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This guy walks into a bar and says... - Mar 20, 2006 - Printable Version
- I was illiterate.
(Gray Like Me: Part 2)
by Ken Shade
I was illiterate until I was thirty-four years old! I'm not kidding. I was.
Oh, I could read. I could write. I understood mathematics. By the time I was thirty-four, I had been literate in all of the ways literacy is usually thought about for thirty years.
Still, I was illiterate in one very important way: I was racially illiterate.
I don't know if I'm the first person to use the term "racial literacy," or not. I doubt that I am. There may be a better term or, at least, a more recognizable term for it. I don't know.
I understood the sociology of race: Affirmative action is a good idea.
I understood the morality of race: Prejudice and discrimination are wrong.
I understood the politics of race: Old-South racist Democrats had fled to the Republican party, which venally welcomed them, and were making it strong.
I understood the history of race: Take everything away from people, then punish them for having nothing.
I'd read Langston Hughes, Frederick Douglas, Marcus Garvey, John Howard Griffin and Malcolm X.
I understood those things intellectually, so I thought I was pretty savvy on the subject.
I was wrong. I didn't understand race in any practical way at all.
It wasn't my fault that I didn't understand. It's just that nothing in my life had taught me. I could learn all of those other things from books, but still have my head up my butt about what race means in America. Nothing taught me what cannot be learned in books. My life had not been adequate to giving me a clue to anything important about race. It couldn't have been.
The first reason it couldn't is the town in which I was raised.
In my grandfather's time, Edmond, Oklahoma was a small farming community with a large, smelly oil field just west of it. It was exactly the same in my father's youth. When I was born there, it really hadn't changed much. The new highway had made it more practical for people to live in Edmond and commute to Oklahoma City to work, but not too many people seemed to be doing it. I remember the oil field smell, wheat fields, one high school, brick streets, two cafés, one cemetery and Dr. Coyner, who delivered every Edmondite baby ever born in the small "hospital" upstairs over the town's one movie theatre.
I remember milk bottles with paper lids from Townley's Dairy on out front porch.
I remember a town in which every adult I saw knew my parents and my grandparents. I couldn't get away with anything. Charlie's Cue Center was downtown, next to Slim's Barber Shop. (Slim gave me every haircut I ever had until my mother told me I could have a Beatle haircut. After that, I went to the other barber shop because Slim said he wouldn't do Beatle haircuts.) If I went into Charlie's, a place I was forbidden to go, Slim would see me and call my parents. I was in trouble before I lit my first cigarette.
What I remember was Mayberry, with one notable exception: If you watch TV-Land carefully, you'll occasionally see an African-American person in Mayberry. You don't see them often, but sometimes, at least. That's something you never saw in Edmond. Edmond was a town that didn't just have a few black people living there. It had none at all. There were a few black students at the college, but they tended to stay on campus. (They weren't stupid.)
Edmond was like thousands of other small towns of the time. The absence of African-Americans was a result of public policy, as well as a matter of civic pride. If you cruise eBay, you will occasionally come across an old post card advertising the Royce Café, the high-class dining establishment on Broadway. Next to a picture of the café, which resembles nothing so much as an old, stone Esso station, are these words:
From Dawn to Dawn We're Never Gone.
Air Conditioned
Royce Cafe, Edmond Oklahoma
EDMOND
"A GOOD PLACE TO LIVE"
6,000 Live Citizens
No Negroes
Home of CENTRAL STATE TEACHERS COLLEGE
Rated as One of the Nation's Best.
Public School System Surpassed by None
Eight Active Churches
Seven Attractive Parks
Beautiful Homes with Ideal Living Conditions
300 Blocks of Paving
Santa Fe Railroad...
100% Pure Water...
Ice Plant
Grain Companies
Dairying...
The Edmond Oil Field, Three Miles West is one of the Best in Southwest.
I have no notion regarding why Royce B. Adamson, the owner of the Royce, felt the need to advertise "6,000 Live Citizens." Perhaps the business leaders of nearby metropolises like Deer Creek, Guthrie and Luther were inflating their population figures by including ghosts, vampires and zombies, and Adamson wanted to draw a clear and honest distinction.
