Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (14 page)

I got stuck with the label in the worst possible way in sixth grade when I had to move to a new school in the middle of the school year. The teacher had my records before I started class, and I later found out he'd prepared the class for the new student by telling them how smart I was and how they were all going to have to work harder to keep up with me. Needless to say, I didn't stand a chance. I was labeled “the smart one” before they ever saw me (not that I was particularly pretty at the time). The kids who were the incumbent smart ones hated me as a potential rival before they even met me, and the kids who weren't considered smart were already intimidated. I had enough to feel freakish about as it was, as I was developing fairly early and already wore a bra, I started wearing glasses, and I had crooked teeth but hadn't lost enough of my baby teeth to get braces. And at nearly five foot four inches—which turned out to be as tall as I'd ever get—I was tall for an eleven-year-old. Add the teacher's preemptive strike, and I was doomed to remain friendless the rest of the school year. I did a lot of reading during that time, including most of Judy Blume's books, because I didn't have anyone to play with.

My heart broke for Deenie's sister Helen when she was dismissed by her mother as “the smart one,” the one who was told not to expect anything outside her books, who wasn't supposed to fall in love, who didn't need to bother dressing well, who'd be wasting her God-given good brain if she had any fun. She seemed as trapped by that label as I often felt, and I've always wondered if she ever caught up with her poetry-writing mechanic who was going to go to forestry school. I, at least, had the good fortune to be able to be myself at home and had parents who let me be smart, pretty, funny, or anything else I wanted to try being (though I didn't test them by trying out “slutty” or “stupid”).

As much as I avoided empathizing with Deenie, she was still reassuring. That brace that at first looked like the end of the world, that made her want to stay home from school so that no one would see her in it, ended up not really hurting her life in any important ways. She still had her friends and even gained more friends because of the new perspective the brace gave her. The boy she liked was still interested in her. He still kissed her, and the brace came in handy when it kept boys from groping her (I'm not sure Deenie thought that was such a good thing, but at the time I first read the book, when I was still way too self-conscious about my body to imagine ever wanting a boy to touch it, that sounded pretty good to me).

If Deenie could survive relatively unscathed with something as awful and obvious as a back brace, then I could surely survive my relatively minor freakish characteristics. Glasses, a few extra pounds, and crooked teeth weren't going to kill me. There was hope that I could break out of my smart girl mold. If a boy could like Deenie when she was wearing a back brace, there was still a slight chance that a boy might like me with braces on my teeth (alas, that wasn't the case, but I don't think it was entirely the braces that were at fault).

Adulthood has given me an entirely different perspective on
Deenie.
I can read the book now and recognize that Deenie had her problems even before the scoliosis. She was, in her own way, just as labeled and freakish as Barbara or Helen. She was stuck being the pretty one, and that limited her options. She had to live out her mother's dreams, and she wasn't even sure if she had a brain because she was never expected to use it. In a roundabout way, that back brace may have been the best thing that could have happened to her because it opened up her options. It meant she'd go through high school without a chance of being a model, and that allowed her to try something else. By the end of the book, she's considering being an orthopedic surgeon, something the pretty girl never would have dreamed of.

There's also the truth that you don't want to accept when you feel like a total freak: the popular, attractive kids who seem to have everything going for them feel like freaks, too. In
Deenie,
that inner freakishness is made visible, but for all those other kids out there, there's usually something only they know about. You don't know what's going on inside. I haven't remained in touch with my middle school peers, as I was a military brat and have moved many times since then, but I do see people I went to high school with, and my dad was a popular teacher at my high school who's remained in touch with some of his students, so I've had his perspective. I've found as an adult that the kids I thought had it all together were just as miserable as I was. They felt just as left out, just as worried that no one would like them, just as self-conscious. Some felt even worse than I did. We really were all freaks in our own way.

