White Girl in the Promised Land

Elatia Harris    

Last Monday my colleague Michael Blim wrote about the Supreme Court’s decision of a few days earlier – Parents v. Seattle Schools – which would start to expunge any consideration of race from the way our children were assigned to public schools no sooner than many of us were firing up our barbecues for the 4th of July. Would we, the People, be too beguiled watching the flames leap to notice the Orwellian turn the Court had just taken?  I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where outrage trumps barbecue any day of the week, so Justice Roberts got his work noticed here.  Read all about it in Michael’s post, which attracted a sufficient diversity of comments to utterly enlarge my notion of the 3QD readership.  And to confirm what I, a vintage Mid-century Southern white, have all my life seen exquisitely demonstrated – that plenty of people park their brains in a sub-basement before they think, and talk, about race.  In that plenteous number, a plurality of our Supreme Court judges might now be included; if so, they are more dangerous than the others, than all the others combined.

That race is an enduringly difficult subject may be the very reason why the Roberts Court drop-kicked it from the law of the land, as that law applies to school children.  One famous response, after all, to a refractory problem is to declare it a non-problem, so that no solution need be sought, still less found.  It’s a perversion of math, where changing a thorny problem to a problem that’s already been solved is as good as a solution -- is a solution.  Gamesmanship and its sophistries pervade Parents v. Seattle Schools, as Michael has shown, never more than in the deeply artificial contrasting of “social engineering” with its false opposite, “individual responsibility.”

Does the Roberts Court imagine we are living in post-racist times?  Probably not, but by disingenuously transferring to the individual – the individual black child, that is – the entire burden of gaining not just opportunity, but access to opportunity, the Court implies one of two readings – either that it believes being poor and black is no different than being comfortable and white, or that it’s so different as to be an incontrovertible disadvantage, one that intelligent taxpayers will triage their way away from. To make no legal distinctions between black children who grow up with the stresses of poverty and white children who live in privilege is to make the law a guarantor of that privilege. Trust me on this one, for I can remember when the law was exactly that.

In a Large Southern City Which Shall be Nameless

A century before I was born in a large Southern city which shall be nameless, my mother’s family left Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where until the Civil War they raised cotton. Their house and everything in it had been garrisoned by Union soldiers before the war’s end, so when the family left, they left with nothing, and I was almost grown-up before I understood that that was as it should have been. Heading west, they joined a cousin in a not-so-distant state, a Methodist minister who wrote them there was pretty good cotton land to be had thereabouts. They got back on their feet – farming, ranching, banking.  There was, briefly, prosperity – my grandmother had a white Shetland pony, and was the fanciest little girl she knew – and then the Depression, which put paid to any notion of a real comeback.

A Southern family with a plantation background is a family keenly aware of dispossession, of what it is to be on the wrong side of history. This is different from an awareness that one’s ancestors were participants in and beneficiaries of a crime so vast and systematic that one’s nation is rocking from it still.  I cannot say that in childhood I found “plantation tales” charming and innocent, but the full horror of them was not yet available to me.  Here’s one.  When in 1860 my great-grandmother, Eleanor W., turned 6 years old, she was presented with her sixth slave, having already been given one for each previous year of her life.  Like little Eleanor, the slaves were children.

Coming along a century later, should I have felt personal guilt for this?  Well, it didn’t make me proud.  But my imagination, including my moral imagination, was affected by this story in a way that I have the sense to be grateful for.  I can only have first heard it in the spirit it was told – by my grandmother, little Eleanor’s daughter, owner of the white pony -- as a testament to the lost paradise of plantation life.  It would be dense years of child-time before I could judge my grandmother for reckoning up the family’s glories this way, years more before I could understand the link between her own disappointments and her luscious memories of the subjugation of others.

You Look Like a Sweet Little Girl, But --

Sometime before I was 10, I spent a very dark summer.  That is, the summer was bright and I was dark from the sun. The photos show me looking fat and deeply tanned, with my dark hair gathered tight into a high braided ponytail.  I don’t understand the tan – then as now, my preferred summer activities were reading, writing and painting in the air-conditioning. I hated the heat, but I must have been out of doors more than I thought.

There was a party for a little girl I barely knew, at a country club totally off the screen of my club-shunning parents.  I had been made fully aware, though, that if we had been country club people -- which we were not -- this club was downmarket from where we would have wanted to be. The party was over, my mother was late picking me up, and I sat in the too-decorous front room overlooking the golf course, waiting for her.