I know why he said "No Negroes," though. He said it because it was true, and he wanted it to stay true.
My father tells me that it was understood by all visiting "negroes" that they should finish their business and vacate the city limits before sundown.
The post card was from the forties. My father's memories are from the fifties. I point them out to show how things came to be the way they were in the sixties, when I roamed the streets.
I can tell you in detail about every black person I met in my entire life before I moved to Norman to skip classes at the University of Oklahoma. I can tell you in detail because there were fewer than a dozen.
One morning, early in seventh grade, there was a rumor that we were going to get to have some black classmates. Early in the seventies, Oklahoma City, by order of a federal judge, began a far more aggressive program of bussing to achieve racial integration than they had ever tried before...IF they had ever tried before. My little home town began a period of exponential growth, as white families with money fled to Edmond to avoid having to send their children to school with anybody of offensive pigmentation. Now, on this morning, rumor was that the other shoe was dropping. I heard the rumor when I noticed about twenty of the school reprobates standing on the sidewalk by where the busses unloaded, looking at the entry to the parking lot with venom in their expressions. This was odd because all of the busses had already unloaded. I walked over to the group and asked Jerry, who was not really a thug, but a greasy-haired moronic thug wannabe, why they were all standing there.
"There's two busloads of niggers coming from Oklahoma City," he answered.
"Why?"
"To go to school here."
I knew this was a fishy story. I'd never heard of forced bussing between different school districts. Still, I thought there might be something to it.
I was pretty sure I knew the answer to my next question, but I asked it anyway: Why are you waiting for them?
"To beat them up!"
"Why do you want to beat them up?"
"Because they're niggers."
I'd never heard anything so ugly and stupid in my life, but I knew there'd be no sense in trying to reason with these guys. So, I stood there with the angry people, formulating a plan. I stood closer to the curb than anybody, judging where the door of the first bus would be when it stopped by looking at the deep wheel depressions in the mud and gravel parking lot. My intention was to jump into the bus doorway as soon as it opened, warn the driver and the students, and turn to face the attackers. If I couldn't block the door, I thought, I could at least distract them into beating me up long enough for the drivers to suss out the situation and leave.
I stood there in position until the bell rang to start the day, and the crowd dispersed. I went to pick up my books and lunch from where I had set them, only to discover that one of the football players had ripped open the bag and thrown my hard-boiled egg and my Snack Pac pudding against the wall.
No busses, with students of any color, arrived from Oklahoma City on that, or any other, morning.
So, I didn't have a black classmate until tenth grade. Nobody attacked him. They were glad to have him.
Richard was a high school All-American defensive lineman in a tiny, moribund town called Arcadia. Arcadia was in integrated school because they had no choice. They were so far from anything else that you either went to that school, or you went to no school at all. There was no other option. As Arcadia died, there were fewer and fewer kids in the school. It reached the point where they had to close the school, and find another place for their children to be educated. The closest and most logical destination for those students was Edmond, but Edmond wanted no part of those African-American kids. They wanted Richard, for obvious reasons. but they didn't want any of the others. They rejected Arcadia's request to be annexed, but re-drew the district boundaries so that one Arcadian family farm was now in the Edmond school district: Richard's. So, when tenth grade began, Richard was sitting next to me in first period while every other black kid from Arcadia rode another eleven miles to schools in Northwest Oklahoma City.
I don't remember much about Richard from class, other than the fact that he was huge. Most of my memories of him are of watching him later play for the Oklahoma Sooners and the Green Bay Packers.
There was one other African-American student in my high school by the time I graduated. She was a cute pom-pon girl, one year behind me, named Kay. We didn't travel in the same circles, so I never really knew her. (I never traveled in the same circle with any pom-pon girl.)
That's it! That is the complete list of high-melanin Edmond Bulldogs from that era.
The only other people of color I knew were the housekeeper, Mrs. Reed, Jack, the man who worked at a scrap yard my grandfather took me to in Oklahoma City, Mack, a student teacher and Steve, a guy in my theatre group, far away from Edmond.
