The Objectification of Freedom: A Dad's Feminist Awakening

I have witnessed her grow into her body. Time flies. The very curves and voluptuousness that appear in my now-grown daughter were not so long ago flattened by a pre-adolescent "innocence" that was perhaps more my fantasy than my daughter's reality. It was the seemingly necessary de-sexualization of a young girl for my own "peace of mind"-- a way of seeing her as sex-incapable, abstinent; girlie flirtation, at best, marked by the innocence of school girl crushes or puppy love. I would come to discover that her reality was much much different. She has grown into a woman who owns her own body-- its decisions, its actions, inaction, its desirability and explorations. Is it any surprise that I helped raise a feminist, if unsure she's even comfortable with such a term and its connotations?


As I sat in the Chicago box theater's front row to see my daughter, Shannon Matesky's, developing one-woman show "She Think She Grown," any fantasy of "innocent" girlhood is shattered. While attuned to much of the hardship she encountered, particularly in the foster care system, and "pre-Dad", I had no idea about some of what would be revealed to me, for the first time, on stage. This show-- a therapeutic exposition of a woman brilliantly struggling to find her voice in the world, in her own grown-woman way-- was masterfully executed if uncomfortable at moments to watch as someone who cares... who wishes I could have rescued her from some of life's hardships, or been there earlier in her life. Shay has always been independent-- a quality that as a feminist-minded Dad, I applaud with liberal resolve. I never cared much who Shay dated when she came of age to date, only that she was happy, not being abused, sexually responsible. I was attentive to her coming of age in high school and the necessary explorations: bisexuality, boys, her just doing her!


My principal concern was that she knew she could come to me with anything- a reassurance of my unconditional love, if with the expected paternal protectiveness. I was among the first to hear about her first college boyfriend, first major breakup, and the struggles thereafter to balance an artistic career with what becomes of desire-ability. Unlike her Dad, who seems sometimes to live for loving-- often to my own detriment-- Shay is stridently, if stubbornly, independent; resolved that career and dreams should wait for no man or woman. I think she could stand to be a little more like me, allowing dreams of being loved well to happily coexist with creative aspirations. But then there are the realities she's witnessed of Dad's trail of heartbreaks. She believes I could stand to be more like her-- unwilling to allow distractions in loving to deter or shape a creative or professional future. I think we both still have a lot to learn from each other.


Our notion of family is far from traditional, but more so, as we say, like Cherrie Moraga familia from scratch. Even as she is now a college graduate and adult, we continue to develop and nurture the mix we make through life's generous supply of ingredients. Single-dad, queer & grown-daughter, bisexual. We both float in the world with a magnetism that both allures and burns-- like a moth to a flame. Our plays and poetry are sometimes the way we best communicate life experiences-- if an oddly public call-and-response, through growth processes, both respectively and as father-daughter. It's so much more difficult to sit and talk about some of these things. We respect the stage as a mode of disclosure. Since I moved to Chicago and we talk more often we are becoming braver to have talk-backs, beyond the audience, one-on-one. So it is in this growth that I have began to struggle with certain feminist tendencies around womanhood and sexual objectification. With a daughter, I am unable to see feminism outside of the lens of my relationship to Shay, or my mother, or sisters, or nieces. And it troubles me that sexism is such an insidiously ever-present normality that I'm thought of as abnormal for trying to challenge it. I don't like that women get paid less for the same work. I hate when the value of a woman is measured through her sex or baby-making ability. I respect a woman's right to choose a destiny I don't believe is not best for her... because i value that same freedom. What is feminism if not about full freedom?


