Ohio town, mid-60’s, elementary school. My parents didn’t raise me to be a racist, I didn’t know any black people but I didn’t think there was anything different about them than the color of their skin. A black family attended the elementary school, there were several kids about 1 per grade. My grade, 1st, got a girl and no one would have anything to do with her except me. I was told by my classmates to stay away from her because blacks were bad and they smelled. I told them that was silly and befriended her. But the family didn’t stay long, not sure whether they moved or got shipped to a less white school.
I once had a landlord that refused to rent a house to a couple that I recommended as tenants because she is white and he is black. He even told them he felt deceived because on the phone Mark “sounded white”, and flat out refused to get out of his car to even show them the house. Didn’t even try to hide his reaction.
This was 2 miles from Yellow Springs OH in 1994.
In the summers of 1989 and 1990 I worked in Champaign, IL with a group of kids from my school, the University of Texas. The things some white folks would say to me because they assumed I was a Southerner… (I’m from Nebraska)… Holy cow.
When I was growing up there was a black family that lived up the street with a young boy in my grade. He and I were friends… well, as much as his family would allow. They wouldn’t let him walk to or from school although it was only half a block. He was not allowed to Trick or Treat. I’m not even sure that officially he was allowed to be friends with me. It was awful, because he was a really nice kid and he was just beseiged on all sides, the only black kid for years until high school when there was one other black kid. He always seemed very lonely and angry. He called me once when we were in college (from his folks house down to my house) and we caught up a bit. He was going to an all-black college not far from me, but he told me I was to never, ever try to come up and visit him. It was too bad.
My family moved to Omaha in 1972 and my folks were told to make sure to move into the suburban school district because Omaha Public Schools was busing at the time. You don’t want to send your kids to school with black kids, you know?
Omaha, AIUI, also has and has had a reprehensible history with racism. I read once where it was known in the black community not to move to Omaha. Kansas City? Ok. Chicago? Ok. Don’t go to Omaha. There were riots here in the 60’s around the time of the Watts riots. I still rarely see African Americans in my day to day life here. Not at the store, not at the mall or the movie theater. Not at work. It’s weird. I get the impression that there is still to this day an unspoken understanding that the blacks will stay on the north side, unless you’re upper middle class, then it’s ok. If you didn’t know it, you’d think the only black people here are the handful that are involved in the shootings you read about in the paper.
Grew up on Eastern Long Island in the late 60’s, in a small town that had relatively few black families. I went to school with a handful of black kids, and liked them well enough; I can’t remember if there was that casual racism that comes from being young and encountering “different” people. I remember being very shocked - and a little grossed out - when, in 8th grade, we were called to assembly, and the subject was “Don’t Play on the Train Tracks!” Part of the presentation was the story of a young black kid who played chicken with a train, but was mesmerized by the oncoming headlight. He was struck, of course. The assembly ended, but the 8th grade was ordered to stay. To hammer home the do-not-play-on-the-train-tracks lesson, they passed around a photo of what remained of the boy after the train hit him: a small tangled mess of pink intestines. And that’s when it hit me: BLACK PEOPLE ARE THE SAME ON THE INSIDE, in a very visceral sense.
It didn’t occur to me that perhaps just because the young actor was black doesn’t mean that the boy who was struck by the train was black. I don’t think it matters, either – it was a good lesson to learn.
Well… most of my northerner racism stories involve relatives, unfortunately.
My Dad’s parents were both from Texas, and while somewhat bigoted, it was somehow a more polite and civil sort; they certainly weren’t rude, or anything like that, they just didn’t associate with black folks. (er… “colored” as they said)
My Mom’s parents were from southern Illinois, and they would toss the n-word around pretty frequently, and were sometimes rude, and condescending at times. Really the only major flaws in a couple of wonderful people.
The other bigoted relative was my cousin- he’s from NE Kansas near Kansas City, and he came down one time when he was in high school and my brother and I were just dumbfounded- it was like he’d joined the Klan or something. N-this, N-that, Jigs, etc…
You just don’t see that kind of thing in polite company down here; the only times I’ve heard it in Texas has been among the very trashiest of rednecks.
Northern Illinois late-1960’s, in a small town proud of it’s connection with Abraham Lincoln. My parents did volunteer paperwork for Black people - legal aid, homebuyers’ assistance, etc. People would call with death threats and we kids would have to play indoors with the curtains shut, or be sent to grandma’s. Sometimes I’d be walking to school and white toughs would pull up in their cars and say shit.
One night when my mom was still at work, after we had been put to bed, some guys came into the house, put a shotgun to my dad’s head, and took him for a ride out into the country. They didn’t kill him, but they stole his big collection of hunting rifles and pistols: could have been the Black Panthers, or the cops keeping him from selling them to the Panthers. Allstate succesfully denied his insurance claim.
By the early 70’s the schools were integrated and there were Black kids happy to raise hell in class and beat the shit out of us white kids.
By the late 70’s I was cynical and misanthropic, and readily embraced the nihlism of the Punk movement.
I’ve gone into specifics before, but the most omnipresent, casual, everyday racism I ever saw was in Ferndale, MI in the late 1970’s. It was particularly shocking to me because I had previously lived in very diverse parts of SF and NYC and was kinda unprepared for it. There were very few black folks in the city itself ( appears that is still the case ), but it intersected with communities with larger numbers in the school district. Quite a bit of a chip-on-the-shoulder “they drove us out of Detroit” mentality. Which manifested itself in a number of racial/class divisions ( i.e. “only niggers ride the school bus” ).
