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Trapped by Class

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

I think about social class a lot. Mostly because so many Americans believe we have no rigid class system, or that class is only defined by money.

But social class is a much more encompassing descriptor. It can relate to education, profession, dialect, zip code, income, ethnic heritage, fashion, decorating, and even food choices. Remember when Obama was criticized for preferring arugula over iceberg and Dijon over ubiquitous American mustard?

When we are not conscious about our social class, we may also be unaware of which advertisements we display that might limit us in our social world. Yes, ornamentation and adornment are social indicators of peer group allegiance and people use those visual cues along with verbal hints to peg us before getting close. What’s that accent? Does he swear? Use slang? Is she sporting a designer label?

I think about class a lot because I am acutely aware that I am in some ways class-less and can comfortably transcend class to and connect with the human under the environmental programming. My own class is complicated: I am a Canadian/American of Irish heritage, middle income/highly educated/mother of biracial children, who lives in a diverse zip code and loves European food and good crystal and table linen. I also swear more than a “typical” woman of my class, and I have friends of many races and nationalities. My world travels have given me a comfort level with people of all classes.

In a Subway Sandwich shop this week another customer intuitively picked up on this. I looked like any middle-aged carpool mom wearing jeans and a T-shirt with my long blonde hair in a pony tail exposing my blue eyes. All this could have been misleading. But the tattooed, corn-rowed, guy in a wife-beater and sagging jeans, turned when I entered the store and spontaneous said, “Hey” and extended a closed fist for me to knuckle tap. I tapped back. And only when my smaller, older, white knuckles touched his brown fist did he become self-conscious. He lowered his head, turned his back on me and looked ashamed. I’m sure he was confused by his impulse and when the reality hit that we didn’t display the trappings of the same social class, he went mute. What a shame. We might have had a chat.

In another version of the class trap, I have a New York friend going through an expensive divorce. He is fighting tooth and nail for every drop of their shared marital fortune. When I suggested that maybe his sanity was more important than money, he quickly responded, “Money is my sanity! Who would I be without money?”

Great question. Who would we be without money? Without racial identity? Without our jobs? Without our clothes? Who is the un-armored human being available to connect with other human beings?

In some ways we so cling to the trappings of class that we miss out on amazing ways to just connect as human beings. At other times, we ignore class and wonder why some of our relationships fail. Class is sometimes that silent orchestrator of destiny. Do you know your class? Can you transcend it?

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Gore Divorce: A Forty Year Marriage is Never a Failure.

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

This morning I sat up straight when I heard an NBC reporter referring to the divorce announcement by former Vice President Al Gore and his wife Tipper, as a marriage that “failed.” How could forty years of supporting each other, raising children, surviving grueling political campaigns, and welcoming grandchildren, be called a failure???? If that’s a failure, I can only imagine what the rest of our relationships could be called!

In truth, back when the “til death do us part” section of the marriage contract was inserted (some say in Ancient Greece) death itself was pretty imminent. Life expectancy was short. Plagues and war took many lives and nearly 50% of women died in childbirth. So promising to stay together until death was a fairly safe bet.

Today serial monogamy trumps lifelong unions, and for good reason. We live a whole lot longer. The qualities required of a partner to say, get us through college and embark on a career, or to have a stint of child raising, or entertain a peaceful retirement may be quite distinct, that is, we may choose someone entirely different for each of those tasks. I am only of the opinion that a marriage should last as long as the projects it creates, thus, until the kids are raised or the house reno is complete.

Now having said that, do I believe that too many couples today throw in the towel way too early? Yes. Too many people bail when sexual feelings and romantic fantasies give way to the hard work and boredom of long term monogamy. Or they simply have so few relationship tools that divorcing feels like the only option. These couples have much to learn.

But this is not the case with the Gore’s. They have done their learning and ridden out the bumps. They should be popping champagne to celebrate. They had a forty year successful marriage. Here’s to your next relationships, Al and Tipper!

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Relationship Tool: Expressing Gratitude Better Than Promising an I.O.U.

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

We all know that relationships are a system of interdependence. Partners provide back-and-forth give-and-take on a daily basis. Now new research shows that expressing gratitude both verbally and behaviorally acts as a booster shot for relationship health.

