Texan who was tricked by Used Husband into moving to Milwaukee. Fomenting feminist revolution based on potty parity, pockets, and psleeves. Bad bacon eater. Also, cats. Also, REVOLUTION.
A report on Fox News this week declares, “According to the poll, 43% of White men, spanning all age groups, say they are self-censoring their speech at work, and an additional 25 million men claim they’ve not been given jobs or promotions because of being White men.” A few things to note off the bat: the Fox piece links to a New York Post piece which links to a YouTube video for a podcast series titled “White Men Can’t Work,” that says it’s about about “the huge mental health toll on men – who are anxious about doing or saying the wrong thing at work. Self-censorship has become the norm.”
Go read the whole thing. While I wait, I will try to think of anything – anything at all – to add to her wonderful, insightful piece.
Like – in my own experience and that of my women friends – how we, too, self-censor at work.
We self-censored by not saying, “But that was my idea!” when a man was praised for suggesting something.
We self-censored when a client – at a lunch he proposed – put Kenny G on in his car (client was driving) and asked 38-year-old you how was it that you weren’t married yet?
We self-censored when the white male VP sighed and said that it was so hard it was for white men when he was looking for his first job in the late ’70s.
We self-censored when the partner made crude sexual jokes and then laughed and said, “Remember I’m the one who does your performance evaluation.” (We got a new job – five states away.)
We didn’t self-censor when we had a temp job for $15/hour (in 1993, when damn you could pay your Austin, Texas, rent with $15/hour) and the boss asked us on a date. We told the boss we didn’t think it was a good idea to date the boss and the next day, the temp agency called and said the client had cancelled the contract.
We didn’t self-censor enough with the boss who told us we used “too many big words that make people feel stupid.” That was the one where when the boss had to lay off one person on the team of ten, he picked you.
We didn’t self-censor enough with the bosses who told us we were too direct, too intimidating, too – whatever.
Whether we self-censored or not, it never worked to our benefit.
But I have told these stories before. I want to hear yours. Tell me.
American history is all about colonization and imperialism, but this was extra
This bridge crosses the Panama canal and connects North America to South America. Because of the way Panama twists, we would see the sun rising over the Pacific on our way to school every morning. Photo by Redney on Pexels.com
When I was in high school, I lived in the Panama Canal Zone.
Let me rephrase that.
When I was in high school, I lived in one of the last outposts of American colonialism and imperialism and state-sponsored segregation and racism.
I didn’t realize it at the time. I was a teenager; I lived on a US military base, which was integrated – the US military is one of the most integrated parts of US society; and at my Panama Canal Company high school, they weren’t exactly teaching us that we lived in a racist, segregated colonial outpost.
But I was there. And I am kind of horrified that I never noticed the things that Michael Donoghue, a Marquette history professor, wrote about in his book Borderland on the Isthmus.
He notes the segregation – literal segregation – in the Zone. As in white Zonians lived one place, Black Zonians another. The Company dictated where its employees lived – it was a company town. That is, people worked for the Company, which also ran the housing, the police force, the train, the movie theatre, the stores, and pretty much everything else in the Zone.
After the canal was built, the Canal Zone became a government-run “company town” with housing, schools and businesses exclusively for American citizens. The Canal Zone was racially segregated until 1954, with Black and white workers given separate “gold” and “silver” jobs. Their families attended segregated schools and used separate bathrooms and recreation facilities.
“The Canal Zone was not a normal place,” says Maurer. “It was essentially run like a giant military base, but also like a socialist enterprise. Everything was operated by the U.S. government, even franchises like McDonald’s.”
He explains that the Zone was also basically a sundown town. That Panamanians weren’t allowed to enter the Canal Zone unless they worked there. That Panamanians couldn’t even have professional jobs in the Zone until the early 60s, which was when one of my high-school friend’s father was hired as the first Panamanian police officer in the Zone.
(And yes it is very strange to read a book and see a name you recognize. I felt the same way in a Latin American history class in college where we read Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express and I saw the name of the father of my ninth grade best friend. Mr Dachi was the US Embassy official who had helped Theroux in Panama.)
What I do remember – and what my friend Jane, who was my biology lab partner, also remembers – is the entitlement and bitterness that the Zonians had – and still have! – over the Canal Zone treaty, which was signed while we were in high school.
Let me back up.
The US helped Panama engineer a coup to reach independence from Colombia. Then the US took over building the canal from the French. When the canal was done, the US maintained a colony in the Canal Zone, a strip of land bordering the canal, with white Americans living in a few distinct housing areas and the Black descendants of the West Indians who built the canal living in others.
