On Racism in America– Where we have come from

On Racism in America– Where we have come from   -Sept 30, 2016

( I cannot believe it's 60 years since the 1950's and we are still dealing with this)

I had a head-start liking black people. Not that I knew anyone black growing up.

There was one black kid in my high school; the exchange student from Uganda. And I would see an older black woman waiting at a bus stop from time to time, and somehow I understood, she was a cleaning lady for some white family. No, I didn't get my head-start in high school. I got my head-start from my father's jazz record collection. My Father loved Satchmo, the master, Louis Armstrong, also known as, “Pops”.

From wikipedia- “Armstrong was one of the first truly popular African-American entertainers to "cross over", whose skin color was secondary to his music in an America that was extremely racially divided. He rarely publicly politicized his race, often to the dismay of fellow African-Americans, but took a well-publicized stand for desegregation in the Little Rock Crisis. His artistry and personality allowed him socially acceptable access to the upper echelons of American society which were highly restricted for black men of his era.”

I, myself, did not adequately appreciate Mr. Armstrong. But there were many others in my father's collection that I enjoyed more.

As a boy, I remember a road trip we took to Florida. I still remember going to some run-down, dirty, “filling stations” for gas in the South and seeing a sign on the rest room door, “Whites Only”. That would have been in the late fifties. I was maybe ten years old.

I also saw very slender, meagerly dressed, black folk in the cotton-fields of the South working under the sun in the fields, and some of the shacks that they may have worked and lived out of. A very different time in America. And not one I am proud to report.

I merely state it as the time I came out of.

     By the beginning of the sixties, I had started my own record collection, with some very prized jazz and old blues records. I had also started reading a series of books which were pivotal in my belated education, for I certainly did not get much, if any, useful information from school. I read “Black Like Me”, by Griffin, a white reporter who dyed his skin black, and traveled through the South, and reported his experience.

I remember books by Dick Gregory describing his feelings and thoughts; “From the back of the Bus” and “Nigger-an auto-biography”. Eldridge Cleaver's, “Soul on Ice” made quite an impact on me. There were also others; “Man-child in the Promised Land” by Claude Brown, “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, and “Go Tell It On The Mountain” by James Baldwin.

     All this is to say, by 1969, I was quite ready for Richie Havens opening the show at Woodstock and I remember his set since I happened to be there, somewhat by coincidence.

     I was about 19 at that time and still did not know my ass from a hole in the ground. The fact that Richie was the only one ready to go on and that he carried the whole weight of the entire event on his shoulders, and they kept sending him back out to keep playing, because they did not have anyone else to put on, still brings tears to my eyes, as I think of what a pure spirit he was and what a gift of his beautiful soul he gave us that night. 

      During that golden time in history when we somehow thought we had vanquished, or at least had met the monster of segregation and racism, and had the beginning of a solution, we deluded ourselves that we ourselves were not racist. But of course, we were young and did not realize how deep were planted the seeds of our fears and all the subtle ways we all participated in the collective choice of society to defend the elevated position of white privilege. That understanding would take many more decades to begin to explore.

      But the upside was that we had opened a door and we were able to enjoy James Brown, Jimmy Preston, Sly Stone, ( especially Sly Stone who brought the whole situation together under one exulted vision ), Stevie Wonder, and the whole galaxy of black humans who shared their special appreciation for the miracle of life.

      And the special tragedy now, even after electing a black president who has been vilified by a sizeable number of Americans, even after all the beauty black men and black women have shared with America and the world, we are still embroiled in the same fear of losing our own sense of specialness as unique humans.    So we all have some “splain-ing” to do, as Desi Arnaz used to say to Lucille Ball.    We have work to do to see ourselves as one human race, equally precious and valuable in God's eyes.    Maybe if we try to see it from God's eyes instead of our own, we will be further along.