The Racist Past

Recently, I watched a short video of New York City, 107 years ago, which was posted to Facebook. There were multiple scenes of various activities - people walking in the parks, down and in the streets, which were filled with vendors plying their wares, children playing, while electric powered trollies, automobiles and horse drawn carriages went by, and all of the images were enhanced by a wonderful piano score.

I was very moved and decided to share my thoughts in the comments section. But before posting, I read a number of those who had already done so.

Many remarks were concerning the predominance of white people. Snarky, indignant condemnation of the perceived racism was common on the thread and left me puzzled and confused.

Regardless of what the prevailing attitudes of that time might have been, everything we enjoy today is the result of choices made by the people from that era.

Were it possible for me to go back 107 years, I would probably have trouble lasting a week. My skill set really would make me pretty useless to that world. And lord help me if I caught a nasty cold or came down with bronchitis. Racism wouldn’t have anything to do with my demise. Reality would be my oppressor. My ‘whiteness’ wouldn’t save me.

Having been born after the invention of antibiotics is something for which few of the commentators have likely given thanks, not to mention the other various and sundry advances such as treated water (which has made cholera a rarity...), birth control, Internet, commercial flight, the prevalence of sturdy homes equipped with standard indoor plumbing, heat and air conditioning, refrigerators, washers and dryers for laundry, dishwashers, microwave and conventional ovens, televisions, i-robot vacuum cleaners, and on and on, it is a breathtaking time to be alive.

The vast majority of people in the not so long ago past were materially inept and poor, living under conditions that were incredibly savage compared to that of the average American (of every stripe) alive today. It is odd that ‘racism’ is the first word many living today would choose for their remarks to describe the past. If racism was so rampant, then it must have played a role in producing the world we now enjoy.

Fate is a funny thing. Allow me to share a bit of autobiography. My grandfather was born in 1888 and his wife was born in 1904. They married in 1920 which would be scandalous by today’s standards but they were poor farm people from Mt Vernon, Kentucky whose parents came from Ireland around the time of the Civil War. My grandmother was pregnant 13 times and lost six of her babies to a combination of miscarriages, still births, and early childhood sickness. These were common tragedies for women until fairly recently. My mother was the second to last, born in 1932.

She married my father in 1964. I was born in 1967, which was fortunate because my parents were having problems at the time. It was just dumb luck my mother got pregnant. They tried to stay together for my sake but we all know how that goes. They were divorced in 1970. (Roe versus Wade was 1973. Hmmm.)

Grandfather (Dad’s side) circa 1940

On dad’s side, my grandmother was born in Pennington Gap, Virginia, 1920. Grandpa was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in the same year. He had three brothers, two of whom, ‘drowned in the river’ when they were young (not sure how). Grandpa met Grandma around 1941, when he was in Pennington Gap, working in a coal mine (and by ‘coal mine’, that meant a 5 foot by 5 foot shaft, with poor ventilation, a pickax, candles, canaries, black lung, collapses, and a variety of physical ailments from working hunched over for 12-24 hour shifts... ).

On December 7th of that year, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Grandpa had a choice to make - keep working in the coal mine or go off to war. He took the ‘easier route’ and chose to fight in the Pacific.

Now, a word on my dad’s mother. She was a wild one - got pregnant before grandpa left for the navy. Dad was born in February of 1942 (and yes I know that means he was ten years younger than my mom - very scandalous..) I learned later that the man I knew as ‘grandpa’ wasn’t really my dad’s father (which makes me an illegitimate grandchild or ‘grand bastard’).

My father

Some time after the war

Perhaps you are wondering, “Why does any of this matter?” Or maybe you are even saying blithely, “What’s the point?”

Here goes: My grandparents, on dad’s side, were absolutely racist. Not virulently, mind you. They weren’t in the KKK, as far as I know, nor did they participate in any lynchings. But the ‘N’ word would fly out of grandma and grandpa’s mouth now and again.

Having said that, the Japanese were much worse. If you don’t believe me, google up information on their invasions and occupations from the 1930s into the 1940s of Korea, China, The Philippines, and other places. Pay particular attention to their brutality in Nanking....

Grandpa was a SeaBee stationed in Papua, New Guinea from 1942-45. He saw a great deal of action but managed to miraculously somehow survive, although he would be plagued by malaria for the rest of his life, dying of leukemia in 1976.

Shortly before his death

(Truly, the defeat of the Japanese military by the US was amazing. Historians characterize the US victory as fated but that is untrue. Were it not for a code breaker, a crucial misjudgment by a Japanese officer during the Battle of Midway, some fancy seamanship at Guadalcanal, and a bunch of ‘redneck’ farm boys, the US easily could have lost.)

Just to provide some clarity on how my grandpa looked at things. There was a time in fourth grade when I brought home a test with a ‘D’. We were sitting at the kitchen table and I started making excuses when dad lost his temper with me a little. He told me, through clenched teeth, exactly how his father would have handled my whining and whimpering.