Being a feminist Dad for me has meant not reducing my daughter's body to an object-to-be-protected... as some extension of my property. It's about encouraging and nurturing spaces for her to self-actualize as she believes will benefit the life she's building FOR HERSELF. There's a way that feminism, unfortunately, re-objectifies the female body in its effort not to. We reduce women to the parts we wish to "protect" even as we critique objectification. It's a very paternalistic, patriarchal, and patronizing gesture. Shay has grown into a full-figured woman. Men and women alike look at her with desire...on and off stage. I can no longer pretend not to notice. She has evolved into quite a beautiful young woman. I recall a recent play (Rivera's "Sonnets for an Old Century")-- a role she understated a bit, though she appears prominently appears in the first scene-- her first lines including the repetition of "sex", replete with suggestive and matching gyrations. At Spoken Word events, I witness how she now gives a brief disclaimer if I'm in the room and she's performing a new piece that I may find provocative or sexual in nature... but I'm getting used to it. I suppose she's a lot like her Dad in some ways. How could I ever exalt my freedom to spit, rap, speak, be and become in the ways I have over the years, before her eyes, and expect less from her? And this is the irony of true equality-- one that enables me to take a critical look at all my feminist leanings, and flip them in a way that suggests: "It's her body, and she'll live like she wants to"...even if it doesn't jive with anyone's "feminist agenda". About this, I am proud. I experience great pride in the woman I helped raise every time I see her perform or hear about her work from others.


Often, people are unsurprised by our kinship. Shay has not been an object or extension of my own movements through life, but a trailblazer creating a legacy of her own that will surely surpass my body of work, give how early she started. She is a being, full of freedom, with choices to make-- some of which I may not agree with. Recently we had a discussion about Beyonce and the mixed messaging lyrically she gives to young girls who "run the world" if through sometimes self-objectifying manipulations. I suggest that self-objectification for gain or favor is, ultimately, "a woman's choice". She suggests "choice", shaped by coercive market demands or by necessity, isn't really choice. It's partially my fault she thinks this way: critically. I'll take partial credit, owning that she very much has a mind of her own-- whatever my minimal influence. Most importantly, Shay Matestky knows she has my love and support-- something my mother has given to me, despite our differences on certain issues. And isn't this the point of feminism and true equality? That each man and woman have the ability to fulfill his or her own destiny as they see fit, with full control of their bodies, full freedom to fly, sit still, soar? What a life! What a wonderful, amazing, beautifully-ugly, tragic-joyful way to experience it all, accept it all. What else is feminism, if not a commitment to full, human freedom?

post e-race... izm: or the collective disrememberence of color lines.

We're all equal now. Obama's symbolic election in 2008, marked instant proof of racial equality for those riddled with guilt about the unmistakable disparities in almost every negative statistical category from HIV/AIDS or heart disease to breast cancer morbidity rates or home foreclosures... black suffering is equal to that of white suffering. Well ain't that some equal opportunity. Many "I'm not racist at all" whites had been wanting that sigh of relief for a minute, and Obama's election became the evidence needed. His daughters attend Sidwell Friends, both Michelle and Barack are Ivy League educated, what's there to complain about, black (and brown) people?


I'm especially attuned to this newfound EQUALITY on my DC METRO ride from Ft. Totten in the mornings to Tenleytown where I teach Washington National Cathedral Scholars on the St. Albans campus. The demographics of those getting on at various stops is as statistically balanced as a Gerber commercial. Yeah, right?! In our post-racial America, aspiration is great deal more showy than reality. We need the black covergirl, the latina-or-could-be-Asian girl, and our standard white beauty in commercials. Equal. We live in a society where "... we all just get along", "some of my best friends are black" is actually true for some whites, and where even white people are fascinated by Tyler Perry movies and can do the cupid shuffle. We have overcome!


I notice this equality no more than when I get off at Tenleytown, with other people of color who arrive with me from more "urban" parts of the city. (Don't you just love how "urban" has become chic for ... well... colored?). Many or most aren't faculty or administrators at one of the many upper northwest secondary or post-secondary institutions. A guesstimate is that at least half of the Black and Latino folk who arrive with me there are help staff or cleaners or other positions graciously prepared by the first-rate public school system. It's the uniform. In our equal society, I don't see whites with these uniforms in equal numbers. On the buses going down Wisconsin, they have on a very ... well... "Wisconsin" (and I don't mean Milwaukee, Wiscompton) kinda business attire. But everybody wears a uniform. Even me. I wear my "safe black guy" uniform to Tenleytown. It's the performative necessity of being-and-race in America.

