My Country is not Systemically Racist
I was born in 1948 during Jim Crow 1.0. It was already crumbling under the weight of a nationwide economic boom, which caused a concurrent boom in mobility. The GI Bill gave returning World War II veterans access to money for houses and education. The Civil War had entrenched the division between the industrialized North and the agricultural South. Incomes were low in the South, and there was a shortage of workers in the North. With the advent of the assembly line, created by Henry Ford, complex tasks were reduced to simpler subtasks that could be done with less training.
This sparked the enormous migration of black Americans to fill the labor shortage in the North. It was not as though people in the North suddenly became enlightened. First, they tried importing “white” Arabs to wok in their factories, but those efforts ran into resistance from the Arabs to assimilate into the new culture. The OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) grudgingly hired from among the flood of black families arriving daily. The OEMs further spawned specialist manufacturers of parts for the cars, thus creating incentives for new workers to relocate to Ohio, Indiana, Missouri and elsewhere.
There were already black Americans living in the North, and the Ku Klux Klan had metastasized from the South to the North. During the first half of the 20th Century, there were far more Klansmen in the North than in the South. The Klan held offices in and from northern states including Senators and Governors. The most famous of these was Robert Byrd, D-WV.
Things began changing during the run-up to World War II. As the military began ramping up, and industry began waking up in parallel, blacks and whites found themselves shoulder-to-shoulder training and manufacturing things. And the world did not come to an end.
In the 1950s, we lived in a rural area with large tracts of forest. While playing in the deep woods behind our house one day I found a black person hanged from a tree. There was a burnt cross nearby. I was so affected that I never revealed the fact until today. In businesses and schools in the area there was full integration. That happens when there’s only enough commerce or tax revenue to build a single building.
The end of World Two brought home men who had largely fought in integrated units, where the color of a man’s skin mattered far less than the color of his uniform. The one with whom you’re sharing a foxhole can have plaid, paisley or tie-dyed skin so long as his uniform looks like yours.
Finally, in 1954, a suit arrived at the U.S. Supreme Court that changed everything. Brown v. Board of Education, brought by Thurgood Marshall, used science to prove that school segregation was harmful to all involved. The Supreme Court ordered the nation to integrate schools at all deliberate speed. That turned out to be pretty slow. I went to public school in a county where schools were still segregated In 1966, I went to a college that was segregated in a system that was segregated. There were seven or eight state colleges in Maryland; two were specifically reserved for black students.
In the nineteen sixties I attended sit-ins and other protests. I marched and was hosed and occasionally beaten. I sat with black friends and acquaintances at lunch counters and was refused service, occasionally spit upon.
College
In college I joined a fraternity. We were a professional fraternity, something the administration didn’t understand. There were social fraternities and honorary fraternities. The college had two choices (this is often called Manichean Thinking, that one is either A or B, which excludes everything that is a number or a symbol. The administration decided we must be an honorary fraternity and overlooked us.) We were the first fraternity to induct a blind brother, the first to induct a black brother and the first to induct an openly gay brother. (I have often asked myself why we don’t talk about an openly straight person, but I digress).
Most of us married and are still alive. Most of those with whom I am in contact remain married to their first wives. There are some who were gentiles who married Jews, and a few Jews who married gentiles. That’s it. One brother’s father-in-law worked at McCormick Spices and invented bacon-flavored bacon bits for gentiles who married Jews.
Military
I won the draft lottery shortly after college and joined the Army. One could not choose one’s neighbors or coworkers, and I quickly adjusted to living and working with people of different races. I wound up spending more than 20 years in military intelligence, and most of it was great fun. My best friend in a six-month spook course was black; he was from Haiti and the best writer in our group. That only extended to writing in French or Spanish, though, so every evening following an exercise I first helped him with his reporting, then another friend’s reporting (his native language was Spanish, and he didn’t write well in that, either). Then I got to do my own writing.
During an exercise practicing checking into a hotel using an assumed identity, I spotted my friend. I said, “Boy, you’re black, carry these suitcases up to my room.” He put on a ghetto accent and bowed, responding with his thanks to do the service. The staff were not military, and they were aghast. The students all found it hilarious.
For on-base housing we had no choice of neighbors, but that only affected us twice. For off-base housing we took what was available, and neighbors’ skin color was immaterial. We had two girls; the youngest was 16 before both had white boyfriends simultaneously. When we bought our first house, we fired our realtor. She would not show us houses in integrated neighborhoods, restricting us to about 25% of the market. Following my retirement from the military we moved from Virginia to Southwest Ohio. We actually put money down on a house, and a neighbor walked across the street to greet us. He began with, “At least you’re white.” We withdrew our offer that day. We weren’t going to fit in with the neighborhood. Six houses later, we moved into an antiquated condominium where I, at 73, got to join the youth group. We’re in Tennessee, the reddest state in the country, and our neighbors are all colors, The President of the HOA is gay; nobody cares.
