|
|
Copyright Flaticon.com |
Capitalizing Black
In writing this blog, I researched whether I should capitalize the word "Black" when referring to the race. In July, 2020, the New York Times changed its policy from using "black" to using "Black," such as in "Black race" or "Black people." This followed the same change by the Associated Press and other major news agencies around the world. The following excerpt is from an internal memo at the New York Times, published on their website:
"We have talked to more than 100 staff members to get their views, reviewed the arguments that have been made over many years, and consulted with colleagues at other news organizations. The feedback has been thoughtful and nuanced, with a wide range of opinions among colleagues of all backgrounds.
Based on those discussions, we’ve decided to adopt the change and start using uppercase “Black” to describe people and cultures of African origin, both in the United States and elsewhere. We believe this style best conveys elements of shared history and identity, and reflects our goal to be respectful of all the people and communities we cover."
The New York Times also began capitalizing the words "Native" and "Indigenous". Words like "Asian-American" and "Latino" had always been capitalized. Words like "white" and "brown" are not capitalized, because they do not refer to a specific culture or origin.
I follow this capitalization standard in this article and wholeheartedly support it.
Defining Racism In My Life
What is racism? I've wondered about that for a long time. In the 1980's I thought I'd figured it out, but I was wrong. The dictionary says that racism is prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person of a particular race or ethnic group, but I think it's deeper than that. It's an innate bias that we pick up from our parents, teachers, friends, and environment and perhaps spend all of our lives trying to discard, if we, in fact, want to.
We are all biased in thousands of ways. I root for a specific baseball team, prefer a particular Chinese dish, watch certain TV shows. I am biased toward Impressionism in art, rather than Expressionism. I listen much more to classical music than country or rock. I wear blue much more than red. All of these are biases I have chosen. We are proud of our biases.
It's hard to distinguish a positive, useful bias from a negative, antagonizing
one sometimes. Is it good or bad that you prefer non-contact sports over
contact sports? Or, that you choose Japanese cars over American cars? A benign bias can turn into a malignant one. A joke, which was once funny, may be demeaning and cruel now.
What I'd like to explore is how my acquired racism was originally fostered, understood, and ultimately discarded. In that process I'll reveal my breakthrough realizations about racism and, surprisingly, how I subsequently changed to arrive at a different interpretation. The process also resulted in a number of principles that I try to live by now, so you'll see seven of them listed in bold type throughout the essay. This evolution, naturally, has to be told chronologically, from when I was a little kid.
An Upsetting Experience
As I wrote in essays about my family, my earliest recollection of seeing Black people is from the Saturday morning Seventh Day Adventist Church congregation on our block, as they exited and walked past our house on Myott Avenue in Rockford. Saturday mornings were a real treat for my sister and me--waking to Gospel music pouring from the windows of the church across the vacant lot next to us, watching our favorite cartoons on TV, and then sitting on the front porch steps to see the dressed-up ladies and gentlemen as they walked past our house after the service.
All other Blacks I saw those days were service people--janitors, waiters and waitresses, shoe-shine boys, cab drivers--and I never had occasion to speak to any of them, because I was always with my father or mother going somewhere. We might drive through the south side of Rockford on errands, where I would see isolated Black neighborhoods, but we did not know any Black families. My father always taught us to treat all people with respect and dignity, no matter what their race, nationality, or religion, and my mother simply said to do what our father told us to do.
When I was five or six years old, my mom convinced my dad that she needed help around the house, so he told her to hire a house cleaner for once or twice a week. She hired the first woman who applied for the job. I believe her name was Bessie. She was middle-aged, Black, and adoring of Sue and me. We were mostly shy and observant. Certainly my parents had known and spoken with Blacks before, but my sister and I hadn't. The hint of an irrational fear began to roil inside me, although I was much too young to understand why.
One day, my mom invited Bessie to stay for lunch. I remember clearly that she served cream of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. The four of us sat at our small table, and I immediately started to feel sick to my stomach. I ate little and got through lunch, and the same thing happened the following week. I was scared of my reaction to sitting next to a Black person, watching that person eat the same food I was eating (or trying to eat). I couldn't speak or ask questions. I noticed small differences about her for the first time--how her palms were a lighter color than the backs of her hands, how her hair was a different texture, how she pronounced words a little differently. My sister, being four or five, had no reaction, but I was ashamed and embarrassed.
I didn't tell my mother and, as our financial circumstances dictated, we could
only afford to hire Bessie for a few weeks, so she was only in our lives for a
short time. Somewhere I have a photo of Sue and me with Bessie under our
backyard apple tree. I'd like to find that.
It was decades later I came to understand my visceral reaction to having Bessie at the table. Racism, per se, was not taught to me, but there were two things wrong with my upbringing. First, although I was told over and over again to respect all people, I had no first-hand lessons in doing that. I could not see evidence from my father or mother, because they knew no Blacks or Hispanics or Asians. Our neighborhood was entirely white. If I were to treat everybody the same on my way to respecting them, then I should have been shown how my parents did that.
