Prelude: Can we talk about racism without tripping over ourselves? No drippy comments about how bad racism is? In other words, if you choose to throw down on this topic, please SHOW me why it's bad/neutral/peachy. Don't TELL. My guess is that we all think it's low. So can we say something other than boilerplate? Can you?
RACE AND RACISM IN MY PRETEEN YEARS
I first thing I remember is the Brown Hornet, Cosby's play-within-the-play on Fat Albert.
The Brown Hornet was the cartoon the FA characters watched in their clubhouse in the city dump (more than simply making us feel sorry for the gang, the implication is that the kids themselves are (perceived as) no more important than trash).
They gathered religiously to watch the Brown Hornet, the one figure they have to idolize (parents in FA are all but nonexistent, but unlike Peanuts, there are speaking adult characters--most are portrayed as conniving). The kids run in a cloud of dust and squeaky-shoe sound effects to make it to the little clubhouse TV. The Brown Hornet materializes out of the static--there's always a sense they won't be able to tune him in. Now, the Hornet is not infallible--he barely pulls off the escape/rescue, and his eyes betray a sense of "How did I get this job?" He gets caught in compromising situations. His spaceship is a bucket. Still, he eventually wins the day, smashing shit up. The clubhouse kids howl in approval.
What it made me consider, at age 5, was that these kids were watching a black guy. Sure, I was watching a black show, but I was white. Here were blacks watching blacks. Nothing profound here--it just made me realize that the majority of what I saw on TV was white. That I was white.
Many years later when the Cosby Show started, I would struggle with the idea of a black doctor dad, a black lawyer wife and well-adjusted black kids, supportive, non-jealous black grandparents, living in the heart of the city. The only black grandfather was Marvin Gaye's dad. What I struggled with was the idea of appropriation. I mean, rich whites raised blacks out of generosity, right? Diff'rent Strokes, yo! We wouldn't have blinked at a shite show with similar characters (hello Silver Spoons), but with the Cosby Show--the biggest draw of its time, I was thinking, whatchoo talkin bout Bill? At about the same time, American blacks were busy appropriating staunchly white icons such as Mercedes (nice hood ornament, cracker--it'll look great as a necklace), Fila (tennis!!), Adidas (Germany! And tennis!), and calling each other nigger. Er, "nigga." But you get the idea? Sure. Meanwhile, the Cos was appropriating white roles in his show. No more dry cleaner kings, no more families living in alleys, no more quiet anger... Cosby is a brilliant dude.
And now Tina has appropriated "pussy." Wheel in the sky, keep turning.
I was pretty idealistic as a preteen. I wasn't really racist until high school. More on that in later post. What I knew from my parents and Jesus most adults was that:
1) it was wrong.
2) it made sense not to judge others based on the color their skin.
Still, the blacks and Mexicans I knew as a kid (few) weren't dressed as well as most white kids. The minority adults seemed sad. Therefore, in my young eyes, there was something going on here. Like we weren't supposed to not like them as much, but there was no practica application. My parents didn't have a lot of black friends, if any? Why?
Nonwhites I knew as a preteen:
Stacy Fitzpatrick, who lived in a trailer. He was ok, then suddenly mean. His clothes were dirty.
Fuzzy, who worked bagging groceries at the local market. He bought a Michael Jackson zipper jacket (red) after Thriller came out. He was later convicted for molesting children. He was awfully friendly. He liked to joke with us at the store, an adult who acted like a child.
Emeka (see below).
Louise, who worked at my preschool. She taught me to tie my shoes. I liked her. She sat on the stoop and watched up play with those heavy stainless steel trikes and hollered at misbehaving kids. We had eggplant one day for snack and I said 100% innocently that it was the same color as her skin. I had no idea about Italians calling blacks melezzane. Oh brother.
I was in the 3rd grade when Emeka Mbachu (a-MAKE-ah mm-BOTCH-oo) made the scene. His dad was from Nigeria (which, along with Niger, were considered hilarious country names for kids just learning to spell, but which wouldn't have been funny at all if Chris Turner hadn't pointed out the word nigger) and was in Sewanee for seminary (the result of aggressive colonization by the Anglican church for the century prior, not exactly paying dividends for the Episcopal Church today).
Enough parentheses. Emeka was a huge black kid. If you wanted to win at football at recess, you picked Emeka first. Whoever won the coin toss to decide first pick won the game. Hand off or pass to Emeka, and he would carry three kid into the end zone, laughing the whole time. He was always smiling.
Given his loose grasp of English, we would sometimes provide him with whispered answers to the teacher's questions. "Three times three?" Mrs. Majors would query. Emeka wanted to provide answers. Someone would whisper to him, "Emeka--'shit.'" And he would blurt out, "Shit!" proudly and with a smile.
Mrs. Majors would then paddle him, which we loved to see, because the sight of a larger male being paddled by a shorter old woman was comical. Did his African blackness and her Mary Kay peachness contribute to the sight gag? Maybe. And he smiled through the paddling. He wore some kind of diaper, I'd seen it when he stood up after (finally) being tackled.
One day my dad came home from a National Guard weekend trip. I was 8 or so. On an early morning training excursion, one of the Guardsmen had fallen asleep at the wheel of his Jeep and crashed it into a tree. he died. He was the father of one of the few boys at school who was black. James Beasley. In later years, it would just seem to figure, a la Scorcese flicks, that it was the black guy who fell asleep at the wheel.
See how much media contributes to our perceptions of the world? Where's Tipper? I owe her an apology.
I wish I could say that it gets easier from this childhood point of grappling, but it doesn't. I talk about, or around, racism with those close to me. It is endlessly fascinating, how race gets tied up with culture (Jews, e.g.) to the point that one is indicernible from the other. How one's phenotype, not genotype, determines how we perceive them (Tiger and Obama on one side, Colin Powell on the other. And Michael Jackson somewhere in the middle, someone who took control of his color, unsuccessfully).
That's enough for now. I feel a little ill.
