The Black Lives Movement has me thinking of these things
I'm not quite sure when I first heard the word but one memory stays with me whether true or not.
I was very young, maybe four years old, riding in the back seat of the family car, a 1949 Plymouth. I was laying prone, my head over the edge of the back seat, watching the pavement rush by from a hole in the floorboard behind my father's seat. Suddenly he hit the brake, I rolled off the seat, my mother reached to grab me, then my father yelled, "Dumb n_ _ _ _ r!"
At some point in my young life, I realized I would never be called that name. Maybe at some later time in my life I called someone that name knowing it didn't apply to me. I can't recall, or don't want to.
As I grew up and my parents divorced, my father said the word at other times. His was not an effort to implant a germ of racial hatred in me. Like some of his generation he uttered the pejorative as a recognition of otherness White people bestowed on Black people. Saying the word confirmed to him, a decorated veteran of World War II, born in Virginia, a primacy by intellect or deed — it didn't matter. He used the word less and not in public after he entered politics, allying himself with those controlling local Democratic patronage. Outside of the political circles he appeared in, I don't recall my father having a Black friend or close acquaintance though he was friendly with some Black politicians, most all Democrats. He admired President Truman and would tell people that he had chauffeured Truman at one time after he left active duty. I never heard him criticized Truman likely knowing it was Truman who desegregated the U.S. military in 1948, helping set the stage for the civil rights movement. I would like to think that his hesitancy to outwardly display whatever racism he held was because of my mother's experience.
Growing up in Poland, my mother never saw a Black person except possibly assigned a small part in an American movie import or in a magazine. The Black person likely would be a porter or maid or cook, or a white man in blackface. But on her day of liberation in 1945 she saw her first live Black man.
Some 18 months after her abduction off the street in Lodz, Poland as a teenager, after a forced march from southern France to Bavaria after the Normandy Invasion to again work in an underground munition’s factory as a slave laborer, she awoke one day to find the Nazi goons had abandoned their posts. My mother and others fled into the Bavarian woods.
Knowing that the Allies were close, my mother and others were unsure of whether the liberators were Russian or American. Hiding in the trees at the edge of a field they heard the rumbling, belching noise of tanks. Not wanting to give themselves away just yet, they waited to see what insignia the tanks displayed, an American star or Russian numeral. Upon seeing the star my mother and others sprang from the woods and rushed the tanks waving and yelling. A tank stopped, the top hatch opened, and a Black American soldier popped his head out. I wonder what my mother thought at that moment. She had been liberated by soldiers of the 761st Tank Battalion, known as the Black Panthers, a segregated and decorated unit that had fought at the Battle of the Bulge and was now doing cleanup operations in southern Germany.
I don't recall hearing my mother ever using the n-word. As I grew older, as my father remained in my and my siblings lives after the divorce, the word was not part of his everyday language. I want to think it was because he still loved and respected my mother and knowing of her liberation story. Maybe that's just a son's reach for some understanding of his parents.
But as a family we fled Black people early on. That '49 Plymouth took us to the southeast part of town into an all-white post-war new subdivision. After second grade I went to a Catholic elementary school no doubt at the insistence of my mother. By high school age a decision had to be made. Tuition at a Catholic high school was out of my mother's reach yet the public high school district we lived in had an increasingly number of Black students. Whatever connections my father had — and I'm sure they were available to other white families seeking a transfer out of the district — I enrolled at a nearly all-White public high school some distance away from our home.
Two years into my high school years, my family again fled Black people. Declining real estate values may have been my father's argument as Black families began to move out of their traditional communities closer to where we lived. I don't recall if my mother sold that house to a Black family. In my young teenage mind, a racial motive to moving was as absent as any discussion of civil rights in the classroom. I remember visiting the neighborhood a few times as an older teen once I got a car. To me not much had changed except all the neighbors I knew were gone.
The new home farther south took me out of the district where I attended high school. My assigned district, based on our family's new address, was tied to an all-White high school. There was a traditional rivalry between the school I was attending and the high school I could now attend. Students there were derided as "cake eaters" because of the wealth associated within the surrounding neighborhood. I remember arguing with my mother and father to stay at the high school I was at. Not out of any awakening to support the quickly accelerating racial diversity at the high school I attended but maybe because I needed to identify with a school gaining a reputation of street toughness in the face of change. Lacking the bravado of a lettered school athlete and being pulled in an anti-authority direction by cultural change, being associated with my current high school help define the distortions I had about masculinity. Perhaps shying from confrontation after years of divorce, my parents agreed to let me stay at the high school I was at.