The second omission was that I never heard some explanation of how people are different
from one another and why those differences don't matter. I was too young
to observe that; the differences weren't identified yet. I knew
that I was Jewish and that my friends were all Protestant and Catholic, but I
simply thought we all studied the Bible and Ten Commandments but had somewhat
different rituals. We looked, talked, and behaved the same, when it came down
to it.
There was a third, very subtle reason why I had the reaction toward Bessie eating at our table, but I really didn't see this clearly until about 35 years later. Although my dad was not raised in a "class" system, I think my mother was. She felt she was somewhat better than a lot of people, including minorities. She had a deep resentment of Germans and Japanese after the Second World War, and I think she was brought up to think of Blacks as servants. Her father was from Texas and she identified herself as a Southerner despite having been born in New Jersey (we think). Looking back on my mom's ever-so-subtle ways of treating others, she was always overly nice to people she felt were somewhat "beneath" her. As a little kid I must have picked up on that, in how she treated Bessie. She didn't want to be friends with Bessie; she just wanted to be overly nice to her. Offering to share her lunch table was a way of doing that.
My mother probably told us to be "real nice" to Bessie, although she never gave us that instruction when we met other people. Bessie only stayed with us for a short time, and I never confessed to my parents about my lunchtime reactions. She liked us, and we liked her. I just saw her as different and couldn't handle that as a little kid.
More was revealed about my dad's family when I searched for and found them in
the 1920 U. S. census records. Ironically, it was they who had a Black
servant! A maid, named Bertha Jones, lived with them in their large
brownstone home in Manhattan. Perhaps my father did have the example of
his parents when he learned how to treat everyone equally. I'm certain
my mother didn't have that example set for her.
A Ballgame In Chicago
It must have been two or three years later when I had my next experience in seeing Black people up close. It was August 28, 1957, a Wednesday, when my dad decided to take me into Chicago to see my first Major League baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Chicago White Sox. It was a month before my 8th birthday.
I remember a lot of things about that day. I remember how excited I was and how I tried to imagine, as we were driving the 90 miles to Comiskey Park on the south side of Chicago, what the stadium would look like the first time I set eyes on it. I had my ball glove, baseball cap, and my dad with me. Life could not be finer.
In those days, the old Comiskey Park at Shields and 35th Street had very little available parking, so we had to park on a residential street about eight blocks from the stadium. Dad did not tell me that only Black families lived in that area, so I was quiet and somewhat stunned as we drove through the neighborhood on that early afternoon. Finally we found a parking spot, got out of the car, and started walking. I remember distinctly that, since my dad showed no fear and was excited about the game, I should feel the same way. All hesitation and fear left me. Certainly all the people we saw knew we were headed to the game and saw my New York Yankees baseball cap, but everyone was friendly!
It was a great day. We stayed for the entire 11-inning game, which the Yankees won, 2-1. Including the two managers, I saw nine Hall-of-Famers on the field that day, including my three favorite players-- Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford. I also got to see Larry Doby of the White Sox. It was many years later I discovered that he was the first Black player to play in the American League!
Those days were the end of an era in baseball, when men wore suits, ties, and hats, and women wore dresses to games. The crowd was not segregated, and no one hassled a 7-year-old boy wearing a Yankees baseball cap. It was late in the afternoon when we walked back to the car. I was a relaxed, happy kid, fresh from my first Major League game. I also didn't know that a big change had taken place in me that day, when I discovered Black people loved baseball as much as whites did.
Seventeen More Years Of Little Exposure
For the remaining years in Illinois, I can only remember about half a dozen other opportunities I had to confront any overt racial biases I may have harbored when I was young. Oddly, I don't believe I ever met a Latino person, even at the University of Illinois or in the Chicago neighborhoods I visited. I never went to a Mexican restaurant or even heard the Spanish language spoken, except in my 7th and 8th grade Spanish classes or on the streets of New York City during short visits there. To say I was sheltered was an understatement.
I'd like to continue the chronology of my minority experiences and impressions
from that time in my life by giving a number of examples:
-
I knew very few Asian kids in grade school and high school. There were
three Asian kids in my graduation class of almost 700, and there were fewer
than ten Black kids. I was one of about five Jewish kids, but I
encountered very little antisemitism. Most of the students were
Swedish or German, with blonde or light brown hair; there were 35 graduates
by the last name of "Johnson." Most kids thought we were Irish, not
Jewish, because we had blond hair.
- The Detroit Riots, part of the "long, hot summer of 1967," really shook the country. My dad had spent a lot of time in Detroit, and he immediately decided to take me to Michigan to show me the aftermath of the riots. Forty-three people had died and almost 1,400 buildings were burned to the ground. We cruised up and down the streets, and I was stunned to silence by the apparent war zone. It was a predominantly Black neighborhood, and hundreds (thousands?) of people still stood outside their homes and businesses that had been destroyed. Dad knew the streets but said little about what I should think or feel. He knew I was overwhelmed by it.
