I've been thinking a lot about race in the light of the Zimmerman case, and I recenly posted the following as a reply to a diary. I was asked to resubmit this as a diary. I had originally written this after giving some thought to an African Americam person with whom I had collaborated on a photography project. I am a serious amateur photographer, and one of the genres I most enjoy is portrait work. Almost all of my models have been African American. I am white. During some discussions, she asked me why I do what I do, and I dug down deep and gave this response. I think its relevance is broader, espepecially at this time...so here goes:
I'm 54 and white (75% Cajun). I grew up saying the so-called N word. Almost everyone I knew said it. The kids next door said “negroes” or “colored people,” but that was unusual. I was very young during the Civil Rights era. I was 5 when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. I was told that the Civil Rights movement was a product of the Jews, northern agitators and communists. Martin Luther King was a particularly bad guy. Everywhere he spoke, violence followed, fanned by the liberal news media controlled by Jews. Although I was very young, I can remember seeing the March on Washington and Rev. Martin Luther King’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial, the attack at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the later march from Selma to Montgomery all on the B/W TV
Some Family History
My dad was 50% Cajun and 50% Scots Irish on his mother’s side. His mother was from a distinguished family (in the 19th Century) who owned slaves and were thus very wealthy and at the near-top of the social pecking order. One of her ancestors was actually waked at the State Capital in Jackson, Mississippi. Somewhere down the line there was economic catastrophe, probably as a result of the Civil War. Many plantation owners were cash strapped after the Civil War, but at least they owned their land and could live comfortably (not as lavishly as before), exploiting black labor through the sharecropper system. Occasionally they could sell of portions of the old plantation land. My grandmother’s ancestors were not so lucky. Family legend has it that family members stole inheritances and thing like that. Eventually they wound up in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, on the east bank, at the edge of a swamp leading to the Amite River and Lake Maurepas, among Catholic Cajuns. Not exactly Tara. She married my grandfather who was a Cajun, and who eked out a living raising strawberries and hogs and cattle on the terrible clay soil there. No tourists visit that area to see the Antebellum Homes, because there never were any there. It was crappy land. I can imagine a telescoping of history where they guy who was waked at the state capital would be sitting on the veranda held up by Greek Revival columns sipping a mint julep, dressed like Mark Twain, was informed that his female descendant was going to marry a Cajun and live on the edge of the swamp, convert to Catholicism, and help raise strawberries and hogs.
On my mothers side of the family, they were almost all Cajun ancestry with a sprinkling of English and one person immigrating from France. They lived on the other side of the swamp, in the extreme southern tip of Livingston Parish, which is predominantly Protestant Scots Irish (Redneck to use the pejorative), but the southern tip is Catholic and Cajun. They were loggers on both sides of the family, cutting down the old-growth cypress trees to build late 19th century New Orleans.
My mom’s parents got married and moved to New Orleans, where my mom was raised. My dad also moved to New Orleans and worked for the bus company, New Orleans Public Service. My mom had a New Orleans accent, and my dad had a white southern accent, not as thick as Mississippi, but still recognizable as such. My mom denies that either her or my dad were ethnically Cajun. Its true they did not speak with a Cajun accent and butcher the English language, but my blood is mostly Cajun. It’s a fact. I am kind of proud of that, but earlier generations must have been ashamed of that. I can relate to how black people stratify themselves based on a manner of speaking, because it’s a similar dynamic. I remember in college taking a biology class under a professor with a thick Cajun accent. It made me feel kind of proud to hear him use all this technical vocabulary in a Cajun accent. Usually we are depicted as fun loving dumbbells who cannot speak proper English. One time in college, a black Creole girl who studied in France and was in our study group said that she couldn’t believe “those people” (the Cajuns) consider themselves French. I really could not believe my ears to hear such a bigoted statement coming from a black person who should know better.
Outside of my paternal grandmother’s family, I do not think there was any slave ownership. But I found out through a distant cousin that one of the ancestors was a guy who captured runaway slaves for a living. This made me feel very bad, and it was a detail I wish I did not know, really. Maybe its not really true, and maybe it is.
