My First Racist

There was this nasty kid in our class at P. S. 217, back there in the Flatbush '50s. I'm not going to name names, but if anyone is cares to look, you can tell him by his superior, know-it-all smirk in the picture of our eighth grade graduating class. For convenience, I'll call this guy K. K was not particularly smart, or athletic, or talented, or attractive, or congenial, so he was quite a way down the social pole, a resident of the land of the nebbishes. But to give him his due, he was intense, dogged, hard-working, and perpetually argumentative. He was not afraid to offend. He took positions that no one else in the schoolyard supported. I remember him haranguing me on the subject of social security. It was a bad thing, he asserted, because his father could make more money by investing on his own rather than contributing to the pot. "But, but, but...," I remember stuttering, "it's insurance, and not everyone is a good investor." This exchange must have taken place during the Truman years. In the P. S. 217 schoolyard, where everyone was the child or grandchild of immigrants, FDR was our guy and social security was a revolutionary improvement in the quality of life. Wasn't it the case that my widowed grandmother received $32 a month from social security -- not sufficient to live on, surely, but a great help, enough to pay her rent? To argue against social security -- where in the world did K get such weird, off-the-track ideas?  Plus, equally astonishing, K was an enthusiastic Yankees fan. What an unholy, contrarian jerk!

Then K disappeared for a month or a year -- some period of time, I can't remember exactly how long. He had relatives in a southern city -- Baltimore, I believe -- and he lived with them for an extended while. When he returned, he starting spouting the most grotesque racist claptrap. It's engraved on my memory:  "they have a lot of uppity blacks down there, they won't even get off the sidewalk for you." Whoa, daddy. First of all, no one said "blacks" in those days -- they were "Negroes." And second -- "uppity?" I had never heard the term before and was shocked out of my skull. And "get off the sidewalk" --WTF???  These were words and sentiments far beyond my experience or conception, beyond anything I had ever heard uttered in our part of the universe. I was offended and flabbergasted. Remember, dear readers, that the only person more sacred to P. S. 217 schoolyarders than FDR was Jackie Robinson. It was from K that I first heard the grotesque sentence, "Would you want one to marry your sister?"

I tell you, I gave K a lot of room after those conversations. Truth to tell, there was no need for our paths to cross -- we weren't in the same classes and K didn't play softball or basketball -- as I said, he was pretty much of a klutz.  

Recently I looked up K on the internet. He's a retired professor of economics and is a "fellow" at a right-wing think tank. He's made a career out of opposing third-world development and supporting "free market solutions" to all our ills. That dogged dullness has produced a number of books. I've even found a picture of him -- where he was once flabby and pimpled, he's now bald and sleek, with a malevolent cast to his eye. 

There's always been a connection in my mind between conservatism and racism. The link is narcissism. "I've got mine, let "them" take care of themselves." For the Ks of the world, it's not "how do we take care of less fortunate and of our old people?"  It's, "how do 'we' deal with 'them.'"  And "they" are usually, almost always, darker-skinned than "we."  I'm sure that K would deny that his "free-market" views have anything to do with racism. But I know better -- I was there at the beginning, before K became quite so sleek.  

Comments

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1352179938]

I think that personalities are a combination of often-correlated characteristics. If they are unacceptable personalities, we call the combination a syndrome.

So of course, your First Racist comes to mind. I think that K’s syndrome includes an exaggeration of traits that all of us share with a de-emphasis on others that we share.

K’s syndrome includes but is not based on:
• Fear of the “other” which leads to hatred of the other and ideations of self supremacy (racism),
• A tendency toward authoritarianism, which includes blind faith in Daddy, (or Uncle Sam or general so and so, or God), chauvinist thinking and action,
• Patriarchal organization,
• And conservative, i.e. preferring tradition and stability over experimentation and action,
behavior.

The primal cause appears to be hereditary, as well as environmental. What the proportions are, I have no clue.
My name for this group is ‘Hateful’. LOL

Since Tradition in our country, at least what we were taught in PS 217, was/is to favor individual rights over community rights, the Hatefuls’ blind adherence to libertarian rather than the communitarian ideology is simply following tradition, which fits their syndrome. Remember the days of McCarthy while we were in 217. I took a dare one day back then, and said the word ‘communist’ on the corner of Ditmas and Rugby. This kind of childish belief and fear motivates the Hatefuls today. Comes in handy when you want to exploit others but still feel morally good.

And so on…..

[Otis Jefferson Brown]

The racist-conservative connection may appear valid at the moment, but in the long view of American history it doesn't hold up. They don't come any more conservative than John Adams, yet on racial matters (and on women's rights) he was far ahead of his contemporaries, while Thomas Jefferson - champion of individual liberty and patron saint of the modern Democratic Party - flunks miserably. Washington, the conservative, freed his slaves; Jefferson didn't. Racism was rife among the populist followers of William Jennings Bryan - have-nots all. There were many racist southern Democrats who were faithful supporters of FDR and the New Deal; if judged solely on their economic agenda, they'd be considered left-wingers. If you studied voters in West Virginia today, I'm sure you'd find that liberalism (on economic matters) and racism can co-exist quite comfortably. It's a big, complicated subject. Without having read it, I'd guess that Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" should be required reading for both of us.

[twitter.com/seanr1978]

Wow - that last paragraph really says it all. Thanks for posting this.

[Otis Jefferson Brown]

There's always something weird about Brooklyn kids from the 1940s who rooted for the Yankees. Think Rudy Giuliani.