A million thanks to Denise Oliver Velez for her great essay today about the pervasive persistence of racism as an ever present defect in the fabric American life. Although I am a white, male, senior, I have acutely and continuously felt the terrible scourge of racism in my own life since I was quite small. If I am not too deeply infected with the destructive and communicable infection, I owe this to my upbringing in the 1950’s by my unusually independent, complex, if difficult to love mother.
In my earliest years, aside from my mother, the adult influences in my life were WW2 generation, white, aunt’s and uncles who, without exception, harbored and freely expressed deeply held racist beliefs, acting upon them, in various ways, without the slightest intervention of conscience. Some of these were Southerners who fully approved of the Jim Crow world still fully intact around them. Others hailed from slightly less segregated border states. One of the most consistent tells displayed by my racist relatives was their unvarying practice of locking car doors while driving through Black neighborhoods.
After my Southern father abandoned our family in the early 50’s, my mother remarried when I was eight. My step-father was deeply racist. He worked on the production line of a small manufacturing plant where job assignments were strictly divided by race, an arrangement of which he approved entirely. African-Americans did the heavy lifting in shipping and receiving or were trusted to sweep out the joint. White men, only, were hired to make tools and dies, to operate metal presses or work in assembly, handling such difficult-to-master tools as screwdrivers and wire cutters. Nota bene, there were no women, at all, on the factory floor.
The rapidly growing outer suburb school district that educated me had almost no Black people. My elementary school had none that I recall. At the junior and senior high schools, I could count the Black students on my fingers, even though my graduating class had over 600 students. The small, private university I attended in the South was similar, though I was in music there and was blessed to visit and perform with some of the Black gospel choirs around town as well as a few very gifted Black music students.
It was in my college town that I learned of one of the “pogroms that wiped out many a black community”, that occurred there just one generation before I arrived at university. By my senior year I was married to my college girlfriend.
Fourteen years later we were still childless, though not by choice. We had spent years in the cruel grip of infertility doctors, to no avail, and had turned to adoption attorneys in hopes of adding a child to our family. But we had waited too long and one adoption agency after another gave our thirty-something backsides the bum’s rush, assessing us as too old to start a family with one of their newly hatched white infants. But we still aspired to raise a family from infancy if possible, and before turning to the prospect of adopting an older child from, e.g., foster care, we tested the private adoption market that our state’s laws (unlike most) allowed.
Our attorney specialized in adoption and was well connected and well informed of potential private placement opportunities. In one case, we came within a hairsbreadth of adopting a white baby boy whose Dead Head mother revoked her intent to relinquish a day after the baby was born, when her boyfriend told her that since it wasn’t a girl, maybe he’d stick around. We took it pretty hard when we saw a newspaper photo of those people with their two week old newborn in tow when the Grateful Dead came to town.
Some months later, an unexpected opportunity for an agency adoption opened for us. Our attorney called to tell us that Catholic Social Ministries had a “difficult to place” child who would be born the following month. Why “difficult”? The father of the child was African-American. The agency maintained lists of families willing to adopt such children, but had made recent placements with all of them. Local adoption attorneys soon got wind of this.
That is how we came to adopt our now 32 year old, beautiful, wonderful older daughter. Racism in America became part of our daughter’s\ life as soon as she learned to talk. Countless times others, l usually children, would ask her, “What are you?” People speculated on her origins, ranging from Black to Polynesian to Mexican to Indian. We frequently heard other adult strangers remark on the beauty our child, but noticed that they were almost always people of color.
We raised her in the South and she regards herself as a Texan, now living and working in Texas. Issues of race have intervened in her life more than I had hoped, but somewhat less than I have feared. Like almost all Black persons in America, she has been sometimes singled out for special disfavor by law enforcement and other authority figures. Fortunately, her own generation seems less infected by and more immune to racism than earlier ones. Perhaps the Grim Reaper will help solve this problem given enough time.
Our other daughter, also adopted, five years later, as an infant, came to us through a completely open adoption. Although her birth mother has achieved a degree of quiet, middle class conservative dignity in her small Southern town, the rest of my younger child’s birth family can be described more or less accurately as archetypical Southern white trash. It’s fair to say that her whiteness has only rarely played a specific role in her life, other than the perks and benefits that all white people in America share the benefits from, usually without ever even noticing. She did have one retail job though, not long ago, where she was the only white employee in a store otherwise staffed by African-Americans. She got that job through connections with the family of her Black boyfriend and she took heat from some of her coworkers who treated her as an interloper. She did not like, one bit, being the brunt of the axiom that race hate spawns race hate.
My life also included a 37 year law career litigating cases under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ten of which were spent representing HR in one of America’s largest company. So, the sum of the old white man’s experience with racism in America teaches that any discussion, of the man in the White House, and the threat he poses to our country, must begin and end, with consideration of the role of racism. It is not merely the shame of America, but, with the election of 2016, racism has become a threat to the continued existence of the modern ideal of America. At the moment, racism, once again, is winning in America.
Now, since it rained this morning, and I think I can now force it into the ground, I’m going to my front yard to install my Black Lives Matter sign.