Color Blind (www.buttonpoetry.com) & Thinking about rACE (Day 23)

Note: A concussion and break-up meant I needed to tend to my heart and break. However, I continue my 30 posts after Oprah on 60 Minutes blogathon. Here’s post 23. 

I was listening to this today and thinking about ACEs.

I was thinking about those without ACEs, at home, who still deal with racial trauma and those who have ACEs and trauma in and from communities and systems. The longer I’m in the movement the more I understand why the Pair of ACEs is essential to all conversations about ACEs.

On “Making It” with an ACE Score of 8

I’ve been asked how I “made it” with an ACE score of 8. I’m not sure what making it means, or if I’ll beat the odds in terms of risks for early mortality. But I do think of why things haven’t been worse.

I think it boils down to five things:

1. I’m white
2. My father left when I was a toddler
3. I was poor, working class, middle-class and upper-middle-class all before I was 21
4. My ACEs were mostly, only dealt in one hand, and so, when I became an adult, most of my ACEs were past and not present tense.
5. I had access to health insurance and could get treatment for all the health things (asthma, migraines, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, or just regular teeth cleanings and pap smears) and sometimes, I’d get a little money towards gym memberships, stress reduction classes, EMDR or support groups

Whiteness with Wealth

I don’t think much of what helped me “make it” has to do with my personality or resilience or persistence nor do I think it was chance or luck. Really, it was way more about access to resources, privilege, healthcare and not being further traumatized by systems. That was “the secret to my success” and why my siblings have done so well even though generations and generations before us struggled. We aren’t better. They weren’t less resilient. They just didn’t have as much of what we did – along with our ACEs.

ACEs matter of course but it’s not just the ACE score but the context those of us with high ACEs live in.

Being white, for me, meant that schools, hospitals, criminal justice systems and the wider world seemed like the hope, the respite, the place where I could be safe and protected. I had the idea that the world was a safe place and I just needed to make it to adulthood and out of what felt like personal chaos. I didn’t have global doom or despair or real threats because of how unjust or unsafe the wider world was.

Everyone’s not so lucky.

My father’s abandonment, in a strange way, also protected me. He had been violent, was alcoholic and his visits were supervised by a social worker who sat at another table at a fast food restaurant. When he left, our family involvement with the child protection services ended too. We now know that’s actually protective.

Even though we were not actually all that safe, and abuse was still happening, it wasn’t compounded by being put in the system. We still had our siblings, friends, familiar surroundings and pets. We still had some constancy, normalcy and we were not with people who poked, prodded, diagnosed, labeled, or “treated” with many of the interventions that we now know (and sometimes still use). We didn’t get secondary trauma or more trauma.  We weren’t forced, coerced or punished if “non-compliant” with “help” that maybe hurts. So we had that. That’s a lot.

Honestly, not being in the system is the most protective aspect of my high ACE experience.

I got to live my high ACEs life, as a kid, which was grueling, and life-threateningly hard, but with the idea that I wasn’t too different from others. It wasn’t ideal, but it did keep me from the further traumatization and scrutiny that poor people of color face far more often (though poor whites aren’t immune). I was not blamed, shamed, abused or edupuked on by others, as a kid or as an adult.

This is why, for me, it’s not enough for sectors to be trauma-informed unless there is power sharing at every level with all working in and using services (by choice AND force) that those sectors provide. Without that, I’m dubious about how much will change besides the vocabulary we use to describe what we do. We won’t have the necessary input from those who know most if or how the work is working (or not).

Middle-Class Reform of the Poor & Working Class

I wanted to be a social worker when I was in college until I did an internship at a shelter for homeless families. I was asked to “model” parent-child interactions for the residents in the house.

I said, “But I don’t have kids.”

It wasn’t necessary. Presumably, I as a white, middle-class college student would automatically have things to show and teach to homeless parents.

How? How could that be an assumption? What does that say?

Isn’t the cure for homelessness housing?

isn’t the cure for hunger food?

Isn’t the cure for poverty cash?

I was so naïve. I didn’t understand why homeless families in crisis had curfews, required classes, and services on top of survival. There was no respite, joy, or relief.

I didn’t dare say my father was homeless, my mother had been a parent at 16, that I was in no position to model anything, especially parenting because that wouldn’t have been viewed as “strength-based” even though it improved my ability to relate with “the clients.”

But beyond that, I remember thinking that me, who was getting paid and getting credits to intern and work, was not actually modeling parenting while homeless and in crisis. I was modeling being a student and an intern without kids.

For modeling to work don’t we have to see people we can relate, who have gone through the same or worse, walk the talk, know the shoes? Is anyone listening, really, to people who share about living through a storm they don’t know first-hand?

As a college student, of course, it was easy for me to play and interact with kids when I was getting paid or credits to do so.  I didn’t have to sleep six in a room and have strangers telling me when to eat, turn off the lights, and how to smile or make eye contacts with my own kids while managing an overwhelming crisis, without access to booze, or even food (freezer was locked) or a midnight smoke because people couldn’t leave their rooms.

That kind of modeling, to me, is about as useful as watching size 2 runway models in bikinis before taking your size 14 or 24 body to a dressing room to try on bathing suits. There’s no hair or style crew or to help me find what fits, works and allows for swimming. That kind of modeling is irrelevant for people in circumstances which are actually nothing like the ones the models are in.

If anything, that type of modeling just makes people feel shame, anger, and causes resentment bred by being patronized.

How does modeling by people who have never been in the same shoes, skin or situation help anyone or anything?

