Thoughts on Grief
Recently, I became interested in the idea of grief as an inheritance. I am a second generation Irish American, whose father, because of the Great Depression, was left in an orphanage for a year at age six, whose grandfather, whom I never met was described to me, or at least as I can remember through the mysterious prism of childhood, as dying in an alley. He was an alcoholic, his charm reported to be boundless but whose thirst killed him alone and penniless. My father was a brilliant, funny, loving man whose personality was transformed when he drank to excess into a violent, angry, and cruel man. He suffered deep guilt but did not stop drinking and that was our family’s shadow.
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Our Failing Public Schools
This was the headline in the New York Times: Rate of Killings Rises 38 Percent in Chicago in 2012. My son had just graduated from one of the selective high schools in Chicago and my main thought was, “Get him away from this city.” He had had a largely idyllic childhood in Chicago Public Schools but there was a concrete sense that Chicago was entering the summer in a dangerous state, gangs, guns and random shootings. The history of education in this country included this court ruling, “In 1954, the Supreme Court decided the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. "Racially segregated schools," the Court concluded, are "inherently unequal." The Court found support for its decision in studies that indicated that minority students learn better in racially mixed classrooms.”
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Teaching While White
Raised by intelligent, socially conscious parents who taught their children the fact that discrimination against black citizens in America was real and your job as a white citizen was to do better, was a good start. That was the reality of my upbringing in a farmhouse outside of Princeton, New Jersey in the ‘60s and ‘70s. My father, a professor of English at Rutgers actively supported black faculty denied tenure based on their “radical” ideas and my mother worked within the black community in Lawrenceville as an architect who designed affordable housing and advocated for the black community. Brought up to see race as a fundamental issue in this country and racism as a scourge in the world I had no choice but to push back.
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