The US also established military bases in the Zone. I lived on one of the bases, which had its own elementary school, but for middle school and high school, all the military kids and the Zonians went to the Company schools. Rich Panamanians and embassy people also sent their kids to my high school (they had to pay tuition).
My high school was full of cliques, but I thought it was just theatre kids vs athletes with some division as well between Zone and military, but it turns out that even with the Zonians, there were differences. The Zonians who had been there for three generations considering themselves very different from (superior to) the rest of us, including teachers in Zone schools and other newcomers.
Jane (whose parents were teachers in the Zone schools) and I were comparing notes on what we have learned as adults that makes us look back at our time in the Canal Zone (she now lives in Canada) and go WHAT THE HELL?
She recommended a book to me – Canal Zone Daughter, a memoir written by a woman whose family moved to the Zone in the late 1950s, when the author was a little girl.
The book is described thusly:
In Canal Zone Daughter, [the author] chronicles her unique childhood culminating to the crushing loss when former President Jimmy Carter signs treaties that effectively eliminates her – and fellow U.S. citizens’ – former home.
That was my first clue that this woman did not look back on her childhood with any insight. Yes, of course it’s a loss for your childhood home to change. But that happens to all of us everywhere. Nothing stays the same. We do experience things one way, but as we age and gain experience and (I hope) wisdom, we can review our past critically. Was it really as rosy as we remember?
The author writes about how the Black people lived in another neighborhood. About her family’s maid – that she and her siblings started to boss their live-in maid around and rather than tell them not to do that, the mom just fired the maid instead. About going to a Panama City casino when she was in high school. About American Canal Zone workers protesting with a sickout, comparing their efforts to the Alamo. About how the US “gave” the canal to Panama instead of returning it.
And she just leaves it all there.
I have to admit it has taken me more time than it should have to realize having space for a live-in maid in base housing was kind of weird. But I went to that same casino when I was in high school and even then, I was thinking, THIS IS BIZARRE DO HIGH SCHOOL KIDS GO TO CASINOS IN THE STATES?
As far as returning the canal to Panama – I didn’t care so much about that. It was just another place where I lived for a while. I wasn’t emotionally attached – I had never considered Panama to be my home.
But when I learned more about what happened in the Zone and with the treaties, I realized returning the canal was definitely the right thing to do. In the documentary Carterland, they explain that Panamanian President Omar Torrijos was asking the US if it really wanted to have to defend the both sides of the 51-miles-long border of the Zone from terrorism. As in, how many soldiers was the US prepared to send to Panama to stand guard? And in his book, Dr Donoghue explains that the US had been trying to get rid of the canal since the 1960s.
“Economically, the Panama Canal was extremely important for the United States before World War II, but after that its economic importance declined rapidly,” says Maurer, author of The Big Ditch: How America Took, Built, Ran, and Ultimately Gave Away the Panama Canal. “And by the time Jimmy Carter decided to take the political risk of giving it back, its economic importance to the United States was almost nothing.”
The author of the memoir does not look back with any criticism. She is angry and is still convinced something was stolen from her. At no point does she say, “When I was a kid, I thought it was normal for middle-class people to have a live-in maid but now I realize that is something that works only when there is a colonial system with huge wage disparities.” At no point does she say, “When I was a kid, I thought it was normal that all the white people lived in one place and the Black people in another, but now I realize that WOW that was Jim Crow segregation and it was wrong!”
Even in her amazon blurb, she writes “Charming, funny, and poignant, the author captures her remarkable American story in an exotic place and time.” Because imperialism and systemic racism is “exotic?”
Although many of the reviewers echo the author’s sentiments – that something was taken from them unfairly, other Zonians in the reviews know better. This reviewer mentions the slums (emphasis mine). I remember them. We saw them every morning from the bus on our way to school. I had never seen poverty like that before.
Missing is the dark side of Panama. A few steps from my house a chain link fence separated our military base from the Curundu river and a slum called Hollywood. Houses made from salvaged plywood and tin roofing stood on stilts to escape the frequent flooding. No electricity, running water or sanitation. It must have been difficult to stare through that fence at our houses with their soft lighting, glowing TVs, and bug lights in well tended gardens. We did not go to bed hungry, nor could we conceive what that was like. We Americans did not create Hollywood, but it was the other side of the coin from our beautiful life. It helps to remember both the good and the bad. Still I would recommend this book, so people will know how special our life was there and how rich it made us. We were a band of brothers and sisters, all in for every new experience, made wiser by the gain and loss of “home”, a happy few in paradise, naive to the pain around us, with eyes forever dissatisfied by ordinary stateside life that lacks the tropical light and shadow preserved in our memory.
