I come from a racist background. My parents were deeply racist. They were also both mixed blood Native and Euro-American. I grew up in a mixed race neighborhood in Los angeles in the 1970's. The racism that I experienced there, in the home where I grew up and the community at large, was deep and deeply scarring.
Even though I grew up in a mixed race area, there was a lot of racism around me. Everyday at home I heard my parents talk about wetbacks and niggers, pollacks and jews. I was not supposed to play with Mexicans or other minorities in my neighborhood or school. I was supposed to play with white kids. My best friend was a little mexican girl named Norma whose father kept a pony for the kids in their back yard. Luckily for me my parents left me unsupervised most of the time.
In Los Angeles when I was kid there were riots in the Watts neighborhood. We watched it on the evening news. it seemed so far away because it happened in a part of this large city that I had never been to. Then the rioting came home. There was a riot at my brothers school, the local high school. A young man was hung from a tree in the quad and They showed a picture of him in the paper. There were other young men beating his body with bats and 2x4's. What I remember was that it was the white kids against the Mexicans. I do not even remember who was who in the photo. I cannot place a race on the dead boy or the killers. I just remember the horror I felt and the sick feeling I get when I dissociate.
My father said the riots were because, "Those people are animals". He said it without thought I am sure because I had heard him complain about how the government had treated our people like animals. And there is the rub. My father experienced horrible, horrible abuse at the place they sent him after his mother died. He was sent there and treated that way because of his Native American ancestry. I never understood how a man who experienced the worst that racism has to offer could turn around and treat others in that way. I still have a very hard time with it. As we grew older my parents, in order to fit in with the times we lived in, tried to mask their racism and pretend they were open minded. They slowly transformed their overt racism into a kind of slimy under the table racism. They slowly stopped using racist words like gook and spade. Instead it was all those people. As in, "Those people think they have a right to do whatever they please." "One of them came in and applied for a management position where I work today. As if one of them could ever run anything." We were chastised for saying racist words but encouraged to hold racist beliefs.
We actually used to have discussions about topics like: which is worse a mexican or a black. A Mexican is lighter skinned, at least nearly the same color, but a black(yes just a black, not a person) at least can speak english in their own way. You don't really want anything to do with either one. But if you had to pick which would it be. That is how I was taught to think about race relations.
My parent both experienced racism as kids. My mothers step-father was white and put down his stepchildren for their native ancestry. My father's story I have told. I never could reconcile it with their treatment of other minorities. Were my parents only responding to the deep racism of the people around them? Were they really sure of all those differences between us and them? Were they just looking for someone to be better than in a world where class and race define how you are treated? Were they transferring their rage at the racism they experienced onto a more acceptable target?
when I was 12 we moved to Louisianna. In that community it was white against black. Not so different than the LA white against Mexican thing only much much more overt. The African american children sat in the back of the class. they sat in the back of the bus on the way to school. The school were integrated in the sense that we all sat on the same bus and in the same class. We never mixed. Almost never talked. It made me lonely. I did not know any better and talked to the African American kids like anyone else. Even they seemed surprised and confused by this. The white kids picked on me and threw the frogs from the biology class at me. Then we moved to Miami, where it was okay to talk and mix again. My brother Greg even had the nerve to make friends with an African American. My parents by this time were sinking deeply into alcoholism and did not seem too bothered by it. He never came to the house though.
We then moved to Chicago. We lived in the suburbs. We lived there just over a year and for the first six months I never met any person of color. In January a new girl came to school. Our only African American student. I still felt lonely.
Then that summer we moved back to Los Angeles. Back to the same area we grew up in. I was back in school with people of many other races and nations. My best friend in high school was Jewish and my brother Greg's best friend was Lebanese. His name was Omar and he was the first man I ever loved. I still have a thing for him all these years later. And yet my brother could and did still harbor racism in his heart. He experimented with Nazism and satanism even as he had friends who were Mexican and African American. He was wearing a swastika the time he got into a fight with some jerk who called his friend Raul a wetback.
Since leaving home I known and worked with people from all over the world and from many different backgrounds. I have striven to rid myself of the racist things my parent taught us. I do not consider myself a racist but It would be stupid to say that I do not have racist tendencies. You cannot spend the first 18 years of your life being taught the things my parents taught me without some of it worming its way into your psyche. It comes out in thoughts now mostly. I catch myself thinking some horrible thing and think 'where did that come from?' Then I remember my mom and dad.
This week: I kind of lost a day, or added one in somewhere, after last weekend episode. This happens whenever I dissociate for a long time. I spent all week trying to figure out what day it was and finally got back on track by thursday. Mr A said that Mr C is okay. He just had a few stitches. Mr B is okay but our landlord was a little peeved at him as it looks bad when the police come around. I do not blame him.