I was born in 1972
to parents who had both been at Kent State University during the 1970 shooting.
At the time of the massacre, they were living in married student housing while Dad
was finishing his degree. Mom had graduated a year earlier and was working as a
teacher. She was pregnant with my older brother on the day of the shooting, and
soon she’d take the next ten years off of teaching to raise kids. A few weeks
before the shooting, she participated in the first Earth Day, where she was
scolded for being pregnant and contributing to Earth’s overpopulation.
Their
mixed experience with progressive movements at the time probably explains why their
parenting philosophy was a blend of hippie idealism grafted uncomfortably onto
the depression-era conservativism they were both raised with. My siblings and I
were raised on books like TA for Tots, which our family read and
discussed together like we were all in a book club. My parents let me play
records at night to help me sleep. One was called Free To Be You and Me,
and it consisted of a number of then-noteworthy celebrities singing or acting
out short dramas encouraging gender neutrality and being comfortable with your
own identity. Although it wasn’t my favorite part of the album, I will never
forget the chorus to the record’s eponymous opening anthem. It promised that if
you took the singer’s hand, you would soon find yourself:
In a land where the river runs free
In a land through the green country
In a land to a shining sea
And you and me are free to be you and me
My
parents believed in the ideals of the sixties, but they also believed in the
bootstraps, no-excuses achievementism passed on to them by their steel factory
fathers. I played piano for three years, although I don’t remember ever asking
for lessons. Was this because they were nurturing, new-age parents who wanted
to encourage me to have confidence in myself, or was it an old-school belief
that children needed culture, discipline, and productive tasks? Yes to both, I
think.
We
were a similar mix of future and past when it came to racial ideology. My biological
brothers (my only siblings until I was eleven) and I knew and understood that
prejudice was wrong, and cruelty to anyone based on any kind of difference they
couldn’t control would result in swift retribution. We knew that we should not
treat the racial or cultural “other” badly, but that didn’t mean we put much
effort into seeing the world from their point of view. A lot of our ideology
could be summed up by the show M*A*S*H, which we watched endlessly after taping
all the episodes. Hawkeye would fiercely defend Korean farmers or Chinese enemy
combatants or Black American soldiers from bigots, but there were hardly ever
any moments in the show when Korean farmers or Chinese soldiers had agency.
Most of the “Koreans” who appeared on the show were whatever generically Asian
actors the producers could scrounge up. Rewatching the show now that I speak
Korean, I can tell most had only learned to say a few lines and didn’t actually
know the language.
Like most well-intentioned white Americans who
might have voted for either party until the culture wars of the 90s took off
and made us solid Democrats for life, our racial ideology was probably centered
around two concepts: the notion of color blindness and the belief in the white
savior.
Color
blindness is universally rejected by liberals as a racial ideology now, but
back then, it seemed like the cutting edge of hip progressivism. People who
practiced color blindness, as I saw it, were what we would now call woke.
They were aware in a way others were not, like Neo in the Matrix. This was
confirmed for me by En Vouge’s 1992 hit “Free Your Mind,” which regarded color
blindness as achievable only by those who had emerged from something like
Plato’s cave:
Free your mind
And the rest will follow
Be color-blind
Don't be so shallow
Color blindness
wasn’t regressive; it was something only those woke enough to free their minds
could accomplish. It didn’t even feel like something I could achieve, because I
didn’t feel cool enough. It was like being a saint: ordinary people could only
hope to imitate the truly holy.
One of the reasons
color-blindness as a model is discouraged nowadays is because it denies
identity and agency to people of color. If I can’t see color, I can’t
appreciate the differences of others and learn from them and adapt to them. I
don’t think, though, that most people ever conceived of color blindness in a
literal way. En Vogue wasn’t telling us we should convince the rods and cones
of our eyes that they were lying to us so we literally couldn’t tell others
were different. It was more limited than that. The idea was simply that you
were to treat everyone the same, in spite of the fact that you could see they
looked different. It wasn’t far off from the adage that you shouldn’t judge a
book by its cover. En Vogue linked it to this adage in their song, because the
verses are mostly about not judging the narrator by the clothes she wears or
the fact that she dates white guys or that she likes to shop. Color blindness
as an ideology might have been restated like this: Once you have seen that
someone looks different—which you of course cannot help but do—try to act as impartially
with the “other” as with those within your group.