No, my background didn't offer me much of a racial education, which leads me to the second reason I was racially illiterate until I was thirty-four: There was no other way things could have been. Even if I had been born and raised as the only white guy in an entire city of African-Americans, I still would have been a white guy. I would have learned about some of the experiences of people near me, but my own experiences would have been different. I would have been able to go out into the larger, white host culture without anybody taking notice of me. I would have seen much of what it is like to be black in America, but I would not have felt it. I wouldn't really know it. I would not have walked a single mile in a black man's shoes.
When I started this installment with the announcement that I was racially illiterate until I was thirty-four, I wasn't telling some people anything that they didn't already know. I became aware of it in 1994, but every African-American person I had ever known up to that time already knew it. When I made mistakes, I didn't even realize it, but they did. I am sure that it was usually attributed to ignorance, but I know of at least one time when it wasn't.
I scared a prospective housekeeper so badly that she refused to return to our house.
I didn't do it because I was racist or mean. I did it because I wasn't literate.
One of my grandfathers used to take occasional trips to Mexico. When he returned from these trips, he always brought gifts for his grandchildren. At least twice, he brought marionettes for me. (I always liked marionettes, and became rather skilled at puppetry.)
One of the marionettes he brought was a black man holding maracas. At one point, the marionette's strings became so tangled that I untied all of them from his feet, wrists and head so I could unsnarl them. Interrupted in mid-task, probably by a savage beating from my older brother, I set the little fellow aside, stringless.
At about this time in my life, I was learning knots in Boy Scouts. One of the knots I was learning was the taut line hitch. One afternoon, as I sat on my bed practicing knots, I realized that the taut line hitch looked a lot like a hangman's noose. It seemed to me that, if I only added a few more loops, I could make a reasonable facsimile of a hangman's noose. I tried it, and was happy with the result. I was so happy with the result that I wanted to save it. If I was going to save it, I needed something, something like a neck, to put the noose around. The little maraca player was lying there, so I put it around his neck, tossed the rope over a curtain rod, and forgot all about him.
Shortly thereafter, my mother was showing a new prospective housekeeper around our house. (I don't know what happened to Mrs. Reed, the aforementioned previous housekeeper.) She was a very proper looking woman in her fifties, with a head of hair most black women would kill for. (I'll probably go into the subject of hair in a later column. If you don't understand why hair talk belongs in a series about race, then you're racially illiterate.)
The visit seemed to be going well, with me tagging along, until my mother opened the door to my room. After a quick look around my room, which was not as messy as usual that day, the woman said that she had decided that she was already cleaning enough houses, and could not do ours, after all. She quickly left, and we never saw her again.
For years after that event, I wondered what it was about my room that had caused her to cut out so quickly. Every few years something would remind me of it, and I'd again try to understand what had happened. About five years ago, I remembered it again. In the new light of increasing racial literacy, it all suddenly made sickening sense.
If she had been a white woman, the 4' X 5' Jimi Hendrix poster by my bed might have been what she noticed. It dominated my room. It was what all the white people who came into my room noticed. To her, though, the striking feature was a small, lynched-but-grinning black puppet. I'll never know exactly how that made her feel because I never got the chance to know her as a person. Unwittingly (or should I say "witlessly?), I had created an unbelievably offensive image to all African-Americans, but especially to people of her generation. Of all the posters, clutter, books, records and toys in my room, that one small, sinister tableau leaped out at her and created an impression that probably stayed with her for a very long time.
I didn't hang that puppet there because I didn't know about lynchings. My father had told me about lynchings when I was very young. It was there because my racially clueless mind didn't connect a black man with a noose around his neck with any actual reality. If lynching had been anything other than an abstraction to me, I would have taken the rope off that marionette as soon as I saw how it looked. I never would have kept it in my room. Looking back on it, it amazes me that that sickening sight didn't strike a chord with me. It's sickening to me now because I now picture that damned puppets face as the face of people I love. If I were black, I could also well imagine it to be my own face.
Now, that woman might have worked on my family's house for years to come with no more upsetting episodes. Who knows? She didn't stick around to find out. She didn't wait to see if I was malicious or ignorant. Only a fool would have. It's like seeing a gun pointed at you. You react, and don't spend too much time wondering if the person holding the gun a murderer or a dolt.