I had a long wait.  My mother’s habitual lateness was inexplicable, incalculable on any particular occasion, and I may have given the appearance of settling in for the afternoon.  A woman in a pale blue dress with pearls and hose and high, high heels clicked out of an almost hidden door to look at me, again and again and again. She pressed her hands together as if doing isometrics to lift her breasts. I suppose that she was the manager’s secretary, psyching herself up to deal with a troublesome eventuality – me.

Finally resolved to do what she must, she strode towards me, chin lowered, hands fisted, wearing a sickly smile.

“You look like a sweet little girl,” she said to me.  “But I need to know – are you a white girl?”

The sound I had been waiting for, my mother’s wheels crushing the gravel of the driveway, delivered me from any necessity to reply. Too bad the lady couldn’t get a good look at Mother, I remember thinking -- Mother, who was tall, blue-eyed, almost blonde, and beautiful enough that she commanded deference.  I knew what would have happened to me, had I lacked the right answer in this country club where people like me  -- my people -- never even wanted to belong: I would have been directed to wait outside, almost certainly at the back entrance, in the 100-degree heat that covered the city like a tight lid.  I would not have had the same right to tolerable shelter that a white girl had, and no blue-eyed avenger would have come early or late for me.

As may be imagined, over the years I have considered this occasion differently.  How complicit with the club lady was I?  Would I -- who was plenty mouthy -- have found my tongue, if my mother had come later still?  As I write this, I understand yet one more thing that was hidden from me then. The way the club lady fidgeted and flexed and left her office to look at me many times – until now, I have recalled that as guilty behavior: the lady had something ugly to say to me, and she didn’t want to do it.  It is far more likely, however, that she was showing herself to me so that I’d be gone at the very sight of her, as a black child would have been cued to be gone.  Important to her, too, would have been that club members coming and going would have seen not just me – a non-member to say the very least – but the brass, vigilant and battle-ready to shoo me.  The lady was intimidating me; white beneath my tan, I had no reason to know it.

Half a Decade after Rosa Parks

Integration wasn’t a cookie-cutter that re-contoured the nation all at once, as anyone who was present and paying attention in the late civil rights era knows.  So it was that, about five years after Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her seat, the odd bus-driver could still have it his way.  Legally?  No indeed -- but there were bus-sized time warps, tiny fiefdoms, where that didn’t make a bit of difference.  And once more, my tan was taking me places.

Every Saturday for years, I went to an art class that lasted for three hours at a museum about a mile away from home.  It was heaven.  Believing that the bus was not an entirely salubrious environment, my mother normally drove me, and it was on one of the very few days that she did not that I was ordered by the bus driver to unseat myself, and get to the back of the bus.

It was crushing.  I hadn’t been asked if I were a white girl first, just ordered to the back of the bus.  I didn’t know the law, only that I was the daughter of a lawyer, and you did not treat me that way.  More than at any other time in my life, before or since, I knew the pain and rage of being othered – and it wasn’t even for real.  Nevertheless, as a demonstration of beastly unfairness – including the kind I bought into without thinking – it was colossally instructive.  You did not treat me that way, you did not treat anyone that way.

Furious, furious child of educated, cultured people, I glared at the driver.  I did not then, nor would I for a few more years, know of Rosa Parks – what had she to do with me?  Because I could, I hurried off the bus.  It had not been taking me anyplace I had to go, only somewhere I wanted to go.  Had there been a black person on board, that person would have known to remind the driver about the law.  In those dangerous days, however, when the law was not widely perceived as the guarantor of the rights of black people to inhabit the same space as whites, a black person might or might not have spoken up.  Certainly the smattering of whites riding that mile with me let the opportunity pass. 

I think if any among them had been 100% certain I belonged with them, somebody would have vouched for me.  She’s white, Mister, that somebody would have said to the driver, leave her be.  And I would have ridden on to my art class – outraged for sure, but the teachable moment just might have passed. 

How many more years would it take before bullying a black child on a bus in a white neighborhood ceased to happen in my Southern city?  I don’t know for a certainty if that many years have yet passed.  Even when the law is highly specific about treatment that is not legal, it is less specific about treatment that is not right. And, in creating room for wrongs that are no longer illegal, the Roberts Court, under the smug guise of even-handedness, has just opened the gate to violations – violations mainly of the rights of children – that only moral repugnance can now prevent.  However, less than 150 years after my great-grandmother, little Eleanor W., came into her sixth personal child slave, I am one of those who stand unconvinced that moral repugnance is, or has ever been, enough.

