Whee – Me!

(Written on Friday, April 4th, 2008)

Today is the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

I was 12 years old when King was assassinated. Growing up in the all-white Galewood neighborhood of Chicago, I was somewhat odd. I gave a bit more thought to race relations and the civil rights movement than most of my pals and classmates, which means only that I thought precious little about those things. I did fancy myself aware of current events and knew a fact or two about King’s work, so that probably made me the resident intellectual of my block.

At the time, huge swaths of Chicago’s west side were undergoing radical change. A couple of miles to the east and south of Galewood, black families were beginning to buy homes in white neighborhoods. As each new black family moved onto a block near the intersection of Madison Street and Central Avenue, their new white neighbors had what can only be described as nervous breakdowns.

Petitions were drawn up, protest marches were held, and teenagers could be counted on to throw rocks through the windows of their new neighbors, toss Molotov cocktails in their backyards, and spit on their children as they tried to walk to school.

When all the yelling, screaming, vandalism, and physical assaults failed to deter black homebuyers, the whites turned to their local real estate agents for help. Whites retreated as if from an invading army. An entire block would turn from white to black in a matter of weeks.

The real estate men spared no pains to portray the black migration as a military siege, whispering to neighbors about the black family moving in, one block over. You know, you’d better think about selling before it’s too late. And the kicker: Hey, do you want your daughter sitting next to a big black buck in her sophomore biology class?

Back up in Galewood, with its comfortable bungalows, neatly mowed lawns, and a populace that was keeping a wary eye on developments to the south and east, I had no more knowledge of what was going on than I had of events in Tasmania.

I was vaguely aware that blacks were restive. In school, I’d learned about slavery in America so when I’d see news reports featuring angry young black men, I figured, heck, I’d be mad too.

I couldn’t imagine any blacks would be angry at me, though. Or my neighbors. Or anyone in my family. Their ire was directed at Georgia lunch counter operators who refused to serve them and Alabama governors who denied them entrance to state colleges.

Blacks had no quibble with me. In fact, I could count the number of times I’d even seen an African-American!

Once, when my mother was walking me to kindergarten, a man walked toward us. I was transfixed. He wore bib overalls, heavy work boots, and a railroad engineer’s cap. Underneath that cap, though, was an astonishing sight. His face was jet black. I stared at him as only a kid that age can and continued to do so, my head on a swivel, long after he passed us.

Finally, after he’d disappeared around a corner, I turned to my mother and asked, “What’s wrong with that man?”

Perhaps she misunderstood my question. Or, just as likely, she understood perfectly and was at a loss find the right words to explain him. My mother replied, “Maybe he’s just going to work.”

I nodded. Then it dawned on me. Of course. He works on a train. All that black smoke blows on him all day long and he simply forgot to wash his face this morning!

I saw another black human being a few years later.

I’d become friends with a kid named Brian in my third grade class. His father was a successful oral surgeon and his family lived in what appeared to me to be a palatial home in the high-toned section of Oak Park, a suburb just across North Avenue from my home. One day, my mother allowed me to go to Brian’s house after school to play. While there, I saw a woman wearing a classic maid’s uniform walking around the house, picking up after us kids and cautioning us not to tear the place apart. Her face, like the railroad man’s, was black.

By that time, I knew what a black person was. But I had no idea what a maid was. Again, I formulated my own explanation. This one disturbed me. Immediately upon arriving home at dinner time, I announced to my mother that I wasn’t interested in going over to Brian’s house anymore after school. “Why?” she asked. “Because,” I told her, “they have a slave.”

The next summer, I eavesdropped on a conversation between my father and a couple of neighbors. One of them, Mr. Mitchell from across the alley, chomped on his cigar as he pontificated about the state of the nation, repeatedly mentioning “the niggers.” It was clear that Mr. Mitchell was highly agitated by them but I never quite caught what their specific sins were. I came away certain only that Mr. Mitchell was unhappy and he blamed, well, you know who.

My problem was, I didn’t know who or what you-know-who were. That evening at dinner, I asked, “What are the niggers?” My mother almost dropped her fork. “Don’t ever use that word again,” she warned. “It’s one of the worst words in the English language.”

I learned all the complex and myriad meanings of the word not too much later. While I wish I could say I always kept in mind what my mother told me at the dinner table that day, I cannot. As that invading army moved northward through Austin, ever closer to Galewood, my neighborhood pals became awfully opinionated about matters of race. The pressure on me to conform was enormous.

Somewhere deep within me, though was an idea that couldn’t be crushed by peer pressure. After dinner that unseasonably warm Thursday, April 4th, 1968, I turned on the television and flipped to Channel 26, at the time one of the new UHF stations that could be counted on for odd programming like wrestling and foreign movies in which I might see a flash of cleavage.

But that evening, Channel 26 wasn’t airing any theatrical grappling or tantalizing breast skin. It simply broadcast a still photo of Martin Luther King, Jr. accompanied by somber music. I switched to the VHF channels and quickly discovered what had happened in Memphis.

Having grown up around people like Mr. Mitchell from across the alley and kids who were more than happy to explain to me what “the niggers” were, I knew that Martin Luther King wasn’t among friends in white America. His assassination came as no surprise.

So I switched back to Channel 26 and searched that photo of King for signs of his humanity as the somber music played. I stared at the photo for at least a half hour. His face was melancholy, roundish, and soft. It was a baby face. Without realizing it, I’d begun to cry.

Being 12 years old, I was horrified by my tears. I craned my neck to make sure nobody was headed toward the living room. Certain I’d be alone for the time being, I slumped back into my chair and permitted myself to cry over the death of a man whose existence I’d too rarely considered before that moment.

