Obama's speech on race in America really hit home, pulling together for me threads of ideas that had been floating around my head for years. Many people are sharing their experiences with the ambiguity of this issue. I think this is a good idea. Here's mine.
I'm 48 and white (French Catholic). I grew up saying "nigger." Everyone I knew said it. I was very young during the Civil Rights era. The Civil Rights era was a product of northern agitators and communists. Martin Luther King was a particularly bad guy. Everywhere he spoke, violence followed, fanned by the news media. I was certain that New Orleans, where I grew up, would soon go up in flames, like Newark. I remember being about 5, lying in bed and wondering if I would hear some sort of low rumble as a warning as the niggers approached Metairie (which is a white suburb...now Republican)so I could escape. I remember many adults saying "They're going to burn down New Orleans too."
I remember having a really bad dream where there was a race war and the whites appeared to be winning. I was in my parents car, and could see black people being shot, and my parents cheered. I was very disturbed by this dream. I remember there was a black kid about my age and he got shot in my dream. Even to this day..I can remember that he had a red and white striped polo shirt on.
Everyone hated Kennedy. I thought my parents would have been delighted when he was assassinated, but my dad was very upset. It seemed like a paradox.
One summer there was a big fight at a family picnic. The subject of race came up. The sides were probably something like arch-segregationists versus the segregationists. I remember my aunt (who had lived "up north" in the 40s, and thus was exposed to "foreign" ideas)got really angry and screamed "What do you think we should do with them? Kill them?!?!?"
I had a cousin who was a real civil rights liberal, along with her lawyer husband. Her father told my dad that they invited niggers to their house as guests. They were probably lawyer types.
My grandfather was a real rightwinger. He used to order all kinds of stuff that would make Fox look like the Nation. I remember reading "White Teacher in a Black School." I remember seeing a book called "The Klansman" with a guy wearing a cone hat. My brotheres and I had no earthly idea what the Klan was. We though his outfit was funny. There was a newspaper called "The Councillor" published by the White Citizens Council. It was what we would call "wingnut" today....really scary wingnut. When Nat King Cole died, I remember my grandfather being sad and saying how he was a real good nigger. I really love my grandfather. My love of modern history and politics came from him. I'm pretty far left, but my introduction to politics came from a wingnut, albeit a really good-at-heart one, who to this day is my favorite person in all the world.
One time my dad, who was an diesel mechanic, put a new starter on a car in the grocery store parking lot for a black lady he never even met before. When I visted the bus garage where he worked, he and his black co-workers were friendly and said "hello" to me. This seemed strange. I remember asking my mom about things like this, and she said, "Not all niggers are bad. There are many really good niggers."
There was one black girl at my Catholic grade school. She was a few years younger than I was. I remember seeing her cry once at recess.
In the early 70s I started high school, which was run by the Jesuits. It was within in the City of New Orleans, in a formerly white neighborhood that was going somewhat black and latino. One day some latino kids knocked me down as I walked to the bus stop for no reason other then the fact that I had a Jesuit book bag and a khaki uniform and was a white kid.
I was on the debate team. One year my partner was a creole guy. One time he came to my house to pick up some notes. When he got there I told him through the screen door that I'd get the notes for him...leaving him on the front porch. When he left, my mom asked why I didn't invite him in.
He lived on the edge of a bad neighborhood. It was an area where lots of creole people lived, but there was a public housing project very close by. His mom told me to be careful when I stopped at the stopsign at the corner of St Bernard Avenue, near the housing project. I thought it was odd that a black was warning me about blacks. His dad looked like a sicilian, but was technically black. He looked like a dark white guy to me. This was the mid-70s. My debate parnter wanted an afro, but his hair was not exactly curly enough. He told me that his dad hated afros and told him "You should be thankful that you had 'the good hair.'" We laughed about how afros for black kids were like long hair for white kids. He dated a white girl. We went on a double date together. We talked alot about race issues and other stuff.
Right about the time of graduating from high school, I became a jazz fan. I always liked white big band swing that I was introduced to as a 5 year old. I can remember seeing the Modern Jazz Quartet and really liking them on the Today Show when I was in grade school. It seems I always understood this music without knowing much about it. Jazz was born in New Orleans among the kind of people I'd known all my life. But it left and went to Chicago and then New York.
In college I dated a black girl a few times. I had an attraction to black women, especially their big brown eyes. As a kid, I remember seeing Diana Ross and the Supremes all over the TV and liking them alot. This was pretty much the height of what is called the Civil Rights Era. In hardcore white supremacist ideology, "race mixing" was the functional equivalent of me fucking my pet cat. I remember some asshole white guy giving us dirty looks at a local amusement park. This was maybe 1983. It had long gone out of fashion to use what we now call "the N word" in public. My family used it less inside the home, but did not altogether. My brothers and I still sometimes used the word "nigger" in the 80s, certainly not to a black person's face, and not out of any kind of hatred...it was just a comfortable word from my childhood. My brothers and I would use it in a humorous manner when reminiscing about our relatives and the things they said when we were young. Nobody outside of my brothers and I would understand this context, I don't think.
These things to white people are like the concept of original sin that I learned about in Catholic school as a kid.
My parents became much more politically liberal during the 1980s as they grew to hate conservatism. They quit voting Republican way ahead of their time. There is the Huey Long streak that runs in our veins. Its been asleep for 2 generations, but I don't think its gone. Unfortunately I dabbled in conservatism from 1983 to 1986. It was more an intellectual movement than it is today. This was before Limbaugh. Today the Republican Party has a "party line" just like the Soviet Communist Party. You can get "brainwashed" from listening to Fox.
After I'd grown up, I watched the Ken Burns documentary series "Jazz" with my mom and dad. In the documentary, the black New Orleans trumpet player, Wynton Marsalis, says that when a white person falls in love with jazz as did Bix Beiderbecke, that you "have to come to terms with the humanity of the American Negro."
My parents were not real jazz fans, but they grew up on big band swing. My dad liked Dixieland (which we're supposed to call "Traditional New Orleans Jazz"). Many people can't tell the difference between Dixieland and Chicago style jazz. In the 1940s, Dixieland musicians put the Dixieland melody and harmonics on top of a swing rythm with string bass...like Al Hirt and Pete Fountain.
At the end of the long documentary series, which traces the parallel story of race and civil rights to the development of jazz, my dad said something like, "I was for all that stuff (ie, segregation) when I was younger, because that's how things were. I was taught that that was how things ought to be. I never really knew that it was that bad for black people. I really wish I'd never had any part of being for that now, when I look back." I thought that was really great that he said that.
He passed away last year, and my mom, who is almost bling moved in with me. She is a serious Obama fan, as am I. I turned her on to the great black swing groups like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmy Lunceford, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, etc. She is a really big Billy Holliday fan. She had heard the name, but thought Billy Holliday was a guy.
Its been a strange journey.