Blindness as a
metaphor invoked the image of the woman holding the scales of justice with a
blindfold over her eyes. One reason for its appeal was that it didn’t require
anybody to actually change how they felt about others. You could maintain your
ancient prejudices as long as you could set those prejudices aside when taking
part in social, business, and legal interactions. It was, perhaps, a not
totally useless stepping stone for the first generation of American society
raised after the Civil Rights Movement, when younger people would be learning a
new way of interacting with otherness while the foundations of the old
way were still visible. Its simplicity and rough-and-ready pragmatism were at
least comprehensible to the masses and provided some guidance about how to act.
The notion of the
white savior was less clear, because unlike color blindness, it wasn’t
something we talked about directly. It was an idea we absorbed indirectly from
the way in which every narrative we knew that involved an interaction between
whites and non-whites ended up with the whites benefiting the non-whites more
than the other way around. This was certainly true in M*A*S*H, with Father
Mulcahy running his orphanage for local children who lost parents in the war. Do
I even need to dissect the message behind Different Strokes? White
saviorism was something a well-meaning white person would imbibe from an
avalanche of narratives in which the praiseworthy, proto-woke white person
showed their modern and progressive attitude toward people of color by helping
them to adapt to and succeed in a world ruled by white people. Neo-liberal
progressivism owes much of its roots to mid-to-late 19th century social
progressives largely coming from a Protestant background, and the missionary
impulse was still there in the late 20th century, even if the movement had
largely secularized.
The upshot of the
prevailing progressive ethos in the 1980s concerning race was that our family
adopted two children from Hong Kong. Nowadays, there is a long-overdue movement
advocating the rights of adopted children, and one of the points it stresses is
the need to undo the narrative that adopted children of color were saved by
heroic white parents. I don’t believe that my parents adopted children to be
admired. There is a fine line between doing a deed because you believe it is
admirable and doing a deed to be admired, and we all likely struggle at times
to have pure motives. I’m sure my parents struggled, too, but I believe they
were at least aware of the struggle and tried, as much as they were able, to do
it out of love rather than the desire to be admired.
Their motives
might have been blameless, but looking back on it now, I can see that our
family was in no position to support the emotional needs of our new siblings. My
parents did what they could. They found someone in Ohio who spoke Cantonese to
help interpret when we couldn’t communicate with them. We made an attempt to
preserve some notion of Chinese culture for them by celebrating Chinese New
Year and occasionally going to eat at a Chinese restaurant. We did this on
special days, like the day they became naturalized U.S. citizens. For my own
part, I know that I must confess to mostly viewing them as strange-speaking,
lovable but funny oddities, and only in my best moments did I manage the
empathy to try to imagine what the experience must have been like for them.
The weakness of
the dual color blind/white savior framework showed itself. This framework gave
me enough of a foundation to defend my siblings against the—depressingly substantial—number
of people in North Canton, Ohio who still used terms like “gook” and “chink.”
It meant I recognized that these were my siblings as much as my biological
brothers. It even meant that I recognized I had some responsibility to help
them, but that responsibility mostly consisted of treating them with “color
blindness,” i.e. treating them like everyone else, partly in order to help them
to adapt to being American. Color blindness taught us to treat others how we’d
want to be treated, but it didn’t give us the imagination to realize others
might want treated differently from us.
Families in
northeast Ohio who adopted Chinese kids in the 1980s tended to know everyone
else in the area who had done the same. We got together for potlucks and
camping trips. Some families had far more children than we did, and many were
very religious, so the missionary impulse in their decision to adopt was much
more evident than it was in my quasi-agnostic, quasi-nominally-Catholic family.
I wonder what kinds of conversations my parents had with the other grown-ups
while the kids were off playing together.
Maybe because of
my 80s-version-of-woke upbringing, my best friend for years, until he moved
away, was one of the few black kids in North Canton. He was one of three
adopted black kids in his family, the children of a Methodist minister. When my
family got together with them, I think it’s quite possible we had a sizable
percentage of all the people of color in North Canton under one roof. Once,
during an intramural sporting event, some of the older kids in our middle
school yelled at him that he should “go back to the plantation.” He laughed at
it. What else could he do? I certainly didn’t leap to his defense. Those kids would
have pummeled me. I didn’t think being a white savior meant I should actually
sacrifice myself. White saviors lectured stupid people, they didn’t get their
asses kicked.
Color blindness
and white savior thinking made sense to me in an environment where people of
color were extreme minorities. Why would they ever want anything but to adapt
and fit in? And someone had to be there to stand up (not always very
successfully or bravely) to the casual and not-so-casual racism they faced.
This was the entirety of the responsibility of a conscientious white person
toward people of color as I understood it.