The story doesn’t end there. Despite being innocently appalled that my friends’ family were “slaveowners,” despite learning at the age of eight that the word “nigger” conveyed an unspecified evil, and despite sitting alone and weeping before a photo of King as an adolescent, I still had a long way to go.

There were still those enormous pressures to conform. While I might have felt a visceral reaction to King’s death, I learned the next day it was smarter to keep it to myself. That Friday at school, I confided to a couple of friends my opinion that King’s killing was a terrible thing. What a mistake! After giving me a sound beating, my two friends went around the schoolyard telling everybody that Glab was a “nigger lover.”

In Galewood in the year 1968, there were two things one never wanted to be known as: a queer or a nigger lover. Suddenly, I was one of the two worst types of human beings in the world.

So I attempted, half-heartedly, to reclaim my good standing. The best way to do so was – what else? – rail against “the niggers.” I tried my level best to join in on the verbal black-bashing that took place virtually every day. I wanted the guys to like me again. I hated the fact that the girls looked at me as if I had a screw loose. But howling about black people came neither easily nor naturally to me.

For the next ten years, a battle raged within me: the kid who cried over a photo of Martin Luther King versus the kid who wanted so badly to be part of the Galewood gang. Sometimes I was the self-appointed conscience of the neighborhood, a conscience to which no one listened, who spoke of civil rights and the martyrdom of King and the promise of Jesse Jackson. Other times I was the coward who said nothing when guys dropped the N-word indiscriminately or, worse, roared with laughter at their racist jokes.

I was an awfully mixed-up kid.

Then, when I was 22 years old, sitting in the office of the cable TV company I worked for while in college, surrounded by a different set of N-dropping lunkheads whom I inexplicably wished to be accepted by, I used the N-word myself.

What I didn’t know was that a fellow named Chris, tall, ambitious and intelligent, had sauntered into the room. He had a deep, commanding voice. He was articulate. And he was angry. “Now, why do you have to use racial epithets?” he asked. Or, more accurately, he demanded.

My mother’s dinner-table admonishment came back to me. I stuttered, “I dunno…, I didn’t mean anything by it…, don’t be mad or anything….” Chris glared at me, gave a tiny shake of his head, and walked out of the room. Chris, of course, was black.

At that moment, I swore I’d never utter the N-word again. It was an epiphany. I wanted to say to all the lunkheads I’d ever known, You know, you’re right. I am a nigger lover!

A couple of years later, walking down Michigan Avenue, I saw a familiar face approaching. It was Chris. As we neared each other, he noticed me looking at him. I started to open my mouth to say hello but thought the better of it when he finally recognized me. His face was transformed. It became filled with anger and disdain. And pain. He looked away and passed me by wordlessly.

What does all this have to do with science?

This: look up the word race. What does it mean?

Science, after spending the better part 400 years trying to justify racism, now offers the only definition that makes sense: nothing.

Race, anthropologists and geneticists say, ain’t nuthin’.

“The concept of race stems from the idea that the human species can be naturally subdivided into biologically distinct groups. In practice, however, scientists have found it impossible to separate humans into clearly defined races. Most scientists today reject the concept of biological race and instead see human biological variation as falling along a continuum.” So says the online encyclopedia, Encarta, in its entry on race.

How about a more venerable resource? “Genetic studies in the late 20th century denied the existence of biologically distinct races, and scholars now argue that ‘races’ are cultural interventions reflecting specific attitudes and beliefs that were imposed on different populations in the wake of western European conquests beginning in the 15th century.” That’s today’s take on race by the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Even the United States government, the same entity that gave its blessing to the peculiar institution of slavery, has come around. Here’s the US Census Bureau’s pronouncement on race in its final summary of the 2000 census, issued in 2003: “The concept of race, as used by the Census Bureau, reflects self-identification by people according to the race or races with which they most closely identify. These categories are socio-political constructs and should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature.”

Ian F. Haney Lopez, professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review: “The data compiled by various scientists demonstrates, contrary to popular opinion, that intra-group differences exceed inter-group differences. That is, greater genetic variation exists within the populations typically labeled black and white then between these populations.”

So what the hell was Martin Luther King, Jr. shot and killed for? For being a member of the black race. For nothing.

And I, through the use of the single word that condemns human beings to a prison of race, caused a man to feel pain for years.

Why? Because I was trying to curry favor with a bunch of guys who’d devoted significant amounts of energy to the hatred of members of another race. They had focused their energy on nothing.

I’ll leave it to a couple of brilliant thinkers, who are more often defined by their skin color than by the capacities of their minds, to explain my own behavior.

Cornel West, professor of religion at Princeton, quoted noted author Ralph Ellison in the opening chapter of his 1993 book, “Race Matters.” Ellison, who won the 1953 National Book Award for his novel, “The Invisible Man,” used the opportunity to attempt to explain how racism brought whites together.

Here’s what he wrote: “Since the beginning of the nation, white Americans have suffered from a deep, inner uncertainty as to who they really are. One of the ways that has been used to simplify the answer has been to seize upon the presence of black Americans and use them as a marker, a symbol of limits, a metaphor for the ‘outsider.’ Many whites could look at the social position of blacks and feel that color formed an easy and reliable gauge for determining to what extent one was or was not American. Perhaps that is why one of the first epithets that many European immigrants learned when they got off the boat was the term ‘nigger’ – it made them feel instantly American.”

So, according to West and Ellison, I only wanted to be part of a group, a real American, a member of the family. Maybe. Only it was the wrong damned family!

It should make me feel a bit better to know that thinkers such as West and Ellison understand why I was such a dope as a young man. But it doesn’t. Not when I think of the pain I saw on that fellow Chris’s face that day on Michigan Avenue.

That’s what I’m thinking about on the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Next time,

Big Mike