In other words, we all had a little bit of Deenie inside us—an inner being who wanted to break free but was hemmed in by physical barriers and outside expectations. And we also had something of the Creeping Crud there, as well, something we wished people could see past so that they could accept us as the people we were. We all rebelled against the labels we were stuck with, like Helen did when she fell for her poetic mechanic. It's a nice lesson to keep in mind but one I'm not sure the preteen brain is truly capable of comprehending. That's why we needed Judy Blume to portray that world the way it really is and kids the way they really are, to give us both the Deenies and the Creeping Cruds and force us to think about both of them.

Jennifer Coburn

For as long as I can remember,
I've been like Winnie, the awkward white girl who lives down the block from Iggie's house. Except it's not Iggie's house anymore. Winnie's best friend, Iggie, has just moved to Japan, and her house now belongs to the Garbers, the first black family to reside on the historically homogeneous white suburban Grove Street. Winnie tries desperately to befriend the three Garber kids but winds up sticking her white foot in her mouth far too many times, showcasing her self-consciousness about race.

With naive curiosity, Winnie asks the Garber kids if they've moved from Africa. More like Detroit. She isn't trying to be a smart-ass. She simply has never seen a black person and honestly thinks the Garbers might be recent immigrants, despite the fact that they speak and dress like every other American kid she knows. How could sheltered little Winnie know she was being offensive? And how could the Garbers know Winnie's heart is in the right place when they receive a chilly welcome from the rest of their new neighbors?

Winnie and the Garber kids stumble into a friendship, despite the bumps they experience along the way. One day while Winnie is visiting the Garber house, Mrs. Landon, the town busybody, places a racist sign on their front lawn. Winnie is so embarrassed that she looks at the black father and flees from the house, bawling with guilt. Does Winnie have anything to do with the sign? Of course not. But when she runs off in shame, I know exactly how she feels. She and I both suffer from the same malady: White Guilt.

The first time I'd ever heard this term was on the nineties comedy show
In Living Color,
in which the irreverent Wayans brothers and crew satirized a number of social and political issues. In one episode, they used the term “Whitey Guilt.” I pointed at the screen with recognition and told my husband, “That's what I've got. I've had it my whole life.”

Unlike Winnie, I was not raised in the suburbs but in Manhattan, where the lesbian movers who helped haul furniture into my mother's and my Greenwich Village apartment called themselves Mother Truckers. I saw African-American and Puerto Rican people all the time, in every walk of life. On my sixteenth birthday, I shared a taxi with a dignitary from the Middle East while we both made our way from the United Nations downtown. I was no stranger to diversity. My grammar school was attended by the sons and daughters of Koreans who sought political asylum, Pakistani doctors who were visiting Beth Israel Hospital, and a host of artists, musicians, and writers in every color. I did not live in Winnie's sheltered environment. Yet I shared her awkwardness and guilt over what other white people had done.

Right around the time Alex Hayley's
Roots
aired on television, our grammar school decided to teach us about slavery. With every whipping, sale, and indignity, I sank lower into my wooden chair, feeling utterly ashamed of my heritage. Was I Southern? Not even southern Italian. My maternal ancestors were in Milan at the time when slaves were being auctioned off in the United States. My paternal line traces back to Russia, where Jews were being forced out of villages and terrorized in droves. No one in my family was even remotely involved in the slave trade. So why did I feel so guilty about what these white people had done? I asked my friends if they were experiencing the same overwhelming grief over our social studies lessons. I wondered if they were lying awake in bed every night thinking about black children being sold to different plantations, being torn away from their parents. “Nah,” a friend replied with a shrug. “My family's Chinese. We didn't have anything to do with that. Plus, it was a long time ago. Anyone who was selling slaves is dead now.”

My friend's answer didn't help.

Like Winnie, I decided to appoint myself ambassador to all black people. Not that she or I ever consciously thought about it this way, but we both wanted to personally make up for all the wrongs and injustices that had been visited upon African-Americans. Part of it was benevolent, but another part was purely selfish. I wanted to differentiate myself, show black people that I had nothing in common with those awful white slave owners—that even though we shared the same pale skin color, I wasn't like them. I smiled too widely at my black classmates. I offered them bubblegum (in the variety pack because
that's
how committed to diversity I was!). I went out of my way to prove I was a different kind of white person—the kind without prejudices.