Another former Zonian wrote this (emphasis mine):
Having lived in Panama for many years…. I was enchanted with this delightful adventure….Along with the laughter she provides, [she] also covers the sadness of the inevitable and eventual turn over of the Panama Canal and the zone to Panama. Despite the tremendous disappointment so many felt at what seemed a betrayal of their way of life (and at the time it was!), most came to realize the international implications of a remaining U.S. “colony” abroad.
I know there is so much I don’t know. And I know I still hold beliefs that need to change.
But I also know that I did not write an entire book about my childhood without ever once thinking critically about what I was writing. The author even has a PhD, so must know how to do research. Surely she could have learned a little more about the history of the canal and woven that information into her book?
I can absolutely see writing events as I remember them. Much of what she writes is fun and interesting and made me think “I remember that!” Of course you record your history as you remember it.
But – does she not remember the graffiti painted on the walls in Panama City? The strikes? The bomb threats? The slums? The fact that her dad probably worried about his employees getting thrown into a Panamanian jail? (My dad worried about his airmen carousing in town and getting into trouble – getting them out of jail was not easy.) Because I sure do. And I didn’t even spend my entire childhood there.
This image is from Puerto Rico, but the same sentiment was expressed in Panama: “Yanqui go home” and “Gringo go home.” Source
You write what you remember but then, you look back with a critical lens of, “Is there more to this story?”
I’m trying to figure out why I am so angry about this book. After all, it’s a tiny self-published memoir that almost nobody read.
But it makes me think of so much of what is happening today.
That plantation in Louisiana that burned to the ground and the subsequent lamenting from some white women who had such fond memories of getting married there.
The older white woman who told me on facebook, “I am not fond of his personality either but I love most every policy he and his marvelous cabinet have put into place or that he promised in his campaign. Enough said. I voted for Obama who reintroduced racism back into the country. Will never vote Democrat again.”
(Also WTF? “Reintroduced racism?” Because racism had been eradicated before Obama was elected?)
Another older white woman who wrote, “Try doing your own research. What about the watseful spending approved in the New Green Deal? What about the lies that #46 was in the ball? I am not a health care professional but I am a caregiver and work with dementia patients often. I could see the signs of dementia in 46 before the 2020 election. They used and abused that poor man. They lied to the American people and put our country in danger by having a man in Office who was not cognizant enough to do his job. They are death and darkness using the murder of unborn children to gain votes. They support homosexuality and use it to get votes when it is an abomination to God. Read your Bible and do some research using non main stream media.”
The people who shrug at American citizens with cancer – little children – being sent out of the country because their mothers are undocumented immigrants. At children being zip-tied in preparation for being deported. At masked unidentified men grabbing people off the streets and throwing them into unmarked vans. At the regime arresting judges it does not like. At a US senator (Hi Joanie Ernst!) smirking as she tells a constituent worried about Medicaid cuts that “we are all going to die.”
All of the people with privilege who refuse to see that privilege.
All the people who refuse to examine their beliefs in the face of new evidence. They think they are safe, so why do they care?
Jane points out, “There’s a lot of power in being able to say to people ‘I used to believe x, and then I learned z, so now I think differently.'”
But that only works if people are open to new information.
I think this person has never actually washed clothes but it’s what shows up when I search on “folding laundry.” What it really looked like when I helped my friend Leigh fold laundry while she fed her new baby was a little less pristine. Also – seriously – knitted underwear? Photo by Dziana Hasanbekava on Pexels.com
What do you do when your friend has a baby?
Do you fold laundry with her while she feeds the baby?
Do you hold the baby while your friend takes a nap?
Do you wash the dishes and clean the counters and maybe even wash the kitchen floor while your friend sits on the sofa with the baby?
Do you tell her that you’re going to the grocery store and ask her if she needs anything?
Do you drop off a tray of brownies and leave?
Or do you show up on her doorstep expecting to be entertained?
Much like throwing yourself a party where the guests are expected to bring gifts – hence the prohibition against family organizing showers, even, because it is kind of tacky for you or your family to ask people to give you things, there are things that are Tacky and Not Done.
(Like throwing yourself a military parade for your birthday using someone else’s money just saying.)
Things that are Tacky and Not Done, at least according to me:
Asking for cash instead of a gift, even though I totally get preferring cash to say, a photo of one’s in-laws with the option of two frames, or a life-sized cast-iron sculpture of a cat. Or a potted Meyer lemon tree. Or nesting tables painted with hibiscus. That is, no matter how awful the gifts are, you are really not supposed to ask for cash instead. BUT SISTER I GET IT and I send cash as much as possible because yeah, newlyweds need cash more than they need a fondue pot.