This is the kind of thing racially illiterate people do. In word and deed, they unconsciously offend, insult and negatively change the lives of others.
Walking a mile in another's shoes is the premise of the F/X network's "Black. White." What came across most powerfully in the second episode, though, was racial illiteracy.
As I said last time, I am suspicious of this show because Bruno, the white man, is an actor. I would not be at all surprised if, at the end of the series, this is announced as some sort of twist. Of course, if he is an actor and a fake, then the entire white family would have to be fakes, as well.
Whatever the case, Bruno and Carmen spend most of episode two embarrassing themselves by being racially illiterate. Early on, Bruno and his African-American counterpart, Brian, visit a bar together. Bruno as himself and Brian in white make-up. Bruno is intent on proving to Brian that white people don't speak any differently in the presence of people of color than they do in their absence. (I hate the term "people of color." We're all *some* color or other. I'm just using it here because I'm getting tired of typing "black" and "African-American" over and over.) What he is trying to say is absurd. People of both races do speak differently when they know they're being observed by one of "them." I've seen the change happen immediately many times as soon as the mix of people in the room changes. It doesn't mean that either side is plotting the mass extermination of the other, it simply means that people become more self-conscious. African-Americans are careful not to discuss certain issues outside "the community," and European-Americans are nervous that they might offend. That nervousness often causes them to offend when they can't stop the very things they are obsessed with not saying from rolling out of their mouths, like when Archie Bunker asked Sammy Davis, Jr., he's have cream and sugar in his eye.
Bruno also wants to prove that racism is a figment of Brian's imagination. He plans to accomplish all this by going to this bar where only white people hang out and simply asking them if they're bigots, or not. Of course, this is a racially illiterate move. There was a time when you could have gone almost anywhere, yelled "Everybody here who hates __________(Insert racial epithet of your choice here) please raise your hands!" and seen hands go up. We don't live in those times, anymore. One of the legacies of the Civil Rights Movement is that we know it's wrong to be prejudiced. We want to be good people, even if we don't always know how, so most of us, black or white, would ever think of identifying ourselves with such feelings. No, things are more subtle, now. If you walk into a bar and ask questions like that, you'll get a lot of fevered protests to the contrary, which is exactly what Bruno got. He blunders in and throws the questions right in people's faces, and gets a lot of answers about how many black friends everybody has. He asks everybody if they'd ever consider being in an interracial relationship in such a direct and ham-handed manner that they have no choice but to say "yes." He thinks he has proven that nobody in the place is even a little bit bigoted, but all he has done is show that he's devoid of social skills and made everybody uncomfortable.
It's possible that he was so clumsy with his questions precisely because he knew it would elicit the responses he wanted. It's too early to tell.
One thing that is easy to tell about Bruno is that he has repressed animosity and resentment against African-Americans. Freed from the normal restraints of society by this televised experiment, he looks for every available opportunity to say the word "nigger" in the presence of the Sparks family. He does it so often, and with such barely concealed enjoyment, that the viewer starts wondering at what point somebody is going to punch him right in the face.
Another thing he does is to express his own biases under the guise of a search for truth. In the bar, he directly asks an attractive young woman if she'd ever had a relationship with a black man. She says she has, and he hits her with this: "Did it make you reluctant to have a permanent relationship with a black man, given how they are notorious for not sticking around and taking care of their families?"
I had to watch that part again just to see if I had heard him correctly.
He obviously believes the old canard about most African-American men leaving their families, and he wants to shove it in Brian's face. He can't just say it. That would be racist. So, he tries to pretend that he's just gathering information for their grand experiment.
Brain just sits there, in white face, wondering how this man can be so blind about how he comes off.
Brian is not taken in by Bruno. He and his wife, Renee, with and without make-up, have already been successful in putting white people at ease so they will speak freely. They have been able to do this because learning how to put white people at ease is a necessary survival skill in the black community. When the people they speak to open up, out gush stunning stupidity and more than a few unsavory attitudes.
