RACISM

If you, like me, are prejudiced against racist rants and quickly turn the page or hit delete when you come across one, I ask you to give this racist rant a fair hearing. Delay deleting this post and you might find that I have become discriminating in my prejudices. And you might agree with me.

I confess that I am a racist. The on-line dictionary defines racism thusly: “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.” That’s me in a nutshell. I am prejudiced against two particular racial groups, both afraid of becoming rapidly marginalized.

Racism in itself is not a crime but certainly a character defect. I do not brag about this or other defects of mine, but I will say that I share this particular defect with a great many humans, perhaps even all humans, and certainly with the soon-to-be-past President of the U.S., while at the same time I do brag that my particular defect is distinct from the President’s.

Racism is a learned behavior—no racism gene has been discovered. Racism is a strong motivator that can Trump self-interest and incite riots and wars. Racism in the form of slavery is a dominant theme in the founding, structure, subsequent history and current events of the U.S. It is responsible for ridiculous anomalies such as our Electoral College that allows a loser to become President, and the U.S. Senate where a state with a population under a million gets the same representation as a state with 39.5 million. Racism in the form of genocide accounts for the large land mass of the U.S.

Throughout my long life, I have seen overwhelming evidence of racism. What we have lived is an essential part of what we are, and for 77 years I have been immersed in racism, some of it unobtrusive, like the atmosphere that surrounds us on a calm day, some of it shocking like a bolt out of the blue. I cannot be other than racist.

I grew up in the south side of St. Louis. Our neighborhood was affectionately called the South Side Dutch, conjuring up the image of the old lady with the white headscarf scrubbing the white marble steps on her stoop (porch) that appeared on cans of Old Dutch Cleanser. As it was an all-white neighborhood, I didn’t notice any racial or ethnic intolerance, except in my family, for many years. There was friction between the Protestants and Catholics, but that was so mild that perhaps it didn’t really exist outside my family. My father’s side was Catholic, and according to my mother, blamed her for not raising my siblings and me as Catholics even though she had signed papers promising to do so. The fault, however, was my father’s. He was prejudiced against the Catholic Church because, as he often claimed, the nuns beat him severely in school—probably with good reason, but maybe that’s my prejudice. 

My father was a man of deep prejudices and used pejorative terms for all nationalities and races, with special passion for black people and Jews. My mother tried to calm him when he went on a racist tirade, usually resulting in increased tirade volume. My mother and her sister must have had their own prejudices, since, as I maintain, racism is universal, but any racial prejudices were not visible to my innocent eyes, and my aunt’s long-time boyfriend was a Jew. As I grew older and became more aware of pejorative terms and phrases, I sometimes felt sorry for the boyfriend when I heard my father or my mother’s brother talk, in front of the boyfriend, about some great deal they got by Jewing someone down. Years later I stopped feeling sorry with the boyfriend when I heard him rant about black people. Victims can also be oppressors.

I must have been about 11 years old when my friend, Leonard Pagano, complained that someone had called him a dago. I was not shocked by that. I knew the term. My father used it often, and a mostly Italian neighborhood in St. Louis was, not affectionately, called Dago Hill. Now it is called simply The Hill and is a popular tourist area. When Len told me, it was as if a light went off in my brain. I realized that racial slings and arrows were hurtful to the targets. 

St. Loo was and still is a racially divided city. Black people lived on the north side and across the river in East St. Louis (I didn’t know the term “ghetto” until I studied WWII history), white people in the south, the west, and the suburbs. Jews congregated in a suburb near Washington U, officially named University City, usually called U City, which my father, not affectionately, called Jew City. There were few Asians or Latinos. My grade school and high school were all white. My mother’s boss in the credit department at Sears was Japanese. My mother liked him and talked about him with respect, but to my father who had served in the military during WWII, he was a Jap. My father didn’t use any offensive terms for German Americans, because they were a majority in our South Side Dutch neighborhood, and my mother’s side was only a generation or two from Germany. Mr. Hirowaki had moved to St. Louis to avoid the internment camps, which I knew nothing about but filed away for future reference. I thought of him when I toured Manzanar. I didn’t know any Native Americans, although my father claimed to be part Cherokee. He had the classic profile and lack of facial hair, but he also had no lack of blarney.

