Tag: Black History Month

The Pieces We Are

Fragmentation in America

I am a 60-year-old American white woman who has been steadily listening to Nina Simone and Miriam Makeba for months now, and today find that I have turned my Apple music subscription to Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. White girl voices are often too breathy and whiny for my taste (so, bless Adele), and the lyrical complaints about girls and boys and coffee date ghosting don’t exactly feel vital or resonant, but there is something compelling about Roan.

It’s good to know I can still be surprised by an artist, especially a white one, because lately I’m not surprised my much else white people do.

Anyone in America who works somewhere has probably been “acquired” by “a firm” of some sort for their “portfolio”; and as a result, we all of us feel this chapter of American democracy, as was, all too keenly: the Musk acquisition of America. I’ve read that the Republican voters who work in civil service never thought that the people they supported for office—that is, the venture capitalists and hedge fund managers and private equity firms—would actually strip the government and its Constitution and sell it for parts, and fire them, but they voted for Donald “You’re Fired” Trump despite all the evidence and have found out why he’s been bankrupt six times and still standing. Musk had swooped in and destroyed Twitter and it meant nothing to these voters, either. What did they think? Well, unlike Captain Renault in Casablanca, “a poor corrupt official” who knows full well how the game is played when he says, “I’m shocked, shocked to find gambling going on here” as he collects his winnings—these earnest civil servants living in their paper pushing D.C. bubble lack a social safety net moral compass. When you think life is only money, only “savings,” you may be missing, I don’t know, a heart. Or basic life experience. (And they are about to find out what unemployment looks like when there’s no money for them to claim, and no jobs to be found except the ones all those poor, now-deported undocumented people did. Godspeed.)

For anyone who needs a personal testimony of this process, the publishing house I work for was taken over, the first time, by finance people who quickly eliminated the Editorial Services Group (ESG) because they didn’t know what ESG meant. And they never asked us before handing out the pink slips and severance packages. The ESG, as it turned out, were the COPY EDITORS and FACT CHECKERS for our textbooks. Our product. Our source of revenue. And even after learning this, the financial overlords just shrugged. Who needs copy that is correct and makes sense in educational materials for America’s students? Who will really notice? $$$ (Now I do my job and their job.)

These are, after all, people who don’t believe in textbooks, obviously; we now formally live in a nation of capitalists who don’t value education because somehow they think they learned everything (and they think, everything) through osmosis.

Cue today’s lethal gem of a typical private equity business slash move:

There’s not an American office worker in existence, or factory worker, or cashier, for that matter, who didn’t read that headline and nod.

Why do you need refrigerators? It’s a grocery store. No more refrigerators.

That kind of thing. Only now our entire nation’s security, health and safety, and economy are in the hands of, quite frankly, money fiends devoid of vision, purpose, or shame, let alone the “common sense” Trump claims to have. (Emerson called common sense “genius dressed in plain clothes.” Take a memo.)

In another example, I read that some 1.7 million HOMES around the country are vacant, sitting empty since being acquired by private equity firms, either for the land or the tax write-offs, with no interest in the communities in which the houses sit. Freeing these homes to be sold to people could end the housing crisis, maybe. At this rate we’ll never know. $$$?

My go-to comfort viewing during all this mess has been rewatching the 2019 documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, like, a dozen times. I read a review that referred to the documentary as “flat,” and it occurs to me that it’s hard for the newer critic folks to enjoy being brought fully into a world as thoughtfully as this film brings you into a teacher and book creator’s life. The subject, Nobel Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison, is as great a subject as a literate viewer might want, unless what you want is a subject like Hemingway, who beat his four wives and fought to the death in wars and bars; or Pablo Picasso, who screwed two women on the same day and then painted them both, as a habit. I’ll take Morrison’s strong sense of self, her moral compass, unflashy living, artistry, deep humanity, and humor, thanks. And she has great literary company for additional commentary. It’s all about the love of language, and the way we use language to tell about life.

Morrison recalls a time in her early childhood where her sister was teaching her letters, and they would use pebbles to scratch the letters on the sidewalk. One day they saw a new word down the block, and they began copying, F…U…, and suddenly her mother ran out of the house and yelled at them, they were crying, they didn’t know what they’d done. In that moment, Morrison says, “I learned, words have power.” (I had a similar experience when a neighbor up the street taught tiny me and my brother Pat, “Eenie, meenie, minee, moe, catch a n***er by the toe.” Not knowing that word, I substituted one I did know, but when I used that word within earshot of my mother, it sounded bad, too, and I got yelled at. So I tried, “Eenie, meeie, minee, moe, catch a quarter by the toe.” Because I couldn’t say “nickel” anymore. My mother, realizing what she thought she’d heard, said that was fine. Even though coins don’t have toes. I learned that language can surprise you, that language is invention.)