Racial dynamics increasingly took hold as I entered my third year in high school. More Black kids were enrolling, and tenseness wafted through the hallways. A kind of blockbusting evolved. White kids abandoned certain locker areas. Segregation took hold only diminished by the loose camaraderie of team sports. Racist remarks increased and fights became more common. A hit list of sorts when out against some White students and one door leading out of the school was known as a Black-only exit. A fellow student, a Black kid of small stature and more attuned to art than sports, whispered to me one day in gym class that I was on the so-called hit list. In an act of teen folly as if to diminish my fear of being "jumped" by Black students, I walked out the so-called Black-only exit one day when classes let out. I was immediately confronted, got in a few punches, found myself on the ground with a bruised face. I escaped back into the school and left by the main exit. Word got around of my daring-do and I wasn't confronted again. Neither did I test my courage — or luck — again.
Outside the school walls whey-faced real estate agents scurried through blocks of white-owned homes unfurling dark scenarios of ineluctable declines in property values and the creeping tenacles of innominate crime. White students seem to disappear overnight as mom and dad packed up the belongings and White real estate agents wooed Black families to buy overpriced homes. Within a few years the school was all Black.
I returned to those high school hallways some years later after the military and college as a substitute teacher. Because I never refused to go to a particular school, I soon found myself going to mostly intercity and neglected schools, at one point finding myself as a sort of permanent sub waiting in the teacher's lounge to take over a class if the regular teacher found some excuse to leave. There in the lounge I listened to white teachers degrade minority students and express constant frustration at their inability to teach or even control students.
It was a chaotic time, anger remained from the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and fiery urban riots underscored the hopelessness held by Black people that America — White America — would live up to the words "All men are created equal." Like today, inequality reigned and what progress that seem to be secure and germinate beyond hatred and fear was beaten down by White trepidation. And I, too, reached a point of abandonment one hot late spring day when I sat in front of class of Black students telling myself that "this class wasn't too bad."
My old high school still lacked air conditioning so the large, ground floor windows were up and open. In the back of the class, I noticed a student talking to someone at the window. When I approached the kid at the window, telling him to go away, maybe threatening that I would call the school office, he leaned in and spit on me. Flicking the spit off my cheek I reached for the kid, he backed away and took off running and I was out the window running after him. Near the end of the school's parking lot, I stopped, watching him gain ground in the distance. Less than two minutes had passed. I turned. The entire class I had just stood in front of was at the windows watching me. I felt stupid. Crawling back into the classroom through the same window I had jumped out of, I apologized to the class. Not long after the bell rang. It was the last class I subbed for. Like many other White teachers in front of Black students, I felt ineffective.
Decades later the memory of that incident remains vivid even as I contemplate substitute teaching again. But I resist because I don't think much has changed and I'm not sure I wouldn't find myself again chasing after an insolent kid, a child lacking an anchor at home, out of school, suffering from the burden of having an identity I have no inkling of. Entrenched segregation remains in most public-school districts, funding public education has become an ideological handmaiden to economic powers more adept at tapping taxpayer money than overworked teachers and impotent school boards facing duplicitous politicians.
Within that atmosphere the police continue to operate under the premise that safe communities come from increased arrests, strong arm tactics and subtle racial profiling. For most any young Black man, one arrest, for whatever reason, can mean the constant plight of police scrutiny coupled with the assumption of guilt . . . for something. The tragedy of George Floyd is not only his murder by the police but the life-long exposure to a justice system forcing mothers and fathers to give instructions to their children in how to avoid surviving an encounter with police.
A retired Pennsylvania deputy police chief in a letter to The New York Times wrote: "The problems and issues that have plagued agencies of late boil down to three: poor hiring, poor training and poor tactics used on the street." He concluded that the best cops are those who come to the job as if it was a calling, like "priest/sisterhood." But what if that calling includes the belief in white superiority?
America's police began as an organized force in the early 19th century for the protection of economic interests, first in the shipping industry in the Northeast and later in the South as slave patrols. Dr. Gary Potter, professor at the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, defined slave patrols as having three primary functions: (1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside of the law, if they violated any plantation rules. The South's prosperity and the wealth of landowning slaveowners depended upon keeping their exploited labor in bondage. After Reconstruction Southern law enforcement evolved to maintaining segregation, enforcing Jim Crow laws and overall disenfranchisement of Black citizens.
In northern big cities the influx of Catholics, the Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern Europeans immigrants and later the rise of labor unions caused fear among White Protestants and threatened the economic interests they held. Later, waves of Blacks moving north underscored that fear driving the police to operate under the premise of "law and order" promoted by dominant political and business interests. White superiority became the credence by which to operate and remains so.
