This Is America

This Is America

Flower Delivery (Existential Violence, part one)

I spent a summer during college working for a flower shop. Mostly, I did deliveries, which was actually pretty fun. Back in those days, I really enjoyed driving. When you're 20, there's not much better than cruising around with your music blasting and singing at the top of your lungs. Especially if you're getting paid to do just that! Of course, even rush hour traffic in Shreveport (at the time, anyway; I don't know about now) was nothing compared to the kind of traffic we have out here in the Bay area all the time, and driving is something I actively avoid these days.

All of which is beside the point. Beside it, because what's important is that I worked at that flower shop.

Except for the other delivery driver, all of the other people who worked at the flower shop were women, and it was owned by a woman. I suppose that makes sense. In the South, if you were a dude who liked to do anything with flowers, it made you automatically gay. Even working as a delivery driver made you suspect, I shit you not. Meaning, it was said to me in all seriousness more than once by dudes who found out I delivered flowers, "You're not gay, are you?" Which is to say that I don't think a guy could have gotten away with working in a flower shop or arranging flowers in the South back then. And that still might be the case, especially these days, in a lot of places. If you like to work with flowers, it means you're gay and, if you're gay, you're going to get the shit beat out of you.

Yeah, that bit of social commentary was free.
But, then, it's all free, but that was extra free.

What this all means is that I spent a considerable amount of time that summer listening to this small group of women doing a lot of gossiping, especially about their home lives, and talking shit about their husbands. Or praising them, depending on the day. There was one woman in particular who -- the correct word here is not precisely "complained," but I don't have a better word than that at the moment -- complained about her husband a lot: He was in the midst of a midlife crisis and, evidently, doing everything he could to kill himself.

I don't mean that he was trying to commit suicide, at least not directly, but he had taken up living dangerously and doing all kinds of extreme sport shit.

It all started with a red sports car. A small red sports car (I don't remember what kind, but he did offer me a ride once which I awkwardly declined). A convertible. Which he never drove below the speed limit unless you count the brief number of seconds it took him to get to 60 when taking off from a red light (which is why I declined a ride in the car). I think there were numerous speeding tickets involved in all of this.

From the sports car, it moved on to skydiving, hang gliding, and I don't know what all else. He really wanted to try surfing, but it's not really the kind of thing you can do in Louisiana. Still, she wasn't too concerned until he took up dirt bikes. At the point when I started working there, he'd already hurt himself several times, and she was legitimately frightened that he was going to die.

I'd heard a lot about him by the time I finally met him. He came walking through the back door of the flower shop in all of his dirt bike gear and covered in, well, dirt. He was in his 50s, hair gone to grey, wiry frame. I don't know what he did for a living (other than try to kill himself), but his wife worked at the flower shop for the social interaction, not because they needed the money, and that money was just hers to spend as she pleased, so she also used to talk about what she bought with her paychecks. He had a swagger to his step, unless it was all of the dirt bike padding that caused it. Honestly, it was hard to tell.

He'd come by that day because he'd wrecked his dirt bike that morning -- but don't worry, because he was okay -- and it was going to take a couple of weeks for the repairs. Because he didn't want to wait to get the motorcycle back, he'd gone to buy a new one. However, while there, he'd been seduced by a crotch rocket (that's the motorcycle equivalent of a sports car, for those of you who don't know) and decided to take up street racing while waiting to get his dirt bike back. He wanted to show off his new bike; unfortunately, not a single one of us really cared. The other delivery driver might have because he was also a mechanic and into that stuff, but he wasn't there that day.

The husband-guy really needed the prospect of death to prove to himself that he was alive, something that I've never understood and I hope that I never arrive in a place like that. What strikes me now, though, is the inherent violence of this kind of existential crisis. Maybe all existential crises, because they all boil down to the same thing: a conflict between what was and what will be and what to do about it in the now. All conflict contains some amount of violence, even if it's not physical.

When I contemplate the current existential crisis we're going through in the USA, right now, this guy, with his need to risk death in order to feel like he's living, is what comes to mind.
But more on that later...

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It's My Fault; I Broke the World

Let's supply some context, shall we?

There are those things that, when we are young, we swear we will never do. Or was that just me?
Well, no, I remember being in 5th or 6th grade and there being some kind of conversation about smoking and how bad it is for people... Just to be clear, this was not health class or anything like that. It wasn't a class lesson. It was a conversation that involved our teacher and was, maybe, initiated by a question from a student? Look, it was a long time ago, and I don't really remember how that happened, but I do remember basically every kid in the class swearing how they would never smoke. Ever. And I never have; who knows about the rest.
[And, hey, smoking is just a very hard line for me. Like being a Republican. If you want to kill yourself slowly, you're free to go about doing that, but leave me out of it.]

Most of those kinds of things I swore off were more personal kinds of decisions. Like deciding, when I was somewhere around the age of five, that I was never going to drink. Let's just say it had to do with my step-dad and his drinking behavior and leave it at that.
Of course, then, the idea of drinking being one of the three mortal sins was strongly reinforced by my Bible Belt upbringing. Drinking, dancing, and smoking, the three things that would send you to Hell faster than a greased pig on a water slide.

Then there were the gross things. Things like avocado. Broccoli, which had such a horrible smell when it was being cooked, being cooked meaning being boiled. And sushi.
Sushi.
I mean, it's raw. Raw fish. I was raised to be against pretty much anything raw except fruit. And lettuce. Iceberg lettuce. Maybe tomatoes. All the other vegetables got boiled.
Not to mention the fact that sushi had other things in it, frequently, like avocado.
And eel. Which I have no good reason to be against, especially considering that I'm very interested in trying snake.
Sushi was like the epitome of all gross foods to me. If there was one thing I was never going to eat, it was sushi.

I started eating broccoli when I was in my 20s.
If you do things to it other than boiling it, it's pretty good and doesn't smell nearly as bad.
I came to an intellectual understanding that drinking wasn't a sin while I was a teenager but, still, I looked around at the way other teenagers acted when alcohol was involved and still decided it wasn't for me. I was pretty firm in that decision until some time in my late 30s when I finally tried a bit of wine. Then there was the post on Facebook I made a few years ago about how I had gone to Trader Joe's to pick up some things and only come out with a six-pack of beer. My friends from when I was a youngster just about lost it.

Which brings us back to avocado. One of the barriers to avocado had always been guacamole. I'd tried guacamole, but it was always bland and rather tasteless and the mushy consistency was kind of off-putting. I didn't understand why anyone would eat the stuff. I'm not sure what took so long but, finally, my wife said, "I bet I can make some guacamole you'd like," and then she went on to do that. Now, I'm guacamole make supreme. And I like avocado.

I still find it weird.

But! But!
None of this is sushi. Because... sushi... raw! fish!

Unfortunately, I have to admit that my introduction to sushi came through Guy Fieri. Look, he used to just be this local Santa Rosa guy who had some restaurants, one of which is a place called Tex Wasabi that is a weird kind of sushi bar. My wife took me because she thought I might like it because, guess what, a lot of the sushi is... fried. I grew up in the South, at that point, it's just fried fish. At any rate, it opened the door to, yes, even sushi. Not that it was my favorite or anything, but I was willing to eat it every now and then.
Regular sushi. We've never been back to Tex Wasabi.

All of which brings us up to how I broke the world.

About a year and a half ago, we tried this new sushi place in town, Yireh Sushi, and it is fucking amazing. Yes, "fucking" is required in that sentence to convey the extent of the amazingness of this place. It's one of our favorite places, now, and we often get sushi from there for the car when we're going to the opera. It's so amazing, in fact, that that's what I chose to have for my birthday dinner (which was last week as you may have noticed if you've been around this week seeing the Alcatraz pictures I posted). Sushi. Raw fucking fish. Some of which had avocado in it. And I had a beer to go with it.

My brain is still processing this data because it doesn't really make any sense, but I'm sure this is proof that the world is broken and it's probably somehow my fault.

So there you go...

The Education Divide, Not a Myth

Talking about education is not something I'm unfamiliar with. Aside from the fact that I've worked as a teacher both in the South and in California, I did a whole series about education as it relates to my younger son, my middle child.

In relation to the recent election and Trump's victory, there has been a lot of reporting about the uneducated, or under educated, white people who voted for Trump. Not to mention that Republicans, conservatives, tend to fall into that same group. Sorry, the data (science!) shows the truth: Conservatives tend to be less intelligent and/or less educated than liberals. Maybe that's why conservatives also tend to hate science so much.

Look, I'm not saying that there are NO smart Republicans/conservatives out there but, on the whole, they tend to be the duller knives in the drawer.

Yes, it's all well and good to talk about studies and data and science, but your opinion is just as good as my facts, right? Well, let me give you a practical example of how all of this plays out in the real world. What I'm about to talk about is NOT science; it is my personal experience and, while subjective, it's also an objective look back at my past.

As I've mentioned before, I grew up in the South, and I also grew up in the Church. Like all typical church kids, I had two groups of friends: the people I went to school with and the people in my youth group at church. In some ways, both of these groups were atypical.