Isn’t it just a kind of arrogance, bias, privilege that implies if people just saw the “right” way to do things, things would be better for them while ignoring housing, poverty, and the crisis that is the actual cause of struggle? That’s how it felt to me.

Changing Social Class & Status

For me, as a kid, I got to believe, at least some of the time, I was basically like everyone else. I had the safety of the school, my neighborhood, of the wealth and abundance of my friends, most of them were not poor by the time I was 12.

As my family climbed the ladder of upward mobility, we were surrounded by more people who had access to resources, in terms of money and people, and that meant actual help with everything: childcare, cooking, cleaning, tutoring, driving, and things that made life easier.

Of course, these people also had ACEs but ACEs without hunger, racism, without being diagnosed and labeled or being judged or “helped” by others who often couldn’t relate or understand or who didn’t share a similar history is easier than ACEs with injustice.

My friends had more buffers, more resources, and supports even when ACEs existed.

And, as my family got more money and social standing, so did I. We moved from food stamps and assistance and sleeping on the kitchen floor to be warmed by a gas stove, to a duplex, with a cul de sac.

We moved from busing and integration and the city and were the “white flight” of those who sought the suburbs when my sister got a rock thrown through the window on her bus ride to Roxbury.

Each time my mother remarried, we changed social class. Each time my mother remarried, we changed father figures, where we lived and the expectations of those around us.

Even though, in all cases, I had the same ACE score of 8.  But it was not the same in all places. People had more resources but also more judgments.

It was hard to fit in because I wasn’t one of them.

I got to learn what middle-class people said or thought about the poor because they told me.

I got to learn what rich people thought about the middle class and poor because they told me.

It wasn’t respect or admiration or regard they had.

It was pity, fear, and judgment, quite often. People said, “You must be glad to be out of there,” “Was it scary?” about the city 45-minutes away. “You are so lucky,” or “You must be grateful.”

In some places, and towns in the same tiny state of MA, my ACEs were cushioned and softened some by who and what I had to lean on. That came to me not because I earned it but because of where I lived when my mom remarried. I had more resources but it was a loss not to be around people I could relate with.

When I graduated high school and didn’t go to college, because I didn’t have the money, teachers and guidance counselors found me to encourage me and help. It’s not because I was so smart and they cared so much, though they did care, but because the high school had a college attendance rate for students of over 95% and my not going messed with their stats.

I had teachers write recommendation letters.

I had teachers give advice.

Though I was the first person in my family to get to get a BA, I wasn’t the smartest. I knew, early on, a college education was about money, not intelligence. In college, I learned how few people are even aware of that believing everyone can go if they want and work hard enough and that they earned their way in. I’m not saying grades don’t matter, but for many, they don’t matter near as much as income.

Even the financial aid process is not the same for everyone.

I learned my rich friends had accountants help fill out forms to hide money and to share tricks about how to get more financial aid. Rich friends had tutors to help with test taking so they’d get better scores and be more likely to get scholarships. I didn’t understand how that wasn’t considered cheating.

I hated filling out those forms and how personal and intrusive and not helpful they felt. What to say under “father” when my biological father had left, was, if alive, missing-in-action, and when the guy we called Dad was a former step-father, disabled and broke, and not able to help with college and the newest step-parent, who was wealthy and we didn’t know as well, was expected to foot the bill on college forms though he wasn’t responsible for me or my siblings though he loved our Mom (and us).

It was terribly awkward and uncomfortable for everyone. No one worried then if that was triggering, shaming, minimizing the reality of some?

Those forms left no space for reality and the complex, complicated or not so normative expectations of the form makers.

I felt the shame and how those forms weren’t made for people like me.

And more and more, as I do work in this ACEs movement, I realize how protected I was, as well as how vulnerable, even with a high ACE score.

Do our ACE scores and quizzes leave room for the different ways ACE scores play out when our systems do and don’t offer the same protection, resilience, and buffering to all of us?

This is what I keep thinking more and more about.

This isn’t a please pity me piece of writing. It’s me asking myself questions about the nature of the work I’m doing, and not doing.

Those things have protected me.

For me, learning to understand race as it relates to ACEs, in particular, but structural oppression, in general, becomes more crucial. There are historical reasons why we don’t all have the same inherent trust in systems and why our work won’t work unless we heal and take responsibility for our own faults and failures.

There are so many ways we don’t see or hear each other even when we share the same ACE score. I have not considered how lucky I have been as well as how burdened, to be white and to be an adult with health insurance.

It’s ongoing. I think of the times I’ve closed my eyes as well as the times I’ve not felt seen.

I have so much to learn.

Studies can help some but stories open me up the most. Listening to people speak in first-person is most compelling. Today, I learned from poetry and the poet, Joseph Capehart, who invited me into his experience and wisdom.

Here are just some of his words.

“it took me 18 years to find God in the darkness. to realize I didn’t need light skin in order to be the sun.”

“but when you say color blind, you are asking me to forget”

“….you’re asking me to pretend

pretend like we’re all born with a blank slate,

pretend some things haven’t already been chosen for me.

When you say color blind,

you’re asking me to do something I’ve never had the privilege to.

Blindness is never a solution,

don’t you dare close your eyes

look at me, look at me and tell me what you see,

tell me you see me, a black boy with so much to be afraid of,

but the biggest smile you’ve ever seen because he has so much to be grateful for…”

I won’t give away the ending, but please watch because it’s a call to action for all of us, an invitation to look, listen and as my colleague Donielle says, practice “healing justice.”