Some U.S. History
Pretty much everyone I knew hated President Kennedy for doing things like sending the National Guard to enforce the desegregation of the University of Mississippi. One Friday afternoon in late November of 1963, my brother came home from the nearby grade school, St. Christopher the Martyr, and told my mother that the school closed, because President Kennedy got shot and was dead. She immediately turned on the TV and it was true. I thought my parents would have been delighted when he was assassinated, but my dad was very upset. It seemed like a paradox. Everything has a kind of cartoon reality as a child. I really did not understand what death was. Like cowboys getting shot in the movies. The fact that my dad was upset about President Kennedy’s death seems so natural to me now as an adult, but in the cartoon world of a 4-year old it seemed strange. Everyone is supposed to be happy when the bad guy gets killed. So that memory sticks out in my mind. The aftermath and funeral went on for days of non-stop TV (which pre-empted Captain Kangaroo and Romper Room, much to my displeasure). I had never seen a flag-draped coffin before. It reminded me of the ads for Stripe Toothpaste, which came out on the toothbrush with red and white stripes. The flag draped coffin was like the wad of toothpaste and the gun carriage was like the toothbrush.
My family hated President Kennedy’s successor even more. He was after all from the South. President Lyndon B. Johnson actually got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed. He named Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. He promoted J. Skelly Wright to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Judge Wright, as district judge in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana (appointed by President Truman) had issued a ruling about the time I was born to desegregate Franz Elementary School in the 9th Ward in New Orleans. Those cases were handled by Thurgood Marshall and A. P. Tureaud, Sr. Both of Louisiana’s Senators, Russell Long and Allen Ellender told LBJ they would blackball any nomination of Wright to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, headquartered in New Orleans, and at that time covering most of the lower tier states of the old Confederacy (in the 70s, they formed the 11th Circuit with Alabama, Georgia and Florida, and left the Fifth Circuit covering only Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi). The senate blackball right (an informal tradition) did not cover the D.C. Circuit, so LBJ appointed Wright there. J. Skelly Wright and Fifth Circuit Judge John Minor Wisdom, also from New Orleans (Eisenhower appointee), were real heros in the major desegregation cases in New Orleans and elsewhere. Johnson also appointed Nicholas deB. Katzenbach as Attorney General. He brought the famous case of Katzenbach v. McClung to the Supreme Court, upholding the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 under the Commerce Clause. If it weren’t for the Vietnam War, LBJ would be considered the best president in the modern era. He had real guts. When the 64 Act was up for discussion, he sat Mississippi Senator John Stennis down, and told him about his long-time housekeeper, who worked at his Texas ranch when Senate was not in session and then travel to Washington when the Senate was in session (LBJ was a senator before becoming VP in 1961). He told Sen. Stennis in blunt terms about how his housekeeper had to travel across Mississippi to get to DC. Johnson’s reported words are really blunt. I’ll paraphrase:
When she traveled across your [@#$%$] state, there wasn’t a [@#$%$] place for her to take a piss, and she had to go out to a cornfield and squat. That [@#$%$] is coming to an end right now!
Supposedly he was shaking his finger in Stennis’s face after Stennis started talking in technical terms of States Rights. When he signed the 65 Voting Rights Act into law, he told Vice President Humphrey that this would destroy the Democratic Party in the South for two generations. He underestimated by at least one, by my count. This took real guts, and I now admire that old Texas Coot for doing that! I wish President Obama could channel a little of the LBJ spirit sometimes.
The Catholic Church
The Catholic Church supplied some real moral teaching during this time. It seemed that Fr. Ignatius, the pastor of St. Christopher the Martyr, would tirelessly preach each Sunday to the angry parishioners how Jesus loved everyone. The integration sermons were book-ended by the absolute worst church music in all of Christendom. I distinctly remember one sermon, whose theme was, “What if you woke up tomorrow, and you were a Negro?” Most (but not all) the people came out of church grumbling. Fr. Ignatius was what they called a “‘N’ Lover.” That designation didn’t mean you were necessarily bad, but kind of like you were suffering from some mental illness that prevented you from seeing the eminent logic of segregation. Starting in the 1940s (probably before), I think a lot of ‘N’ Lovers entered the Catholic Clergy (Thank God). They did a great service when I look back. During the height of the Civil Rights Era, and coincidentally right after Hurricane Betsy destroyed a lot of New Orleans as I was about to enter first grade, Phillip Hannan was appointed Archbishop of New Orleans. He was a tough Irishman and a serious “‘N’ Lover!” First of all, he said that the Catholic Schools would operate on an integrated basis. Then he recommended that Pope Paul VI appoint Rev. Harold Perry to be an associate bishop for the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Bishop Perry was a black guy. He was the first African American Catholic Bishop in the United States in the modern era (there was a man in the 19th Century, Bishop James Augustus Healy, who was mixed race, but mostly white and who passed for white who was a Catholic Bishop before – I think it wasn’t generally known during his life that he was black by application of the so-called “one-drop rule.”).