I bought this latest notebook at McNally’s on 8th Street yesterday.
My first desire for this notebook, after placing impressions from all my rubber stamps on the inside cover, was to write all my letter forms and numbers. And it really got me into a sense memory of how much work it took to learn penmanship, to practice spacing, use the lines, to be able to form words to communicate. And I was impressed with my young self. I really was. Education is wonderful.

The opening credits for the film show an artist putting together an ever-changing collage of black and white photos of Morrison’s face, pieces from the many stages of her life, along with patterned paper, to jazz music, and I could watch that over and over just by itself.

From Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. Art by Mickalene Thomas

But on this day of Black History Month, I want to share this observation Morrison makes about her growing up in Lorain, Ohio, a background woven throughout the film to create a familiar texture, one that grounds the artist in a relatable experience for most of us. “It was a melting pot, it really was,” Morrison says of the Blacks, Italians, Poles, and other working-class migrants who came to this steel town along Lake Erie, where “there was no shame in being poor.” Having enough to get by, pay the bills, have a roof, meals, your people—you know, you were good. (I grew up that way, to start. My parents were working class and moved to the middle class, and it was a big deal; values started changing, more materialism, fitting in, all that. Poverty stood out. As a nation of billionaire worshipers, we need to think on that.)

But more interesting to me this time is when she says that she had come to realize that the melting pot, “the cauldron”—and here she makes the pot with the hands—“is Black people. We are the pot.”

The United States of America would not exist at all without the slave labor of Black people, and we know that; and more than that, there would not be a culture without Black people, or at least not a culture I’d want to live in. Along with our Indigenous roots, Black music, dance, energy, love, drive, gospel, wisdom, persistence; Black love, righteousness, and willingness to throw their bodies at justice, at life, to boycott the bus lines of Montgomery, Alabama, for thirteen months—all this holds the rest of the (white) country together, makes this a democratic nation, and one I can stand to live in, if not be always proud to live in. Morrison’s late life understanding that Black people were the holders of what was melting in that pot, that they were the pot, hit me hard when I watched the documentary again last night. They were our models for the fights for justice.

I read this on Friday morning on the Instagram account of my favorite trans performer, 2024 McArthur Fellow Justin Vivian Bond. I went to the Stonewall website several times, where they also removed the “Q,” and when I scrolled down and it said, “Was this information helpful?” I chose NO, and a box asked for tips. Oh, I gave some tips. “Where’s the T? Where’s the Q? For shame.” Times 10.

On Friday, which I’d taken off to have a four-day mini break, I’d planned to spend the cold winter day at the Met Museum but instead took a detour to the Trans Rights Rally at the Stonewall National Monument at Christopher Street. I want to be an ally. Standing with all these people, where it all began, is a little surreal. “Let’s go get coffee,” one person said to a partner part way through, checking his phone. Stonewall made that possible—to just live your life.

And really, face it, without gay men, there is no Hollywood, no theater, no fashion, no clubs, no fun. Without lesbians there is no feminism, no suffrage. These are small examples, broad strokes, but you see what I mean.

American rock music—our greatest export—has its roots in American Indigenous music as well as African music. It’s not that there are no contributions by white artists, it’s just that this country would be unrecognizable, and without doubt way less interesting or dynamic, if left only to cisgender, straight whites. (Lawrence Welk, anyone? At least there’d be no Kid Rock, what with rap off his radar.) Watch what Trump does to the Kennedy Center, if you can. You know it’s cringe.

The ironic wit and hijinks of The Onion and improv theater notwithstanding, white culture has lately been elbowing out any good stuff in order to put that glaring spotlight on capitalism, our god; private equity, individualism, willful ignorance, winner take all, white supremacy, oh, and fuck you, parasite, should there be a fuck left to give. If you see what I mean. And porn. And rape. And brews for bros.

Time to melt that into the pot. And keep it melted.

Meanwhile, keep the faith, show up, find the joy somehow. That’s what I think today. I’m trying to listen to more music. Dance. And you might watch The Pieces I Am, especially if you feel like all this fragmentation of America is making you fall to pieces. It’s so hopeful. And read Beloved.

Love,

Miss O’

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” ~ Virginia Woolf, paraphrased. Blue button and “Yes Now Right Now” button by Lisa DiPetto and available on Etsy. I had really hoped my Love trumps hate button would be a relic by now. P.S. Red lipstick was a sign of resistance against Nazis, fyi. Nous continuons.

Quick Take, for Whites during Black History Month

A Condensed History of Whiteness in America

Hi, kids. If you are a friend of mine, I am not telling you something that you don’t already know; and I’ve written about this before. But a few years ago, my late super, who was from Eastern Europe under communism and who had never learned American history—not unlike contemporary whites in red states today—asked me, “Lisa, can you tell me please what it is about the Blacks?” I didn’t follow. “Why all the whites hate them. What did they do?”

