Author Archives: Amy Gage

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About Amy Gage

A community relations director in higher education and mother of two adult sons, Amy Gage spent the first 20 years of her career as a journalist and public speaker in St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. The issues addressed in her award-winning newspaper column, "On Balance: Issues That Affect Work and Home," remain relevant today. In "The Middle Stages," she continues the vital conversation about women's work and lives, with a focus on the challenges and contradictions of aging, the mixed blessings of forsaking family time for the more immediate rewards of a career, and how middle-aged women can continue to forge full lives even as their priorities and sensibilities change.

We liberal women owe Hillary our support

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Five days before the all-important Iowa caucus, CNN ran a story about why “women” are wary of Hillary Rodham Clinton. The reporter based this generalized conclusion on one visit with a group of middle-aged women gathered for conversation and Chardonnay.

Their reservations were not the understandable concerns of conservative voters who differ with Clinton on issues from abortion rights to amnesty for immigrants.

These were liberal women — educated, middle-class, Midwestern voters like me who came of age at a time of unprecedented gains in women’s rights.Hillary magnet

Unlike me, these Iowa voters were women whose fear or reluctance to proclaim themselves feminists could tilt the race against a woman whom the New York Times is calling “one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in modern history.”

Let’s examine these women’s concerns point by point:

  • Point 1: Hillary is less “authentic” than Bernie Sanders, they said. She displays what one columnist calls a “plasticity” that leads some to conclude she is merely ambitious. She wants to be president and has cast herself accordingly — especially in the U.S. Senate and as Secretary of State.

Think again: Where some see plasticity, I see professionalism and poise. What some denigrate as ambition, I call a singular focus.

Unlike so many women her age — who have moved in and out of the work force, setting aside their careers for families and channeling their talents into unpaid labor — Hillary Clinton has built a career as a consistent champion of women, children and society’s marginalized. Her post–First Lady life has given her a global perspective that Bernie Sanders lacks. And one that none of the Republican candidates seems to value.

  • Point 2: Hillary stayed with Bill Clinton for political reasons, the Iowa women said. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, whom Mrs. Clinton admires, Hillary took a shrewd look at her marriage and concluded that the partners could do more good together than alone.

Consider: The Clinton Foundation has raised $2 billion, with more than 88 percent of those funds going directly to programs. The foundation’s five interest areas include climate change and global health, and its Clinton Global Initiative focuses on education for girls and reducing gender-based violence. Surely the wine-drinking women from Iowa aren’t opposed to that.

I find the criticism of Bill and Hillary’s marriage particularly odd — and disingenuous— when it is leveled by women, historically the keepers of family ties. What Hillary has chosen to live with in private is not the public’s business, but it is a matter of our concern. No divorced woman would be elected president. Hillary knew that. And whatever sacrifice she made on behalf of her ambition (a word considered pejorative only when applied to a woman) is not merely self-serving.

It’s time for feminist women to recognize the literal and symbolic importance of electing a liberal female president — just as African Americans saw the meaning in electing a first-term U.S. senator to the highest position in the land.

  • Point 3: Hillary and Bill represent the past. The Iowa women noted a malaise that they called “Clinton fatigue” and seemed to lean toward Sanders for the same reason that young people do — his impassioned if impractical call to throw out the old political system in favor of a “Democratic socialism” that no contemporary U.S. Congress would abide.

Let’s get real: Sanders is 74 years old. He officially became a Democrat only after launching his presidential bid. His celebrated “America” ad — an emotional, narration-free pitch — is set to a 48-year-old Simon and Garfunkel song.

But no one declares him “dated” or “inauthentic.” None of the Iowa women claimed that his quarter century in Congress makes him a candidate of the past. Failing, perhaps, to remember that Ronald Reagan took office a month shy of 70 and began his battle with Alzheimer’s disease barely into his second term, supporters don’t see Sanders’ age as a potential handicap.

I respect Sanders’ doggedness and his focus on income inequality. His presence in the race has drawn Hillary to the left and rightfully earns him a spot in her cabinet. But I also believe he is getting a pass — on age, authenticity, ambition and temperament — that is not being granted to his more able and experienced challenger.

The women of Iowa better wake up, and quickly. I’m a fan of Paul Simon’s songs, too, but unless more women of all ages who benefit from feminism are willing to stand up and support one of the movement’s true champions, then come November, I fear, we’ll be humming not “America” but “Slip Slidin’ Away.”

