A brief history of racism

Last week, the Associated Press and other news outlets reported that racial attitudes have gotten worse, not better, since the United States elected its first African American president four years ago in 2008.  Those who admitted to having anti-African American feelings rose from 48% in 2008 to 51% in 2012.  If the researchers included implicit racist beliefs, the proportion rose from 49% in 2008 to 56% in 2012.  Anti-Hispanic attitudes surveyed in 2011 were reported at 52% (57% by the implicit racism criteria).  This is disheartening.  My social science-trained spouse believes that this is a suspect conclusion; he suggested that more people surveyed were willing to admit to racist attitudes than the people surveyed during the last presidential election.  I hope he is right.

The survey brought to mind not the small minority of white supremacists in America, or members of what the Southern Poverty Law Center refer to as the Patriot Movement, but what I imagine is the wide middle swath of people who wouldn’t dream of burning a cross on anyone’s front yard, or putting a  group of people in a concentration camp, but nonetheless harbor ideas that diverge significantly from the idea of Ebony and Ivory living together in perfect harmony.  Families like the one I grew up in.

My grandfather, a man whose memory I still revere for the selfless love he showed me as he helped raise me, was born in 1907 and brought up in a Swedish American home in Nebraska.  He moved to Wisconsin in the 1930s.  Most of my memories of him are happy ones — planting trees together on his farm, milling around his modest home while he made dinner at 5 pm on the dot for our family, listening as he hummed along to country songs by singers like Anne Murray.  But along with those are memories of him talking at the television as the NBC news broadcast images of Billy Carter and men with covered heads and dark glasses.

“Damned A-rabs!” he’d shout over the traditional, delicious meat-and-potatoes meal he’d just cooked, saying that whatever Billy Carter was doing, it was un-American — as un-American as whatever the hell “Hanoi” Jane Fonda had been doing in Vietnam a couple of decades earlier.  Just behind my grandpa, on the shelf that held little colored vases my grandma collected, was a certificate from the John Birch Society thanking him for his membership.  (Over the years as I have revisited my childhood dining room in my imagination, I have wanted to excise this – telling myself that I was mixing up “Birch” with the American Tree Farm certificate that stood nearby.  But alas, no; both pieces of paper were there, congratulating my grandpa for his patronage.)

My grandmother was born in 1908 in to a mixed European, mostly German-American Nebraska family.  I remember her as an outspoken, often overbearing woman with an impeccable coif, an ever-present cigarette — a tough-talking yet loving grandma.  When she watched the news over dinner with us, if there was a news story about dysentery in a foreign country, or teenage girls getting married, or one tribal group wiping out another, she would declare over the background sounds of Tom Brokaw and David Brinkley that she “thanked God in heaven that I was born White and American!”  Other times, when describing trips she had taken to big cities or people she had met in her life, she told us that “Black people have a different smell.”

You would think that having biracial grandchildren sitting there listening to this would have made my grandparents self-conscious.  You’d be wrong.  To them, they were simply stating the truth; and Black people were 100% different from Chinese people, who were only somewhat different from White people.  Their love for us, the products of my Caucasian mother’s brief marriage to my Chinese father, was separate from their ideas that their culture was the best.  (Of course, this also has to do with the benevolent racist assumptions of being Asian — my grandparents and many others believed that my brother and I were hard-wired for industriousness, love of the traditional family unit, and math.)

My mother didn’t say anything as outrageous as this when she was raising my brother and me.  But we grew up in an overwhelmingly Caucasian place, and it was hard to avoid the default settings of the implicit racism the overwhelming sea of Whiteness bred in us — where having “a Black friend” was supposed to be shorthand for “there’s no way I could be a racist!”  Etc.  I could tell stories about how she claims that if the perfect man happened into her life and was Black, she claims she would date/marry him, or about how she speaks warmly to the naturalized American citizen from Latin America who babysits my children and yet is adamant that illegal immigration from south of the border is a scourge and a danger to “our way of life.”

But I can’t quite bring myself to go there.  In an election year filled with racial and cultural innuendo (who is “one of us,” who is not), this all cuts too close to the bone for me.

I don’t claim to be fully evolved when it comes to racism.  I think of it as a journey rather than a destination.