I had occasional
glimpses into worlds where people of color were not minorities. We’d play
basketball against all-black or nearly all-black schools from Canton or Akron
(and lose, badly). Although it was obvious that with these kids, they weren’t
looking to fit into my world or act like white kids, that they in fact had
their own, autonomous ways of acting and speaking and living in the world, I
somehow always wrote that off as an exception. America was mostly a
monocultural white society, I thought, with occasional pockets of idiosyncratic
non-conformity. But these pockets were in “the inner city,” a place that seemed
as exotic and unreal to me as Korea in M*A*S*H.
And then, I joined the fucking Marine Corps
After high school,
I entered the Marine Corps. It was the first time I’d lived in an environment
in which whites weren’t a clear majority. When my platoon in boot camp lined up
at night in the squad bay wearing only towels, half along a yellow line on the
port side and half along a similar line on the starboard side, it was the most
black skin I’d seen in my life. It wasn’t majority black, perhaps, but it
wasn’t majority white, either. The recruits to my left and right as I stood on
the line were black. Three of my four drill instructors were black, including
the senior.
The Marine Corps
encouraged its own form of color blindness, one it believed made the Corps a
unique haven of racial utopia among the mess of society we all came from, a
society for which it could not possibly express its contempt strongly enough.
The Marine Corps didn’t see black and white, they said. There was only light
green and dark green. That was the actual vocabulary used. If you needed to
describe a person to someone who didn’t know them, you said they were light
green or dark green. If it was a very dark-skinned person, you’d say dark-dark
green. (I don’t know why they picked green, the color of our camouflage utility
uniforms, when the Marine Corps colors, as they never grew tired of telling us,
were scarlet and gold.)
Although the
Marine Corps claimed to be color blind, it could also be cruelly observant
about the physical features of recruits. It is, I have since learned, not
unlike China or Korea, where someone a little bit overweight is likely to be
called “fatty” by his friends. Our black senior DI called a very “dark green”
recruit “Daffy Duck.” The black recruit I was probably closest with in boot
camp was Wilkens. I don’t know his first name. We didn’t use first names then,
and nobody called him Wilkens, either. He had a prominent gold cap on his front
tooth, and the drill instructors, with all their imagination, dubbed him
“Goldtooth.”
Because Wilkens’
surname was the closest one in the alphabet to mine, he stood to my left and
slept in the bunk next to mine. He was a big guy, and this presented problems
for us every night when we had to perform a sweeping ritual. We were supposed
to grab our “scuzz brushes”--little hard-bristled brushes--run to the bulkheads
(walls) behind our bunks, then duckwalk between our bunks, sweeping up the
squad bay as we went. When the two sides of the squad bay met in the middle,
we’d clank our scuzz brushes on the deck (floor) in unison to get the last of
the dirt out, and then the two recruits who had the first shift of fire watch that
night would sweep them up. The rest of us would run back to our bunks, tuck the
brushes into our boots under the bunks, and return to stand on line. Woe to the
recruit who straggled getting back.
Yet straggle I
often did, because Goldtooth and I couldn’t both fit into the space between our
bunks. One night, out of desperation, as Goldtooth and I turned from the middle
of the squad bay to run to return our brushes, I reached out and took his from
him. It surprised him, but thankfully, he got the point in time for me to run
back and drop both our brushes off and return to the line much faster than I
usually did. This went on for a few nights until he surprised me by reaching
out to take mine. For the rest of boot camp, we took turns like that, and we were
faster than anyone else at getting back to the line before lights out.
After we’d been
doing this a few weeks, one night a drill instructor noticed what we were
doing. It was a night when it was my turn to carry the brushes for both of us,
so all Goldtooth had to do was go straight to the line. Realizing I was
carrying his brush for him, the drill instructor asked, in the impossibly
sardonic voice only a D.I. can accomplish, “Does he always carry that for you?
Is he your little errand boy?”
“We take turns,”
Goldtooth answered. He had a high and soft voice that you wouldn’t expect to
look at him.
“Welllllll, isn’t
that sweet,” the D.I. retorted. “Ebony and Ivory.” He didn't even notice that Goldtooth had used the pronoun "we" instead of the proper "these recruits."
I think Ebony and Ivory would have become our new nicknames, except that D.I. was suddenly replaced in
the middle of boot camp.