First, church kids are always atypical. The real church kids, at any rate. I'm not talking about the ones who go on Sunday mornings because their parents (moms) make them; I'm talking about the youth group kids who are involved in all the stuff: Sunday morning, Sunday night, midweek youth group, even choir. Those kids are a fairly small population from any high school.

However, my high school, as I've mentioned before, was also atypical. It was one of the first magnet schools in the nation and was (and still is) the top ranked high school in Louisiana. So, yeah, Louisiana: That's not saying much. BUT! At a time when Louisiana was ranked somewhere around 48th in education (not that it's not still down there), my high school was one of the top ranked high schools in the NATION. Top 10 for years. I think it was #3 at some point, even.

Needless to say, I didn't have the typical Southern education, and neither did any of the other teenagers I went to high school with.

Surely I have a point beyond bragging, right? I do! And this is it:

Of the people I'm still in touch with (more than a few) with whom I went to church, the ones who went to regular high schools and received a typical Louisiana education, well, they pretty much all voted for Trump. The exceptions are all female. Every dude I went to church with, every under-educated one of them, voted for Trump.

Now, of the people I went to high school with... Wait, let me drive this point home: You had to be smart to get into this school to begin with and, even so, half of the freshman class EVERY YEAR failed out because they couldn't cut it. So we, at my high school, were both on the smarter end of the scale and receiving a superior education.

Now, of the people I went to high school with with whom I am still in touch (more than a few), nearly all of them supported Clinton. I know of two exceptions: one male, one female (but she was also a church kid, and that kind of conservatism tends to skew things (I say that from my own experience)).

I could go on with this, but I think it's pretty clear. And, sure, some of the people in my youth group went on to higher education, but many of them did not. Those that did didn't go to universities that anyone would consider top notch, and I'm pretty sure, for most people, if you haven't encountered an education that makes you think, requires you to think, before you're out of high school, college is too late.

The truth is that conservatism is based around accepting what you're told without question, Questioning is the enemy. Questioning things that come your way can overcome confirmation bias, and Republicans/conservatives are much more susceptible to confirmation bias than liberals. That's why 85-90% of the fake news during the election was pro-Trump/anti-Clinton. One of the biggest peddlers of fake news stories during the election said they tried, also, on Democrats but just couldn't get Democrats to take the bait.

Look, I'm not trying to offend anyone, not this time. If you feel offended, it's probably because you know this is you. That's not my fault. I'm not calling anyone stupid. [Okay, there is ONE person I would gladly call stupid, but I've already done that, and I don't think he reads my blog anyway.] To some extent, intellect is a choice, because intellectual curiosity is a choice. YOU can choose to not just accept the shit you're eating. YOU can choose to educate yourself.

Stop reading and listening to Right Wing propaganda. Find the news and information that is objective, the places reporting FACTS, not opinions, and follow that, instead. Listen, the only reason the media is "liberal" is because the Right is SO FAR RIGHT that everything else looks liberal. Facts and data and SCIENCE are not "liberal;" they just are. So...

If you don't want the "Coastal Liberal Elites" looking down on you and thinking you're stupid (and sometimes calling you stupid), start educating yourselves on the actual data. And, you know, maybe read the Constitution and look at the laws that Trump is already violating.

Make a difference.

Other Firsts (Change: part 5)

We went to IKEA.

I mentioned that before back when I was talking about getting the espresso machine and all of that, and I see from looking back that I said I was going to do a post about the whole IKEA trip thing. Well, I never did that. At this point, I'm probably not going to, either; this will have to serve as that post.

I think the IKEA thing is interesting because of the sort of cultural significance of what IKEA has become, i.e., a relationship testing grounds. My wife and I talked about that a surprising amount on our first trip (yes, that means there has been at least one other trip). She was worried that we would get into some kind of fight or argument in relation to the item we were going to purchase (yes, the "red thing").

At any rate, the whole trip felt like some weird kind of rite of passage for us, like, even though we've been together nearly 20 years, we weren't a "real" couple because we hadn't been through the IKEA fire of purification.

Personally, I don't really get it. I don't get the whole fighting at and over IKEA. I understand why it happens, but I don't get it. See, the problem is that couples go to IKEA with no real plan about what they're doing or what they're getting, so they end up getting into arguments about that there in the store. And everything related to it. But my wife never does anything without a plan, so we've always already looked at all the options and come to decision about it before we ever buy anything so, when it comes to the purchase, we just go and buy the thing.

Which is not to say that we just have the argument at home, because that's not it, either. We're actually pretty good at just discussing things and knowing what's actually important to each of us. What's important is, well, an important thing, and it's important to know those things going in. For instance, we could have had a fight over the color, but that's not really important to me, but I think that's the kind of thing a lot of people would get into a disagreement over. Not because both parties felt passionately about the color but because there was a mild preference for something different for each person that ends up becoming a fight.

Anyway...

Learning how to discuss things and come to agreements is something that many people never learn how to do, and we had our years of learning those things, but those were a long time ago.
Mostly.
heh
But we made it through IKEA, and that's what's important, right?



We changed Christmas.

As I mentioned in my first "Change" post, people have a hard time with change, especially if it has to do with family traditions and more especially if it has to do with family traditions dealing with the holidays.

When I was a kid, my whole family, including my dad, hated going to my paternal grandparents' for Christmas. It was horrible. Everyone sat quietly in the living room with the poor lighting and watched TV that was barely audible. That would last for hours before there were presents, which we were never allowed to open or play with while we were there. There were also no toys at their house, which is why the kids just sat and watched TV with everyone else. Nothing to do in the house, and we weren't allowed outside, because we always went over there one evening during the week leading up to Christmas. Oh, and there was no food, either. My grandparents would always get one of those store bought deli plates; you know, the one with the meat and cheese on toothpicks. One. It never lasted more then 10 minutes into everyone arriving, and we (the kids) were always told not to get more than one meat and one cheese until everyone had had some. That meant there was never any left because the adults didn't follow that rule.

We all hated it, and, yet, we went every year.

Until we didn't.

That was my fault. I don't remember how old I was, but I think it was sometime during middle school when I stated, "I don't want to go." Of course, I didn't want to go anywhere when I was in middle school. But I didn't go. I guess that kind of broke the whole thing. Not right away of course, because my parents and brother still went but only for a couple or few more years. The fact that I started refusing to go over there and sit on the couch for four hours (or more) staring at the wall eventually allowed everyone else to stop going, too. Or something.

And sure, you could say I was (or am) just a bad person for refusing to go to my grandparents' house for Christmas, but really? Family obligation only goes so far and should be two ways.

But that's not what this is about. It's just an example.

When my wife and I prepared to spend our first Christmas together, we actually sat down and had a long talk about how to do it. I really had left all of my traditions back in the South, so it was all about looking at what was important from each of our childhoods and working out what we wanted to do. And that was great. But...

The food was not great. We've been doing the very basic ham, mashed potatoes, etc thing for nearly two decades, and the ham ends up sitting in the fridge for days after being eaten pretty much only by me. Not because I like it that much but because I don't want it to get tossed. But, you know, tradition. And my daughter especially gets ruffled whenever any tradition thing gets changed (just this week she was bemoaning the loss of a sandwich shop (the shop shut down at least five years ago) where we used to get sandwiches every year for Independence Day firework show).

However, in part because of all of the other changes during 2015, just after Thanksgiving, my wife said to me, "What would you think about doing something different for our Christmas dinner this year?" I, of course, was all for it. And, surprisingly, my daughter (and the boys) bought in, too. So for Christmas, we had a big "traditional"-ish Italian Christmas dinner. It was really great, and we decided to do some different ethnic theme every year from now on.

In fact, we have actually worked that into our food routine. January was our month for exploring Indian food, and we learned how to make several different dishes (and my wife made the most amazing naan!). March will be Moroccan cuisine. February, due to travelling, has been a carryover of Indian. It's a lot of fun exploring foods this way, and it never would have happened if we hadn't messed around with our Christmas tradition.

And there was no leftover ham this year!

Well, not until New Year's when we did Cuban food and needed ham for part of that, but oh well...

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 8)

One thing I've come to know is that you can't say you're from the South without automatically being linked to racism. It's a thing I hate, and it's, unfortunately, a thing that is almost completely legitimate. And it's not just racism, it's like all the "-ism"s. Or "-ist"s. And I don't want to switch this topic to sexual orientation, but I just want to point out that virtually all of the places that are acting like petulant children in regards to marriage equality are in the South.

Before I get to the issue of the Confederate flag, let's talk about why we're even talking about the Confederate flag: Dylann Roof.

Generally, I would not be one to talk about someone who has not been convicted of a crime as if he is guilty of the crime, but I think it's pretty safe to say that Roof is guilty of the nine murders at the church in Charleston, South Carolina. Actually, it's not even Roof I want to talk about. Roof stated quite plainly that he wanted to kill some black people, that he felt like it was up to him to do something about "it," whatever "it" was, and he went and did that. Even if they were so nice and welcoming to him that he almost changed his mind.

That Roof is a white supremacist and racist isn't in question.

