It wasn’t the worst beating I got as a child, but it was surely in the top three.
I’m a mutt, more Cherokee than anything, more Irish than anything but Cherokee, with fair portions of Blackfoot and Romanian thrown into the mix. But I’m white enough. And my last name is Gibson, a common name among the Aniyun-wiya but common enough among the rest of the population.
I made a mistake.
I was in third grade, and there was this good guy wrestler named Danny Little Bear who everyone thought was cool. And when we were all on the playground playing wrestling (by…ummm…wrestling) I wanted to be Danny Little Bear. I pointed out that I was Indian, which was not enough to carry the day, and the more violent than approved scuffling that followed inspired my teacher to talk to some parents. During the conversation my teacher told my parents that I wanted to pretend to be a particular wrestler because I was part Indian.
My father yelled at me as we walked back home. After we got there the belt came off. My dad wasn’t beating me for fighting in school. He was beating me for saying I was Indian.
My dad was a World War II veteran, a member of an Engineering Combat Battalion. World War II ruined him. By the time I was born, a couple decades later, he was judged permanently disabled. He lay in bed most days, drinking coffee and water, staying in the darkness of the only bedroom in the tiny apartment where we lived. In a couple years, the summer after fifth grade, he’d have me stand at the foot of that bed and read Orwell aloud, then start me on William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Not today. Today he swung his belt and told me I was lucky to have a British name, because British was the best thing to be. He told me that what had happened in Germany could happen here but it might not be Jews or Gypsies next time, it might be anyone, but that in the United States of America the people it was least likely to be were those of British descent.
I don’t think less of him for what he did that day. He’d been inside Buchenwald shortly after it was liberated.
I didn’t pay attention to him either. I was growing up in inner city Kansas City, eventually going to a high school that was about twenty percent white. Westport High was majority black at the time but there were plenty of Latinos, Asians, and even a sprinkling of kids from Iran. Everything seemed so…mixed. So ordinary. There were some “white boys” and there were some n-words, but when there was a mixed fight the racial component usually became a factor after the initial conflict, not before.
Plenty of people I went to high school with died or were incarcerated, but that was a pretty racially mixed group, too. I had been voted Most Likely to Succeed, male edition, and by the time of our ten year reunion the grim joke became that I would validate the vote by just making it to sixty. When I was young I just thought that was a poor thing, an inner city thing, but by the time that ten year reunion rolled around I’d seen some stuff.
Once I went to college I noticed I wasn’t being followed around in stores anymore. First time I came back from college I told the man who’d become a sort of father figure to me after my dad died that I knew I was an adult because I didn’t get trailed in stores anymore. He looked at me for what seemed a very long time before he asked, gently, who I was going into the stores with. I had some oddly different (pleasant) interactions with police, though even now, as a starting to be old man, when I hear a siren or see a police car I first feel threatened. But things were different, and even dumb as I was I eventually understood it was because I was white.
I still didn’t believe in my father’s painful lesson. Yeah, those things I noticed were intolerable injustices and I railed against them, but they were vestiges of a past I could see dying all around me. In my twenties I put the story of my beating into heavy rotation, you know, part of the “you think you had crazy parents” repertoire. I even remember thinking about it while I was crying on a November night in 2008 that I thought proved that we were moving beyond even the most remote possibility of something like what happened in Germany happening here.
I’ve been a member here for a long time. Haven’t commented much and this is the first diary I’ve written. I was big for Bernie during the primaries but I refuse to get into the blame game now. The important thing is to go forward embracing our liberal principles in full, not being willing to accept a half plate of just social liberalism or just economic liberalism, but to fight for justice and equality for all, in every aspect of American life. And I hope I’m wrong about what I fear the next four years will bring. I hope some bedrock of decency and patriotism in those who will be holding nearly all the levers of power might curtail the worst excesses to which their philosophies would logically lead.
Mostly though, I’m writing this diary to apologize to my dad. No, I still do not believe that our nation will stray that far into the darkness. But for the first time I have seen my country put itself into a position of such vulnerability that it could.
Dad, I never hit my kids. Never would, don’t believe in it. But maybe you should have beat me a little harder.