Unconscious bias in a life of white privilege

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Dear White People: The Chicago police have shot another black man — and killed a black mother about my age. Pre-Christmas protests at the Mall of America and the Twin Cities airport were staged to remind me — us — of the unearned privileges we enjoy daily.Dear White People

Since the Black Lives Matter movement has come into public consciousness, I have felt blamed but largely blameless as a liberal white American. I believe in social equality. I strive to treat all people with kindness and compassion, whatever their race or ethnicity. I recognized the significance of President Obama’s swift rise to power.

I even thought my critique of him as an “acceptable black” — a cool, well-spoken and sophisticated man whom white America could embrace in a way we never would have the more militant Rev. Jesse Jackson — showed a level of cultural awareness.

It’s not enough. My cries of innocence, my position on the sidelines, my watching of the Black Lives Matter protests from the safe distance of my laptop, amount to nothing more than good intentions. In fact, they make me part of the problem.

I began to recognize my complicity in our country’s stratified social code even before African American philosopher George Yancy challenged me and all white people in a New York Times blog post on Christmas Eve to “accept the racism within yourself, accept all of the truth about what it means for you to be white in a society that was created for you.”

As a white American — a person of inherent privilege — I am being called upon to wake up, stand up and speak up at an age when I thought I’d earned the relative comfort for which I’ve worked so hard.

Unquestioned bias

I am a middle-aged Minnesotan, born and bred, who grew up in a small community with people who looked like me. With all white people.

I’m neither proud nor ashamed of that fact. It simply is. What matters, I am coming to see, is what I do with it.

My awareness of my white privilege has come haltingly, unbidden, in baby steps over the course of years. It may have begun during my years living in liberal, largely white Northfield, Minnesota. A black woman from one of the few African American families in town failed to show up at my house one night to work on a volunteer project for the public schools.

I was polite when she told me later that she’d gotten lost and that “a black person can’t be seen wandering aimlessly through this community.” But internally I scoffed. I judged her to be making excuses. I told myself that no one in that two-college town would regard a black person with such suspicion. Except I did.

The window to my awareness cracked open another inch when someone pointed out the assumptions I took for granted in my middle-class upbringing:

  • Of course I would go to college.
  • Of course Dad would pay for it.
  • Of course I would delay pregnancy till I was married through my access to high-quality health care and reliable birth control.
  • Of course, given the (white) feminist movement of the times, I would pursue not just a job but a career.

Each of those decisions, those options — those privileges — has kept me rooted in the middle class. That I did nothing to earn my station in life, and that I saw a safe neighborhood, good schools and economic opportunity not as a birthright but as the norm, did not occur to me till I was well into adulthood.

The clincher came weeks before Christmas, when I invited a young man onto my porch and then into my living room. He was looking for his smartphone in the snow by my house on a Sunday morning wearing only a lightweight jacket and shorts. He’d been drunk the night before — he conceded it, and I could smell it — but he was driving an SUV (a sure clue to social class), and he looked about the same age as my college junior.

I told myself I wanted to be a good neighbor. But I recognized the reality of my bias as the young man drove away. Would I have been so welcoming or felt so safe had his skin been black or brown? No need to pose it as a question. I know the answer.

Listen and learn

By 2019 the majority of children in the United States will be people of color. When my older son, a fair-skinned blond, turns 60 in 2050, the country will have no ethnic majority.

I learned those facts recently at a managers’ forum about unconscious bias sponsored by the University of St. Thomas, where I work. Our discussion leader, Dr. Artika Tyner, asked the audience of primarily white people to examine two questions:Artika Tyner_small

  • What are the biases I grew up with, that I hold to be true?
  • What efforts have I made to make awareness of my privilege a “lived reality”?

Dr. Tyner is an attorney, a professor, an author and the university’s interim chief diversity officer. She also is African American. Among the concepts she discussed that day — most of them new to me, a college graduate who’s worked in higher education for 13 years — was the notion of cultural taxation.

The academic term was coined in 1994 on behalf of non-white (or non-male or non-straight) professors. Dr Tyner defined it as the “under-represented team member who assumes additional responsibility for cultural awareness.”