When I went to
Defense Language Institute to learn Korean, all I knew about Korea was what I’d
learned in M*A*S*H, which wasn’t much. As class went on, I realized something
about the racial attitudes of fellow classmates. Some who started out training
not openly racist at all would become so during training. They were frustrated,
I think, with so much immersion into total otherness all at once. I’d been
raised to think that racism was always the result of not knowing people of
color, and that if we just got to know each other, the world’s problems would
be solved. That might be true, but there’s a curve to it. Before things get
better, they sometimes get worse as people get their first dose of realizing
otherness can be so, well, other. You
have to keep going deeper in to get past the disorienting feeling of it all
before you can get to an acceptance based on knowledge rather than a general
principle. This takes time and work. Some students got stuck in the early
phase.
I am told by a
much younger, currently active Marine that “dark green” and “light green” have all
but disappeared, and that only very old Marines will still say it. “Most
Marines now acknowledge color,” he told me when I asked him. That seems to be the
way society has moved, also. The song “Ebony and Ivory” that my drill
instructor referred to claimed that, “We all know that people are the same
wherever you go,” another attempt from that generation to achieve color
blindness by insisting the differences between us didn’t matter. Nowadays, we
are just as insistent that people are not the same, and that we need to understand,
appreciate, accommodate, and account for our differences.
Where we go from here
The rise of Trump
has led to increased visibility for openly racist groups, the kind that the 70s
and 80s were trying to get rid of, the kind I thought were all but gone by the
turn of the century. Many people read this as proof that old-school racism
never really went away and was just lying low, awaiting its moment. That’s
certainly one way of reading it, but I think that among white swing voters in
places like Ohio who turned the state from Obama twice to Trump twice, the
number of whites who wouldn’t dream of carrying a tiki torch but who are
nonetheless unhappy with the change from color blind ideology to the
anti-racism they see in their social media outnumber the carriers of torches by
at least ten to one. Every person I grew up with in Ohio who voted for Trump
fits into this category. They all accepted the notion of color blindness in the
80s, so they have a hard time accepting the label of racist today. To them,
racism still means what it did in the 80s: a person who said things like “gook”
and “chink.” Changing it to a subtler meaning of supporting systemic inequity
and then lobbing the term at political opponents feels unfair. As one friend I
know said in 2016 when explaining his vote for Trump, “I got tired of being
called a racist.” It was a vote of defiance. If you’re going to call me a
racist anyway, I might as well go all-in.
I was born at the
beginning of what has been called “third-wave anti-racism.” The first wave was
the end of slavery, the second the Civil Rights movement, and the third a
post-Civil Rights movement to counter, as John McWhorter put it, “a different
form of abuse, psychological rather than institutional.” Judging from the
practical outcomes, the third wave has used one effective strategy and one
ineffective one.
The effective
strategy has been the explosion of narratives from people of color. One of the
weaknesses of 70s and 80s color-blind ideology was that the default “neutral”
position was white and male. Hawkeye spoke for the person of color, rather than
letting the person of color speak for herself, denying her agency. Nowadays, the
available novels, memoirs, network dramas, Netflix standup comedy specials, and
blockbuster movies written by and starring people of color absolutely dwarfs
that which was available forty years ago. I tend to think that if only this
change had been made, many of the other changes third-wave anti-racism wanted to
achieve would have happened on their own. The default neutral position of color
blindness would have changed for enough people that the “psychological abuses”
would have changed, too. Even Trump voters from Ohio watch these narratives enthusiastically.
If our culture had been able to pass a generation with new voices speaking, the
political goals might have followed the culture far more easily.
The less effective
strategy has been to call people who still cling to some form of the racial
ideology of the early post-Civil Rights years racist.
My wife Amy grew
up in the same part of Ohio, with as little racial diversity as I did. We went
to graduate school in Chicago, moved to Maryland in 2004, and she began working
as a teacher in an all-black middle school in Baltimore in 2006. Her only real
preparation for her job was that she’d focused in undergraduate and graduate
school on black writers. She was a middle class, white woman from rural white
Ohio, now teaching poorer, black kids. On her first day of class, she had
students fill out index cards with their information. One line asked them to
write “something you think I should know about you.” One student wrote, “I hate
white people.”
I wouldn’t have
believed it, but the two dozen or so black writers Amy had read during college
actually was a halfway decent preparation for her job. As a lit major myself, I
always harbored the fear that literature was probably kind of useless in the
real world, but her experience suggested that isn’t so. She knew the worst verbal
mistakes to avoid, and she was able to interpret remarks from the perspective
of her students with reasonable accuracy. She has always been one of her
students’ favorite teachers. Her social media today is made up of hundreds of
former students who love her. One of those former students is now our daughter,
and when I deal with the issues involved in trying to meet her needs even with
all the resources available today, I can only marvel at the sheer moxie my
parents had, flying nearly blind in the 80s.
