I’m white. That’s not an identity statement. It’s just to get that out right up front. White. Old white guy. That’s what people see.
Since I also farm and drive a pickup and live in a rural part of Washington state, it’s easy to assume that along with the white “farmers tanned” skin goes a red hat and maybe even a rebel flag. Trump voter for sure.
But that would be wrong. Way, way, way wrong.
I don’t identify as a color but I do have an ethnic identity: Quebecois. I was also born and reared in deeply racist north Florida in the deeply racist 1950s and 1960s.
I know what crossing the “color line” means. I remember when it was dangerous to do so.
I remember it supposedly fading away and supposedly being put firmly into its historical final resting place when America’s first African-American President took the oath of office. I cried that day, in belief our country had fundamentally changed.
I cried in November 2016 because we had not.
But now it’s not change I fear. It’s change back to something far worse. To something that’s supposed to be dead and buried: the color line.
I will not stand for it being reimposed.
This is a story of crossing the color line. But first, a little background to that story.
My mother was born and grew up in Michigan, just across the border from Quebec. Several of her aunts, who lived just across the border, spoke only French. Her ancestry was wholly Quebecois. Her father came to America just before WWI broke out, determined to serve in the American army rather than be drafted and sent to fight for the British, as he put it.
He did not identify as a citizen of British Canada. He was Quebecois, an “ethnic group” strongly discriminated against by the British when Canada was their colony and long after by the “English” majority after colonialism ended. Many Quebecois were, in turn, forcibly transported from the Brittany region of France, including my mother’s ancestors.
They were not immigrants.
They were exiles. Despised by the French, and later, hated by the English.
Some called the Quebecois the “n-word” of the North”. I have heard that, and not said in jest. Relations between the French and British ancestral groups in Canada have not been warm. Even into the 1970s and 80s large portions of Quebecois supported independence from the rest of Canada.
I did then. I do not now.
My grandfather did serve in the American army in that war, but he was murdered by a drunken farmer just before my mother was born, just months after mustering out. His death led to my mother being raised by her mother’s grandmother, and when she died when my mother was 16, landing up in Florida to live with her Quebecois grandfather. There, she met and married my father, an offspring of French immigrants who either stayed in parts of New France when it was ceded to the British, or who refused to return to France or stay in Canada under the British. That was my great, great, great grandfather, who lived in the wilder parts of northern New York and Western Massachusetts between the fall of New France and the birth of the United States, until the Revolution. In his 70s, he and his sons took up arms against the British in the Battle of Saratoga, a key turning point on the road to American independence.
In short, I don’t identify as a WASP.
Not even close.
But my father’s father was a literal “cracker” in Florida. The term Florida cracker supposedly epitomizes the rural racist white population of Florida. But the term derives from the mule drivers who “cracked” whips over the mules as they cleared roads and railway lines and then as farmers clearing land and plowing. He left the heavily French origin part of Indiana first to fight in the Philippines in the Spanish-American War, and then to the frontier of Florida to work on Flagler’s railroad, after an unfortunate encounter in Virginia. A tenant-farmer there, he put birdshot into the backsides of both the local judge and sheriff after they wrecked his corn field the third time while fox hunting with horse and hounds. Wisely, he packed up his family and fled to the south Florida swamps in 1909. There they stayed until the 1926 hurricane killed one of his baby sons and wiped out his farm (literally washed it down the river after the Lake Okeechobee dikes broke).
So I grew up in North Florida, to all appearances a “white boy” in good ole boy cracker country, born not even a century after the Civil War. The anniversary of that war, 1961-65, was also the height of conflict over finally ending it by ending the “Jim Crow” system of racial segregation and discrimination.
It was 1966, just as I started my teenage years, with the struggle for civil rights still raging, that I saw my mother and father try and fail to cross the color line.
My father, a construction supervisor, engaged two African-American workers who worked with him to help him dig a new septic line. My mother didn’t want a digger running over the yard and garden, so they (including me and my father) dug it with shovels, by hand. At lunch we headed inside. My mother had added the center board to the table, and had two extra places set for the workers to join us for lunch. Instead, they sat on the steps outside and broke out their own sandwiches. My mother sent me out to invite them inside to eat with us, even if they just wanted to eat their own sandwiches. They politely said thank you to me, and said they preferred to stay outside in the fresh air. When I asked my mother why they didn’t want to come inside (it was a hot Florida summer day), they told me the men didn’t want to get us into trouble with our neighbors. I knew the retired cop who lived next door was very racist. And the slightly older boy who lived next door on the other side had told me his mother, a waitress, refused to serve N-words until her boss told her the law had changed and she had to or she would lose her job.
