an almost all-black church in Charleston, West Virginia. Ron's sister and brother and law and niece were members there. We were all middle-class and college educated. This was the wave we'd be waiting to break over us all. Right?

Today I talked to a young white man who has begun his practice teaching in an urban middle school in a major metropolitan area. The school is almost 100% Black and any relationship to Dodd Middle School in Cheshire is purely coincidental. Dodd is a great school, 99% white and Asian. My friend's school, he told me, in a nightmare. He said he'd been called "white boy" by dozens of students when, in his mind, being 'white', wasn't anything of interest.

Discipline and learning in his school is all but non-existent. Hope isn't even in the equation. Most of the teachers have given up and are just going through the motions. He was very depressed, though he had decided to resist depression and give it his all.

Republican state legislatures around the country are being creative in how to deny the vote to Black and Hispanic folks. Nobody--not our Black President or anyone else--talks about the poverty gap or the racial inequality these days.

I notice that most of the drivers pulled over in Cheshire, where I live, by the police, are people of color.

Where is Lyndon Johnson when we need him?

Why is no one talking about the racial divide that colors our culture? What happened to Martin Luther King's dream?

Does anyone care? That's the question that haunts me--does anyone care?