In grade school, my middle brother (I was the baby) ran for class president, calling himself “Dixie Savoie,” and adopting the Confederate battle flag as his logo. He was not using it in an overtly racist way. The school was 100% white in those days. It was highly unlikely that any black person would see them. My brother just thought it was cool. He was really a rebel, so why not campaign with the rebel flag? Fr. Ignatius got very angry and ordered him to take the posters down. It seemed like a real injustice. We did not know that the Confederate flag was hijacked as a symbol by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s and was very offensive to black people (regardless of whether it was hijacked or not). Gee, I wonder why? But we were ignorant of that at that time. Ignorant in an innocent sense. When I look back, Fr. Ignatius was like a hero of that time even if he was only a bit player. I think it took a lot of guts to preach about integration to a hostile congregation on a weekly basis for years. A real thankless task.
I liked to argue (which is part of the reason I became a lawyer). One time the smart ass in me really came out, and I got into a debate with Fr. Ignatius about integration, his pet topic. I took the wrong side and Fr. Ignatius took the right side, but I battled toe to toe with the adult, who patiently tried to explain why I was wrong. We fought to a draw, and ended by agreeing to disagree as lawyers say. I felt really proud of myself how I went toe to toe and fought Fr. Ignatius to an intellectual draw on his turf. I know Fr. Ignatius is in heaven today. I know he prayed for me. Thank you Fr. Ignatius.
Later that night I told my dad how I went toe to toe with Fr. Ignatius on the subject of integration. He was angry and said, “Don’t do that!” I was taken aback, after all, I was merely parroting the stuff I heard for years from my dad and other relatives. I’m sure my dad realized this precisely, which was why he was not proud of his son’s great accomplishment. I started to realize that overt bigotry made you look like you were stupid. Even if I did not have a fundamental change of heart, I did not want to appear to be stupid. I had too much pride.
My brother had a very liberal Catholic nun in the early grades who told the class that “colored people are more likely to get to heaven than white people, because they suffered more.” This was considered shocking, and even now, it seems like a weird thing to tell a class of seven year olds.
Riots
It seems strange historically that when the Civil Rights Era was seemingly resolved by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that black people seemed to have gone bezerk instead of feeling satisfied.
I was certain that New Orleans, where I grew up, would soon go up in flames, like Newark, Detroit and Watts, all of which were covered extensively on TV. I remember lying in bed and wondering if I would be able to hear some sort of low rumble as a warning as the black mob approached Metairie (which is a white suburb of New Orleans) so I could escape. I remember many adults saying "They're going to burn down New Orleans too."
A lot of white people who had gone along with desegregation started to turn against black people, and in the 1966 off year elections, the Democrats took a big hit.
One summer there was a big fight at a family picnic on July 4th or Labor Day. The subject of race came up (probably after some extensive beer consumption). The sides were probably something like the arch-segregationists versus the segregationists. I remember my aunt was outnumbered by the hardcore clique. She had married a “Yankee,” a Romanian American guy from Indiana she met when he was in the Navy stationed in New Orleans, and had lived "up north" in the 1940s, and thus was exposed to "foreign" ideas like treating black people like human beings. They eventually moved back to New Orleans where she was from and her husband got a job here. During the long and drawn out argument, after she had survived the typical querie, “What would you think if your daughter wanted to marry one of them?” she got really perplexed and angry and screamed "What do you think we should do with them? Kill them?!?!?" Of course the logical result of the extreme racist view would be to institute a race war.
This next event is very vivid in my mind even after some 47 years: At about 5 or 6 I remember having a really bad dream where there was a race war and the whites appeared to be winning. I was in my parents car, and could see black people being shot, and my parents cheered. I think the shooters were like white drive-by shooters. I didn’t actually see the shooters in the dream. It was on Airline Highway in Metairie, at the corner of Shrewsbury Road. This area of Jefferson Parish had a pocket with a good number of black people, and from later study of the Civil War, I think they are at least in part descendants of slaves who left the east-bank river plantations after New Orleans fell in April, 1962. I know that Gen. Butler had the army prepare a place like what we would call a refugee camp today. It was along some Confederate fortifications on the northern approach to New Orleans along the Mississippi River. A small Confederate parapet stands to this day in this black neighborhood. Unfortunately for the Confederates, the Yankees came from the South, courtesy of the U.S. Navy.
I was very disturbed by this dream. I remember there was a black kid about my age and he got shot in the chest in my dream. He fell backward like the famous Robert Capa photo taken during the Spanish Civil War. Even to this day,.I can remember that he had on a red and white horizontal striped polo shirt. I woke up very disturbed by this dream, but never told anyone about this for years. I was upset that my parents seemed like animals in the dream. They were not shooting, but they were definitely cheering Team White. I was really upset about the little boy who was my age who got killed. I think God may have been whispering in my ear about the horror of the logical implication of extreme bigotry.
