Running for Love of Women

October 19, 2008 was Race Day in Dallas; Race for the Cure, that is.

I have had friends over the years who have had breast cancer; many have survived and thrive still. Some have died of the disease. Breast cancer has come closest to home in the person of my beloved M., who is a 20-year survivor. I marvel at the stories of what she went through during her two surgeries, with subsequent chemotherapy; and I whisper small grateful prayers for our meeting, and our life together. It so could have been otherwise (and when I think this, I always think of Jane Kenyon's poignant poem of that name, "Otherwise").

Given that I started running this year, and -- much to my surprise and delight -- have stayed with it, and given that my daughter decided to walk with a team of women from the office where she worked this summer, it occurred to me that I could run in the race this year. I've been running five miles at a whack pretty regularly, so I figured a three-mile run was doable.

We got to the race location early, riding transit with many other pink-clad women down to the massively-crowded site; about 25,000 runners and walkers participated in the 25th anniversary Race today.

We walked around for a while, since we got there early; I noticed a strong representation of African-American women; some Latinas were there as well, but it did not seem to me there were a number representative of their overall population in Dallas. That got me wondering ...

And then it was time to run. As a novice, I was one of the few runners clueless enough to start at the back of the pack; the first two miles were bumper-car running through yards, among walkers and strollers, and sometimes on the street where I was supposed to be. About halfway through we ran by a high school, and a bunch of kids were passing out water; I noticed they were mostly Latino/a.

The sweetest moments came in the last mile, as the road opened up for a clear run, down and then uphill, and then around a corner where a high-school group was cheering and clapping. I knew it wasn't personal, but applause and a band playing is rare for those of us who are not playing high school football, so I got a lump in my throat. I noticed the group was all Latino/a kids, too. And then the finish line was in site, and I was looking for my beloved M., who promised to wait for me and watch me cross the line.

It felt great to run across the finish line; it felt even better to see the grin on M's face as she snapped my picture and gave me a big hug. I was thinking about a finish line she crossed 20 years ago, done with surgeries and chemo and learning to live into her survivorhood.

We walked around afterwards, waiting for our teenager to finish, and got to participate in donating to a local tissue bank that is supporting breast health research.

As we walked around, I wondered about the representation of ethnicities among the women involved, and got curious.

When I got home, I Googled up some statistics on breast cancer findings by ethnicity. In a report titled "Trends in Breast Cancer by Race and Ethnicity"*, I read that "The average annual age-adjusted incidence rate from 1996 to 2000 was 140.8 cases per 100,000 among white women, 121.7 among African Americans, 97.2 among Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders, 89.8 in Hispanics, and 58 in American Indians/Alaska Natives."

Although more breast cancers are diagnosed in white women, tumors found in women of color tend to be larger (by the time they are found) and tend to be at later stages, with resulting increases in rates of death. Racial disparities in access to health care, including mammography and other screening and diagnostic services -- particularly for low-income women -- are primarily to blame. Other contributing factors leading to a higher rate of death from breast cancer in women of color include delays between abnormal mammographic findings and definitive diagnosis, more limited access to health characteristics, and variances in follow-up care. For instance, studies have shown African-American women are less likely to have follow-up radiation therapy after surgery.

When treatment protocols are equalized, death rate disparities are substantially less. For instance, "An analysis of the survival experience of women with breast cancer treated in US military health care facilities suggest that the disparity in breast cancer survival between African American and white women could be reduced by 70% by providing
equal treatment to all women."

The study referenced above asserts that "Passage of the Breast and Cervical Cancer Prevention Act of 2000, which states the option to provide medical assistance through Medicaid to eligible women who were screened through the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program, should reduce economic barriers to those who meet the eligibility criteria."

Options ... shoulds ... well. Laws don't always have intended outcomes. What's the funding level? Who qualifies through Medicaid? What about women who don't qualify?

The authors of this study note the truth that much additional research is needed on the causes, prevention, and treatment of breast cancer; but they also note that "much progress can
be made by applying current knowledge fully and equitably to all segments of the population."

Indeed. That's a race I'd like to be helping to win.

* Here's the citation for the journal article that provided the statistics I quoted: CA Cancer J Clin 2003; 53:342. Asma Ghafoor, MPH, Ahmedin Jemal, DVM, PhD, Elizabeth Ward, PhD, Vilma Cokkinides, PhD, MSPH, Robert Smith, PhD and Michael Thun, MD, MS

Coming Out Day

Coming Out Day is a chance to celebrate the courage and freedom of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people (who have been able to choose) to be open about who they love. It’s also a chance for straight allies to express their support.