They didn’t want to get us into trouble by “crossing the color line” and joining white folks at table. I also suppose they didn’t want to risk getting confronted as they left by the neighbors either. Especially, I guess, because we had full plate glass windows in the dining room and our neighbors would easily see us sitting together.
The “color line” was a community imposed set of behaviors you were supposed to observe or pay the consequences. It applied to both white and black, but of course penalties were more severe for black than for white. I remember as a child drinking from the colored fountain instead of the white fountain. My mother never said a word—“water’s water” is what she said. Ignore the kids. And we also went in and out of the “colored entrance only” door of the dentist we went to. I don’t remember when that sign disappeared—I was too young to remember—but I do remember that it was in a town that was a naval base that closed when I was about 9 years old. My father admired the white dentist for doing dentistry for both AAs and whites, even after the base closed, just like he did when it was open, but he had to have a separate treatment room well into the 1960s. I don’t remember when that segregation ended, but it had to be sometime in the mid 1960s.
I also remember when, in 7th grade, I think this was 1966 or so, the first African Americans entered class with the whites. Calvin was the first AA in my math class. Toward midyear he dropped out of school, even though I knew he was smart and should have stayed in school. I knew his mother and older sisters, who had come for months while my mother was ill and my brother and I were 5 and 7 years old, respectively, to help us with cleaning and cooking. He never came with them—I suppose now his mother didn’t bring him over because she was afraid we would play with him in front of neighbors and get him into trouble.
It was in seventh grade that I also had a long series of fist fights with real “good old boys” who thought “something was wrong with me”, that my mother was a Yankee and I was a Yankee. That included the neighbor boy next door, but extended to 5-6 other boys who kept trying to impose their values on me, or at least make me afraid to cross the line.
Like my ancestors who fought for the North in that war, I licked the Southerners, good and proper. Even when it was four to one. They then left me alone. But changes in the country also began to intimidate these boys, and I guess their parents as well.
I remember when George Wallace stood in the door. I also remember when he ran for president.
I got my first African American teacher as a junior in high school. He was a one-armed sociology teacher, a man “who happened to be black” as he put it. He lived in a house, a house that was actually pretty well built, that had tar-paper exterior walls. Those, he told me, privately, when I asked out of curiousity, were there to protect him, to hide how nice his house actually was so as not to incur jealousy and anger from whites. That was apparently common practice in the south among the better off African-Americans in small towns and rural areas.
It was some time not long after I graduated high school in 1971 that his house got a proper exterior siding installed.
I do not know for sure when the color line disappeared in the south. I left it in 1979 and never lived there again.
And won’t to this day. I lived 27 years in China, as a minority. I missed a lot about changes in American life while living abroad, but I don’t miss racist dog whistles. And some whistles are not inaudible to all but dogs. While we lived there, a Chinese woman accosted my wife on the sidewalk, shouting “Go back to your country, bitch! Go back to your country.” Telling someone to “go back to their country” is racist.
Period.
Trump is trying to reimpose that “color line” of the old South via his attacks on immigrants. His real target is reimposing white supremacy, and all that means. He uses Twitter to try to resurrect the notion that minorities must practice “proper behavior” or be censored or worse. I recognize what his attacks on AOC and the squad are.
I won’t have it.
And Nancy Pelosi needs to stop attacking them too. She may think they have a proper place and limits because they are young and freshman congress people, but Trump is using her chiding of the squad, to get them to conform or at least “respect” their elders, as a means to resurrect the color line notions and practices.
Telling someone to go back to their country is overtly racist. But it clearly says someone doesn’t fit. They don’t belong. They must change their behavior. They must stifle themselves before their betters.
They must get back on their side of the line.
We must be alert.
We must be alarmed.
We cannot go back and let Jim Crow crawl out of its historical grave.
We cannot let Trump re-impose “proper behavior” — the color line—on us again.
Nancy, fellow Democrats. WAKE UP! RESIST!
There is a line, and that line is the line against racism, however hidden or overt. Cross that line, and there is no stopping until full white supremacy is restored. Do not cross it. Be aware of it. Be aware that Trump and his supporters are bent on restoring white supremacy. Nothing else really matters to them. It is their way to become “great again,” to restore a time when the least white person was “better” than any minority person.
We cannot go back. We will not go back.
In Canada, Quebecois no longer push seriously for independence from a fully multi-cultural country. Yes, it has warts and issues, but the discrimination disappeared and the line between French and English blurred as Canada accepted and implemented multi-culturalism.
We must do the same.
E Pluribus unum.
Thanks for reading and commenting, if you will.
And by the way, extra points if you recognize the picture above. That too, is commentary on our past, and present.