Radio, TV, and Hollywood movies were rich sources for racial prejudice material. I laughed at Amos and Andy on the radio, while most Asians were, naturally, the evil enemies in war movies, be they WWII or Korean. The Chinese, as a race, were not the enemy—we hated the Maoists but loved the Chiang Kai Shekists—but they were good for laughs. I was amused by old Charlie Chan movies on TV in which white actors portrayed comical Chinese characters.  I vividly remember Mickey Rooney playing the Chinese landlord with impossible buck teeth and coke-bottle glasses in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He, as did Charlie and family, spoke with a hokey sing-song accent.

St. Louis was not an important stop on the foreign film circuit, and I was mostly limited to war, cowboy, or Rock Hudson and Doris Day movies. I was impressed when Rock, without Doris, stood up for his Mexican daughter-in-law in Giant, but seldom saw Native American role models. No one wanted to play Tonto when we played cowboys and Indians. I didn’t see a Japanese movie until I was in my thirties and lived in California. I now much prefer the Kurosawa originals to the spaghetti-western rip-offs. 

At 17, I went to the U of MO at Columbia where I, for the first time, mixed with black students. Black students were a distinct minority and most were athletes, but a few who weren’t. Sixty years later I can still picture the black girl I talked to on the steps outside our chem class. I liked her and thought she was attractive, and it occurred to me to ask her out, but I was shy, afraid of rejection, and had no money—boys had to pay in those days—which meant that I didn’t really date.

Football games at the U of MO were big deals with huge crowds that chanted missouRAH and a marching band that played Dixie while some people waved Confederate flags. It was all new to me—I was from the big city and said Missouree and had never seen a confederate flag except in Civil War movies—but because the crowds loved it and cheered, I enjoyed it but refrained, I hope, from cheering. I did not think of the implications, not for a minute.

In my second year, an older, black, gay, grad student lived in a single room across the hall. He seemed to like to me and often wandered into my room which I shared with a friend, white and straight of course, from Kansas City. The grad student—I no longer remember his name; this was 59 years ago—flirted with me, probably to wind me up. I had no experience that I knew of with gay people (subject for another post?). He worked in some state government job and had an apartment in Jeff City which he invited me to several times. He liked my hair—dirty dishwater blonde with some blonder streaks, and occasionally ran his fingers through. I was embarrassed but shy and could only come up with lame excuses for not going to Jeff City with him. When he left our room, my roommate giggled and teased me. I liked the man but I also giggled. And quite possibly the man giggled in the privacy of his own room.

I laid out of school one year and worked in a factory in North St. Loo. No black people worked in the factory but a lot of rural migrants did, the kind who said Missoura. It was a poorly paid job but I felt important when they made me Traffic Manager. I arranged for shipments in and out of the warehouse. One drayage firm hired a black driver. I met him at the warehouse. He seemed nice enough. That same day I got a call from the warehouse manager telling me not to send that driver again, because he was a terrible driver and took too long backing the semi up to the loading platform. I dutifully called the drayage firm, and the dispatcher accused me of racism. I didn’t think I was racist because I liked the man and had nothing against him, but the dispatcher was right. Because I didn’t stand up for the black driver, I was part of the systemic racism in the U.S., and 57 years later I am still ashamed.

