By: Cyndi Whitmore

SOOO… I’m a thirty-something Unitarian Universalist/urban/professional/hippie/ghetto/trailer park/country/antiracist/pro-choice/standing on the side of love/1983 station wagon driving/single/ADHD/volleyball/boxing mom of three multiracial children and three bad-ass dogs.

I live in the 7-11 Fight Back Neighborhood in South Phoenix, also known as SoMo or South Mountain Village. Prior to the 1970’s, it was the only part of the city where houses were sold to Blacks, due to restrictive covenants throughout the rest of the city. It is the only Majority Black neighborhood in Arizona, a state in which, according to the 2007 Census, only 6% of the population is Black. South Phoenix is also home to a large Hispanic community, and recent development has brought an increasing number of White families to the area.

Development is not what brought me to South Phoenix. Three of the most beautiful kids on the face of this planet led me here, first as an occasional visitor and eventually as a proud resident. That choice confounds White folks, and perplexes many Black folks too. One friend pressed me,

But what did you think before you moved here? Did you think it was a nice neighborhood?

No, I never thought that. Like just about any transplant, I had been indoctrinated long ago that South Phoenix was a part of town to be avoided completely. Years ago, when I was a mentor with Big Brothers & Big Sisters of Arizona, I took my Little Sister horseback riding at South Mountain. Unfortunately, we got lost in the maze of one way streets downtown and I hadn’t had the foresight to have a) written directions, b) a map, or c) a full tank of gas, before venturing into that part of town. If I hadn’t been I was afraid I was going to run out of gas and be stranded in the hood in the days before everybody and their dog had a cell phone, there’s no way I would have gotten out of my car. I was convinced I was going to be shot in the time it would take me to get five bucks in gas (this being back in the days where five dollars in gas was enough to get you OUT of South Phoenix).

In 1996 I gave birth to my son, and began to realize how limited my own social circle was. Even though my early childhood was spent in diverse environments where I’d had friends of all races, by the time I got pregnant, I was like most White adults –in a social circle nearly devoid of diversity. The only Black people in my life were my boyfriend and his friends. Three years later, Tyler’s dad moved to the east coast, taking not only himself, but also Tyler’s social network. Tyler’s sitter was Black, but that didn’t exactly feel like a point in my favor between the social implications and her being the only Black person with whom I had any kind of friendship. I found myself, time and time again, frustrated with the bulletin board resources for parents of multiracial children. When questions came up about raising multiracial children with a healthy identity, particularly for single parents, White woman after White woman would comment, “Well, his father doesn’t really identify as African American so I just don’t worry about it.” I wasn’t buying that… but clearly, if I wanted my child to have a healthy sense of self, I was going to have to broaden my own white-washed world. Talk about a conundrum: how exactly does one go out and make non-white friends? I mean, you can’t just walk up to an acquaintance and say, “Hey, I’d like to invite you over for dinner because I think it would be good exposure for my child.” How self-serving and entitled is that? When a fellow parent from a bulletin board I frequented during my second pregnancy realized how close our offices were and suggested lunch together, I wouldn’t even let myself be hopeful that our commonalities (she also had a multiracial child born in 1999) would be enough to bond us. I was sure I would somehow alienate her with my silent desperation. But some things, however “too good to be true,” are meant to be. A sisterhood was born between two of the most unlikely candidates: a 25 year-old White Unitarian Universalist liberal who spent the second half of her childhood in a rural town where almost all of the Black families lived on the same block (referred to as “Nigger Alley” on a not-so-infrequent basis), and a 38 year-old Black Christian woman who grew up in the inner city and later confided that she once had a low opinion of interracial dating.

Less than a month after we met in person, Arria invited me to Thanksgiving dinner with her family after I cancelled plans with my own because my mother’s husband made a racist comment about my children. Over the next two years, I spent more holidays in South Phoenix with her family than I did with my own. In 2001, I enrolled my son in kindergarten. I noticed immediately that he was the blackest kid in his class, and possibly in the entire kindergarten. That’s saying something, because Tyler’s complexion isn’t much darker than mine. There didn’t appear to be any Black teachers, and I never saw more than a handful of Black students. Tyler’s dad was living out of state, and I worried again whether summer and winter breaks with his father would be enough to give him a solid sense of his “culture of colour.” I wondered where my children were going to see realistic, much less positive, portrayals of Black people to combat the negative images that are presented in media. I knew that no matter how close we had grown, my “token Black friend” wasn’t going to give my children the community I wanted for them. So, in 2002, halfway through my third pregnancy, we moved to South Phoenix. A lot of folks questioned my sanity (and some of them still do).

Despite all the issues in South Phoenix (and I know we have them), I’ve fallen in love with this community. I had to make a heart-breaking decision to send my children to a school in a neighboring suburb four years ago, but for the three years prior, I loved the many teachers and administrators I met in our home district who had attended Roosevelt schools and had come back to teach or become a principal. I love that I have a favorite checker at the grocery store and we know each other by name and ask after each other’s children! In many ways, South Phoenix is a small town in a sprawling metropolis, where you are more likely than not to run into someone you know at the gas station. Beyond that, living in a community where I am in the minority has forced me to see the reality of white privilege and denial, concepts that were previously theories I acknowledged but understood only in academic terms. People have occasionally applauded my “altruistic” decision to move to a predominantly Black neighborhood, but I see it first as one of the most obvious examples of my white privilege, and second, as much of a blessing to me as it is my children. I believe, or at least desperately hope, that making my home in this community has better prepared me to nurture these children whose flesh is of my flesh but is not the same color as my flesh.

I’ve blogged for almost a decade, and over the last couple of years I’ve become increasingly passionate about the objectification of multiracial youth, white privilege and denial, media portrayal of the community I love, and how racially divided our society is. We may work together, and our children may go to school together, but we are still profoundly divided in so many ways. In the dozen or so years since I started fielding the “What are they” questions, and particularly since moving to South Phoenix, I find myself talking about White people like I’m not one of them. A high school classmate recently made a comment, “Call 9-1-1… somebody stole our White girl again.” Arria shook her head as she laughed, saying, “The White people never HAD you.” I’ve been accused of everything from thinking I’m the great white hope to thinking that all White people are racist. I tend to say things people don’t expect to hear out of someone who looks like me, and every now and again I feel compelled to climb up on a soap box or two… I love to hear from readers, so please feel free to leave comments.