2020.07.26 My "Racism"—Brief Anecdotal HIstory, Part Seven, Rights, Duties, A Rite

Chapter XVIII. Social Disorganization. My Rights?

I signed up for a college course, Social Disorganization, because I loved the title of it. It promised stimulation—something different. The professor Mr. Neal DeNood didn’t stride in and slowly approach the podium with professorial dignity, but rather bounced in and hopped upon the dais. I liked him instantly. He had zip, was extraordinarily handsome, and sported a small upper-lip mustache. Most all the other male professors were clean shaven. I’d heard someone in the religion department use the word charisma—sparkling with charm, maybe from God. Mr. De Nood was that.

“There are no rights without duties,” DeNood began the first class, paused, then repeated his dictum. I wrote it down twice. De Nood elaborated on his premise until it was embarrassing—humiliating. I had never thought of this equation. I had assumed my rights were legal, eternally guaranteed, personal, and secured by our constitution. I never thought of them as dependent on someone else’s duty to honor them.

Social DISorganization happened as a result of too much unevenness. It meant revolution, sometimes war, sometimes riots and crimes, even assassinations. It happened when basic human rights to things like housing, education, healthcare, and economic security were not supported by appropriate legal, economic, medical, and economic structures and policies, accessible to all members of that society. In a democratic society the people have a say in such policies, and politicians work to assure them.

I pondered about private schools and public schools. I’d started in private and switched to public. I was glad, thinking it would be less snobby/preppy. Smith was private and costly. Students earned their place by academic merit—and money. Wealth or merit?  Which?

Was my privilege my right? my duty? both? neither?  How much did it depend on money? This might have been the first time my own color—white—dimly occurred to me as a factor.

Neal De Nood was a full professor in 1958. He’d started his teaching career at Smith in 1937-38, the year I was born. Safe to say he was too old for me, but you can see how handsome he was in this archival photo. He is in the right hand photo, second from left. Perky, huh? The archivist wrote: De Nood “startled his colleagues and undergraduates with his prowess as a lecturer, his unorthodox views, and his penchant for the sensational.”


I never forgot that no rights without duties wisdom. It was inspirational—meant to tantalize us smart young people to go out into the world and take up our duty: make sure that every American is able at least to exercise her or his right to a good education of their choice.

De Nood’s equation floundered in American society. The duty half of it too often crashed like a seesaw.

Chapter XIX.  The Chaplain

I gave a glancing thought to God, the one I’d met under a table as a young child, the one in my book, the one sitting in a garden listening and loving every sight and sound on earth, the one who listened to me when I chattered on and on about the injustice of my parent’s nasty cocktail hour, the God I’d lost track of. But I remembered the Bible and bits about Jesus—all into rights and duties and justice and peace, but they killed him.

The next best option was the college chaplain, the Rev. Mr. Richard Unsworth—another crushingly handsome object for my affection. Still, I thought he might have some ideas about my rights and duty questions. He agreed about Jesus. He also listened to my yearnings for religious ritual—sort of Catholic but not. Listening was God-like. He suggested I try the Episcopal church—the very last thing I thought would help.

I’d grown up in the Presbyterian Church which in the 1940’s and ’50’s was dry as parchment. I had tried those Catholics that Betty Singer sang about and discovered at Mass, a Mystery called Eucharist which held me in its grip, even in Latin. BUT, the Roman Catholic priest I talked to was a bust. He did okay about racism (not a godly thing) but he failed at sexism (women were ungodly, except Mary-in-concrete). So now I would try this Episcopal Church, thanks to this gorgeous chaplain who wasn’t even an Episcopalian.

While driving my mind nuts thinking about rights, I found a rite—a ritual, a sacramental meal that required no thinking at all and engaged my body—kneel, bow, cross my chest with Christ, eat, bend a knee but not in protest. What struck me about this holy meal was that everyone was welcome at the altar table. No one was turned away. Of course you had to be Christian, but I brushed that requirement aside, because it looked like everyone had a right to come and be fed. This church fulfilled its duty. This Eucharist was a meal my mind could not comprehend but could love. 