The study was authored by Dr. Sara Algoe and is published in this month’s issue of “Personal Relationships.” In it, sixty-five couples were studied who were in ongoing, satisfying, and committed relationships. The researchers followed the day-to-day fluctuations in relationship satisfaction and connection for each partner and found that little, everyday, ups and downs in relationship quality were reliably marked by one person’s feelings of gratitude. The positive effects on the relationship were noticed even the day after feeling the gratitude was expressed. This study supports the idea that that even everyday gratitude serves an important relationship maintenance mechanism.

But the authors warn that expressing “indebtedness,” a need to repay the kind action, did not have the same affect. I’m wondering if an expression of “I owe you one” implies a scoring system where equal contribution is the expected outcome. Kindness has the most value if it involves a sponteneous sacrifice by the giver, not an I.O.U.

When I think of this concept, I am reminded of the relationship I have with one of my closest girlfriends. Over the course of our twenty year friendship money has changed hands in a very fluid way with an unspoken rule: Whoever is flush picks up the check. And should either my girlfriend and I utter the phrase, “I owe you one” it is quickly responded to with, “No you don’t. It all comes out in the laundry.”  Thus, our friendship is given the booster shot of gratitude far more often than any calculation of debts.

So, gratitude is the way to go. According to the author of the study, “Gratitude triggers a cascade of responses within the person who feels it in that very moment, changing the way the person views the generous benefactor, as well as motivations toward the benefactor. This is especially true when a person shows that they care about the partner’s needs and preferences.”


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What’s Killing Our Relationships? Fear of Dependancy.

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010

Everyone seems obsessed with relationships these days. When men and women share their relationship stories with me I see one big epidemic in our culture — fear of dependancy.

For instance, last night I was at a dinner party and when word got around that I am the Ph.D. who studies relationships, an inevitable mini group-therapy session broke out. The stories abounded about our curious relationship landscape. And alcohol-fueled questions popped out that amounted to “why am I like this?”

With few social rules forcing people into traditional relationships, many people are beginning to understand that their relationship style whether it be dominated by promiscuity, serial monogamy, an emotionally avoidant marriage, or preference for solitude, lies on them. With few family and friends forcing us into a legal, heterosexual, monogamous union, we are free to live out who we are. And that’s the problem. Many of us do not want to live out our “natural” attachment style and actually long for a closeness that will help us feel secure. Or we long for a relationship that will help us procreate and create healthy offspring.

Time and time again at these ad hoc therapy sessions, I find myself explaining “fear of dependancy.” Because, in my opinion, that’s what most relationship strife boils down to. In order to have a healthy relationship, we have to trust someone, we have to trust love and believe it will be consistent. And partners have to learn to depend on each other. All these beliefs about love are programmed in infancy and early life.

So when pop-psyche writers like myself identify someone as being comittment-phobic or a bad-boy or a cougar, we are actually looking at a behavior that is the outcome of a mistrust of love. A fear of being dependent on another.

For some reason, our culture places great value on independence. It’s one unfortunate downside of capitalism. My suspicion is that large, intertwined family systems are a threat to commerce and politics. But too much independence is a killer of romantic relationships. A healthy relationship is also not a kind of co-dependence where no one can remember who’s problem is whose. Instead, a mutually supportive relationship involves interdependence, where partners takes turns leaning on each other. And like that game of trust where one closes his eyes and falls back into the arms of a trusted friend, are you really convinced that you will always be caught? Because that’s exactly what’s keeping you single or disconnected in your marriage.

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Can Love Grow Through A Keyboard?

Monday, May 17th, 2010

With the explosion of online connections, cyber introductions, and old-lover google searches, it seems that the whole world is in a digital love frenzy. But can text and email really grow a healthy love connection? The answer is a bit complicated: Sort of and No way.

First of all, what is a healthy love connection? I would say it is a relationship built on trust, honesty, and intellectual commitment. And it usually gets ignited by sexual passion.

The internet is certainly a great place to find sexual passion, since it takes barely a visual whiff or the promise of excitement and/or love, to trigger a sexy juice flow in most people. After all, arousal and orgasm are the sole domain of the individual psyches. We each have an individual pattern of arousal that is triggered by sight, smell, voice, and touch, all related to some early-life events that stimulated us. For instance, years ago I remember, one man examining my manicure closely on a first date. Months later, he shared a distinct memory that in middle school he had had a spontaneous erection at the exact moment that a teacher with a pretty french manicure placed a hand on his desk to emphasize a point during her lecture. In fear of being discovered, he stared at her hand while experiencing a confusing arousal. Even at the age of 35, this man was checking dates for pretty french manicures because the two events had now joined in his mind. While his story is a concrete example with a linear connection to his sexuality, most of us have a Picasso style of arousal, made up of bits and pieces of our memories. And online lovers are a great place to project those patterns, because no one is there in person to dispute the our fantasies.

