Date: May 24th, 2018 11:48 PM
Author: submissive idiot range
her (((White))) husband surnamed (((Kaplan)))
When I married in 2000, I changed my name. I expanded it — kept my name but added my husband’s name, Kaplan, without a hyphen. I wanted my name to reflect a conjoining that was also an evolution, literally one thing following another. This was an experiment, as all marriages are, that felt exciting and open-ended, not least because I’m black and my husband was white.
I wasn’t excited because I thought we’d be some kind of symbol of racial resolution. I was hardly that naïve, and neither was Alan. I am a journalist who had been covering black matters for years at that point, and Alan was a locally famous high school teacher of American history who believed that race and racism had shaped America far more than it was willing to admit. Not surprisingly, he didn’t think changing my name was a great idea. “Black people know you as Erin Aubry,” he said bluntly. “They’ll resent a name so obviously white and Jewish. It’ll get in your way.”
He wasn’t being snide or heroic. One of the many things he’d figured out is that white people showing up in a black space, including the intimate space of a relationship, is seen by many black folks as an incursion, even if they don’t say so. That he understood and was even sympathetic to this view impressed me, but I changed my name anyway. It felt romantic.
We were married nearly 15 years. In the summer of 2015, Alan died unexpectedly from complications following a routine surgery. He was only 60. A little more than a year after that, Donald Trump was elected president. Since then I have wrestled with two kinds of grief: losing Alan and losing the singular honesty and clarity he brought to the issue of race not just as my husband but as a white man in America. The griefs are related, one compounding the other.
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In this new age of racial retrenchment, without the incisiveness Alan brought to our discussions of whiteness and its vastly underestimated impact on the national psyche, I feel more alone than at any other time in my life. Throughout our relationship, we shared a political lens and a common language around the import and meaning of race that was a big part of our intimacy, and part of my certainty that however estranged I might feel from the larger white world, I always had someone at home to talk to.
And talk freely: I never had to explain or defend my racial frustrations, anxiety or even paranoia. That isn’t to say Alan agreed with me all the time. We routinely questioned each other’s orthodoxies about white and black. Sparks flew because the stakes were high on both sides, personally and professionally.
Alan’s anger about racial inequality was rooted in his work, but it wasn’t something he left in the classroom — and I loved that about him. Ever the teacher, sometimes he’d challenge me to justify my feelings with evidence; other times he’d cite a book or article he’d read recently — by Chris Hedges, Naomi Wolf, Chalmers Johnson — that put my feelings into a bigger, more complicated context than I sometimes wanted to consider.
“I’m not one of your students,” I’d say impatiently. “I don’t have to write a paragraph supporting my opinion that Trent Lott is racist. He’s racist!”
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“That’s true, but that doesn’t mean you can be a lazy thinker,” he’d shoot back. “If you don’t have a strong argument, people can take you apart. They’ll take black people apart. You’ll lose what you should win.”
But just as often he listened, and got angry right along with me. One thing we understood is that while we had racial differences, we had the same racial problems.
At the same time, he had racial blind spots; he could still be a white guy with privilege who thought his views should wield more influence than they did. In the new millennium, as the conservative grip on the country tightened during the Bush years, he grew impatient, then angry, with fellow teachers he felt were too complacent about race. He was sometimes dismayed that I was pegged as a black writer when what I wrote should have resonated equally with readers of all races. He hated that.
Our different upbringings made for different outlooks. In Alan’s privilege he expected change; in my non-privilege, I expected struggle. For all his wokeness, he couldn’t escape his American sense of entitlement, and sometimes I watched it from the outside with a kind of bewilderment, even admiration.
But always our back-and-forth kept me thinking, reassessing, curious about the nature of the country’s flaws and, with every new idea Alan dissected, I was more hopeful that the flaws could be repaired someday. He was not nearly as hopeful, but that optimism gap was part of the yin and yang that bound us together. His impassioned analyses of racial disconnection was part of our connection; the historical failure of black and white to cohere became part of our personal coherence that, even as it grew, I never took for granted.
These days I know plenty of outraged white people, good friends among them. But none have Alan’s hard-earned view, his heart, his organic and sometimes abrasive indignation that was part of who he was, not a response to a particular moment or crisis or president. And of course no person, black or white, was as close to me as he was. No other person was my husband.
With Alan I could say all the things too risky or too subtle to say to white people at parties or in public. Today, while I’m determined not to hold back with white folks anymore — in the age of lies-as-truth, honesty feels like the only path left — the not-holding-back feels like a job. It’s not an act of love, at least not in the immediate way it had been for me.
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In Alan’s last days, when he was conscious (but unable to speak) and I was sure he’d recover, I tried to re-enlist him in our running conversation. I gestured to the news playing on the TV in his hospital room. “Look, Alan, Trump is running for president,” I exclaimed. “Can you believe it?”
I knew the answer: Of course he believed it. He’d been talking his entire career, and our entire marriage, about the gravitational pull of racial fear and loathing on politics, and Mr. Trump’s swiftly rising appeal was the storm that had been gathering during eight years of Barack Obama.
Yet for the first time, he seemed utterly uninterested in such news; as I ranted at the screen, he turned his eyes away. Maybe he knew what was coming, and knew he wasn’t going to be here for it.
I am living the next adventure by myself, though I take some comfort in living it — surviving it — with his name.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3986044&forum_id=2#36123516)