Mock interview, part 3

Q: I want to know what it was like leaving Whitesville. How were you received in the new communities of color you found yourself living in?

Well, first of all, I didn’t just quote unquote find myself living in these communities. I made deliberate, conscious decisions to relocate, with the express purpose of being around people who look like me, people who have created different kinds of lives than the one I knew growing up in Whitesville. I want to make sure that people following this story understand that transforming my life didn’t just happen.

It took a degree of intentional planning, conscious commitment, education, and goal- or priority-setting. I knew that in order to enter a new community as an outsider, I needed ethnographic background information just to get oriented quickly. I also understood, having received great training in the Multicultural Education program at the University of Massachusetts, that I would have an easier time if I went in fully cognizant of my social positionality. What I mean by that is that I was taught to recognize the privileges I had been given by society for example, as an English-speaking, middle class, able-bodied man, even as my consciousness had been raised about the oppression I experienced as an adopted, non-Christian, gay, biracial person of color.

So before I went west, I learned as much as I could about life on the reservation and in Native America in general. I did the same sort of self-education before I took the teaching job in Compton, California. Part of my training at UMass included what my mentor, Sonia Nieto, has referred to as arrogance reduction. Those of us who have been granted comparative privileges need explicit education and corrective action that recalibrates our inflated sense of self-worth. We need to humble ourselves before we can truly begin to actually see and appreciate the strength and beauty of the unfamiliar cultures that we were taught to hold inferior by our Whitesville educations.

But you asked how I was received. Moving to New Mexico was nothing short of incredible. It was the first time in my life (maybe with the exception of living with my African American foster family, but I have no memories from that time before I was adopted)—it was the first time that I felt I fit in. That is, everyone had brownish skin like me, whether they identified as Hispanos, Chicanos, Indians, or even as sun-burned hippies that had arrived in the late 1960s.

Native people asked me what tribe I was from. That felt so much more welcoming than the question I had grown up being bombarded with, the “What are you?” question. Back in Whitesville, the “What are you” question always felt like an assault, a reminder that “clearly you are not one of us.” In other words, “We’re not sure what you are, but we need to know before we can place you properly in our pecking order.” Contrast that to the curious but friendly inquiry from another person of color about which tribe I claimed as my own. So yes, New Mexico was absolutely amazing, for a lot of different reasons.

Then when I decided I should be teaching African American children in the city, I sought another job even further west, in the Los Angeles, California school district. I went through their interview process. At the end, a black woman principal said to me, “Mr. Raible, you have passed the interview with flying colors. I’d like to hire you, but there’s one small problem.” Oh really? What’s that? She said, “I have already reached my quota of African American teachers. Can we say you’re Puerto Rican?”

I literally threw my head back and laughed. Here I had traveled 3,000 miles, fleeing Whitesville, to teach the children of quote unquote my people. And this, mind you, after working really hard to establish a strong, proud black identity. So I actually turned down the job with L.A Unified and kept looking. Thankfully, adjacent to Watts, where I had hoped to teach, I learned that Compton was hiring, and since I could be black there, that’s where I moved. I ended up living and teaching in Compton for five amazing years, and that’s where I met the two boys who would become my sons.

And again, I was received with generosity and hospitality in ways that I could not have imagined. I lived in an apartment building where all of my neighbors—almost all of them African American—were on welfare. I had a single unit all to myself, whereas my neighbors shared a similar tiny space with their whole families crammed inside. Nothing bad ever happened to me while I lived there, either. Other apartments were broken into, people in the community were assaulted and even shot. The only bad thing that happened to me was having my car stolen, and I got that back the next day. I really felt lucky that my neighbors were protective of me and were looking out for me.

I took on the challenge of teaching in one of the school’s designated bilingual classrooms, where half the kids were Spanish-speakers and half were English-speaking African American kids. On Friday afternoons, outside my classroom I would meet one or another of the mothers of one of my students who had brought a meal she had made for me to eat over the weekend. Here were these impoverished immigrant moms, with hardly enough to feed their own families, bringing me, the bachelor “maestro,” delicious home-cooked meals. I was making a modest effort to learn and speak some Spanish, and I guess they appreciated what I was trying to do for their children.

Q: How was it connecting with other African Americans?

