As many of you know, I grew up in New York City, Manhattan
mostly, although we had a few excursions elsewhere. I can’t say we were poor,
but we certainly would have qualified for low income. My Mother married what we might call a Ne’er-do-well,
Rudolph by name. He apparently skipped
the education part, maybe finishing 8th grade, and a bigger maybe, high school. Now Daisy, the Mom, also maybe finished high school, but Daisy got
herself some training in bookkeeping, preparatory to actually getting a job. Maybe she knew that husbands might be
unreliable on that front. So, then she
got married to Rudy. Not sure what prompted that affair. Maybe Rudy was a
charmer, although that seems unlikely in the extreme. Still, Daisy saw
something in the dude, so they got hitched.
And then came the parade of kids. First sister Ruth in 1925. Then, in
not so rapid succession, Bill in 1931, and finally me in 1934. We must have lived for some time in Brooklyn,
because that is listed as my birthplace. Now, Ruth was born in Florida, which
remains a bit of a mystery. What was she doing in Florida? Maybe living there
with the first dude she married before Rudy (yeah, yeah, Daisy had a brief
marital fling with someone before Rudy).
But my first memories are Manhattan, Eastside, Second
Avenue. I have explained in a previous
post about living in a railroad flat, the first with a shared bathroom, the
second with our very own private bathroom. And that was when Daisy was working, putting
her bookkeeping to good use while working at a Naval Ship architectural firm in
lower Manhattan, Gibbs and Cox. And, of course, Rudy was working once in a
while, when he wasn’t drinking on the job as a bartender. Mostly, Rudy was
missing in action. And when War was
declared, Rudy was still missing in action. He would have been 40ish, so well
past the draft stage. Still you would think he could have come up with a job
during the War. God, everybody had a job
during the War, just not Rudy.
So, we banged along on Daisy’s bookkeeping salary, barely
keeping food on the table and the rent paid.
And my memories of that period are either sitting in grade school, PS-82,
or playing on the streets of New York.
Now, we lived in the 70’s on Second Avenue. And, guess what? No Blacks
lived anywhere on our street. Nope. To my limited knowledge, African Americans in
Manhattan, were confined to Harlem, 125th Street and above. So, I grew up, poor, but all lily white. I literally have no memories of meeting Black
kids on the street, or in school. And we
were in the streets a lot. It’s where we played—stickball, marbles, fake fist
fights as a part of cops and robbers.
Lots of accidents, some cuts, broken bones, but just kid street stuff.
Then as the War wound down, Daisy decided that her kids
could not remain on the streets of Manhattan and hope to remain alive—my brother
Bill got hit by a passing lorry, and wound up in the hospital, scaring the
bejesus out of Daisy. So, Daisy, having
actually saved some money by buying War Bonds for the past 4-5 years, decided
to take her total savings and use it to buy a house in the “suburbs” of New
York, in Rockland County. The plan was that, after she bought the house, our
grandpa—a carpenter by trade, would fix it up and the kids would move into the
house, supervised by the errant father, who was promising to be good. Daisy would remain in the City, continuing to
work at her Gibbs and Cox job, while Rudy bartended somewhere in the Rockland
County vicinity.
And so we moved to a place called New City Park. And guess what? New City Park was also lily
White. Yep, no Blacks lived there at
all. And, once there, I attended a nice
little grammar school, Chestnut Grove by name. I think the entire school had about
90 kids or thereabout. And although I
would have sworn it was also lily white, it turns out, on close inspection of a
school picture, we had one Black kid, who I do not even remember. And, none in our graduating class.
And then, after graduating from Chestnut Grove, I went on to
Spring Valley High School, in 1948.
While there, I actually met one or two Black kids. Turns out, Spring
Valley was mainly white, and surrounded by mainly white communities. But it was
not 100% white. Still, because the community
was way beyond predominantly white, black-white was never an issue. The few
Black kids were just kids. All of us were just kids. There was no police harassment—no fines for “driving
while black”, no folks shot for “living while Black”. No racial anything. And because we did not
subscribe to any newspapers, I never was exposed to reading about New York City’s
racial problems.