My Cousin the Liberal
I had a cousin who was a real civil rights liberal, along with her lawyer husband, who was from an old-money white Creole family. She married up. Generally those white Creoles think of people with Cajun names (although equally French) as being as low as dirt, and they know the difference. They can read you like you were the label on a wine bottle.
My cousin was very, very educated and spoke the English language like Queen Elizabeth with a New Orleans accent. She was very Catholic in the finest sense of the term. Her and her husband were also classic “‘N’ Lovers.” The family thought she was a little kooky, but they knew she was really smart, probably a certified genius. My father referred to that type as “educated idiots.” Her father told my dad that they invited black people to their house as guests. They were probably black lawyer types who were high up on the black totem pole of society. Years later, Prof. Joseph Logsdon at UNO, a white history professor and expert on black U.S. history, told me that during that era, any white person who was for any type of social equality was viewed as a real nut case by white society at large. I thought of my cousin when he told me that. That took some guts for them, as they were a young couple, and I am sure he wanted to fit in with the big New Orleans law firm he worked for. Probably some of the old “gray hairs” at the firm did not believe in “Negro equality,” as the term was used back in the day. Professor Logsdon taught me about the dynamic of Jim Crow legislation and that the old money whites had no real ax to grind with black people, as they viewed almost everybody as equally being lower than dirt. Jim Crow had to be sold politically to poor whites, who although dumb as fence posts, still had the right to vote. Jim Crow was sold to poor whites as an implicit reaffirmation of their intrinsic value to society in order to prevent the unthinkable, poor people voting as a bloc. You might be dirt poor, but you were somewhere in the middle of the social pecking order.
My Grandfather
My grandfather had a fourth grade education, but was really smart in terms of native intelligence. He really liked to read books, but his book selection was not very good. He used to order all kinds of crazy books. I remember reading "White Teacher in a Black School." I remember seeing a book called "The Klansman" with a guy wearing a cone hat on the cover. My brothers and I, coming from the New Orleans area, had no earthly idea what the Klan was. The Klan did not particularly dig Catholics, so they never were to big in the New Orleans area. We though the Klansman’s outfit was really funny, especially the cone hat. There was a newspaper called "The Councillor" published by the White Citizens Council. It was what we would call "wingnut" today....really scary wingnut.
Basically my grandfather believed that the Jews had everything planned out generations in advance, and actually planned the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and controlled the whole world really. As a small but significant part of their plan of world domination, they used puppets like Martin Luther King to instigate racial turmoil in the United States to bring its downfall so the Communists could pick up the pieces. If you substitute some of the nouns in the preceding text, you get today’s Tea Party.
He almost always used the N word (I am sure he never would have said that directly to a black person). I think if there was a black person he was particularly fond of, he would refer to him as “a colored fellow.” When Nat King Cole died, I remember my grandfather being really saddened to hear the news, another thing that was out of place in the cartoon world. I really love my grandfather. My love of modern history and politics came from him. I'm pretty far left, but my introduction to politics came from a wingnut, albeit a really good-at-heart one, who to this day is my favorite person in all the world.
My Dad
One time my dad, who was a diesel mechanic, put a new starter on a car in the grocery store parking lot for a black lady he never even met before. She was trying to start her car as we came out of Schwegmann’s on Airline Highway (one red light away from where my dream took place). He drove us back home and returned to work on her car so she could get home. My mom was kind of mad, because it was lunch time, but my dad said he had to do that, because the lady had all her groceries in the car, and lived way in New Orleans, and had no way to get home. I really respected my dad for doing that even at that time. Putting a starter on is not like some easy job. Its messy, and you have to really get under the car.
When I visited the bus garage where he worked, he and his black co-workers were very friendly and they said "hello" to me. This seemed very strange. I remember asking my mom about things like this, and she said, "Not all “N’s” are bad. There are many really good ‘Ns’“ I started to realize that those people like my family did not like black people in a very abstract sense, but got along with actual black people pretty decently. This concept has fascinated me on an intellectual level, as a student of history, for years. I suspect that there is an analogous feeling on the part of many in the black community with respect to white people.