Not thanking people for their gifts, although again, once someone starts giving you crap you don’t want and would never want and using it as a way to demand reciprocity, how do you craft your thank-you to reflect the fact that you absolutely hate the item? I have been there.
Assuming other people will pay for your meal when you go out on your birthday. Looking at you, college freshman year roommate who, when the check came, didn’t put in any money and we couldn’t figure out why there wasn’t enough cash until we finally realized that L, the roommate, who had invited herself to go with us to get pizza, wasn’t tossing in anything. I don’t remember how we resolved it, but my friends and I were very careful not to go out with L again and the next year, I found a different roommate.
Not having lunch food in your house for guests just because you don’t eat lunch. Damn, people – if you invite a guest to your home, you feed that guest! All three meals! And you have coffee, even if you don’t drink coffee. I didn’t start drinking coffee until a few years ago, but I always had coffee for guests.
I guess that’s it on the Tacky for me.
OH WAIT NO.
I have another Tacky item.
Back to the baby.
When your friend has a baby or other life event that consumes them and causes them to lose sleep and maybe miss work and in general, is disruptive, what do you do?
You take food!
Yes! We all know this! You take food. You take food for life and for death.
You make a casserole or brownies (or both) and you tape a note to the casserole with the cooking/warming/freezing instructions. You prepare it in a container that does not need to be returned. You text your friend and ask when you can drop the food off and when she answers, you drop the food off. You might knock on the door, you might not. Either way, you deliver the food AND THEN YOU LEAVE.
This is the important part:
You
Leave.
You do not show up with food when there is a new baby (and probably not in any other circumstance) and invite yourself into the house.
Where you then proceed to wait for the new parents to cook your casserole.
And then not help clean up.
While you drink the bottle of wine you brought with you.
You do not demand hosting from new parents.
Yes this story is true and yes, my friend remembers it as if it were yesterday, even though her kids are grown and out of the house. And yes, she is still plotting her revenge.
They are trying to take us back to the dark ages but some of us are already there
When I was canvassing for Kamala last fall during early voting, I ran into a woman who was not on my list. My habit is to talk to everyone I see, so I asked her if she had voted yet.
No, she had not.
Indeed, she said, “I don’t vote.”
“Ever?” I asked.
“No,” she answered.
“Why not?”
“My husband gets mad,” she told me.
My husband gets mad.
She was 79 years old and she had never voted because it would make her husband mad.
She had had a career – she had been an art teacher and had traveled all over the world. She was sharp and clear, telling me about the native plants in her garden.
But she had never voted because her husband did not want her to vote.
I told her she could sneak out to Serb Hall for early voting and register there. (Wisconsin has same-day registration.) All she needed, I told her, was her drivers license.
She doesn’t drive anymore and her license has expired.
This is how you vote in Wisconsin.
First, you register.
To register, you show proof of residence, which can be a driver’s license or a bank statement or a utility bill. (Or even a traffic ticket! Any official government document with your address on it.)
Then to vote, you need a photo ID, which can be a driver’s license or state ID or a passport.
To get an ID, you need a certified birth certificate, a social security card, and a proof of residence.
You can request the certificate and social security card (VoteRiders.org will help), but where do you have them mailed if you don’t want your husband to know?
Then you need to go to the DMV to get the DL or the ID.
If you don’t drive and can’t get a ride, it’s hard to get to the DMV. You can get there by bus but not easily.
How do you vote if you are married to an abusive man?
How do you vote if you don’t have a drivers license anymore and none of the bills or accounts are in your name and you don’t know where your birth certificate is?
And now, with the proposed SAVE Act (really, SAVE America for white men only is what it should be called), throw in finding a copy of your marriage certificate?
How do you vote if you have to keep it secret?
I have also encountered some men who had never voted – at least three white men, ranging in age from late 20s to mid 70s.
The difference between the men and this woman?
The system already works for white men.
How do you convince a white man to care about voting? About who’s in office? No matter who’s there, things usually go pretty smoothly for white men – at least, compared to women and minorities. White men aren’t losing their reproductive rights. They don’t worry when a cop pulls them over. The know they are favored in the job market.
And if they don’t care about anyone else, then what do you say?
They know they will be fine and that’s enough for them.
I begged the woman to figure out a way to vote. “We have a chance to make history,” I told her.
“No,” she told me. “Someone will see me and tell him. You’ll get your chance to make history later.”
Texan in Exile 