Lessons in
Black
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November 28, 1969. The corner of 42nd
ave and Central in Los Angeles was a familiar place to me, a place I had made
my way to weekly for three years in a long city-crossing series of bus rides
from UCLA to the heart of what then was called “the Ghetto.” On that block stood Operation Bootstrap, a
unique self-help community center and vocational school started by two former
civil rights workers. I had begun volunteering after the Watts Riots in 1965.
On this night however, the school was closed and I arrived driving a
dilapidated Chevy station wagon, at the end of a caravan of Communist Party
members that had been summoned by the Black Panther Party. I was 21, still a
student at UCLA, still a roamer of beaches and hills and not a Communist. And
barefoot for some reason I cannot now recall. But it allows me to remember now
the feeling of the warm city sidewalk under my feet as we walked toward the
open door, nervous young Black Panthers with rifles and berets manning both
sides of it. They gestured up to the roofs of the buildings on the opposite
side of the street and, with a start, we took in the rifles extending all along
the Central Avenue roofline held by men lying on their stomachs. The Los
Angeles Police Department was massed in force. Inside, we were shown the
entrance to an upper room where seven or eight young mothers with infants in
arms had been attending a class in new baby care when the confrontation began.
We had been summoned to escort them home, and, one by one, we did. I dropped
off the woman and child I was assigned and drove home without incident.
I did not then take in the real peril
all of us were in - a peril the Black Panthers were to face in earnest two
weeks later. I found myself in the company of Communists because I had chosen
that night of all nights to find out for myself what Communism was direct from
a comrade’s mouth. Somehow I had located their offices in LA and driven there
in my old Chevy from the North Hollywood apartment I shared with my father. For
two hours, an eager young man, not much older than me, had done his best to
explain the theories and imaginings of the Communist movement. A cell leader
working to find converts in local factories by day, he was eager to tackle a college student studying history. He was
filled with idealism. And I had been primed, oddly, by the far right of the
Republican Party, to want to hear him.
Some time during the 1950’s McCarthy
hearings, not so long after the birth of television, these men, those most terrified by the threats posed by the rise
of Communist ideology after WWII, held a
series of televised giant “educational” events in a football arena filled with
people in which they tried to explain to Americans in detail their opinions of
the false promises and dangers of this movement. It was the first time my
child’s brain had ever tried to follow abstract thought. And, ironically, all I
took away from watching was that
Communists wanted to help poor people. That sounded nice. Later, as a fifth grader I even undertook to
teach myself Russian. Studying in secret, I
managed to memorize the alphabet and finally say “Shto eto? Eto
karandash.” (What is it? It’s a pencil)
before I lost interest. Later, as a college student, my curiosity was
renewed when the Great Leap Forward in China was being promoted on college
campuses all over the nation as a glorious thing, said to be liberating
millions from feudal suffering. Mao’s “Little Red Book was passed out for free
on college political tables leading to the UCLA cafeteria. I read of the dramatic
idealism of the fighters in Red Star Over China and was moved by their
passion to make this world fairer. Listening to the earnest young man, however,
I grew more and more troubled by the future he painted.
“But when is it finished?” I
interrupted him. “When do we stop being revolutionaries and begin being free
people again? Free to do other things?
Like art?”
“Never,” he blurted. “The revolution
must constantly be renewed.”
“But what mechanisms are there to
control the leadership if it becomes corrupt?”
“That could never happen. All power
will belong to the people.”
“All poor people are not saints,” I
pointed out. “ How will the Communist
system prevent the rise of a corrupt strong man?”
And so we went on until we could go
no more and I became and have remained ever after, dismayed by this unique
human experiment, despite its admirable first goals to rid the world of very
real injustice. Indeed, even then my doubts were proving valid as events of the
sixties and the nationwide purges under Stalin and Mao unfolded. So I thanked
him, ticked Communism off my list of interests and was about to leave when the
call came. “The Black Panther Party needs volunteers!” someone shouted across
the room. “White ones.” He went on to explain they needed young people they
thought the police would hesitate to shoot, because their LA headquarters were
surrounded. What made me turn back at
the door and go with the Communists? That is easy to answer. I considered the
Black Panther Party, though I did not know them well, as my neighbors.
