This told the brave deeds of Rangers, including ones who chased Pancho Villa. I remember one quote being something like: “He considered the only good Injun was a dead Injun.” Note to young self: Indians are deceitful and bad.
This was given (unread, I’m sure) by a very sweet couple who hosted our church home group, and would never have personally opposed someone based on race, but still, the message for a moment got through to me that “you just can’t trust Indians.”
Do you have memories of unwitting/unthinking racism by people who weren’t even culturally brought up to be so? This does disqualify Southerners who thought they were being nice, but honestly thought blacks were lesser people who needed help.
OH: I’ll give another one. My grandmother, born about 1917, was a bit doubtful about the idea of one of her grandsons bringing home a black girl. She was widely considered a real sweetheart, so I can only attribute this to some things she was taught as a child, of which I have no knowledge. I think that if it had happened, she would have gotten past it (she’s gone now). Her third grandson has now adopted a boy from Uganda, so “there goes the family name.”
Trust me when I say “Northern” states were certainly no less racist that “Southern” states in my youth, and the same probably holds true today. I was born and raised in a small town relatively near Chicago.
My grandmother - who came on the boat from Sicily - used the “N-word” all the time and had not an iota of respect for anyone who was not Italian, let alone not white. You never wanted to be in public with her.
She is probably rolling over in her very Catholic grave knowing her grandson is Gay.
The local yokels thought nothing wrong with telling racist jokes and making dumb ass comments and nobody, ever, called them on it. Passive agreement to the racist bullies was the norm.
By the time I was about 8, I knew every racist name for every minority group in town - Wops, Pollacks, Mick’s, Wetbacks, Krauts, Frogs, Limies - not to mention fags, queers, fairies, sissies, pansies…
Let’s just say that growing up was a cesspool of small town hate and prejudice and that was in a Northern state.
Gee - wonder why I couldn’t wait to leave that area?
I’m not sure if the quote here is referring to a Texas Ranger or to Pancho Villa, but the line about “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” is commonly attributed to Union general Philip Sheridan, of Albany, NY.
Another data point off the top of my head: the Ku Klux Klan of the early 20th century attained its greatest political prominence in Indiana.
Sheridan was prominent in Texas during reconstruction. Could he have been in the OP’s book? Also, he said say something to the effect of if I owned Texas and hell, I’d rent Texas and live in hell.
We had a Sambo’s restaurant in Marquette, Michigan when I was a kid. I remember the artwork inside the restaurant being somewhat memorable. I don’t remember if I realized when I got older that the images were racially insensitive, or if I came to that knowledge from what other people told me later.
True, but that version of the Klan (there were three) was primarily a multlevel marketing scheme. You rose by selling Klan paraphernalia to others. Racism was a part of it, of course, but so was good salesmanship.
I actually don’t remember any overt racism when I was going up on Eastern Long Island in the 50s and 60s; my family was very much in favor of equal rights and would never say anything demeaning about anyone (it wasn’t until college that I learned the line wasn’t “catch a tiger by the toe”). There was little racism in my school, but there were very few blacks – three in my graduating class.
People used to talk about “polacks” (we even had a “Class Polack” in our yearbook), but the people using the term were all of Polish descent (the unwritten rule is that you can use epithets for your own group among your own group for humorous effect).
Pretty much this. Racism and prejudice is so common in my family, and the environment I grew up in, that it pretty much just goes with the territory at any family get-together that someone’s going to make some disparaging comment about blacks or ‘‘niggers.’’ I’m fortunate that my mother is not racist and raised me with the belief that discrimination in all its forms is wrong. But racism is alive and well in Southeast/Mid-Michigan and I don’t anticipate that changing any time soon.
…when I was in high school we had a friend named Doug, who was Asian.
We all visited the grandmother of another friend of ours one day, and were introduced to her. We she got to Doug, who of course was introduced as “Doug,” she smiled warmly and said, “Oh, dear, don’t worry - I’ve traveled. What’s your real name?”
In third grade, my first teacher (who was thankfully replaced for mysterious reasons a month into the year) was reading roll call and got to my name, and made a point of speaking slowly and distinctly as she told the class that they would all help me learn English.
I visited a middle-aged woman to interview her as a potential witness. My appointment had been set up by someone else, so she had only my name prior to our interview. At the end of it, as I was leaving, she confided that she was very glad to have met me, since based on my name, she had been concerned I might be one of THOSE kind of Hispanics.
One of these incidents was in Maryland, the other two in Virgina, so I don’t know if those count as “Northern.”
When I got my current job teaching, I put up two pictures of the classes I taught there. One of my colleagues, who has a Masters degree and was about 26 years old at the time, looked at me and said, "So, it must have been really hard telling the differences between the kids, right?’
I said, “Uh, what do you mean?”
She said, “Well, because they all look the same. Did you ever confuse them for each other?”
I just stood there dumbfounded. Finally, I said, “Well, they really don’t look anything like one another. You know Asian people don’t actually all look alike, right?”
She just stood there and said, “Well…yeah, I know…”
The thing is, her question about confusing them was genuine. She wasn’t making a mean statement or a dumb joke. She really thought that I would have a hard time telling Chinese kids apart. For some reason.
This happened in Wisconsin in the '80s: I had a history teacher in high school who was from Germany, and emigrated to the US as (IIRC) a teen or young adult. At the time this happened, he was probably in his late 40s or early 50s, and had a couple of his own kids at this same high school. It’s also worth noting that he still had a pretty thick German accent after living in the US for a few decades.
