White nationalists, skinheads, and other hard-core racists don’t just hate people of color, but they also hate white folks who display multi-cultural and multi-racial values. My first personal experience with that mind-set took place when I was 11 years old. (The word hate is often overused — and used inappropriately these days, but in this situation, I think that it is appropriate.)
White folks - including children - in parts of Texas can be brutally prejudiced. I am very white — Dutch & Scots-Irish heritage. In 1952, I was adopted by a couple from Effingham, Illinois. The next year, we moved to the SW side of Chicago near Marquette Park. Then my new mom and I took the train from Chicago to Nacogdoches, Texas to visit her sister and family. My same age cousin (11 y/o) and I had to talk his friends out of beating me up simply because I had a Yankee accent.
That’s not much compared to what minorities — especially blacks — have to endure. However, it made a lasting impression, and introduced me first hand to the reality of hard-core southern white bigotry and prejudice.
My Chicago high school — Harper HS at 65th & Wood Streets — was still all white when I started there in 1956, and the first black students arrived during the late 1950’s while I was a student. But my first real friend of any color other than white was a coworker at a summer job. At the end of my sophomore H.S. year, my father, a Presbyterian minister, got me a summer job as a dishwasher at a church-owned summer camp. The camp was for “underprivileged” children from Chicago’s inner city, and the kids, counselors and staff were multi-cultural and multi-racial. There were three dishwashers — Randy Drs and I were white, and John Elliot was black. The three of us shared a tiny hexagon-shaped cabin, and became good friends for the summer. I don’t recall any issues related to race, even when John hooked up with a very pretty teenage white girl who was brought to the camp with the younger kids to get her away from a bad situation back home in Chicago. I was a bit jealous, but John was athletic, and much more of a “studly” teenager than me, a science nerd, and I recognized their chemistry.
I dropped out of college in 1962, joined the U.S. Navy, and spent 4+ years stationed as a Hospital Corpsman at the Oakland Naval Hospital in Northern California. That was my introduction to the SF Bay Area.
Years later, after my Navy days, I worked as a production laboratory technician at Cutter Laboratories where we processed human (blood) plasma into medicine. I had decided to go back to college and get a degree, and while working swing-shift at Cutter Labs, I first attended local junior colleges, and then transferred into U.C. Berkeley as a junior. The good-paying swing-shift job at Cutter Labs was down the hill from the Berkeley campus by San Francisco Bay. My sub-group supervisor was a black woman, and the main group’s supervisor as well as the overall department manager were black men, as were many of my co-workers, and it all seemed perfectly natural.
In sum, I absolutely loved the natural beauty, the international atmosphere, and the multicultural aspects of the Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco region. I ended up spending almost all of my adult life in the greater Bay Area — from 1962 until 2012 (age 20 to 70).
Like most people, my experiences from childhood into adulthood most certainly shaped my fundamental views and attitudes, but there also seemed to be a natural, hereditary trait of tolerance that added to my easy adaptation to new ideas, people and places.
And now, at age 75, I live as an expatriate in Boquete, Panama — a small tourist and agricultural town in the mountains near the Costa Rica border, and the home of the best coffee [LINK] in the world. In this Latin American country, brown-skinned people are a big majority. I live in a Panamanian neighborhood — not in a ”white” or “gringo” enclave. And I love living here! The people here accept me as a neighbor and friend.
International Living Magazine did a one-page story on me in their July, 2017 issue entitled “Making Wooden Wonders in the Highlands of Panama” (which referred to my hobby of artisan woodturning). The boxed quotation in the middle of the page said: “I have more real friends now than I’ve ever had in my life.”
Those friends include Americans, Panamanians, and people of all colors and from all around the world. As a white kid in a white family in a white neighborhood, I never dreamed that my “golden years” would be spent in such a wonderful, international, multicultural location. (Living in a high-altitude rain-forest climate doesn’t hurt, either. Here in the “land of eternal spring and rainbows,” the temperature seldom goes over 80°F or under 60°F ever — any time of year.)
¡La vida es buena!