“Grandpa would have back handed me in the face and knocked me out of that chair you’re sitting on, in one motion, if I was acting like you!“ Then, dad firmly grabbed my arm and pulled me close to his face and asked softly, “Do you want me to do that to you?”

“No”, I replied meekly...

“Good! Because I never wanted to be that way with you...”. Of course, dad loved grandpa but his life was so brutal. He was impatient with any kind of whining or complaining... That’s how the men rolled back in those days. If you weren’t born dead, you might get crushed on the job or ‘catch a pneumonia’, or something... Life was short.

I went on to college, working my way through, earned a degree in Economics, became a financial adviser and ended up meeting a lot of people who may not have ever had an opportunity to be in the United States, were it not for flawed men like my grandfather.

Here are a few examples.

A retired professor of mechanical engineering, PhD, University of Michigan. I met him right after he had been given a clean bill of health for colon cancer. He was 74 at the time. He and his wife were about to go abroad to see Europe and to India, to visit their families. He said he was one of the first 200 exchange students to come to the US in 1964. He taught engineering for well over thirty years. During his treatment for cancer, he performed a study of the colonoscopy test in order to understand how his doctor failed to diagnose his cancer sooner. This study revealed a blind spot in the standard colonoscopy procedure and will probably end up saving lives in the future.

He also told me that one of his earliest memories was from three years old when his family was on the road from what is now Pakistan into India in 1947, the day after a major sectarian clash had taken place. The road was blood soaked and lined with decapitated and mutilated bodies...

Around 2012, I met a Vietnamese gentleman who told me he came to the US in 1980, when he was twenty years old. His family was Catholic, originally from the north, but moved south during the war with the French in the 1950s. After the fall of Saigon in the 1970s, he took his 12 year old brother and 8 year old sister and tried to escape by boat via the South China Sea. He said they left at the wrong time and the waves pushed them back into shore where the army was waiting for them. After hitting the beach, he said everyone scattered and tried to get away. He escaped into the jungle but his brother and sister were captured and put into prison camps, where they stayed for a couple years. They eventually made it to Los Angeles in the early 1980s. He became a chef, was working at Benihana when I met him. He said his brother owned a fishing business in New Orleans and his sister was a stay at home mother, still living in LA. He was a very interesting fellow - a very typical immigrant - thrifty, hard working, owned his (very nice) house in Northville MI, had no debt, plenty of money saved, a couple kids in college. He couldn’t understand why the typical (white) Americans he knew were always broke.

Lastly, there was a Chinese lady, who had worked as a translator for Northwest Airlines (now Delta) for a number of years. A devout Christian, she managed to save enough to retire. Her son lives in Manhattan near the Union Square subway station, a very successful businessman. She never spoke of how her family got out of China and came to the US, but I surmised that they had settled in New York City, perhaps in the 1970s, because she told me she and her son have property there. How she came to live in Detroit where I met her is a mystery. A divorce perhaps? She never said, but she was one of my favorite customers, always friendly and upbeat.

It is interesting. I have seen recent statistics which show the highest per capita income earning ‘group’ in the US falls under the category of ‘Asian’, which includes Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Bangladeshi, Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Indian, Pakistani... How could this be the the current state of affairs if the white population of the last 100 plus years was truly as racist as has been characterized? To have millions of Asians earning far more, on average, than the typical white guy, the majority population, which is Caucasian, would have to have been supportive over a long stretch of time, would it not?

Did the civil rights movement produce a change in attitudes or was it simply that sacrifice, hard work and technological advances made it possible for people to be more enlightened? A combination perhaps?

Let me go back a little farther in time.

Think of the vast changes that have taken place over the last 500 years. The first circumnavigations of the globe just happened recently, thanks to the invention of better seagoing vessels, trigonometry and the sextant. When the steam engine was invented, immigration exploded. And when commercial flight became prevalent, immigration went to hyper speed!

And what about the African Americans who can trace their heritage back to the expanded slave trade, which was a byproduct of these changes. One could argue that many of those persons sold to the white slavers were already enslaved via tribal conflict. Many of the men, who would normally have been emasculated by the conquering tribe, were saved by the slave trade because they were more valuable with their manhood intact. The plantation owners wanted their slaves to multiply... As brutal as that world was, the descendants of those slaves today enjoy a way of life that very few persons in Africa have access to.

And what about my Irish ancestors? Their choices weren’t so good. Stay on the Emerald Isle, starve and die or nearly starve and remain oppressed by the British... Or, they could get on the boat, sit in their own filth for a couple weeks, maybe catch a disease and die on the way, then starve in the ‘new world’... If they were lucky, perhaps things would be ‘better’... How fortunate am I that my ancestors rolled the dice?

Yeah, racism. What about it? There’s no reason to think that way. But some still do, I know... Their days are numbered.

Having said that, condemning the persons of yesteryear for their savage ways seems a bit unfair to me. They did the best they could and we’re here today, enjoying a way of life that nobody a hundred years ago could have imagined.

Here is the video