Mid-Century Whispers

White Southerners of my generation – Justice Roberts’s generation – who grew up talking about civil rights at home are numerous, but I am not one of them.  My parents were Democrats, not activists, they had no black friends, and the hugely divisive issues of the day were not table talk in our house.  I will never know, in their own words, what they thought about the end of segregation in the public schools.  Was it a good thing?  If so, then for whom -- for every member of society?  I have to face that the straight answer from them might have been No.  But the imagined answer I can tease out in the form of inference from the very things I did not hear them say, from the very things I was forbidden by them to say.

Many whites my age remember truculent whispers behind closed doors – their parents, talking over the end of the world if the schools were integrated.  And after the schools fell – then what?  Whisper, whisper, whisper.  I never heard any of that at home.  If I had wanted to talk that way about black people being a threat, or needing to be kept down, or if I had wanted to use the N-word, that would have earned me a serious rebuke. My father, who would die before the civil rights movement bore fruit in our city, was adamant that no such words find a safe harbor in his home. 

More than I wanted anything, I wanted to please my father, so the casually hateful utterances about black people that my peers paid no penalty for went unsaid by me – and to an astounding degree given the regnant culture – unthought by me.  I did this for love of my father, not for the abstraction of social justice, and came later to understand that he had done as he did for love of me.  As a young adult, I asked my mother how it was that he had been so far ahead of the pack in this one area, this refusal of racism, when our entire culture encouraged it.  Mother looked a little strange and quieted down. He did not refuse racism, she finally told me, he refused to pass it on.

Orwell wrote of needful things that are lost in a generation’s time – they fall out of use and are gone for good.  My father would have known the exact several lines, and may have believed that one generation was also enough time for the permanent banishing of hideous habits of mind – although that would have been naive.  While he was ashamed of his racism, Mother told me, and knew it was wrong, he could change only his mind, not his heart.  So, like nearly everyone, my father had to struggle to be good in ways that went against the grain.  And like some people, he was in a key area of life – the commitment not to model prejudice for the rising generation – successful in his struggle. 

The Fountains

In a department store, I used to see something I never saw at school -- two drinking fountains about six feet apart, one for whites and one for “coloreds.” The signs letting you know which one to queue up at were just overhead, the letters large enough to be read from the far end of the floor.  My school didn’t need two fountains, for there were no black children there, and no black teachers.

But what if a black child had wanted to drink at the fountain in my school? Not the water fountain but the real fountain – the well-supplied classrooms, the skilled patient teachers, and the general atmosphere of application and order in which a child thirsty for knowledge will flourish.  Yes, what if black children needed some of that? 

Living in an all-white world, I reached an embarrassing age before I wondered about these things.  Out of sight, out of mind.  Black children lived and went to school in a neighborhood far across town, and I was perfectly untroubled by the notion that they might be given a different school experience than I, if only because the notion did not yet exist.  True, I had been hit over the head by some Black Like Me moments during precisely the years that John Howard Griffin was writing his historic book, but it was a long road from a few astonishing pseudo-racial incidents to the realization that just across town from me, black children were having bad days in bad schools for lack of the very resources that made my own school days fairly pleasant and supremely fruitful.

And another thing I didn’t know then, and would not know for many years, was that some of those black kids in bad schools were my cousins.

The View from Behind the Courthouse

My brother, like our father a lawyer in the large Southern city which shall be nameless, occasionally takes a brownbag lunch to an area behind the courthouse.  There are benches, a view of a fork in the river, and it’s very pleasant because the eye can travel far.  He’s not the only one who likes it there. One day he got talking with a man at the other end of the bench from him.  My brother is gregarious, and easily clicks with people.  At the end of the lunch hour, he and the other guy, a black man who did business downtown, traded cards. On the card of his new friend, my brother saw our mother’s maiden name, a very unusual one.

“Let me guess," my brother, who knew what he was getting into, said to the man.  “You must be the great-grandson of Byron S.”

“How did you know?”

“Because I am too.”

They shook hands, they made plans – my brother figures they were both kind of psyched, although it was of course very awkward.  It was also high time, my brother was thinking, as possibly was his newly discovered cousin.  So, these being enlightened times, it was all going to be all right.

That was more than ten years ago, and the two have not met again.

Byron S.

Our maternal great-grandfather, Byron S., was a banker and a two-family man.  The husband of Eleanor W.,  he had with her four children who lived past childhood, my grandmother of the white pony among them.  With another woman, a black woman who lived across town, he had many more.  This does not make him an unusual sort of Southern white man, but I didn’t know that when I first found out about it.  About it. 