- Sue and I staged a folk music party in our basement in the fall of 1967, inviting our many friends who loved folk music. As a surprise we invited one of the local folksingers, Sam Sharber, to perform with his twelve-string guitar. I first heard Southern blues played by Sam, songs by Lead Belly and Blind Lemon Jefferson and Robert Johnson. To be honest, he was my first Black friend, although we didn't mark the occasion in any special way. He was a very good singer and guitar player, and he was a lovely person. He also surprised the heck out of our parents when he walked in the door. I think my dad was very pleased and my mom very "nice."
- Throughout college on a very integrated campus, I knew almost no racial minority students. One Black man lived on our dorm floor, but I almost never saw him. It was noteworthy that my math and computer science classes had almost no minority students; similar classes today would likely have a majority of Asian students.
- I should point out that I was never consciously aware of classifying an Asian person as non-white; there was no distinction of races for me. I thought of Chinese and Japanese people as having a different culture, just as I thought of French or Italian or Greek people. My brother, Mike, married a woman of Japanese descent in 1973, and I was overjoyed to meet her family in 1976--more curious about the Japanese culture than anything else. The kids in her family were all educated in America and spoke English as a first language. Mike approached Sumaye's father to ask for his approval, and her father said, "My daughter, Helen, has already married a Chinese man, so the family's gone to hell anyway." There was a gleam in his eye, and Mike was quickly accepted into the family. Once again, my mom felt she had to be overly nice when she met the family, as if to prove she no longer held a grudge for WWII. I suspect that many people of her generation had to get past their developed, persistent racial biases after the World War.
- I was a sheltered, innocent kid in high school, oblivious of gender and sexual choices. As with racial biases, sexual preference biases were rampant, although I knew little about them. I was first approached by a gay man after I graduated from college. He was a professor at U of I, and I kindly turned him down, but I explained that I knew nothing about the gay culture and would like to learn about it. He agreed. We met several times for dinners or coffee, and he even took me to a couple "pick-up" places on campus, including the student union bowling alley! It was an ideal introduction to the gay community, and he'd often introduce me as his "straight friend" so no one would bother me at all. I'd heard the phrase "token Black" or "token Jew." I was the "token straight guy."
- If there's one episode that stands out in my mind concerning my racial bias evolution when I was young, it was when my sister and I drove to the University of Chicago to visit a friend. I was driving my dad's Pontiac, not long after he'd died. I'd visited my friend on campus several times, and I knew the surrounding area was an all-Black neighborhood. When we left the campus, it began to rain very hard, and the driver's-side windshield wiper broke! What broke was the rod that moved the wiper back and forth. I immediately pulled into a gas station and spoke with the attendant, explaining the problem. No one had ever seen this problem before, so no one knew how to fix it.
I asked if I could use the phone to call my mom in Rockford (reversing the long-distance charges), and he said, "Sure." I called her and explained the situation, knowing she'd be worried about our late arrival. She asked where we were, and I told her. She asked if she could speak to the service man. He went to talk with her, and I could hear him say, "Yes, ma'am. No ma'am. Yes ma'am." When he hung up the phone, I asked him what she's said, and I'll never forget his reply, "She told me not to kill you." We stared at each other for a few seconds, and then we both broke out laughing.
He devised a brilliant way to fix the problem with the windshield wiper, and we were on our way after an hour. I had been embarrassed by my mother's plea, and I apologized, but I didn't "get it" then. He was probably used to that reaction from whites, and I'd never know what he went through each day.
California Awakening
When I moved to California in the summer of 1976, it was an amazing awakening. Not only was the San Jose area much more diverse, but the degree of integration was astounding. Within a block of my brother's home, where I initially stayed for a few days, there were families of half a dozen different nationalities, each speaking their native language. Many of the people worked for hi-tech firms in Silicon Valley. The houses all looked the same, but the people were different--rather the opposite of what I'd known in the Midwest.
I'd spent a lot of time in Chicago during my youth, but it is and always has been much more of a "distinct neighborhood" town--a Black neighborhood, a Polish neighborhood, a Jewish neighborhood, often separated by streets which defined the borders. Never had I seen so many different ethnic groups living together.
Still, all of my friends were white. My activities--volleyball, ceramics, jogging, writing software--were comprised mostly of white people. Sure, I ate dinners in San Francisco's Chinatown, went to my first Mexican and Japanese restaurants, and attended lots of baseball games in Oakland and San Francisco, but I wasn't challenged by the ethnic diversity I found in those places, not yet. My challenges were few and almost insignificant.
I fell in love with Chinese and Japanese food--so different from each other--and gained an appreciation for Asian cultures. I'd had Asian food before, but only in restaurants frequented by English-speaking white people. A trip to San Francisco's Henry Chung Hunan Restaurant opened my eyes and taste buds to a new world! For once, I was in the small minority, because most of the people there were Chinese. The cooks and wait staffs were amazingly fast, and the menu was filled with inviting dishes. I could see the cooks in their open-for-view kitchen, each cook with two or three woks active at one time. Novice Hunan diners were politely handed a full pitcher of ice water each! I fell in love with the food and enjoyed the culture immensely.