But there lies the problem with Cyber Love. It is a dance with ourselves. It is a perfect place to imagine the perfect mate. Now, one nice thing about digital communication is that people who are a bit timid about revealing their most secret intimacies in person or via phone, find IM’s. Text, and Emails a safer place. On face value that is true, especially for men, who often have trouble verbalizing feelings. But the danger is two-fold. Text is also a boundary-free world where lovers often disclose too much too soon, before real trust is established. And that can set the relationship up for a pressured first-meeting. I mean, how terrifying to have so much emotional intimacy before one has even walked hand-in-hand with someone. The other serious danger with typed intimacies is that they become a document that can live forever, and what was once an innocent flirtatious remark can be used as a weapon later on.

So my big advice to would-be cyber lovers is to move to telephone chat long before too many secrets have leaked out onto your keyboard. Then when you feel safe, meet in public with friends around. If your relationship continues to grow, use text as an enhancement not as the primary communication. Love and intimacy must grow with eye contact, vocal tone, pheromones, and touch.

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Can “Miracle Boy” Ever Truly Heal?

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

An eleven-year-old Dutch boy, the sole survivor of a plane crash, reportedly smiled at his aunt and uncle who flew to his bedside when they recognized him from television pictures. He hasn’t been told yet that his parents and brother died in the crash.

The boy, identified as Ruben van Assouw, suffered multiple fractures in his lower limbs when the Afriqiyah Airways Airbus A330-200 crashed Tuesday at Tripoli International Airport killing 92 passengers and a crew of 11. Ruben is the sole survivor.

So, what lies ahead for the young victim? The good news is that his body is projected to have a complete recovery, however, his psychological injuries may persist for the rest of his life.

The most obvious danger is persistent Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) when one is witness to death or potential death that can cause lifelong feelings of anxiety, depression, detachment, distressing dreams or “flashbacks”. In children repetitive play may involve acting out the trauma over and over.

One major symptom of PTSD is “Survivor’s Guilt” and it adds symptoms of depression and low-self esteem that follow the belief that somehow their survival caused the death of the others. The sad thing about survivor’s guilt, as seen in the families of Holocaust survivors, is that is can be a multi-generational disorder.

Finally, Ruben may suffer painful Attachment Injuries because his primary attachment figures were suddenly eliminated. The child can grow up to have a powerful mistrust of love and relationships, or in a very anxious way, cling to new attachment figures even when they don’t provide a healthy return.

The road back to mental health is long, though very possible. Intensive grief counseling might be combined with family systems therapy to help him bond and attach to his new caregivers. Once Ruben is able to view himself as a sufferer, not one who caused suffering, he can mourn and continue with life.

The most amazing thing about the human psyche is it’s ability to heal after trauma. His biological predisposition to anxiety, depression, and feelings of abandonment will be a major determinant of his future mental health. Some people recover from horrific events very well, while others can become dysfunctional by even minor emotional trauma. That’s the fascinating thing about psychology — it happens at the intersection of biology and environment. Our prayers go out to Ruben.

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Love Style and Birth Order: Does the baby of the family always grow up to desire more sex? And, are divorced couples most likely to have the same birth order?

Friday, May 7th, 2010

An area that has fascinated psychologists for most of this century is sibling birth order in relation to just about everything: intelligence, sexuality, personality, mate selection, etc. A quick review of the research shows that there is also great debate in how much of a role birth order plays in who we are. It seems for every study that claims to have a significant result, another one disputes the data. My personal anecdotal experience indicates that birth order and gender tend to affect mate selection as people seem to choose a romantic partner that matches some early life coupling. For instance, as a middle sister, I tend to be attracted to eldest born men. My little brother seems to go for middle or eldest females too. But again, this is just my speculation.

In scanning some of the current research, here are a few interesting findings that might make you look harder about your objects of attraction and you ways of relating to them.

First of all, here’s a basic run-down of personality traits that tend to be associated with birth order. Do any of these characteristics resemble you?