In 2006, I once attended a School Board meeting discussing racial demographics and how better schools were failing poorer children in which one Montgomery County parent lamented the negative effects of diversifying schools-- noting that tracking was good, because it prepared our "best" for "good colleges" and that there would always need to be people to do manual labor, cook and clean. This, of course wasn't a "racial" comment, but one about class, though its speaker had little class. Perhaps she didn't notice the crude overlaps between poor and working class people in the DMV and people of color. No.. I didn't say 1966, I said 2006, but i digress. We have arrived. Even if I'm not sure what people of non-color look like? But i again digress...


Did I say that I noticed our post-racial equality no more than when I get of the Metro at Tenleytown from Ft. Totten?! I mis-speak. One Sunday I decided to dress down and to do some class preparations at a Starbucks in DuPont Circle. See, they are pushing the gentrifying gays out of DuPont as evidence that "gay is the new black". I thought black was still the old new black! Does that mean the gays are moving to PG county? I'm never gay enough so I can't seem to keep up with these things. But i digress. This post is about race. I'm sufficiently black-acting, i think. Still, the NAACP revoked my black card years ago because I still argue that the etymology of the "N" word suggests ignorance on the part of those who negatively re-appropriated (and mispronounced) it for a stigmatization niggaz bought into. Anyhow... so I'm just a colored, African-American, black Negro enjoying my Cafe Mocha whipped with fudgey swirls and working on my rubric when a white sista engages me in conversation about teaching. I try my best to just keep it simple when I'm in such spaces, generally referring to what i do with broad generalities like "teacher" (to which they "Awwww... how cute..." which pisses me off), "artist" (which they always assume is theater or dance, never creative writing), or "rapper" (see I would say emcee, but that would just be too difficult, and I enjoy the puzzled looks of how a brotha can be so many things and still manage to be [and these are her words]: "so well-spoken, ambitious, and brave". Well KUDOS!! Some big black man's gotta keep massa's chillrens in order, I do declare. We's equal now! We're so equal I don't even bother to suggest how it's insulting to say that a Professor of anything is "articulate", "knowledgeable" or "accomplished". My white colleagues are seldom if ever described as such. I've actually asked them. I was dressed down, so it wasn't so much racism, right? It's interesting how white profs and teachers dressing down and working in Starbucks is "having a casual, relaxed workday". I get to be "charming", "refreshing" (why? cuz I ain't robbin' nobody!?), or "talented" (cuz when you're black and smart, you're not intellectual or brilliant... any intellectual superiority is reducible to "talent"). Did I mention that I love playing basketball and proudly like chicken and watermelon (though seldom, if ever, together). Yep. Very Black. Almost Equal.


There is one last place that I really really really think shows how America has become post-racial: my classroom. Fifteen or so students of color, a few of whom like to interrogate or undermine my credentials because i started off "too cool" and then had the audacity to demand rigor and maturity. My Duke and Stanford degrees "don't mean nothing", even though some of these students aspire to attend such universities. You see, I'm not all that surprised when white sensibility of post-racialism rears it's ironic racist head. I'm most frustrated when students of color you prepare day and night to teach, some of whom don't often see black men in classrooms at all, don't respect the journey and passion you bring to the work. I used to do the suit and tie thing on the first days, just to feign some concern about authority and professionalism; when any fool can dress the part and not know at all what they are doing. I suppose I'm wrong for expecting my professionalism to show up in the experience and knowledge i relay. I think I care too much. Yep... those white liberals got to me and canceled out my street cred. Damn.


Yes, all too often, by my own (black students), I am tested: either not cool enough or too cool. Perhaps carrying the burden of having to be too many things in this limited space of six weeks to make an impression about how Social Justice and Activism can be facilitated through a broad base of social networking and communication mediums, namely the blogosphere. Things have improved. The students are doing extremely well...and 3 of 6 weeks in, I think we've had more developed and nuanced conversations that have enabled the kind of maturity and focus I'd hoped for. But some days it's still draining. Some days I wonder if one can care too much that we're not quite equal...and read the papers and see the stats and see that we're a far cry from a society in which people are judged, principally, by the content of their character. Perhaps the students I'm teaching this summer don't quite get it, being high-achievers. Perhaps they don't know their peers who year after year fill fewer classrooms and more jails for having dropped out, more section 8 housing for having become pregnant, or remain aimless and dejected because they have just given up hope.