This story -- which is how I came to have a large black family whom I’ve never met, just as they have me -- is the subject of a fiction I’m writing, so I will not write about it here.  I don’t want to meet these black descendants of Byron S. as a writer going after material. And how could I be other?  No, I want to write the thing and meet them afterwards.  And tell them truthfully, I made it all up – almost.

I do not know what they might want with me.  But they already know my first name, Elatia – it comes from very far back in my mother’s family, and there have been black Elatias too.  I mustn’t assume their curiosity about the white descendants of Byron S. is urgent.  But at the time there was a pitched battle to integrate the public schools, it probably occurred to them that the white descendants of Byron S. were holding on pretty hard to their better deal, and that only the law could or did take it from them.

MLK & Me

Much of the rhetoric of the civil rights era tends to be heard an ugly and inaccurate way. As if whites were feasting, and blacks wanted only that they should divide up their food into decent portions for everyone. The last sentence in the paragraph above reflects this thinking, although I wrote it with a subtext – whenever there are two opposed sides tussling for anything, somebody comes off with less of that thing. Hence the total absurdity of Solomon offering to cut the baby in half – not only will there be no baby, there will be a lesser half.  Over and over and over again, we need to be shown not to divide up that baby.  To see that society can only go forward as one, and that anything else is carnage.

The failure of many white people I have over the decades observed to understand  “I Have a Dream” is still striking, even as we approach the 39th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King.  Some people think it’s all about blacks rising up to claim their place at the table, elbowing whom they must.  Others regard the notion of brotherhood as no more than something achieved when whites hand over what is, after all, theirs to hand over – the bounteous gift of equality before the law.  “I Have a Dream” does not concern itself only with benefits to black people, however, nor does it detail sacrifices from whites.

Reading it, one sees that it is a moral vision of an entirely different order.  The words are both too familiar and too little understood, and the point is in any case a cumulative one that quoting a line here and there will not support. “I Have a Dream” does indeed speak of freedom for black people – freedom to do what had not been done before.  Less emphatically though no less clearly, it speaks of freedom for white people – freedom from the corrosive burden of racial hatred.   People who know what that burden is, and yet do not bear it anymore, will appreciate what Martin Luther King had to offer whites. People who do not know what that burden is have already appreciated the offer -- they are living in the Promised Land.

I cannot believe that the Roberts Court has laid aside the struggle for equal opportunity at the public school level because it believes the struggle has been a success, such a brilliant success that it is like Nietzsche’s good thing that ends by overcoming itself.  Nor can I believe that they understand the Promised Land as such a selective place – like a top, top school that only the most individually responsible kids can or should enter.  What I suspect is that they believe no worse result for society will attach to dismantling school integration than to enforcing it, and that if they’re right about that, tax money and effort will have been saved. If they’re wrong about it -- well, they must be comfortable with the risk.  And they say they are not social engineers.

Comments

[Amy]

I really enjoyed your article. Its very thougthful and shows your passion for the issues of racisim.

[Tasnim]

Dear Elatia: I got goose bumps and tears in my eyes as I read your wonderful article. It reaffirms my faith in America and more importantly in Americans. There are of course bad peple every where who will use the powerless to their advantage. What is different about America to me has been that there are so many people who are moral and good (like yourself) who would stand up and fight for what is right even against one's own kind. That fight between good and bad has been going on from the very beginning of this great nation. To right something that was wrong in society, even if the constitution proclaimed equality of all men. It took 87 years to corrrect the first time and then another hundred years to to civil rights for the blacks. I have personally never felt the ugly things you described in your beautiful recollections of your family stories and your own childhood. But that may have been more because of my profession. I deal with people at a different level. I am depressed about the Roberts court obviously and the thought that the court is so young means it will be generations before it can be corrected again, which may give them enough time to reverse all the gains made over the last 50 years, since the civil rights movement anyway. But after reading your article I have faith that it will not be so easy. There will be many voices of reason to fight it out. So thank you for this very moving and hopeful piece. Tasnim Raza.

[John Altobello]

I loved this article. Elatia, you have a wornderful way of interweaving the very personal with complex social issues. This is a tour de force.

On another note, I can't wait to read the fictional piece you're working on.

John

[Abbas Raza]

Brava!