In the segregated world of the
sixties, I know that too needs explanation, so let me go back four years from
that night. In August of 1965, when I was seventeen years old, newly graduated
from Santa Monica High School, I was living in Malibu with my mother, her
second husband, Charlie Farrell, and my then seven-year-old brother, Chris.
Malibu was not yet the series of gated communities of celebrities and the
hyper-rich that it was to become, but it was rich enough - Charlie was a
well-paid engineer at Hughes Aircraft -
and we counted several actors as our neighbors. The days were mild and
clear, the sea clean and blue. The beaches were much wider than they are now,
and not crowded. We lived squarely within the California Dream. What a puzzlement
then, one day, to see smoke rising from the heart of Los Angeles on our far
horizon.
“What’s that?” I remember asking.
“There is a riot in Watts,” I was
told. I frowned. This was a place name I had never heard before. “The Negroes
are burning their ghetto.”
The fires and the riots went on for
six days, and I had more questions. “What are Negroes doing in LA?” I remember
asking. “What is a ghetto? Why are they burning it?” I had barely glimpsed
people of other races in my cloistered world. Looking back in my high school
year book, I now see dark faces, but
they led separate lives in the early 60’s. And for me, their presence had never
really registered. Put to the question, I would have said that “Negroes” or “colored people” as descendents
of African slaves were then named, all lived in the south.
I did not know it yet, but I suffered from a learned myopia that was
nearly universal among northern whites of my generation, even in liberal
families. The world I grew up in was saturated in the attitudes of the Jim Crow
era. In school my US history textbook informed me that slavery had been a good
experience for most Africans, providing them, not only with civilization and
religious instruction, but free food, and rent,
not to mention a steady job. I do remember wondering if that could
really be true. Hadn’t I also heard that slaves often tried to run away? But in
fact, I and most of my peers were almost comically out of touch with the
history and realities of race in America as the Civil Rights Era dawned. I did
not know people of color were routinely excluded from the hotels we stayed at,
even in California, nor that most of the restaurants we patronized did the
same, as well as the companies hiring for the jobs which supported our middle
class lives. I was shocked to discover a couple of years later that even the
purchase agreement of our Malibu house stated that the property could not be
sold to “coloreds.” My mother had always declared that Negroes were equal. That
we should never ever discriminate. She did this so vocally and so predictably
whenever someone “colored” came into view, even in their presence, that I
always became acutely uncomfortable as if I were being told not to look at or
question a person with some terrible disability. I can only imagine how keenly
the person she was talking about must have wanted to get out of her range. And
yet, with my step father, she signed that lease. It was required by the real
estate office and they really wanted the house. How could it really hurt anyone?
She never noticed when, at five, I
picked up and repeated the childhood rhyme circulating around me when we played
hide and seek, “catch a nigger by his toe, if he hollers, let him go.” It was
how she had learned the song. It was how it had always been sung. There was no malice in it, but no awareness
either. Just as we played cowboys and Indians and always shot down the Indians.
We were walking blind in a moral minefield and never noticed any of it.
I had heard nothing of the racism and
police brutality African Americans regularly suffered, nor the family ordeals
generated by being “last hired, first fired.” Interracial marriage was a felony
in most states. Interracial dating created apocalyptic levels of shock in every
person who walked by, of either race. It was almost unheard of. What I thought
I knew about the lives of African Americans, came from glimpses of white actors
in black face on vaudeville stages, from
the aw shucks jiving of the
characters on TV’s Amos and Andy, or the
“Yassuhs”, and “Yassims” muttered by actors posing as self-abasing
slaves who opened the mansion door for their white masters in movies about the
old South. These were always shown as broken clowns of human beings,
demonstrating in every gesture what “slavish” means. In fact, these grotesque screen portrayals
fit well with the propagandized history I was receiving in elementary school.
Those who think there has been no progress in America might do well to dig up
some of these old films. Gone with the Wind, saturated with racist
myopia as it is, looks positively enlightened by contrast. Movies about Africa were worse and they were
an endlessly popular genre. For years my
child’s image of Africa was lines of
gibbering simpletons wearing clothes like diapers with boxes on their heads,
following behind handsome resourceful white men in neatly ironed khaki. At the
first sign of danger, these diaper men would throw down the boxes and flee in
terror, gibbering in a higher register. When the movie “Zulu” was made in 1964,
of the South African battle of Rorke’s Drift in which a trained regiment of
highly coordinated Zulu warriors attacks a British military station, it was a
revelation. In high school, and even in
college, the history of Africa was presented almost exclusively as the history
of white colonization. We have indeed come a long way, however far there
remains to go.
