Black/White Distrust I

We are talking about black/white distrust. About why it is so much easier to befriend an African or Caribbean black person—about why I instinctively distrust even Barack Obama and his wife—just because he is an American born black man. I am certain that if we ever met, the feeling would be entirely mutual. Because of who and what we are.
I’ve seen the insides of a hurting white person more than once in my life—whether it was pain from death, betrayal, loss of a job, loss of a hope or dream. Only once have I been permitted to look beyond the grinning face of a black human being and observe the real person.
Let’s call him J.J. He was about my age, in his late twenties. I had grown up in a reasonably tony area of Grand Rapids; he had grown up in the bowels of segregated Washington, D.C. He would look at his very dark skin and reminisce, “I was so black even the niggers discriminated against me. When I talked college, my counselors advised trade school.”
He made it through college (and, later, law school). He served four years in the army. His colonel was a southerner who hadn’t adapted to Truman’s integration of the military a decade before—but because of his sheer competence he advanced J.J. to captain in less than four years.
(He just didn’t let J.J. actively command troops.) By the time I knew him, he was a Special Assistant to the President of the United States. I’ve known few men I respected more. We met while we were both working for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
In the fall of 1967, a year before the 1968 election, LBJ and his advisors took a look at the explosive political situation (rife with civil rights riots all over the nation) and realized he wasn’t going to get re-elected without a lot of help from angry white voters.
So he began to dial back the activities of agencies like the EEOC. He placed a very wealthy black man from “Strivers’ Row” in Harlem as Chairman of the EEOC and had him bring in a lot of his white Harvard buddies to help run the agency—more circumspectly.
The new white guys didn’t know diddly squat. Someone had to break them in. The agency chief gave J.J. the job of taking these clueless white folk on a intimate tour of the Washington ghetto. So he took them out and showed them.
I was the person who sat with him after he returned from these tours and unwound. All the humiliation, pent up memories, frustration in the man poured out as I listened and watched.
Some of it was funny. He would walk past a couple of kids, reach down inside a bag they were carrying—and show the burglary tool to the newbie. Or he would walk up to a group of young black men standing on a corner, start a conversation and bring the white man into it.
At the next corner where there was a group of young men, he would turn to him and say, “Now you do it.” Easier, far easier, for that man to empty the Pacific Ocean with a teaspoon. But no humiliation of his clueless white charge could quite measure up to his own.
He told me how, at a White House reception with all manner of hors d’oeuvres on display, conspicuous at one side of the table would be a platter of fried chicken for him and any other blacks present. He learned to live with it.
I mistook our relationship for actual friendship. One weekend I was throwing a party—I casually invited him to bring his wife and come. He looked at me. “A lot of invitations I can’t turn down—but yours I can. I’m sorry; I’ve been the nigger at too many parties.” Ouch. How stupid of me. But some mistakes you simply cannot take back.
We went on working together. We covered each other’s back in an increasingly treacherous environment—but nothing was ever quite the same between us. I had foolishly presumed. My education in racial distrust was continuing.
But he had let me—wittingly or no—see into his real self. I had seen at least some of his insides. I never forgot that—I never stopped respecting him.
But we could never have been friends.
More next time.

Michigan's Hiroshima--Black/White Distrust

I wrote yesterday about the chasm of distrust between whites and blacks in Detroit, in Washington and in most of the nation. I was telling the story of an experience I had in the 1960s when I tried to organize a community to keep it from being destroyed.
The immediate cause for this destruction was a white apartment management that had so much contempt for black Americans that they felt no need to continue to maintain apartment buildings blacks moved into. I was fighting to force them to.
I had come to rely on a wise old black preacher who was seated next to me when the door to our community meeting burst open and some drunken, angry white men advanced on me with clubs and ax handles, cursing me as a “dirty, commy, nigger loving Jew.”
The danger was real and serious. I didn’t know yet just how serious. Something happens to me when things get nasty—in a traffic situation or on the streets. It isn’t courage; I don’t know what it is. My insides go cold and I feel nothing. Time slows so much that it nearly stops.
But, I thought, I am not alone. I looked over at my “steering committee”, nearly all black. They were frozen in place, fear all over their faces. The old black pastor stood up suddenly, looked at the drunken deputy sheriff and pointed at me.
“If I had known,” he shouted, “what sort of a person this man was, I would NEVER have had anything to do with him.” It dawned on me that I was utterly alone. My black “allies”—even though they out-numbered the white bullies by a substantial number, and were mostly young and strong—were going to sit on their hands and watch me get pounded.
My eyes went back to the advancing drunk. He was half-way down the aisle, coming toward me, right where a cross aisle went from right to left across the auditorium. Somehow I felt moved to ask, “What are you so afraid of?”
His bully boy followers hawed and hooted. Him? Afraid? He’s not afraid of nothin’! The sheriff, however, came to a full stop. He turned to his left, ran down the cross aisle and out a side door. His bully boys stopped, looked confused, then turned and followed him out.
I felt the meeting had gone its full length. I dismissed them and they left (I would hope sheepishly). One of the younger, husky black men came up close to me and said, “We thought they were going to kill you.”
Well, duh, thanks for all your help—verbal and otherwise.
The next morning as I was going up the steps to my office one of the attendee’s slipped up side of me. He asked me to understand, “You’re a white man; you have options. You can live anywhere. We’re black—we don’t have options—so we couldn’t help you.”
I looked at him, “I thought that was the whole point of what we were doing. Helping keep the places you could live maintained and decent.” He gave me no answer. I took his brown arm, held it next to my white arm and said, “I guess we were born with our uniforms on.”
I moved out of the complex a few weeks later. Some of the black steering committee helped me load a U-Haul truck. I appreciated the help—but I do suspect they were just happy to be rid of me. I never saw any of them again.
Over the next years, the scales fell from my eyes. I made no further efforts to assist in areas where I would find myself alone and without backing. I expressed no surprise when a charming black hostess invited me to dinner and then went into a tirade about how all whites should be killed (I tend not to accept invitations to any more black homes—we smile and chat in public venues).
I learned in a hard and dangerous way that I am not trusted on their side of the fence (imaginary fence or real) and I learned the sad reality that I cannot trust them. Many of the million folk who have fled Detroit learned the same hard, unhappy lesson.
If somehow, someway, somebody doesn’t trust somebody, we’re going to have a lot more dead cities like Detroit—and it won’t be all the auto companies’ fault. God help us.
More later.