WYLD and Mr. Johnny
The first black radio station in New Orleans was WYLD. My mom and dad had a friend, an Italian American guy, Mr. Johnny, who was a salesman for WYLD. My dad found it strange that a black radio station would hire a white guy for anything. Actually it was not that strange, as I realized years later doing some research for a photo shoot concept of mine, the 1930s Black Diva Project, that one day I am going to pull off. I want to do a monochrome shoot in period costume with period microphone circa 1937 (a particularly great year for jazz). I thought about those old radio microphones with the call letters on top, so I needed to see if WYLD existed in 1937. Unfortunately, it started after the war, in 1949. But in finding that out through research, I gleaned the fundamental economics of the foundation of WYLD. One of the major financial reason to start the station was that Jax Beer, a local brewery, wanted more black beer drinkers to buy Jax, as opposed to Falstaff (another local brewery). Dixie Beer, not without effort, could never seem to attract black people to buy a beer named “Dixie.” As an aside, when I was coming of age, if you went bar hopping in New Orleans, if the bar had a Dixie Beer sign out front, it was 100% assured that it was a white bar, and you could go there without fear of having a scene like the one in the movie “Animal House” where these white college kids walk into this black club and the music stops and everyone in the place turns around and looks at them. Anyway, it made logical sense to have a white guy selling air time to white owned businesses who wanted more black customers.
My parents bought a stereo when I was 5 years old. It was a nice piece of furniture with a not-so-good amplifier, turntable and speakers all built in. Mr. Johnny gave us literally hundreds of demo 45 rpm records from WYLD. So at that age I got exposed to great mid-60s African American music with the classic labels like King, Kapp, Stax, etc., all courtesy of WYLD. Thank you WYLD and Mr. Johnny.
Black Women
We were inculcated with this idea that black people were really ugly. I remember seeing the Supremes on TV when I was very young and thinking that they were really pretty, especially Diana Ross (I didn’t know her name then...I was too young). I remember spending the night at my grandparents’ house when they were on TV, and I told my grandmother that I thought Diana Ross was really beautiful with those big onyx eyes that showed up nicely even on B/W television. My grandmother replied in a soft, kind voice, “Yes, a lot of ‘Ns’ are very beautiful.” I had never heard anyone admit something like that before, especially in such a tender manner (even though she used the N word). She agreed that Diana Ross was really pretty.
At some point in early high school, my best friend ever to this very day (a white guy named Pat) and I went to a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans. Naturally we were checking out the girls before the parade came by. Across the street there was a black girl about our age who was sitting on top a mail box, so you could see her above the people standing along the curb. My friend remarked about how pretty she was. I had never noticed how black girls were beautiful before (other than the Supremes). I remembered agreeing with him. She was very dark, like dark chocolate, with a beautiful complexion, a nice figure, and very pretty legs. It was not so cold, so she had shorts on. She was not drop-dead gorgeous like Diana Ross, but still she was really pretty. And she looked more like a typical black person. She had what is now called a “girl-next-door look,” meaning very pretty, but not so pretty to be almost surreal, like Diana Ross. From that day on forty something years ago, I realized how pretty black girls were, but I had very little chance of actually meeting any of them, as I went to an all boys school that was 90% white. Even meeting white girls was kind of a challenge.
My Friend Mike
In the early 70s I started high school, which was run by the Jesuits. I was on the debate team because I loved to argue. One year my partner was a Creole guy, Mike. One time he came to my house to pick up some notes. When he got there I told him through the screen door that I'd get the notes for him, leaving him on the front porch. When he left, my mom asked why I didn't invite him in. I felt really bad about this. Did he notice or maybe think I’m a bigot? I had remembered that thing about my uncle complaining about how my cousin had black guests at their house. I didn’t agree with that by the time I was in high school, and certainly not with Mike, but I was somewhat concerned that my parents might say something that would embarrass me. I knew they would not say anything ugly to him, but maybe something stupid, like trying to be nice and offer him some watermelon or something stupid like that which would make me want to drop dead. Kids often think their parents don’t have a clue and will embarrass the hell out of them at the drop of a hat. In the end I was embarrassed by my own actions, both to Mike and my mom.
He lived on the edge of a bad neighborhood near the St. Bernard Project . It was an area where lots of Creole people lived, but the project was very close by. All the houses had bars on the windows. His mom told me to be careful when I stopped at the stop sign at the corner of St Bernard Avenue, near the housing project. I thought it was odd that a black person was warning me about black people. I thought it was only white people who were afraid of other black people.
Mike’s dad looked like a Sicilian, but was technically black. He looked like a dark white guy to me. His mom was more classically African American in terms of facial structure, but was the exact color of café au lait at the French Market. She was very beautiful with sparkly brown eyes, and was very nice to me. This was the mid-70s. Mike wanted an Afro, but his hair was not exactly curly enough, so he had to get something done by a hair stylist to get a real Afro. He told me that his dad hated Afros and told him "You should be thankful that you had 'the good hair.'" We laughed about how Afros for black kids were like long hair for white kids: parents hated our styles. It was very interesting to talk to Mike about race and all kinds of other things kids talk about, like girls, teachers, etc. Until the Spike Lee movie, I really thought “good hair” was a term coined by Mike’s dad. I really laughed out loud when I saw a trailer for that movie, being taken back to 1976 and thinking of my old debate partner, Mike, and his loose Afro.
