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Monthly Archives: October 2018
Labor Day weekend and it is unbearably hot in Baltimore. Being the last weekend the pool would be open, we drag ourselves out early so as to ensure we get lounge chairs in the shade. I watch as the object of my complete devotion – my 9-year-old daughter – dives repeatedly into the deep end. She soars in the air, arcs, moves with grace and confidence through the water, touches the bottom and pushes off to the surface. I am overwhelmed with some feeling I can’t name, ‘love’ being far too weak a word to capture it.
As early as 4 years old, we knew she was a water baby. She experimented with it incessantly as a preschooler. On trips to the ocean she stood at the shoreline singing and dancing and engaging the sea as if it were a sentient being with whom she shared a special language.
Then came the pool. The pool to which we belong dates back to 1959 and is among the first integrated pools in Baltimore. I am very proud to be members of an organization with this kind of legacy. I think the joy of a swimming in a pool alongside all manner of people will provide my daughter a life lesson that will serve her well.
Like most community pools, ours has a phenomenon to ensure safety: the dreaded “deep water” test. This is a quiz of sorts that children have to pass in order to gain the privilege of enjoying the entire pool – the deep water and the diving board. Typically, this test involves swimming a lap without touching the side and then treading water for 60 seconds. Those who pass get a bright rubber anklet that cues the lifeguards as to the child’s level of water access.
My child failed this test the first time she took it. And the second. And the third. She stepped up fully eight times, over weeks, before she succeeded. I left her to it, watching her persevere and believing it was best for her long-term sense of self to do this on her own. I also felt sure it was the best thing for pool safety in general. When she passed it was worthy of our celebration that evening. We are family who believes that things that come easy are nice, but hard-fought wins are the stuff of life.
That was years ago. This day I am enjoying a lazy morning in the shade watching my daughter frolic in the water.
Then a mother comes with her blond-haired white son, who looks to be about six years old, to attempt his first deep water test. The first thing I notice is that the mom gest into the water with her son without any objection from the lifeguard. This strikes me as odd because the deep-water tests presumes that the child is wanting to be in the pool without a parent by their side. The whole point is that the kid has to be able to keep himself safe in water over his head on his own. Next, the mother swims with the child on his lap, encouraging him and continually saying “no, don’t hold on to me”. He is barely maintaining his little head above water in his final 20 yards. Once he finishes his lap, he sits on the side of the pool for a while, resting and gathering his strength for the task of treading water. This also strikes me as unusual, since the point of treading is that they do it after the lap when they are tired. Finally, he begins to tread. Reaching for his mother, she persists in telling him to let go. He manages to last the requisite time.
As he dons his new anklet, I realized that lifeguard would neverhave given my child a pass if she had shown that level of ability.
The rules of engagement – in this instance the threshold for access to deep water – sound like they are universal. But in reality, my dark skinned, dreadlocked child is held to a different standard than white children. When she misses the mark, the world presumes the problem is her – that she is misbehaving, or not paying attention or simply not good enough. She had to work eight times as hard to get the level of access so easily awarded to that little white boy. When the mark was hard for him, the world assumed something was wrong with themark. And then they moved it.
The kids all race off for popsicles either way. And I get a glimpse behind the veil as to how, every day, we create a world where our children grow up to believe that some people are just better than others.
Molly Tierney is an adoptive parent who lives in Baltimore, MD.
1 in 5 women are victims of sexual assault in this country[i]. Based on my back-of-the-envelope math, this must mean that every woman in the United States has either been attacked, planned her daily activities around avoiding being attacked, or both. Regrettably, I count myself in the latter category.
Talking about it is all the rage in the #metoo[ii]era. I hope that bringing this issue out of shadows and into the light will both reduce the risk to women and also help to shift power from the hands of white men into a more egalitarian distribution.
Then came Harvey Weinstein 2017. And I thought, quite honestly, sure he did it. All of it. This belief was confounded by an equally strong opinion that the women who went to his home, hotel room or office were participating in a profession that is riddled with all the trappings of Sodom and Gomorrah[iii]. I don’t mean to say they weren’t victims. To be sure they were. But I also heard them say some version of “I had to do it if I wanted the part.” And I thought: surely they knewthat was the deal in Hollywood. Which means they also knew that they could have stayed home in their little do-nothing towns and gotten a job at the Walgreens like the rest of us. None of this gives Harvey cause and I think he should rot in jail. But something about this story being a big splash made me see more clearly the difference between sexual harassment and rape.
They are wildly different. Sexual harassment is pressure to choose an awful, impossible option. Rape is a violent act of terrorism. A hate crime. It occurs in epidemic proportions – and that based on the fraction of those that are actually reported. One possibility is the epidemic is due in part to the fact that rape is masked as a sex crime. A phrase that puts us at risk of paying more attention to the word ‘sex’ than we do to the word ‘crime’ – and therefore looking away because boys will be boys, or girls should not dress that way or she should not have been in that area that late at night…. And once it’s clearly categorized in our mind this way, it’s an easy road to merging sexual harassment and rape. That choice will keep us from owning up to the terrorized experience of so many women who have been raped. While #metoo may bring sexual harassment into the sunshine, rape will stay in the shadows. That will end up being a dis-service because if we – men and women – don’t own it, we can’t fix it.
Then came Bill Cosby 2018. And I thought, quite honestly, sure he did it. Probably all of it. Being a person who believes that the myth of the black man is the single greatest conspiracy in the history of time, I was ambivalent. A black culprit, especially of a sex crime against white victims, would be a brilliant method of drawing attention away from the hundreds of thousands of white men who have committed, and still commit, these very same crimes without retribution.
Then came Kavanaugh. And I am absolutely sure he’s been a beer guzzling frat boy predator who has capitalized on his privilege for the duration of his life. No doubt: he did it. He represents the circular logic of the archetype: white man can do what he wants when and to whom he wants it because he can. And in the face of this high-profile case, we rejoice in the potential power of the #metoo.
But wait. 1 in 5. And, as all victims know, every time the subject of rape comes up we are returned to the most terrorizing moment of our lives in technicolor and hi-fidelity. And now every news source – radio, print, tv – has rape and sexual assault as the top headlines. All day every day. That means that one fifth of women in this country are debilitated every time a head line hits. And the white producer is going to buy his way out of his crime. And the black actor is sitting in a jail cell. And white lawyer is going to be appointed to the Supreme Court.
This leaves me feeling painfully naïve and worrying that in the celebration of what feels like the success of #metoo, we have been blind to a calamitous detail. The power white men hold in this country is entrenched without vulnerabilities and approaches the insurmountable. This power is intrinsic to the very structure of our nation. In it, we used our own movement take ourselves out of the game without even realizing it.
[i]http://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc_factsheet_media-packet_statistics-about-sexual-violence_0.pdf
[iii]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodom_and_Gomorrah
