The question, “Are we there yet,” is a cliché of traveling with children. We expect adults, even those grown weary with traveling, to have a better understanding of how long it takes to get from Point A to Point B. This blog entry is about our collective journey from racism to a “postracial” culture. It was prompted by recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, following yet another police shooting of an unarmed black teenager. The policeman, as is usually the case, was white. One such shooting isn’t the real issue, of course. The problem is that this one was just one among many, and the many are a definite problem. The core issue is the racial divide, an artificial division based on perceptions rather than reality. The events in Ferguson may have been a tipping point in the same way the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 was a tipping point.
It’s time we recognized that most of us, not only in the States, but also in most parts of the world, are of mixed race. You may recall the DNA test on the white separatist that revealed that he is 14 percent black (Sub-Sarahan African). The guy looks white and seems to believe that he is nothing but white, but his DNA doesn’t lie. If we were all tested, our DNAs would show that we are all related in more ways than one. Because most of us are of mixed race, race is a bogus issue that influences most people far more than it should.
In terms of ethnicity, my father was primarily Cherokee Indian with a bit of English tossed in. My mother was primarily Norwegian with a bit of English tossed in. On my mother’s side, the English seems to have been primarily from the Pict or Pitt tribes from the north of England. They were among the tribes that led the Roman Emperor Hadrian to build a wall across England for protection. I would be curious to know what a DNA test would tell me about the accuracy of what I think I know about my ethnicity. Regardless of what such a test would show, however, my sense is that we are all more closely related than physical appearance—including skin color—suggests. DNA tells the story….
I spent most of my youth in Los Altos, California. When my family moved there, the town was small and the area was primarily farms and orchards, but the subdivisions were going up quickly. The “minorities” (who were probably the majority when my family first moved in) were Mexican and Filipino. To find people with black skin you would have had to go to East Palo Alto (east of Stanford University) or to San Jose, which was the largest nearby city and the most ethnically diverse. Throughout the region, Mexicans were the prominent “minority.” If you look at the names of places in that part of California, the Mexican heritage is immediately obvious: Los Altos, Palo Alto, Santa Clara County, San Jose, Los Gatos, and so on…. I grew up playing with and, later, working with Mexicans. There were some divisions. Most of us in the Los Altos school system were the children of new arrivals and “white.” A larger percentage of those in the Mountain View school system, which was an older community, were Mexican. Some of them came from families that had been in California since before it became a state.
Most of my early experience with black people came from the TV news. The Civil Rights movement gained momentum in the 1950s, and TV was there. I met blacks for the first time when I went away to college. At the College of Wooster in Ohio, I joined a campus fraternity (fraternities were local and called “sections” at Wooster). At the time I joined, Fifth Section was primarily for athletes. Several members of the section were black, and most of them were on athletic scholarships. I do not remember much in the way of racial strife, but the black men on campus significantly out-numbered the black women (there were few athletic scholarships for women in those days), and interracial dating was not well-accepted in 1960.
The term, white privilege was not widely used at that time, so we did not have a broad base of understanding how our experiences were different. One of my black friends at Wooster expressed dismay at how many of us complained about all the rules and restrictions we encountered at what we called “a small, Christian school for small Christians.” He came from Cleveland’s inner city and said that Wooster was like Heaven for him. Even in retrospect, I can only imagine what he meant about the safe environment provided by the college community. Although I didn’t appreciate it when I was there, I can see now that Wooster was ahead of its time in promoting racial accord. The blacks I knew at Wooster did OK academically. One I didn’t know because he was a senior when I was a freshman later returned to Wooster as Athletic Director.