I was a big baseball fan, and my best buddy and I often sat in the dollar seats in the center field bleachers at Sportsman’s Park. I knew who Jackie Robinson was and how important he was to baseball, but, I was a slow learner, and didn’t realize that even after the Dodgers moved to L.A. they drew a large black crowd when they came to town. I knew the Cards were late in integrating, but when I began attending games they had four black stars. And a Cuban. Curt Flood, Bill White, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, and Julian Javier, were all favorites of mine. Late one season when the Cards and the Dodgers were fighting for the pennant, my buddy and I sat in the old wooden center field bleachers, two white boys in a sea of black fans. Late in the game, Flood, the Cards’ speedy center fielder, dashed to the wall and made a spectacular catch of a long drive, practically right in front of us. Everyone in the bleachers rose as one and cheered. The black man next to me and I hugged each other. Flood later became an even bigger hero because of his abolitionist challenge of major league baseball’s reserve clause.

As Latinos were few in St. Loo—we didn’t even have a Mexican restaurant–I wasn’t aware of much prejudice against them. I don’t even remember my father using a pejorative for them. In my 20’s I dated a Mexican American. She told me the family had changed their surname from Cruz to Cross, to fit in better. I was ignorant and slow and didn’t realize what she meant.

When I was 24, Uncle Sam made me an offer I couldn’t refuse—at least my conservative background led me to believe that an old baseball injury was my only honorable way of refusing. For the medical exam 40 or so of us stood, stripped to our shorts around the perimeter of a large cold room. A doctor—well, a man in a white coat—stood in the center of the room and told us to turn around, drop our drawers, bend over and spread our cheeks. When the man in the white coat examined 40 anuses at a 20-foot distance, it occurred to me that my old sports injury might not be much help. I also noticed that a big black man in the room wore tight black boxer shorts while all the rest of us wore baggy white Jockey shorts. It had never occurred to me that there was any other color for men’s underwear.

Because of my advanced age I was flown with several other twentysomethings, including the man with the black boxers, to Fort Bliss, TX, while the 18 year olds went to Fort Leonard Wood, MO. I didn’t notice any racial or ethnic prejudices in basic training, possibly because I was too wrapped up in my own problems, too worried about my immediate future. I became friends with the black-boxers man, Bobby. He was a tight end on the Cardinal’s football team. I shared a room with a white kid, Lonnie, and Bobby shared a room next door with a black kid, Mooney. We did not bunk in the main part of the barracks. I remember that out in the desert, a very tired and thirsty Bobby and I drank out of the same canteen. When Len Pagano and I were kids, we sometimes drank out of the same bottle of soda, wiping it theatrically first to get rid of the cooties. Bobby didn’t give my cooties a second thought, nor I his.

We had two drill sergeants, one white and one black. The white one had a lot of red in his neck and was nasty and sadistic. He liked to pick on the weaker recruits. Color didn’t matter. Once, when we were doing pushups, he stepped on a recruit’s head, slamming it into the cement pavement and causing his forehead to bleed. Another time when he was obviously drunk, he hit a recruit who couldn’t understand his order. The black drill sergeant was exemplary, always looking sharp in ironed fatigues with knife-sharp creases. No dust dared decamp on his spit-shined boots, not even on forced marches in the desert. He did all the exercises with us, never breaking a sweat, his campaign hat never listing out of place. He was as hard on us as the redneck, but never unfair or sadistic. When we graduated, he came into my room and relaxed, shooting the shit with Bobby, Mooney, Lonnie and me. He told us that he was a confirmed lifer and was going for thirty (years). His only complaint about the army was that too many bases were below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Because he was a pro football player, Bobby was immediately made Sergeant and sent to Germany. I was sent to Fort Rucker, Alabama for advanced training. I noticed a lot of prejudice there. There was open animosity between a white guy from Georgia and several black guys who hung out together. The white guy explained to me that he wasn’t a racist, but they were. That was my first up close and personal experience with projection, which I have now seen nearly every day these past four years. I also saw convincing evidence that things were not as peachy as the white Georgian claimed. On leave I went to a run-down gas station across the state line in Georgia. It was hot and I had my uniform on and I wanted a drink of water. The white attendant in greasy overalls listlessly pointed to a ceramic drinking fountain attached to a slowly collapsing shed. The fountain was as filthy as the attendant’s overalls. The filth and a White’s Only Sign hanging somewhat crookedly above the fountain shocked me. I was not completely innocent and knew that whole populations saw similar signs every day, but it was if those signs, that overt bigotry, was from a foreign country, an alien reality. I had never experienced that reality before, and it was a bolt out of the blue. I decided that I was not thirsty enough to drink from a fountain my old buddy Bobby couldn’t drink from. Too many cooties.

