Long…rambly… Possibly without a point.
Well, it’s Blog Against Racism Week. At first, I thought, What the heck do I, as an educated white woman, have to say about racism? Well, plenty. First and foremost that racism has to be one of the dumbest, direst -isms around. I mean, how can you reject someone just because of the color of their skin or the shape of their features? That makes no sense to any functioning brain. People aren’t what they look like. They are what they do. They are what they believe. They are their hearts and their minds and their passions. They are not how much melatonin their skin has.
First of all, I was born in Steubenville, OH. I share a hometown with Dean Martin and Tracy Lords. Go me. Steubenville was, and still is, a dying industrial town along the Ohio River. As with many river communities in the North, industry was the big employer. Steel, coal, auto factory, textile mill, pottery, glass-rivers in the North helped these businesses get their product to other parts of the country. When railroads came along, they usually followed rivers, but they also crossed rivers, which made more of a marketplace for Northern industry. It wasn’t until the mid 20th Century, which companies started to buy their rough and manufactured good from foreign countries that the problems started.
Steubenville is a small town. Many hulking factory complexes have sat empty for years, if not centuries. Steel was the major industry in Steubenville, but by the mid 80’s, had pretty much disappeared. I spent my first years in Youngstown. My grandmother and extended relatives lived in East Liverpool. When I was about 3, my family lived for a few months in Schaumburg, IL. Dad worked at O’Hare. The apartment complex where we lived is still on Rt. 72. (I drive past it often on my way to the maul.) Then, it was back to Youngstown. For the most part, I spent my first years in Ohio, which was farm country surrounding factory towns. There’s a town in Ohio (right next to the West Virginia border) called Tiltonsville that was founded by some of my English ancestors (mother’s side). But, for the most part, my ancestry is one of farm and factory labor. Some of my oldest ancestry in this country predates the Revolutionary War. Welsh Quaker coal miners who refused to fight in the Revolution because, as Quakers, they were pacifists. Yeah, I don’t think the DAR is going to be knocking on my door anytime soon.
Anyway, I come from “just folks”. Ordinary people on the lower end of the income scale. I don’t really recall any specific race interactions. For some reason, we were mostly around white people. I don’t know if that was a conscious choice or not. I do remember having friends of other ethnicities and that never being a problem with my parents. And, to my child self, people who looked different just looked different. It wasn’t an indicator of their value or whether I should talk to them or not. I was a pretty precocious kid and would talk to just about anyone. I do remember one of the waiters at a very fancy restaurant my Aunt Debbie took me to. He seemed incredibly tall and with his dark skin, I remember he had a huge, dazzling smile. I chatted him up and he responded in kind, not talking down to me as most adults did, but talking with me. When we finally left, I waved like crazy and he brought over a little piece of cake, wrapped up to go, for me to take. I remember my Aunt Debbie smiling at the exchange. I don’t ever remember her telling me not to talk to dark people (or wait staff). She did refer to the waiter as my “new friend” and seemed pleased that we got on so well. This was in the late 60’s.
When my mother died in 1968, my father mourned for a long time. There was a dark period where he worked a lot. I hardly ever saw him, spending most of my time with baby-sitters are varying skill. (Marcia Swan was my favorite. She was the youngest and would play with me and interact with me.) Then, Dad met Mom at an airline employee party. They started dating. Then Dad started to *gasp* have her over for long weekends. Yes, kids, the Summer of Love was in full swing. But I thought Ginny was all that and a bag of chips. She was from a big farming family, but she joined the Air Force when she graduated high school. She got to travel. She was a single, career gal. She lived in Denver, which was terribly exotic. She wore her hair in a beehive and wore fierce clothes like Audrey Hepburn capris and stiletto heels and shirt dressed with full skirts and white lipstick and huge hoops. Man, she was amazing. I certainly fell in love.