Intuitively, I realized that this meal could not be racist if it tried—unless of course the Church and its control issues mucked it up.

The Episcopal Church and I bonded. While still in college I was confirmed.


Chapter XX.  A Psych. Test

I thought to major in English, because I love literature. I thought to major in Religion, because I love God. I thought to major in Spanish, because I love languages, could roll my R’s, and my favorite Spanish professor, a poet from Spain, no less, was one of my crushees. I thought to major in Psychology, because I needed clues to the inner workings of, well, everyone. Spanish poetry won out, in large part because the department was small and I thought I could shine.

While I was cogitating all this I took several psychology courses. One of them included some kind of a personality test, not Myers Briggs or MMPI. It was designed to identify personality types. I answered everything, hid nothing. I had a lot to hide, but I didn’t know it yet. The test revealed my personality type: RELIGIOUS. I was astonished. I’d hoped for something like adored-by-all or destined for literary fame. But religious?

Curiously, what the religious personality type defined was someone who tended to see things in wholes, who looked for and saw the larger picture, valuing it, in spite of contradictory details. I already knew I wasn’t practical, and now I knew I’d always be doomed to seek balance, this equity that is impossibly possible, dependent as it is on rights and duties.  

2020.07.19 My "Racism"—Brief Ancdotal History, Part Six. Privilege?

Scene XV. Racism—A Discernment

I know it’s unfair to write about my racism without acknowledging that it came about largely because of the absence of Blacks, coupled with the piercing, indelible, unshakeable memory of my childhood friendship with one black girl, Carol Lee. It was that friendship, and the shame I felt when I chose to have my beach club party without her because the beach club barred blacks, that let me know there even was such a thing as racism—a phenomenon I did not know how to name, but whose impact stayed with me. I chose from privilege rather than from heart.

I do not say: “My best friend is black”—as if that assertion proved anything. One of my best friends really was black. Our connection happened over a few summers, and I haven’t seen Carol Lee  in over 70 years. I tried to work Google-magic to find her and did find one image I thought might be my Carol Lee—in an obituary, alas. Nevertheless, my Carol Lee memory became a benchmark strong enough to serve as a plumb line against which I measured, and measure, my felt racism.

My “Racism” has quotation marks around racism, because I’m writing about my discernment process over some 80 years. My scenarios are wisps of personal memory that structure the grid of my learnings—bits and pieces that unfold in answer to my question: I’m not racist—or am I?  I do not yet know the answer.

I intersperse some contemporary wisdom on the subject, everything in the context of my own direct experience.  Racism is word that in 2020 is headlined all over the world and laid at our national doorstep as a call, I’d say from God, to examine and change our personal and national addiction to its practice. It’s time.  

In 2019, I heard African-American, Isabelle Wilkerson, the author of The Warmth of Other Suns, speak about the great migration of southern blacks to urban areas of the North and West, I was spellbound by the memoir-like flavor of her historical study. A whole people were forced to move en masse, because, although emancipated, they were denied adequate access to resources necessary for thriving in America.

The New York Times Magazine (7/19/2020) published Wilkerson’s article, “America’s Enduring Caste System” in which she imaged caste as the usher’s flashlight in a darkened theater silently guiding us to our assigned seats—assigned, but who bought the tickets?  This is caste, not racism, according to Wilderson who writes: “The instinctive desire to reject the very idea of current discrimination on the basis of a chemical compound in the skin is an unconscious admission of the absurdity of race as a concept. With no universally agreed upon definition, we might see racism as a continuum rather than an absolute.”  (Italics mine.)

Anyone who has ever been in high school knows what caste feels like. Everyone is ranked. Everyone is hurt. No one forgets. It is the field in which the seeds of racism, and all other -isms, take root and grow.

