Forever 21

I have had a hard heart. Time and death have tempered it. Still, it grieves me when I feel its sharp edges. Why aren’t I less reactive, where’s my compassion? I’m not the first to gaze down the long road from head to heart.

I believe that hard heart explains why, at some point in my late twenties/early thirties, I became a Republican. Not in any social sense, but for fiscal reasons. I had an attitude back then, and my choice of political party had not much to do with reality but with this attitude. With what I am calling my hard heart. The story went something like this: Government should be small since it has to be paid for. I work and my husband works and we support ourselves and so should everyone else. Handouts should be kept to a minimum and only for those who really need them. And if able-bodied people needed help, it should be limited and the government should be training those people to help them get jobs.

I was independent, I needed no help. I was good at at taking care of myself. I believed this was the spirit of the Republican Party. What I couldn’t see then was I’d developed disdain for neediness out of the shame I had for my own. This had nothing to do with politics, but that’s where I projected it. In this, I am not alone.

As far as social, issues, well, they were mostly settled, weren’t they?. Of course woman could choose to have an abortion. Of course gay people could marry. Of course blacks and women and every other minority should have equal rights. It was ridiculous that that even had to be said. We were all human beings. Why should skin color or sex determine what your rights were?  I just assumed we’d continue to progress along those lines. And didn’t the election of Barack Obama prove we’d come a long way?

I find my naïveté shocking.  

As I write this, my Waking Up app just sent the following quote from George Eliot: “When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.” 

I grew up in New York City. I never discussed politics with my parents. We were mostly silent at dinner, the roots of which I’ve sometimes discussed in this blog and am not going to get into now. I assumed my parents and extended family were Democrats, like the majority of the city. That’s how out of touch I was. I was surprised and pleased to find that they were, in fact, Republicans. At last, I could fit in with them!

A few years later, my friend Ed shook his head. “You’re a liberal,” he said. “You just don’t know it.”

Then Philip died and nothing else mattered. Particularly politics since it was all a never-ending argument about who was right. What did I care about that? My hard heart was shattered, maybe all the more for its brittle severity. 

In 2016, the Republicans nominated Donald Trump as their candidate. I was stunned. What were they thinking? They weren’t thinking, actually, or such a thing couldn’t have happened. That day I sent a letter to the RNC notifying them I was resigning from the party and registering as a Democrat because of their unfathomable choice. I had no idea just how lethal to our democracy that choice would become.

I grew up in Brooklyn in a white neighborhood. When I was 11, a black family moved into an apartment building nearby. Their windows were broken. My parents did not disapprove. I did. I didn’t understand. There were plenty of black kids in my school. I didn’t think about where they lived. I figured it was somewhere in the neighborhood. I also didn’t think about the fact that none lived on my block, which is where I mostly played after school.

As an adult, I have heard family members call black people names I will not repeat. When my husband and I bought a house in Montclair, I was asked by a family member if I knew there was a black family across the street when we bought it. Out shopping on Church Street, she said, with disdain, “There are a lot of black people around here.” I was angry but, as usual, I remained silent.

I find what I don’t know stunning:

I did not know that race is a construct. There is no such thing as “white.” Of course there are different skin tones, but white is not a race. Human beings are about 99.9% genetically similar. This matters because of the way we group people, assign them traits and then treat them according to those social constructs. What we do to each other in this regard is not new. That we continue to do it is a disgrace. We look at skin color, we listen to unfamiliar accents, we decide what those things make a person and treat them accordingly. We thought it okay to bind and chain black people, to own them, to enslave them, to beat them because of their skin color.

Even as a kid I found this appalling but it was a distant past, no?  Back then I thought that if black and white people kept marrying, eventually everyone would look the same and our troubles, at least as far as racism, would be solved. I thought racism was only about black people.

I wish not to speak like this. Black people, white people, brown people. But this is the language I have to use.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, “race is the child of racism, not the father.” I had to sit a while with this to understand what he was saying. Racism, which involves the exploitation and hierarchy of people, came first. Race was invented to justify it. Skin color and hair decide where human beings fit into the hierarchy. And in this country, exacerbated by this president, we know what that looks like.    

 In his book, Between the World and Me, Coates talks of racism as visceral. It involves his body. And all bodies subjected to racism. It’s not only what was done to blacks when they were enslaved. It’s the beatings, lynchings, shootings and all manner of brutality that people whose skin is darker than mine deal with to this day. I can’t imagine having to tell my children how they should behave because the color of their skin is a liability. I can’t imagine then sending those children out into a world where there’s no god to protect them from people who think their “white” skin gives them license to make violence upon anyone who looks in a way they deem inferior. And a system that will often agree.

All of this has gotten worse under Trump as he rambles out of both sides of his mouth. I’m not racist, he will declare. The evidence to show otherwise is easy enough to find. He’s used words like “animal” and “rabid” to describe black prosecutors. He uses DEI whenever he can to assign blame to a situation before investigation. At the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville he said, “There are very fine people on both sides.” In debating Joe Biden, he refused to denounce the Proud Boys. He called African countries “shit holes.” He wants to overhaul the U.S. Refugee system to give preference to whites. And right now the Supreme Court is deciding whether to further gut the Voting Rights Act.

You don’t need me to go on about this. It’s all out there.

Ed sent me a link to a conversation between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehesi Coates, which I would urge you to listen to. At one point, Klein quotes the Buddha:

I am of the nature to grow sick
I am of the nature to grow old
I am of the nature to lose the people I love
I am of the nature to die
How then shall I live?

That is what it comes down to – how, then, shall I live? This has been an uncomfortable post to write. Turning the lens from the page to my-self, I am unsettled at what I see. I’m afraid I wrote it wrong, I’m unsure of what I sound like. What else am I going to find that “I didn’t know?” I can’t answer that any more than I can answer the question of how I shall live. It’s to be asked every day because the frame of reference changes. How will I live now that I know race is a construct, that things suffered by others are so much more visceral and complicated than I understood? How will I live now that I’ve discovered my country is not what I thought it was? 

I don’t know, but it will be different than it was yesterday.

© 2025 Denise Smyth