King was assassinated while I was at Ft. Rucker.

I nearly drowned in bigotry in Vietnam. The air was thick and oppressive, as was the racism—I could feel its weight—but it was not the racism I expected. All the GIs used a common pejorative for the Vietnamese, even the black GIs. I vowed not to give in, but I confess that one particularly bad night during Tet, I lapsed. I had never been around so many people who were different than the people in my South Side Dutch neighborhood. I became friends with Pete, a Mexican American from Texas, and my best friend my last six months was Larry, a black man from Chicago. Larry often complained about the rednecks in his hooch and spent his off hours in mine. Our First Sergeant, an old southern white guy, younger than I am now, seemed to go out of his way to call the black GIs boy. He did not use the off-limits N word but his thick southern accent transmogrified the word Negro into Nigra. I got along, I like to think, with a highly decorated black sergeant on his second tour. We shot the shit as we stacked buku sandbags after Tropical Storm Bess nearly wiped us off our little hill. When he got caught with hash and was about to lose a stripe, his anger erupted. He accused our CO of racism and tried to kill him with a white phosphorous grenade. Two black GIs ordered the white soldiers to stay away, and they tackled the Sergeant. It had never occurred to me before, but now because of the B. L. M. movement, I think they were afraid some white GI would shoot the Sergeant. We all carried M-16s, locked and loaded.

I made it out alive and moved to Philadelphia where I began my transmogrification into a coastal elite (perhaps the subject of another post). I didn’t know much about the politics of the City of Brotherly Love, but soon after I moved there, Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo led a police raid on the Black Panther Party offices. They took the prisoners outside, stripped them naked and leaned them against a wall in full public view. This was meant to humiliate the Panthers, which it no doubt did, but photos of the event appeared in the local, national, and world press, humiliating many Philadelphians and Americans. It didn’t humiliate enough Philadelphians and Rizzo was soon elected Mayor.

I got a job as a roofer in a company in the suburbs of Philadelphia. My mentor was an old black guy. He had a lot of years as a roofer under his belt, and was a good teacher, but he worked for low pay—higher than mine—for our non-union company. The city was tightly unionized and no blacks were allowed in the roofer’s union.

For the past 30 years or so I have interviewed many hundreds of indigenous Guatemalans. I have been to the refugee camps in Chiapas, Mexico and indigenous towns in Guatemala. Learning about their lives has taught me a great deal about the persecution of black people as well as Native Americans in the United States. I have testified in Immigration Court that the situation for the indigenous people in Guatemalan is similar to that of American blacks in post-Reconstruction southern states. They are ostensibly free, free to work for starvation wages on the plantations where they are abused and cheated by non-indigenous supervisors and owners. Sound familiar? Non-indigenous people can and do rape indigenous women and sometimes indigenous men with impunity. Sound familiar? Some of the stories I have heard have shocked even me. I studied and read about the North American genocide of Native Americans in the 1800’s. I learned about the Guatemalan genocide of the Maya in the 1980’s through interviews with survivors. Even today indigenous Guatemalans are driven from their ancestral lands by brutal tactics. Even today many indigenous children are discouraged or prevented from getting an education or becoming teachers—non-indigenous teachers routinely insult and physically abuse indigenous students, causing many to drop out. The high illiteracy rate is then trumpeted by the racist non-indigenous people as proof that the indigenous people are inferior. Sound familiar?