I was a junior at the time, and one of the seniors who had him had been taken aside after class for him to tell her something. She had an “American” first name and a Chinese surname. He told her, speaking slowly and enunciating, that she spoke English very well and that he was impressed. I think she’d said her response was just “thanks” or something, but her statement later to friends was, of course she did, because she was born in the US! She had a Midwestern accent like the rest of us. She also graduated at the top of her class that year.
My brother-in-law had been given the job of president of a bank in a smallish town in Iowa. The head of the chamber of commerce was showing him and my sister around and came out with “You’ll like it here, there’s no blacks and damn few Catholics”.
Well like DMARK… i’m a chicagoan and we proudly wear our intolerance on our shoulder…(Like that old Bob Conrad battery commercial " I dare you to knock it off") I grew up on the southside and i never even attended a class with a white kid until a failed busing experiment in the fifth grade. Mindy and Becky (their real names) were withdrawn before Halloween. It’s really saying something that you could quite easily attend school from K- high school and never know a white person other than a teacher or administrator.
As for incidents?? Being refused service at a restaurant in Cairo and Dwight, Illinois. A quite terrifying incident in the Bridgeport neighborhood… i mean hell remember Marquette Park? Busing? The election of Harold Washington? Chicago simply seethed with resentment on both sides. Love that city… but so glad my ex prompted me to leave… I mean… this is the city that hit Martin Luther King with a brick… and made him leave. Old man Daley is the only person to whip MLK’s ass and send him packing.
I grew up north of Minneapolis in rural Minnesota. Racism wasn’t really an issue. Everyone was white.
Is that really racist though? It’s pretty common for people to have trouble distinguishing distinctive facial features in populations with different physical characteristics. With time, people adjust.
I attended integrated public and private schools, and lived in what was then one of the few city neighborhoods that wasn’t strongly associated with any one ethnic group. We sang “Catch a tiger by the toe”.
A few friends were on the racist side; they had more blue-collar parents. From adults, I never heard the N-word, but there was a lot of archaic language , and it wasn’t uncommon to hear things like “Those coloreds don’t put as much importance into taking care of their houses.” and “Coloreds spend too much on flashy cars and clothes.”
The neighborhood began to “turn” in the mid-1980s. White flight was far more complicated than “there’s too many blacks moving in”; there was large die-off of elderly residents, and an exodus from the region thanks to several massive plant closings. The neighborhood also had a lot of starter houses, so many young families bought their first house there, and moved on as soon as they could afford it. Houses in the neighborhood were dumped on the market cheap, and found willing buyers in the form of absentee landlords and lower-income blacks moving up from more troubled inner-city neighborhoods. Middle-class and lower middle-class whites and blacks were increasingly replaced with poorer blacks.
As racial transition took place, there weren’t any incidents of cross-burning, firebombing, vandalism or anything similar. Whites just quietly left the neighborhood. People talked about “The Line”, the street that marked the dividing line between majority black and majority white sections of the neighborhood, and how fast it was moving north. My parents left in 1992, when The Line was a few blocks away. They had a run-down absentee-owned house on one side, and a new neighbor with a Rottweiler tied up to a 4’ long chain that barked non-stop on the other. They had the money to move, so they jumped to an upper-middle class neighborhood in an adjacent suburb.
Damnit! I wish my grandmother was still alive. She went to a small-twon Pennsylvanian high school in the '40s and was good friends with the only black girl in her class (daughter of the only black family living in the town). I bet she has some interesting stories. I do know that on their class trip to Washington DC they ran must’ve run into some interesting problems. I don’t know how the hotel/restaurant situtation was handled, but Granny did mention how she refused to sit upfront on the public buses (or streetcars ) and sat in the back her girlfriend. Boy did she get some strange looks.
Most of my personal stories of racism in the North involve my brother and his ex-wife. I can’t wait for the day one of my neices brings home a black boy.
Busing: forgot about that. Busing wasn’t a big deal in Buffalo, except in mostly-Irish South Buffalo, where the residents despised blacks … and Jews, Poles, Italians, Germans, and anyone else who wasn’t Irish. The city’s black neighborhoods are located in the geographic center of the city, and many schools there were converted to what became very desirable magnet schools. Black students were more affected by busing, because many sent to schools in the outlying predominantly white neighborhoods; there was much less forced busing in the other direction.
Well, we didn’t have separate bathrooms or water fountains for different races in my youth in NJ, but there was certainly prejudice to be found.
My mom was cool – she told me a story about how she used to tutor a black male classmate in high school – this would have been in the late 30s in Pennsylvania. Somebody asked her wasn’t she afraid, and she responded that she certainly was not, and that there was no reason to be. When I told her about the first black (“colored”) student in our previously all-WASP school, she very firmly told me, “Don’t you EVER forget – that girl is exactly the same as you are inside.”
However, my dad told about how they changed their mind when shopping for a new house when he saw a “colored man” mowing a nearby lawn and the real estate agent confirmed that yes, that was the owner and not hired help.
Personal experience, in the 60s: My husband and I were shopping for an apartment and one prospective landlord insisted that we meet him someplace and he would take us to the apartment. After we met he apologized for the incovenience, but said hubby sounded “colored” on the phone and he had to be sure first, because he certainly couldn’t rent to “that type.”
The stereotype of the “drunken Native” is still in full force today in Alaska, with good reason. Alcoholism is rampant among Alaska Natives, with the public face being that of the poor souls who hang out in downtown Anchorage. These are the people that tourists and locals see every day, falling down drunk and harassing people walking by. Unfortunately, this view is held of all Natives by many who live there (and should know better), including my brother/sister and their spouses. I was guilty of having that same casual racist view when I was a teenager, although we didn’t consider it racist, only an expression of what we saw every day. When I reached working age and had colleagues who were Natives and was able to travel to some of the villages, my viewpoint changed.