Birth Characteristics

First Born

  • More responsible then other siblings (Alder)
  • Overemphasize the importance of law and order (Alder)
  • Serious (Leman, 2000)
  • Goal oriented (Leman, 2000)
  • Conscientious (Leman, 2000)
  • Well organized (Leman, 2000)
  • Conservative (Alder)
  • Emotionally intense (Koch, 1955)
  • Upset by defeat (Koch, 1955)
  • Higher esteem (Morales, 1994)
  • Leadership characteristics (Morales, 1994)

Middle Born/Second Child

  • Mediators (Leman. 2000)
  • Acquire fewer problems (Leman. 2000)
  • Set unrealistic goals (Alder)
  • Achievement oriented and often fails (Adler)
  • People pleaser
  • Calm
  • ‘Go with the flow’
  • More cooperative than first born (Adler)
  • Feel they are playing ‘catch-up’ to first born (Adler)

Youngest

  • Entertainers (Adler)
  • Pampered (Adler)
  • Dependent (Adler)
  • Selfish (Adler)
  • Attention seeking (White, 2007)
  • Lazy (Adler)
  • Spoiled (Adler)
  • More open to experiences (Big Five Personality Test)

Only Child

  • An only child has no rivals for the patents’ affection and may be pampered causing later interpersonal difficulties.
  • Only child take more internal responsibility for their actions because they never had other siblings to blame things on. (Falbo, 1981)
  • Only child had a lower need to be sociable

In terms of romantic attachment style, birth order does not seem to play as big a role in partner choice, but it can affect emotions that influence relationships. For instance, one study from the Netherlands found that later borns were more jealous than firstborns, and that only children were only slightly less jealous than firstborns. So, it is suggested that the experience of exclusive love and attention in one’s childhood, leads to a lower level of jealousy among firstborns. In another study published in 2008 in the North American Journal of Psychology found that middle children had the most jealousy. Were us middle’s so neglected that we feel jealous? Another interesting finding of that same study is that the baby of the family grows up to be the biggest romantic.

One of my favorite studies showed that partners with the same birth order (two youngest, two middles or two eldest) did not guarantee a successful relationships. They could be happy or unhappy. Birth order wasn’t a factor. But  this study found something else astounding: Birth order is a huge factor in unsuccessful relationships! A study of ex’s found that they are likely to be of the same birth order. Hummmm. Very interesting. The Ex who fathered my children is also a middle born.

As for sexual behavior, another study showed that later borns seem to desire more sex than first borns. Additionally, first born people desire to have children at a younger age, suggesting a greater pursuit of long-term sexual strategy than the baby of the family. The draw back to this fascinating study is that is was a self-report study and in my opinion, people lie about sex more than they lie about money.

And on the subject of romantic attachment, birth order doesn’t seem to be as influential as a mother’s attachment style. Mother’s don’t tend to change attachment styles between children and first-borns don’t show better attachment skills than second babies. I might add here, that this study didn’t look at later borns from very large families where a mother couldn’t possibly have the time to practice the a secure attachment style with a sixth, seventh, or eighth child.

Finally, back to the profile of me, the middle born. Yes, me, me, me, the ignored middle born. Middle borns express more positive views toward friends and less positive opinions of family in general. Could that be why I live thousands of miles away from my siblings, yet more than two-hundred friends recently wished me a happy birthday on line? Mating strategies are also a bit different for middle-borns. One Canadian study showed that middle borns are the least likely to cheat on a partner. Are you reading that, prospective boyfriend candidates? Of course, studies are just that. A study of a smallish group of people with an attempt to generalize the findings across a larger group. But this is one study, I’ll be happy to wave around. :)

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Sandra Bullock Adopted a “Son” Without a Race?

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

When the news of Sandra Bullock’s recent baby adoption broke with the morning sun, a smile as long as the Louisiana bayou broke out on my face. Here was little Louis’s precious face on the cover of PEOPLE and on every morning television show, nuzzling his glowing mommy. I know that feeling, that intoxicating smell of a milky baby’s breath and sweaty chick-fuzz. And the flip-flops of love and worry that tumble in a new mother’s stomach. My very first emotion was happiness for Sandra, especially in this time of pain over her husband’s bad behavior.

My next thought had to do with the sweet brown melanin in that yummy boy’s skin. How could one not notice how beautiful this baby was? (Aren’t all babies beautiful?) Yet, so many politically correct online bloggers, reporters, and comment posters ignored his race. Kudos to you, but by ignoring a physical trait completely draws attention to it. I mean, if Sandra’s baby had been a blonde tow-head with bright blue eyes, his physical attributes would have been mentioned. So, why the silence over melanin? It seems we are as progressive as we are confused. Afraid to say the wrong thing. Yet to create a race-less society would be to homogenize beauty. How sad.