Of course, for lgbt people, pretty much every day is coming out day: we come out over and over and over, to different people in different ways, and we are always calculating the cost, even if we have been able to choose to live out of the closet all the time. Some people love our reality; some tolerate us; some hate us; some kill us.

Coming out stories are fascinating to me (and to enough other people that collections of coming-out stories have been published); they bear all the earmarks of conversion experiences, of metanoia. I like to hear the stories of people who seem to have always known their same-sex preference, and the stories of people for whom the realization came slowly, and the stories of “late bloomers” like me, who lived straight lives until some catalytic event catapulted them into their own reality.

My own reality tried to peek through the blinds of my enculturation as a straight girl, but there were enough barriers in the way for me as a young person that I could not let myself fully acknowledge what I felt and what it meant. That truth hid in a gray space in my soul I kept so carefully locked away it seemed even God could not find me in it. I thought the gray space was constructed to contain the childhood sexual abuse I had experienced; but the truth was buried even deeper than that.

A different light came, slowly. First, through language. There was the feminist theology class where I heard the term “compulsory heterosexuality.” Then through visibility: there were the lesbian friends I met in my M.Div. program who I could see living into full Christian identities. Finally, through experience: the friendship that teetered on the edge of becoming something more.

What surfaced through that friendship had the power to reach what I thought was the deepest wounded place in my life, and turn it into my deepest question: am I a lesbian?

The question was too risky; I ran from it, into deep and heartfelt prayer, including fasting prayers. A day here, a day there … my life as spouse, parent, pastor and student continued, with regular activities and exercise. Every day I prayed Psalm 51: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit with me.”

This came not from a sense of homosexuality as sin; I had a longstanding affirmation of lgbt folk as beloved children of God, deserving of justice and acceptance. However, I was struggling with the notion of accepting this affirmation myself, when it seemed everything hung in the balance: my marriage, my children, my ministry, my ordination, my church.

I asked God to take away the desire for this woman, for any woman, even as the awareness began to surface of how there had always been an important woman in my life. The truth was streaming in; I was stubbornly running. The cost of embracing this truth would be too high. “Take it away, God. Take it away.”

Weeks went by … five, six … I was oblivious to what was happening in my body as I prayed back against the frightening freedom beginning to dawn in my soul.

Finally, one day, I stood lost in prayer before my closet, wondering what was happening in my life even as I wondered what clothes I could put on my body that I would not feel lost in. A small voice came, in response to my by-now monotonous prayer for clarity: “Have you noticed that your lifelong addiction to food is gone? If I can take away that unhealthy desire, don’t you think I could take away this one? If I thought it was unhealthy? You don’t need clarity. You need courage.”

Stunned, I moved through my day, accepting the implication. Later, at the local Y, I stood on the scale. Forty pounds had melted away … and God was right. I felt completely different about food, and I was beginning to feel differently in myself, and about myself.

I was changing, from the inside out: changing shape, changing identity, changing allegiance. Having come out to God, I began the process of coming out to myself.

And a funny thing happened. My spiritual director, a pastoral counselor friend, and my womanist theology professor all gave me the same good advice in a space of weeks: “Tammerie, before you can figure out who you are meant to love, you have to learn to love yourself.”

And so, I set about the task of learning to love this new self God had given me. I went about it the way I would love another: I would want to know the beloved’s favorite activities, joys, passions; I would want to know where the hurts where, what needed tenderness, what brought pleasure. I gave myself the space and permission to experience healing – to feel healed. I chose when to say no; I chose when to say yes.

There was a high cost; the women of color I was co-pastoring with could not abide the questions or the changes coming about in my life, and it took several years for those relationships to regain their footing (and I am thankful they did). The anti-racist, multicultural church we were pastoring together – a vessel for so many dreams and hopes – had already been struggling to survive, and this was one difference too many. We came apart.

To make space for my own and our family’s discernment, I found the courage to resign my credentials in and respectfully disengage from a denomination and a church that could not affirm even the question of my orientation. I moved to a local church community in the United Church of Christ, which offered room for the asking and answering of this question. And over time, God and community helped me and my family to move as nonviolently as possible through the painful process of ending a 21-year marriage, and beginning family life anew in a way that spans two households. I am grateful that my ex-husband has happily remarried; and I am unspeakably happy in the rightness of the love I now share with my beloved M.

I have made choices and taken stances to live into who I feel made and called to be. I meet white people who are uncomfortable with my stances on racism, anti-racism, white privilege, feminism, or my queer identity. Some individuals and communities of color struggle too with homophobia, and sometimes in those settings I experience tension between my queer identity and anti-racist stance. Sometimes, when my feminist commitment runs up against a person of color behaving in a sexist way, I need to find the way between my anti-racist and feminist stances.