[Kate Vrijmoet]

Elatia, thank you for writing so eloquently on the issue of being black in a white dominated society. Personally, this has been an enormously weighty issue. I am white and I was raised by a depression era father and former catholic nun mother. My father (mort 2002) was racist and my childhood was filled with every racist crude comment you can imagine. I didn't understand why being black, portuguese, italian, jewish, indian, japanese, or chinese equated to not being human, for that was the content and subtext of my fathers tirades. The impact on me is an interest in other races. I sought out friendships with non white persons when I could. I worry that this still makes me racist in a circuitous kind of way. - Similar to openly rejecting offensive ideas under the false assumption that the ideas will not influence you, when in fact, working so hard to reject them demonstrates how deeply they do influence you. What's the solution? Don't talk about it at all? Ignore it?
I have difficulty speaking in any way about about race for fear that whatever I say will somehow demonstrate intrinsic racism. I feel guilty about my whiteness. I observe my friends of non-white origins and I feel a little jealous because I perceive they are insiders and I am an outsider.
The encompassing unifier of being white is the exclusion of non-whites from the human subset. The idea of whiteness as exclusive is pervasive in modern capitalistic culture and reflected continually in our advertising. Advertising has long been held pedagogically as a social barometer. The mass marketing of perceived exclusivity, albeit an oxymoron, is one of the most successful advertising techniques used. The offering then becomes desirable which allows the advertiser to inflate its price. This leads to actual exclusivity.
An equally used tenet of design is the use of "white space." In areas of dense population, the cost of space is at a premium. The use of space denotes high values which denotes large dollar amounts which denotes exclusivity. The message becomes white is superior and exclusive.
Racist ideas are deeply embbeded in our culture. The challenge is to become aware of them.
I'm 41 years old, the youngest of seven children. At a recent family gathering, my very catholic mother announced that her grandfather was jewish. Astonishingly, the comment passed without much notice...I now feel a little less like an outsider.

[Francie]

Hi Elatia,

Fascinating. FYI, as late as 1980, attending your same school in this un-named southern city, several friends and I were threatened by the KKK because of inter-racial dating within our social circle. Things hadn't changed much by then anyway.

However, whenever someone tells me that the ends justify the means, my eyebrows always raise. Assigning students to schools according to race undoubtedly can have both positive and negative effects. We must have a bright line saying it's OK or it's not OK, because anythng else gives too much discretion to people who shouldn't have it. I personally prefer a line that says "no" because I don't trust our society to always make such assignments in a manner that advances our society as a whole. And the possibility of assigning according to race with discriminatory intent is an uglier spectre than that of de facto separation of races due to other forces at work.

[Lakshmi Bloom]

Elatia - I've been away from your writing for too long! Thank you for writing this piece and making us all sit up and think...you have an amazingingly eloquent way of doing that. Lakshmi

[DCBob]

One of the best blogposts I've read this year. Thank you very much.

[heather]

Delaware's "school choice" of a few years ago has in effect segregated the inner city schools, as the parents of most of the white children choose to bus their kids out to the suburbs. I fear that what happened in Delaware will spread throughout the country as a result of the Supreme Court's decision.
Thanks Elatia for your post, enthralling as usual!

[Deborah]

This should be required reading. This is a powerful, deeply personal, deeply universal telling of a story that I once believed, in my 1960's naivete, we would outgrow. Thank you for taking us into your personal version of this perennial struggle.

[aguy109]

Important post, Elatia.
Here is a link to an article with some statistics about the progress and problems of Afro-Americans:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/p/patterson-integration.html
"The United States came out far ahead of all other nations in its level of ethnic tolerance. Thus, 42 percent of French people expressed dislike for their North African minority; 21 percent of the English openly detested the Irish among them; 45 percent of West Germans held unfavorable views of the Turkish minority; and 49 percent of Czechoslovakians expressed dislike for the Hungarians among them. In comparison, only 13 percent of Americans responded that they disliked the Afro-American minority."

[Michael Blim]

Elatia: Very beautiful weaving of personal history with the national tragedy of racial supremacy and African-American oppression. Sometimes, I think that only a reflective southerner like yourself can really plumb the historical depths of racism in practice, which you bring out so tellingly in the narrative of your family.

There are so many things in your piece that require further reflection and comment. But let me take up the case of your father who could change his mind about racism, but not his heart. I had occasion to be very close to a white bourgeois southern family for a decade and more, and spent a great deal of time at their home in a borderland state. Your father and the southern father I knew well could well have been brothers for the degree that they shared this remarkable split between belief and feeling.