Mike dated a white girl. We went on some double dates together. One or two times, I went with this black girl from another school’s debate team. It was easy to meet her, because all the teams hung out during tournaments. They weren’t date dates really, but like having fun and getting a pizza and talking a lot. I think she met us, cause I can’t remember going to her house. She lived near where I lived, near where my dream took place, and maybe was a descendant of the people at Gen. Butler’s refugee camp. She was very pretty, and had big sparkly brown eyes, and was the color of a Hershey bar. As I recall, she had a flawless complexion. She had her hair pulled back into a pony tail, which is very conservative and very elegant. To this day, I love the elegant simplicity of that look. Unfortunately almost all women (not just blacks) like to mix a lot of civil and chemical engineering into their hair style. I ran into her years later at the 1984 Worlds Fair, when I was in my mid-20s. She was married and still a very sweet person. She gave me a big hug, remembered me, and was genuinely glad to meet up with me.
My school, Jesuit, had some other black kids. It was an all-boy school. It was kind of expensive, and my parents were not rich, and had to struggle to send me there. Its probably the best high school in New Orleans. Marc Morial and Mitch Landrieu, future New Orleans mayors, went there while I attended. Most of the black guys stuck together and it was hard to get to know them really. But I remember in our band, there was a guy named Kendrick Foy, a very gentle nice kid, and some of the white kids would joke (not out of any hatred–just stupid high school humor) and call him “Kendrick Boy.” And he would say something like, “Did you say ‘Roy’ or “Foy’?” Before that time, I never heard that this was an ethnic insult, honestly. A lot of white people refer to other white adults as “boy.” Its kind of ambiguous. But after that episode with Kendrick, I noticed that one of my uncles constantly referred to black adults as boys, not in an ugly way, but I recognized it was racial nevertheless. He was a real nice guy. I worked at the company he ran one summer when I was about 20, and the black guys there absolutely loved him. Many of them told me what a great guy my uncle was. I don’t think they were telling me that to be nice.
College
I dated another black girl some years later when I was in college at UNO. A met a nice girl in my accounting class, and took her to the amusement park called Pontchartrain Beach before it closed in the mid-1980s. Pontchartrain Beach (at the end of Elysian Fields) was segregated before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There was a black amusement part called Lincoln Beach east of Pontchartrain Beach, on Hayne Boulevard. I think there are some vestiges of Lincoln Beach still there, like Roman ruins. When I went to her house to pick her up, her dad came out to meet me. He was very nice, but was obviously checking me out to see if I was some kind of creep. White dads did this too, but it made me more uncomfortable. At the beach, there was this old white guy who kept giving me dirty looks. I could read his mind. In hardcore white supremacist ideology, "race mixing" was the functional equivalent of me dating my pet cat.
Fading Use of the N Word
By this time it had long gone out of fashion to use what we now call "the N word" in public even between white people, and even between co-bigots, really. My family used it less and less inside the home, but did not altogether quit. My brothers and I still sometimes used the word in the 80s, certainly not to a black person's face, and not out of any kind of hatred...it was just a comfortable word from my childhood. My brothers and I would use it in a humorous manner when reminiscing about our relatives and the things they said when we were young. Nobody outside of my brothers and I would understand this context, I don't think. In all candor, about once every few years I say this in a fit of road rage.
These things to white people are like the concept of original sin that I learned about in Catholic school as a kid.
Derek Todd Lee
In the early 2000s the Baton Rouge area was plagued by a serial killer. He ultimately turned out to be a black guy, but the FBI expert types thought he would be a white guy. Typically, but not always, this particular type of psychopathy does not exist in the black community. The expert profiles said that the serial killer was not only a white guy, but someone about my age. These profiles were widely publicized. I remember coming out the mall one day at the height of the scare and noticing that women in the parking lot were closely observing my movements relative to them out of obvious caution. I’ve never experienced anyone thinking I was menacing before. It was a very strange experience. I would think black men of no ill will experience this often over the course of their youths and young adulthood.