With friends I went to my first Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, and Burmese restaurants--each type offering many flavors I'd never tasted. For the first time in my life, I noticed that there were many Asian cultures, and through the food, the restaurant decor, and the people, I saw that they were very different from one another.
It was really because of my great friend, Chet Amborn, that I fell in love with Asian food. Not only was he an excellent Chinese chef, who cooked the best Ma Po Bean Curd I've ever had, but he was the first to introduce me to Japanese food. When we worked together in the 1980's at our own company, we went to the same Japanese restaurant for lunch two or three times a week! The owner, an elderly woman, adored us, because we always asked for extra rice and would try the house specialties. After a couple years, she began giving each of us a bottle of plum wine for the holidays.
Affirmative Action
Affirmative Action has been around for a long time. When you think you understand it, a thousand other issues, opinions, and proposed solutions emerge. Wikipedia says that Affirmative Action "refers to a set of policies and practices within a government or organization favoring particular groups based on their gender, race, creed or nationality in areas in which they were excluded in the past such as education and employment."
The term "affirmative action" first appeared in an executive order by President John F. Kennedy, which stated that government contracts should "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated [fairly] during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin." (Oddly enough, "gender" was not included at that time.) So, most importantly, Affirmative Action originally meant that, among other criteria, race should not be considered during the employment process, that all people should be treated equally. Somewhere along the way, Affirmative Action grew to mean that race should be considered and certain races given preferential treatment in the employment or school admissions process. It became the symbol and watchword of "forced equality."
My first awareness of Affirmative Action was of the latter meaning--that race should be considered in employment and admission decisions, and I was against it. I am very much for nondiscrimination, but I am very much against favoritism as a means to oppose discrimination. It is perhaps the only thing that I and Justice Clarence Thomas agree on, although I would not be surprised to discover that we have completely different reasons for our opinions.
One famous Black Bay Area professor, who opposed Affirmative Action, used the term "level playing field" in describing what minorities strive to achieve, and that struck a chord in me. It doesn't seem to me that Affirmative Action provides a level playing field now for minorities; rather, it gives special preference while reinforcing and perpetuating an uneven playing field.
It was Affirmative Action, however, that first got me thinking about racism. I didn't consult others or discuss the matter with anyone; I simply thought it through. The more I thought about discrimination of people, the more I thought Affirmative Action was just another means for masking the forces in our society that promote discrimination. Instead of fixing the problems of discrimination, it tilts the results of the analytics by establishing quota systems, whether they are explicit or implicit.
Explicit quotas are generally outlawed in this country now, but in giving certain minorities preferential treatment, selections of applicants to jobs or schools turn out to be implicit quotas. This is because the selection goals are almost always "zero-sum based." If a company has 50 job openings and 5 people are added because they are of a certain race, 5 other people are thus removed because of their race. It's not as if the number of job openings were increased from 50 to 55; the number of openings remains at 50 and an implicit quota system is applied.
The general intent of Affirmative Action was to increase the percentage of minorities accepted into colleges and jobs. The intent, unfortunately, was not to better prepare those minorities for schools and jobs. That's another reason why I've always opposed Affirmative Action; it doesn't go to the roots of racism: inferior education opportunities for minorities.
Rather than have a quota system, most of the world-class orchestras in the world, for instance, have "blind" auditions, where the race and gender of the person are hidden from the selection committee. Professional musicians unions greatly support blind auditions, because they promote the quality of the orchestra in a fair, unbiased way. In July, 2020, a New York Times music columnist came out against blind auditions, because he stated that the resulting orchestras are still not diverse enough. In the last paragraph he admits that maybe something should be done to improve the training of budding minority musicians in the "pipeline" that leads up to the auditions. Duh! He is advocating for Affirmative Action, while again placing changes to our education system on the back burner.
Another startling admission in the New York Times column is that the quality of American orchestras will certainly decrease if blind auditions are banned, but that's okay. He said that maybe minorities will bring other positives (rather than quality), such as suggestions for new music. I
found that really insulting—of the musicians and audiences. He ignores the fact that American audiences expect quality in the arts, and that if you place the arts on a quota system, you'll lose the audiences if the quality changes for the worse. Many major orchestras in the United States are already close to bankruptcy; reducing their performance quality will drive them out of business.
As I contemplated the intricacies of discrimination over the years, I discovered more and more reasons why I was fundamentally against Affirmative Action. In short, it's an unfair approach to rectifying something that's already unfair. In several studies of university programs that implemented some form of Affirmative Action, it was found that increased admissions of one minority often penalized another minority. If more Blacks were admitted, for example, then fewer Asians were admitted. This "rob Peter to pay Paul" approach to solving discrimination doesn't work for me.
Another example of how minorities are set up to be against each other is in the hiring of Major League Baseball managers and coaches. The Black players and media want more Black managers; the Latino players and media want more Latino managers. White players and media generally agree that the hiring of any minority manager or coach is good for the sport. Not only is there a tension between Blacks and Latinos for the next managerial job, but the hiring of a minority manager obscures the real problem--almost no minority owners!