So, I grew to the age of 17, with no awareness of
Black. To the extent I attended movies,
and I am sure I did, I am also sure they were movies by and about white folks. And then I applied for and was accepted by a
college in California, Stanford by name.
And, I know, your first thought is, so Richard, how come a relatively
poor kid from New York select, no less get accepted by that rich school in Palo
Alto, California? Well, it turns out it
was all a bit of an accident. See, my sister married a guy who became a doctor,
and they moved into the San Francisco Bay Area after he finished his residency
in Seattle. And when I started looking, my sister suggested I look at
Stanford. Note, there were other schools
out there—UC Berkeley for one. But no,
she suggested Stanford. And, having no clue about money, I applied and got
accepted. How I/we would pay for Stanford was not even within my
thought-sphere. Remember, my dad had
long ago left us, so he could remain permanently drunk I guess. And my mom still worked as bookkeeper, but
now for a small local bakery in Rockland County. Not a lot of money there. And yes, I worked
part time—summers, weekends. Still, my work produced pocket money for me, not
tuition money for a place like Stanford.
But it turns out that Stanford had not raised its tuition
rates in maybe 20 years. It had fallen way behind the Ivy League schools. So,
the total cost of attending Stanford—tuition, and room and board—was $1,300 per
year (or about $12,600 in 2020 dollars). So, not trivial, but still not horrible. My sis helped with the first year, then I
worked part time to pay for the room and board thing and took out loans for the
rest. So, I wound up with a student debt
of about $2500 on graduation.
But then, you might imagine I might have become more exposed
to some African Americans while at Stanford. But you would have been wrong.
Nope, my four years at Stanford remained pretty much lily white. I am certain
that Stanford had Black students. I just never met any of them.
So, see, it is possible to grow to the magic age of 21 with
no Black awareness, not to speak of friends.
Following graduation, I had become married the year earlier, we moved to
the LA area, so I could join the aerospace industry working on a guided missile
program. And we moved to Garden Grove in Orange County—guess what—yep, pretty
much all lily white. No Blacks in our
neighborhood, and none, to my knowledge in my work.
After about a year, we tired of the LA smog and moved back
to the San Francisco Bay Area, moving to Sunnyvale, and another aerospace firm,
to work on the Polaris missile program. And yep, mostly all white. I say mostly
as though I had seen or knew Blacks. But no, I simply assume that Blacks lived
somewhere in the Bay Area, just unknown to me. See, here’s me at my exotic
Lockheed workplace in about 1957. See, all the Black engineers?? No, oh, me neither.
So, now, having worked for a few more years, I turned 29,
and received an offer to move to a totally exotic location—India. Now, the
reactions of some of my working colleagues was borderline hilarious. Perhaps the funniest was a colleague who said,
“But Richard, how can you move there? Do you understand that there are 400 million
foreigners living there?” But move we
did. Why? I don’t know. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. And, to be fair, my
colleague was largely correct. India in 1964 had some 488 million people living
there, and only a relatively modest number would look like me, i.e., light
skinned, green or blue eyes. Here’s a
group of us at a training session we gave in Srinagar, Kashmir, circa 1965.
See, the big color mix? Well, it turns out, India had perhaps as large an
awareness of color, as we did in the USA. If one perused the “personals” in the
local newspaper
One might find personal ads placed for the purpose of finding
a permanent mate for life. And the men always asked for a “fair-skinned virgin”.
Perhaps not unlike the USA, India’s human color resembled the US. As you moved
from northern Kashmir, where folks tended to be very fair skinned, to southern
India, people became darker in skin tone as you moved south. And there was a clear awareness of color,
almost as though it had some magic power of worth. Still, India was a diverse
country, where many peoples had arrived at varying times in the country’s
history from other parts of Asia. Within the country, not only was there
peoples of diverse skin color, but they spoke different languages. When we were
there, there were 13 different languages, and 845 dialects spoken by the people
in different regions.
So, we (I) became aware of color as a variant of the human
condition, and language as yet another variant.
People from different places looked and sounded different.