What is in question is the racist tendencies of many people (Republican Presidential candidates) who responded to the attack by trying to call it something than what it actually was (a racially motivated mass shooting). So let's look at that:

Rick Perry, former governor of Texas and a Republican, called the shootings an "accident" and blamed the incident on drugs.

Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and a Republican, basically blamed the victims and said the incident could have been prevented if only they had been armed. Because, yes, the answer is always more guns.

Rick Santorum, another Republican presidential hopeful, called the attack an attack against freedom of religion and Christianity and not motivated by anything to do with race. He's not the only conservative to espouse this view and to call for more pastors to arm themselves for the coming war against religious freedom.

Rand Paul, another Republican hoping to become President, also blames religion, but he blames it on a lack of religion. If only we, as a nation, weren't so heathen and doing things like having children out of wedlock, then poor Roof wouldn't have done what he did. He fails to mention racial issues at all and conveniently overlooks that it's in religion and church that we retain the greatest segregation in America. In other words, churches are the greatest breeding places of racial hatred in the US.

Lindsey Graham, another Republican presidential hopeful (does this sound familiar yet?), seemed to echo Santorum's theory by saying that Roof was just out to kill Christians. It was just coincidence that he happened to kill black ones. [BULLSHIT]

I could go on but, really, what's the point? It's all more of the same and all Republicans trying to divert the issue.
Why?
That's actually a good question that boils down to only one real answer: They are okay with the status quo.

Now, there could be any number of reasons they're okay with the status quo. For instance, maybe they think racism is too big of an issue, too hard to deal with, and, so, they would rather pretend that everything is okay than to look at the issue. Looking at the issue means you have to do something about it. Or, maybe, they're okay with it for no better reason than that they are okay with it. As in, nothing needs to be better because there shouldn't be racial equality to begin with.

I don't know these guys personally, so I'm not going to try to guess. However, when someone is running a white supremacist website, professes a dislike for black people, and states his intent to kill some, then, when he does that, it's almost certainly (you know, like 99.99%) a racially motivated crime. Occam's Razor and all of that. To try and change the dialogue afterward is, at best, irresponsible.

All of which brings us to the issue of the Confederate flag.

Look, I am all for the 1st Amendment. Seriously. I will defend your right to be a racist asshole and spew racist assholery as quickly as I will defend my right to call you a racist asshole for saying racist assholery, that includes your right to have your own Confederate flag on your own property. However, I cannot be behind a state government being allowed to fly a symbol of racist assholery over a state capitol building. There is no "heritage" that excuses the government for making any kind of statement that supports racial hatred, and, I'm sorry, but the Confederate flag is a symbol of racial hatred. Just ask the neo-Nazi movement in Germany, who use the Confederate flag as their symbol because Nazi symbology is illegal.

Somewhere in my schooling, I picked up that the Confederate flag is a bad thing. Being schooled in the South, I'm not quite sure where I picked that up. It certainly wasn't a thing they tried to teach us. If it was, the Confederate flag wouldn't be so prevalent. And, yes, I did grow up watching The Dukes of Hazard, but that's as close as I got to any ties to that flag (and I'm sorry John Schneider -- I know it cuts into your income stream -- but I agree with the pulling of your show from TV).

One of my cousins (on my dad's side) and I, during high school, had frequent arguments about the Civil War. He hated Lincoln and the "war of Northern aggression." That's what he always called it and tried to make it about "states' rights," but the only "right" that was in question was the "right" to have slaves. Point being? We went to school in the same city and we both came through it with radically divergent views.

It's time to move past the Confederate flag. Or, to put it another way, it's time to lay the Confederate flag to rest. It's time for the government, including each individual state government, to get behind "all men are created equal." We can never expect the citizens to start believing in that while the leaders are still claiming racial hatred, through flying the Confederate flag, as a "heritage."

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 7)

Which brings us to today. Sort of.

It's not that there aren't other things I could talk about...

I could talk about the race riots in Shreveport in '88 just after I'd gone off to college. Guess what they were over. The shooting death of a black man by a white person (a woman in this case). I could talk about my friend who was also from Shreveport (he was black and from the Cedar Grove neighborhood where the riots were taking place) and how worried he was about his family. He was a sophomore and, theoretically, had a lot of friends but, when it came down to it, I was the only one he could talk to because everyone else was too busy making fun of "all the black people burning down their own houses." They said that kind of stuff to him without any regard that they were talking about his home. It didn't help when it made national news and even Leno was making fun of the situation.

My friend couldn't even find out what was going on, because the phones were down and he couldn't get a call through. [Yeah, that sounds so weird, now, but there were no cell phones at the time.] He spent days worrying about his family, eventually got someone to drive him back (I didn't have a car my freshman year), and, pretty much, didn't come back to school after that. I don't even know what happened to him other than that I found out that he came back at some point and moved his stuff out.

I could talk about how in 1991 David Duke was almost elected governor of Louisiana. David Duke who had been a member of the KKK, was "famous" for wearing Nazi uniforms during his days as a student at LSU, and was involved in inciting several racial incidents during that same time period. There were three candidates, and Duke captured, basically, a third of the vote, so there was a runoff between Duke and previous (but not incumbent) governor, Edwin Edwards. Edwards won the runoff, but Duke still took more than half of the white vote in the state. Yeah, that's the state where I grew up; I'm not proud of it.

I could also take about my black friend who went to D.C. for for a work conference during the mid-90s and got the reverse treatment that I had received when I'd been there. One day, when out to lunch with some friends at a rather high class restaurant, she was completely ignored by the staff. The host shut the door in her face when they were going in. She was with two white coworkers, and the host, then, only offered them a table for two. Upon being corrected by one the white male of the group, they still only set two places at the table and had to be prompted to set a third place. The waitress did not acknowledge her presence and left after only taking the orders of the two white people she was there with. When the waitress came back, the male, again, had to place her food order for her while the waitress made comments about how someone must be really hungry to need to order two entrees.

Or I could talk about how just a few weeks ago during a report about the Nepal earthquake that killed nearly 9000 people and wounded almost 25,000 more, the reporter called special attention to the five Americans who were killed. Five! She spent almost as much time during the report talking about the Americans as she did the rest of the report about the earthquake. I kept thinking, "Why should I care about these five people who were killed in comparison to the thousands of Nepalese who were killed?" Why? Because they were white? And I have to assume that they were, because in our national consciousness American=white.

As far as I can tell, nationalism is just a more insidious form of racism. All of the immigration stuff going on, right now, revolves around nationalism and how we need to "keep jobs safe for Americans," but what they really mean is that we need protect white people and their jobs from all of these brown people who keep crossing our border and who will worker cheaper.

I think all of this comes down to some mistaken idea that we somehow "defeated" racism back in the 60s with the death of Martin Luther King and, eventually, giving him his own holiday. While I would agree that we took a step forward back then, by the 80s we'd decided to sit down. "Oh, yeah, we did all that racism stuff back in the day. We're all through with that now." Unfortunately, part of the problem is what was once part of the solution. For instance, that we refer to black people as African Americans rather than just Americans. Sure, it was, at the time, a way of respecting the roots of black people but, now, it's a way of setting blacks apart from whites. They're not "Americans;" they're "African Americans," just a subset of actual Americans and an inferior one at that.

Why do we need to have African Americans and Asian Americans and Whatever Americans at all? White people are not Caucasian Americans or European Americans or anything other than Americans. And that's not to mention that we don't include South America or Mexico in "Americans." That's a thing that has bothered since I was in high school.

Honestly, we won't have dealt with this issue, the issue of racism, until we don't have Americans at all. Or any national identities at all. What we need to have is Earthlings. [And, when it comes down to it, we may eventually need to include more than just humans in the description of Earthlings.] One planet. One people. That, really, is the only way forward.

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 6c)

Picking up from 6b...

Lunches were included with the convention. The only problem was that the lunches were horrible. Well, that might not quite be fair. Maybe the food was good, but it was frozen, so who would know? Seriously, the first day, we all went and got our boxed lunch, which was fried chicken (and we thought that was awesome because we'd expected crappy bologna sandwiches or something), but, when we went to eat it, it was still frozen. None of us were happy.

The next day, the day of the elevator incident, Jeff decided that we were going out to lunch (and we discovered we were not a democracy despite being in Washington D.C.). Of course, we didn't know where anything was, but that wasn't a hindrance to Jeff. We would just walk until we found something!

Fortunately, the lunch break was rather long (like three hours? maybe four?), because that was also our sight-seeing time. So we walked and we saw bits of the city that we would never have seen on one of the bus tours and, finally, we found a place to eat.

It was a little burger joint; you know, one of those hole-in-the-wall kind of places owned by someone who knows how to cook. I mean really knows how to cook. We strolled in as if it was McDonald's. Which is to say that it wasn't McDonald's, and it wasn't McDonald's in the way that apples are not oranges. Because, see, Burger King and McDonald's are both oranges, and this was not that, and we were the only white people in the place. A relatively crowded place where every eye turned to stare at us when we walked in. Stared at us hard. Stared at us hard enough that we could feel it, which is saying a lot.