I feel the constraints of respecting positions I know in my embodied self to be wrong. In wrestling with those tensions, I come back to the primacy, for me, of my anti-racist stance. I name the truth as I can, and live into my commitments.

Given the interconnections among forms of oppressions, and the similarities of their processes and effects, I gain some insight from the experience of sexism and heterosexism that helps me in my attempts to be an effective white ally, in dealing with racism and white privilege. And, conversely, I have learned some things from people of color about how to deal with and resist oppression when it comes. I have not learned everything that is on offer, but I have learned some things, about courage, honesty, grace, and being human.

I will never regret coming out, because it has been a coming into my own, a coming into the self that God uniquely created me to be. I will always thank God for bringing me to my senses. Literally.

Rhythm? No. Rhyme and reason ... some.

I thought I would develop some rhythm in the writing of this dissertation, and the blog that (sometimes) reflects it. Well, no. Real life keeps getting in the way. I recall with some humor the concluding words from the acknowledgments in a text written recently by someone on the faculty of my institution:

"Finally, I'm grateful to my family, who gladly leave me to my intellectual pursuits without complaint."

Okay, yes, it is a man who wrote that, white, of a certain generation. This sentence conjures up a whole (imaginary) world for me, of a person for whom laundry is done, food is acquired and cooked, a house is kept, children are raised ... and all that goes on outside the door of a closed office, in which this man has the leisure to cogitate, reflect, and write. For long stretches of time. In peace.

I don't live in that world.

In my world, there are the teenagers, the widowed mother with significant health issues who just moved closer by, and my beloved M., who has been slowly but surely moving into our house and winding deeper into our hearts, and who unintentionally tugs at the strings of my wanting-to-be-with.

I am grateful to my family, too ... though they do not typically leave me to my intellectual pursuits. Pursuit of laundry, shopping, and transportation, yes. Intellectual pursuits ... well, when we do talk about my work, I usually learn more than they do. So, it's a good thing I am not completely left to my own devices.

It is hard to write a bit here, think a bit there, edit and reorganize and try to hold onto a train of thought until my mind gets to the station. And yet, I can't stop with reflecting on the lack of male privilege in my life. Because there is plenty of white privilege, and the difficulties I have being a sandwich-generation full-time mom and lot-of-the-time daughter and part-time instructor while attempting to write a dissertation do not change that.

I sit in a house acquired through one of those they-had-no-right-give-her-a-mortgage loans; and I have been supported not only by my own efforts and employment but also by gifts and inheritances flowing through the gates of a white world. My mother has moved into an assisted living center where the nurses and administrators (in higher paying jobs) are for the most part white women, and the nurses' aides and housekeepers and hands-on care providers (in lower-paying jobs) are all women of color. The cost for this is paid for with money my dad made, profits generated in part by using underpaid Latino labor.

White privilege plays into all of my environment ... and I do see my complicity. But I can't stop with noticing. It's like housekeeping; you know you are going to keep making messes, just by living, and so you keep cleaning up, and you try to make a little less mess than you clean up.

I have been working for 15 years now on accepting that what I can do is good enough; becoming a working mother -- even with white privilege -- took a big bite out of my perfectionism right off the bat. I had to accept that I could not be the employee I wanted to be or the mother I wanted to be, if I was being both, and so if I wanted to be both, I had to accept the notion of "good enough." (I had some help in that department from Bonnie Miller-McLemore's Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma, which I picked up for working mother tips, not realizing it would trick me into quitting my job and eventually going to seminary.)

Beginning to (try to) live into an anti-racist identity took a few more big bites out of the perfectionist cookie. You realize the original sin of whiteness: i.e., you are born into and grow up in systems that teach you (and help you internalize) your superiority, such that you think it's natural and inevitable. You realize that it is sheer grace that causes God and people of color to love you anyway, despite the ways you keep acting white (see Macon D's excellent and prolific blog at http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/ and everything Tim Wise every wrote). You learn to forgive yourself so you don't get paralyzed with guilt, and you learn to be willing to risk being wrong -- even as you try your darnedest to do the right things right -- so you don't get paralyzed with fear.

You learn that partial and imperfect progress is better than no progress at all. And so you set yourself to write an anti-racist theology, even knowing that you will be making a part-time and imperfect effort that will not be the best, not even the best you could do, but it will be the best you can do, and that whatever you can do is worth doing.

My committee probably won't want the dissertation cover to read "Best That Could Be Done Under the Circumstances."