Scene XVI. Dominus Flevit 

One makes forced choices when trapped in a radically caste-enclosed and unjust system. I thought of Jesus, how he sweated and wept and groaned before he decided to head to Jerusalem to challenge the system of injustice that trapped his people. He shed tears over Jerusalem when he got there, telling his followers that the things that made for peace and justice and love were “hidden from their eyes.” Many thing were hid from my eyes. I too know so little, so very little about so many things. I was no Jesus. I had no larger vision. All I had was my ignorance, twinges of conscience, and a few tears of my own.

There is a church in Jerusalem marking the site where Jesus wept about all this systemic ignorance and the impending destruction of the Temple. There wasn’t much he could do—not much at all. The church is shaped like a teardrop. When I saw it in 2012, I wept for all I did not know, had not known, still don’t know. The church is called Dominus Flevit (The Lord Wept). It means a lot to me.

 

Scene XVII. A Wound of Privilege

I went to Smith College, partly because I was NOT going to go to Vassar like my maternal grandmother who’d graduated in the “class of aughty-aught".  Also, because I loved Smith’s campus and living in houses—no dorms and no sororities with all that sisterly pain. Mostly, however, because my best friend, Annie, was going there too.

I knew it was a privilege to go to Smith, not because I knew I was privileged, but because my father groaned out loud about the “astronomical”tuition which in 1956 was absurdly low—below $10,000 in today's dollars.

Annie had to leave Smith after one year. Her scholarship money dwindled, and her father couldn’t afford to pay the tuition. Our hearts were broken. Impulsively, I told her my father would pay her room and board, but she said her father would be too proud to accept. We both were right.

Annie went on to graduate from the University of Connecticut with honors. We stayed friends of course, but there was an almost indiscernible crack inside me, like a slight fracture in a bone. What was it? Guilt? It was the fissure of privilege. I could spell that word correctly, but now I was learning to feel its power—the power to rent asunder, to hurt when it was supposed to help.

Despite my father’s money worries, we had wealth—not vast amounts of money but wealth, that invisible security blanket enjoyed by some and not others. It had to do with family security; it had to do with neighborhood, class and family assets; it had to do with privilege and the cruel habit of ranking that limited opportunity. It had to do with the same thing that forced those southern blacks to flee in order to survive. It had to do with something a friend recently said in the midst of her own severe lack of resources: “I’m super scared, but I know I’ll be okay because I have family with money to help—if I get less proud.”  

I had wealth and Annie didn’t. The wealth gap had nothing to do with what I’d been brought up to value: work hard and you’ll get ahead. Oh no you won’t! Annie’s father had worked and struggled all his life. He was bright, had a PhD, and was principal of a school. My father worked on Madison Avenue, a business executive. I was learning about classism, a first cousin to racism, fertilizer of privilege, pollinator of all -isms.

Annie and I were white, yet our friendship was wounded by my privilege. We cried so hard—so very hard—when Annie left Smith and I stayed. My privilege bought me rank and a great education, but it sure did not buy me peace of mind, and it sure didn’t make me feel good. 

At Smith I met my first Jew. I didn’t know what a Jew was. Now that is an hilarious statement. Really! It sounds absurdly anti-semitic now, but I didn’t know what that was. I’d heard of the Holocaust, but not really, if you know what I mean. As with Blacks, there were no Jews in my suburban town.

My sheltered ignorance was appalling, not my fault, and painful anyway. White as I was, I didn’t connect it with my privilege—yet.

I chose academics to make my mark. It did pay off. I studied like a fiend, got good grades, earned graduate degrees, and felt smarter than I really was. Okay, that’s not fair to me, but in college I didn’t yet know how to be fair to myself.

2020.07.12 My "Racism"—A Brief Anecdotal HIstory. Part Five. Race-Blind/Caste-Savvy

By the mid-1950s, my “racism” went underground—buried alive. You know how it is when you’re looking into a blizzard—wild snow so heavy you can’t see a thing except all-white horizons everywhere you look. I was learning to live-race-blind.