I - and most of the rest of “white”
America - were at the beginning of that journey in 1965. But I was keen to
start. When Watts went up in flames, I asked my father if he would drive me
there so I could see for myself. He drove me through quickly once the streets
had opened again, doors locked and windows up, and I remember only flashes of
what seemed then a foreign country. Traffic moved steadily but broken windows
still lined the streets. I did not notice the residential areas behind the grim
boulevards, thousands of row houses, many as neat as a pin with well kept
gardens. Or see the Sunday parade of elegant older ladies in large flowery hats
on their way to church that I later became aware of. So much of Watts in those
days was populated by a generation of law-abiding country people who had
escaped the old South. They carried with them values of hard work and family
loyalty and hope. But those hopes were being dashed as they fought to make a
living or realize any kind of personal dream in still racist California. And
they were losing their children to the violence and despair of race-based
gangs. The Slauson Street Gang. The Crips. The Bloods. They were all started in
those years.
Several months after the start of my
student life at UCLA, a small notice caught my attention on a library bulletin
board. Operation Bootstrap, a black self-help organization in south central Los
Angeles was seeking volunteers. My curiosity about the riots still strong, I
decided to go. It was a long journey from perky Westwood to Watts on a city bus
in those days. I needed three buses to get there, if memory serves. The streets
grew ever more functional and drab as each bus drove farther south, hundreds of
blocks of factories or small poor businesses, empty, littered vacant lots,
liquor stores on every corner. Gradually the color of the passers-by on
sidewalks grew darker as we passed through Asian neighborhoods, hispanic neighborhoods
and finally neighborhoods that were exclusively “Negro.” Those getting on the bus looked tired and
dispirited. There were young women with a long day of menial work behind them
and a whole life of it ahead. There were young men who swung into seats, edgy and miserable from their endless
fruitless search for any job that would last more than a few days. Grey-haired
men and women, old before their time, gazed blankly out the windows, illusions
gone. And there was anger to be seen through those windows. I remember a sudden
flare of fury as women outside a liquor store began to fight, screaming
insults, dragging each other down to their knees with hands buried in their
opponents hair. A drunken young prostitute staggered diagonally across a major
street, her shirt ripped, yelling obscenities at passers by. To me it seemed a
fearful, alien planet. I was nervous even to walk a block by myself in those
early days.
But I soon had friends. Operation
Bootstrap itself, on 42nd and Central Avenue, proved to be a large cinderblock
building with a sizable central room and several smaller ones. My offer to
volunteer was greeted warmly by the three men who started it. Bob Bailey, Robert Hall and Louis Smith and
been involved, only months before, in
the Freedom Rides to help bring voting rights to blacks in the South. In Los
Angeles, their goal was to lift residents up “by their bootstraps” by offering them free
skills-based education right in the neighborhood. The idea was that students would quickly be
able to make a real living from learning keypunch or going into the arts or
helping to build a toy factory, funded by Mattel, that made black dolls.
Teachers from local universities and businesses volunteered to offer free
classes. Lou Smith was also in the midst of a concerted outreach to educate and
involve college students like me. He didn’t just want to get jobs for a few
people. He wanted to change the culture. It was his notice on that bulletin
board at UCLA that had brought me so far.
And so my education in black began in earnest.
As I worked at the front desk as a
receptionist, he began with short lectures. I learned about the realities of
slavery, about the old South and the new 1960’s version, the cattle prods, the
jail house beatings, the realities of Jim Crow for the people who lived there.
I learned about “field negroes” vs “house negroes,” a schism created in the
antebellum south, that was still poisoning attitudes within the black
community. Those with darker skins, more African hair or features, were not
seen as attractive. But that was changing even as I absorbed the lessons he was
teaching me. Stokley Carmichael had arrived in Watts for a series of evening
harangues and at long last “Negroes” were hearing the novel idea, “black is
beautiful.” “Black” became their proud new identity. It was truly a movement of consciousness for
a whole nation.