So, maybe I'll just acknowledge on my acknowledgments page my gratitude for everything that gets in the way of this project -- because every distraction reminds me what it's really about.

Having the courage to see the world, name what's not right, and take responsibility for doing something about it.

Of Bailouts and Reparations

I'm sure I'm not the only person looking at that number -- $700 billion -- and listening to the debate and wondering where the national will to responsibility comes from.

When I listen to the back-and-forth on the bailout, I can't help but think about the much-less-ballyhooed topic of reparations for African-Americans who are generationally disadvantaged and continue to be oppressed by the historical legacies of enslavement and Jim Crow, as well as racial prejudices in the present.

When the topic of reparations does come out, white resistance typically takes the form of such challenges as "I'm not responsible; I never owned slaves, and neither did my family." Or, "How could we ever figure out how much was owed to whom?" Or, "They would want too much; we as a nation would be bankrupted."

Hmm.

Consider the following, from House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, making final appeal for the bailout: "This is a day of consequence for the American people. ... None of us is an island. We're all bound together in boom or bust."

Well. That pretty much says it all, doesn't it.

None of us is an island ... not white people, black people, or people of any other hue ... and we are all bound together, in boom or in bust.

So, given that we are all bound together, and given that $700 billion is a number we are willing to talk about as an estimate of the amount required to restore "faith" in a crumbling system that was established primarily by white people and that primarily benefits white people, maybe that will be a good (re)starting point when we do get around to that reparations discussion.

And that is a discussion we should have, because there is a besetting original sin in the US economy: that fact that it is constructed on the stolen life energy, blood, sweat, and tears of enslaved and exploited people of color -- from Africa, Mexico, and China, among other nations -- imported legally and illegally to do the dirty work of building a nation and its wealth.

Oh, to live in a Micah 6:8 world ...

Hiding the White Numbers

Many theorists on race have pointed out that the white race is the one that need not speak its name; this certainly pertains in the case of theology, where we can now find black theology, womanist theology, Latina/o theology, Latin American theology, liberation theology, feminist theology, African theology, Asian theology, queer theology, Native American theology ... a plethora that points out the obvious: anything without a label or hyphen is by definition a white theology.

But not a consciously white theology; not theology written from a perspective informed by a critical understanding of what it means to be white. Rather, before the critiques and constructions of marginalized communities, most theology was written by white (presumably straight) men who regarded their perspective as either objective or universal.

The advent of people of color and feminists and eventually lgbt people noted the falseness of that objectivity and universality. (Of course, the white feminists immediately got it wrong, too, thinking there was a universal female perspective and failing to realize white feminists could not speak for women of color, but that women of color needed to speak the learnings and visions of their own experience.)

Perhaps not too surprisingly, the U.S. government continues to do its part to render whiteness invisible ... conveniently also making white privilege more difficult to discern. For instance, the Census Bureau's Quick Facts web page on the United States as a whole notes that of the total number of business firms documented in 2002 (22,974,655), Hispanic persons own 6.8 percent of those firms, African-Americans own 5.2 percent, Asian persons own 4.8 percent, and indigenous peoples own .1 percent (i.e., one-tenth of a percent).

Conspicuously absent is the statistic for white ownership of business firms, which – based on the figures for other ethnicities – I would estimate at around 83 percent (a figure that might be rounded down somewhat for the inclusion of some Hispanics who might designate themselves as being white). And these are predominantly male owners, across all racial/ethnic category: the percentage of woman-owned firms, unparsed by race or ethnicity, is 28.2 percent.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) also organizes its data in a way that renders whiteness invisible. Its Current Population Survey data on employment and income is tabulated for workforce totals and then presented in subsets for women, African Americans, Asian and Hispanic/Latino workers. Data for men and/or white people must be extrapolated. But even as one extrapolates from the data, one finds that the data is presented in such a way that it can only be used to estimate white workers or male workers, but not – for instance – white male workers.

There are changes afoot; many authors and bloggers and theologians and just plain folks are working to make whiteness more visible, in order to render it critique-able ... and ultimately, many of us hope, transformable.

White by the Numbers

Several months ago, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz challenged me to consider the question of what it would mean for white people to experience liberation from oppressing. That sent the chapter I was working on into a deeper place, which was a good thing.

I had been writing about Latina calls for liberation, and was about to document the white response so far. As I developed that section, I also began to address the question from Isasi-Diaz about liberation from oppressing, and as a result ended up with a 100+ page chapter, which I have now split into two chapters, one on Latina calls to liberation, and another on white liberation(s).

The chapter on Latina calls to liberation is about 25 pages. The white liberation chapter is about 80 pages. Hmmm. Maybe that's as it should be? Maybe that's what it looks like when white people do their own work? To be determined.

