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