Jazz
Right about the time of graduating from high school, I became a jazz fan. I always liked white big band swing that I was introduced to as a 5 year old when my parent bought the stereo. My mom, not really liking the selections of WYLD, went out and bought a Tommy Dorsey record that I really liked. I can also remember seeing the post-bop black jazz giants, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and really liking them on the Today Show when I was in grade school maybe about 1965. Even a lot of black adults find something like Modern Jazz Quartet to be a little too abstract, but I understood their musical concepts as a little white kid. It seems I always understood this music without knowing much about it. Jazz was born in New Orleans among the kind of people I'd known all my life. But it mostly left and went to Chicago and then New York.
After I'd grown up, I watched the Ken Burns documentary series "Jazz" with my mom and dad. In the documentary, the black New Orleans trumpet player, Wynton Marsalis, says that when a white person falls in love with jazz, as did the white trumpet player, Bix Beiderbecke in the 1920s, that you "have to come to terms with the humanity of the American Negro." I knew exactly what he was talking about.
My parents were not real jazz fans, but they grew up on big band swing – the white bands like Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. My dad liked Dixieland (which we're supposed to call "Traditional New Orleans Jazz" today). Many people can't tell the difference between Dixieland and Chicago style jazz. In the 1940s, Dixieland musicians put the Dixieland melody and harmonics on top of a swing rhythm with string bass instead of tuba...like post-war Louis Armstrong, Al Hirt and Pete Fountain. Al Hirt called it “Dixie Swing.” My dad in the 1960s did not like Al Hirt for refusing to play the song, “Dixie” at his club in the French Quarter.
At the end of the long documentary series, which traces the parallel story of race and civil rights to the development of jazz, my dad said something like, "I was for all that stuff (ie, segregation) when I was younger, because that's how things were. I was taught that that was how things ought to be. I never really knew that it was that bad for black people. I really wish I'd never had any part of being for that now, when I look back." I thought that was really great that he said that.
He passed away a few years ago, and my mom, who is almost blind moved in with my wife and I. She is a serious Obama fan, as am I. I turned her on to the great black swing groups like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmy Lunceford, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, etc. She is a really big Billie Holliday fan. She had heard the name, but thought Billie Holliday was a guy.
My Black Cousins
Sometime in the late 70s, I had a second cousin on my dad’s side who married a black guy and had children together. The marriage did not last, and she raised the kids. It was real hush-hush. I remember overhearing the mixed kids’ grandmother, my dad’s first cousin, saying something quietly to my dad like, “I gotta love them; they’re my grandchildren.” When those mixed kids grandmother died, I went to the funeral. We were never really close to that branch of the family. I had never met my mixed race cousins, but I really wanted to. This was after I was an adult. I wanted to express a warm welcoming to them. Unfortunately, they turned out to be typical preoccupied teenagers who didn’t seem to be concerned whether I loved or hated them. I was kind of disappointed. I will probably never run into them again.
My Friend Pat Turns Out to be a Black Guy
My best friend Pat turned out to be a doctor and practices in Houston. He’s one of the smartest people I ever met. He went through UNO pre med with only one B in organic chemistry. All the rest were As. He went to LSU and did his residency at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. He is the only doctor who I have ever met who is indifferent about making money. He went to India right after medical school to do some work there. He works at what he describes as a skid row clinic caring for the really down and out, a lot of drug and alcohol problems. I am sure Dr. Pat is going to heaven. God really blessed me to make our paths cross. When I had some problems earlier in life, Pat was the one who talked me into going back to UNO and making something of myself.
Pat had actually met my Creole friend Mike once when we were in high school. He was surprised to learn that Mike lived on the same street just doors down from his great aunt or grandmother or something. Pat told me at the time that it was strange that she lived in this Creole neighborhood close to the St. Bernard Project.
Years later someone in the family did some genealogy work and found out that his father’s ancestors were classified as being black. You never could tell this. Pat had kind of curly hair, but not even as curly as Mike’s. He had blue eyes and was lighter than I am. He looks like a prototype white person. But under the operation of the one-drop rule, he was technically a black person. Pat thought it was really funny and was proud to tell me that. He said during his residency at Charity, he had an old black patient who lived in that area, and Pat told him about his relative who lived there. The guy said he knew this elderly “octoroon” who lived in that area. Somehow some generations up, they got the paper work to say “white” on the birth certificates of later kids.
As an aside, Pat’s sister had long straight blond hair and blue eyes, as did her husband, and their large brood of daughters. One time when the notorious Nazi/Klansman David Duke was campaigning for something on Causeway and Veterans he came up to their car and saw all the blond hair blue eyed girls looking like something out of a Hitler Youth poster, and “complimented” them on their “fine Aryan family.” Pat’s sister told him to go “F” himself. That was really out of character of her too, as she was very proper and ladylike. I love that story!
