White Boy
My Personal History with Race in America
I started to write this essay in June of 2020, but like many other writings of mine, it remained unedited as the world moved around me with its opportunities, challenges and distractions. I retrieved it today, as recent happenings in the news are sparking old memories for me. In Iowa, our Republican governor and overwhelming Republican majority just passed a school voucher bill into law, a bill which by most non political assessments cuts the legs out from under the guarantees made by the U.S. Constitution that equal, public education be made available for all children. Meanwhile, in Memphis, another instance of police brutality, this time black police officers kill a black man. A bit more complex, but racism nonetheless.
That made me think of the unique experiences of my half century on this planet and my personal experiences with the “racial question”. It reminded me of this old polaroid — about 1968 when we lived in Santa Ana or Sylmar, California. My Dad and his friend Charlie, a black truck driver for Allied Van Lines, from Ohio, both of them giving the black power salute in our backyard, and mugging for the camera. (my sister Liz looking on). We’ve all come a long ways since then.
I was born in Iowa, and when I was just a little over a year old, we moved to Los Angeles, California. It had to be scary for my parents, a couple of small town, Iowa farm kids, to arrive in LA in the early 60’s on the heels of the aftermath and tensions of the Watts Riots; buildings burned, and 34 people killed by police bullets and violence. I’m sure my parents were aware of riots, and the tension at the time. I asked my mom about this, and she says “I was too busy to pay attention to that stuff, I was working nights at Mercy hospital, with 3 kids in diapers…”.
When I shed my diapers, I was fortunate that my parents were open-minded and had friendships with people of different races and cultures. I was only 4 or 5, but I remember Venice Beach in 1968, the hippies and freaks, the cars. Our house had no shortage of pictures on books and magazines of Martin Luther King and John F Kennedy, two most revered men inn our household. I remember visits to canyon country to see my hippy Auntie and some kittens. I can still see the first episode of Sesame Street on a little black and white TV, with Gordon opening the show, and it’s lessons on equality and fairness (everyone should watch it again — it holds up). My mom praised the virtues of peace, love and equality — even though she was working all the time and couldn’t take an active part in politics yet. I still remember her reading us Ezra Jack Keats, “Whistle for Willie”, and “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Mom explained the intricacies of racism in simple terms, and It took me years to understand that just being nice to people with different skin color didn’t automatically mean you weren’t racist.
After we moved out of Los Angeles in 1970 or so, I was part of forced public school integration two times, in very different cities, but similar, well-intended goals — to make equal the quality of education for all kids.
The first time I experienced integration was in 1971 shortly after we moved to the south side of Oklahoma City. A court ordered bussing plan re-distributed white and black students across the Oklahoma City School District, and at my all-white Hillcrest elementary school I saw my first angry adult faces and hurled rocks and expletives. It was scary for a 2nd grade kid. I remember the voluntary segregation in the lunch rooms when they had black kids from inner city visit us. A young crew cut version of his father, “Look at them niggers, eating with their hands.” I embarrassingly dropped my fish strip from my hand and began eating with a fork. As side note. somewhat related, I had been taught that there was Native American bloodlines on my father’s side, so when an announcement was made over the school PA for all “Indian” kids to go to the auditorium, well, I went, but that is a story for another time.
Fortunately, at home I had good guidance and my parents put things in perspective. I was taught that we are all equal and that the reason for the bussing was that the schools in the OKC district were anything but equal. In Oklahoma, the wavin’ wheat, can sure smell sweet, when the wind comes right behind the rain, but in the early 70’s the smell of racism in the bible belt was ripe. I am digging deep to remember, but I have swirling memories of Mr. Lee, the Asian karate teacher who came to our restaurant and was killed by men who antagonized him for his race, then shot and killed him, and went free because his knowledge of karate was a lethal weapon. About the black family that moved into our white neighborhood, skinny little Sandra, with a yellow dress, and the grumpy neighbor complaining about “them”. I was lucky to have my parents to interpret and give reasoned, positive narrative as these things unfolded. Still, I mostly did kid things with my best friend, Timothy, a full-blooded Pawnee Indian, who took me to an eye-opening Powwow, with overflowing colors, drums, excitement and smells. I was oblivious to my good fortune to be a member of the favored race in America.