I am not obviously the first to say it, but the peculiar institution continued in the south via the servant role African-Americans played in the lives of the white bourgeoisie. This remarkable commingling of dominant whites and subordinated African-Americans as maids, nannies, and yard men in the most intimate spheres of family life recreated a racist paternalism that outlived even the years of successful struggles against racism. Despite the romanticism that southern whites often derive from this intimate life with African-Americans, racism continued. Due to the subordinate roles African-Americans took on, their differences in income and opportunity, were attributed to African-American character rather than their straightened circumstances.

Segregation was more complete in the north. African-Americans were people with which many working-class and lower middle class whites had no experience, except as competitors on the boundaries of turf wars over housing and education. The unions save steel and auto workers in big northern cities were bastions of racial supremacy, as were political machines, city and suburban. Segregation in toto then created a circumstance in which African-Americans were experienced as threatening others, and African-Americans felt the same way about whites. Police violence and murders of African-American young people in white neighborhoods were instrumental in sealing off civil rights as practical protections for African-Americans in the north.

The northern bourgeoisie used black labor domestically, and though I have no empirical sense of the social relationships that developed, housing segregation often put those involved in other worlds after work was done.

I think of your brother and the lost opportunity to recreate your family as part of a process of reconciliation, and it saddens me.

Your journey, on the other hand, as exhibited in your column, has already borne fruit for you and for us as readers. I hope it is a harbinger of a racial reconstruction this country so badly needs.

Thanks so much.
Michael Blim

[Chris Schoen]

Elatia,

Given the absence of relevant subjectivity in the Parents decision, your blending of the personal and the political seems especially to the point.

It is a strange irony of the philosophy which maintains that people are individual agents rather than members of a society, that these individual agents must always be considered as utterly generic, and therefore not actually individual at all. Individuality must be destroyed in order to save it, as they used to say about villages in Vietnam.

I think another reason why this piece is so satisfying is that many of us are so frankly baffled by this SCOTUS decision and what may portend, and in the face of that bafflement, sometimes it's just nice to hear a good story and wait for things to become clear(er) again.

[martin g]

Thank you, Elatia.
It is absolutely imperative for people to continue to talk about race relations. The more the better. It is too easy to sweep it under the rug and it is all too typical for people to think that a modicum of progress is sufficient. It is important for all perspectives to be examined and discussed, even of those who want to pretend the problems don't exist or that our peculiarly American problem is just another manifestation of natural clannishness. It is not. People should engage those they disagree with. I am afraid that I too often avoid it. I don't want to appear patronizing to some or trigger animosity in others. I sometimes feel like a coward because I don't know exactly what to say in response to some racist comment. The fact is I don't want to condemn anyone, even racists (just the racism). I wish I could get them to think a little harder and deeper on the subject.

Your article has brought so many thoughts and memories to mind. No one would ever mistake me for a person of color. Thirty years ago, when I was a young man in the navy, a Jewish shipmate (Samuel from Boston) told me that I looked like I should play the part of a nazi in a war movie. The fact is his comment made me uncomfortable and I felt a little flustered by the vague thought that he was insulting me. Or was he complimenting me?(!) I couldn't be sure. I wish I had had the presence of mind to turn the joke back on him. That's actually a somewhat pleasant memory (it's funny). Another shipmate, Mark from Chicago, was black. We were friends. We sometimes talked about race relations. I once broached the subject of interracial couples. He told me that in his neighborhood no one would make a big deal about a black man with a white woman. I asked "What about a white man with a black woman?" He said that she would have been laughed at. I think he was trying to tweak me.

One time someone broke into Mark's locker and trashed his stuff, including a small framed picture of St. Martin de Porres (Mark was an observant Catholic, I unobservant). I tried to console him and told him that he should not take it too hard and that there were only a few neanderthal assholes on the boat. I pointed out that the incident was being treated seriously and investigated (real conflicts of any kind are intolerable on a small sub). He was very angry and hurt. He told me something that sounded somewhat enigmatic at the time but it has stuck with me ever since. He said "People don't understand how a hurt can effect a child for the rest of his life." I believe I understand him now. He was referring to the experience of a racist incident or incidents in his childhood and that this (clearly) racist attack had brought all of that back to him. On a sub the crew is constantly baiting and teasing each other with crude jokes and insults. It is part of the culture and serves the purpose of relieving tension and dissolving social divisions. There is no paradox in this. I was teased about how when we got back to port my pretty young wife would be waiting on the pier with a big bag of quarters (implying she's a two-bit whore). When it turned out that what was really waiting for me was the news that she had met another sailor and was divorcing me the most persistent of my tormentors (a guy we called Pud) very sincerely and somewhat abjectedly apologized. Of course he felt bad for me. Even through my misery part of me thought his discomfort was funny.

