The whole Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman thing got me thinking about this. Back in 1967, visiting my sister in Indiana, I went to a private sort of social affair (I no longer remember the details after close to 50 years) where people were dancing. Well, I started dancing with this incredibly good-looking sexy guy and wow! He was a great dancer. I remember that part so distinctly. We danced and danced and when it was about time to leave, I asked him if he and I could go out to something or other that happened to be pretty public (again, it was a long time ago and I don’t remember those details). He looked at me like I was crazy and told me that if we did that, he could get lynched! As it happened, he was really dark-skinned and I was and still am very white. I was disappointed and wasn’t sure if that was true, but he obviously didn’t want to go with me for whatever reason, so I let it go.
A couple of months later, I was on a Greyhound bus from Indiana to Florida to visit a friend with whom I had gone to school. When we got to the Jacksonville depot, I had to pee really, really bad. I dashed into the first place with a woman’s sign on it and heaved a sigh of relief. When I came out of the bathroom, I stopped at the drinking fountain and had some water. While I was drinking, all of a sudden I was punched in the side of my head! I turned around, ready to do battle, and encountered a middle-aged fat ugly woman screaming obscenities at me. I had gone to the wrong bathroom and had drunk out of the wrong drinking fountain. Couldn’t I see the sign “For Coloreds?”
It suddenly dawned on me. If this woman could treat me, a woman of her own race, so disgracefully, how in the world was she treating other people? How would she have treated that beautiful man in Indiana if she had seen us together? Those two experiences have basically influenced my attitudes towards racism ever since.
What rock, you ask, was I raised under that this came as a surprise? Follow me after the tangled skein of orange yarn.
I was born and raised in a small town in Ohio. My mother was a Finnish immigrant and my father was second-generation Finnish. The population of our community was predominantly Finnish with a few Swedes stuck in the corner and some Germans here and there. The most common names where I lived were Korhonen, Virtanen, Mäkinen, Mäkelä and Karbacka. I’ve been told by people who grew up there that there was a significant black community (in fact, the town was on the path of the Underground Railway). But in growing up, the only two black people I knew were (1) my best friend in the third grade and (2) a woman who worked at my father’s store.
Racism was rampant in our community, but it was not directed towards people of color – it was directed first towards Russians (a linguistic and ethnic minority in Finland) and second towards “Gypsies.” Roma? Really? Yep. For good reason, the Finns hated the Russians but for some other reason, still not clear to me, they hated Roma. Of course, there were no Russians or Roma in our town, or at least any that I encountered, so the racism I was taught was totally theoretic. And, because of that, it ended up looking absolutely ridiculous to me. But it was still racism. And when I ran head first into the American version, it took a couple of months to accept it and that only after experiencing it directly.
I don’t think that I have yet to meet a Roma and the only Russian I know for sure is a woman I work with who is one of the best at her job.