I Was a Teenaged Racist
It wasn’t my fault. I believe what Mama and Papa had told me, as they’d presumably believed what my grandparents, recent émigrés from Germany, Latvia, and Ukraine, had told them.
As a child, I had a grand total of one black classmate, Ms. Sandra Lucas, who, as my college friend Dennis Castañares would later describe himself as Basque, rather than Mexican, described herself as Spanish. That no one at Loyola Village School gave her a hard time — at least that I was aware of — might have had to do with her being beautiful. Michael Eddy, who was an albino, and not gorgeous, had it much harder.
There was one black boy at Orville Wright Junior High School. Like Sandy, he had a superpower — his remarkable athleticism — as many of my beloved Los Angeles Dodgers did too.
Dedicated to the memory of my OWJHS classmate and friend Norman Stone
My parents’ racism wasn’t virulent. My dad told me that black folk had natural rhythm, and that many of them were wonderful dancers and singers. He especially loved the Ink Spots. Mama came from Minneapolis, at whose North High School around 20 percent of her classmates had been Jewish, and maybe five percent Negroes, which word at the time implied respect. She’d had a (platonic!) Negro girlfriend, from whom she’d pulled away for fear that her white classmates might look down on her for the friendship.
Neither parent ever told me that Negroes were lazy, larcenous, or foul-smelling.
And yet, and yet. When the civil rights movement began in earnest, Papa would recount conversations he’d had with fellow Hughes Aircraft employees who supported Dr. King’s efforts in the South. In his recounting, the conversations commonly ended with Papa asking, “But would you let your daughter go out with one?” or sometimes, “But would you want them living next door?”
I think the latter question was more about property values than morality or hygiene. And I know for sure that when Sunset Mesa, the semi-upscale neighborhood in which we lived, got its first black family, my parents declined to sign the petition emphatically suggesting that the family relocate. Not exactly crossing the Edmunt Pettus Bridge, but not nothing, perhaps.
The first black person I ever spoke to was an earnest, hard-working dishwasher-turned-chef at the seaside restaurant where I was a busboy. He might have been 30, and I 16. I liked him and imagined he’d cherish as an affirmation of my affection hearing that I didn’t hate him because of his being black. I promise you I had only the best intentions. It took me a couple of.years to realize that his reply — “Well, thank you, suh” — had been sarcastic. What a very entitled, naive little shit I was at the time!
At Santa Monica High School, maybe 10 percent of my might-have-been classmates (students of color were reflexively put in normal or even remedial classes, while the likes of me were in college prep ones) were chicano and five percent black. Animosity toward the former was much more overt. We called them “beaners”, and assumed they’d grow up to work in custom auto upholstery shops on Lincoln Blvd. Tuck and roll, ese!
Shame on us.
I advanced to college, where there were a lot more students of color. I’d never heard English spoken more beautifully than by the black African graduate student who lived a few doors down from me in our dormitory. Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and I had a class together, and he would nod at me from on high when we passed each other on campus. I gave my parents a hard time for having made me wary of persons of color, but of course there wasn’t much about which I, as a self-righteous little faux hippie, didn’t give them a hard time about.
As a young adult, I had a couple of black girlfriends. That neither relationship lasted very long had nothing to do with their being black. I came to regard racists with the same contempt I felt for homophobes and, slightly later, misogynists. But I’ll get to them in separate essays.
I would sooner live in neighborhood mostly of Haitian or Central American or Eritrean refugees than one with a lot of Trump bumperstickers.
Your Complete Guide to Digital Sparring With Nincompoops
Oh, sure, you encounter plenty of horseshit on Substack — women saying they covet as subscribers others who share their interest in Living Authentically [capitalization mine], or persons of both chromosomal configurations speaking of “lived experience” [an experience is, for God’s, sake lived
Thank you for writing this.
I grew up in a project in Philadelphia in the 40's and 50's, It was all white then, so were my schools. My high school basket ball team regularly lost to Overbrook HS, and routinely lost as their center was a dude name of Wilt (the Stilt) Chamberlain.
There was a couple of dudes, about 10 years my senior that got jumped and knived on Rising Sun Avenue, outside Exide Batteries, they were blacks from,. of all places, Nice Town. I did not understand the racial tension.
In 1955 the City of Philadelphia decided to integrate the project, so they carefully selected families, only about four or five. The Edwards moved in about four doors up (row houses) and my mother, divorced trying to raise three kids on a $1 an hour bank analyst salary, dated the brother of one, my sister dated the nephew.
I never thought nothing of it, until I was told by my principal, that if I showed up at school the next day (ny 17th birrhday) I would be arrested and sent toDaniel Boone, basically a school for delinquents in south Phillie, and what a reputation it had.
Short story I wound up in a small town in NW Louisiana living with my grandparents in a shot gun cabin, owned by my Southern Baptist preacher uncle (from him I learned what racism was) .
Being an unredeemed punk, I fell in with the local bad boys, wild ass cajuns, thanks to my street knowledge we commited all kind of mayhem in that sleepy litttle town. Tjhe Cjhief of Police was a second cousin, and I was a bane to his existence.
Mostly there were fights behind the stands at rival football games.
Then one Saturday night the Dupreee brothers, and Gene Coyne thought that it would be fun to go miggah knocking. Dirving through the black side of town, with a hose draped over the roof of the car,when they approached a black the hose swungdown.
That was it, Monday I enlisted. And in the service I found best friendships with blacks, Puerto Ricans, Hispanics and a Lebanese who slept in the lower bunk,in a quonset hut in my year at Iqaluit on Frobisher Bay Canadian NWT.
One interesting point, the town built a new High school for the blacks, years before they built one for the whites. And the whole town boosted and was proud of the Abraham Lincoln HS football team. It was perpetually all state, never mentioned the white HS football team, as it was an embarrassment.
In the South football is indeed a religion.