to which this was appended as a comment. Others have suggested I post it as its own entry so others can see it.
If you have not done so, you need to first read My "identity" can get me killed, her powerful post from earlier today.
I have omitted the first paragraph of that comment, in which I explained why I was posting it as a comment.
Here is the rest of what I wrote, and you can make of it what you will’
First, Denise and I are very near contemporaries. I graduated from high school one year earlier, in Mamaroneck, across the Long Island Sound from the Island on which she lived. Many of the racial incidents she describes in New York City and those she did not but which I saw in Westchester County where I lived growing up, are indelible parts of my memory.
We had some students of color. I played in the orchestra with a black violinist named Nancy Goode. Our Cross-country team was captained by my classmate Sammy Shelton, a very gifted athlete whose size worked against him. There were the twins Reggie and Isabel Lake, the latter of whom earned a doctorate and at our 50th reunion lit into Tom Horne, a Harvard and Harvard Law graduate whose opposition to things like Mexican Studies programs in Arizona and his general anti-immigrant attitudes were anathema to most of us who came to that reunion — ironic since he was born in Canada of parents who fled the Nazis in Europe.
But our social spheres were very different. The largest group of those considered the lower class were the Italian kids. Those of us of Jewish background were fortunate in that we were a large enough group to be safe but not so large as to be isolated in a religious ghetto. We made up about 1/3 of the high school, and more than twice that fraction in things like Advanced Placement Courses, although neither our valedictorian nor the runner up were Jewish.
The only “dating” I remember across “racial” lines were that those of Asian background were acceptable as date for whites, at least according to the adults in the community.
Our prom was held at a Jewish country club, because the other clubs while they might have had some Jews as members did not want that many of us there. As I look back, of those I socialized with in any way throughout my K-12 education more than half were also of Jewish background, although I did occasionally date gentile females — I remember Lynn Flowers and Jean Giovannone among others, but on my rare dates the females were more than likely to be those I knew from the youth group at our synagogue or one of the other synagogues nearby.
And yet — despite that relatively benign upbringing I could not help but be aware of racial tensions. As I have noted here before, I first became aware of racial divides in 1956 when getting off a plane in Miami and seeing whites only bathrooms in the terminal. My growing up was filled with things like Little Rock, the Freedom Riders, burnings of black churches, and more. Because of television we could not pretend that there was not turmoil in the world over race. Because of the history of our own oppression as Jews many of us found ourselves drawn to participate in some way, as I did sufficiently to wind up on a bus with the Bronx Chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality coming to Washington DC on August 28, 1963.
There were few people of color in the class of ‘67 at Haverford when I started there some 53 years ago. I did not experience being in regularly close quarters with non-whites until I dropped out after my sophomore year and became a Marine. Through boot camp and infantry training, we worked together, trained together. One of my acquaintances was the younger brother of the great tennis player Arthur Ashe When assigned to the band at Quantico, I played dance music with Sergeant Leroy Sermon, and while the rock group in which I was keyboardist was all white the other including the post band members was biracial. I arrived at Quantico at a time only months after there had been serious racial conflict in Quantico Town itself, a community to which you could get on land only by driving or taking a train through the base itself, and which would have shriveled up had the commanding general followed through on his threat to make the town off limits. I did not experience that, but its memory shaped a lot of the interactions I did have.
Fast forward — in the late 60s I wound up back in New York City, until I returned to Haverford for the third and last time in 1971. I was there at the time of the Young Lords. I was there when Bobby Kennedy was killed. I was there at the time of Howard Beach. I was there at the time of the teacher strike, and the conflicts between largely African-American communities and the schools that had large numbers of Jewish teachers and administrators. While there had been a somewhat historic alliance in advocating for civil rights between the Jewish and Black communities, in the late 60s in New York it was coming apart from both sides.
I returned to Haverford some 45 years ago. In some ways things have gotten better, but I am not a person of color. My friends and acquaintances over the decades of my adult life have included people of very diverse backgrounds — on race, on sexual orientation, on political orientation.
I first got to know Denise at a Sunday Worship Service at one of the bloggers conventions, where we had a long talk as we came back afterward. I have followed her writing here with great attention since then. I know she often reads what I write.
I am a 70 year old white man of upper middle class Jewish background, with two parents with Ivy league educations who has himself been the beneficiary of an elite education. I am married to a woman who can trace part of her family back to the Mayflower, but also has descent from people of opposing views on the American revolution. In our own extended families we have had by marriage inlaws who were Hispanic, Native American, African-American, and gay. In those families we reflect the increasing diversity of American, and the fluidity of boundaries that when I was younger were considered bright lines not to be crossed. That is part of the progress I have seen, as it the rising of women and people of color to positions of political leadership — Here I think not only of our current president, but as a Virginia of Doug Wilder. I think of Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton. I think of Raul Grijalva, who when I joined the National Democratic Club saw I was a new member and came over to greet me and get to know me, and who is someone whose political courage I greatly admire. I think of Tammy Baldwin, who before she was a Senator was the Congressman representing the community where my sister-in-law is getting her doctorate in African Art. I think of the women for whom I have worked, including several principals who are women of color. I think of the men of color to whom I have reported, in schools, in the business word.
Yes I know, after the recent election campaign, even beyond the results, the unleashing of hatred and misogyny and racism and religious prejudice and xenophobia are horrifying. Yet despite that, I still think how far we have come in my 7 decades on this earth. Now many of us who qualify for some degree of white privilege immediately speak out, and at least some of us immediately interpose to protect those who are the target of the hatred and bigotry. That was rare 60 years ago.
For myself, with the exception of one year, in 20 years of teaching I have never been in a heavily white school. Some were almost all completely African-American students. Once I was the only teacher in the school who was not African-American, and only one other staff member,a counselor was also white. Most of my schools, and the vast majority of the classes I taught, were very diverse, more than i could have imagined growing up. I have served as advisor to a Muslim Students group, where the biggest issue was getting the totally Sunni leadership of the group at the time I joined them to welcome the Shi’a students in the school. The schools had their haters, but their intolerance was strongly opposed, and as they got to know their peers often overcome, despite the prejudice and hatred in their homes that strongly opposed such development.
I recognize that my experience is very different from someone like Denise. I can talk about what my ancestors experienced in Europe, and the lesser degree of discrimination here in the states, since the first of my forebears arrived here in the 1860s. I can acknowledge having at least been through some of the same times that shaped her. I value her voice so that those who did not experience even as the kind of observer I was can understand the depths of what shapes our nation.
Denise, you are my sister. As with my biological sister Judy, now living on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, I will tolerate no discrimination towards you, and affirm you in any way that I can.
I thank you for your willingness to share what has shaped you. For many of us, we need to realize that your experience has, whether or not we realize us, shaped us as well, even if we might be much younger, because it is part of what has shaped the culture in which we now find ourselves.
Peace