I can understand the need for quota systems in some circumstances. If you're filling a PTA committee in a community which has 35% Blacks, 35% Latinos, 10% Asians, and 20% whites, where the only rule for qualification is that you have a child in the school system, I can see that you might wish to maintain those percentage representations on the committee. That seems to be a fair solution, but it's only fair because you're not excluding people who are more qualified!
[Proposition 16 was soundly defeated by a vast majority in the 2020 election, mostly by voters who know nothing about what Affirmative Action means, assuredly.]
In my personal debate over Affirmative Action, in effect, I came up with my first two principles of how I should treat people, whether they are in the majority or in the minority:
Principle #1: Treat all people equally and fairly.
Principle #2: Special treatment is not fair and does not solve any discriminatory problem.
It was not an especially profound leap for me to realize those two principles. My dad had been the epitome of the first principle, and many times I had witnessed how special treatment, to the exclusion of others, was neither fair nor effective. To me, Affirmative Action stood in opposition to those two principles.
Most of my progressive friends are for Affirmative Action, and I don't criticize their decisions at all. It's a complicated issue, and one's instinct, as with Climate Change, is to take as many incremental steps as possible as an individual. It's also entirely likely that most people think Affirmative Action makes things more equal for minorities, while I believe it keeps things more unequal. This point was hammered home to me during the summer of 2020, when Blacks were interviewed at Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Most of those interviewed had the same message, almost word for word, "We don't want special treatment; we want equal treatment." From those interviews, I began to believe, for the first time in my life, that equality for minorities is possible.
Affirmative Action has been banned in California, a very liberal state, since 1996. The current law states that race can't be considered when awarding contracts, jobs, and admissions--just as Kennedy's executive order stated in the 1960's. A proposition is on the state ballot for the 2020 election, to reinstate Affirmative Action in public education and contracts. I am conflicted once again, because of the number of respected people and organizations who are for the proposition. Once again, I think it is like prescribing band-aids for a person who needs a heart transplant, in the name of "doing something" for the patient. I am more certain than ever that Affirmative Action stands in the way of getting rid of racism. I would much rather see free pre-school and free community college tuition for all children, for instance, as the next step. Affirmative Action has been around in this country for almost 60 years; we should be much further ahead in eliminating racism by now.
[Proposition 16 was soundly defeated by a vast majority in the 2020 election, mostly by voters who know nothing about what Affirmative Action means, assuredly.]
At that point in my life, in the late 1970's and early 1980's, I thought I had race relations all figured out. Then I met one very important person who influenced me to re-think and re-challenge myself about racism.
Chet Ratliff and His Family
I met Chet Ratliff at work in the summer of 1979. In fact, I was one of the people who interviewed him for the small company where I was employed. Both of us were programmer analysts. (I have profiled Chet in both my Meetings With Remarkable People and Best Friends essays.) We talked about professional things during our interview over coffee at a cafe, but we had our first "real" talk at lunch a couple weeks later.
Chet grew up in Berkeley, California, and graduated from University of California, Berkeley, in physics and pure and applied mathematics. He was from a middle-class Black family with two parents and two kids. From the beginning our chats challenged and stimulated me. They were not so much about our lives and histories, but about people and philosophies in general. As with most people I met in California, we got to know each other by doing things together--movies, skiing, concerts, baseball games, car races, lunches, and dinners. Each time I made the mistake of thinking I really knew him, a whole new side of him would open up.
During the first year or two, I was aware that, for the first time in my life, I was becoming best friends with a person of a different race. It was something akin to realizing you are best friends with someone who grew up in a different part of the world. I had a secret sense of pride that it was turning out to be so easy, for I had long thought that you can't claim to be non-racist without knowing and spending time with people of different races. It would be like thinking you could speak French well after four years of high school French, without ever going to France or a French-speaking country to really find out.
I can't remember when I was first invited to Chet's family home, but it was within two years after meeting him. We lived about 55 miles apart, so the visit had to be during a weekend. Chet always was the only person to work on his Jensen-Healey two-seater, so he invited me over when I asked if I could watch him work on the engine. I met his mom and dad that day, and I absolutely fell in love with them.
It felt as if his mom, Christine, and his dad, Chester, adopted me as a second son, although I'm sure they were always polite and caring with all of Chet's friends. It was clear that Chet shared his parents' values and respect for other people. If Chet happened to be running late, I was happy to sit and talk with one or both of his parents, and I always looked forward to the cookies and milk Mrs. Ratliff would offer me, as she showed me to the most comfortable chair in the living room.
Chet and I never talked about race, but there were moments when I noticed that I was experiencing something I'd never experienced before. The challenge I gave myself was to not feel out of place, no matter what I was doing with Chet, because he demonstrated that he never felt out of place. There was the time he took me to a jazz club on one of San Francisco's piers down near the Embarcadero. The club opened at 11:00 pm, and we probably arrived around midnight to a packed house. Chet found us seats in the cramped front row, where I first noticed that I was about the only white person in the place.
