Pride and Prejudice

Growing up, I didn´t think a lot about race and prejudice.  We lived in a small, predominantly white middle and working class town.  There were only three African-American families in the immediate area and they were well incorporated into the social fabric of the overall community.  Within my own family, any underlying taint of racism was manifested in occasional jokes where black voices were stereotyped in a southern and uneducated drawl (I’se gots to go!) and phrases like “look at those cute pickaninnies” when referring to black children: holdovers, I rationalized, from the prevailing depictions in once popular ‘50s and 60s television shows like “Amos and Andy” and the stereotypical characterization of Jack Benny’s black servant “Rochester”.  I considered myself untouched by a racist upbringing and thought my parents above – or at least to the side of – any outright racist inclinations.  Until, that is, I brought home a black girlfriend.

I admit I might have better planned the thing.  I basically showed up on the doorstep of my family home with the girl (her name was Linda) and said “Surprise!”  Linda and I met when I was a soldier at Fort Meade, Maryland, where she was also stationed.  Early in our relationship, I was reassigned by the army, and what had been a blossoming love affair was cut short when I was sent to the Japanese island of Okinawa.  We wrote impassioned letters back and forth for a number of months and, on a somewhat crazy whim, I requested leave and booked an Army military flight back to the U.S. to see her.

Of course, no one from my family knew anything about my love affair.  They didn’t even know that instead of quietly soldiering away on the other side of the world I was back in the U.S., just a few hours away.  And they remained blissfully ignorant until the moment my parents got that phone call from a booth on the edge of town and heard me say “Hey!  Guess what!  I´m going to be there in five minutes…and I’m bringing a “friend!!”

You know that image of the Titanic ramming into that gigantic iceberg?  Imagine that ton of ice falling on top of my family home.  Linda and I sat rigidly on the edge of the living room couch through about 40 minutes of stilted and stunted dialogue.  When I finally escorted her to my old room and went back downstairs alone to say goodnight to my parents, their first words were “How could you do this to us?!?”  “Do what?” (I could be annoyingly and sarcastically innocent when I wanted to be). “She’s BLACK!” they cried.  “I noticed” I replied.

My father went on a drinking binge, disappearing from the house for three days.  My mother fretted and cried.  Linda and I made the rounds of visiting my sisters who, if perhaps not entirely at ease, were more circumspect and accepting.  In our time in the area around my hometown, we experienced quite a few evil stares and nasty murmurs as we walked hand-in-hand in local supermarkets and other public spaces – something we hadn´t felt as intensely in the more liberal Washington, D.C. area where we had first met.  We soon returned to Maryland and a few days later I obligatorily headed back to my post in Okinawa. I didn´t speak to my parents for months after that and when time brought about a reconciliation, the topic of my black girlfriend was never spoken of again.  Distance eventually took its toll on Linda and my relationship, and we amicably parted ways before my tour in the army finished and I returned to the U.S.

I have written about this small part of my personal experience with imbedded racism previously and in different forms.  But I was reminded of it again while contemplating the iceberg that is Donald Trump and the atmosphere of fear, distrust and division his impact with America has had. While not all of this polarization can be directly linked to Trump’s flagrantly racist past as a discriminatory slumlord or his longstanding virulent and inflammatory rhetoric (dating from his very public clamor for the death of 5 innocent black children to his current attacks on non-white immigrants), he has been instrumental in awakening the never quite dormant beast of racism among his loyal and frequently unenlightened base. 

Face it - America has never fully come to terms with its racism.  In fact, we should include the other “isms” here as well (sexism, heterosexism, anti-Semitism and a multitude of other prejudices).  We examine, discuss, beat our chests for a while, point to any number of historical, cultural and psychological reasons and then fall back into a comfortable sense that well, we did something, didn’t we?

Facebook, for all of its foibles, offers a window into how rural small town America has not experienced significant change.  Among my FB “friends” are many that remained or stayed near to my hometown.  Almost unanimously, these are the folks who hold fervently to their support of Donald Trump, even in light of so much evidence of his racism, sexism, untruthfulness.  Economics plays a role; Trump´s cry of economic improvement – no matter how ephemeral and lacking in substance - is a comforting message to those who are struggling to make ends meet on a daily basis. Inherent racism, however subliminal it may be, also influences this support: insecurity and fear of the unknown is a powerful motivator for rejecting change.