Can We Get Rid of Racist Trump?
` I was born and lived in Washington, D.C. from 1944 until 1956. In 1950 I started the first grade in West Elementary School on Farragut Street.
In 1953 the Supreme Court issued its historic Brown v. Board decision which said that separate wasn’t equal when it came to public education and that segregated school systems had to change.
Until I entered the 5th grade in 1954, I had attended an all-white school. The D.C. public schools, believe it or not, were segregated, but because they were located on federal property, the system had to integrate right away.
The D.C. school administration decided to integrate the system with a two-year plan. The first year they integrated one school as a ‘pilot,’ the second year the entire system changed.
My school, West Elementary, was chosen as the pilot school, and when I walked into my fifth-grade classroom on the first day, there were now both black kids and white kids in their seats.
I don’t recall thinking anything at all about the fact that my class had a whole bunch of new kids with whom I could make friends until during the first recess when we went out into the playground, several of my white friends took me aside and made comments about those ‘niggers’ who smelled bad and were ‘dumb’ or ‘stupid’ and shouldn’t have been allowed into the school.
One of the white kids told me that his parents told him they were moving out to Maryland where the schools were still all-white. Another kid said that his family was going to move across to the other side of Rock Creek Park where blacks didn’t yet live, because over the summer houses that had been owned by whites on our side of the park were now owned by blacks.
D.C. had a lot of residents at that time who were retired military now holding government jobs. Many of them were Southerners, and they came from states and cities where the color bar had been absolute.
My parents, on the other hand, were native New Yorkers who had grown up in racially mixed neighborhoods and attended integrated schools. The company my father managed was located in Southeast Washington which was where most blacks in D.C. lived, so he routinely employed blacks and never thought twice about any racial issue at work or in the schools.
When two of my white classmates told me they didn’t want to be in a classroom with blacks, I can still remember how I felt, even though these conversations occurred seventy years ago. To this day, this emergence of anger and fear left me feeling entirely non-plussed.
I had known these white kids, played with these white kids and even once or twice snuck around the corner from our school to try puffing on a cigarette with these white kids, and until the first time they made racist comments about the new students in our school, I had never on any occasion been unable to understand what they said or why they said what they said.
All of a sudden, I not only felt that these white kids were saying something to which I couldn’t bring myself to respond, for the simple reason that I simply couldn’t figure out what it was that made them even notice that now some of our classmates were white and other classmates were black.
To this day, seventy years later and every year in between, I still can’t figure out how or why anyone could make an issue of different skin colors, or even take the trouble to notice that some people are white, some people are black, some people may be yellow, brown, or maybe even something else.
What the fuck difference does it make? How can skin color make any difference at all?
I once asked Eli Wiesel why Germans hated Jews to the point that Hitler had plenty of support to carry out a ‘final solution’ and try to forcibly remove an entire population from the face of the Earth.
To which Eli replied almost immediately, “People always fear things that are different, particularly when the thing which is different is another human being.”
I don’t know whether Eli was right, or Eli was wrong, although his novel Night is to me a work about the Holocaust so profound that he truly deserved his Nobel Prize.
But I’ll say this about the current situation where we have a Presidential candidate who has been using racism and racial hatred to promote himself since he ran that disgusting newspaper ad demanding the execution of the Central Park Five back in 1989.
But when Al Sharpton introduced those black men at the DNC last week, for a moment I once again had a memory of my white classmates expressing their fear and hatred of blacks back in 1954.
And maybe, just maybe, the fear we have about people who are different from us will become less of a burden if Kamala wins the campaign ending on November 5th.