Funerals

How many memorial services is too many? At some point they start to add up and then they are a part of your life pattern. Unlike celebrations where you usually wait to be invited, attending memorials is generally your decision. Yesterday, I attended a service for a professional colleague thinking that our professional connection was the primary reason to go. I had a personal feeling about it, too, knowing that she and I had, for many years been the only two Asian women in a large, predominantly white female professional group. I doubt it had meaning to anyone but me, probably not even to her, since we rarely met and hardly knew each other. It turned out that I only met one person I knew and suddenly felt more like a witness than a participant.

More than 300 people gathered to share stories about a woman I hardly knew. They described how she had dedicated her life's work to one nursery school. One person at a time, the depth of the community revealed itself: an African American mother who travelled from the Bronx in the '90's to bring her boys to a school that welcomed them and made them feel part of a community; teachers who had worked at the school more than 20 years ago, but remembered how this colleague reached out to them; a salesman who said that he made a cold call to this school twenty years ago and because of the director's warm response he entered into a business relationship that has, over time, turned into a friendship; a father who said that the director had always sent him on his way reassuring him that his son would be fine and now, he felt that the community had gathered to send the director on her way; a younger sister who told family stories about how she, her older sister and her younger brother were the three youngest of 10 children.

The moment that sticks in my mind, however, is when a boy walked up to the lectern and asked that all the alumni come forward to light candles in memory of their school's director. From every corner of the room young people walked toward the candles. Most of them were black or hispanic males, some were white and a few were Asian. I had recently heard at a meeting a comment that the independent schools are wondering where all the black boys in New York City are; they are the one group that is underrepresented in most schools. But here they were, the majority of this group.

Then a young black man stopped at the microphone on his way back to his seat and spoke. He said that he had attended the school in the '80's and had recently been asked by a friend how he had made it through life and avoided becoming a statistic. He commented that all the forces were in place for that to happen, but something had saved him from falling through the cracks. He set out on a detective's search for the answer and ended up at "the scene of the crime," his nursery school. So, recently he had gone there to be reminded of the love and care that had set him on a path to adulthood. With tears in his eyes he said, "The one thing I just forgot to do that day when I saw the director was to say thank you."

The Help

The Help is a first novel for Kathryn Stockett, a writer who was born and raised in the South and who now lives with her husband and daughter in Atlanta. In this novel, inspired by her childhood memories of the family maid, Demetrie, Stockett explores life in the early 1960's in Mississippi from the viewpoints of several young white women and several black maids. Altogether their voices tell a rich and troubling story of privilege, discrimination, segregation, and rigid cultural norms. One white woman dares to challenge those norms and discovers the disparities between her life and those of her peers and the strength and power of the written word to reveal, acknowledge and share truths.

The story explores how people gain and control power using communication, emotional connection, and vantage point as tools. There is sadness in the pressure to conform in the the white women's experience; there is despair in the code of silence of the black women that driven by fear. There is hope in the many acts motivated by humanity.

The context of this story has changed, but the human condition has not. The story gives us a chance to consider the human condition one more time in the safety of the past.

Summer Diversity Institute

I didn't know what to expect going in. Six days that started with breakfast at 7am and ended with home group at 8:15pm. It was all listening and talking, thinking and, thankfully, time for walking. A lovely 12,000 steps per day, on average. Oh yes, and meals with more talking and making friends. A real test of skills we hope to have learned in kindergarten.

Coming out of the institute it was difficult to know what I had learned, but the best test was spending a beautiful day with a good friend. Our first stop turned into more than 2 hours at a local Starbucks, sipping and talking. Our next stop was a 2 hour lunch at Pain Quotidian.  The evidence that I had actually processed some of my side of the diversity conversation was a story she told me, the best of the whole week. It went like this (I hope I do it justice in the retelling):

When our daughter, adopted in infancy from Korea, was young I would tell her how she came to our family. One summer, when she was about 8 years old, we were rushing around preparing to go on a family vacation. I made her my laundry helper to fold and sort all the clothes for her and her brother and sister to go on the trip. We folded one item at a time and stacked them in piles. In this moment of hurried activity and the pressure to get ready to leave, she asked me, "How did you get me when I was a baby?" 

I took a deep breath and gave her the full answer to this very important question about her adoption. "You see, when you were just a little baby in the orphanage they had two piles of folders. A big stack and a smaller stack. The smaller stack was folders for the babies. It was smaller because the folders were very thin since babies didn't have much to put in their folders because they were so little. The bigger stack was for the families that wanted babies. There was lots of information about the families in the folders so the folders were very think and made a bigger stack. 

One at a time they would take a folder from each stack and put them together. And finally, your folder was on top of the small stack and our family's folder was on the top of the big stack. Someone took your folder and our family's folder off the top of each stack, tied them together with a red ribbon and that's how you we became a family." She listened, paused and then said, "Yes, but what about those little plastic boxes that were all lined up in the hospital. How did they know which was the Jewish baby?" 

Is a gentle kiss of affection a micro-aggression?

Excited, happy, joyous high school graduates receiving their diplomas. They walk the few steps up to the stage and reach out with a left hand to receive the diploma. The diploma-giver, a male, shakes the right hand and then reaches that arm around them for an embrace as they both smile at the photographer who captures the moment for each graduate. The graduate walks down the row of school dignitaries waiting to congratulate them. The next male in line hugs some boys, shakes hands with others. He leans in to give each girl a kiss on the cheek. Is this a micro-aggression? A message that separates boys from girls at a moment when all is equal? They are all graduating.

Seeing, counting, being

I'm looking around the restaurant banquet tables imagining how this group came together, one year at a time. Seven teachers who connect us to the past, one person who connects us to the Riverdale campus and history, and the remainder, the teachers and staff who came on board during my administration. I realize that I don't actually know how they identify themselves, but here's my guess.

6 Latina
2 Latino
6 African American
4 Asian
18 Caucasian

This is what it takes to experience diversity. Fifty percent. There is rarely a time in our work groups that there is not someone of color sitting at the table. Can we imagine moving the entire faculty and staff, 300+,  toward this goal?

Micro-aggressions

Micro-aggressions. Sometimes you don't notice or feel them until you think about them. Sometimes they are disguised with a cheerful voice or smile. They hang in the air and the power is in the polluting effect as much as it is in the offense to the individual.

Most recently heard:

It's so nice that the students selected you; they didn't just choose the most popular student this year.

We want to talk to you about his aggressive behavior and clowning around (to an African American mom about her son). 

Meanderings

I keep thinking I will enter something new into this journal, but so many scraps of stuff come my way every day, every week that I am finding it hard to decipher what's really important about all these tidbits. Is it the teacher's attitude as s/he tells the story? Is it the reality of the conversation I'm hearing retold? Is it the horror I feel that there is real evidence surrounding me that we live in a hostile world and arming individuals to be strong in the face of adversity is the best we can do? Should all acts of niceness be suspect?

I continue to think about Geoffrey Canada as a role model for problem solving. In his search for the answer to why it is that some children surface out of poverty successfully and break the cycle of poverty within their families and some don't has led him to decisions that are likely to have long-lasting positive impact on the communities where his work takes place.

I keep listening for the key phrase, the single difference, the one story that will release a vision for positive change.