As the Garber kids' friendship illustrated to Winnie, trying to showcase your lack of racism is, in fact, a form of prejudice. Focusing on how race is not an issue makes it one. By doing backflips to show how hip I was to black folks, I made everyone painfully aware of my race self-consciousness. I'd clumsily borrow dialogue from black characters on television shows, greeting black people with, “Hey, hey, hey!” like Dwayne on
What's Happenin'
or replying that a suggestion was “Dyno-mite” à la JJ from
Good Times.
When black folks visited my lemonade stand, I so badly wanted to make reparations for slavery that I never charged them for drinks. Naturally, this made them more than a little uneasy about drinking my concoction, but what I was trying to say was “My brother, you have more than paid for this lemonade.” Winnie and I both struggled with wanting so badly to differentiate from racists that our actions were another form of racism—the type where well-meaning guilty white people see group before individual. They see an opportunity to enhance race relations before they see the person.

A lot of white people try to casually slip “black talk” into conversations with African-Americans they meet. While talking about one topic, they force a tangential comment about a jazz or gospel concert they recently attended. Or they might reach into their mental Rolodex to share a thought from their “good friend,” Shaniqua Jackson. I've done this dozens of times, thinking people must be really impressed with how unprejudiced I am.

My roommate in college used to laugh about how people always tried to interject Latino names and subjects into their conversations to show her how hip to the Puerto Rican scene they were. (See how cool I am, with my Puerto Rican college roommate?) The problem was that Evelyn wasn't terribly impressed with people telling her how much they loved Tito Puente (Cuban) and burritos (Mexican). So am I really demonstrating my
enlightenment
by assuming that a black person would be interested in Shaniqua's musing on Dizzy Gillespie simply by virtue of the color of his or her skin?

While taking an African-American history class in college (a class I would never dare skip, despite a spotty attendance record everywhere else), I listened to a group of young black guys talking about how insulting it was when white women clutched their purses as they passed on the sidewalk. Again, I decided I would be the white person who changed all of that. When African-American men passed me, I would let go of my purse, which I normally clung to. I would make eye contact and smile brightly, hoping they would catch my message: “I'm not afraid of you, my black friend. Look at my purse, dangling freely off my unprotected arm. I have no fear of you snatching it from me, for we are all sisters and brothers in the rainbow of equality.”

As you might imagine, this was not often the message received. Rather than link arms with me to sing a quick round of “Kumbaya,” some guys viewed my overly friendly gestures as a come-on. My stomach tied in knots of guilt when I had to reply that I didn't give my phone number to
any
guys I didn't know. “Oh dear God,” I'd silently plead. “Don't let them think I'm a racist.” But some did. On one such walk down the street, after declining to give my number to an African-American male, his friend informed him, “See bro', I told you white chicks are a bunch of cock teases.” I felt damned if I smiled, damned if I didn't. My mistake—like Winnie's—was in treating black guys differently than their white counterparts. If two white guys passed me on the sidewalk, I'd look right past them, clutching my purse a little tighter than usual. If a white guy asked for my number, I would have politely declined, rather than going into a whole song and dance about it. I wouldn't have changed, hyperanalyzed, or agonized over my actions. The fact that race was driving me was what made me a racist.

When I was in my late teens, my cousin Debbie told me that we were actually one-eighth black. I could have danced hip-hop all night! Debbie confided that our grandmother, Rose Cohen, a first-generation Brooklyn Jewish immigrant from Russia, was not actually the child of my great-grandfather, Boris. Our great-grandmother, Fanny, had a black lover who she would visit every month when Rose was a young girl. My great-grandmother had never told Rose this. And Rose never caught them kissing. There were no paternity tests. But Grandma Rose said that she “just knew” that the black man was her father. To top it off, Debbie said that Fanny's black lover was the runaway slave Crispus Attucks.