After a moment, they all turned away and ignored us just as hard as they had stared at us. We got in line. The ignoring was more uncomfort-making than the staring had been. Especially when we made it to the front of the line and they continued ignoring us. Then, they started taking orders from people behind us, and none of us knew what to say. I mean, it was obvious they knew we were there, and it was just as obvious that they were not going to acknowledge our presence.

Bob and the girl started nudging Jeff and whispering, "Let's just go." He kept saying, "No." One of them started in about being hungry, and I pointed out that we weren't going to have enough time to find another place to eat if we stayed for much longer. Jeff said he wasn't leaving without being served. It was all so very unreal. Almost like we didn't even exist. No, it was exactly like we didn't exist. It could have been right out of the Twilight Zone. Except the racist version.

Eventually, the lunch rush was over and there were no more people coming in. Eventually, we were the only ones standing there. Eventually, people started emptying out of the place, and we were still standing there. And Jeff wouldn't leave.

Jeff wouldn't leave!

But, eventually, the guy behind the counter gave in. I think we'd been standing there at least an hour at that point. He took our order, and we sat down to wait. They didn't actually make us wait an inordinate amount of time for the burgers.

You know what? All of it, all of the waiting, was worth it. To that point in my life, that was the best burger I'd ever had. By far. It was amazing, and it still occupies a mythical place in my mind. The mythical place of "best burger ever." We told them that, too, before we left. They actually looked gratified.

And we made it back to the convention center on time. Barely.

So the obvious point here is that racism can go both ways and, while that is a point, that is not the point. The point is that we would never have gotten away with what we did if we weren't white. No one threatened us. No one called us names. No one resorted to violence towards us. In an opposite circumstance, a group of black kids in a white establishment like that would have been forced to leave, if not through words then through actions.

It was an eye opening experience, to say the least, and a valuable lesson that I have never forgotten.

Now, the epilogue to the elevator incident:

After the "success" of our lunch outing, Jeff decided that we should walk back to the hotel from the convention center. Despite the points of not really knowing the way (he said, "How hard could it be? We just need to go toward the Capitol.") and not knowing how far it was (his logic was that it only took, like, five minutes by the Metro, so how far could it be?), we learned, again, how much not a democracy we were. After all, he was in charge. Right? So we walked...

And we walked...

And we walked some more. Somewhere in there, we stopped for food, but that went more smoothly than lunch had gone, and we walked some more.

We finally made it back to the hotel some time close to midnight. Only three-ish hours late. On the door, on all the doors, was a bulletin. Someone had set off the fire alarm in the hotel that morning (and after the incident with the actual fire at the other hotel, no one thought it was funny), and they were looking for the perpetrators -- there was a reward and everything -- so they could send them home at their own expense.

We were horrified.

Jeff started giving orders about how we shouldn't talk about the thing in the elevator and rushing us up to the room and, generally, making us more freaked out than we already were. Bob and I spent the rest of the trip with this fear poking the backs of our heads that we were going to get found out and sent home. And we didn't have any money to pay to be sent home! We'd worked and scraped to get enough money just to go on the trip. There was nothing left over!

Jeff, though, he was fine. See, unbeknownst to us, he went and did some asking around about it and found out the elevator thing was isolated to the elevator and what they were looking for was someone who had actually set off the hotel fire alarm and caused an evacuation until they figured out that it was a false alarm. Of course, it didn't occur to him to tell us that we had nothing to worry about. We didn't find that out until we were on our way home and one of us said, "Well, I guess we don't have to worry about getting sent home, now." He just laughed.
Yeah, thanks, Jeff.

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 6b)

So... The elevator...

And, yes, you should go back and read 6a for context.

The elevators were jammed every morning with teenagers waiting until the last possible moment to leave and, yet, still get to the convention on time. That first morning, it was something like a 10-15 minute wait just to get on the elevator. Being that we were on something like floor 887, the stairs were not an option. Of course, by "elevator" I mean the main elevators that were just off of the lobby area, basically, the "center" of the hotel.

However, either in looking for the ice machine or just looking around the first night, I discovered that there were other elevators. Or, at least, one other elevator. It was at the end of the wing our room was on, well away from the central elevators. The second morning, I suggested that we should try that elevator instead. What was the worst that could happen, right? That it would also be crowded?

And I had to convince everyone! Seriously, what's with having to convince everyone all the time? Okay, I didn't have to convince the girl since she was just, I don't know, along for the ride. I think she actually just lived right outside our hotel door since she was always there waiting for us every morning when it was time to leave, and that's where we left her every night. I seriously don't think anyone knew where her room was.

So we went down to the other elevator, and it was completely empty! No line. No other people at all, in fact. [Why do people always argue with me about these things? I will never know.] So we pushed the button, waited the moment for the elevator to arrive, got in, someone pushed the button for the first floor... and that's when things got interesting.

As soon as the door started to shut, there was a voice from down the hall, "Hold the door! Hold the door! My granny's coming. My granny's coming." Now, the elevator wasn't just at the end of the hall. The end of the hall turned about 30 degrees so that the elevator was facing a window that overlooked the city rather than a blank wall across the hall, which meant that you couldn't see down the hall without actually stepping out of the elevator and looking to the left. But the voice was decidedly childlike. Jeff reached out and stopped the door from closing.

An eight- or nine-year-old boy appeared in front of the elevator. A skinny, little black boy... wearing a tuxedo. A black tuxedo with red, canvas high-top basketball sneakers and a red baseball cap. To say the least, he was adorable. "Hold the door! My granny's coming!"

The door, though, didn't like being held and was fighting against Jeff's hand, so Jeff, being the brilliant college student that he was, decided to "stop" the elevator. By "stop," I don't mean that he pushed the button to hold the doors open or anything like that; by "stop," I mean that he pushed the big, red, emergency "stop" button. Before anyone could do anything about it or even think that we should do anything about it. An alarm sounded.

Bob was gone. I mean that very literally; he was just gone.

If you've been reading this whole series, Bob lived in the neighborhood around our church with his grandmother and his father. It was a big house, one that I'm sure had been very nice when his grandmother had first moved into it something like 60 years earlier. But the neighborhood was in as much of a state of neglect as the house, which is to say that it wasn't, hmm... It wasn't what you'd call safe. So, when the alarm went off, Bob ran so fast, we didn't even see him leave the elevator. [Yes, he did that in front of the girl, whom, if you remember, he had a crush on.] He just wasn't there anymore, and there wasn't even a cloud of dust with the word "zoom" hovering in it to mark where he'd been.

The little boy's eyes were huge, like the proverbial "as big as saucers" kind of eyes. Jeff literally grabbed me and the girl and carried us out of the elevator, almost under his arms, as it were, and said, "Go!" As we came out of the little alcoved corner where the elevator was, we saw Bob way down at the other end of the hall peeking around the corner at us. And, when I say "way down," I mean "way down." The other end of the hall was a good 50 or 60 feet away, and Bob was all the way down there before we'd gotten all the way out of the elevator.

But Bob was not the only one we saw. Coming down the hall was the smaller duplicate of the boy at the elevator. He was probably about four, had on a black tux with red, canvas, high-top basketball sneakers and a red baseball cap. It was like adorable overload with his slightly chubby cheeks. He was saying something like, "What's happening, Granny?" to a short, large black woman in a big, flower dress, and she was saying as we passed, "There go those white boys, done playing in our elevator." Or something to that effect.

Despite the fact that the... incident was definitely user error, we never went back to that elevator and suffered through the long wait times at the regular elevators for the rest of the trip. However, that might have more to do with what happened later...

Growing Up In the race Divide (part 5e)

This post is not specifically about racism, but it would hardly be fair to not tell how it all ended.

After the church made the decision to merge, I went into damage control mode in order to protect my youth group. I mean, I knew I wasn't going to have a job anymore once all the merger stuff happened, but I wanted to make sure my kids were taken care of.

Wait, let me back up a step:
What they tried to tell me (and kept telling me over the few months that all the legal stuff for the merger took place) is that I would be necessary through the merger and beyond; they would need me to help integrate the two groups of kids. "Don't worry; you're not going to lose your job." But I knew that was bullshit. Not that it mattered. There was no way I was transferring to the other church.

We set up some joint events between the two youth groups... you know, so they could get to know each other. Yeah, it sounds like it would be such a great idea. Except, well, the other group, being the teenagers of upper middle- and lower upper-class parents were completely dismissive of my group. And my group tried. I had a couple of very outgoing kids, and they walked right up to some of the other teens to introduce themselves, and the kids from the other group would just turn and walk away without saying anything. Basically, at each event we had set up, my group got shunned by the other group. And their youth pastor did nothing about it. Each event, within 20-30 minutes, my kids were saying to me, "We don't want to be here. They won't talk to us."

And here's the complication:
I spent a few years working as a substitute teacher during this time (because I wasn't on staff at the church, just an hourly worker), so I knew a lot of the kids in the other youth group. I was a well-liked sub. In fact, I was the favorite sub of at least two schools because, as the administrators said, I was one of the very rare subs who was liked by both the students and the teachers. So I knew the kids in this other group, and they already knew that they liked me. Many of them liked me more than their own youth pastor (who, honestly, wasn't a lot of fun).