Then there was the time we decided to grab dinner after a symphony concert in San Francisco. He knew just the place, Hamburger Mary's, about which I knew nothing. We parked along Folsom Street and approached the front door, where my first thought was, "Oh, we're a little over-dressed, because we're both wearing three-piece suits to visit a bar." At that moment some guy came roaring out of the front entrance on a Harley motorcycle, and I had to jump out of the way. Chet and I entered, and I could tell he could barely keep from laughing. We sat at the bar and ordered hamburgers (which turned out to be the best hamburger I'd ever tasted), and then I casually noticed that there were only men seated around us. Yes, it was a gay biker joint. Chet had told me nothing about Hamburger Mary's, because he wanted to see how I'd react. He'd been there before and loved the place, and so did I.
One more incident stands out in my memory. It was not at all intended as a challenge, but I saw it as an opportunity to observe my own reactions, to experience--in reverse--what he experienced every day. Chet's sister, Debbie, was to marry Harold Roundtree in 1983, and Chet was invited to Harold's bachelor party. With Harold's consent, Chet invited me to join him, because I was already friends with Harold and Debbie. When we showed up, I realized that I was the only white man there, out of ten or fifteen guys. The first thought I had, however, was whether it was odd for Chet in showing up with the only white person. Of course, it wasn't. I thought of the thousands of times Chet had shown up at an event and been the only Black man in attendance--and that neither of us felt out of place! I felt welcome and happy to be there.
It was probably a few years later I had a remarkable realization, when it suddenly crossed my mind that Chet was Black. It had been years since I'd even noticed! I'd begun to see skin color not as an indication of race but as a trait and nothing else. After I'd meet someone I might notice their height, physique, hair color, eye color, speech patterns, and mannerisms, so why not skin color similarly? I'd quickly assimilate all of those things into an overall impression. A person's skin color had become just another physical trait, which became my third principle:
Principle #3: A person's skin color, accent, or mannerism is nothing more than a physical trait.
Maybe I was years behind other people, or maybe I was years ahead. Certainly the fact that I lived in a very diverse area played a part in my forgetting about race, because I saw people of every skin color almost daily. If I were to uniquely identify a person to someone else, I would start with the person's gender and follow that with skin color (not race!), height, size, age group, what they were wearing, how they walked, and any other distinguishing characteristics. We all have those distinguishing traits.
So, at that point in my life, I thought I had it all figured out. If I treated all people fundamentally the same and only saw skin color as a trait, rather than a difference that made me wary, didn't that make me totally non-racist? If racism was not in my heart, wasn't that enough?
Meeting Henry Gage, Jr.
The next big shift in my life regarding race didn't happen for a couple decades. Chet and I saw less and less of each other after I got married to my first wife in 1994. He moved further north, and I stayed in Mountain View. Since 1990 I had worked at home, minimizing the opportunities I had to meet people except through the client sites I visited. I did grow to be good friends with three or four people of minority groups, but I was not at all challenged by race questions. I was content with my principles; I rarely thought of a person's race.
In 2004 I met Henry Gage, Jr. in our Cuernavaca neighborhood. He and his family had recently moved in, and I saw him outside his home frequently. We'd wave to each other (yes, I wave to lots of people), and finally one day I stopped to talk with him. Immediately I felt a kinship with him. He was a business consultant, software inventor, and application designer, so we had several things in common. I asked if he might like to grab coffee together some time, and he readily agreed. In fact, he suggested the Bean Scene in Sunnyvale, which became a favorite spot of ours to meet.
Henry and I soon discovered that we could have long conversations, not just about business and the creation of software (he was developing a stock market application), but about family, world events, and how people treat one another. His father had been in the military (where he earned two Purple Hearts!), and so the family had moved from place to place, but Henry's junior high, high school, and college years were spent in San Jose. When in high school, his friends played a trick on him by placing his name in nomination as the Black Student Union President, and he won! As he describes, "That started a new phase in my life."
In 1978, Henry's father co-founded the African American Community Service Agency in San Jose, which still exists and thrives today. Its mission is "[to provide] quality educational, cultural, social and
recreational programs, services and activities in order to perpetuate
and strengthen African American identity, culture, values, traditions,
knowledge and family life." The AACSA has five pillars: Education, Health & Wellness, Economic Development, Social Services, and a Family Resource Center. In short, those values reflect the type of person Henry is and how he has dedicated his life to serving others.
Our conversations took us to places both surprising and confirming. We talked about our lives and often found similarities and connections, but when we talked about discrimination, I contributed by listening, for I had few personal experiences. Certainly, as part of a Jewish family in a mostly Christian town, I'd seen lots of bias, but we could choose the home we lived in, where we worked, the stores where we shopped, and most of the activities in which we took part. (Jews were not allowed to join one country club, but we didn't have the money to join anyway.) Henry's father, a radio and communications expert, encountered terrible discrimination in trying to find work at some tech companies, which hired people he'd trained but not him.