My own mind was moving as well,
peeling off layers of unconscious bias as if I were an onion. Lou’s lessons sometimes took effect days
after I received them. One I remember
particularly. At UCLA one day, I attended a science fiction film made in Japan.
A space ship landed and aliens from Mars emerged, a prince of Mars and his many
robed attendants. Science fiction was in its movie infancy in those days. Such
improbable characters were routine. But the audience and I began to laugh out
loud. The reason? The royalty from Mars were all Japanese! And then, mid laugh,
I stopped. And for the first time, realized.
I remember the same lesson coming
home as I really looked at the graphic in my UCLA anthropology textbook one
day. The Evolution of Man was illustrated, starting with a monkey, rising to
brute, to ape man, and at last to glorious
homo sapiens. I had never before noticed how odd it was that this pinnacle of creation was
always pictured as a robust white man with reddish hair wearing tennis shorts. Of
course he would be white. The European version of mankind, I finally realized
with real shock, was exclusively what my culture had always presented to me as what “human
beings” looked like. All others were exotics, variations from this norm, odd people always being studied by scientists who shared photos of them in National Geographic Magazine. And
that final image was male because of course women were a specialized variation
too, not the main event of the species. When the Japanese put themselves
forward as aliens who looked like human beings, what I experienced for the
first time was the shock of cognitive dissonance.
There were other revelations, some
perhaps more than Lou even intended. In the garage behind Operation Bootstrap,
once a week, “encounter sessions” were organized. College professors from USC
and UCLA, a sprinkling of young volunteers like myself, and some 30-40
neighborhood people, speaking to each other with passion, love, despair, and
sometimes fury across the racial divide. Lou or Bob started it off and young
men stood to harangue the professors with the stories of the police brutality
they had endured and all that was wrong with America. The crowd swayed and
amened and people called out supportive comments. The professors were conciliatory, eager to
learn. For they carried what all whites in those days carried, a keen sense of
guilt for the injustices that were all around us then, even for slavery itself.
In the sixties there were still people alive who had known people born into
slavery. This was not ancient history. And the terrible aftermath of Jim Crow
was certainly not over. I struggled with that
concept. White guilt. I still do. It may have been a necessary part of the
healing process in our society then. I am not so sure it is now.
As the lessons continued, black Americans grew to impossible stature in
my mind, handsome, powerful, daring, worldly wise in ways the whites my own age
could not hope to attain to. I found myself frowning at the “honkey” boys in
college. They now seemed meek, ungraceful, unmasculine, even childish. It was
black men and women who had my attention, and because of Lou Smith, my
trust. This false image itself became
one more layer of my onion however. One
night, after such a garage encounter session, two men I didn’t know, but Lou
did, invited me to coffee afterwards. One, I later learned was Bunchy Carter,
founder of the LA Chapter of the Black Panthers, the other his friend, Wilbert
Terry. I remember no unease as they
drove me south, deeper into the ghetto, and finally stopped at their apartment.
The conversations sparked in the encounter session continued on a friendlier level, though I
can’t now remember what we said. It was Terry, mainly who talked. It was Terry,
who, an hour after i got there, pulled a gun out of his pocket and pointed it
at me. “Do you know what this is?” he enquired, clearly curious what I would do
or say next.
I frowned at the small silver object
in his hand. “It's a piece,” he informed me, puzzled at my lack of
comprehension.
“A piece of what?” I asked him.
Confused by this sudden turn in the conversation.
“It’s a gun, bitch.”
The statement seemed to hang in the
air, but I finally got it. And the fact that the gun was pointed at the middle
of my chest. This was producing a most remarkable sensation. My body had gone
cold, then riveted on the line the bullet would take. It felt as if all my
organs were moving, congealing at that point into a ball of ice. “What are you
doing?” I asked him, finding it hard to concentrate on anything but those
physical sensations. “You’re scaring
me.”
“Go into the bedroom,” Terry
commanded. “Take off your clothes.” He was confident, clearly on familiar
ground. I would obey with a gun pointed at me. That is what one did after all.
Instead I sat down on the couch. I
had never had a gun pointed at me before, never experienced violence or
coercion of any kind from my fellow human beings. I was 20-years-old and,
entering the fugue state of emotional shock, still could barely take in that my
hosts had become so uncivil. I continued simply to argue, and to refuse. For
some reason still mysterious to me, Terry never took the next step. He didn’t
hit me or take my arm or try to move me by force. Instead he began to talk. He
talked for almost another hour, waving the gun at me, unleashing all his fury
at whites. He demanded to know why it was okay for white men to molest black
women, but now that I was in his neighborhood, I thought I should be exempt.
