When I was five my father took me to a semi-pro baseball game. I was dropped off in a playground area and headed for the swings. Already high in the air, singing jubilantly to herself, was an African American girl, probably a year or two older than I. I hopped on the swing next to her and pushed off, pumping hard, but unable to compete with her performance. When we finally scuffed our feet against the ground to slow down, we began to talk.
Somehow the conversation led to our identities. I do not recall how we got there, but I do remember telling her that I was “white.” “Then what am I?” she asked. “Well, you’re a “n****r,” I replied. Two seconds later I was on the ground, for she had easily knocked me off the swing with one good punch. I took off running, dirt-stained tears flowing, to my father and his drinking buddies. When he swooped me up in his arms and questioned me, and I told him, he and his friends roared with laughter.
I did not understand..
I knew, however, in my tiny, five-year old gut, that I had done something wrong. From that moment on, I began to watch and listen. The next event in my tutorial regarding “n***rs” scared my little, eight-year old soul.
My father was watching a baseball game on television. The Cleveland Indians were playing, and it just so happened that the Indians had more African American players than most, even though the Jackie Robinson milestone had happened only a few years previously, and there were lots of African Americans in the stands. My father (I do not recall if he was drinking) blurted out, I guess to me, since I was the only one in the room, “I wish I was down there right now. I would take a machine gun and mow all those “n***rs” down." Stunned, I backed out of the room quietly, most likely leaving on the floor the dresses I was designing for my paper dolls. I probably ran outdoors, for I had reason to fear my father’s physical abuse, and now I had further insight into what was inside of him.
A year later, when I was in 4th grade at an all-white school, two “dark-skinned” girls were enrolled in the middle of the semester. I observed them, assuming they were African Americans, and decided I wanted to get to know them. “Rivera” was not a surname I had heard before, but I was drawn to them and worked up my courage to befriend them. The youngest, “R,” became my best friend. The Riveras were the only minorities in our neighborhood, and I became their third child, invited into a world that simply dazzled me. What? A gentle man for a father? Warmth between parents? Shoes off when you enter the house? Exotic foods you could not dream up?
“R” and I remained best friends until late junior high school, when she began to be pursued by boys. She was, after all, astoundingly beautiful. I suppose I could have become her gay side-kick, but what did I know of gay? I did not hear or read the word “homosexual” until I was a freshman in college. Being small for my age, and somewhat of a “sissy,” of course I got picked on. But I soon developed an elaborate defense: become top of the class while becoming class clown. Keep ‘em laughing, and they will not really see you. I shall never forget being asked to sit in the hallway for disrupting a class when it was my turn to read a verse from Poe’s “The Bells.” I thought the “tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells” was just too good not to be mocked.
And, finally, high school. I got to sit next to kids from “colored town.” Many of their parents, like mine, were originally from the South, part of the vast migration after the Depression to the factory cities in the North. In fact, I was born in the front bedroom of my grandmother’s house in Red Hill, Tennessee, about 30 miles from the Alabama border. Harriette Arnow’s “The Dollmaker” is a great novel about the struggles endured by so many whites in this group, especially those who migrated from rural areas to cityscapes.
By this time, I did not understand anyone’s aversion to a person because of his/her color. I got up courage to argue with my father and with my relatives in Tennessee. My grandmother told me to look to nature: “Red birds don’t mate with blue birds, do they ‘J’?” I do not know how old I was when she said that to me, but I should have pointed out that she was the owner of a mixed-breed dog. My relatives all teased that when I got married I would probably be bringing a little black girl home with me. Little did they know that I had begun day dreaming about the captain of the swim team.
What happened in college.
When I ran out of money after my junior year, I got a part-time job at a children’s psychiatric hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Half of the orderlies/aides were African American. We became a tight-knit group: apartment parties, learning the “twist,” attending movies together, and then one night, venturing to an African American bar called “Washboard Willy’s,” where funky music was played and I got to hear my first version of “See that girl with the red dress on…”
Whenever we went to Washboard Willy’s, our group was the only one with white members. I felt comfortable there; after all, were we not with black friends, and were we not supporters of the burgeoning civil rights movement that was starting to march across the nation? Well, yes, but…
One night, one of our entourage, a young woman with very blonde hair, next to whom I was seated, shook her head quickly because the African American woman standing behind her dropped the ash from her cigarette on “C’s” head. When it happened a second time, we realized it was not an accident and we decided to leave.
I understood the young woman’s resentment. But, not until sometime later, did I see a connection to white privilege. Why had I assumed that we would be welcomed in a bar created by African Americans for African Americans? A year later, just before the “riots” in Detroit, Washboard Willy and his band had moved to Detroit because too many white university students were beginning to frequent the bar.
I will never forget the close, loving feelings our group shared, though, but like many college communities, we were destined to disperse across the states and even to other countries. “C” married a Turkish man and was living in Istanbul. “M,” an African American woman, married a white PhD fellow from Australia. I came out and moved to Los Angeles.
“The White Privilege Working Group” has made me think about things I have not thought about in years. To this day, those racist feelings my father tried to bury inside my tender heart have small cilia that occasionally come to life and demand my attention. Racism, in its many forms, remains a constant battle for me. And I am one of the lucky ones
Updated by jarbyus at Mon Feb 28, 2011, 12:47:25 PM
Off to work now. Will be back later in case someone reads this. Thanks.