There was nothing funny about Mark's experience. For someone to suggest to him that this was part and parcel of being a member of the crew and that he shouldn't be so sensitive would have been outrageous. This wasn't an inclusive act (we all got picked on). This was a malevolent act of rejection.

To at least the partial credit of the crew nobody actually suggested that. The perpetrators were suspected but nothing was proven. There was talk that they were seriously reprimanded by their Chief. But for Mark, how could he ever feel an accepted part of the crew? He transferred off soon afterward.

When I was a little kid we lived in an area with a sizable Hispanic population. I was frequently picked on by the local toughs. They would spit on me. They would chase me around the neighborhood and threaten to beat the crap out of me or knife me. Some places you just didn't go. Later in life I was tempted to compare my experience to the racial discrimination experienced by others. I was spat upon because I was white. I was insulted and tormented and excluded because I was white. What a load of bullshit! I was given a good education in a private Catholic school. My dad had a good job. I didn't experience luxury but I never experienced want. Many of my friends were Hispanic. Today my two sweet, beloved little grandaughters look as mestizo as anyone from the heart of Mexico. But most telling of all, as I grew up and interacted with society at large no Hispanic person insulted or attacked me for being white (though they may have resented me). No adult Spanish American ever called me "fockin' anglo". The bullies who picked on me were the disadvantaged ones, not me. If I was today to meet one of those bullies I would have no sense of fear or resentment towards him. We could probably joke about it.

There is no way I can compare my experience to that of my friend Mark's. As a child he experienced real racism. As he grew up I am sure the experience was continued. It doesn't matter that there were laws passed and progress was made in civil rights. It doesn't matter that people more and more kept their racist opinions to themselves. Every racist insult or slight no matter how subtle or overt would have been cumulative for him. Just knowing that there was someone who was prejudiced against him because of his skin color was a burden on his life and kept current a sense of being rejected and excluded. The experience of the African American is not the experience of other races or ethnicities in American society. It is, sadly, unique.

In closing I would like to brag about my late dad. Not much in the way of street smarts. Pretty gullible when it came to finances. But he was very principled. When he passed away I received all of his "papers". Many thousands of items (thanks alot dad!). Looking through them I found a letter dated Sept 23, 1955. It was from Time Magazine and said in part: "Your letter written in connection with our Thurgood Marshall cover story presents an extremely thought provoking viewpoint regarding the desegregation issue...we are publishing it in our Oct. 3 column...".

Even though I was only an infant in 1955 I was surprised that I had never heard about this or seen an old 1955 issue of Time tucked away somewhere. My curiosity was piqued. I went online and found the Time Magazine archives. Below are a couple of letters from that column. The second is my dad's, the first is a differing opinion.

From Time Magazine | Letters

Monday, Oct. 3, 1955
The Tension of Change

Sir:

South Carolina is proud to find you have assigned it a grade of "F" on desegregation. North Carolina! How she must be humiliated at receiving only "C minus!"

We hope you'll find it in your heart to give us the same or a better grade, maybe "Z" ten years from now. We can assure you we will do our best against the destroyers of the Constitution and States Rights.

You might tell Marshall he can expect a "Thoroughgood" time in our State.

C. F. B- Union, S.C.

Sir:

The "Negro problem" of the United States is really a white problem, and the sooner it is recognized by all as such, the sooner it will disappear. It is the problem of how are we to convince the "white supremacy" racists that the conclusions of common sense, the principles of Judean-Christian ethic, and the consensus of the vast majority of mankind all point to the fact that there is no superior race and that all men are essentially the same.

JULIUS G- Lafayette, La.

About a year later my dad was fired from his teaching job and we moved out west. I wouldn't have known that he was fired except that I found a copy of a letter he wrote to the school's administration flat out accusing them of firing him because of his outspoken support for desegregation in Louisiana schools. Apparently he was a very prolific letter writer as I have found responses from among others the FBI regarding a group called "The Southern Gentlemen", and a newspaper editor in Mississippi named Hodding Carter. Some very interesting stuff but sadly almost no copies of what my dad actually wrote.

Sorry for the lengthy post! Story got away from me.

[Pete Chapman]

Elatia; thank you.
At "3quarksdaily" one can get used to "excellent writing"; in the articles and often in the comments as well. Your piece isn't just "excellent writing". It's also necessary. That's a very rare quality. Again thanks.