I’d made it through Junior High and was headed for High School. At least I had a couple of small but discernible boobs, one cashmere sweater, and a pencil skirt in which actual walking was prohibitive. So I minced along, pretending to be sexy—proud to have had a one-time smattering of blood. A real—my type—boyfriend was the next step to fitting in.

Scene XII. First Kiss

Bob was my very first crush. That’s what they called it when you felt mentally and emotionally crushed by some combination of anxiety and hormonal desire—enough to make you inarticulate and turn dumb. Bob was pathologically shy, hence I targeted him for flirting practice. We went for a twilight walk in the local bird sanctuary. Trees hung over the paths we walked, the air smelled like peaches, and every bird was singing an aria. I felt faint with sheer joy as Bob pulled me closer—and closer. His breath smelled. 

Still, my August birthday loomed, and for my sweet sixteen birthday party I needed a date. This party would have boys. Boys! Bob, the only boy I’d ever kissed, would say yes. Darien had a private beach club. I’d lived this scenario before. Damn! But now I had other problems. 

First, there was the humiliating problem of a swimsuit, preferably one that would magically make me look slim and sleek, like Esther Williams. I’d solved the my-date problem. The more profound and invisible problem was the guest list. My best friend helped me with that. I did not, thank God, have to make racial choices. There were no Carol Lees in “whitesville.”  I concealed the queasy swell I felt inside, but I remembered anyway. I remembered till it ached. I dove off the float, my arms parting the cool dark waters like Moses had, or maybe God—down and down  as deep as I could without drowning. It helped.

Scene XIII. The Right White Boy Named Bill

Bill Brakeman was the most handsome boy I’d ever seen. Even better, he was a failed immigrant, transplanted from Chicago as I had been from New York. We first met at one of those teenage parties hosted by the parents of a classmate who was more handicapped than me. I only imagined I was fat, the worst thing to be, but this girl was actually fat. 

I lurked at the food table, grazing on celery while longing for a huge piece of the chocolate layer cake, when I spotted Bill. He stood in the corner alone with beckoning eyes—not flirting just longing. My heart leaped into his arms. (No wonder “Blue Moon” eventually became our song.) Bill was going steady with someone else, but in the game of high school belonging, steadiness wasn’t a strong player, even though everyone craved it.

Our first official date was the next day. We went to a football game. I didn't understand a thing about football, but that didn't matter, because I was with this boy named Bill who, I was sure, knew what he was doing. Two teams ran out onto the field; cheerleaders jumped and howled; the announcer blasted: Tarrytown versus North Tarrytown. Not even our school! We laughed and laughed and watched the damn game anyway. We became a couple.

High School was full of racial-like categories—jocks, prom queen/cheerleaders, spicks, hoods, wops, nerds, whores, aka sluts, and madonnas like the one in Betty Singer’s song. Groupings were organized according to physical appearance and ranged from most popular to untouchables— like Phineas, or the girl who still wore an undershirt. There were religious classifications too—Catholics and everybody else. There were no Jews thanks to an  unspoken agreement among realtors not to show properties in the shore towns of lower Fairfield County to Jews.

I was in the middle group—a “madonna” secretly aspiring to slutdom. We girls struggled to climb up the social ladder. A lot depended on who we dated, or if we had a car, or if we had a sport or a special gift. Bill, for example, was an electronics whiz and could fix anyone’s radio. I had won the 9th grade foul shooting contest.

In truth, there wasn’t much social mobility at all in high school. It was a caste system. You just knew it—without going to India. 

