Michael Eric Dyson recently wrote some challenging comments about how whiteness is a often a kind of blindness. It started me thinking about my own life and how I grew up in a racist family without really knowing it. I write below some reflections. It was a different time, with no internet, no social media and far less availability of information than today. This was in Springfield, Ohio, a medium-sized industrial city.
My father was a kind, generous man, a high school dropout. My mother was from the Virginia mountains (Bath County) but was no stereotypical mountaineer; her father was a publicist for a major resort, and she grew up on the fringes of high society. Both were outgoing, much-loved, smart people. Both were racists. An odd thing, though, is both had “colored” friends (that’s the word they used). One male friend of my father’s was a member of the Springfield Stamp Society, which both belonged to. My mother knew and socialized with several black women, especially after she started working at a nearby college. Yet in no case did they visit our house or we, their houses.
My father would sometimes get tipsy and try comic routines, jokes and such. As a teenager I just thought it was weird. But here’s one of his favorite little lyrics, which he’d sing off key to make my mother laugh:
Zero to zero,
Figger to figger,
All for the white man,
None for the nigger.
My family used some phrases that were common at the time and I didn’t think much about. Someone who did something nice for someone else might say “That’s white of you.” It wasn’t used often, and I forget the contexts, but the meaning is obvious. If a person was working hard, sweating in the heat of summer, someone might say “he was working like a nigger...” There were lots of terms referring to black people. Some of the more printable ones that I remember are “jungle bunny,” and “jigaboo.”
I recall a few other related things. I bought my mother a few books, and one had some black characters, and my mother said “I don't like books about black people.” Another case was I was accepted by and attended the college where she worked, and I did not find out till later she interfered with the admissions process to make sure I did not get a black roommate.
The first time I thought about racism was when a black family moved in next door. They had a little dog, and one evening as I walked down the alley between our houses, the dog barked and barked at me. This may well sound incredibly naïve, but I still remember vividly thinking that it was a perfectly normal little dog but barked at me and liked black people. They had a son about my age, and somehow I was scared of him. We played together a little but then stopped and never said a word to each other again. Then this little wrinkle. Our water pipes froze during an extremely cold storm. We needed water, but the only neighbors willing to let us fill up some containers was this black family—my mother thought it was hilarious that we had to go around to their back door.
Another example is an uncle in Virginia, a man I loved as much as I did my father. On a trip we stopped at a roadside vendor and bought some socks. When we got to his place, I showed the socks and he spotted a flaw and said “How far did you have to chase that nigger?” I thought at the time that the comment was a little weird. Years later, in the early 1970s, we had an argument about civil rights (I had by then become aware of racism and other vital issues) and he said “Martin Luther King deserved what he got.” In a fit of holier-than-thou I stormed out of the room and never spoke to him again—he died a year or so later of lung cancer, and I never got around to telling him he was like a second father to me. Still years later, I stayed with his son for a couple of days for a funeral, and during that time, one of my cousins got a birthday present from her husband, a large and scary looking gun, which he called a “nigger protector.”
I got some familiarity with black people in my high school. Two high schools split the city, and we had kids from wealthy and from impoverished parts of town. I was for one season on the wrestling team, and the team spirit somewhat overcame the sense of difference. There was one black student with a name quite similar to mine, and teachers often confused us, to our hilarity. That was a time of tenuous friendships but almost no socializing outside of school or sports. A term widely used was “nigger lover” and it had a powerful impact on people’s behavior. It wasn’t just black people, I vividly remember a male gym teacher telling me I “threw like a girl” and sometimes people threw around words like “faggot” and “pansy” without understanding, but that is another story. (We also called Asians “chinks” and Catholics “mackerel snappers.)
I hope I’m over all that, but Dyson’s words still have me thinking. He’s right. There is I think, a kind of white blindness, a blindness of those who will not see. As much as I dislike contemporary literary theory, there’s a concept called the “gaze.” Typically this is written about as the male gaze assuming it is the proper and only way to look at the world, not comprehending the existence of a female view. There’s a white gaze, too. It is cobbled together from experience, from education, from family, from friends and from society. A way of looking at the world, so far as I can tell, grows organically and, well, is just a way of looking at the world. Sometimes that unexamined gaze can be rattled a little, and for the better. Thank you, Michael Eric Dyson.