[OT]

This is brilliantly written and from such an interesting perspective. I want to read more about this family and the writer, either in memoir form or fiction. I agree that it's necessary writing, in the historical sense, but also in the individual--I need to hear more from this voice.

[Elatia Harris]

Dear All --

Thank you so much for reading and commenting.

Tasnim, this is a scary subject that makes one truly wonder about the nature of our commitment, as a people, to children living in poverty. I'm glad you see things to be hopeful about. A few conservatives wrote to me privately to point out small things about this decision that suggest progressives need not be too overwrought. Ahem! I want to repeat what Michael wrote in his answer to commenters two weeks ago -- the entire decision can be read at the NAACP Defense Fund Web site. If God is in the details, then we need to know the minutiae here. I believe as school starts up in the fall, more people will be engaged by the decision and its implications, and that will be a test of national will.

Kate, you write very well about how it can be confusing to be white, and how we all wonder about fitting in. Francie, I need to tell people what came up in our private correspondence -- that those KKK members objecting to school-based interracial dating 25 years ago were indeed "parents in sheets." Ouch.

DCBob, thanks for reading -- I haven't seen you at 3QD before this, and I hope you'll be back.

Deborah, Heather, Amy, Chris and Pete -- thanks for reading. I am still pretty new around here, and if in January anyone had said it would take me only 6 months to write about my Mid-century girlhood, I would not have believed it.

Aguy109, great link. It would be interesting to know how all those Europeans want their children to be educated to regard their fellow humans, and if they could truthfully answer that they found their prejudices to be no psychic burden to bear.

Michael, thanks for writing more in this space. You bring so much gravitas to the subject, and I look forward to reading more in your column about whether the Supreme Court was able to consider what the social sciences had to say in its decision.

Martin, this decision has been time travel for us -- your father was a brave and enlightened man, thank you for telling us about him.

John and OT, thanks for your encouraging words about my fiction -- I really appreciate it.

ATB,

Elatia

[Martin Moran]

Dear Elatia,
I remember feeling shocked the morning I read of the Robert's Court decision. I grew up in Colorado at a time when court ordered desegregation caused terrible riots and pain and, ultimately, created a better, richer and fairer school system. I was so grateful to read your eloquent piece. Your personal story woven with your sharp insights is a kind of balm to read, a ray of hope and humanity in the midst of this, as you say, Orwellian madness. Thank you. Thank you.

[Harriet]

I am always fascinated by what this beautiful and insightful writer has to say.

[holly alderman]

I believe the court decision you recognize as pivotal toward loss of educational freedom is but a foreshadowing of a revolution coming soon to an America near us, as rights of women (Roe v Wade) may next be cast aside by the new leadership. A friend clued me in: the election is not about an executive. The real future of Americans (especially black and/or female) will be determined by the judicial branch. Meanwhile your insights into the meaning of I Have a Dream reveal the path to the ultimate freedom -- the promised land of enlightenment beyond racism. I could not agree more that the race issue is as intensely personal as it is public and political. In college, my constant companion and best friend since high school, beautiful, brilliant, funny, was newly categorized as black by other black students. While Panthers made news, at the end of freshman year she told me that she had been encouraged by black classmates not to associate with [me and] other white classmates at Harvard. Among our dorm neighbors were Suzanne Lynn, who became human rights commissioner of New York City, and Lani Guinier, who became the first tenured professor as a woman of color at Harvard Law School and has written about issues of school and race far better than I ever could; but no writer could be more compelling than you in your own stories. I also look forward to the fiction (having just read your short story "Delphine dials 9-1-1") and can already imagine it assigned to senior English classes or American history classes in all high schools coast to coast. (I wish this blog would appear in the standard high school US history text side bar, the section that students actually crave to read.) Here is proof that a relatively provincial northern rural girl can be struck as if by lightning by your southern insights, revelations and writing style.

H

[reven]

Very thought provoking.

[David Hardwick]

Thank you for writing about that place and time in such an elegant and even-handed way. I remember when our church youth group invited the youth from St. Peter Presbyterian in Stop Six, a historically black neighborhood in Fort Worth, to join us at our Sunday evening meeting in the spring of 1969. We hosted the gathering at our house in mostly white Ridglea Hills. The kids got along fine, and the neighborhood nitwits ran out of steam in a couple of weeks. And I got to know that some people I hadn't thought much about were unexpectedly supportive, given some of the local attitudes. Thanks again for bringing that time so vividly to mind.