At the moment, I want to share a few numbers. One of the points of the chapter on white liberation is to illustrate the reality of white privilege (historical construction and present reality). Along the way, I did some research on white representation in certain job types. I was recalling a photocopied article I saw some years ago called "Blinded by the White," which noted the heavy preponderance of white people in positions that count, either by virtue of being highly salaried or societally powerful or both.

While the representation of women and men of color has risen in many positions, white people are still heavily over represented in the positions that count. We white folks represent about 66% of the (census) population. Hence, any position where we hold more than 66% of the jobs is a position where white people are overrepresented, in my simple way of thinking. So, here's what I found:

White representation in higher-salaried positions of power (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey 2007*)

Occupation	Percent held by whites	Males	Females
Chief executives	87	75	25
HR managers	78	30	70
Education administrators	79	36	64
Medical/health service managers	76	30	70
Property/real estate managers	79	50	50
Business/financial operations	76	44	56
Architecture/engineering	79	86	14
Lawyers	88	67	33
Magistrates	83	57	43
Education/training occupations	79	27	73
Post-secondary teachers	79	54	46
Health-care practitioners	76	26	74
Dentists	80	71	29
Pharmacists	75	47	53
Physicians/surgeons	72	70	30

By the numbers, white people still hold a preponderance of the positions that count, out of proportion to our presence in the population, from which I would argue we are able to maintain white-privileging control over the systems and institutions that shape our society, including business, legislative and judicial systems, property sales and management, education and health care. (Note that the percentages of non-white, non-male legislators was considered too small to be tabulated.)

Of course, not all white people are employed in positions that afford economic power and privilege. Whites represented 44 percent of the 37 million U.S. citizens living below the poverty line in 2006. The (historically constructed) sad thing about that is that most of the white people living in poverty think they have more in common with wealthy white people than they do people of color also dealing with poverty. And that keeps folks from banding together and working together to insist on change in an unjust reality.

Tim Wise put the point admirably his book, White Like Me:

"I am not claiming, nor do I believe, that all whites are well-off, or even particularly powerful. We live not only in a racialized society, but also a class system, a patriarchal system, and one in which other forms of advantage and disadvantage exist. These other forms of privilege mediate, but never fully eradicate, something like white privilege. … But despite the fact that white privilege plays out differently for different folks, depending on these other identities … whiteness matters and carries with it great advantage. … [A]lthough whites are often poor, their poverty does not alter the fact that relative to poor and working class persons of color, they typically have a leg up. No one privilege system trumps all others every time, but no matter the ways in which individual whites may face obstacles on the basis of nonracial factors, our race continues to elevate us over similarly situated persons of color." (ix-x)

More on all this later ... at the moment I have a honker of a chapter to get closer to done.

* Sources of data include "Household Data Annual Averages: Median Weekly Earnings of Full-Time Wage and Salary Workers by Detailed Occupation and Sex," Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.pdf. as well as personal calculations.

** Although women outnumber men in HR management positions, men are compensated more highly, earning a median weekly wage of $1581 compared to women’s $1073, as reported in “Median Weekly Earnings.” A similar discrepancy exists for education administration, where women hold 64 percent of the positions, but receive less compensation than men, $1371 to $960.

Goodbye, Randy Pausch

It's a rare thing for so many regular people to become aware of the death of another regular person.

Like millions of others, I was touched by Dr. Randy Pausch's Last Lecture, given after his terminal diagnosis, and shared globally via the internet.

Read this for more from someone who knows ...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120951287174854465.html?mod=null_topbox

I don't want to take anything away from this man's life, and there's little chance my comments will, since no one who knows me knows him or his family.

But there's a thought that came up over and over again, toward the end of the Last Lecture, and repeatedly during his Time Management lecture (which I watched, since he said he thought it was more important, and I was curious -- and yes, a bit of a procrastinator).

I felt the time pressure in his life, which was there before the terminal diagnosis. Some white anti-racist activists who have become aware of the way some of us put the to-do list before human relationships have experienced it as time oppression.

I think after the diagnosis the only time pressure he felt was to spend time with his family, and leave clear evidence behind for his children that he loved them.

White privilege helped him do that, as did the love and concern and resources he had earned. I can't ignore that. There's whiteness in our living, and in our dying.

How many men and women are dying and leaving partners and children behind and do not have the resources to leave anything but the shell of the body and the memories a mind and heart can hold?

I do not begrudge his widow and children a bit of what he was able to leave.

I just don't want us to forget the inequality that prevents everyone from having such a good death.