Okay, so why is a middle-aged white dude writing about race? Mostly because I experience it more from the perspective of the oppressor than the oppressed. A funny thing happens sometimes when I am alone amongst white folks – they occasionally say openly racist things, and they say them with the confidence of someone who is amongst his/her own kind; people who share their prejudices, and will likely concur with their grisly sentiments. I don’t believe I’m unique in this regard – I have to think that a lot of white people have this same experience.
So sure, I smirk a bit when I hear people opine that racism is dead and that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow is behind us. Though it seems a little retrograde, I suspect racism is not only alive and well but concentrated amongst those of us north of age thirty, with generally increasing intensity as you climb the ladder of age; so, the average 70-year-old white person is more bigoted than the average 35-year-old. (The current under-thirty generation is probably the least bigoted ever with regard to race, nationality, sex, sexual orientation, you name it. That, more than anything else, gives me hope.)
I’m in my fifties, and I can tell you that if it hadn’t been for my vehemently anti-racist mother (thankfully still amongst us), my fair-minded working-class father, and my very cool elder siblings, I would likely have been as racist as some of the people I’ve known over the years. Throughout my youth, all of the external inputs were negative. Schoolmates were almost ubiquitously white racists, particularly in New Hartford, where there were no people of color whatsoever. Some of my teachers were openly racist, particularly my third grade teacher in New Hartford, Mrs. Higgerson, who used the n-word as a show-and-tell item. (My junior high school swimming teacher, recently departed, once cautioned me that if his generation hadn’t won WWII, “you would have slanted eyes right now;” no lie. He was lecturing me for wearing a “Solidarity with Indochina” button, apparently unaware that the Viet Minh (precursor to the Hanoi government) fought the Japanese during the big one.)
So … with respect to racism, like most non-racist white folks I’ve whistling past the Klan meeting pretty much all my life. Just thought it was worth saying on this anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. We have a ways to go, folks.
luv u,
jp
Who would have guessed that we would have made it to the 17th episode of this monthly audio mash-up of classic Star Trek, Mr. Edd, and the 2012 Republican National Convention? Not I. Even so, this episode (introduced as always by Lee Majors) is a riff on the classic series episode, the Paradise Syndrome – Captain Romney bumps his head in a stone outhouse on an alien world, loses his memory, and goes all native CEO on the cigar-store Native American stereotypes who inhabit this television paradise. Oh, and the Nixon android has a zero-gravity tryst with an automated mining vessel. (You … kind of have to listen to it. )
Once again, thank you, George W. Bush, for locking in this reactionary Supreme Court majority for the rest of my natural life. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, like the Iraq war (motto: killing people from Fallujah to Fort Hood since 2003). So we should expect more of this sort of thing; ultimately, I am sure, the remaining flaccid constraints on the outright purchase of our elections by billionaires will be condemned as violations of “speech” and stripped away. McCutcheon was delivered with the same Panglossian assurances offered in Citizens United that, in essence, the market will govern itself. We’ve seen where that goes.