No DEIA curriculum
prepared her for her job. She had no anti-racism set of principles laid out.
She was an empathetic person with passion who had read stories from people
similar to her students. That was enough to get started with.
The limitations of
the color-blind ideology we grew up with meant that only going in with a
determination not to judge her students by appearance would not have been
enough for her to succeed. In fact, even during the heyday of color blindness
as an accepted idea, the cracks in it were apparent. They were apparent in that
same En Vogue song, as a matter of fact, because at the same time as the
narrator is asking for color-blindness, she also tells those judging her that, “Before
you can read me/You got to learn how to see me.” The song realized that blindness
has its limitations. Nonetheless, Amy, who like everyone from our time started
with color blindness as an ideology, was able to adapt from there. Color
blindness, with all its faults, had been a somewhat effective bridge.
For me, thrown
into a situation I was also not prepared for, if I had ever been to DEIA
training, I don’t know if I’d have ever reached out and taken Goldtooth’s
brush. Was that being insensitive? Was I assuming too much? What unconscious
biases might be leading me to take the lead? Should I wait for him to tell me
what he thought we should do? Instead, I made the assumption that “people are
the same wherever you go,” and that he would quickly see the advantages to the
arrangement. He did.
This is the strength
of the simplistic racial ideology we were brought up on. It allows for action. An
imperfect but committed action is sometimes better than well-informed inaction.
The 80s gave me ideas that allowed me to do something. My workplace DEIA
courses, and the discourse on anti-racism, for all their claims to be about
action, leave me wondering sometimes what the hell I’m actually supposed to do.
Rather than
blowing color blindness out of the water, I think it would have been more
effective to simply refine it. It could have been updated to: If dealing
with someone whose background might mean they view the world differently from
you, start with the assumption that what you like, they will also like, and
then refine from there. Our culture now gives us tools to refine. Color
blindness is like the advice given to beginning chess players, such as to avoid
placing your knight on the edges of the board. There are situations where you
will want to put your knight on the edge, but that comes with playing and
learning. A simple heuristic, though, will at least get you playing. The
relative complexity of third-wave anti-racism’s message, though, has encouraged
many people from my generation who used to think they were progressive to drop out
of engagement with racial discourse. Social media’s tendency to flood their
timelines with the most extreme forms of anti-racist messages, because those
are what provoke rage-based engagement, tend to make it all much worse.
One thing both the
old generation and the new have in common is a wistful, hands-thrown-in-the-air
questioning of why we can’t do better. This was voiced many ways pre-2000, from
Rodney King’s “Can’t we all just get along?” to “Ebony and Ivory’s” “Oh Lord,
why can’t we?” to “Free Your Mind’s” “Why, oh why, must it be this way?” However,
I think the exasperation of the older generation was different from today. Today,
the frustration is that the problem seems too complicated to solve. A
generation ago, the disgust was that the problem seemed so simple to fix, if
only people would do what they obviously should.
There is always a
relationship between culture and politics. What has changed since 2016 is there
has been a much more intentional attempt to use politics to change culture,
rather than the other way around. This was occasioned by one group believing
that the culture influencing politics had become too “woke,” which was another
way of saying one group did not understand how the goals and aims of
anti-racism were an improvement on the color blindness preached a generation
earlier. Calls for “equity” seemed to them like the antithesis of color
blindness, and the attack on color blindness itself seemed like an attack on
something that had done some good compared to the 50s and 60s.
There is always a
balance between idealism and pragmatism. If the goal is the elimination of what
may be termed “sneaky” racism, there will need to be a mix of unbending calls
for absolute justice and also political deals struck to achieve less than the
full goal. It seems to me, though, that time is on the progressive’s side, and
there was never any need to rush. Rather than blowing color blindness out of
the water, a better strategy for the present might have been to refine color
blindness by saying it’s a good place to start, but that afterwards, listening
and reflection might refine your thinking. Culture is doing a good job now of
providing grist for that reflection by producing so many great stories by new
voices. If pushing too hard for change all at once is causing a reaction, it
might be okay to practice a little Taoist wuwei and back off for the moment, letting
the inertia culture is creating do its work. This isn’t about coddling
sensitive white people who see their privilege threatened. It’s about a change
in rhetoric to avoid losing an election that might mean the end of the world.