Here’s what’s wrong. As a single mother of two biracial children the wrong thing is to not mention how cute my kids are. How fabulous their curls spiral. How their mocha complexion looks positively breath-taking in colors like bright orange and turquoise. How their strong brown legs shine in the froth and frolic of ocean play. To ignore human beauty, whether it be white, brown, beige, curly, straight, or frizzy, is to draw attention to race as an “unmentionable.”

Even Sandra, in her PEOPLE magazine interview failed to mention her baby’s appearance, simply calling him “perfect.” Perfect he is, as is every healthy baby, but Sandra, he is also exceptionally gorgeous, partly because of his racial mix.

The thing about beauty is that it is in the eye of the beholder. We are all attracted to a set of visual stimuli that created in our brains through a series of exposures in our formative years. My particular early life experiences happened in Nova Scotia, Canada, where I was born. Many Americans don’t know that the true end of the historical “underground railroad” was Nova Scotia, where run-away slaves sought refuge and safety north of the boarder. To this day there is a huge population of African-Americas (I’m told that title is preferred over African-Canadian) on the east coast of Canada, and when I entered elementary school I attended a fully integrated public school. My first crushes were boys with brown skin. Many of my playmates were black girls. Sitting at my school desk, behind well coiffed braided heads and high cheek bones wrapped in flawless glowing completions, I developed a penchant for that version of beauty. So, it was no surprise to me that I would fall in love with a man with dark skin and give birth to such beauty myself.

Like Sandra’s son, my babies are perfect. But they are also brown. Gorgeous brown. And to say I don’t LOVE they way they look — because of race — would be a lie. I’ll never forget the first time my then three-year-old compared her legs to my white legs in the bathtub. She wanted to know why her legs were brown. I didn’t even have to consider my answer. I quickly responded with, “Your legs are brown because your Mommy is smart. I found the most beautiful man on the planet to be your Daddy because I wanted you to be the most beautiful girl. And it worked.”

All babies are beautiful, but Sandra Bullock, don’t be afraid to scream it from the top of a mountain that your BROWN baby is beautiful.

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Connecting in The Age of Technology

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

New Tools. No Rules. That’s what I call the technological revolution.

I have three stories to tell that illustrate how technology is affecting the way we date, mate, and relate.  Story number one comes from the wisdom of a middle school girl, with one entire school semester of dating experience under her belt and a lifetime of tech training. She reminded me that the game of love has a whole new high-tech playing field. I was having dinner in a California Pizza Kitchen with three twelve-year-old girls and I received a text from a 47-year-old guy I’d been dating for about six weeks.

“Oooh” sang my own daughter in an age-old schoolgirl taunt “Is that from your boyfriend?”

I responded with a defensive girlish quip that I perfected twenty-five years ago, “He’s NOT my boyfriend!”

Her friend immediately took meaning from my response and followed firmly with, “Oh, then you only text.” As if to imply that a texting relationship is indeed a kind of relationship but not one that deserves the title of boyfriend.

Then I confused her. “No, we talk too. But only via cell. I haven’t given him my home number yet. And we have dinner dates,” I said.

I watched her eyes widen as her tech savvy mind tried to make sense of what I was saying. “Well, is he your Facebook friend?”

“No.” I said, “We’re not ready for that.”

“Does he follow you on Twitter?”

“Nope.”

Then she gave me a look that read, “How can you sit at the same lunch table with someone who isn’t even online with you?”

It was then that I realized that today, the level of two people’s tech infiltration indicates a level of intimacy and indeed, commitment.

Story number two is a bummer for one almost-bride and reminds us that technology affords few people privacy. This one from a friend. A guy finally gets up the nerve to ask his longtime girlfriend to marry him. Just weeks before the wedding, he finds her tagged in an old photo on Facebook. The photo was innocently posted by a not-so-brainy gal pal as part of a party album and shows the future bride loopy and draped across the lap of an ex-boyfriend. The album is dated and when the groom does the math (Boys are so good at math, aren’t they?) he discovers that this sexy party shot was snapped just weeks before his marriage proposal. Because of this, he calls off the wedding.

