rev·e·la·tion/ˌrevəˈlāSH(ə)n/nounnoun: revelation; plural noun: revelations1. a surprising and previously unknown fact, especially one that is made known in a dramatic way.2. the divine or supernatural disclosure to humans of something relating to human existence or the world.Middle English (in the theological sense): from Old French, or from late Latin revelatio(n- ), from revelare ‘lay bare’.
We are finally, slowly, getting to that place in the decline of our Covid19 numbers that we may start opening up some of our local personal services businesses again. Except in Toronto and Peel Region, the rest of the province is open for business, albeit in a significantly altered form. Newly re-opened hair salons are unable to keep up with the volume of business. Desperate women with three inch roots and grown-out bobs are flocking to the salons. I haven't decided yet whether I will be one of them. I could certainly use a haircut. My hair is now down to the middle of my back and though I normally dye it myself every four or five weeks, I haven't done it since the middle of February when we left for our Australian adventure. It has grown unusually fast. My roots are four inches long. I'm less than two weeks away from my senior citizen birthday, officially making me an old lady in a gray ponytail. A few months ago, I would have been mortified by the thought but not now. I have a couple of bottles of hair dye in my bathroom cupboard but sometime in these days of lock down, I busted my give-a-damn. I haven't been able to work up enough interest to care.
I can count on the fingers of one hand, the number of times I have dabbed on a little makeup in the last four months. I rarely wore any in the Australian heat save a couple of nights we were going out for a special dinner. I made a bit of an effort when I attended my cardiology appointment a few weeks ago. I've made it a policy to try and look vital enough that the medical team is motivated to save me. But mostly, I'm feeling the same way about my unvarnished face than I do about my hair. It is what it is.
My head has been in other places. It is an amazing time to be alive. Covid19 laid bare the world and exposed many of the inequities in our society. It is as if we have woken from a long sleep and for the first time are seeing the extreme divide between haves and have-nots, the horrendous oppression of people of colour and the depths of corruption of those in elected office. And now awakened from our slumber, we can no longer close our eyes. The challenge before us is to know what to do. How do we change what is? How do we reinvent our society? Where is our place in this reordering of the world?
A couple of weeks ago, I had a revelation of my own, not about the wider world but of a personal nature. I dug out a picture of my dad taken ten months before he died. I wanted to post the picture on Facebook on the day that would have been his one hundredth birthday. As odd as it must seem, until I looked at that picture again, I never realized that my dad was not a white man but a brown man. I can only now surmise that in the time and place where I grew up, we didn't know any brown people. There were white people, black people and Asian people. Daddy wasn't black or Asian so he was white. He used to joke that he had a prenatal tan. I remember the first time I was given a self-identification form to fill out for a federally-regulated employer required to track the racial composition of their staff for the purposes of employment equity. There were so many boxes to choose from including one for those who identify as Middle-Eastern. I was shocked to see it as minority category. I checked "Caucasian". It is what I always believed myself to be. My mom was French Canadian, fair-skinned, green-eyed. What was rarely spoken of in her family is that her father's mom was a full-blooded Mohawk, and yet her father was as white as white can be. None of this makes a difference to how I see myself. I have always identified as white though I'm not the whitest woman in the world. I have, at times, taken a few arrows - mostly for the crime of traveling to the U.S. while having an Arab name. I had a frightening encounter in upstate New York with a man in a pick-up truck who mistook me as Mexican and tried to run me over on a Sunday morning a couple of weeks before the election of Donald Trump. There have been a couple of other minor incidents over the years, all of which I found more puzzling than upsetting. But nothing that has happened to me is as horrid as the stories I hear from black people and the murders of black men we have watched with our own eyes these past few weeks. I have cried rivers of tears, not just for those lost but also for their mothers and for all the mothers of black children. I am the mother of a white, heterosexual, cis-gendered man and I still worry about his safety all the time. I can't even imagine the depth of fear those mothers must have.
Last week, I lost a consulting assignment at an agency where I have previously done some work. I wanted the assignment badly - while there wasn't much money in it, I thought it was a chance to really help. It was an investigation of race-based discrimination and conflict in a non-for-profit agency. I have been doing diversity and equity work since 1982 and in the course of my work for the agency last year, I flagged some problems for them that I had uncovered though they were unrelated to the project I was doing at that time. I offered my assistance (without charge) but they didn't take me up on it. Almost a year later, the issues blew up and they approached me about retaining me to do an investigation. But a few days later, they told me they wanted to retain a consultant from a black-led business and they set out to find one. Fair enough. I couldn't be angry about that but I was certainly disappointed. I am feeling powerless to help. I can't even participate in a peaceful BLM protest march while we are in the middle of a global pandemic. After forty years of equity and diversity work, I can no longer find my place. I have been wondering if it is time for me to retire. Last week I reached out for advice to a friend who runs a diversity training consultancy. She recommended that I bide my time and assured me the right opportunity to help will present itself. In the meantime, she suggested I braid my gray ponytail and maybe shave my legs. And suddenly, my heart felt lighter.