And then, we moved back to the US of A in 1968. And in 1968,
race became an actual issue in my life. In April, as we were poised to leave
India, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot by a racist idiot at the Loraine Motel
in Memphis, Tennessee. Suddenly, race
was a live issue in my, til then, ignorant life.
Now, to say I was largely ignorant of race as an issue,
while true, is also partly untrue. I was now in my 30s, and I did read. I was
aware of the Civil War, and its continued aftermath as a dividing issue in
America. Many who lived in the South continued to hold onto the fiction that
the Civil War was not about slavery, but about States Rights. Slavery, they
maintain, was a side issue. Whereas, I believed, based on the reading I had
completed, that the Civil War was about the ability of a State to dictate that
Slavery was either legal or illegal. Slavery was a huge economic issue, in
addition to a human rights issue. Many Southerners ignored the human rights
issue altogether. But, I was not sufficiently aware of the deep-seated hatreds
that existed within the country about slavery and about current race relations.
As I now see the world, there exist two kinds of “awareness”—intellectual
awareness, and awareness based on events within your own life. For example, I may read the New York Times
articles about race relations, and become intellectually aware that America has
a race relations problem of substantial magnitude. But, if I were Black, and my brother was
driving his car, and was stopped by a policeman and then shot for “driving
while Black”, I would have a different awareness of race relations in
America. I would be feeling grief, despair,
and then hatred. And those feelings would never go away.
And so my life went on with this partial awareness of race
as a dividing issue in America. As we
moved about, and as I changed my places of employment several times, I did finally
meet and become aware of African Americans. Over time, we became friends with
many African American couples and individuals. But here again, the awareness
thing continues. My African American friends had the same or greater levels of
education, and financial status as we did ourselves. And so, their race, or
color, always faded into the kind of “interesting variation” we had experienced
in India. Having an African American
friend in Washington, DC, was not materially different from having a South
Indian friend in India who had moved to Delhi.
And, so I have now reached the age of 85, or as I like to
claim, I am in my 47th 39th year of life. And I am aware
of Race. And with the George Floyd killing, I have again become intellectually
aware, even if my level of rage is now intensified. But with this level of rage, also comes a
level of disbelief, furthered I think by Donald Trump. See, I have lived
through 14 US presidents. None of the
first 13 even came close to producing any outrage, such as I have experienced
with Donald Trump. Now, the rage in my
mind is almost palpable. Because, with Donald Trump, I see the possibility of
an ending—an ending of America. Maybe it
is close to the feelings I might possess were some White idiot-malenfant take
out a gun and shoot my brother. But, I have not experienced that level of
personal outrage yet. But I assure you, I am close.
And now, on top of the ever-present rage at Donald Trump,
comes this COVID19 thing . . . the “Pandemic”. And that thing, that vaguely
horrifying cloud over all our lives has moved into our world of outrage,
producing a disjuncture such as I have personally never experienced. See, now,
we cannot go anywhere without introducing personal protections, and still
encountering some level of personal risk. And, at our advanced age, the risk is
not becoming ill with the flu. No, it is becoming ill and then dying in two
weeks.
And then, on top of this weird, horrifying world of multiple
risks, we sit in our chairs and watch a policeman kneel on a Black man, cutting
off his breathing purposefully, until he dies. In other words, we watch a
policeman carry out a premeditated murder of a Black man, while his buddies
watch on without any resistance. And
that gives rise to protests and even some riots. God, ya think??
And meanwhile, President Stupidhead, quotes from a racist
policeman in the South, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts”. So, he intends to call out his own personal
army troops and start shooting whoever gets in his way. Because, that’s who he
is, a racist, con-man, organized crime gangster, who thinks he can order
killings because he is the mafia boss.
And we are supposed to just shut up and let him do whatever
he wants, while his Organized Crime PR machine, Fox News, plays bits of fluff
from its unending cast of idiot racist cheerleaders.
And, because we are now seriously past our sell-by date,
there is little we can do to protest, except, by God VOTE. And Vote we shall,
whether the maniac in charge likes it or not. We will by God VOTE, and kick his
ass out of the White House. And you can take that to the Bank Mafia-Man. And by the way, Donald Trump, kindly Go Fuck Yourself.
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