At the very first joint event we went to, a social event at their youth center, within 10 minutes of us being there, a girl from the other group, a girl that I knew, walked over to me where I was standing with a couple of my kids and said to me, in front of them, "Why are you hanging out with these losers? Come hang out with us; we're better." After I recovered from my disbelief, I made it clear that my kids were not losers, and I wasn't going to have anyone talking that way.

Yes, the other pastor and I had a discussion, though it was less discussing and more me just telling him like it was. This guy who was a decade older than me. But he didn't argue. It also didn't change anything.

Which mostly brings us up to the week of the merger. There was a last Sunday at the church I grew up in; that was the day they announced the merger was official and that the next Sunday would be at the other church. The other church was supposed to send one of their buses around to pick up my kids for the Sunday morning youth stuff on that first Sunday. That was the only thing I was concerned with.

Now, you have to understand that on the Sunday of the announcement, the last Sunday in our building, they were still telling me, "We need you. We need you." Technically, we didn't become part of the other church until midnight, so Monday. Monday afternoon, I got a call, a call I was expecting, "We just wanted to let you know that your services are no longer required." That's pretty close to the exact wording, "Your services are no longer required."

I called everyone I knew that week, everyone with any power to affect the first Sunday of joint services, to make sure that they picked up my kids. "Yes, yes. It's all fine. We'll pick them up." Sunday morning came. My parents and brother went to church. I was somewhat livid over that fact. My mom, I suppose, was trying to keep her job. At least, at the time she was. They went; I stayed home. Sometime around mid-morning, I got the first call, "No one picked me up."

"No one picked me up."

"No one picked us up."

"What do we do?"

"What do I do?"

It's what I knew was going to happen. I was full of rage and tears, and there was nothing I could do about it. Again, on the Monday, because I had made some calls on Sunday knowing I wouldn't be able to get anyone, I got a call, "We've decided that it's not cost effective to pick up your kids. You'll have to find some other place for them to go."

And I did try. But these kids had just had their home ripped away from them, and for some of them, my group was almost literally their home. The only place they felt safe. Including the kid I had to kick out of service about once a month whom I never expected to keep coming back, the kid who, when picked up by the cops one night, had them bring him to me, not his parents, and who did, always, keep coming back. And their home was just... gone. Because it wasn't "cost effective."

Of the three dozen kids, only three of them allowed me to get them situated in another group. My old youth pastor's group at the church he'd moved to when I was graduating from high school. Just three. The rest... just quit church.

What they learned was that churches couldn't be trusted. Churches were full of hypocrites. Churches only wanted you if you had money and wore the right clothes. The people in churches were worse than the people not in churches so why bother to go. There was no, "They will know you are Christians by your love."

Now, it's easy to say at this point, "Well, that was just a bad church," but I  have worked with and in a substantial number of churches across three states, and they were all essentially the same. Except one. That one was a church composed of homeless people and existed through donations to keep it running. "Keep it running" meant enough money to pay to rent the space they used on Sunday nights and to feed the homeless people who came. Yes, they came to eat, but they also listened while they were there. There was no salary for the pastor or any staff or deacons. Just some people who volunteered to help make sure people were getting fed.

All of the other churches where very much about looking the part if you wanted to attend. The right color skin (white or, maybe, slightly "tanned" (meaning there might be someone of Asian or Pacific Islander descent, but there were no black people)), the right kind of clothes, and, most importantly, the right kind of money. You know the focus is wrong when, during a social event, the pastor turns to you and says, "Hey, by the way, how much are you tithing, right now?" [True story.]

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 5d)

[You should really go back and read the previous parts of this.]

I was scheduled to preach.

I'm only telling you this so that you'll understand the context in which all of this happened for me. See, despite that I had been working with the teenagers for... well, if you start counting at the point I began teaching (when I was a teenager)... something like eight years and specifically working with the youth group as "director" for more than four years, I had never been allowed to preach. Not in "big church," as the adult service was referred to by the youth. I'd been trying for years...

There's a whole other story here, but I'll boil it down to the fact that I wouldn't let them ordain me. I wouldn't let them ordain me for the sheer fact that I lacked respect for the whole lot of them, and I was not about to be ordained by anyone I had no respect for. I don't know if they knew that or not. I think they thought I was just stubborn and that this extended from my lack of acquiescence to being a ministerial student.

But, finally, they'd agreed to let me preach in the adult service... on a Sunday night. Because, you know, there weren't as many people there. But, still, I was going to get to preach, and I had my whole Good Samaritan sermon already worked out. [And I'm not going to go into why that was the appropriate message, at the moment.]

However, the Sunday before I was going to preach, we were scheduled to have a church meeting about the upcoming merger proposal because, yes, it had become a merger proposal. It was to be a time for the congregation to ask questions, voice opinions, and whatever else people might want to say. It was no secret at that point how I felt about the whole business, and my mother had been receiving warnings that she needed to get me to quit "mouthing off."

She, in turn, counselled me to keep my mouth shut because nothing I was going to say was going to change anything. I knew nothing I said was going to change anything, but I wasn't going to sit by and say nothing, either. What they were doing was wrong, and I wasn't going to let that go unspoken. Basically, what they were saying was, "We would rather close our doors than have to be in the same building with 'you people.'" The whole thing disgusted me. It still disgusts me, now.

The meeting was the most highly attended thing we'd had in years, probably something like 500 people. Basically, all people to show support for the merger. Sure, there were questions, but they were all self-serving questions. Things like, "Will there still be a van to pick me up on Sunday mornings?" and "Will I get to keep my same Sunday school class?" [Yes, these are questions from adults.] The pastor fielded the questions but, after the questions, anyone who wanted to speak was allowed to. And, if you wanted to speak, you had to go up to the pulpit to do it (because that's where the mic was).

Which led to my first time in the pulpit. [Now, you really have to pay attention to this to understand the richness of it.] Most of the people getting up to speak (by "most," I mean "all") were talking about all the good things that would come from the merger with the larger, older, richer (and even more white) church. Some of these people (because, remember, there were people like the little old lady in the congregation) went so far as to say how glad they were that they would not have to share a church with "the blacks," although most of them (not all) added something like, "They're okay and all, but I don't want to have church with them." [Now, why don't you just move to the back of the bus and go use that other drinking fountain, because this church is for white folks only!]

The more I listened, the angrier I got. Every time they asked if there was someone who wanted to speak, my hand went up. They avoided calling on me as long as they could. My mom leaned over at some point and said, "If you go up there, they're not going to let you preach." I didn't care. I mean, I did care but, if that was the price I had to pay, then so be it. [It occurs to me only now that the offer to preach in the first place was probably some attempt at buying my silence. But old age and treachery will beat youth and enthusiasm every time.]

Eventually, they had to let me have a turn. It's not like everyone in the church knew what was going on between the leadership and me, and this was an open forum, meaning anyone that wanted to speak got to do it. And there was my hand every time. If they didn't let me speak, there would (amazingly enough) be questions. People did, after all, know who I was. So I took my turn in the pulpit, the only time I would ever stand at the pulpit in the church I grew up in. [Well, during a service, anyway.]

I let them have it. Both barrels. All the barrels. Any barrel I could find. It was definitely what you would call "righteous anger." Unfortunately, I don't really remember exactly what I said. I pointed out, though, how I had grown a youth group from, basically, nothing into being something living and growing from the neighborhood around the church, and I told them how ashamed they ought to be of themselves for just abandoning people. And, this part I do remember if not in exactly the right words, I told them they should be ashamed of themselves for just sitting on their butts for more than a decade because they would rather the church withered and die than reach out into the neighborhood around the church.

There was complete silence when I was finished. I walked back down to my seat and sat down and, still, no one said anything. For minutes. Everyone stared at me, and I just glared back. The meeting wrapped up not long after that. I suppose I was a bit of a hard act to follow.

The call was almost immediate. As immediate as it could be, anyway. Within a couple of hours of me getting home. [Remember how I said to pay attention?] Officially, the reason they gave me for telling me that I wasn't going to get to preach was that I said the word "butt" while in the pulpit, and that was completely inappropriate. I mean, if I would say the word "butt" while in the pulpit, there's no telling what I might say.

Aside:
The pastor we had throughout the 80s used to say "peckerwood" from the pulpit all the time. When I was a kid, I didn't know what it meant; I just knew it was derogatory. Also, every so often, he'd say "dickhead."

But I couldn't preach because I had said "butt." I'm fairly certain that I am not the first person to have said that from that very pulpit, though I can't point to a specific instance. I just find it hard to believe.

Sometimes, in even the most serious of situations, there are those things that are so ludicrous all you can do is laugh. And that's what I did. Not while I was on the phone (with the head of the deacons); no, on the phone I just shrugged it off with an "okay." After I hung up, I laughed. And I laughed more when I told my mom. She was all concerned, "I did warn you." She didn't understand that I really didn't care at that point. Why would I want to be involved with people as petty as that?

