Adele: Mommy, what’s Wrong Conversation Syndrome?

Mommy: A term I introduced to my African American Studies class last year, Petunia.  Basically, it means “mainstream media” coverage of just about everything, every story.

Adele: My favorite is about the hippo and her belly button.  No one ever writes about that.

Mommy: The example I used for my class was that Supreme Court case about whether lethal injection was cruel and unusual punishment.  The case they should have been arguing was how racism and classism shape and drive the prison system in the country (as does cruel and unusual punishment).  Everybody knows our penal system is racist.  Everybody.  From ordinary people like me to legal experts to prisoners to Corrections Officers.  Death row is a Black male death row, for the most part.  It can take anyone with a brain about 10 minutes to learn that this is true.  And yet we’re in the Supreme Court arguing about lethal injection?  Seems like the Wrong Conversation to me.

Adele: I’ve never seen a Black man.

Mommy: You’ve probably seen some, Adele, in the park or downtown or at the store or what have you, but no, we’re white folks, you and me and your daddy and your brother.  And alomst all of our friends are white, especially the ones we see often.   So you haven’t really spent any time with Black people in your 11 months of life.  Your brother hasn’t either.

Adele: Shouldn’t we be talking about that, then?

Mommy: Ha!  What a smart girl you are, Petunia!  Wrong Converstaion, eh?  Maybe we should be.  Hmmm.  I was hoping we could talk about other examples of Wrong Conversation, like how we’re talking about restraint holds for Special Ed students that killed them rather than about the fact that Special Ed is so incredibly under-funded and supported and what this might have had to do with those horrible deaths.  Take NPR, for instance (an allegedly liberal media outlet that I think resembles more and more each day mainstream, stupid news).  Today I kept waiting for some caller to tell the removed host about how the ratio was crappy or how the training was rushed and the pay was shit and the stress was astronomical, and about how this is an institutional problem having to do with the lack of value and care we have for children–especially abused ones, neglected ones, disabled ones–in this country.  I mean, really.  But no.  Not even NPR gets to the meat of it.

Adele: I want my education to be special.

Mommy: It will be, Petunia.  It will be special because I’ll help you unlearn everything.  All those tests you’ll have to take?  That I hope your school won’t prep you for?  That’s Wrong Conversation, too.  What we should be talking about is learning, not test scores.  They’re two different things.  What we should be talking about isn’t Michelle Obama’s organic vegetable garden, it’s the fact that many pesticides cause cancer (again, a no brainer).  And on and on and on.

Adele: You make me tired, Mommy.

Mommy: I make myself tired, Petunia.  That’s why I take Prozac.  And we live in California, which is the most fucked up state in the universe.  Wrong Conversation Syndrome might have been born here.

Adele: I was born here.  That was a hard day.

Mommy: Maybe you can change things, Petunia, since you’re right in Wrong Conversation Heartland.  Maybe we can get people talking about rairness, love, equality, helping others.  What the problems really are.

Adele: You should let me pinch you.

Mommy: It hurts Mommy when you pinch me.

Adele: But I love to just squeeze squeeze squeeze!

Mommy: It’s not fair to pinch Mommy.  It’s not loving.

Adele: It’s like a little wormy.

Mommy: You need to exercise self control, awareness of the feelings of others.

Adele: What’s that?

Mommy: Subjects of conversation that too few of us have had.