When Mom and Dad decided to get married, they decided to move to California. So, for the first year of their marriage, I lived with my grandmother (Dad’s mom) in East Liverpool. Granma was a Nazarene, which is about a millimeter to the left of Southern Baptist. That year with her was the first time I ever became overtly aware of race. Because Granma was a wee bit of a racist. The kind that grew up in institutional racism as “that’s the way things are”. I don’t recall her having a particular hatred for anyone not white. She never said that non-whites were bad. She just kept to white people, interacting with people of color with no rancor when she had to. I was 5 at the time and I became keenly aware of how different people in my father’s extended family reacted to non white people. There was no vitriol. Just not “mixing”. Which confused the Hell out of me because my best friend at the time was of Pilipino/Caucasian decent. I heard a couple of Granma’s friends comment on that. My reaction was to leap to my friend’s defense. “Her mommy is Phillipeen! And that’s okay!” I would shout with all the outrage of a pissed-off 5-year-old. Until Granma shooed me from the room to play elsewhere.
After a year of white-on-white Ohio, I joined my parents in Southern California. We first live in Montclair for a year. I went to first grade in a racially mixed classroom. I do remember being startled at first, only because my limited school experience had been with white students. But, I soon settled in and accepted it. My parents never made any negative comments about it. In fact, my best friend in first grade was Cindy. Cindy’s family was from Thailand, which I thought was fascinating. We would ask each other about our families all the time. Cindy taught me how to ride a two-wheel bike. We would spend hours in the grape arbor, playing Barbies and sharing secrets. My arch nemesis was a boy named Kevin. Kevin was black, but he was also the shortest kid in our class. (I was the tallest until senior year of high school, if that tells you anything.) Of course, I don’t remember what actually started our feud. All I know is that during recess, we would pound the snot out of each other. I’m not sure why. But we couldn’t have been that serious about it because we never hit that hard. It’s not like we returned from the playground with torn, bloody clothes. I’m not sure exactly what we were doing. We were never really even that mad at each other. I think he just took exception to the fact that I was taller than him.
After that first year, we moved to Cucamonga (now incorporated Rancho Cucamonga). When I moved there in the early 70’s, it was still orchards and pastures. We moved to a new housing development where most of the houses were still empty. The first person I met (who was my best friend for the next 8 years) was Betsy. She lived across the street with her parents and sister. There was always people over at her house because she came from a large Mexican family. Her grandmother would try to learn English by watching television and listening to us talk. Every once in a while, she would get impatient and chastise us in Spanish. “She said we’re talking too fast and she can’t follow what we are saying,” Betsy translated the first time. After than, I figured out when Grandmama exploded, it was best to say, “Mis apologias” and “Hablaré lentamente.” Which usually earned me a, “Una tan buena muchacha” and a pat on the cheek. Universal grandmother language.
It was to the point where I would sprinkle my language with Spanish regularly. I would use “Mira!” (Look here: come look at this) and “Mijo/Mija” (an abbreviation of “Mi hijo/hija” which was Little Boy/Girl) all the time. To this day, I use “pobrecito” (which is a term of affection: My poor little thing). I knew more Spanish in grade school than I ever learned in high school, when I had to take it. And it was just a cool thing to know. I still can understand Spanish better than I can speak it.
By the way, both Montclair and Cucagomonga are located in San Bernardino County Please note that of the land claimed as San Bernardino County, 99% of it is the Mojave Desert. I lived in the foothills of the mountains, on the edge of the desert. The Mojave Desert is the largest sub tropical high desert in the Americas. It occupies 54,000 square miles in southeastern California and portions of Nevada, Arizona and Utah. It is bordered on the east by the Sonoran Desert, on the west by the San Gabriel Mountains. Las Vegas is pretty much smack dab in the middle of the Mojave. I include this random geography lesson because I think the land I lived on had a lot to do with my racial experiences. Lots of Mexican people in Southern California-lots. Also, we had a lot of transplants from other areas of the country, all looking for better opportunities in the blast furnace that is Southern California. So, my classes and neighborhoods were always populated with a mix of ethnicities. Mexican and other Latinos, of course. Many black students. Because California is the first major American port, we had lots of Indians, Asians, Southeast Asians, and Pacific Islanders. A friend in one of my classes had a father who was a big, barrel-chested Maori. He would do the war face and the dance yell just to make us squeal and giggle.