Do you hear his question? Here’s a man who at that point had lived two decades in the United States, himself an immigrant working around every conceivable type of immigrant, from tenants to other supers to management, in the most diverse area of the world, my borough of Queens in New York City. He heard and saw all the racism, surely from the white men (because I still hear it now through their support of Trump), but he really didn’t know where it was coming from. “I have these Jamaican guys who do the electrical work for the building, there, and they are great. They smoke the marijuana, the smell, my god, I hate it, but they are great.”

And so it was that Miss O’ did a brief history for him.

Black Africans were brought to the United States in chains beginning in 1619, if not earlier, men, women, and children captured by white European men or purchased as prisoners in their own land where there was no concept of enslavement for life let alone forever in perpetuity along with your families, which is what whites did in the United States. To justify this horrific practice, and to justify unlimited greed, whites started deciding that they were superior to all other colors of humans. They must be, because as the Puritan descendants of the Second Great Awakening said of being among the elect going to heaven (as explained to me by my 11th grade high school English teacher Chuck Edwards), “Surely, if you were not among the elect, surely God would not have blessed you with a Cadillac.” Or made you white.

The plantation system in the American South made each plantation owner a little king, a greedy little tyrant (just like the “farmer king,” King George III from whom we were emancipated, oh, irony), who kept all the money he made from his crops and made even more by working slave labor just about to death—no hope of leaving, no money, no say—morning, noon, and night, and forcing the strongest Black men to “breed” Black women as a bull would cows, when the tyrant wasn’t raping those same Black women for his pleasure and a stable of more (mulatto) slaves.

Meanwhile, the white people in the South who did not own land, and that was nearly all of them, had no work. They looked on, impoverished, as these Blacks were “given” houses and food in exchange for work, work which poor whites did not have, homes which poor white were not given (clearly not comprehending the horror). There was a growing (and understandable) resentment. To quell this, white tyrants told their legions of poor whites, “Always know that at least you are superior because you are not having to labor like these beasts.” To appease them, the tyrants dropped a nickel and handed a gun to any poor white man who was pissed off and said, “Guard my slaves.”

And so it was that for 400 years, poor, uneducated, angry whites came to believe that they themselves would have more if only those Blacks weren’t here, and that guns were identity. And they weren’t wrong, though their logic was. What these charming, charismatic white tyrants were able to convince these poor whites of was that he, the landowning rich tyrant, had no choice but to use “free labor” so that he could be rich and live like a king, that God had blessed him, and he had to fulfill this promise to God by being the richest one.

And despite a Civil War, despite education and marches and all of the hard work of generations of Blacks, Native Americans, and enlightened, moral whites (immigrants all), there are still vast swathes of white Americans who truly believe that IF ONLY there were no Blacks (and now browns, too), they themselves would have it so good.

The Donald Trumps of the world—the ones who deny wages, safe working conditions, clean air and water, and health care to anyone not them—have been such absolute geniuses at convincing poor white people to feel so sorry for them that these poor white people empty their pockets and do whatever it takes to prove their love to the rich white man God. And the poor white people still blame Blacks for their fate.

I learned about this book from the Toni Morrison documentary, The Pieces I Am. Recommended reading.

Following my quick take on the horrors of the Black experience and white supremacy, my building super from Eastern Europe was silent. He looked at me and said, “Why they don’t kill all of you?”

That’s the million-dollar question.

I’m about to make a couple of broad generalizations.

Black culture in America is a culture of love and faith. It’s a culture rooted in ebullience, joy, dance, music, energy, justice, hope, and deep, deep love despite deep trauma and great suffering. I have seen it and felt it all my life. Not that there aren’t assholes and tyrants; I’m talking about roots.

White culture in America, dating back to Puritans and colonizers, is a culture rooted in punishment, jealousy, cruelty, demands for some kind of Christian self-abnegation (that no one can achieve), faith in (one man’s) white superiority, and fear born of trauma, our original sins of Native genocide and Black enslavement. White is right. Spare the rod and spoil the child. “God’s will” is for me to lord it over you. I am God. Not that there aren’t lovely white people; I’m talking about roots.

See how white supremacy works? Image from the web.

And I am so fucking sick of white culture—the good things whites bring to the table are, perhaps, irony, Greek logic, and wryness (all of which are embodied by The Onion), and of course Mary Oliver and Shakespeare and bagpipes. Right now, for me, that’s about it. Even the best of our white politicians play by the white tyrant’s rules without even realizing it. We all do.

You can follow Digital Meddle Your Childhood Ruined on Instagram.

“Mediocre white boys,” to borrow from the brilliant and righteous Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), have taught all of us whites—ALL of us—to feel sorry for them. To pity them, poor helpless things. To give them money and power. To give them a pass. Meanwhile, all that the rest of us sentient whites do for our entire lives is play that same old song, “RESIST,” and I am so fucking sick of it. These white men rape, they steal, they stiff, they destroy, and then they smile, and we pity them all over again, don’t we? And carry our clever signs to the latest march.

