iceberg said:
and yes, i've been threatened by blacks while in "their neighborhood" as a child in austin and told my "white a** better be gone before the sun goes down". also in austin i had a group of black kids take my basketball (i was more of an icecube at the time) and begin to kick my arse and my mom had to literally come over (we were in a public gym just playing with friends) and get me outta there cause i was getting stomped.
I too had experience with race at a very early age, Iceberg, but mine was fundamentally different, and colored my entire life's perspective, just as your colored yours.
There was one, just ONE black family in my entire town when I was a kid. I don't know how or why the good Lord chose to put that family of a career Army man, his wife, and four kids in the house next door to ours, but the result was my siblings and I got to grow up with kids who didn't look just like us, and were allowed the opportunity to understand that racial differences are among the most superficial of all differences.
I remember as late as the summer of 68 (in the so called enlightened northeast) my mom getting into a heated argument with a woman at the local lake who did not want our black friends in the water with HER kids (guess it was gonna rub off). The lifeguard actually took the woman's part..guess it was just easier to make US go away. They didn't know what a blank on wheels street fighter my mom is tho.
Can remember so clearly my late dad trying summer after summer to get the neighbor kids a summer job with my brothers on the construction sites picking up bric-a-brac and flagging or whatever they did. No go. Most of my dad's co-workers were aghast some black kid might get a cushy good paying summer job before the 'entitled' white kids. Yes, it's we who have been the entitled. For centuries.
I had to endure the looks, the N word, the J word, the mistrust, the N lover words...for all my formative years, because of who my friends were.. But at the end of the day, I could escape to the sanctity of my safe majority household. My friends could not.
Later in college I roomed with an African American woman, my best friend to this day, and got another dose of the daily indiginites, the store *****, the
expectations of inferiority, the unwillingness
to meet her eyes. The inability to look her straight on of my own white friends.
Of course, marriage to a man of mixed (West African-Arab ) 'race' has been yet another round..but I was prepared for it by then. I will admit tho, I thought long and hard about making our life together in the USA. Having never ever experienced racial discrimination in his entire life, how would he handle it here? But my way in life has been to fight it, fight it every inch of the way, like my parents did, and to TRY never to take the easy way out and let it 'pass'.
It is letting it 'pass' that perpetuates it. Injustice can NEVER be allowed to slide on by, tho inevitably weariness sets in.
as you can see, that stays with you when you're a kid of 6-7 years old. now i can either spend my life demanding revenge for the unjust treatment or i can realize that's how life works and i need to take some steps to work past it even if i go at it alone.
Good for you. One of my brothers went thru something like you did and decided to chalk it up to a valuable experience on feeling what it's like to be a minority. I agree steps have to be taken to work past an experience of being bullied...I hope you have been able to not allow a few punk kids to color your feelings on an entire race. Just as I have not allowed the bigots I have encountered to make me dislike all white people.
And I tell you quite honestly that has been HARD, damn hard. There was a period of time in my young adulthood when I was so day to day FURIOUS that I probably could have gotten walked into the white girl auxiliary of the Black Panthers
- like many young people my sense of outrage coincided with my study of history. Luckily, I was able to turn my need for justice 'academic' enough to realize the place where I could make the MOST difference was on the INside, and over the years I have done all I can to influence the young adults I am charged with helping to educate. But I could very easily have 'moved' outside the mainstream.
years ago leaving deep ellum with friends we passed by a group of black people outside a clud and we heard one of 'em say "you be some brave white boys to be here..."
And years ago outside a disco a group of black girls threatened to kick my arse because I was with a pretty hot black guy. Just a friend, but they weren't about to split hairs.
But you know what? I know
exactly where they were coming from.
Understanding wher they were coming from didn't make me sullen, resentful, prejudiced, or a victim. It made me a better and wiser person I would like to think. But then, I have only my parents to thank for teaching us how to walk in another man's shoes.
wow. i left liquid lounge to go back to my truck and i'm "brave"? and i used to work with a friend who had to go before HR because he was accused of being racist because he had to fire a black lady who was in the end NOT doing her job and had MORE warnings than i could get away with and HR realized that and in the end all was fine. but he still had to go through all that crap of being called racist and having to defend his actions.