A few weeks later, there was a meeting for the vote. It was anonymous, which was ridiculous, except that very few people that weren't me would have been brave enough to raise their hands on a "no" vote. Not that it mattered. Even blind, there were less than 10 votes against the merger.

Don't worry. It gets worse.

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 5c)

Note: Probably, you should go back and read at least parts 5a and 5b before reading this one.

Now, we arrive at the problem.

Everything probably -- okay, not "probably," let's say "might have" -- would have been okay if I had just kept the kids out of sight, but, after youth group, I would open up the gym to the kids and let them play basketball. Or whatever. But, you know, basketball. Because it was always basketball. Sometimes mixed with skating. Don't ask. The gym was directly across from the chapel, which was where the adults met on Wednesday nights (the sanctuary, where Sunday service was held, was in the other building). So, basically, I flaunted my youth group in front of the adults. Not that that was the intent, because the intent was to let the kids have some time having fun.

Let me make one thing clear: At this point, the problem wasn't just the black kids; it was almost all of the kids. 90% of my group were kids from low-income or lower middle class families. They weren't the demographic the church leadership wanted. And it was just the kids, meaning that they didn't bring tithing parents along with them. However, it was the black kids that stood out. And, to make things more complicated, they couldn't tell me they didn't like what I was doing because how would that sound? So the message I was receiving was, repeatedly, "Great job! Keep it up!" And I did, because, well, I was young and naive and trusted them.

All of this took place over a few years, and there were other things going on that affected the eventual outcome, but it's way too much to try to cover, so I'll give you the basics:

1. While I was in high school, we (the church) had begun a Spanish mission church. They met on Sunday mornings in the chapel while the main church happened in the sanctuary. The pastor of the Spanish mission was part of the church staff, and his daughter (one of them) was in youth group with me. What I failed to see as a teenager was that having the Spanish mission kept Hispanics segregated from the main church. There was never any overlap or joint activities between the two groups.

2. During the time I was acting as the youth director (because they wouldn't call me "pastor," but that's another story entirely), the church opted to start -- I don't remember what they called it, but it wasn't "African American" -- another mission a few blocks away, one for blacks. They hired a black pastor with the intent of paying him until the church could stand on its own. This, of course, pulled the black kids I had in my group out of it, and they set up a separate night for the mission to use the gym. I think it was Thursdays, the point being that it was a night when the church was not normally in use by any white people. Effectively, they eliminated any "black element" from Wednesday nights. And, actually, from Sundays, because there had been the occasional black visitors on Sunday mornings as the black population around the church grew. They couldn't legitimately just turn them away, so they gave them somewhere else to go and patted their own backs while doing it.

3. Because the "core" church membership was in such a decline, they began to have talks about what to do about that and how to grow the church. Of course, what they wanted was to return it to the state it had been in in the late 60s/early 70s: 1500 white, middle class members including lots of families with children. They had started trying various tactics meant to spur that kind of growth in the mid to late 80s, including hiring a pastor who was supposed to be an appealing preacher, but, despite their efforts -- because they didn't make any substantive changes -- the membership had continued to dwindle. By the early 90s, they were beginning to worry about sustaining the money as the older, rich members died off and ceased to tithe. It's always about the money.

Which brings us close to the end.

As the leadership saw it [I should point out that I was not considered leadership because I was not, technically, on staff. To be on staff and go to staff meetings, you had to be salaried, and they wouldn't do that with me (again, long unrelated story). However, my mother was on staff (church cook and all), so I got to know everything that went on during these meetings. The other leadership was the deacons: old, rich, white dudes one and all.], at the end of it all, the church had two options:
1. Merge with the church that originally planted my church more than 75 years prior. That this even came up as an option should tell you something, but it did come up as an option, and that church pushed for it, because it, can you guess, wanted our money.
2. Open the church to neighborhood surrounding it, which would include absorbing the black mission that we had planted, at this point, somewhere around two years before. That this was spoken of in those terms should also tell you something. "Open the church to the surrounding neighborhood."

"Open the church to the surrounding neighborhood." This all makes me sick and mad just to think about it. I mean, that this ever even had to be a consideration is... wrong. And the debate, as it came down to it, especially among the deacons, was that they would have to share leadership with "those people." And "those people" couldn't be trusted. And won't we lose all of our members if we let "those people" into our church.

And I wanted to scream, "What members?" At this point, it was normal to have less than 200 in the congregation on Sunday mornings, and 30 of those were my teenagers!

Believe it or not, this all resulted in what can only be called a final showdown. Which I'll tell you all about next week.

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 5b)

Note: Go back and read the last entry in this series before reading this one.

So...
There I was, all of 20 years old, officially the unofficial youth pastor (or unofficially the official youth pastor; it's hard to know which) at my first night of youth group, and I had two kids. Middle schoolers whom I didn't know from Adam.

Initially, I couldn't even find them, because they weren't where they were supposed to be. They were down in the game room. You might think, "well, what else would you expect from middle schoolers," but that they were middle schoolers wasn't the reason. The reason they were down in the game room was because it had been weeks, at least, since they'd had any kind of teaching or, even, a leader down in the youth area. Basically, they just came each week to hang out because it was better than being at home. [And, man, I don't even know how to feel about that. I didn't then, and I still don't now. Just... how horrible is that, to have a home life that is so unenjoyable that you would rather come and just be ignored at church with nothing to do than to stay at home (because, sometimes, it was only one of them there).]

Now... You might think that the problem here was that the youth group was practically non-existent (however, we did have a few more, maybe 10 (including the two from Wednesdays), that would come on Sunday mornings, kids who had to come because their parents made them), and that was a problem, but that wasn't the problem. No, the problem was that I didn't have any of the prejudices held by the church at large and didn't care about the "acceptability" of the teenagers who came.

So let me give you some history:
My church was started as a mission of another church around 1915. At the time it was founded, the neighborhood it was planted in was a fairly well-to-do, up-and-coming middle class neighborhood. Big Southern houses and all of that. I think it probably reached its peak in the 50s and, by the 70s, was on a steep decline. The "founding fathers" of my church had all lived in the area around the church when it started; by the 80s, all of their families (and, yes, there were old men in the church, deacons and such, who had grown up in it) had moved to the outskirts of town to get away from "urban blight." [The actual definition of that term has to do with buildings (and that was true: once stately homes in the area around the church were falling into disrepair), but, when they talked about it in my church, it had to do with people.]

As the members moved farther away from the church, fewer and fewer people from the actual neighborhood around the church attended it. So, where it had once been a church that people walked to on Sunday morning, it had become a church that people drove to. And, sure, that's how churches are now (and were in the 80s), but churches didn't start out that way. Protestant churches in the US, I mean. But I digress... The point is that the church was still a mostly upper middle class/lower upper class congregation when I walked down the steps to the youth room in 1990. The people in the mile or so radius around the church weren't welcome there, and they knew it. [Which isn't to say that anyone would have been turned away (despite the fact that we had "guards" at the doors), but no one from that area, having come to the church once, would have ever come back.]

The real problem, I suppose, was that the church hired the wrong guy when they hired me. I mean, they didn't hire someone who was going to play their game. I'm sure they thought they had, but they should have known; I'd given them plenty of clues. The biggest one was that I refused to be a ministerial student despite the fact that they tried to bribe me to do it then tried to extort me to do it. They were very disappointed that I was majoring in English (so was my college faculty, except for the English department, who had tried to coerce (force) me into math). But those are other stories. I think they forgot that, although I grew up in the church, I was not ever one of them. I was part of the "hired help," and my family was, at best, lower middle class (and I'm not sure we were always that).

However, with their stated desire of hiring someone to revitalize the youth group, they definitely hired the right guy, and that's what I set out to do. [The issue here is that their stated goal was incomplete. It should have been "to revitalize the youth group with 'our kind of people.'"] And I did it by focusing on the neighborhood around the church. Because why? They were kids, and that's what I was there to do: minister to kids. I didn't care if they were rich or poor or black or white or, probably, even if they had been Martian, but I never had a green-skinned kid show up, so I guess we'll never know about that.

To make a long story short, we'll just say that I succeeded. Within a year, I was running over 30 kids on Wednesday nights and, by the end of two years, more than 50. Most of those kids were from lower income homes, and more than a dozen of them were black. Almost none of these kids had parents who went to the church. Or any church. And, now, we arrive at the problem: I thought I was doing a good thing. The right thing. But I was causing some problems higher up the food chain; I just didn't know about them.
Yet.

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 5a)

I was 15 when I started working at my church. It started out with small tasks, I suppose you'd say. I'd help in the kitchen, which was an easy job to get because, well, my mom was the cook, so, if they were shorthanded and needed someone to do the dishes or something, I'd get drafted. I mowed lawns for the building superintendent. Sometimes, I got the oh-so-fun job of cleaning the bathrooms. Things like that.