Carter interjected a few comments,
and, oddly, seemed to be on my side, or at least not on Terry’s. From time to
time he attempted to shift the conversation to a kind of banter, an invitation.
He suggested I join their “stable.” They
kissed the women who prostituted for them he assured me. They were emotionally
supportive pimps. For a college girl whose head was still full of over-the-top
historical romances, this was not a strong argument. To this day I wonder at
the profound loneliness of any woman who would think it was. They had clearly
found it a successful recruiting message in the past. So I continued to sit on
the couch, rigid, refusing all suggestions and commands, but I did not feel the
full shock of fear until suddenly, when Terry wasn’t looking, Carter took away
and hid the little pistol he had set down on the mantel. Was I then in real
danger of being murdered? He knew his friend. Was Terry crazy enough to do
that? My frozen mind and body began to emerge from its shock. I stood up. When
Carter, still arguing with Terry, brusquely gestured to the door and said I
could go if I liked, I slipped out into the hall and down the stairs. I
couldn’t hear whatever arguments Carter used to stop Terry from pulling me back
in. I just got in my car and drove.
At home, my father was still out. I
went to bed, shaking in every limb, and
never told him of my near escape, though, much later I did tell Lou. He grimaced, but said little. And in April, 1968
came another lesson when Martin Luther King was assassinated. I remember Lou
pushing me out of the building and into my car minutes after the news first came
on the radio. “Drive!” He commanded. “Go now!” I remember angry hands slapping
my car at intersections as the electrifying news spread across LA on the radio.
I drove and made it home and followed the news that night as activists and LA
police barely stopped Watts from erupting once again. Across the nation 110
other cities burst into riot and unrest.
For over a year, any thought or mention of
that night with Carter and Terry made my hands shake uncontrollably. A inch
wide swatch of hair on one side of my head turned white. And yet, thanks to the
grudging intervention of Carter, I was not raped, and not physically
harmed. It makes me admire, today,
the courage of young people in inner
cities who often experience multiple episodes of such armed bullying in their
teens. It was far more than I could handle at age 20.
I never talked to Carter or Terry
again. I often thought of them with anger, but I was shocked when I learned it
was Carter who was gunned down a year later, with John Huggins in an event
hosted by the Black Student’s Union at UCLA. A member of the US organization
led by Ron Karenga (Bootstrap’s neighbors on the other side) took offense at
something they said and shot them both. Reading his biography today, I have
learned that Bunchy Carter is credited with starting the Black Panther
organization in Los Angeles - something I didn’t know when I met him, and
before that was a leader in the Slauson Street Gang with the nickname “Mayor of
the Ghetto.” I am almost sorry to reveal that, according to what he said to me that night, he was also a pimp because the BPP he led was truly trying to move beyond gangs and create a
political movement that lifted and empowered black youth. They offered classes,
free community breakfasts, and role models who tried to protect others from
bullying police. He had been rapidly evolving, from gang member, to prisoner,
to Black Muslim, to community activist and leader. Where he would have ended up if he had not
been assassinated, no one can say. Nor
what the Black Panther Party would have become if its leaders all over the
country had not been assassinated or imprisoned
by the FBI, as they were over the
next years. Reading today the memoir written by Elaine Brown - one of their
last surviving leaders - I can see the immaturity, as well as the earnest
courage, of their ideas. They carried guns and postured in sexy black leather
and demanded respect and obedience, but they also really tried to help. I
believe now that their self-righteous approach was destined to skirt closer to
fascism than the communism they were accused of. But they were so young, in
their early twenties. It took real courage to do what they did in those Jim
Crow tainted days, learning everything for themselves from the ground up,
putting their lives on the line, and fighting with each other as often as with
those outside. It was those internecine struggles the FBI encouraged that lead
to Carter’s death. Of Terry, I never heard more, nor wanted to.
Thus it was that the (hopefully)
final layer of my personal onion came loose.
I looked down one day at my yellow-toned freckled and tanned arms and
began to object to being labelled “white.” It was not just that the color was
inaccurate, I began to bristle at the idea that my identity was a color.
