For Those Who Wish to Draw the Curtains

Two mothers stand along a busy road in the chill of a January afternoon.

“Are you from here?” she had asked, peeking out the vehicle window. The woman, I had assumed, was in search of directions.

“Yes, can I help?” Relieved, she exited her car with a small stack of postcards, bold black ink printed across the top. An American flag waved from the bottom. She pushed one in my direction.

“I wanted to let you know about an upcoming school board meeting where they will be discussing some really important issues.” She smiles. I smile back.

Based on the handout’s bullet points, I am doubtful we will be allies. But the concern in her eyes is evident, so I let my hope linger just a bit longer on the snowflakes drifting between us.

“What are the issues?” I ask. She enters into her spiel.

Her opening sentence snatches all hope from the wind and drops it to the icy sidewalk. It seems she is very concerned about the books in the school library. I wouldn’t believe the vulgarity in these books, I’m told. The cursing. The propaganda. The lesbians! And the lies – so many lies. “Would I believe all of these lies?” she wonders.

For fuck’s sake. Why me? Why today? My children stand around like sentinels, looking quizzically from me to her, her to me. This afternoon was supposed to be fun; this lady doesn’t seem very fun.

I stare at the postcard, wanting to shout or maybe cry. I stand quite frozen to that sidewalk, attempting to make sense of this woman before me – how she became so entrenched on the far-right side of the battlefield. I assume she fell into that hole long ago. I assume she knows few people of color. I assume she sleeps with the Bible between her legs to protect her from all of those lesbians. I assume so many things, but still, I stand there. I wait.

A child pulls at my coat sleeve. “Mama, can we go?”

“Just one second, buddy,” I say. How much have they heard already? Damn this woman.

But I am not ready to call it yet.

She keeps talking at me through the cold as I try to figure out how we got here. No answers come. Finally, when I can listen no longer, I share that we are not in agreement on the “dangers” at hand, a confession to which I receive a bewildered stare.

“Really? Like what?”

On everything, honestly, but where do I begin? I point to the third bullet – her hot button issue – Critical Race Theory. It should read “anti-racism” or “diversity efforts” or “inclusivity” or “honesty,” but it doesn’t, so we are already at an impasse.

CRT, this old-made-new-again academic discourse, has been a catch-all lately for any attempts to discuss race, most especially, in schools. It has been highjacked by groups wanting to instill fear across white America, groups like the one this woman sacrifices her weekends to. With her standing in front of me, though, I have yet to read her group’s problematic sentiments. All I see is a mom, albeit one I am now leery of, afraid for our children. “Do I understand that they are being taught to hate themselves? To hate white people?” she wants to know.

“I have a baby boy with brown skin at home who deserves to see himself reflected in the books he is reading at school, too. My goal is to protect him, as well,” I say.

Her voice tightens. “And I have adopted African American children,” she replies. “And they are teaching them that we are bad!” Her white hand makes circles around her face as she says this. I stand dumbstruck, gut-punched.

No!

How?

She’s supposed to get it. She’s supposed to see through the bullshit.

Here we are, two white mothers trying to raise children of color in the same predominantly white town, living in two totally different countries. If she and I can’t find common ground on diversity efforts, how on Earth are all of the white mamas with white babies going to get onboard? I grind my boots into the cement and the remains of my splintered hope.

This middle-aged woman haunts me for the next three weeks. She chases me still. I picture her worried brow and frantic hand circling her face. The sincerity in her anger is so familiar to me, but for reasons far, far away from where she is.

My anger, my fear is that this community will swallow my child of color right up. I worry that he will not be given the space to form his own identity, that he will be seen as an anomaly, something to be either tossed aside or molded into a pre-specified box.

I fear that my white children will not be challenged to break free of the boxes that sit ready for them. That they will not be taught to think critically about their country’s history and how that history has shaped our present day. I want my children shown the full story of this land and all of its people, not just tailored snippets meant to reinforce the lie of manifest destiny or some fictional post-racial utopia.

This mother, standing before me on the sidewalk, warns that we must “listen for other CRT words like diversity, equity and inclusion.” These are the rightful things to fear, she says. “We need to recognize that these ideas are separating families and creating racism.” Racism is not new, and efforts to make people aware of its presence should not equal its expansion. If it does, white supremacy has a larger hold on us than we realize.

“Critical Race Theory is used to divide people,” she claims. “Similar techniques have been used to divide people before, but this is the first time they’ve been used in a large scale on us as Americans.” The first time? The near erasure of Indigenous populations, 250 years of slavery, the segregation that followed (that follows us still), the suspicion surrounding Japanese, Muslim, Mexican and, most recently, Chinese Americans are all obvious ways in which our country’s leadership has tried to divide us. So, who exactly is this “us” that we must rush to protect now?

As schools across this country open windows for our children to better see the world outside of their communities, groups like these draw the curtains, a mother devoting her Saturday to shutting out as much light as possible. Her stark white, shaking hand – circling her face, pulling the curtains – grabs me daily out of the naivety I thought I’d left behind. It reminds me that we are not the same. I cannot speak to this particular woman’s experiences or how she reached this point, but I can speak to the great sadness I feel for the fear that she lives under, a fear that can only be undone by the exact education she, and others like her, long to stifle.

Ashley, Woman of a Certain Rage