CARICATURE OF A RACIST
THIS IS ABOUT ME
First, I look more like Newt Gingrich than Newt does himself. No joke.
Second, my ancestry is 100% British Isles. I even snore in a British accent.
Third, I was raised in Southern Maryland, an area that supported secession during the Civil War, and helped John Wilkes Booth and crew escaped. I went to college in Appalachia, Western Maryland, coal country. I went back ten years later to the local school where I did student-teaching. Budgets devoted to in-classroom spending had been gutted. Teachers were prohibited from working overtime or spending their own money for items for the classroom, all at the order of the teachers’ unions. Spending went up, but it funded Equal Opportunity bureaucrats, a joke. Everyone in the county was equally white and equally broke.
I live in Tennessee, the reddest state in the country. Definitely a racist, case closed.
Reality:
I was raised by two Wisconsin transplants. My mother learned politics at the dinner table with her father’s good friend, Bob LaFollette, who founded the Progressive Party, what today would be called libertarian. My father hated no race, but was a virile anti-Semite his whole life. She dropped out of college, he got his master’s in International Relations and edited a Russian news gazette. He was investigated by McCarthy, and was permanently sidelined in the defense establishment for telling a general during a 1951 meeting that there would never be nuclear-powered aircraft in that decade or any decade.
I was reading his textbooks at four, and was a horrible problem in school. I wanted to learn how to build an atomic bomb; who gave a shit whether anybody ever saw Spot run. Eventually in Kindergarten I was banished to the library under my mother’s watchful eye where I discovered encyclopedias. After starting with the “H” volume I grew increasingly frustrated after thati stumbling as I went until I noticed a discussion about atomic warfare, and saw the word “nuclear” a lot of times. That led to other branches, and I developed the skills to navigate an internet more than 45 years in the future.
We lived in the DC suburbs, so once I could navigate buses and streetcars downtown, I began frequenting the stacks of the national archives. I quickly learned that the details of the crimes were in the subcommittee records.
I noticed that not everybody looked like me, and asked why there were no black people where we lived. There were no good answers. By the age of 8 I was downright angry. Tax money was being wasted building two of everything, one for white, one for colored. Eventually we began attending an integrated church, and the black folk were my tribe. They liked to sing loud and clap; didn’t give a shit what anybody else thought.
Quickly, my best friend was a young black man. The day after MLK’s assassination he and I went into downtown DC; he was the one who got hassled. We marched together in protests, did sit-ins, got beaten by police and spit on. It was one of the best times of my life. We weren’t asking for anything more than to be heard.
My college in Appalachia was slowly integrating. I dated a black girl once, and the restaurants let her in, but not me. I got the message. My fraternity was the first to induct a black brother, after inducting a blind brother and an openly-gay brother (to experience brotherhood with openly-straight guys, I guessed.)
The Military
I won the draft lottery and joined the military. I’ve never had good visual skills, am probably an ultra-high-functioning autistic. I could listen, and got my cues from sound. I could differentiate between Hispanics, whites and inner-city thugs, but would forget what they looked like while still talking to them. I had no problems.
I flew home after 18 months and married my sweetheart. It was fifty years this past January. She hadn’t been out in the world much, so when we arrived in Berlin and she saw an oddly-dressed woman and asked me about her, I said she was a prostitute. My bride did -an Exorcist-worthy head spin and stared.
We quickly became friends with a wide variety of people and joined a bowling team with our best friends, a black couple, and rounded it off with a single Jew. We called ourselves the KKK. Unofficially, of course.
Fast-forward to our first New Year’s Party, where we were the only whites. Buying our first house, we fired our realtor because she wouldn’t show us any integrated neighborhoods. When we first moved to Texas my in-laws were visiting when my boss and friend, Rick, drove me home for lunch. They walked out of the house rather than eat under the same roof with a black man.
Our two girls were 14 and 17 before they first had white boyfriends simultaneously. It was the way it was. When we moved to Ohio we signed a contract to buy a house, and the neighbor across from us welcomed us to the neighborhood. “Well, at least you’re white.” We surrendered the deposit and found another house.
We did our best to raise our daughters to think of people as individuals, not part of groups. Now in Tennessee, we live in an integrated neighborhood. Our daughters don’t see race as anything significant. We were imperfect parents, but succeeded in at least one important things.
right effing on Bill, your kids are lucky. My parents were the ones who would have said, or at least felt, like saying what the Ohio folks said....ah well...I got a rough start. Endedup on a mixed street in Portland OR, and I can say I have evolved some Best
Enjoyed this tremendously.