Remarkably, I'd never really discussed different types of discrimination with anyone before I became aware of how Henry's family had encountered challenges. Henry never talked from a place of anger or resentment. It was always an honest talk from the head, heart, and spirit in equal measures. That's what I love about Henry; he speaks from all three places. That's what led to my next principle of how to treat people.
Principle #4: Eliminate discriminatory practices suffered by others.
Our best conversations, however, revolved around family. I talked about my two step-kids, with whom I am still very close. When we lived together, Heather and Hal had been about the same ages as Henry's two kids, Jackie and Joey, were when Henry and I met. The deeper our conversations were, the more I understood that the talks we had with our kids were mostly the same, but at times strikingly different. We shared the tasks of teaching lessons, responsibility, respect, consideration, and making good decisions, but I never had to have "the talk" with Heather or Hal about being pulled over by the police, nor did I ever stress that the kids should keep their family heritage alive and growing.
I never taught pride, beyond believing in themselves, as an element of succeeding in the world. Being proud that they're white had no place in my conversations with them, but I learned that, with all minority groups, pride in one's race must be taught as part of survival and excelling. In order to instill pride, one must respect and celebrate one's heritage. There was already a lot about the Black culture that I loved, but in talking with Henry, I was able to put it into words for myself, which became my next principle.
Principle #5: Appreciate and join in the celebration of all people's heritage.
Frequently I would hear Henry use a word that I'd never truly valued: service. The words "in service to others" crept into his sentences often, and I think it reflects how Henry treats other people. At the time we met, I was serving on our Cuernavaca Homeowners' Association Board, and we had a spot that had just become vacant. I asked if he might like to join the Board, even though he had not lived there for long, and he immediately accepted. It was one more opportunity for him to serve others, and he did a great job on the Board. [Henry and his family moved away from Cuernavaca in 2007.]
When his kids were grown, Henry moved to the East Coast. It was years before I heard from him again, but in the interim he had formed an LLC called Build Green Now. He and his partner buy a home in a depressed neighborhood, remodel it using Hempcrete (a sustainable building material), and resell it, at the same time providing training for area youth to help with the remodeling. Again, Henry has found an important niche in serving his community.
Henry and his kids inspired me to think about serving others, partially as a means for understanding our differences and supporting a diverse world. That's what led to my sixth principle.
Principle #6: Serve others, especially those who are in any way different from you.
I think often about Henry and our chats at the Bean Scene. When he visits the Bay Area, we try to meet at our old, familiar coffee place to renew our chats. His energy, community involvement, and global awareness continually astound and challenge me.
Our Mixed-Race Life
Since 1994 I have lived in the townhome community of Cuernavaca in Mountain View, CA. There are twenty homes on my street, and I know most of my neighbors. We have people on our cul-de-sac from Mexico, India, Australia, England, China, Russia, Scandinavia, Peru, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Germany, and probably three or four other countries. The owners of the home next door--a Black family--are moving back in after their remodeling is finished. Over the last 26 years, they've always rented their home to families that moved to California from other countries--Canada, Germany, France, Israel, England. Our short little street is a community unto itself, where families of all races, many nationalities, and extraordinary backgrounds live together. Oh, and Lou Castellanos, Archana Thampi-Rajagopal, and I represent New York City, which is like a separate country.
I wish all families could live as we do, surrounded by people who are both similar and different from us. We encounter different cultures, different religions, different viewpoints, different histories, and countless opportunities to meet and learn from each other. When you appreciate all the differences, you also discover the amazing similarities you have. There must be some sociological phenomenon where, as you spend more and more time with people of different races and cultures, you become less and less aware that you are different. You become less implicitly racist in your behavior.
We are also fortunate that our casual daily lives bring us in contact with so many people of other races. The Latino population in the Bay Area provides many of the services that homeowners require here--housecleaning, care-giving, landscaping, tree trimming, fence-building, sidewalk and stucco repair. A Korean family-owned company painted our house. All of our auto mechanics are Latino. Our favorite restaurants are Mexican, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. My barber of 25 years is Japanese. Shige and I have become good friends, from our shared loves of golf and baseball and art.
On a personal level, my life has been immeasurably enhanced by
becoming a mentor of a Latino boy. He is an amazing kid, a high school
senior and almost 18 now. The pandemic has greatly reduced the time
we're able to see each other, but we remain close. For the first year
of our relationship we did many things together--a glorious trip to the
San Francisco Zoo, a private tour of the Humane Society Silicon Valley, a
meet-up with a famous ceramics artist at the Palo Alto Art and Glass
Fair, an evening at a chamber music concert, an afternoon at the
Computer History Museum. Chris is not a talkative kid, but he's
eloquent in many of the things his bilingual mind expresses. His
parents were divorced when he was one year old, so he has always split time
between the two homes. Life is not easy for either family, but Chris
does not complain. In the few times we've talked about race, he's seemed
really tolerant of everyone, really aware of everyone's problems. He's
a great person.
