Since I often get to talk to students in my university classes about race in America, I think I have a good sense of what they think it is. I tell them that I'm old enough (65) to be able to remember a particular era of racism in America and I say that it was different from what they think, and worse. I also tell them that I can remember America before television, fast food, and rockandroll.They believe it, but only just barely. The stories I tell them about race in America are about how I experienced it growing up in Erie, Pennsylvania, then a classic blue-collar, working class city.Some of my anecdotes they find hard to believe, like the fact that I never touched the skin of a Negro ( the term we used then) until after I graduated from college. But what I mostly want them to get is that racism was not what they think it was, an idea, a concept, that it was in fact a feeling, and an awful one.
I remember hearing my neighbor say that we could not allow Negroes into the public swimming pool because then it would have to be drained and scrubbed clean and refilled before white people could use it again. This, remember, is in a city in the North. In a documentary I saw recently, I learned that the same thing actually happened to Dorothy Dandridge at a hotel in Las Vegas where she was performing, this when she was of course relatively rich and famous. Can you sense what the white people were feeling? It was not just that Negroes were thought to be dirty (though that was part of what people said), it was worse: people obviously thought there was something about dark skin that was taboo, untouchable.
It was so untouchable that I can never remember seeing a white person touch a black person on television until into the sixties, though Sammy Davis Junior might have been an exception. And if a white and black person were to kiss on television? It would have been on the front pages of all the newspapers in the country.
Recently reading another volume of Caro's biography of LBJ, I was reminded of another expression I had not heard in years. When Johnson was trying to persuade key southern senators to support his civil rights legislation, he had to have conversations with them about what those senators called (excuse the vulgarity of this please)"greasy niggers." You see what I mean? It was not just that blacks were seen as inferior; that one would be easy to disprove as they gained access to education and jobs. It was not just that "they" were socially inferior; social class has a certain dynamic quality even in the American south. It was that (again please excuse this vulgarity) they were disgusting to whites. They made white people sick.
When I read a Faulkner novel with my students I talk with them about this feeling so that they can begin to understand (but only begin) why an artist as creative and independent as Faulkner was able to say so often, and even in later work, that Negroes "smelled different" from whites. Most of them get it on their own, of course, that this was a way of experiencing the fact that black people were working people, that they sweated under the hot Mississippi sun while a lot of the whites sat on their porches (or like Faulkner in their offices). If my twenty year old students can see this so clearly, why was it invisible to someone with Faulkner's imagination and mind. 'Well, he was a racist after all," students sometimes say with the kind of self assurance that comes with their age. He was, I think most readers would say, and they would also say that he hated racism with the kind of rage we can only imagine, because he hated it from the inside. He felt it and hated that he felt it.
I admit to my students that I was stained emotionally by growing up during these years. They know me and can see that I try hard to be a good person so they find it hard to believe that I was tainted by racism. But I was. Most Americans of my generation were.
I wrote this diary in honor of Meteor Blades who resisted it. Thanks man!