My Photography
For a year I have been doing serious photography and am a member of ModelMayhem.com. My portrait work is basically limited to brown eyed African American women. I really try to capture that look in black women’s eyes that is so interesting. I love the way the light sparkles on such eyes.
I have a lot of deep feeling when I want to shoot African American models. I really have a deep feeling to use my photography as an art to show the deep beauty of this unique part of God’s creation that has been lacking in our history. Recently one of my models posted something on FB to the effect of, “I have nappy hair, a flat nose, big lips, brown eyes, and dark skin, but despite all that I am comfortable who I am.” To me she is one of the most strikingly beautiful models I’ve shot, and all of them have been really beautiful girls. It saddened me, and I messaged her about why she put it like that - in such a negative manner. She told me something about “eurocentrism” as a standard for beauty, to which I pointed out pictures of her that conformed to a Greco-Roman objective standard of beauty. She really liked that, I think. There is a need for what I do, and maybe as an outsider, I have some abstract level of objectivity to do this art. When I got into this last year, I was worried that prospective black models would think I was some kind of flake, and not want to work with me. On the contrary, people have been really nice and accepting of me.
What Does it Mean to Me to Be a White Person
This is a really difficult question, but I think this response is not complete without it. I never really thought of it before, so I had to think deeply about this. The best way I can describe it is like how scientists compare a test sample to a reference sample. Being the predominant culture, loosely termed “white,” is analogous to a reference sample to me; if the actual sample has no variance from the reference sample, it is said to be “unremarkable.” So I find being a white person is “unremarkable.” If something seems African American, Afro Cuban, Filipino, French, etc., those findings are “remarkable.” It is very neutral to me. I have no special affection for white people as such, which is not to say I have any disaffection for white people.
Should I be proud that George Washington was the first white president? This is utterly ridiculous. Should I be proud that Bach or Beethoven was white? I am not German so far as I know. I guess the last time I watched a boxing match about 30 years ago, I might have pulled for the white guy, but its more like rooting for the underdog than it was to being anti-black. Not even knowing the names of the boxers, I would pick the black guy as more probable than not of winning. I am proud that Wynton Marsalis is from New Orleans. I am proud when the Saints score a touchdown regardless of the race of the player.
The whole concept of race is not based on biological categories, according to scientists so I am told. It is a sociological construct. True, you can look at a picture and with maybe 99% of the time almost everyone would agree on how to put the individual photo subjects into discreet race categories. This becomes impossible within the criterion of the one-drop rule, as shown above. Pat’s sister would be technically black even though she looked like she could be a model in an ad for Nazi propaganda even to David Duke. Race really is a social construct without actual biological justification. Still, black people are generally recognizable as such, and so are whites. I understand (but this is over my head really) that the genetic difference between a white and black persons is insignificant scientifically. The differences between, say, different breeds of dogs is much more significant (so I understand). Its like calling balls and strikes in baseball. At the edge of the strike zone, it is difficult to call. In this situation it is like it is unclear what is the shape of the base.
The “white” race seems to me, based on personal experience and also learning, to be an artificial social construct basically meaning European; however, Persians are considered to be Caucasians, and people from India have certain genetic and linguistic relationships to Caucasians. Is it meaningful to say I am proud to belong in a category of people that includes Norwegians and Persians? I am sort of proud to be Cajun, but it is not something I think about often.
From a purely functional point of view, “white” really has meant “not black” and “not Native American (and maybe not Asian, plus what-have-you)” It is a negative category. I do not believe that Europeans inside of Europe ever considered themselves to be within a category called “white people” until the voyages of discovery in the 1400s and beyond. The French considered themselves to be French and so on.
If we accept this working definition, is it proper to be proud of not being black? Or perhaps one step further, should I be proud of not (knowingly) having so much as one ancestor with one drop of black blood since the 1600s or whatever? By implication, you have to have a negative view of what is black. So I think I am correct in viewing my race category as something neutral.
Certainly an organization such as the NAACP has an historic validity even if the “CP” part of the name represents a category not based entirely on biology. Folks like David Duke argue that the NAAWP is nothing more than a mirror image of the NAACP, and merely wants to advance white people. This has appeal on at least a superficial level (beyond which the vast majority of people never get). What does it mean to advance white people? Are white people in need of advancement as a people? Are they even “a people?”
People like me were once classified as “‘N’ Lovers.” Now we are known as “race traitors” albeit to a much more marginal section of the population than those who used the former term. What allegiance do I owe white people? From where does this duty arise?
2:34 PM PT: I've never had a diary make it on Community Spotlight. Whoever is responsible, I really appreciate it!
I've been involved in serious photography for two years. I didn't change that number in the edit to post here. It says one year in the text.