My colleagues, mostly older black women, similarly took me under their wings and helped me adjust to my new environment. I got a lot of advice and encouragement as a beginning teacher and newcomer. I also felt some subtle pressure in terms of match-making with available single women, but overall, teaching there was a wonderful and eye-opening experience. Even though it was a typically under-funded, neglected inner city school, the kids and families were great. The school staff threw me a shower when I adopted my first son. And they elected me Teacher of the Year, probably to encourage me not to leave, as many younger teachers do throughout many sub-standard urban school districts across the nation.

Q: It sounds like a truly transformative experience, living and working in Compton and on the rez in New Mexico. What lessons did you take with you when you moved back East?

When you get invited to Thanksgiving dinner on the reservation, when you sit down to eat turkey with an actual Indian family, your perspective on Native Americans shifts. When poor but generous Spanish-speaking moms make you enchiladas and bring you tamales that taste better than anything you can get in a restaurant, your perspective on what it means to be a Latin American immigrant family shifts. When older, church-going African American women back off from their match-making efforts and affirm your value to the school even as it dawns on them that you’re not really interested in dating any of the single women they had hoped to match you up with, your perspective on quote unquote homophobia in the black community shifts. So I can’t say enough about the benefit of moving into, and joining as an active participant, unfamiliar communities. It’s the best way to make the unfamiliar familiar.

If I could do it, and it was by no means easy, I know that others can do it, too. I mean, I’m not asking white adoptive parents to do anything I didn’t do. But I am reminding them again and again that clinging to what they perceive as the safety and comfort of Whitesville is way too limiting, and way too easy. And I have to stress that it’s really not in the best interests of their adopted children of color. Maybe I should leave it to white individuals to point out how it may not be in the best interest of white kids, either. But that’s another story.

Q: No, please, I’d like to hear your thoughts on white children who grow up in Whitesville.

Well, believe it or not, I care deeply about what’s happening to white children, too. I will say that I think it’s interesting to see more and more parents, I’m thinking of some non-adoptive parents that I have met or talked to online, who are apparently reaching this same conclusion or a similar analysis about the limitations of a Whitesville upbringing.

For instance, I recently spent a weekend visiting a Jewish friend from high school who has chosen to live as an adult in New York City. He loves living in the city. He and his wife and their eight-year-old son showed me a great time around Brooklyn’s neighborhoods, including the one where they live. I was blown away by the mix of people, including Hasidic Jews in their distinctive hats and shawls and the handsome African families in full regalia out walking to church on Sunday morning. When his wife showed me a photograph of their son’s class, I was struck by how outnumbered this little boy was as one of the few white boys in the picture. He was immersed in a sea of shining, smiling faces of various shades of brown. I thought, What an amazing gift his family is giving him, allowing him to develop a counter-narrative to the confining, skewed mental shackles from a typical Whitesville education. I mean, he’s growing up with friends from all kinds of backgrounds and families. Keep in mind that this dad went to the same high school I attended back in Worcester.

To listen to him talk about why he loves living in New York City compared to Worcester sounds a lot like why I complain about Whitesville. Yet my friend puts it in less overtly political language than I would. But as I listen to him talk about why he loves New York, what feels the same is his awareness of how limiting and oppressive life in Whitesville remains, even though for many, many residents there, life can be comfortably numb, to quote a Pink Floyd lyric.

My white friend has made a conscious choice to give his child an alternative, some might even say a healthier, upbringing. He and his wife have sacrificed economic advantage and proximity to family, and in other ways, to do so. In other words, they have made the kind of conscious commitment to living with diversity that all of us can learn from. I respect their choice tremendously. I truly believe that the only way we are going to effectively integrate our society is when more and more white families make similar choices. And that will only happen when more parents wake up to the dangers of raising their families in the toxic social environment of Whitesville. Instead of viewing it as the Promised Land, or the goal to aspire to, more and more parents are choosing something that is actually better, in terms of diversity and opportunities to practice active anti-racism. And that gives me hope.

Q: That, and how about the way the country is demographically getting browner and browner?

Ah, yes! Browner and browner…

Me with a few of my Navajo neighbors in New Mexico, 1984

(What tribe am I from??)

Click here for the Conclusion of the Mock Interview (part 4).