A combination of factors, including the winter weather in Ohio, led to my transferring to the University of Redlands in Southern California. At Redlands, most of my friends were musicians. None were black. Although I joined the soccer club and worked out with the team even though I was too inexperienced to play in the games. Redlands was followed by my “drop-out” year, during which I worked a variety of jobs in the Los Angeles area. One of those jobs was working in a Federal Housing Administration office. My supervisor was black, and my closest friend there was black. We talked about meeting socially. I had a car and suggested that my wife (now “ex”) and I drive to where he lived. He told me that his neighborhood wouldn’t be safe for me and that he would come to my house, which he had to do by taking a bus and walking. It turned out that he lived in the Watts neighborhood, which was close to exploding in a massive race riot. He was right that his neighborhood would not have been safe.
After that year, I entered the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, where my wife had a job as a librarian. The student body consisted of a variety of ethnicities and nationalities. It was very different from the small-school atmosphere I had experienced previously. My wife became friends with a black woman who also was a librarian. Her husband, also black, was working on a doctorate in athletic administration. They were among our best friends while we were there. Those were the days of the marches for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam. Virtually everyone we knew was an activist, including some who became famous (pictures in Newsweek) for their activism and a few who emigrated to Canada to avoid the draft. I had finished my undergraduate degree and started grad school by the time I received my draft notice. Many college students, especially married college students, were exempt from the draft. My draft board, however, was in California, and I was in school in Illinois. I was called.
In terms of race, the Army was the most egalitarian organization with which I had been affiliated. Although most of those in the officer ranks were white at that time, the enlisted ranks were well-integrated. I can remember hearing some complaints from new arrivals at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, about having to follow orders from black noncommissioned officers, but such complaints had disappeared by the time I was out of basic training and assigned to a unit. The sergeant major of the battalion I was in was black, and I was a company clerk reporting to a first sergeant who was black. My experiences at my next two duty stations, Ft. Sam Houston, Texas, and Long Binh, Vietnam, were similar.
I am old enough to remember when the accepted term for those thought to have African ancestry was “Colored.” The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in 1909, primarily in response to lynchings, which were all too common in the early part of the twentieth century. My wife and I had lived for a time in Oakland, California, within walking distance of the University of California at Berkeley. At the time the Black Muslims were on most street corners selling copies of “Muhammed Speaks.” About that time, James Brown was singing, “Say it Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud. I’m not sure when the term African-American gained popularity, but “black” has stuck with me, at least in part because my sense is that virtually all of us are a mix of racial backgrounds, not everyone labeled “African-American” has any more roots in Africa than the rest of us, and all terms based on race are essentially misnomers.
At this point in U.S. history, we seem to have what I call “pockets of postracialism.” We have places and people for whom “race” is not a significant issue. Musical groups are often of mixed race. Interracial marriages have been increasing over the years. Even so, blacks often experience problems that “whites” rarely encounter. Even the United Nations has commented on our inability to practice what we preach.
Of all the times I have been stopped by the police—almost always for speeding—I have usually been treated well. I have received a few tickets I didn’t deserve, but I definitely earned the vast majority of them. I don’t know whether this was “white privilege” at work, as news about how blacks were treated by police was not reported except in a few widely reported cases, typically associated with large-scale protests. I have never been accused of stealing when I have been shopping, and I have never been denied service in a place of business, including lunch in Swett’s Restaurant in Nashville, Tennessee. I do not know whether my black friends could say the same about their shopping and dining experiences.
Even if “race” is a misnomer, however, racism is still very much with us. I am not sure what it is going to take to get us—in the U.S.—past our unfortunate history of slavery, lynchings, and segregation. In my own case, my parents were relatively free of racial bias and expected the same of me. Having early experiences playing with Mexicans and then having black friends at a relatively early age doubtless made a difference. My sense is that integrated schools and neighborhoods are crucial in eliminating racism. We had been making progress integrating schools until 2007, when the Supreme Court said that we needed to take a step back and have more segregation. A certain portion of our population is very fearful of those thought to be “other.”
Although we have a black president and many of our most admired sports heroes and movie stars are black, we clearly aren’t “there” yet. Have things improved? Most definitely. Have we improved enough? Not by a long shot. If you have ideas for speeding the process, please let me know: joel@scs-matters.com
