Melissa,
I remember when I "graduated" from the kids' table to the adult table during family holiday meals. It was when I had a home of my own, had cooked and hosted the family dinner, and insisted on my right to sit in the formal dining room, instead of at the kitchen table with assorted cousins ranging in age from 2 to 42. I was truly a "woman grown" in the eyes of my family, but in my heart, I actually missed the kids' table. Growing up, the kitchen, and particularly the kitchen table was a site of comfort, laughter, advice, gossip, and good food. Important family decisions were made at the kitchen table; elaborate Sunday dinners of candied yams, fried chicken, and collard greens were prepared. At the kitchen table, homework was done and bills were paid (and left unpaid). You could distinguish "family" from "guest" by whether they were seated at the kitchen table or in the more formal areas of the house. I grew up watching generations of Black women experience the sorrows and joys of life at the kitchen table.
I find myself dining at all types of tables now, but none of these tables elicit the acceptance I once experienced at the kitchen table. As a Black woman in the academy, I've been invited to sit and eat at the Ivory Tower table, but I have not felt welcomed as a full participant in the meal. It wasn't so long ago that someone like me would have only been allowed to clean the table. As a Christian and lay minister, I join my brothers and sisters in Christ at the communion table, but I often feel like an outsider when gracing the pews; I wonder if their God is the same as my God? I struggle with a form of double consciousness, a term which W.E.B DuBois defines so brilliantly: "this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."
So, my hope is that this blog creates a "kitchen table" in cyberspace for those of us who struggle with being on the inside of an institution, but still feel like outsiders. I hope there are others, like ourselves, who enjoy conversations about race, religion, politics, and popular culture - but informed by a historical consciousness. But most of all, I hope that we can model what has been glaringly absent in our own professional lives: a place of refuge and acceptance for all the roles we bring to the table. We are scholars, activists, mothers, and public intellectuals. And we need each other to survive and thrive. I hope there are other folks out there who'd like to join us on this journey.
Yolanda
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3 comments:
Once again, I wanted to be the first to comment on your blog. This initial post seems like it will make for a great blog. I have been following Dr. Lacewell blog on the root, and so to have the two of you together is almost too much to take. Also, I appreciated your deft usage of the table imagery: communion tables, Ivory Tower table, and the sobering memory that African-American were cleaning some of those tables not too long ago. As always, thank you for providing insights with your post.
Just last night when talking with my mentee, I told her that her mother wants to keep her at the kiddie table. My mentee is a new employee --- fresh out of college. She attended an HBCU and she is systematically challenged by not having EVER had a mentor or mentors to guide her, open her eyes up to other dimensions, or simply listen to her very beautiful, eager mind. She is a child of Boomer Black parents and what I see of their entire generaton, they don't know how to balance detaching from their parents for their own healthy growth.
It's no different than our generation. Well, it is. Their parents need them for co-dependent comfort because they, physically rendering features of adulthood, has made their parents (also ours --- from first marriages and such) to realize now that they are finally getting old. Their parents need them to provide them with continued purpose. Black Boomers used their childrens' welfare adn education as a crutch to give them identity when it was a universal cop-out to not challenge the status quo many of times. Their alibi to have to do whatever to protect their kids was a fallacy and the mentee sees it. It was good marketing to keep her in line and loyal to her parents' engineering design.
When we grew too big for the kiddie talbe they allowed someo of us to sit with them, if and only if, we continued to support their platforms. But it was not a comfortable fit and we were out of place. Many of us forced ourselves to want to pick up their ideologies to the point we tried to validate by mythicizing whatever they told us about themselves. Boomers wanted us, Gen Xers to remain "taken with them" and not figure out really what was going on in them not prepping us to lead. They wanted to still speak for us.
The kiddie table was too small and the grown folks' table was uncomfortable and inefficient. Boomers pushed it off in transitioning us while we aged in our twenties but this younger demographic has finally made them realize their last and youngest babies are adults now and are not prepared.
So in leading her last night to understand her mother's co-dependency on babying her now that she has returned home, I told her that she cannot enable her mother because it only elongates her mothers and their generations guise to not realize what they have and have not done for them and all of us. All long as she seems dependent, it gives her mother the co-dependent identity which is really false in that she is preparing her.
The mentor sees this in now being at our organization to see her White Peers leagues ahead of her academically, socially, and spiritually. I did not refrain from the ugly truths that our people, especially the Boomers, since Integration have engineered a lot of co-dependency tendencies in making us think they were there for us when they never were. They were at the adult table and she was at the kiddie table never knowing how to be a real adult.
I am finding out she sensed some of this but could not articulate it. And hearing me say it is reassuring to bolster her resolve that she knew something was wrong with the socialization of her family, our communities, and her alma mater, Bethune.
This is not what we talk about. We have been bred to remain in allegiance and mythicize the Boomers --- wanting so desperately to sit at their table while our hair was graying right before them. I told her that I would fight for her but that she could not leave me hanging fighting for her against our common social concepts that did not have our collective best interest at heart, two generations next to one another.
But she understands and admitted that she too has suffered continuous abandonment of when those who you need are in your presence denying you but keeping you company at the time, wishing you would change and not be so idealistic, so driven, and so demanding. She gets it!
I want her to start to invade the adult table at work and at home and in our dsyfunctional community of a people. She has been trained to be polite and wait her turn --- thinking someone nice would realize she was dedicated to doing the work. This week has been dedicated to teaching her that because she is behind, she has to catch up and it could be painfully strenously because I don't hand-hold or mince the truth and those at work in Corporate America don't care enough to take the risk on a Black Female.
So...this is ironic you wrote this and I am just reading it. I've been talking about the social barriers of the kiddie table and Gen X with their parents for awhile but my peers are so loyal to their parents they don't want to discuss the obvious in what I don't see White Parents do in hindering their own from being prepared to take over after they are done. White kids were expected to partake and learn the structures in nuance in how their communities' language was exchange and social relationships formulated while hearing and witnessing how business was done right over a meal. We were not taught that.
We were told to stay out and for some reason they thought we would magically "get it" as an adult. I see my Gen X peers still as wimpish children afraid to really, really, really upset their parents in leading. I want more for her. I want her to be the adults we refuse to be. I want her to be the adult her spoiled, enabled, voluntary co-dependent peers refuse to be.
We need leaders that should destroy kiddie tables and raise our children to assume more responsibility of determined reality and purpose at a younger age so that they are not stunted and paralyzed by "challenges and expectations" when they reach adulthood but can't be an adult because they were never prepped for it.
I came. I read. I liked what I read. I'll regularly visit.
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