Daily Archive

I am a word person.  For the longest time I thought that the world was made up of word people and number people and never the twain shall meet.  Then I realized that number people can make a lot more money than word people and decided to set about making my daughter into a number person.  She seems like she is straddling the world of numbers and words and although she has taken higher math than I ever could have handled in high school our arguments aren’t rooted in the fact that I can’t solve long algebraic equations like she can but the fact that in her eyes I am old and unhip just because I am her mother.

My stepson also seems like a numbers person although I think it might be by default.  His new school schedule came and they have him down for a type of remedial English and everything else is a regular 8th grade curriculum.  Actually, I think the highest grade he got on a report card last in a subject area was a B-minus in math  (of course he aced phys ed).  I don’t think he’s able to get a handle on math because he’s half Asian but more because he’s a boy and boys, being more left brain oriented, are always shoving useless math stats in their heads like who leads the league in stolen bases or how many games must your team win and other teams must lose to make your team number one.  Whereas girls keep foremost in their heads useless love songs/poems, who likes who, and why every other girl is better than they are. 

Last summer my daughter attended a two week science/math camp which was supposed to turn into a summer internship this year which she decided to forgo in favor of a job doing art instead.  On the 2nd to the last day of camp the advisors invited all the parents and camp sponsors to show them what the teen boys and girls had been doing for two weeks.  My daughter was a project leader but I didn’t get a chance to see her presentation because I had to return back to work.  I would have if the head of the camp hadn’t taken up most of the time with his speech.  In his speech he talked about the need for such a program because American kids are lagging behind the rest of the world in math science.  At least 10 minutes (or what felt like 10 minutes) was attributed to how other countries are not only surpassing us in math scores but also churning out more engineers and mathematicians.  Even a linguaphile like me had heard those stats before.  But he didn’t exactly say why they were excelling in the math and science fields.

The difference has to be less innate and more cultural.  On the Cocky Asian Blog I found a link to a BBC news story from the spring that talks about how the Chinese do better in math than Americans.  This math problem alone blows my mind.   Being over twenty years removed from my last geometry class I found this problem daunting.

But there is no way on God’s green earth I’m even going to think about solving for anything in this one:

My daughter is taking the SAT again this fall.  Since she took it this spring they have been sending sample SAT questions to my email.  The grammer and word questions I can easily answer but the math questions I sometimes try to guess at.  I have this sinking feeling that a parent in China who is similarly 20+ years away from their last math class would have no problems tackling the average SAT sample questions I get.

When I was a little girl one of my favorite songs was “Go Away Little Boy” by Marlena Shaw.  I loved the attitude and the funny lines she sang about kicking out her no good man.

“Some Afro Sheen/Some Afro clean/Some Afro Fluid/Some Afro do it to it/Gonna sit up in the room and look at the black beautiful.”

Years later I sat on the phone with my best friend critiquing the song.  “It started off good and strong in the beginning when she was kicking him out, but then she immediately became a punk when she decided to let him stay,” I had given some in-depth analysis to a song that could have been a rallying cry for a generation of women, picking out it’s strengths and weaknesses.  “I mean when she sings ‘let the door knob hit ya where the dog shoulda bit ya’ makes it a classic but then she wimps out at the end.”

“Yeah, when she starts saying ‘Don’t kiss my eyelids like that’ and ‘Don’t nibble on my neck’ and then she let’s dude back in? ” I could imagine my friend shaking her head over the phone.  “She immediately messed the song up. She got punked by love.” We both laugh.

As young girls we thought the problems between black men and black women were maybe one or two generations deep. On the frontlines we heard the stories and saw the fights between the men and women in our lives although the stories sometimes had a decidedly female slant since sometimes the males were absent. 

From a literary view I remember feeling crushed as I read Richard Wrights’ “The Long Dream” and how he described light and white women as the epitome of beauty for the black male.  I still recall how I became angry about the Sapphiric character of Ida in James Baldwin’s book “Another Country”.  Ida was a black woman so cold and so angry that her hostile demeanor helped to push her white boyfriend into the loving arms of another man.  But then these literary allusions didn’t become battle brocades to wrap ourselves in when black men pointed to the “alleged” anti-black male sentiments in the works of Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker or Terry McMillan.  Instead we sometimes acquiesced that the men were right and denounced Essence as helping to increase the gap, all the while getting our secret monthly subscriptions.  Anything that was for black female empowerment was against black males and therefore inimical to the black community.  We weren’t like white women, we said.  We can’t be in with feminism.  They are trying to escape their men and we are trying to get with ours.

We didn’t know that as far back as the beginning of the 20th century black women were complaining about black males stepping out of the box by courting and marrying white women. 

In a chapter of Randall Kennedy’s book, “Interracial Intimacies” he recounts how black women in one segment of the burgeoning NAACP were so upset with the number of black male-white female couplings that they wrote a letter to the chapter’s head to have something done.  A few pages later he writes of how W.E.B. Dubois noted the high numbers of IR coupling between black males and European women in a Northern city.  It seems that since the emancipation of black women we have had problems finding a good black man.  And we have only wanted black men, even as statistics showed a steady increase of black males marrying out at twice the rate of black women.  Even then a lot of black women still loudly proclaimed that only a black male will do for them.

Numbers from the 2000 census show black women have slowly began to date/marry out, although we haven’t caught up with black males.  Reporting from the frontlines I have talked about how a growing number of black women have grown weary of black males and are now looking towards non-black men as a viable option.  For the last few years the battle has been under the radar but I guess such a noise has been kicking up online that now the AP has brought it to worldwide attention through an article that is on the net and hardcopy in some city newspapers.

This revolution might just get televised.

 In the article Tim Alexander, director of the upcoming movie “Diary of a Tired Black Man” says, “To a certain degree, black people are sick of each other…  It would be better for black men and black women to open their options.“

Ya know what, Tim, recently I have been thinking the same thing.  I just hope that the record shows the first volley wasn’t thrown by black women.  As a group, black women have been fairly patient and loyal, even as our characters have been impugned by society at large.  There is an underlying feeling among some black women that only black on black love can strengthen black communities, but as the main plan we have been working under for the last several decades it doesn’t seem to be working.  In the underclass a lot of children are being raised in single parent homes and too many of our communities are synonymous with high crime areas.  A better way to make strong communities would be to have strong families and one of the best ways to do that would be for black women to have better choices in choosing mates.  Sometimes it might mean marrying outside the race. 

A few years ago after a breakup with the last black male I’m ever going to date I called a local old soul radio station and asked the DJ to play the Shaw song.  He laughed and said long ago a woman he had been dating sat him down and played the song for him before right before she kicked him out the door.  He said after the song for me he would play the response song he wish he sang to her.

It was Bobby Womack’s “If You Think You’re Lonely Now“.

I laughed at his selection. I was sure if his ex had known this was his comeback at her she would have laughed, too.   Anyone who can sing the Shaw song without punking out at the end was indeed strong.  No, not lonely, I thought.  Not when the sea is full of fishes and we have the best bait in the world.