In 1974 we packed up and headed north to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in our brown Pinto station wagon, with newly acquired Okie southern accents and hope for more liberal and progressive folk as we crossed the Mason Dixon line. We settled in on the Polish and German south side of Milwaukee, and assimilated well into the socialist leaning city. Ice skating, neighborhood fights, and honest-to-goodness “greasers” — leather jacket wearing polish and german “ski’s” — hoods with slicked hair and a tendency toward beer drinking and random violence (ironically, their grandparents either escaped, or ran concentration camps). It was right out of “Happy Days” and “Laverne and Shirley”.
In 1976, Federal Courts ordered the Milwaukee Public School District — one of the most segregated in the U.S. — to come up with a plan to integrate. Again, I saw the anger, violence and fear triggered by racism. This time, as a 6th grader. Rather than subject me to the randomness, of the race lottery, Mom and Dad did the complete opposite of the white flight that was taking place, and they sent me to Jackie Robinson Jr. High School, a predominantly black school on the inner city north side. Take that, segregation! The school was an odd mix of kids from the neighborhood and kids from idealistic and hippie parents. The teachers were a mix of traditional and experimental. Everyone smoked in the bathroom. A new world. More assimilation.
Jackie Robinson was an alternative, open classroom school, which meant the kids decided when and what classes they wanted to go to. I mostly read books in the reading lab for hours each day, or checked out to the music lab to watch Peter and the Wolf, over and over on a film projector, or listen to Beatles records. I learned a lot about the school’s namesake Jackie Robinson the first black baseball player in the major leagues, and I saw Hank Aaron, Reggie Jackson, Johnny Bench and Pete Rose at the 1975 All Star game. I also learned that things were tougher in the inner city. That I could get my ass kicked for lunch money, and get mugged for my coat and gloves. I learned firsthand that violence is often born from frustration and survival. That everything can be incredibly different just a few miles across town. I saw guns and knives and needles for drugs, I saw someone beaten almost to death. I was called “White Boy” more than once, and not always in a nice way. But hey, kids will be kids.
I was called “White Boy” more than once, and not always in a nice way.
The single biggest salvation and take away for me was FUNK and SOUL music. Parliament, Chaka Khan, Bootsy!, Ohio Players, Rick James. Damn! Everyday at lunch, the music would blast from big speakers. I was indoctrinated and intoxicated — One nation, under groove! The school had a drill team, which was basically a drum line with strobe lights. They put on a show in the auditorium and I was mesmerized — the accent on the 1 and 3 was forever imprinted on my brain. This was the moment I fell in love with music. Assimilation gave me groove. I didn’t think it then, but know it now — music at it’s purest, knows no color or race. It is the great emancipator, and my musical soul was free at last.
I also learned some hard lessons and saw first hand the poverty of inequality. One day at gym class on the playground, a police car pulled up and two cops stepped out to collar a kid in our class, named T.J. He was sporting a big afro and wearing a white tracksuit. The police said he fit the description of someone who had robbed a store that morning. He protested, the teacher and kids protested — he had been at school all morning. I witnessed for the first time, with disbelief, the power and wrongness of policing. I also saw how some of the older, black school teachers treated the black kids differently, harder. I watched as they lectured black kids about being the fool and how that won’t fly in whitey’s world. I got a crush on two girls that year, both named Barbara, one with caramel skin, bell bottoms and a perfect two foot afro and one a hippy with sleepy eyes and straight brown hair. I don’t remember racial tensions, just the normal Jr. High angst and dumbassery. The closest thing we had to conflict most days was whether to play Aerosmith “Rocks” or Funkadelic “One Nation Under Groove” in the student lounge. Take away race and bad is bad and good is just good, and music is just music.
