Thanks Ms. Porsche! (Why I'm not a racist)

When I moved to the US at the age of seven I’d never met a nonwhite person before. My parents, who didn’t speak the language or know how to do anything in America, initally mostly mixed with Bulgarian immigrants of prior generations, mostly escapees. These older emigres were racist. There’s a lot of reasons why, none excusable, but to explain: their aversion to Communism was a great opportunity for Republicans to scoop them up as lifelong voters in the 1960s and 1970s; it’s the same dynamic as with Cuban immigrants in Florida. Republicans, as we all know, have dog-whistled or actually whistled racism for a century. So, not excusable, but that’s more or less the explanation.

I started school in the second grade without a word of English, a scared, skinny kid from the former Soviet Bloc. My teacher, Ms. Porche, assessed the situation, and with no-bullshit efficiency that should make the teaching profession the highest-paid in the world, assigned a boy, Joseph, to watch out for me and help me learn English. Both Ms. Porche and Joseph were Black. What I remember about Joseph is that we both liked to run, and often raced one another, and that he once wrote a song set to Little Richard’s “Tutti-Frutti” about Ms. Porche.

“I got a teacher, named Ms. Porche, she know just what to do!!

“I got a teacher, named Ms. Porche, she know just what to do!!

“Tutti-frutti! … 🎵🎶.”

“Tutti-frutti! … 🎵🎶.”

“Tutti-frutti! … 🎵🎶.”

This musical tribute, written on note cards and performed on multiple occasions, was patiently appreciated by Ms. Porsche (Again, good teachers are heroes).

When I look at the class picture, I’m astounded by the diversity. Black kids, white kids, Hispanic kids, Asian, East Asian, Arab. I remember a lot of them. Carlos, a boisterous, handsome Mexican boy who I was in love with, but he had a crush on Vietnamese Truc Pham, that bitch. My mother was concerned to find that I had drawn an X over Truc’s face in the class picture. “What did Truc (pronounced True) do?”

“She took Carlossssssss!” I wailed.

Jerry, a Korean kid I resented because he was some kind of genius and way smarter than me. There’s Sanders and Saunders, Black twins. I remember being puzzled that the white teachers couldn’t tell them apart, they looked totally different from one another to me (though the teachers’ confusion, they played to great advantage). A nice Turkish girl, as skinny and English-less as me. I don’t remember her name but I remember we were both pleasantly surprised to find that we didn’t slaughter or oppress each other, as we’d been taught Turks and Bulgarians did in the time of the Ottoman Empire.

***

Since elementary school, every space I’ve existed in has been less and less and less diverse in terms of race and class. Sadly, the least diverse places are fixtures of the elite.

When my parents took me to orientation at my fancy liberal arts college, they noticed nearly all the new students were white. They gave me shit about it, deserved vengeance for the years I’d obnoxiously battered them with teenager political self-righteousness. When my Dad told his friend, Raul, an engineer co-worker who was second-generation from Mexico, that almost everyone at Reed College was white, Raul said, “That is very, very bad.” It was. I’m grateful for my years at that college. But the lack of race and class diversity was bad. It was especially bad for the working class people and people of color who’d managed to get there. My friend Rene was half Mexican, half white. He looked white but had a Hispanic last name, from his working-class Mexican dad. Every time there was some photo-op, they’d call up Rene, thinking they’d have a person of color in the picture. He’d show up and their faces would fall in disappointment because he was a replica of his Irish mother. My friend Annie had grown up in a shack her crazy, impoverished Dad had built in the Oregon woods. Her first year, the housing advisor said to her, “You’ll probably drop out. Working-class people don’t make it here. (Fucking dick. She graduated and is a successful psychiatrist).

***

And there’s the media industry of course. For two decades I’ve observed, with various iterations of eye-roll, the clunky way my bosses have tried to create class and race diversity in the newsroom and just … fail, in spectacular ways.

LOL. My boss for 10 years at AlterNet, a lefty website: To his credit, he did care about race and class diversity. He was always trying to recruit people who were working class. But his own prejudices usually turned the effort into tragicomedy.

For one thing, he assumed that anyone of color was working-class. He even thought I was working-class because I was born in Bulgaria. So he’d often complain to me about how, this Indian girl or this Jamaican girl he hired turned out to be like the heiress to some merchandizing fortune or had a Dad that ran the entire main hospital in Houston (these are real examples).

No matter how many times I told him, “My parents have advanced degrees and my Dad is an engineer. I’m not working class,” he never quite shed the idea that I’d been born in a mud pit in Bulgaria next to a donkey.

Anyway. My boss finally hired a Black reporter from a poor, horrifying background. There’d been violence, addiction, extreme poverty in his family. He’d built himself from nothing to become a great journalist. I sat in on the interview. I knew, immediately, his hiring would end in a “Get Out,” the movie, type disaster of out-of-touch racist white liberalism.

I was proven correct. This was right at the start of the BLM, and the reporter was greatly connected and well-sourced. “Hey, let’s use this!” I said. Instead my boss, chasing virality like Gollum, tried to assign him listicles like (real example) “10 cities in America Black people are least likely to be killed.”

Everything came to a head when he wanted to write about overcoming his trauma through therapy, a PSA for other Black men to seek mental health care. My boss said no. He wrote it for another publication. My boss freaked out and decided to fire him.

I cautioned against this. When I warned him in an email that it wasn’t a great idea, his response was, “Hmm. Are you worried he’ll try to kill himself?” (“No you fucking psycho” I fumed in my head, intravenously pouring a bottle of wine into my body. “I hadn’t even thought of that, but it’s a bad fucking look to fire a young Black man for writing about the invisible mental health problems experienced by Black men”).

“Oh I think it might just look bad …” I wrote.

“Don’t worry, I’ll ask have E*, a Black woman on the board, fire him.”

***

Look, Karma is real. My boss got MeToo’d so hard. As it turns out, his commitment to race and class diversity usually resulted in him hiring hot women in their 20s and 30s, who he then sexually harrassed. “It’s like the United Nations of hotness,” my friend Kristen drily observed once, when we realized the editorial team was comprised of good-looking young women of every race and creed. Diversity in the workplace!

Anyway my point is, real diversity is good, fuck the anti-immigrant Nazis.