In my house, all my friends were welcome. And I brought everyone home at one point or another. They were regularly asked to stay for dinner and/or swim in our pool. (Before you get all excited, just remember in Southern California, it was unusual if you didn’t have a pool.) My parents never forbade any of my friends from coming to the house. My parents never told me not to associate with anyone. We never really discussed race because it was never an issue in our home. I remember my parents had more racially diverse friends in California as well. I do remember when I finally understood the American slave trade, I was sick to my stomach. I remember wailing to my dad, “How could they treat people like that?” He tried to explain, but all I knew was that a group of rich people were mean to a group of African people for no good reason and my young morals were outraged.
After 8 years, we moved to West Covina, which is in LA County. I do remember having more Asian and India students in my high school classes, but it was one of those obvious things that doesn’t occur to you until an idle moment. But my high school was mixed as well. I was on the Volleyball and JV Basketball teams with girls of all races. Our JV forward was of American Aboriginal decent and I remember her being very angry about it. I was never sure why. In retrospect, I see that I was probably a little on the clueless side. I mean, the 70’s was the era of Wounded Knee, the Occupation of Alcatraz, Billy Jack, and Cher. How could she be mad to be Indian when it was such a cool, rich heritage?
In October of 1980, two months into my junior year of high school, Dad was transferred to Arlington Heights. I returned to Northern Illinois and had the culture shock of my life. Where as my campus in California was open-air hallways and grassy quads, my high school in Illinois was contained in one grim brick building. In California, it was so easy to skip school that no one really tried. In Illinois, hall monitors and proctors pounced on anyone who didn’t have the all-important hall pass. In California, classes were mixed and we just accepted diverse culture as a matter of course. In Illinois, I lived in a very tight, white area. We had exactly three people of color in my school-2 black, one Hispanic. In California, no one really thought about race. In Illinois, they were obsessed with race. With a predominantly white school class, I heard race jokes that I had never heard before. Racial epithets were insults. And they seemed to be singularly uninterested in not being a bunch of racist morons. After all, they were white and had money. Why should they bother?
I never really took to my second high school. The attitude about race was a big part of it. I just couldn’t believe how backward and stupid people sounded. I mean, they talked like my hillbilly uncle, a redneck to beat all rednecks. He made Archie Bunker look like Mr. Macky. Perhaps my formative years in Southern California was some sort of idyll. I know that race was an issue to some, but mostly, being a racist was a bad thing. You didn’t have many friends if you were a racist because our communities were so diverse. But I had a crash course in race relations, white privilege, and the power of money those couple of years in Illinois.
So, for me, race is still not an issue. I prefer racially mixed living conditions, which is why I like my building so much. I prefer neighborhoods in Chicago over suburban neighborhoods because of the diversity. Frankly, if I’m in an area that’s too white, I start getting nervous. It’s the Stepford Effect. I enjoy learning about other people, other countries, other religions, and other societies. I think diversity is the strongest link in America and am dismayed that most Americans don’t see that. I mean, I’m not an idiot. I do notice if someone has different skin, hair, or features than I do. I even notice accents and patterns of speech. But those are things I notice way down on the list, long after I’ve noticed their manners or if they make eye contact or how they approach different situations. Young black women aren’t the only people who fly off the handle. Indian people aren’t the only ones trying to bargain down prices in stores. Asian people aren’t the only bad drivers and Hispanic people aren’t anti-American. Stereotypes, like all myths, have a kernel of truth. But if you paint everyone with the same brush, you are missing out on so many of the intricacies and variables that make Life so rich and rewarding. I take the person first. Whatever physical characteristics they have are secondary. Or even last. Having been judged by my appearance my entire life, I am very insistent on not doing the same to others.