Calling any person a skin color tells you almost nothing important about them
as a person any more than the color of their eyes or hair. It may hint strongly
at a history or a social status, but it also may not. The label “white” was
used to make assumptions about me that were rarely true. “Black people know all about white people,” I was told
repeatedly in those days. “All the movies and TV shows are about white people.
We know you. You do not know us.” But I have never seen a TV show or movie that
comes even close to the life I personally lead or the thoughts I personally
have. I did not know the people around me at Operation Bootstrap perfectly, but
I had made tremendous efforts over three years, and some progress, in doing so.
I finally woke up and realized very few such efforts were being made in
reverse. For most at Operation Bootstrap, excepting Lou Smith, even after those
three years, I was still, first and mostly, only a color.
From the lessons at Bootstrap and
from reading history, and most of all from the years of world travel that were
to follow, I have learned that “white people” are not unique, not even in their
racial blindness. To think they are is to show ignorance of the experience of
oppressed groups in almost every country and time - Koreans in Japan,
untouchables in India, Tibetans in China, Muslims in Tibet, Shia in Iraq, Tutsi
in Rwanda, non-Communists in Cambodia, Jews in Germany and Russia, Palestinians
in Israel, Armenians in Turkey, Rohingya in Myanmar. The list goes on. The
European Age of Imperialism was real and terrible in its effects and attitudes,
but to elevate Europeans to a status as unique monsters no other group will
ever match creates a kind of racism in the negative. A silly idea. There is so
very much impressive competition.
Meeting a person and taking their
skin color as a critically defining characteristic, to me now, is the bottom
line of racism. Being able to forget about skin color altogether, or take it as
no more than a detail of personal appearance like eye color, or height, is the
liberation from racism we all seek. Moving contrary to the dawning era of “political correctness” I also began to push
back against arguments for “white guilt.” Today I no longer accept
responsibility for actions that took place before I was born, on issues I had
no part of creating. Nor do I accept
guilt for decisions I do not make now or for thoughts I do not have. What I do
feel morally responsible for are my actions now, and for the thoughts I share.
I still support efforts to repair the damage of the past, such as affirmative
action in school placements and job placements, but not reparations. None of those alive now have ever legally been slave owners nor have
any been their slaves by law. We do not owe each other money. Life is hard in myriad
ways for everyone. What we owe each other is fairness going forward. We owe
each other honest awareness of the lingering effects of the past and the need to
ensure they do not persist or give unfair advantage. When abuses occur in our
society because of current racist attitudes, we owe each other real listening,
protection, just laws, and a just response - in both directions. And there is another reason. Asking "whites" who are, for the most part, already struggling, to pay enormous taxes to provide reparations for the sins of their ancestors (regardless of when those ancestors arrived or what they personally did) cannot possibly bring about a healed or united America going forward. It would instead spawn a hurricane of aggrieved feelings, charges and countercharges. Have we so soon forgotten the effects of the reparations demanded of Germany after WWI? They devastated German's already war-damaged economy and spawned a generation of poor and bitter young people who felt unjustly punished for the sins of their fathers. Their solution was to idolize the man who told them to stop feeling guilty and be strong again. Take back what used to be theirs. Be supermen. And thus was Adolph Hitler enabled to bring hell on earth to a whole continent.
As I see each new generation of
“black” American youngsters wake up to the horrors in their history, I can
acknowledge their anger, maybe even accept their need to aim it at me for a
time as they come to grips with it. But in the end I have come to agree with
Morgan Freeman’s revolutionary conclusion: “The way to finally end racism is to
stop talking about race... I don’t
want to call you a white man anymore. Don’t call me a black man. I am Morgan
Freeman.” It serves up no justice to
say, as I so often hear said these days, “It doesn’t matter if you personally
are racist. You are part of a racist system.” By all means call out racist
attitudes that are really manifesting in action or speech, but so often the people
who are shaming others are guilty of exactly that same myopia. And “systems” consist only of people and the institutional
rules they think they are following. So let’s really talk when things feel
wrong. And really listen. And every person in the conversation maybe look in
the mirror a little longer as we change together old rules and habits that
still need changing.
I am Francesca, complexion light
yellow-brown with freckles. Eyes blue. Wavy hair gone white. 5’6”. Weight secret. Nice to meet you.