Story number three comes from one of my blog readers. A New York City real estate agent is out on a date with a lovely woman who works in television marketing. She is 35, comes from a family that never divorced, loves her sister’s kids to death, and is seriously ready to have a family. The problem is this: The guy she is sitting at the dinner table with has an online love in Dubai, a real world college sweetheart in Chicago whom he keeps in touch via text and email and visits about once a month, and a line-up of local dates waiting in the wings on Match.com. How can he ever hear the call of true love over the din created by so many opportunities for love? And they all exist because of technology.

The Problem

In this high-tech age, our culture and circumstance run interference against that course of evolution. That is, to attach long enough to breed and nurture offspring who can form their own healthy bonds and attachments. Today, healthy attachments are threatened by a permissive society, a sexualized media, too much opportunity that creates “Love ADD”, all fueled by technology.

Technology was designed to keep us connected but it has morphed into a monster that has millions of people keeping in touch, yet touching nothing tender. Take Twitter as a prime example. The text-based megaphone to your contact list limits your feelings to 140 characters or less (including spaces.) Unless you are Ernest Hemmingway, it is impossible to communicate anything of substance with such brevity. Text may be instant, but it is far from intimate. It is a communication void of body language, eye contact, vocal tone, and pheromones. Imagine your favorite band without the drummer or the vocalist and you’ll understand how inferior text communication is. Even longer messages sent via Facebook, MySpace, or traditional Email, may be filled with more words, but can be seriously lacking in emotional content, especially if one is not a very good writer. So much is lost in this kind of communication.

The Answer

Believe it or not, I’m not down on tech. Technology, if used correctly can be a strategic way to find and keep love. It can be used for its original purpose, to keep people connected. To help lovers express what they may be shy to say out loud, to help families schedule tech-free time to relate, and even to help heal the wounds of a relationship rupture. But the key is the knowledge of how to use technology to grow and keep love, and how avoid its hazards. We need a set of tech rules for love and I’m open to hearing your ideas for how to use these new tools to find and keep a mate.

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Are Racial Slurs Okay as a Term of Endearment?

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

Recently I began hearing my middle-schooler call her close friend a “blonde.” The manner in which she used the word implied that it was a short form of “dumb blonde.” My kid would come home from school and say things like, “Mom, you know what my blonde said today?” This kind of bothered me. Not just because I happen to be a blonde, but because I have a really hard time hearing anyone defined and entitled by skin or hair color. You’ll hear me point out someone by the color of their clothes long before I mention skin color.

So, I talked to her about it. I told her that movies like “White Chicks” and “Legally Blonde” may make it seem that girls with blonde hair are the last group that are culture allows us to make fun of, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. Then she stunned me with this retort. “Mom, we are best friends. We’re joking. It’s how she knows I love her. And she calls me her maid.”

“Maid?” I asked

“Yah, she said if we were born a long time ago, I would be a slave so she calls me her maid.” Then my daughter peeled into giggles of laughter at the thought. I should tell you here, if you haven’t figured it out already, that my daughter is bi-racial, of Irish and African ethnicity.

This whole expanded definition of the “blonde and maid” friendship didn’t soothe me a whole lot. But it did get me thinking about how terms of endearment are sometimes slurs that spoken in the privacy of an intimacy imply, “This is our special word. Our joke. This separates us from the world and bonds us together,”

A perfect example would be the fact that many African-Americans use the “N” word within their racial circle as a term of affection. Oprah would prefer to erase even that use of the word. Chris Rock thinks it’s powerful. Within the context that it is used, it is a word of acceptance and brotherhood or sisterhood. But damn the person with white skin who accidently thinks they are in the club and uses the word. For many Americans of color, that word, even spoken in love and affection by a white person, represents yet another thing they are robbed of. Call it culture, identity, or simply a group cohesion. When a white person uses the “N” word they are often met with a glare that says, “You will not take that away from us! We remember the historical use of that word.” Curiously, I should also tell you that I have been referred to by the “N” word. It happened often in a loving, intimate way with an old boyfriend who felt proud to call me his, “N.” And I accepted it with love.

But back to maids and blondes. Have our historical trappings become loosened? Are we so far past the tragedies and injustices of the past that this new generation can make light of it? Maybe it’s no different from the “witches” costumes that we wear at halloween, a tragic symbol of hundreds of thousands of women who were mercilessly tortured and murdered for the crime of thinking “out of the box.” Are these middle school maids and blondes doing the same thing? What do you think?

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