When your life is filled with a diverse group of people, you grow to ignore that diversity and take it for granted. There are times when lack of diversity still shocks my system.
Years ago we visited friends in Bend, Oregon, a truly lovely, beautiful city. The people are so caring and nice it's said that, if you ask directions of anyone, not only will they draw you a map, but they will take you there! We loved everything about the area, but, after three days, something was bothering me which took another day to figure out. Suddenly I realized how white the population was; I missed the diversity! I mentioned that issue to several people who live there, and every person agreed. One person mentioned that the town was 97% white, but that a campus of Oregon State University was to open soon in Bend, and that would provide more diversity. Everyone looked forward to that. I was quite stunned that the lack of diversity had had such an uncomfortable effect on me.
Another amusing incident occurred several years ago in Mountain View's main "downtown" area, Castro Street, which is lined with restaurants, cafes, and bookstores. I was standing on a corner one evening with a friend, waiting for the light to change, when I suddenly noticed something odd. Of over 100 people standing on corners of the intersection, he and I were the only white people; everyone else appeared to be either Latino or Asian, and everyone else was much younger than we were. I knew the reason for the anomaly--most of those young people were techies at the nearby Google campus, which, at the time, drew 28,000 people per day to Mountain View. Twenty years earlier, I would have felt woefully out of place, but I smiled and felt the camaraderie of being a fellow techie, rather than feel the difference in our races.
Years before I retired in 2015, Suzanne and I set out to sample many areas of the country as potential destinations for our retirement. In the process, we both realized that we needed a heterogeneous, progressive community if we were to ever move, and we have found none better than Mountain View, so it is here we shall stay.
More than ever, I am convinced that racial bias is sustained by inferior education and services for minority groups. The reasons are rooted in many things--tradition, money, politics, lack of leadership, culture, religion, injustice. All countries harbor racial biases, but the ones that do something about it make strides in educating their people and providing equitable services to all.
Decades ago I read an article in a magazine (it was either Smithsonian Magazine or Quest) that told the story of how a white supremacist (convicted in a minor crime) was sentenced by the judge to serve on the town's education board and work with a Black woman, rather than spend a year or two in prison. They both had kids in the school system, and they both wanted to see changes. They hated each other from the start but learned, over the course of many months, to work together because they had the same goals for their kids. By the time his sentence was up, the man had become a good friend of the Black woman and quit his white supremacy group.
To accomplish true integration, people have to be available for integration. People who live in insular communities have little chance to experience integration. Many years ago, I began imagining that all kids should have the opportunity to spend a week with a family of a different race, as part of their school curriculum. That's one of the changes I'd like to see in this country--a kind of educational peace corps.
There are all sorts of federal programs I'd be eager to support--Universal Basic Income, clean water acts, increased minimum wage, support for community food banks, free community college tuition, free child care--anything that would help to level that playing field for minorities without penalizing middle-class families.
We are donors to the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama, probably the foremost organization in the United States fighting bigotry and racism. I would like to see it federally funded. I would like to see our federal government take a real, formal stance against the racist activities of hundreds of hate groups around the country, by publicly identifying the groups and shutting them down through the courts, as the SPLC does. It is stunning to realize that there are over 1,000 documented hate groups in this country.
More federal programs would certainly help, but the more important changes must come from us as individuals. I won't suggest all of the things you could do (voting would be at the top of the list), but I'll tell you what I do. After all the opportunities I've had in my life to change--compassionate parents, four years of college, moving to a diverse, progressive area of California, working and enjoying activities with many people of different races, religions, nationalities, and backgrounds--I'm still learning about racism.
In changing our reactions and behavior toward minorities, one useful step would be to get rid of the once-positive but now very much negative term, "politically correct." When I hear someone say, "Well, to be politically correct," what I really hear is, "Well, to be politically correct, even though I really don't want to be." Another way to interpret the statement is, "Well, to be forcibly sensitive to others' feelings." The person who uses that term is hiding their biases, their true natures. while trying to appear sensitive, so the term "politically correct" is a red flag for me. I want to shake the person and say, "If a term is now interpreted as derogatory, just don't use it! There's
nothing politically correct about explaining why you don’t use it"
Perhaps it's a natural tendency we all have, to treat others differently because we are, in fact, different, but as individuals we have to get past that. We have to recognize that there is a very delicate balance between treating everyone the same and honoring our differences. In the last few years I've been able to reconcile that contradiction by recalling what my great friend, Steve Porges, has always told me--to respect the suffering of others, for we all have our own problems and go through our own private struggles. That thought has led to my seventh and final principle.
Principle #7: Listen to the suffering of each person, for we are all different.
I will try to remember 2020, not for COVID, the increasingly dysfunctional political system we have, and the loss of the public congregations (restaurants, concerts, sporting events, churches), but for the eloquent, effective pleas of the Black Lives Matter movement. BLM is an opportunity for all of us.
Listen to the suffering of others, and then try to fix it.