In hindsight, both of the attempts at forced integration that I was part of were mostly failed, but the intentions were important. In retrospect, they did little to improve the systemic racism that caused the poor school systems and broken neighborhoods that they were trying to fix.
In 1978, I was dropped into the whitest place on the planet. Wall Lake, Iowa. Where grandfathers still passed on racist words and phrases to their grandkids. Like; “nigger rigged” to describe something shoddily repaired, “nigger rich” meaning spending a small windfall on frivolous items, and telling racist jokes that remind one of Uncle Remus and Amos and Andy. It’s hard to be overtly racist when there hasn’t been a person of color since the negro baseball league played in town in 1923, But haters will always find a way to manifest hate and look down on others to make themselves feel better. When you hear things like that in casual parlance, it has a numbing effect, and it seeps into your brain like poison. Because of the way I was raised, the words jarred me. Later, the same racists would zero in on Mexican and Central American immigrants, calling them “beaners”, and making jokes about how many of them live in a single dwelling, meanwhile, our hispanic workforce works harder and cares more for family than most of the legacy families in the area. (Read Art Cullen’s book “Storm Lake” for an in depth account of what happened when moneyed interests warped the big agriculture labor market, and immigrants saved Storm Lake from itself.)
The other day, I read a Social Media post from a former schoolmate, the gist of which was; “There is no such thing as white privilege, where I come from, we all worked hard to get where we are”. There is so much irony here. Someone from a small, all white community, who, if they have traveled, has probably only traveled to a resort compound in Mexico or Jamaica, or perhaps gone on a mission trip to Haiti, and likely never taken a frightening wrong turn in Newark, NJ, or found themselves in the Chicago Projects, or Roxbury in Boston, with a police helicopter overhead (I have), or witnessed racial profiling, or being treated as guilty without doing anything wrong. Where he came from, white ancestors left Germany, Norway, France and Ireland willingly. They joined others who looked like them and spoke like them and took mostly free government land to homestead. When my former schoolmate’s grandfather was farming and working hard to get enough money to buy a farm, that wasn’t possible for black, former slaves, or sons and daughters of slaves. The best they could do was to become sharecroppers — basically slaves who were paid just enough to stay in debt, and were hung for looking at white woman the wrong way. That was grossly unequal footing, that changed little until the 1960’s, and still has a long way to go. Some people can work twice as hard and get half as much. That is injustice.
This summer I was in Kosovo, where I got a first hand account of the ongoing racial tension between ethnic Serbs and Albanians. A deep, historical divide that is mirrored in hundreds of regions across the world, from Palestine to Pittsburgh. Racism is a bewildering concept to me. It is a judgement bias, based purely on a group of people who simply look and act differently than another group. Always the hopeful optimist, I see hope in unlooked for places. Music always builds bridges and modern social media is more egalitarian than not. We can change the trajectory, but not without pushing boundaries, and dismantling the systemic underpinnings of a legacy of unfair societies.
It took pain for Lincoln to Abolish Slavery, to defeat Jim Crow lunch counter laws with sit-ins and for MLK and John Lewis to endure brutal treatment, for the right to vote. It takes pain to stand up and say Black Lives Matter, and it will take pain to get us to the next place, but we will. I believe this. I also believe that music, art, culture, film, writing and entertainment will lead the way as it always has. Art can start a revolution! But only if those who are standing safely in the middle, will stand up when they see an injustice and will speak up louder than the bullies and spreaders of hate.
This is what my background prepared me for; love your brothers and sisters, help those less fortunate and those who are lucky enough, should level the opportunities for all. Greed is wrong, judging on the basis of race, creed, religion or any other is wrong. Love, compassion and common sense is always right, and always the answer. It’s all there, in the Bible, Quran and the Torah. We know what is right and the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice — but only if we bend it!
