Racial matters Pt. 3

Some random thoughts today.

I've always been tall. This would seem to make me a natural basketball player except for the fact that I'm horribly uncoordinated and can't dribble a ball to save my life. Nevertheless for two years in middle school I tried to play basketball for the local YMCA league. The first year our team did pretty horrible. I think we won maybe one or two games. I actually scored a basket once but more often than not I was there to act as a traffic stop for the little guys on the other team.

I noticed sometime during the second or third game that probably half of our team was black. It didn't bother me but I could tell it was a concern for my parents. We finished the season and I brought up playing again. My parents didn't discourage me playing the next season but they didn't encourage it either. I wanted to play so they signed me up.

The next season I was the only white kid on my team. My parents were perplexed and worried by this. They'd make fun of me and the situation by calling me "The White Shadow" after a TV show that was on at the time. When they'd go to games they'd sit off by themselves at the top of the bleachers. At least they were pretty easy to spot in the crowd. Mom eventually stopped coming to my games leaving dad to bring me. I could tell that he was coming for me but he obviously felt uncomfortable. My dad was not an outgoing person but he seemed even more isolated at the games. I didn't even think about asking to play again next season. I knew what the answer would be. Instead I went back to soccer where I actually had some talent and where a lot of the kids were Catholic and, therefore, mostly white.

When I was a teenager The Cosby Show was very popular. Kids at school were talking about it and how funny it was. I'd never seen it and I wanted to watch it. After supper one night I turned it on in the living room and watched about 10 minutes of it. It was funny of course and my parents heard me laughing. My mom came in from the kitchen and asked me what I was watching. When she saw what was on TV I could see the look on her face change. I'll never forget what she said next. "That's a show for black people Paul. We don't watch those shows. We watch shows about our own kind." And she turned it off.

My parents occasionally had arguments with the neighbors over parking. It didn't happen all the time but it was a fairly consistent feature of my childhood and adolescence. One time in particular I remember the neighbor had parked in a way that made it difficult for us to back out of our driveway. My dad went over and had words with them. When he came back he was angrier than I had ever seen him. My mom asked him what happened. My dad replied "I told them that if they ever did that again I'd put this house on the market and sell it to a nigger!"

How do children respond when they grow up in an environment like this? I'm sure many identify with the racism. It is coming from their parents after all and parents are supposed to be our role models. But I did not identify with it - I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with my parents' attitudes about race.

This would all be tested when I entered Junior High.

Racial matters Pt. 2

In fourth grade my family recieved the news that our school system was desegregating. This meant that I was not going to be going to our neighborhood grade school anymore but was going to be "bussed" instead to a school in a nearby town that was "all black". At least that's how my parents portrayed it. In reality the school was probably about 50% black and 50% white but to my parents that was close enough to be "all black". My parents were scared and angry.

Bussing almost caused our family to move out of St. Louis County entirely. I began hearing things about small towns an hour or so away from us that "still had good schools". I was terrified. All I knew was that bussing was a bad thing and that I was heading into a danger zone. But I also didn't want to leave my friends and neighborhood behind.

Looking back I can empathize with my parents a little bit. They had the expectation that my schooling would follow the same path as my older brother. I would go to the neighborhood grade school till 6th grade, then the Junior High, then the High School. Part of why our family moved to the area was so that we could go to the neighborhood grade school. They didn't want us to be sent to another school, much less one in a different city and certainly not one that was "all black".

I clearly remember the first day of the new school. I walked into the building the first time feeling small and wary. It was a middle school which meant there were only 5th and 6th graders and there were a lot of kids milling around. I honestly expected to be the only white kid there surrounded by a sea of blackness. I quickly realized how wrong that was when I began to see the familiar faces of some of my friends. Yes there were a lot of black kids there and I wasn't quite sure how to relate to them. On the surface they seemed okay but who knows what they were really like?

I expected there to be fighting every day at middle school. I expected to be personally threatened. I expected some unspecified bad thing to happen. My parents would quiz me after school. Did anyone get hurt? Did anyone threaten me? Just how many of the kids in my class were black and how many were white? What about the teachers? Were they black? I actually only had one black teacher (my gym teacher) and he was a 7 foot tall former basketball player and was one of the nicer men I have ever met.

Looking back it was a very good educational and social opportunity. I made black friends for the first time. Not many but I did get to know some pretty well. They seemed nice. They talked a little different than me and liked different music. Other than that it was a pretty uneventful two years.

Even many years later my parents would talk about how I "got bussed" and what a bad thing that was. I know it was supposed to be a bad thing but I couldn't help liking my middle school. For the first time I began to distance myself from my parents' views and question them.

Racial matters Pt. 1

I grew up in St. Louis County during the 70's. My parents were older and had been raised during the depression in downtown St. Louis. These two facts shaped a lot of how I came to think about race.

My parents were basically racist. They never attended Klan rallies. They never said an unkind word in front of a black person. But they were certainly racist. So were their friends and coworkers. And neighbors. You see we lived in a white neighborhood - I don't ever remember seeing any black kids at my grade school. My parents had moved out of the city along with everyone else to live in the suburbs. Was it to get away from the increasing numbers of blacks living downtown? I don't know but I'm sure that was at least partially the reason.

Sometime in fourth grade I began to be aware of changes that were happening in our area of St. Louis County. I'd hear my parents and their friends talking about the fact that there were neighborhoods near us that were "going black". This was a huge deal for my parents because we'd just moved to a new house 5 years prior to this and now they were faced with the possibility that our neighborhood could also "go black".

I didn't know what this meant - this going black. But it was clear to me that it was going to be a bad thing. I began hearing phrases like "property values going down" and "taking over" and "pretty soon you won't even be able to walk down your own street". Needless to say I began to get scared.

I've been thinking about racism lately

I've been preoccupied lately with the tragedies surrounding hurricane Katrina. In keeping with the themes of my recent (and not-so-recent) posts I could spend blogging time talking about the Christian response to Katrina. There's been both good and bad responses from Christians but that really hasn't been on my mind much. Instead I've been thinking a lot about racism.

I have several things I need to sort out in my head about racism. I intend to do the majority of that here so you can look forward to a couple semi-incoherent, rambling posts on the subject in the next week or two.