The crowning idiocy of Bruno's trip to the pub is his final question to the young woman who had the interracial relationship: "So, is it true? Is the myth true...about black men being more well endowed?"
She has the decency not to answer. In fact, she puts him down for even asking. In my opinion, she should have said something like: "Oh, yes! There isn't a black man alive with less than thirteen inches...flaccid! Even a small African-American boy's penis dwarfs your tiny pecker, peckerwood." Bruno would have sulked out, feeling forever insecure about his minuscule member. He'd probably move his wife to Sweden, so she'd never get the chance to compare.
Speaking of Carmen, her racial illiteracy provides episode two's comic moments. She and Bruno are going to attend church with Renee and Brian. Carmen wants to be sure that she is dressed accordingly, so she has Renee take her shopping. She walks from shop to shop with Renee, always zeroing in on the loudest colored clothing on display. She clearly thinks that black women always wear bright, clashing outfits. She even says, at one point, that she feels free to be outrageous, now that she's black. Each time she picks out some ridiculous dress, Renee says the same thing: "Well, that;s not what I would wear, but if you like it..."
Renee is being passive-aggressive, here, because she's still angry with Carmen for calling her a "bitch." Carmen claims she thought it was a term of endearment among black women. It isn't. Even if it was, she still shouldn't have said it anyway. She's not a black woman. She's a white woman in make-up, and Renee knows it. If Renee wasn't angry, she would probably have said: "You'll look out of place if you wear that." As it is, she doesn't seem to care how stupid Carmen looks.
Carmen eventually decides that she and her husband should wear dashikis to church.
I'm not kidding! She buys dashikis, and proudly takes them home to Bruno. They try on their dashikis, and express great satisfaction with their appearance. They don't realize that they are on the verge of committing social suicide until Brian starts to laugh at them. Much to my disappointment, they opt out of wearing their dashikis to church. (I really wanted to see that.) Instead, they choose to humiliate themselves by trying to out-Pentecost everybody. In the church, some of the regulars shout, some raise their palms to the sky, some say "amen," some stand, some sing and some clap. Bruno and Carmen do all of those things, and they do them all wrong. None of it is at all natural or spontaneous. It's just two stiff folks trying to pretend they're not stiff.
The other high point of the show, for me, was when the white teenage daughter, Rose, outs herself as a white girl to her poetry group. This whole segment calls into question the realism of the scenes shot with a visible camera. Why in the heck, I wonder, did all of the black teens in her poetry group think a camera crew was following Rose around in the first place? How can any of their statements or reactions be authentic with a visible television camera in their faces at every turn?
After Rose spills the beans, obviously with the consent of the show's producers, she invites the poetry group over to her house where they can all see her as the white kid she is. When they arrive, Rose is upstaged by her racially illiterate mother, who goes from kid to kid, telling them all how great they are. Each time, regardless of what laudatory adjectives she pastes on them, she can't help reminding them what color they are. They all know they're African-Americans (Kids are clever that way.), but she feels she has to put the word "black" into every description, thus emphasizing their "other-ness." After she calls one of them a "beautiful black creature," the evening ends on an uncomfortable note, with all of the kids leaving.
Carmen thinks she has shown her open mind and her lack of bigotry. What she has done is ruin a good thing, much like a dumb-ass kid I once heard of who lynched a marionette.
Racially literate people do not do things like this.
I will never be completely racially literate because I will never be a black man. To be completely literate, a person would have to have been both races, and that's not possible. Still, my observations are more informed than most. I have not had to fight prejudice and ignorance on my own behalf, but I have had to fight it on behalf of my children, and that is about as close as one can come. When your child skins a knee, you wish that you could take that abrasion for them. That's what I'm talking about. I can't take away their hurts, but I can feel the pains along with them. I cannot shield them, but I can help prepare them to deal with what comes along. I cannot change the world in which my children must live, but maybe I can spread a little literacy.
I want them to at least know that I tried.
This is part 2 of the continuing series "Gray Like Me". To read part one, "I Am The White Sheep Of My Family.", go to:
http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/GuyWalksIntoBar/1012.html
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