Fanny and Crispus might have simply been Chaucer enthusiasts who shared books—or drug buddies who shared needles—but we didn't care about silly things like facts. Grandma Rose said she thought they were lovers, and that was all the proof we needed. Rose “just knew,” and that was good enough for us! We were black. Talk about an emancipation. Finally, I could free myself from the shackles of guilt that came with being the same race as those nasty white people who kept slaves and made black folks sit at the back of buses. Of course, this was a little tough to swallow with my stick-straight blonde hair, pointy nose, and green eyes, but Debbie told me after three generations of being diluted by genes of “the white man,” my blackness didn't show up as well as, say, Shaniqua Jackson's.

Deep down, I think Debbie and I both knew we weren't black, but we loved the idea so much that we still cling to the possibility. When I recently asked our oldest living relative, Aunt Bernice, about this, she said she couldn't be sure. “So Grandma may have been black?” I asked.

“The term is mulatto,” she replied haughtily. The fact that she could not definitely deny that we were part black kept hope alive.

Recently I went to see
Glory Road
with my eight-year-old daughter, Katie, who is a reviewer for the “Rated G” section of our local newspaper. The paper hires about a dozen kids who they send out to children's movies, theater, and events so that they can share their unique perspective with other children. Katie was sent to review the true story of America's first all-black starting basketball team to win the NCAA Championship. Set in the civil rights era, the film explored themes of racism in a pretty realistic way for a kids' movie. As characters used racial epithets and verbally abused black players, I sank lower into my seat. I found myself looking around the theater to gauge the reactions of African-Americans who were also attending the preview. I wanted to give them a little “peace out” sign and show them that these two groovy white chicks would've had
nothing
to do with the nasty crackers who beat up the basketball player in a diner restroom.

Naturally, they were all watching the movie, not looking to connect with an audience member seeking absolution for the sins of her father (who very well might have been a quarter black!). As we walked out of the theater, Katie said to me, “I feel really embarrassed to be white.” My first reaction was to tell her that I did, too, but I refrained and instead asked her why. “Those white people were so mean to those guys for absolutely no reason,” she said. “Why were they so rotten?” Katie asked. I had no answer.

How do you explain the concept of purposeful humiliation to an innocent child? How do you teach her to live her life with integrity and not saddle herself with guilt when you are still seeking forgiveness from every African-American person you meet?

Plenty of people don't understand where I'm coming from on this issue. My husband says he and his family are good people and have never discriminated against anyone. That's fine for him, but what do the Winnies of the world do with their White Guilt?

Like Winnie challenged her mother to stand up to Mrs. Landon, we need to do the same and then some. We need to make sure our kids get off Grove Street every now and then—and not freak out when they notice race. When Katie was three years old, we went to Chicano Park Day together, where she quickly noticed, “Everyone is brown here.” The people who heard her weren't offended, as it was the simple observation of a child. My whole body tensed as I fought back the impulse to apologize. A few people chuckled. No one seemed upset that my child noticed their skin color. It wasn't the noticing that was offensive; it was when the awareness resulted in different treatment that pissed people off. Katie's innocuous comments were no big deal; it was the long-winded explanation that followed that surely caused a few eye rolls. “Yes, Katie, some people are brown and some are white, but what really matters is what's inside,” I said for the benefit of people around me. Looking back, I'm shocked that no one shoved a spicy burrito in my mouth to shut me up. It was so patronizing, I want to slap myself.

As I reread
Iggie's House
recently, what struck me was how unresolved Judy Blume left the story. In some ways, it bothered me, because I wanted to know whether the Garbers sold their house. I wanted this resolution in some ways to assuage my White Guilt. If they stayed, the happy ending gave me some solace. In real life, though, race relations is an ongoing process—one in which we don't get a nice, neat ending wrapped in a bow.