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.
