One of the problems with peeing in the pool (not that you would do it, of course) is that the pee goes everywhere. Humans, and perhaps other animals as well, tend to be short-sighted and do things for their own convenience. For however long humans have been on planet Earth, we have been metaphorically peeing in the pool and then moving to the other end. Whether we have finally discovered that there is no “other end” remains to be seen. The principal impetus for this blog entry is not some new information about the way humans have been damaging the environment, although that’s an important and ongoing issue. The principle event that has prompted this blog entry is the recent shooting in a Charleston, South Carolina, church served to remind me that the human ecosystem is also fragile.
For most of my life, I have been fortunate to be in the “no peeing” end of the racial-strife pool. My parents were relatively free of bias. Not long after WWII, my dad sponsored a Japanese architect to come to the U.S. to study and work here. My mom was a clinical social worker in Santa Clara County, California, and was well-acquainted with racial problems. The community where we lived (Los Altos, California) was new construction, and most of our minorities were Mexican or Filipino. I developed my first friendships with African-Americans (I will typically use “Blacks”) during freshman year at the College of Wooster, in Wooster, Ohio. Several of us, but none of the Blacks, went to Ft. Lauderdale for spring break that year. I was not well-prepared for what I saw on the way there. I had never seen separate drinking fountains marked “Colored” and “White,” for example.
I spent my last two summers of high school and early college working construction crew. The crews for most of the jobs I worked were primarily Mexicans and Whites, and while I did see a few Blacks on some of the jobs, I didn’t have any direct contact with them. After my sophomore year in college (at Redlands University, in Redlands, California), I had to drop out of school for a year. For part of that year, I worked as a clerk in a FHA office in Los Angeles. My boss was a Black, and the one friend I had there, was also Black. We decided to get together away from work. I had a car and suggested that my wife and I could meet him close to where he lived. He said “No,” that he would come to where we lived, that we wouldn’t be safe in his neighborhood. His neighborhood was Watts, where the riots occurred not that long after.
By then, my wife (now, ex-wife) and I moved to Urbana, Illinois, where I was a student and she was a librarian. Our best friends at that time were Black, and we spent quite a bit of time discussing race relations. As I suppose is true for most colleges and universities, the University of Illinois was fairly isolated from the rest of the community. I was friends with an auto-mechanic/gas station owner at the place my wife and I always bought gas and had most of our mechanical work done. He often spoke disparagingly about “Black People.” When I complained about that he said, “Yeah, but … look at where you are [at the University]. The Blacks you know are better people than those who come here.” I don’t know the degree to which that might have been true. After all, it was a Black person who warned me about going to Watts.
At Illinois, I was in the English Department, and nearly everyone I knew was a social activist. The same group was active in both the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War Movement. We really believed that it was the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and that we would have a bloodless Revolution. Things didn’t turn out quite that way. And then I was in the Army.
Whatever else you might say about the Army (and, I assume, the other branches of the service), it was reasonably well-integrated by the mid-1960s. After WWII, President Truman issued an Executive Order banning discrimination in the military. By the time I served, many of the Noncommissioned Officers were minorities, even though most of the Commissioned Officers where I was stationed were still White.
After the Army, I returned to graduate school at the University of Illinois. When I completed the Ph.D., I accepted a job at the University of Florida. After a year there, I joined the faculty at Western Michigan University, where I stayed until I retired. Blacks have consistently been a minority in most of the colleges and universities I’m familiar with (Fisk would be an exception). I don’t know the degree to which bias exists in the academic community and how much is self-selection, with Blacks choosing to work in occupations that require less education and pay better. When I was the chair of an academic department, the concern was that all our minorities were from India, Pakistan, or China. When we actually had a Black female applicant from a good school and with a wonderful dissertation topic, the University authorized $30,000 less than the going rate for new PhDs in Computer Information Systems.
While at Western Michigan University, I started training in karate. I have been at the The Okinawan Karate Academy. The Okinawan Karate Academy is essentially post-racial. If it weren’t for the evening news, it would have been easy for me to think that the U.S. has finally arrived at a post-racial society. For the past year or so, I have found much of the news about race relations disheartening. Many of us who came of age about the time John F. Kennedy was running for the US presidency, had the sense that we had turned the corner and were heading comfortably into a time of greater peace and justice. That may, of course, still be true, but a number of events of the past several years leads me to wonder. It is hard to tell whether hate and prejudice are currently in a death spiral making things seem worse than they are, or whether we have actually lost ground that we thought we had gained.
The recent shootings of unarmed Black people by police, the unequal rates of incarceration for similar “crimes”, especially possession of small amounts of drugs, and the continuing cycle of poverty and unemployment, and (last but not least) the shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, has led me to realize that while we’ve been swimming, a lot of people have been peeing in our pool. I’m not sure what can be done about it, especially when so many of our politicians seem to think that the shooting was part of a war on Christians.
However difficult it may be, we will have no peace until we have both justice and reconciliation. Those who have been privileged by race and history also need to make reparations, not only for economic advantage based on slavery, but also for perpetuating economic disadvantage resulting from discrimination. And, lest we forget, much of what we now consider the United States was taken by force from those we now call “Native Americans.” [Disclaimer: my father was mostly Cherokee from the Texas/Oklahoma area, so his ancestors survived the Trail of Tears, the relocation of the Cherokee from the Carolinas to Oklahoma Territory.] It’s also worth noting that the Spanish Conquistadors stole Mexico and the area including Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and most of California from Native Peoples. After the Mexican War of Independence, White Europeans stole Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California from the Mexicans.
Our “domestic history” in the United States is long and bloody. The same is true, of course, for other countries and territories. Humans are, after all, part of Nature, and, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, said Nature is red in tooth and claw in the competition for survival. I suspect that we not only need to change our ways, but must if we are to avoid joining most other species in what is rapidly becoming the Sixth Extinction. As George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It’s time we started remembering it, as repeating it increasingly looks like a “dead-end street.” It’s time we stopped peeing in our pool.