As an old white guy, I have a deep understanding of the resistance to change. At the same time that I chafe under change, I embrace many of the great changes I see. Black, Latino, and Asian actors are common in the movies and on TV in leading and meaningful roles. A work of art, Moonlight, won the best picture Oscar a few years back. Mixed race couples are common. As an aside: Why don’t geneticists speak out against this purity of the race nonsense? Aren’t species with larger gene pools better adapted to survive? Something to think about during those long pandemic nights?

The changes have become so widespread and common that many people do not notice them, many take them for granted and embrace them, as we have seen in the very large B.L.M. demonstrations. While it is undeniable that “all lives matter”, as even the B.L.M. people would agree, that term has become the rallying cry of the racists, their attempt to turn the tables on the B.L.M. movement.

It is undeniable that racism is still a force to be reckoned with and will not go down without a fight, a fierce, no-holds-barred, punches-below-the-belt fight. It is undeniable that white cops stop people for driving while black, use excessive force against black people, and kill black people. It is undeniable that old white President Trump is racist, surrounds himself with old white enablers, and performs for his gun-toting, white supremacist followers. It is undeniable that many old white Congressmen opposed what President Obama proposed primarily because he is black. It is undeniable that many white politicians scheme to deny black citizens the right to vote. It is undeniable, unless you’re a Supreme Court Injustice, that racism is still systemic in the U.S. The optimist in me thinks that even they might have had their eyes and minds opened a little by the recent surge of cop killings of black people and the Black Lives Matter movement. But then the pessimist in me thinks that poor math skills will prevent the Injustices from extrapolating from excessive force by police to voter suppression. And the cynic in me thinks that some Injustices simply want to keep Red states Red.

I confess that my use of the word undeniable is illogical, knowing that denial is our first line of defense.

My family and friends have all moved out of the old neighborhood and into the all-white suburbs, part of the white flight exodus and partly because that was the American dream. On my rare visits to my hometown I like to go to the old South Side Dutch neighborhood, not for nostalgic excursions down memory lane, but because the old neighborhood has had an attractive makeover. It is now a vibrant area with Mexican/Nicaraguan, Middle Eastern, Vietnamese and Thai restaurants. The old white-bread Kroger store is now an international food store. Foot traffic is still mainly white, but with a healthy mix of black, brown, and Asian people, and what seems to be a large, out, gay community. I also go to The Hill for good Italian food or to shop at the great delis. Those areas give me hope that my hometown might yet overcome its bigoted past. Those hopes were somewhat dashed at a high school reunion, in the suburbs, of course. At lunch with a group of old friends, all old white men, of course, I blathered enthusiastically about the changes in our old neighborhood. One ex-friend told me that it was so dangerous that he wouldn’t let his wife go there (as if she needed his permission). When I innocently mentioned that suburban people probably said the same things when we lived there, he got defensive and offensive and said that I didn’t live in the area and didn’t know what I was talking about.

I am smugly self-satisfied by the fact that I have not brought out the old anti-semitic trope about some of my best friends, etc., etc. But I will now dust off that old cliché, shake it, and twist it into the shape that fits my prejudices. I confess that I am still a racist. I am prejudiced against at least two racial groups.

I am prejudiced against old, straight, white men, although some of my best friends are old, straight, white men, although I am an OSWM. Walking down the street or in social events, I try to avoid unknown OSWM. When I do meet one, my fight or flight response locks and loads, knowing that if I’m not careful in my conversation I will strike a wall, greater than Trump’s and also not paid for by Mexico, which will keep me up at night thinking of the many useless points I should have fired at that impregnable barrier.

I am also prejudiced against young, straight white men who feel the need to carry automatic weapons in public places as if every city street were a war zone. When I see them on TV I think of Lewis Black’s riff on water—people leave their apartments in Manhattan every morning, carrying a liter of water as if they were going to cross the Mojave Desert. I shudder to think what these gun-toters’ fantasies are like: Probably only different than my childhood fantasies in that I was a child with make-believe weapons and Nazis and fascists were my enemies. And I realized they were fantasies.