This is changing. I do see hope. But we have to crack it all open and drain out the rest of the pus. White culture as a whole, ultimately, must change, or else we take the planet down with us. And this Black History Month, we have to see the joy of embracing all the greatness that Blacks bring to the world. Celebrate. Emulate.

Love from her core of rage,

Miss O’

Wise words from t

Miss O’ Booking It: On Groundhog Day in 2025, Reflections on Black History Month

Last night I looked around at my personal library, and I decided that for Black History Month, I will post pictures of the books I own, starting with children’s books I love.

I can’t explain how the story, the format, and the pictures accomplish their miracle, but I cannot read this book without laughing and ugly crying. It’s beautiful
Such a surprising and wonderful subject, beautifully told and rendered.
What we as humans should all share. Come on, now.

In pulling these wonderful books out to reread (and I’ve never understood why great books have to be categorized into “children’s books”) and suggest for you, I also happened on my 50th anniversary copy of Free to Be You and Me.

Back in 1972, Free to Be You and Me, both a record album and book, became national bestsellers. I know I’ve written about this before: the album, played in elementary and middle school classrooms all over, the book on library shelves, featured “Marlo Thomas and Friends,” and her friends included Mel Brooks, Alan Alda, Lucille Clifton, Judy Blume, Carl Reiner, Shel Silverstein, and many other wonderful talents. In 2002, however, about the 50th anniversary of this remarkable celebration of diversity in community, the publisher was silent. Why? Because the MAGA millions would have demanded the banning of the book, would have stormed the publisher’s offices, maybe, so ignorant, angry, and fanatical in their hatred of anyone not white and male, had this group become.

I don’t know about you, but today, February 2, 2025, I feel like I’m living through the classic American movie Groundhog Day. This lunatic country can’t seem to move the hell on, grow up, be joyful, and get a goddamned grip on itself. In 1972, coming out of the peace and love movements that emerged out of civil rights and voting rights struggles, antiwar protests, extreme violence by our police and military on peaceful American citizens, Free to Be You and Me was this joyful, light, funny, and also serious clarion call for all of us to see the wisdom, really, of children, of artists. Love people. Learn about them. Celebrate the good. Sing, read, play, dance it out. Do you work. Have fun doing it. Look at us now.

In my Creative Drama class in middle school, Miss Graves played this record over and over, using it to teach about the many ways to tell a story.

When Ronald Reagan was elected to the presidency in 1980 (ironically, his catch phrase was “There you go again”), all the promise of progress embodied by President Jimmy Carter not only came to a screeching halt, but we went back 80 years. Groundhog Day, all over again. The journey of Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is our American story.

When President Barack Obama was elected by a solid majority in 2008, and his inauguration was attended by the largest crowd ever seen, then and to this day, I ugly cried with relief. Finally, I hoped, we were moving on, like that time Bill Murray’s Phil finally has a great date with Andie MacDowell.

But it doesn’t take, that great date, and Phil just fucks it all up again, day after Groundhog Day, because he can’t seem to learn anything about how to be a better man.

We elected Trump. Twice. See what I mean?

All of President Joe Biden’s progress is being undone. Trump’s administration and all federal offices will no longer celebrate Black History Month or Juneteenth; the CDC has taken down all information about LGBTQ+ acceptance or health; these fuckers think they can simply erase all the progress, all the humanity, all the education of two generations.

Phil’s fucked up Groundhog Day yet again. “I got you, babe.”

But you know what? Remember in that movie how Phil has to go to rock bottom, to day after day after repeated day including numerous violent attempts at suicide, before it finally occurs to him that aside from feeling like a hopeless immortal god, he might, you know, use this gift of eternal life to learn piano, say, to save lives, to make friends, to bring his coworkers coffee, to invest in the community?

I think it’s vital to our survival to remember the message of that perfect movie, that for each of us, life is Groundhog Day. You wake up, you begin, and you can live it the same way you did yesterday and the day before that, or you can begin anew, grow, find joy, and have a good time in your personal hell. I’m not saying it’s easy.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., one of the finest writers and minds this country ever produced, lived through the horrors of WWII and produced Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death in 1969, five years after I was born and three years before Free to Be You and Me, for which he wrote the afterword:

Into the second day of this Black History Month, on this Groundhog Day, I hope we realize we don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it.

Sending love,

Miss O’

P.S. The Ed Sullivan Show, on the air from 1948 until 1971, when I was 7, was this marvelous compendium and showcase of all the wacky and beautiful and radiant stuff what was our common culture. For Black History Month, I’d like to close with “Pata Pata” by Miriam Makeba, should you need to celebrate living.