I do not know if any of the 17,985 police departments, or their unions, make their members aware of the history of police in this country in their training or otherwise. What police history that is taught I would imagine is geared toward the heroism of officers or crimes good police work solved. Such testimonies create the strong bonds of loyalty and brotherhood cops share. Not fully examined within police unions are questions as to why police remain overwhelming conservative in their support of likeminded politicians to the point of refusing Covid vaccines, being mostly silent against ridicule of Capitol Police dying and injured because of the January 6 insurrections and where police shootings of Black citizens continue despite media attention and meager prosecution of offending police officers. Nearly 1,000 people die due to police shootings annually, a rate that has held steady through the years with Black Americans killed at twice the rate of White Americans. A sad irony to that statistic is that suicide remains the number one cause of death for police officers.
Potter considers the role of police as defined by "economics and politics, not crime or crime control." What political candidate doesn't welcome the endorsement of a police union or what corporation would refuse to issue a congratulatory statement honoring the police? The need for police unions has been questioned with some progressives noting that the number one priority of police unions, like all unions, is seeking to protect its members. Police unions, when they close ranks behind an officer, are an additional barrier between the police and the community they profess to protect and serve.
In the early 1980s when I was a correctional officer at a big-city county jail we sometimes could tell which police force, the urban or suburban, brought in the accused when they stepped off the elevator. Telltale was the extent of the bruises and cuts on a Black face. Training required us not ask the cops what happened; we did, however, made the assessment whether medical care was necessary. Though the jail I worked at was considered to have a somewhat enlightened leadership, my CO instruction was mainly one week in a classroom, some self-defense training and then onto the jail floor. Even during the recession at that time turnover was nearly 50 percent leaving me supervising two other officers and responsible for over 200 jailed men within six months of my hiring. I assume such deficiencies continue in most county jail settings.
Working with the accused can dispel the fear of crime as hyped by the media or disingenuous politicians. In most county jails the incarcerated were either waiting for trial or to be transferred to prison after a trial. The few with money work the system to stay free on the street. Everyone else is poor, ill-educated and many arrested on drug charges, stealing or failure to pay child support. The dangerous — murderers, gun related incidents of violence — were confine in what was called aggressive sections of the jail. Those assigned to those areas had spoken of their hatred of the White race or Black or Brown people. For the White racist that included any White person they perceived as well disposed toward non-Whites.
When a new hire was put under my supervision, I urged the Black CO to be careful when checking on all-White, racist sections. One day I heard a commotion back in a White racists section and found the CO and several inmates engaged in a screaming match. I ordered the CO off the floor and threatened the inmates with a disciplinary action. A few days later an inmate in that section told me discreetly that if the Black CO came back by the section, he could be drenched with toilet water or worse. I ordered the Black CO not to check on that section and to let me handle it. He objected and the next day filed a racial discrimination complaint against me.
In my mind I was helping prevent him from possibly getting hurt. Maybe in his mind I was a patronizing White supervisor questioning his ability to do the job. He was transferred away from my supervision; the complaint resulted in me facing a nonaccusatory interview with the jail supervisor. The Black CO and I never talked about the incident or anything else. To this day I wonder if I was played by the white racists in that section, them knowing I would keep the Black CO away from them, leading me to explain my rationale without gaining any understanding of how the Black CO felt. It was a case of White privilege winning out and a Black man devalued.
White manipulation of issues of oppression and equality have always been part of America's view of itself and the fodder for aggrandizing certain ideals claiming to be the bedrock of the nation's history. White people have a hard time recognizing such control because most White people live in a White bubble maintained by fear. Though some White people deny such a cultural foundation as White privilege, Black and other non-White people have confronted it for centuries, recognizing its consequences at an early age.
Perhaps empathy overcame any inclinations I may had to embrace White privilege. The horror my mother felt as a young woman terrorized by the Nazi geocidal plan unconsciously seeped into me, pushed along by the ridicule she faced in this country because of her accent and the isolation she may felt from women who thought they were better in upholding a purer American Whiteness. Even now when I look at photos of my mother, I'm drawn to her faraway look, her face slightly turned, looking at something in the distance never captured by a camera, searching for a time when death and the dread of meeting it was not a part of her life. To me my mother's survival was an act of the Divine, my Whiteness a random accident.
Historian Howard Zinn said the creation of Whiteness came about from the transatlantic slave trade. From 1526 to 1867, 12.5 million Black people were kidnapped and stripped of any bond holding them to a previous life and sent to North America. It's estimated that 1.8 million died in the journey. Zinn noted that the plantation system, which completely relied on slave labor, created "a racial hierarchy in which Whites could claim superiority." That superiority — much like the Aryan nationalism the Nazis employed — led to laws and brutality where "Whiteness constituted the legally sanctioned platform for social and economic dominance in America."
My mother was a Nazi slave laborer, meeting her first American being a liberating Black man. Her experience and eventual embrace of her new country was uniquely American. That Black soldier in the tank and his descendants are also uniquely American. Let Whiteness drift into achromatic nihility.