Jimmy Fraccola was Italian and olive-skinned—the wop category. He was extremely handsome and had a crush on me. Once at the public beach—not a club—he pulled me under the water and kissed me. It was slimy; I was sure I would drown; I ran up the beach and sheltered with my girlfriends. “You won’t believe what just happened?” I reported, horrified and titillated at once. Jimmy, who aspired to be a cop and had a motorcycle, didn’t give up. He once pursued the car Bill and I were in—a chartreuse convertible no less. His cycle roared and farted, because that’s what motorcycles do, as he pulled in front of our car. I felt as if I was in a movie—the beautiful young heroine pursued by the ‘bad guy’. Would “prince charming” rescue her?  Jimmy, playing cop, ordered Bill out of the car, and threatened to beat him up, announcing that I was going to be his girlfriend. No one asked me of course. Bill stood up to him and told him to leave us alone, or else. I wasn’t sure what “or else” meant, but  Jimmy backed off.  Bill was a hero—my hero.

We were friends immediately. I could be myself with Bill, even gorge on chocolate cake without embarrassment. This bond of affection meant more to me than his looks or his bravery. We could navigate high school together. I didn’t think of this back then, but Bill was also safe—normal, white.

The charge I’d gotten from Jimmy’s dashing bravura at first tempted me, but my gut flashed a warning sign. My mother would have said: “He’s not your type, darling.” Normally, this would have send me joyfully into Jimmy’s embrace, for the sake of defiance. But, resistance tugged at me inside.  Fear of Sex? Well, of course. Italian? Maybe, but Italians were common in our high school. There was Bartolo, Romanello, Fraccola. Still, something more subtle exerted its pull on me. Something I couldn’t then define.

I was learning internalized ethnic prejudice. I was running into the undertow of the high school caste system whose outer accoutrements I easily identified but whose infrastructure consisted of unwritten rigid rules about who could be where with whom and how. There was no why.

Oddly, the Parable of the Sower, told by Jesus and remembered in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, raced across my mental scan.The Sower sows seeds in all kinds of soil, not all of it receptive, hence unfruitful. I had read the Bible, and intuited something wrong about this parable—maybe something that had wisdom about racism in it?

Chapter XIV.  Going Beyond, aka Postscripts

Jimmy died in 2016. James Joseph Bruno Fraccola, still handsome, had realized his dream. He was a cop in the Darien Police Department, also married with six children and thirteen grandchildren. One of those Catholics! According to his obituary, Jimmy had “ranked as deadly marksman and was truly a cop’s cop.” Thank God, he didn’t have a gun in high school! I felt a surge of plain happiness when I read that Jimmy had made good.

Bill and I stayed together over the years—on and off/off and on. We married in1962. Good humor, deep caring, and the blessing of four remarkable children sustained us over twenty years of marriage, half of it painfully insecure. Divorce brought intense grief. We both remarried. For all of it, and all the memories I am grateful.

Bill died unexpectedly of acute leukemia with respiratory complications on February 14, 2020. He was my first true love, the one who first helped me feel real, and I grieve.

The heart is a spacious vessel, capable of holding many loves, an infinity of feelings.

To be continued.

2020.07.05 My "Racism"—A Brief Anecdotal History, Part Four. America?

We weren’t Catholic. I knew that because my mother said Catholics weren’t really American. Who was American? Was Carol Lee? Did she feel not American?  Is racism an American problem? 

July 4th was Independence Day. Americans were celebrating—with flag-waving and fireworks—our independence, our formation as a nation, a democracy.  How ironic it is for me to be writing about my own racism in 2020 when “Independence” the very definition of  our “dream” is NOT fully enjoyed by every American. I have no choice but to observe my world today and reflect on it in the light of my experience.  Am I American?


Scene X.  Phineas, Hairy Legs, and Mr. Fitz

There is probably no culture more cruel and life-threatening than that of a junior high school bus—that long orange monster that rolls around town and picks up strays who gather at a designated SCHOOL BUS STOP.

Unless you were totally normal you were a target for torturous humor. For girls, normal meant cute, perky, flirty, in a cashmere sweater with obvious upper body endowments and a waist, ripe for “slutdom”. For boys, normal meant swaggering and strutting and punching as if they had something no one else did, panting to create “sluts”.

I shifted from side to side, pulling at my skirt or trying to puff up my hair without upsetting the overweight pile of books shoulder-strapped together and poised on one hip.