That said, in-your-face race baiting didn’t seem common in my limited schoolyard experience. It was more an undercurrent than a symptom of constant public clashes.
Oh god, this reminds me of a friend’s anecdote. My friend Kristine is Korean-American. Her parents are both from Korea, but she was born and raised in California. When she was in college, she had someone ask her what her real name was. She said “Kristine”, but the questioner persisted, apparently unable to grasp that her actual factual name is Kristine. Finally, Kristine gave up and said, “well, my Korean name is [whatever it is, I forget], but that’s my legal middle name, my name really is Kristine.” Later, this person then introduced Kristine to someone else as “this is Kristine. Well, we can’t pronounce her real name, so we call her Kristine”.
Kristine didn’t seem too offended, she just laughed as she told me this story. It’s just so weird. I mean, she did her undergrad at UC Berkeley, where ethnic Asians (many of whom were born and raised in the US) are the single largest ethnic group. The idea of an Asian-American with an ordinary American name shouldn’t have been too foreign to her. Just…weird. I don’t know precisely when this happened, but it must have been sometime in just the last few years.
Gosh, this thread is becoming a little depressing to me. I’m reminded of reading that when the US Army was integrated, many of the southerners had better attitudes, because at least they’d been interacting on some level all their lives, while many of the northerners hadn’t.
I now recall that my dad told me that when he was selling our house in suburban St. Louis in ~1978 (all white as far as I know), one of the neighbors saw a black couple tour the house and made a small appeal to my dad to not bring down everyone’s property values.
These stories all the more eye-rolling and tiring because as I say, I have a Ugandan-American nephew, who will be caught in the middle quite a bit, I expect. On sight he’ll apparently still get some form of crap at random intervals even in Santa Barbara. He’ll sound “California-white”, and given his dad, he’ll probably be more into punk than the Jay-Z comeback album, so I’m afraid he won’t be “black enough” to be fully accepted by many in that way, either. Facebook Here he is with sisters and boy cousins.
I expect that some people who only know him from the phone will literally look right past him, searching for the person they’re meeting. We joke that he’ll come home many times and say, “They thought I was taller.”
Smokey and the Bandit:
Buford T. Justice: Hey boy, where is Sheriff Branford at?
(black) Sheriff Branford: I AM Sheriff Branford.
Buford T. Justice: Oh, pardon me. For some reason you sounded a little taller on radio.
Remember some of these anecdotes are oldish. Mine date back a good 30 years and I note that these days good old Ferndale … is well-known in the Detroit area for its LGBT population and progressive politics, having elected the first openly gay mayor in the state of Michigan in 2007. Believe me, that was probably not the case in 1979.
Racism is still around ( and probably always will be, humans being humans ), but I dare say things have improved since my childhood.
Though I hasten to add that I once again live in the semi-progressive bubble of the SF Bay Area and therefore may have rose-colored glasses on.
And might I say, they look fabulous on you.
Every time I had a new teacher, I knew to listen to the pause as s/he started on the Bs. My legal first name is not Lynn, but is something that’s DEFINITELY not your standard Anglo Saxon female first name. In the 60s, in Fort Worth, the classes were not integrated (we had one Jew and one black kid in my whole elementary school, which was fairly large), and the teachers were flummoxed when they came to my name, as neither the first nor the last name was something they could pronounce.
I got a lot of teasing about my names, and also some outright discrimination, because my father wasn’t considered white by some people.
I grew up in the NW suburbs of Chicago.
Back in the '60s, there were approximately zero black people in McHenry County. Not one in my grade school, middle school, or high school classes.
In grade school one of the taunts to be used when a pair of kids got into a fight:
“Fight, fight, n-word and a white”
“Come on your buddy’s name here, beat that white!”
I don’t think we were racist so much as ignorant. Not that that makes it right.
Walt
The underlying assumption of the OP’s question is that it’s possible to live a life in the complete absence of racism. I would argue that that doesn’t exist in any country in the world, and that racism, where you find it, is not unusual nor does it imply that there is some sort of superiority of one group over another for being less racist.
For example, you might find less racism against blacks in New York than South Dakota, but there could be more racism against Muslims there.
I guess it’s more “racially ignorant”.
And I rather disagree. I don’t think people have any trouble distinguishing facial populations of foreign races.
Actually, I’ve read of studies that show that Japanese people at first have trouble telling white people apart, so it cuts all ways.
As far as my grandmother was concerned, anyone who wasn’t an Irish Catholic had something wrong with them to some degree. She especially had issues with the coloreds, the Jews, and the Hungarians.
And some forms of discrimination/prejudice remain that you’d think would be irrelevant. Before I got married a bit over 10 years ago, some of my relatives on my mom’s side confronted my then-fiance because they disapproved of their cousin getting married to a Catholic Eye-talian from Chicago. :rolleyes: (They’re white, Northern European descent, and Protestant.) He told them to go pound sand.
A Korean friend saw a picture of my dad and declared that he looked just like Colonel Sanders.
My dad looks absolutely nothing like Colonel Sanders, but I guess the plastic statue in front of the Seoul KFC was the only exposure she’d ever had to an older white man, so there you go.
LOL, my husband’s grandmother lives in Ferndale, and is highly conservative. As he puts it, ‘‘She’s always bitching about the gays taking over Ferndale… and what’s so hilarious is that she’s kinda right.’’
It was interesting watching her come to terms with the fact that her granddaughter (my SIL) is gay. She cried at first, but then invited her over and let her bring her girlfriend, and allowed them to sleep in the same bedroom. And then caught my SIL smoking on the front porch, and lost her shit because omg she’s smoking.
Old people are weird.