But I was good with kids so, somewhere in there, I transitioned to working in the various children's programs, and I spent the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school (when I was 16) working in the gym assisting the recreation director with all of the summer programs, including the ones for teenagers, which meant I was in charge of my friends. It wasn't a big deal. I mean, I never had to go get someone higher up to enforce the rules because people wouldn't listen to me. Not even when I was in charge of adults during the evening programs. And, as time went on, I was left in charge more and more often.

During my junior year of high school, the recreation director left to go somewhere else. The church didn't hire a new one; they just put me in charge of the recreation programs. Nominally, I was under the auspices of the youth director, but, really, it was just me. Basically, he just had to sign off on whatever it was I wanted to do, but he never said no. [This was a good deal for the church, by the way. We were in a decline, at the time, and they replaced a salaried staff member with an hourly worker. A minimum wage hourly worker, at that. I'm sure they pocketed at least $25,000 off of the deal.]

During my senior year of high school, I started teaching Sunday school. Not to little kids, to my own age group. Sometimes, I also taught on Wednesday nights, too, to the whole youth group. And, sometimes, I taught the college group on Sunday nights. These teaching gigs were not because they didn't have anyone else to do it. They were because the youth director acknowledged that I was the most qualified. To put this in context, any time there was a disagreement about anything in the Bible between my youth director (who also taught Latin, so a smart guy) and myself, when we got into it and did the research, he always had to come tell me that I was right. [This is not me bragging. This is me giving you the necessary contextual background to understand what's coming up.] The only thing he didn't fully concede to me was our disagreement on Revelation to which he said, "I'm not saying that you're right, but I am saying that I was wrong."

All of that to say that I was fairly integral to the running of things "downstairs" (where the youth stuff was located) well before I graduated from high school. But, then, I graduated from high school, and, then, I went away to college. During the summer after my graduation before I left, the youth pastor quit. It was very sudden, but he got a (much) better offer from another church in the city and, basically, just walked out the door. Sure, he gave, like, the standard two weeks notice, but that doesn't mean much in church work. Needless to say, I was pretty pissed at him for bailing, and we didn't exactly part on the best of terms.

Now, let's jump ahead a couple of years.

Where I went to college, although in another state, was only about an hour away from home. My mom didn't much like having me out of the house, but freshmen were required to live on campus, so that's what I did. As soon as I became a sophomore, though, she started urging me to move back home and commute to school. The thing that decided me to do that was that opportunity to become the acting youth director at my church, the church I had mostly not been to for the past couple of years (other than the summer between my freshman and sophomore years). Hmm... maybe "acting" is not quite the word I want. Technically, there was a youth director, but they had rolled a whole bunch of stuff up into one position, so he was about six different things: youth, recreation, college/career, education, and... well, I can't remember what else. At any rate, he wasn't much interested in teaching the youth, so he offered me a spot under him in which I would be over the youth (and, mostly, the recreation) program. I was still not on staff, though, and still being paid by the hour. [Yes, it's like the crummy deals that authors take from traditional publishers when they are first starting out because 1. they don't know any better and 2. they are just happy to be being published.]

Just to make this point clear, when I left to go away to college not quite two years prior to that first Wednesday night I walked down into the youth room to teach, we had been running 40-50 teens on a Wednesday night. But I and the youth pastor had both left at the same time, and he had been replaced with a guy who felt like the teenagers were a burden and didn't really want to have anything to do with them. I knew there had been deterioration, but, still, I wasn't expecting the sight I was greeted with: two kids. Two. Both of them middle schoolers. I didn't even know who they were.
Well, then.

[So, yeah, I know that this doesn't seem to fit into this series, but, trust me, it does. Just come back next week.]

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 4)

Probably, you should go back and read part 3 of this series before going on. The two are somewhat related.

As I said last time, the reason my mother gave me for not allowing me to invite my black friend to church was that "it wasn't a good idea." At the time, I couldn't really figure that out. We were told every Sunday in Sunday school that we should invite our friends to church with us and, the very first time I wanted to do that, I was told it wasn't a good idea.

Needless to say, it was a long time before I ever wanted to invite anyone to church with me again. A really long time.

So let's jump ahead to high school. And I'll try to keep only to the relevant data.

My church employed a number of janitors; they were all black. The building superintendent was white, but all the guys that worked for him were black. Also, my mom was the cook at my church, and all of the help they ever hired for her was... I'll say non-white. I'll also say that, as part of the "paid help," my family, as with the building super, was barely passable, and that's just because we were white. The non-white employees didn't actually attend my church, and the janitors (because we still called them janitors, at the time) were specifically forbidden from entering the sanctuary during services. They could only come in to do the clean-up afterward.

I didn't know about all of this until later, but it all has to do with why it wasn't a "good idea" for me to invite my friend.

One morning, I was walking with the guy who was in charge of the bus ministry. He was helping a little, old lady from the "gym side" of the church to the "sanctuary side" of the church. When I say "little, old," I mean it, too. She was at least in her 80s, unable to walk without assistance, and what you would call wizened. Without any of the wisdom that came with it. As we entered the connecting hallway (the church was laid out in a large U), one of the janitors was leaning against the wall near the intersection. He was supposed to be doing this. They were stationed at what were considered the rear doors so they could open them for people (and to keep out "undesirables" (seriously)).

I liked this guy, and I wish I could remember his name. He was taller than me (not surprising), in his early 20s, had a big smile, and laughed easily. By this point, I was already working at my church, so, sometimes, when I was doing work in the gym area and he was around, we would joke and stuff. Plus, he played basketball with my brother who was only in the 10-12 year old range, at the time, and he treated him like a person, not a kid.

So... there he was, leaning against the wall, as the three of us came out of the other hallway. I went to say hi, the bus guy went to say hi, the old lady... She didn't let us say hi, because she -- pardon the language, but there's really no other way to say this with the same meaning -- lost her shit. Right there. She started screaming that there was a "nigger in the church!" She had a cane, and she, this lady who could barely walk, raised it and tried to go after him screaming about the "nigger" the whole time.

I think my brain froze up, because I just stood there not knowing what to do or how to respond. Evidently, the bus guy had dealt with this kind of thing before, because he just guided the old lady around the corner and off down the hallway while looking back over his shoulder and mouthing an apology. In what I'm sure she thought was a whisper, the old lady was saying, "Did you see that? There's a black person in my church!"

And the janitor? He just shrugged and waved it off. He even chuckled about it. But I stood there, mortified. I hadn't done anything, but I went over and apologized. It was the first time I felt, well, shame at being who I was. Because I was white. I felt soiled just from having walked down the hall with the old lady, not to mention that I had helped her off the bus and into the building. I wanted to go wash my hands. But he said it wasn't a big deal and not to worry about it. It wasn't me, and she was old, and it didn't matter.

To some extent, he was right. I mean, it wasn't me and she was old, but I couldn't get behind the part where it didn't matter. I thought it did matter. I mean, we were in church! What kind of person acts like that to begin with, but what kind of person acts like that at church? Which made me wonder what she'd been like when she was younger and that kind of behavior and been acceptable. And not just acceptable but expected. And I got all sick feeling again and ashamed of being white.

And that's when I understood why my mother had told me that it wouldn't be a good idea for me to bring my friend to church. I never came to a conclusion, though, as to whether it wasn't a good idea because she was concerned for my friend or if she was concerned about any potential labels that might have gotten attached to me or our family over it. After all, "nigger lover" was still a pretty common term in those days.

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 3)

One of the worst things about growing up in the South was learning that the last place where racism should exist was often the first place you'd find it: at church. And you wouldn't just find it there; racism was subtlety built into the structure of whole denominations. It was pervasive in that same way where you don't notice a bad smell when you've been around it too long. You can only notice it if you step away and come back or if someone points it out and you put some effort into smelling the thing they're talking about. Not that a lack of racial integration is true of churches just in the South; it's true of churches in general. As Joshua DuBois recently said, "Right now, 11:00 am on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America." And it's better now than when I was a kid.

When I was a kid...
There were no black people who lived on my street. However, if I went around my block to the next street, it was all black. Well, there may have been what was referred to as "white trash," which I didn't understand any better than I had understood "porch monkeys." The only point of context I had for the term was that there was a kid in my grade, John Spain, who was really mean and constantly in trouble and my mom used to tell me to just ignore him because he was "just white trash," so, in my mind, "white trash" meant "bully," not someone who shared the same socioeconomic position as, say, the black people on the street behind mine. [I say behind because it was the block behind my house, not the next block over in front of my house.]

And there was a marked difference between my street and the street behind my house. All of the houses on my block had nice, green lawns, even the house that was mostly unlived in. There were no cars on any of the lawns or broken bikes or toys. And there wasn't any trash. I mean actual trash, garbage, which tended to pile up at the curbs on the street behind mine. Most importantly, I suppose, at least to the people on my street, there were no black people. Ever.

Which was a problem, because I had a friend who lived on the street behind mine, and he was not allowed to come over to my house to play. I think, actually, that was more his mom than mine. There was this one time when I wanted him to come to my house and, when his mother said no, he protested, and she started whipping his butt right there and dragging him into the house. [That was not necessarily uncommon no matter what color you were.] I don't think either of us ever brought that up again.