Instead of us whites looking to her to tell us how to embrace or understand diversity, we could just start doing it. Like so:

  • “Begin with your humanity,” she said. “Say hello” to a person who doesn’t look like you.
  • Practice “radical hospitality” — making efforts to welcome and interact with people from different backgrounds.
  • Seek out readings about diversity. Dr. Tyner recommended a recent New York Times piece called “Diversity Makes You Brighter.” Or set a Google alert, she suggested, with the word “diversity” and another keyword related to your discipline or interests.
  • And this, of course: “Get out of your comfort zone.”

I’ve been practicing. Stepping onto a moderately crowded city bus recently, I deliberately sat next to a young black man and exchanged pleasantries with him as he got off at his stop.

Instead of grabbing for the usual chick lit for easy reading over Christmas break, I chose the 2010 memoir by National Public Radio correspondent Michele Norris, The Grace of Silence. Norris, whose parents integrated a neighborhood in south Minneapolis after World War II, leads “The Race Card Project” for NPR.

I Googled “yoga and diversity” and came upon articles about yoga and skin color, body shape and sexual identity. I noticed this morning, finally, that I rarely see people of color at my favorite yoga studio.

None of these is a particularly courageous step, but it’s a start. “Be willing to be vulnerable,” Dr. Tyner said, “and to give people the benefit of the doubt.” One person, one interaction, one observation at a time.

Flipping the bird at Thanksgiving

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It’s not that I’m an ingrate or fail to recognize the many unearned blessings in my life.

I simply want no part of Thanksgiving.

I don’t need the 4,500 calories that the Average American consumes in the carbohydrate- and gravy-laden meal served on the fourth Thursday of each November.

I don’t want to expend the time or money shopping for food, and I’m even less interested in spending days preparing it.

Instead, after having to cancel a visit to see my sister in Colorado because of work, I am spending Thanksgiving the way I wish I spent more weekends — with no plans at all.Flipped Bird

Turkey rebellion

Here are five reasons why sitting out this most overrated of holidays feels like the right thing to do this year.

No. 1: The food is predictable. Dry turkey, drier stuffing. The only color on the traditional Thanksgiving table comes from whatever centerpiece the hostess has assembled. Everything else is shades of brown and tan, like those suburban subdivisions I used to pass on my commute to work.

And what guru decreed that the traditions can never change? Put fresh green beans instead of canned in the infamous Midwestern casserole? Heresy. Bake the sweet potatoes with soy milk and ginger instead of butter and brown sugar? I made that mistake only once with my German-Catholic in-laws.

No. 2: I hate football. It’s boring. It’s slow. Its players have inflated pocketbooks and egos. I’ve wasted way too many Thanksgiving “holidays” pretending to be interested because the noise of the television drowned out any conversation in the room.

If women spent Thanksgiving watching Norma Rae, Tootsie or name-your-favorite-Meryl-Streep-movie at full volume while men overworked themselves in overheated kitchens, Thanksgiving would have been cancelled years ago.

No. 3: Thanksgiving is a sexist holiday. (See above.) Dad’s job — the role of any father from a bygone era — was to sharpen the knife, carve the bird and later ask from the easy chair when pie would be served. Mom’s job was everything else.

Even in my own nuclear family, with sons raised to be progressive, the men turn to me (the one who works full time and is in graduate school) with the wide-eyed question: “So, what are we doing this year?”

No. 4: I feel too somber to host or attend a meal. My mother died in September, and I think the best way to honor the woman who introduced me to feminism and the necessity of breaking social codes is to avoid repeating the obligation she dreaded every year.

In fact, Thanksgiving hasn’t been the same since my husband’s sister and children’s godmother, Peggy Studer, died in January 2011. Peggy was the family’s center. She held us together. Sure, she cooked too many potatoes and preferred pumpkin pie to pecan, but her humor and bold bitching about the timeless traditions never failed to make them fun.

No. 5: I don’t need Thanksgiving to remind me to be grateful. A Buddhist friend introduced me to the practice of gratitude in 2010. We spent a year exchanging a gratitude list by e-mail every night.

On the inevitably difficult days — those low times that later help us recognize real joy — I can always lift my spirits by reciting or writing down a list of why I’m thankful.

For my health, my home, my husband and grown sons, my job, my friends and family, my silly dogs, my sense of purpose: I am truly grateful. And that’s enough for me to celebrate Thanksgiving this year.