Plus, there is no logical reason to discriminate against someone based on physical traits alone. And I have a strong logic gene. If I’m not going to like someone, it’s going to be because they are rude or a jerk or controlling or uncivil. Those traits come in all colors. Caucasians aren’t the end all and be all, as much as some would like to think they are. Each person has something to contribute, regardless of their background or ancestry. We are all the better for it when they do. We need a better grasp of that concept.
First of all, I was born in Steubenville, OH. I share a hometown with Dean Martin and Tracy Lords. Go me. Steubenville was, and still is, a dying industrial town along the Ohio River. As with many river communities in the North, industry was the big employer. Steel, coal, auto factory, textile mill, pottery, glass-rivers in the North helped these businesses get their product to other parts of the country. When railroads came along, they usually followed rivers, but they also crossed rivers, which made more of a marketplace for Northern industry. It wasn’t until the mid 20th Century, which companies started to buy their rough and manufactured good from foreign countries that the problems started.
Steubenville is a small town. Many hulking factory complexes have sat empty for years, if not centuries. Steel was the major industry in Steubenville, but by the mid 80’s, had pretty much disappeared. I spent my first years in Youngstown. My grandmother and extended relatives lived in East Liverpool. When I was about 3, my family lived for a few months in Schaumburg, IL. Dad worked at O’Hare. The apartment complex where we lived is still on Rt. 72. (I drive past it often on my way to the maul.) Then, it was back to Youngstown. For the most part, I spent my first years in Ohio, which was farm country surrounding factory towns. There’s a town in Ohio (right next to the West Virginia border) called Tiltonsville that was founded by some of my English ancestors (mother’s side). But, for the most part, my ancestry is one of farm and factory labor. Some of my oldest ancestry in this country predates the Revolutionary War. Welsh Quaker coal miners who refused to fight in the Revolution because, as Quakers, they were pacifists. Yeah, I don’t think the DAR is going to be knocking on my door anytime soon.
Anyway, I come from “just folks”. Ordinary people on the lower end of the income scale. I don’t really recall any specific race interactions. For some reason, we were mostly around white people. I don’t know if that was a conscious choice or not. I do remember having friends of other ethnicities and that never being a problem with my parents. And, to my child self, people who looked different just looked different. It wasn’t an indicator of their value or whether I should talk to them or not. I was a pretty precocious kid and would talk to just about anyone. I do remember one of the waiters at a very fancy restaurant my Aunt Debbie took me to. He seemed incredibly tall and with his dark skin, I remember he had a huge, dazzling smile. I chatted him up and he responded in kind, not talking down to me as most adults did, but talking with me. When we finally left, I waved like crazy and he brought over a little piece of cake, wrapped up to go, for me to take. I remember my Aunt Debbie smiling at the exchange. I don’t ever remember her telling me not to talk to dark people (or wait staff). She did refer to the waiter as my “new friend” and seemed pleased that we got on so well. This was in the late 60’s.
When my mother died in 1968, my father mourned for a long time. There was a dark period where he worked a lot. I hardly ever saw him, spending most of my time with baby-sitters are varying skill. (Marcia Swan was my favorite. She was the youngest and would play with me and interact with me.) Then, Dad met Mom at an airline employee party. They started dating. Then Dad started to *gasp* have her over for long weekends. Yes, kids, the Summer of Love was in full swing. But I thought Ginny was all that and a bag of chips. She was from a big farming family, but she joined the Air Force when she graduated high school. She got to travel. She was a single, career gal. She lived in Denver, which was terribly exotic. She wore her hair in a beehive and wore fierce clothes like Audrey Hepburn capris and stiletto heels and shirt dressed with full skirts and white lipstick and huge hoops. Man, she was amazing. I certainly fell in love.