I was privileged in my military career to know a number of presidential appointees, not only in the Defense Department but elsewhere. I used what credibility I had to get audiences to listen to a compelling case for not prohibiting homosexuality in the military. Part of this was pure logic. In no other area is wanting to do something illegal. I can think all day about wanting to rob a bank, but until I actually try to do so, I have committed no crimes. Not so with homosexuality. The military had criminalized thought. This and other efforts by other people led to “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell.” The policy today is seen as an insult. In fact, it was a necessary step to prepare the institution to accept the amount of change needed to legalize homosexual activity. Organization readiness to accept change is rarely considered when introducing new policies or programs. A great deal of effort is wasted as a result. Today, same-sex relationships are seen as part of a normal continuum.
I suppose I need to talk about slavery in here somewhere. The story is that slavery began here in 1619, arrival of the first black slaves in the colonies. The date is correct, the description is wrong. In 1619, the official depopulation of Ireland began by the English. They sent hundreds of thousands of Irish to the New World, reducing the population of Ireland from 1,500,000 to 600,000. The difference was shipped to Virginia, New England, and English islands in the Caribbean as slaves.
If further proof is needed to show that the Biden administration is wrong, and the US is not a systemically racist and oppressed country, it is available in the numbers of people streaming across our open southern border every day. According to the US Customs and Border Patrol figures, in fiscal year 2022, which began on October 1, 2021, we are admitting approximately 200,000 people across the Southwest Border from over one hundred countries around the world, every month. Of these, we expel about 25,000 every month. The remainder are given notices to appear in an immigration hearing on dates up to two years distant. They are then flown overnight to destinations inside the US and dropped off in cities with no notice to local authorities. The local jurisdictions are then required to feed and house these people at their own expense and cover their health care and education costs.
The bulk of these new arrivals are people of color, totaling more than the population of Philadelphia each year. They come to the US via perilous routes, often spending their life savings to get a single family member into the U.S., to be marginalized and oppressed by white supremacists. These are either the stupidest people on the planet, or the underlying premise of oppressors of privilege is wrong. I invite other views.
Hi Bill,
Glad to see you still kicking the Grim Reaper's ass! Great post, seems like the wheel has finally turned and is starting to roll. As a famous black dude once said "I pity the fool!"
so I added some new sections and redesigned my platform, would love to get your take on it. I added a POLITIX section, which will focus on my angle there.
Another fine essay, thanks. I grew up in VA and was in HS as Brown arrived. At the time, I was aware of the segregation and thought it odd. I enjoyed hanging out, outside bars in the black part of town, enjoying the music along with teens of color. We were there to enjoy the music and would pass around our bottles bought either by bribery at the state liquor store or via boot leggers. There were skirmishes related to teens and hormones, but no real trouble. Most of us just accepted a system we thought unfair. I did have friends that got all worried about blacks stealing our girls but at the time had a certain relationship with a lovely black girl so I just ignored them.
Our elders seem concerned about the social breakdown but I wasn't particularly concerned. I joined the military as an escape and served in generally integrated units. I was in one unit that was quite segregated perhaps because we operated in small teams requiring high technical skills. Whether it became segregated as a result of the social compatibility testing we had to endure or because of the high technical content is uncertain. We often operated in isolated locations for weeks where we had to share cooking, etc among ourselves - in those cases you often had to develop great tolerance for others. Back in the unit, the teams would dissolve and new teams created so at least we got new blood in the game. I understand that the organization now has become more inclusive, even with females now, but I understand those isolated locations are no more. Given the sensitivities, I'm not likely to ever know. But that work was but a few years into some 22. In other assignments, I've never found much reason for discrimination. I do see that in today's wokeness apparently they are finding discrimination persists. I wouldn't know and maybe in my time it just eluded me or wasn't common in the more technical fields.
I think sometimes we create problems so we can solve them. Just an observation.
BTW, the real 1619 story is fascinating - the red letter year - first boatload of women as well as captured blacks and the formation of government. Some of those blacks became property owners and had their own indentured servants. Just imagine the colonists as this privateer arrived with such strange cargo of quite primitive people who couldn't speak English. They were purchased as were all who owed for passage to the New World and became indentured like all who arrived without means. Whoever purchased them had to train them and socialize them. At the time the buyers took on a lot of extra responsibilities. Slavery was unknown in most English speaking places in those days. The distortions of the modern view are quite sad.