At some point, I wanted to invite him to church with me (I think around 3rd grade), and, because it came up when I was with him, I just asked him. Without checking with my mother first. That was probably a mistake. I ran home to ask my mom; he went inside to ask his mom. His mom actually said yes; mine did not. She told me she didn't think it would be a good idea. I, of course, didn't understand why it wouldn't be a good idea.

Now, she did actually make an attempt to explain it to me. But it didn't make sense to me. See, there were actually two black kids in my church. A boy in my grade and his younger sister. They were it, though, in a church of 1200-1500. Not that I was aware of the numbers. I pointed out to my mom that, look, there were these two other kids, but she could only tell me that they were a special circumstance, something which I never found out the why of even when I was good friends with both of them later in high school.

However, I do think that my mother was probably, actually correct in her assessment of it not being a good idea. That wasn't something I understand until I was in high school, though, and which I'll talk about next time. All I knew at the time was that I had to walk back around the corner to his house and tell him he couldn't come. I had to crush his excitement (and he was excited) by saying no. It was one of the hardest, longest walks I've ever made, It was just a trip around the block, but, to my 3rd grade self, it was like walking to an execution.

Which it was, in a way, because that was the beginning of the end of our friendship. It just wasn't the same after that. I don't know if it was just me or if it was both of us, but it felt like something broke when I had to tell him that he couldn't come after all. And he wanted to know why, and all I had was, "It's not a good idea." What a horrible phrase, that.

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 2)

Ironically enough, my first encounter with racism had to do with myself. Let me explain!
But, first, go back and read part one of this series.

I didn't get very many birthday parties when I was a kid. In fact, I got a sum total of two. The first one was during first grade. My mom actually gave me a party at McDonald's, which is probably something that I wanted to do because what kid doesn't want to do that? Okay, kids these days probably don't want to do that so much but, back in the 70s, it was a cool, new thing to do. The problem was that, due to the cost, I was limited to something like only five friends. Or four. Some small number. It meant making some hard choices as to whom to invite.

Three of the people were a given. Two of them, the boys, were my best friends all through elementary school. Well, that elementary school, at any rate. The other was a girl who would end being my longest running friend. Basically, she and I grew up together from kindergarten until we graduated high school. Of course, I didn't know that was going to be the case in first grade, but it says something, I suppose, that she was one of my best friends even then. All three of them were at that party.

There may or may not have been one other person there but, if there was, I can't remember who it was.

The issue, though, arose over the "last person" I invited.

I remember the discussion with my mother about whom I was going to invite. On the list were the three (or four) people who ended up coming, and I had one more person to go. I was conflicted. I could either invite Derrick, a black boy in my class at school and next in line on the "friend scale" after the people I had already invited, or I could invite Chris, a boy who had lived down the block from me before we'd moved and had gone to my school until he moved. He had been one of my close playmates for a couple of years, but I hadn't seen him since he left my school. Playdates weren't a thing back in 1977 so inviting him to my party seemed to be the only way to get to see him again. I ended up choosing Chris over Derrick.

That turned into a problem. Chris didn't show up to the party, so my mom wanted me to call Derrick to see if he could come because she had to pay for the guest whether there was a person there or not. So there we were at the party and my mom was telling me to call Derrick and also telling me about how upset Derrick had been not to be invited and that Derrick's mom had even called her and said that I didn't invite Derrick because he was black. Basically, my mom was shifting the racism comment onto me.

Of course, she hadn't told me any of this ahead of time. She waited until we were actually having the party. Evidently, she'd suspected Chris wasn't going to show because his mother hadn't RSVP'd, and my mom was upset about wasting the money. The problem is that I can't remember whom she'd wanted me to invite in the first place. I remember there being a discussion about it, but the only part I remember is that I wanted Chris to be at the party more than I wanted Derrick at the part because it had been close to a year since I'd seen him.

The party was... traumatic. The only thing I remember is being on the phone, listening to it ringing and ringing, and my mom telling me that I didn't invite Derrick because he was black. And crying. I was pretty horrified, too, at the thought that Derrick would think I left him out because he was black, which just wasn't true. And, of course, no one answered the phone. Because Derrick's mom had taken him to do something fun and special because he didn't get invited to my party. The party I can't remember.

I don't remember our friendship being the same after that, and I have always always felt bad about what happened over that birthday party. Sure, yeah, I know it wasn't my fault. I was barely over a hand old. But that doesn't change the emotion involved. In general, when they ask that question about things you would change in your past if you could, I don't have a lot of those things, but this is one. I would certainly go back and invite Derrick instead. If I'd known how important it was to him, I wouldn't have cared about Chris being there at all.

But I didn't know.

It was this relationship, though, that inspired the character of Derrik in "Christmas on the Corner." See, I did grow up in the South, and I did have black friends. Let me rephrase that: I had friends who also happened to be black, because I never thought of my friends in colors. They were just my friends. Derrik is a reflection of that dynamic and, I think, an important one. But Sam won't be having any birthday parties that Derrik doesn't get invited to.

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 1)

I grew up in the South. I don't mean the quasi-South like Missouri or Tennessee; I mean the deep South. Louisiana. Even so, I grew up without any idea that race should ever be an issue. I'm not sure why this was so other than that my parents weren't particularly racist. They weren't particularly un-racist, either. For instance, at some point when I was a kid, I remember my dad using the term "porch monkeys," and I had no idea what he was talking about. When I asked, because I couldn't find the monkeys, no one would explain to me what he meant, so, I suppose, he was ashamed enough for having said it (and my mom ashamed of him) that no one would explain it. Later, when someone did finally explain it to me, I still didn't understand. The term just didn't make sense to me; it was years before I understood that it was a racial slur.

The Oscars this year, "the best and whitest," have me thinking a lot about race and how and where I grew up. I am not much a product of my environment. For instance, I don't have an accent. Someone asked me recently about how long it took me to get rid of it after I moved to California, but, see, I never had an accent. And, no, there is no explanation for that, because my family most definitely does have an accent. In fact, I can barely understand my brother anymore.

I went to a desegregated elementary school. Of course, I didn't know that. I'm not sure any of us knew that when we were kids. I don't know for sure if it made a difference, though. The school was mixed, sure, but the classes, on the whole, were not. I never realized that until now in thinking about all of this. Supposedly, the classes were divided based upon ability and, to some extent, I'm sure that's true, because there were a few black kids in my classes, but, mostly, the black kids were in one class, and the white kids were in the other class. I'm pretty sure there were no white kids in any of the "black" classes. The white kids got a white teacher, and the black kids got a black teacher. Except 1st grade: In first grade, both teachers were black, but that was the only black teacher I had until I got to middle school.

The principal, though, was black: Mr. Hudson. I loved Mr. Hudson. By the time I was in first grade, he called me Dr. Leon. I was Dr. Leon to him all the way through 4th grade, my last year at that school. He said it was because of all my brains. Or something like that. He was always very serious with me and would shake my hand when he saw me in the hall. Evidently, race wasn't an issue for him, and he was the first adult male I admired other than my grandfather.

Middle school... I went to an experimental middle school. It was following in the footsteps of the experimental high school I would soon go to. These were some of the first magnet schools in the country and an aberration in Louisiana. I suppose the logic was that if they could get magnet schools to work in Louisiana, which was (and still is) among the worst educated states in the country, then they could get them to work anywhere. And they did work. CPMHS was in the top ten high schools in the country the entire time I was there. In Louisiana.

So, yeah, I had some black teachers in middle school and in high school... but they weren't academic teachers. They were P.E. teachers and an art teacher. The only exception to that was my biology teacher in high school. However, she barely counts, because they let her go half way through the year, because she was not able to handle the academic load of teaching the AP Bio II class. This class was geared toward academic decathlon training, so they had to find someone able to teach that class above all else. Just to be clear, she was not the only teacher let go from Magnet because the teacher couldn't handle the academic load in the advanced classes, and it was her first year teaching.

Also, to be clear, there were some black teachers of academic classes at my high school, but I was in all honors and advanced classes, and they didn't teach any of those.

My high school didn't have the regular team sports associated with high school. No football, no basketball, no baseball. We had what our principal called "Olympic sports": tennis, fencing, track. I only say that to reinforce that this was an academic school. There was testing to get in and you had to maintain a certain GPA to stay there. Each year, we lost about half of the freshman class. As opposed to my elementary school, at which the more advanced classes were more than 90% white, there were plenty of black students at my high school, and they weren't there to play sports. These were smart kids who had done the work to get into a kind of elite school. As I was reminded frequently by my friends at other high schools, we were the "nerd school."

Mostly, though, I want to focus on my elementary school, since it was a typical school in Shreveport. [I would like to think that my high school was more merit-based in its decisions on teacher hiring, and I think that it probably was because of the emphasis on the academic decathlon.] It makes me sad, now, thinking back, that my school got by by following the letter of the law while discarding the spirit of it, and I'm sure that my school was indicative of the "way things were." Probably not just in Louisiana, either. I have to assume that this was the way all schools got around desegregation all through the South. "Sure, we'll have mixed schools, but no one said anything about the classes."