There are some folks who will get over in that way..but for most of our nation's history, they've been white. We practiced occupational apartheid long after slavery ended, and while I personally deplore getting over, rest assured, it is just as difficult for my husband to can a lazy incompetent white worker as a black one. They call it 'due process'...we don't need unions anymore to protect the inept.
but those are isolated incidents, latuna. i'm sure they have their reasons for it both when i was a child and then 3-4 years ago when i was a much older child. and i'm sure there are people who use their race one way or another to be basically lazy - yes. all that is life and a part of living, not to be called out at every opportunity and the one who's in the "majority" race punished or having to be "defensive".
This is where we differ. I believe you DO call it out at every opportunity. You call it out not for your own sake but for the sake of your children, and their children. The legacy of 250 years of
race-based slavery, another 100 of legalized segregation, and the vestiges of institutional racism demand it.
As I've grown older, I've learned to pick my battles more discriminately, but I also realize the psychic damage one does to oneself everytime the choice is
made NOT to fight injustice.
we need to quit "handicapping" races and people are going to have to quit expecting a + here and there because of their race and not what they do and how they do it.
We handicapped blacks since the first slaves were brought over in the early 17th century. I'd like to see more admission of that, and more apology for it.
Purely anecdotal, but in my experience a minority still has to be considerably 'better' than a non-minority to get the benefit of the doubt of his/her competence. I do know I've met few people as flat out intelligent as my engineer husband, ( I admit I'm nowhere near his pure intellectual capacity, but there's more in life than advanced mathematics
) and he has done very well in this country..simply because you'd be hard pressed to find many people who can do what he can...growing up in a culture where university education is totally merit based, not our democratzed ideal of educating everyone who wants a degree. But there has never been one instance when his race, ethnicity or native language actually worked FOR him. He simply is smarter than the competition, and a workoholic. To be black and successful, you still need to be 'better'.
if you really want racism to end you gotta quit seeing races. that's a lot to ask of people and in our lifetime it won't happen. so while i agree with you on a lot of things i disagree that simply reverting to the other extreme is "helpful" in the overall problem.
Very few people are capable of that, but the answer is simple. It's inter-marriage and the inevitable irrelevance of the concept of 'race' that will ensue. You and I won't see it, but it'll come. The very idea of 'race' is a cultural artifact that is on its way to oblivion. There is little that pleases me more than the notion of that racist bugaboo 'the browning of America" dawning historically nearer.
i don't deny it's tough being black in todays world. i'm sure it was a lot tougher 30-40 years ago and brutal before that. what history has done we can either work to undo and come together or we can keep seperating ourselves and expecting differences in treatment that in the beginning we hated - those differences in treatment.
99.9 % of differences in treatment still favor US. I am ALL for that ending. But then, I don't believe even on the eve of New Year's Eve, off duty police officers justifiably concerned with heavy holiday drinking and driving , are going to cuff either you or I for taking a leak against a dumpster. Yeah, as someone said, the man 'broke a law'. But it's the meting out of punishment that still carries the weight of our sad past. You probably would have walked, I definitely would have.
i also don't deny it's tough being a woman at times. or chinese. or the fat kid, or the gay dude in gym class trying not to stare. is there anyone over 10 years old alive who's not felt like they didn't belong in many social and other situations? God made us different for a reason. i can only hope one day we get smart enough to realize it should be a good thing, not additional reasons to fight.
Being 'different' is great, it's glorious in fact. But I cannot in all honest equate the fat kid in gym class with one of the most horrific episodes in all of human history, and that is our own legacy of race-based slavery and racism.
and who give a damn where terry glenn had to peepee last night unless it was on my tire after a steely dan concert, then i'd just want his autograph when he was done. : )
Who gives a damn? As Betty Davis said 'hold onto your seatbelt, this is gonna be some wild ride'. Prepare to see every detail of TG's past dredged up and castigated by some mediot or 'fan'. It's already started up here.
Later, don't pee against any dumpsters tonite.
