Racism
Racism has been on my mind a fair bit lately. I like to think of myself as not being a bit racist, yet I know better. I know that society has improved a great deal in this category, yet it has a long way to go.
I am old enough to remember when blacks sat on the back of the bus, had seperate bathrooms and water fountians and sat in the balcony of the theater. Oddly enough as a small child for a while I thought it was the blacks who were lucky. On those ocassions that we would ride the bus, I would want to sit in the big couch looking seat at the back and my grandmother would say we couldn't sit back there. When we would go to the movies I wanted to sit in the balcony cuz' it was upstairs and my Mom would say we weren't supposed to sit there.
Perceptions changed a bit over time as my early years were in East Texas. Overall a White woman could hire a black maid and work part-time and still earn more than she spent on the maid. Thus, we had a maid at least twice a week during most of those years and 5 days a week when mom worked more. This was a two part thing: 1. I was exposed to black women a lot because they were my primary baby-sitters when mom was working. 2. Black women were shown to be in a servant or subserviant role. Thus, I never hated blacks, but I did see them in a very different light. My fathers only employee besides my mom was a mulatto "coon-ass". I didn't even know he was 1/4 black for years... I thought he was white, he was quite my buddy.
However, his being slightly black still consigned him to the back of the bus, etc.
I attended segregated schools almost all through elementary school. I did attend a school for a time that was desegregated, but there were so few blacks in the school that I never had one in the same classroom. I mostly attended Lutheran parochial schools in Elementary school, and they were all white. When I started 7th grade, I would have gone to public school but they had introduced bussing to acheive integration. The public Jr. High I would have attended was on the opposite side of town. My parents may have enrolled me in public school if the distance hadn't been what it was. They said they wouldn't have me riding a bus for an hour a day so they enrolled me into a private school for that year. The next year for 8th through 12th they were going to enroll me into Pulaski Academy which actually began as an anti-desegregation school but I bucked as I didn't want to go to "Plastic Academy" with all the spoiled kids.
Since I didn't want to go to "Plastic Academy" and there were no openings at Catholic High they began looking at houses in surrounding communities. They bought a house in Cabot, Arkansas. Cabot was a mostly white town that was quite "Mayberry" at that moment. I did love being able to ride my bicycle to almost anywhere in town and the soda fountian at the drug store.
Cabot was however an almost all white town within 30 minutes of Little Rock, so it didn't take long for it to become a white flight town. During the 5 years we lived in Cabot, it grew from about 2,000 to over 3,500. Cabots poopulation in 2005 was over 20,000. Although Cabot was already mostly white and passively racist, with the influx of white flight people, it became very overtly racist. At first, I bought into some of this, but a few things influenced me to begin to question and then despise the racism. This was the begining of my prejudice shifting to rednecks (A prejudice I still struggle with).
One day I came home from school and said "Nigger" and my mother slapped me silly and told me she never wanted me to say that again. She also began exposing me to more black people which required us to travel to Little Rock. We attended the Unity Church in Little Rock for most of the Cabot years as it did have a few blacks in attendance.
The first time I was around blacks my age in a learning environment was at band camp. At Band Camp, we would play in the same band as blacks, eat with blacks and recreate with blacks. This was my first real experience with blacks as personal friends. My second year at band camp they had an odd number of black and white males and the director of the band camp called in some of the boys that had registered for camp later and asked for a volunteer to share a room with the black guy. I had roomed with a friend, so I wasn't the volunteer. Oddly enough, the volunteer was from Cabot. This was in 1975 and brought to light to me that Racism was far from dead, even outside of the white flight towns.
Although Cabot was a good town for schools and had a great Methodist church and small town atmosphere, it wasn't really a good mix for my family. My parents bought an old Craftsman house in downtown Little Rock in about 1975. During my Senior Year (1977-78) we lived part-time in Little Rock and part-time in Cabot. I had enough credits to quit attending school after the first semester of my senior year. Thus we moved full-time into the Little Rock house in January of 1978. That house was in a neighborhood that was about 60% black.
Later, when my parents bought a one story house in a more suburban environment, they went out of their way to find one in an integrated neighborhood. From 1978 to now, I have almost exclusively lived in mixed neighborhoods, and all of the houses I have lived in independent of others have been in neighborhoods that were predominately black.
I had originally intended to devote this blog to commentary, but I started giving background information because I believe it shows where I am coming from. The auto-biographical information has exceeded the planned length for the original post, so I will continue with the commentary in another post.
