I grew up in the 70s and 80s. My mother, a liberated woman by most accounts, was a stay-at-home momuntil I went to middle school. My father worked 9-5 in the fashion district, home before dinner every night. He called himself a feminist, taught me that term wasn’t just for women. This meant he took me shoe shopping when my mother and I couldn’t stop fighting long enough to actually buy me shoes and when my mother said she wanted to go back to school and then get a job, he supported her doing that, ultimately being responsible for dinner several nights a week. It all seemed very cutting edge at the time.
My father was a gentle, Italian man who loved his family more than anything in the world. He never told
me what to do; in the house my mother was in charge. He just supported her decisions. I asked for his adviceoften, though, because he had created something out of nothing in his own life and I respected his focus and work ethic tremendously.
My father grew up poor. Very, very poor. He lived a few blocks from Yankee Stadium in the Bronx- 5
people in a 1 bedroom apartment. His father was an alcoholic who worked occasionally as a cab driver, his mother died when he was 10. Just about then, he went to work 6 days a week as a stock boy. He used the money to buy food for himself and his younger brother. He went to Bronx High School of Science, after which he and my mother got married and his brother moved in with the newlyweds because their father’s home wasn’t safe without my father there to run interference.
They waited to have children so my parents could work their way through college. My father went to FIT
for 10 years at night; he never graduated. He left, he said, when he’d taken the classes he needed to start his own business. They bought a condo in Yonkers and later a 4 bedroom center-hall colonial in Larchmont, raised two children who both went to college and graduate school, debt-free.
My father didn’t like to talk about being poor or how difficult his life had been, but he was proud that he
had worked his way out of that into a different life for us.
When we talk about economic injustice, when we talk about racial injustice, it’s stories like my father’s
that get told. Came from nothing. Made something. If you can’t do it, there’s something wrong with YOU.
What’s often neglected is the power of being a white, straight, Christian, cis-gendered, man who was born
in this country. My father’s story, and the idyllic life he created for us didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened in the context of a nation that wanted my father – and men like him – to succeed. All of our systems are designed to support this American Dream so that young, poor white boys can grow up to be upper middle class, suburban husbands and fathers. My dad was the target audience.
He went to one of the best high schools in the city. Most of the kids there were white. He got grants and
loans to go to college, an easy mortgage for his first condo, even though he had no credit history and was just starting a new and risky business. When he wanted to buy a house, everything was available to him. No redlining for my dad; I remember walking through towns like Scarsdale and Bronxville deciding what felt like home before choosing Larchmont where we were welcomed wholeheartedly. When he moved his business in the 90s from 5th Avenue to Gun Hill Road, local business owners as well as local police took the sign of a white man in the neighborhood as a good omen.
There are 70 million fathers in the US today, but not all of them have the opportunities my father had.
Police in this country were originally created to protect white people’s property and the dominant paradigm as defined by white men. Redlines were drawn on maps giving white men exclusive access to better neighborhoods with well funded schools. My father was encouraged to vote, and invited into country clubs and other circles where doors could open and influence could be expanded. Fatherhood and the life available to the family’s of our nation’s fathers is wickedly dependent on American social structures. These structures have changed, some, over time but not enough to create equal opportunities every father.
As a nation, we’re in an unraveling. Let’s just look at the last few months. For the first time since the
1930s, we’re having a serious discussion about the role of capitalism. We’re asking how the government could or should be helping people directly, giving us money in times of crisis, posing questions about how wealth is distributed, asking if the consequences of our economic system on the planet are worth the cost, wondering how capitalism has supported entrenched systems of oppression and guaranteed economic injustice.
We’re also witnessing a massive call for racial justice, not seen since the 1960s. Not just a moment, we’re
part of a movement, a shifting of the conversation that has seen more accountability in the last two weeks than we’ve seen in the last 20 years. People have taken to the streets en masse all over the nation and the world calling for an end to the systemic racism and white supremacy culture that has defined this nation from our inception.
And this week the Supreme Court determined that it’s unconstitutional for an employer to discriminate
based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Not a single person who shepherded the mid-century law in question would have considered the implication for gay or transgender people, but here we are, dismantling oppressions. Happy Pride Month!
And lest we leave out people who are here without documentation, the Supreme Court also granted at least a temporary, and certainly the road to a permanent stay for DACA recipients.
In our faith, we are called to stretch our arms as wide as we can, always pulling people in from the margins, making the center whole.
We are also called to live out of one of our central theological tenants. Revelation Continues to Unfold.
It did not happen once and for all time. Truth is revealed over and over again and we are called to live into these new ways with joy and welcome.
When I consider my father and his fight and success, I have a beautiful example of what’s possible. But,
it has to be possible for more than just him, for more than just white Christian, documented, straight, cis-gendered men. The current unraveling might feel awkward or frightening for some people, especially those for whom the current systems work well. For many of us, these systems were designed for our benefit. Watching them get dismantled isn’t comfortable. But, for many of us, these systems were designed to keep us down, to ensure our lack of success so the dismantling is a sign of hope, one we’ve been waiting for for a good long time, one our parents and grandparents might have been dreaming about, too.
Today is the summer solstice, the day of the year with the most light. The Earth is always moving, life is
always changing, a notion we can attest to this year more than any other. But with all the discomfort of change, this week, there is a whole lot of sun shining down on us as we celebrate the unraveling and await the new growth beginning to take root.
Father’s Day is far too narrow for us today. We celebrate our fathers, and father figures, and fatherhood. We celebrate men and the changing roles and new opportunities for men in our new society. This week we get to celebrate gay men and women with a significant step forward in the solidification of their rights. And we celebrate transgender people who are safer today than they were last week. We celebrate the energy coming from millions of people to dismantle systems of racial and economic oppression.
So today, as I celebrate my husband and indulge sweet memories of my father, I will also do all I can to
aid the unraveling so that next year, even more people will have reason to celebrate.