Goldtooth

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.