Shalom, Conrad
Racism has been on my mind a fair bit lately. I like to think of myself as not being a bit racist, yet I know better. I know that society has improved a great deal in this category, yet it has a long way to go.
I am old enough to remember when blacks sat on the back of the bus, had seperate bathrooms and water fountians and sat in the balcony of the theater. Oddly enough as a small child for a while I thought it was the blacks who were lucky. On those ocassions that we would ride the bus, I would want to sit in the big couch looking seat at the back and my grandmother would say we couldn't sit back there. When we would go to the movies I wanted to sit in the balcony cuz' it was upstairs and my Mom would say we weren't supposed to sit there.
Perceptions changed a bit over time as my early years were in East Texas. Overall a White woman could hire a black maid and work part-time and still earn more than she spent on the maid. Thus, we had a maid at least twice a week during most of those years and 5 days a week when mom worked more. This was a two part thing: 1. I was exposed to black women a lot because they were my primary baby-sitters when mom was working. 2. Black women were shown to be in a servant or subserviant role. Thus, I never hated blacks, but I did see them in a very different light. My fathers only employee besides my mom was a mulatto "coon-ass". I didn't even know he was 1/4 black for years... I thought he was white, he was quite my buddy.
However, his being slightly black still consigned him to the back of the bus, etc.
I attended segregated schools almost all through elementary school. I did attend a school for a time that was desegregated, but there were so few blacks in the school that I never had one in the same classroom. I mostly attended Lutheran parochial schools in Elementary school, and they were all white. When I started 7th grade, I would have gone to public school but they had introduced bussing to acheive integration. The public Jr. High I would have attended was on the opposite side of town. My parents may have enrolled me in public school if the distance hadn't been what it was. They said they wouldn't have me riding a bus for an hour a day so they enrolled me into a private school for that year. The next year for 8th through 12th they were going to enroll me into Pulaski Academy which actually began as an anti-desegregation school but I bucked as I didn't want to go to "Plastic Academy" with all the spoiled kids.
Since I didn't want to go to "Plastic Academy" and there were no openings at Catholic High they began looking at houses in surrounding communities. They bought a house in Cabot, Arkansas. Cabot was a mostly white town that was quite "Mayberry" at that moment. I did love being able to ride my bicycle to almost anywhere in town and the soda fountian at the drug store.
Cabot was however an almost all white town within 30 minutes of Little Rock, so it didn't take long for it to become a white flight town. During the 5 years we lived in Cabot, it grew from about 2,000 to over 3,500. Cabots poopulation in 2005 was over 20,000. Although Cabot was already mostly white and passively racist, with the influx of white flight people, it became very overtly racist. At first, I bought into some of this, but a few things influenced me to begin to question and then despise the racism. This was the begining of my prejudice shifting to rednecks (A prejudice I still struggle with).
One day I came home from school and said "Nigger" and my mother slapped me silly and told me she never wanted me to say that again. She also began exposing me to more black people which required us to travel to Little Rock. We attended the Unity Church in Little Rock for most of the Cabot years as it did have a few blacks in attendance.
The first time I was around blacks my age in a learning environment was at band camp. At Band Camp, we would play in the same band as blacks, eat with blacks and recreate with blacks. This was my first real experience with blacks as personal friends. My second year at band camp they had an odd number of black and white males and the director of the band camp called in some of the boys that had registered for camp later and asked for a volunteer to share a room with the black guy. I had roomed with a friend, so I wasn't the volunteer. Oddly enough, the volunteer was from Cabot. This was in 1975 and brought to light to me that Racism was far from dead, even outside of the white flight towns.
Although Cabot was a good town for schools and had a great Methodist church and small town atmosphere, it wasn't really a good mix for my family. My parents bought an old Craftsman house in downtown Little Rock in about 1975. During my Senior Year (1977-78) we lived part-time in Little Rock and part-time in Cabot. I had enough credits to quit attending school after the first semester of my senior year. Thus we moved full-time into the Little Rock house in January of 1978. That house was in a neighborhood that was about 60% black.
Later, when my parents bought a one story house in a more suburban environment, they went out of their way to find one in an integrated neighborhood. From 1978 to now, I have almost exclusively lived in mixed neighborhoods, and all of the houses I have lived in independent of others have been in neighborhoods that were predominately black.
I had originally intended to devote this blog to commentary, but I started giving background information because I believe it shows where I am coming from. The auto-biographical information has exceeded the planned length for the original post, so I will continue with the commentary in another post.
Shalom, Conrad
posted by Conrad at 9:56 AM
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