Yes... many days I want to erace race.... don't wanna run the race. Want to race to that space people talk about called "post" that is the after-beyond of the reality that sticks to me like DC humidity mid-summer. But somehow I find courage to do it. "Brave" she said. Nice white woman. She didn't mean any harm or know any better. Meant well by it. Was telling the truth. I am brave. In equal measure to her courage to converse with a big, swole black dude, on a computer with a rubric, dressed down, in Starbucks...whip and fudgey swirls and all.

full circle

I had the privilege of meeting today with a former student, Rahiel Tesfamariam, whom I taught in Stanford's Writing and Critical Thinking program back in 1999. While we've kept in touch via various social networking mediums over the years, I hadn't imagined the parallel paths our lives would take. I remember her as a student: as passionate about writing as about the life she reflected through her poetry and journalism. Some 12 years later, we reconnected, both being in DC this summer, and having discovered that she was using Social Media to engage a variety of Social Justice issues.

I am currently teaching a Social Justice/Activism course in DC this summer through the Washington National Cathedral Scholars program-- a school that recruits among DC public school's best and brightest. Among the schools represented is the high school Rahiel attended in DC: Benjamin Banneker. After a response to her birthday wish for me on Wednesday, I proposed that she come speak to my students about her experiences as an activist, community organizer, blogger, minister, educator, etc... She enthusiastically accepted the invitation to speak to my seniors who are creating blogs as a medium to explore the intersection of Social Justice and I.T./Social Networking.

Introducing www.urbancusp.com to me, I became more astounded and honored by all she has accomplished. It was no doubt an affirmation of my early influence on Rahiel as a young teacher and graduate student-- vulnerable and dynamic in my approaches to teaching. I'm happy that my course enabled what continues to be a empowering career as a Renaissance woman, an urban griot, and Spiritual leader.

I remember 1999. I think she vaguely remembers it also. She somehow cleared the blurry haze that period had become: me on the cusp of preparing to die while finding ways to relay whatever legacy I'd leave behind at 27 years of age. Twelve years later, if felt great to give her a copy of the book I wrote, Red Dirt Revival, as the testimony that would encourage triumph over the shame and confusion associated with that time in my life. Here and healthy going on 13 years later, I was able to also share the music I'm doing also. Rahiel loves Hip Hop and remembers my performances at Stanford's COHO during her tenure there. Because she is a Christian woman speaking with a stridently post-theological non-religious, spiritual man, we had an opportunity to discuss grown-folk topics I would have felt uncomfortable broaching at the time-- perhaps spurred by her witnessing a heavy conversation with a friend whose valuation of me was, at best, self-absorbed... and surely hurtful.

We talked dating, Hip-Hop culture, God. I love talking about God... and especially Jesus, so we started our day with an inspiring breakfast that offered contexts to the relationship between our educating and activism and our spiritual paths. After her wonderfully exciting presentation to my seniors, we had a chance to talk a bit more. I applauded the vulnerability that she relays in her writing and work-- an observation made by a male student as the site's most alluring quality; and something about which Rahiel has some anxiety-- being such a strong, independent, woman in control. I told her that this period of transition for me-- from Houston to Chicago...then to DC to teach (which I am loving)...to return to Chicago for a hopeful continuation of teaching, writing, performing... reminded me of the cusp she so eloquently embraces: Eritrean and Black-American, Christian and Hip Hop, Street-savvy and Ivy League. It's the postmodern m.o. that suggests it's perfectly fine to be both/and, rather than limit our selves to the grasps of those who'd prefer to restrict our selves to either/or. We also talked about how her pastor and spiritual leader is a college friend and discovered all sorts of other re-connections. I just hope "Fly Brotha" gets a review on her site. LOL. I'd love to think what Hip-Hop loving progressive Christians think about it. The album reflects my deepest passions and most fearless zeal for the better life I want for myself and the communities from which i come...which is the entire world, as i see it.

Sometimes those we teach touch us in ways that are revealed years later. Rahiel is an amazingly, beautiful, powerful sistah who I continue to teach and learn from. Today, she was able to be there for me: to enhance my pedagogical vision for students I'm teaching... and for me personally as I continue to grapple being on the cusp of questions about spirituality, sexuality, friendship. parenting, love, and, and, and...

Love you Rahiel. And very proud of you!!!