When Mom and Dad decided to get married, they decided to move to California. So, for the first year of their marriage, I lived with my grandmother (Dad’s mom) in East Liverpool. Granma was a Nazarene, which is about a millimeter to the left of Southern Baptist. That year with her was the first time I ever became overtly aware of race. Because Granma was a wee bit of a racist. The kind that grew up in institutional racism as “that’s the way things are”. I don’t recall her having a particular hatred for anyone not white. She never said that non-whites were bad. She just kept to white people, interacting with people of color with no rancor when she had to. I was 5 at the time and I became keenly aware of how different people in my father’s extended family reacted to non white people. There was no vitriol. Just not “mixing”. Which confused the Hell out of me because my best friend at the time was of Pilipino/Caucasian decent. I heard a couple of Granma’s friends comment on that. My reaction was to leap to my friend’s defense. “Her mommy is Phillipeen! And that’s okay!” I would shout with all the outrage of a pissed-off 5-year-old. Until Granma shooed me from the room to play elsewhere.
After a year of white-on-white Ohio, I joined my parents in Southern California. We first live in Montclair for a year. I went to first grade in a racially mixed classroom. I do remember being startled at first, only because my limited school experience had been with white students. But, I soon settled in and accepted it. My parents never made any negative comments about it. In fact, my best friend in first grade was Cindy. Cindy’s family was from Thailand, which I thought was fascinating. We would ask each other about our families all the time. Cindy taught me how to ride a two-wheel bike. We would spend hours in the grape arbor, playing Barbies and sharing secrets. My arch nemesis was a boy named Kevin. Kevin was black, but he was also the shortest kid in our class. (I was the tallest until senior year of high school, if that tells you anything.) Of course, I don’t remember what actually started our feud. All I know is that during recess, we would pound the snot out of each other. I’m not sure why. But we couldn’t have been that serious about it because we never hit that hard. It’s not like we returned from the playground with torn, bloody clothes. I’m not sure exactly what we were doing. We were never really even that mad at each other. I think he just took exception to the fact that I was taller than him.
After that first year, we moved to Cucamonga (now incorporated Rancho Cucamonga). When I moved there in the early 70’s, it was still orchards and pastures. We moved to a new housing development where most of the houses were still empty. The first person I met (who was my best friend for the next 8 years) was Betsy. She lived across the street with her parents and sister. There was always people over at her house because she came from a large Mexican family. Her grandmother would try to learn English by watching television and listening to us talk. Every once in a while, she would get impatient and chastise us in Spanish. “She said we’re talking too fast and she can’t follow what we are saying,” Betsy translated the first time. After than, I figured out when Grandmama exploded, it was best to say, “Mis apologias” and “Hablaré lentamente.” Which usually earned me a, “Una tan buena muchacha” and a pat on the cheek. Universal grandmother language.
It was to the point where I would sprinkle my language with Spanish regularly. I would use “Mira!” (Look here: come look at this) and “Mijo/Mija” (an abbreviation of “Mi hijo/hija” which was Little Boy/Girl) all the time. To this day, I use “pobrecito” (which is a term of affection: My poor little thing). I knew more Spanish in grade school than I ever learned in high school, when I had to take it. And it was just a cool thing to know. I still can understand Spanish better than I can speak it.
By the way, both Montclair and Cucagomonga are located in San Bernardino County Please note that of the land claimed as San Bernardino County, 99% of it is the Mojave Desert. I lived in the foothills of the mountains, on the edge of the desert. The Mojave Desert is the largest sub tropical high desert in the Americas. It occupies 54,000 square miles in southeastern California and portions of Nevada, Arizona and Utah. It is bordered on the east by the Sonoran Desert, on the west by the San Gabriel Mountains. Las Vegas is pretty much smack dab in the middle of the Mojave. I include this random geography lesson because I think the land I lived on had a lot to do with my racial experiences. Lots of Mexican people in Southern California-lots. Also, we had a lot of transplants from other areas of the country, all looking for better opportunities in the blast furnace that is Southern California. So, my classes and neighborhoods were always populated with a mix of ethnicities. Mexican and other Latinos, of course. Many black students. Because California is the first major American port, we had lots of Indians, Asians, Southeast Asians, and Pacific Islanders. A friend in one of my classes had a father who was a big, barrel-chested Maori. He would do the war face and the dance yell just to make us squeal and giggle.