Phineas failed the normalcy profile—catastrophically. He didn’t strut, he galumphed. He played the violin which he carried with him onto the bus. He wore thick glasses. He was borderline obese. Every day when Phineas thudded onto the bus the boys cooed and wooed him to the back of the bus where they’d gathered for the massacre. They forced  Phineas down onto the floor. They took his violin, removed it from its case and played it till it squeaked in protest; they called him names; they spit on him, and removed his glasses; they held him down so he could not get off at his stop. Every day he walked home. Phineas, to his eternal junior high school shame, cried.

I will never forget Phineas. I felt nauseous. I cried. I prayed. I said nothing. I was learning to be a coward. I tried recently to look him up on Google, which despite its near-divine status, failed on Phineas. Please God, let him have lost weight, ditched his Mayflower-like family name, wear contact lenses, and be a brilliant violinist in some symphony orchestra. 

There was a female version of this horror show. She was overweight like Phineas but with a “normal” name—until she earned the nickname of “Hairy Legs”.  Girls are just as mean as boys but less physical. We relentlessly teased her, because her unshaved legs were, well, totally abnormal. She said that her mother wouldn’t let her shave her legs, and back then girls did not wear pants. I cursed her mother.

She suffered for something she could do nothing about. This made me think, once again, of Carol Lee. This bullying behavior was racist BUT all these students were white. And so was I.

The school bus driver, Mr. Fitz, was the owner of the bus franchise, Fitzgeralds. He was obese, so fat that there was no space between the lower edge of the steering wheel and his paunch. I stared at him to see if I could somehow get him to stop the boys and rescue Phineas. He did nothing. In fact, once I saw him smirking. He could have at least intervened to make sure Phineas got off at his stop.

I felt tortured myself. My way of dealing with my horror was to demand that my mother drive me to school. I would never ride the bus again—never.

These people were all white just like everyone else in Darien, but I was beginning to wonder if racist behavior had broad applications. White-Against-White?  I wished I could talk with Carol Lee about all this.


Scene XI. Gunnar Myrdal

Throughout junior and senior high school there was a required course called Problems of Democracy. Some schools called it Civics. It was to help students understand how our government was structured, how it worked—or didn’t. Our teacher was Mr. Beckwith. I liked him, and I liked the course. I don’t remember what texts we read, but I do remember that Mr. Beckwith talked a lot, in just about every class, about this one book by Gunnar Myrdal. It was on racism. Why was he teaching that when we all were white, and the book was not the assigned reading for the class? Were we even a race? Of course none of us read it, but I have never forgotten that name: Gunnar Myrdal.

I looked up Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987). He was a sociologist and economist and a Swedish Nobel laureate, a professor at Stockholm University in Sweden, and, according to record, openly anti-Nazi. Myrdal’s major work was An American Dilemma. The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, published in 1944. Here is Gunnar Myrdal at about the time he published the book I never read.

Myrdal's book was a study of race relations in America. The “dilemma” was the perceived conflict between high ideals embodied in what Myrdal called the “American Creed” on the one hand and poor performance on the other. Democracy in America was unable to put its human rights ideals into practice for African Americans, one tenth of our population. Myrdal had planned a similar study on gender inequality, but he couldn’t get funding for it.

If Mr. Beckwith was so hot for this book why wasn’t it on the curriculum? 

I was learning about censorship in school curricula. People behind closed doors decided what texts students could read, and believe me the lily white town where I lived would not want to stir up trouble. Taxes fund public education. White people pay high taxes. Money controls learning, controls what is taught and how. I learn best when I’m stirred up. I felt sorry for Mr. Beckwith.

I learned something, a take-away they now call it, from Myrdal’s thesis: when I don’t perform well it’s usually because I don’t like what I’m doing. I’m not invested in the endeavor. America wasn’t invested in its own “dream.”  Was I?  Was I American?  Am I?  Was the Bible?

I don’t know. I didn’t know then either.  First I’d get a boyfriend, handsome if possible.

To be continued.