In my house, all my friends were welcome. And I brought everyone home at one point or another. They were regularly asked to stay for dinner and/or swim in our pool. (Before you get all excited, just remember in Southern California, it was unusual if you didn’t have a pool.) My parents never forbade any of my friends from coming to the house. My parents never told me not to associate with anyone. We never really discussed race because it was never an issue in our home. I remember my parents had more racially diverse friends in California as well. I do remember when I finally understood the American slave trade, I was sick to my stomach. I remember wailing to my dad, “How could they treat people like that?” He tried to explain, but all I knew was that a group of rich people were mean to a group of African people for no good reason and my young morals were outraged.
After 8 years, we moved to West Covina, which is in LA County. I do remember having more Asian and India students in my high school classes, but it was one of those obvious things that doesn’t occur to you until an idle moment. But my high school was mixed as well. I was on the Volleyball and JV Basketball teams with girls of all races. Our JV forward was of American Aboriginal decent and I remember her being very angry about it. I was never sure why. In retrospect, I see that I was probably a little on the clueless side. I mean, the 70’s was the era of Wounded Knee, the Occupation of Alcatraz, Billy Jack, and Cher. How could she be mad to be Indian when it was such a cool, rich heritage?
In October of 1980, two months into my junior year of high school, Dad was transferred to Arlington Heights. I returned to Northern Illinois and had the culture shock of my life. Where as my campus in California was open-air hallways and grassy quads, my high school in Illinois was contained in one grim brick building. In California, it was so easy to skip school that no one really tried. In Illinois, hall monitors and proctors pounced on anyone who didn’t have the all-important hall pass. In California, classes were mixed and we just accepted diverse culture as a matter of course. In Illinois, I lived in a very tight, white area. We had exactly three people of color in my school-2 black, one Hispanic. In California, no one really thought about race. In Illinois, they were obsessed with race. With a predominantly white school class, I heard race jokes that I had never heard before. Racial epithets were insults. And they seemed to be singularly uninterested in not being a bunch of racist morons. After all, they were white and had money. Why should they bother?
I never really took to my second high school. The attitude about race was a big part of it. I just couldn’t believe how backward and stupid people sounded. I mean, they talked like my hillbilly uncle, a redneck to beat all rednecks. He made Archie Bunker look like Mr. Macky. Perhaps my formative years in Southern California was some sort of idyll. I know that race was an issue to some, but mostly, being a racist was a bad thing. You didn’t have many friends if you were a racist because our communities were so diverse. But I had a crash course in race relations, white privilege, and the power of money those couple of years in Illinois.
So, for me, race is still not an issue. I prefer racially mixed living conditions, which is why I like my building so much. I prefer neighborhoods in Chicago over suburban neighborhoods because of the diversity. Frankly, if I’m in an area that’s too white, I start getting nervous. It’s the Stepford Effect. I enjoy learning about other people, other countries, other religions, and other societies. I think diversity is the strongest link in America and am dismayed that most Americans don’t see that. I mean, I’m not an idiot. I do notice if someone has different skin, hair, or features than I do. I even notice accents and patterns of speech. But those are things I notice way down on the list, long after I’ve noticed their manners or if they make eye contact or how they approach different situations. Young black women aren’t the only people who fly off the handle. Indian people aren’t the only ones trying to bargain down prices in stores. Asian people aren’t the only bad drivers and Hispanic people aren’t anti-American. Stereotypes, like all myths, have a kernel of truth. But if you paint everyone with the same brush, you are missing out on so many of the intricacies and variables that make Life so rich and rewarding. I take the person first. Whatever physical characteristics they have are secondary. Or even last. Having been judged by my appearance my entire life, I am very insistent on not doing the same to others.
Plus, there is no logical reason to discriminate against someone based on physical traits alone. And I have a strong logic gene. If I’m not going to like someone, it’s going to be because they are rude or a jerk or controlling or uncivil. Those traits come in all colors. Caucasians aren’t the end all and be all, as much as some would like to think they are. Each person has something to contribute, regardless of their background or ancestry. We are all the better for it when they do. We need a better grasp of that concept.