From: burke@tss.com (Jim Burke)
Subject: Another white person's experience
Reply-To: burke@tss.com (Jim Burke)
Organization: Teknekron Software Systems. Inc.
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 23:39:50 GMT

This is an accounting of my experiences as a white person interacting with black
people.  If you're not interested in hearing such an account, please don't read
any further.  If you choose to read on, I'd be very interested in constructive
comments.  Oh, and some will wonder about my motivation for posting this - well,
it's like this.  There's no way I can ever really understand what it is like to
be a black person in America.  There's no way a black person can understand what
it is like to be a white person in America.  There's no way a person born to wealth
can know what it was like to grow up poor, and vice versa.  All we can do is to
tell each other.

Having been born in Appalachia, I never knew any black people until my family moved
to Michigan when I was 8.  We lived in River Rouge, an industrial little city
that borders on Detroit.  River Rouge is interesting in that the population was
about 55% white, and 45% black but the black and white people literally lived on
opposite sides of the railroad tracks that ran throught the city.  There were
two elementary schools on the "white" side of town and two on the "black" side
of town, so I still didn't interact much with black people up through the seventh
grade.  Grades 8-12 went to the high school, of which there was only one so this
was the first opportunity to experience integration.  Having been born in November,
I started at the high school when I was still 12 years old.  My first real interaction
with black people was during my second week in the high school.  Two older black
students cornered me outside the gym and told me to give them some money.
I said I didn't have any and so they told me I'd better bring them some the next
day or they were going to kick my ass.  These guys were probably 10th or 11th graders,
but to me they were just a lot bigger and older than me.  I had never experienced
anything like this but I knew enough to be scared shitless of them (which is what
they wanted) so I told my homeroom teacher.  He took care of the problem by talking
to them.  One of them saw me a couple of days later and told me they were really
going to get me for telling, but nothing more ever came of it.

Several weeks later was homecoming.  It was Friday, and the principal of the
school thought it would be nice to let everyone out early and have them attend
a school spirit "pep rally" at the athletic field, which was located next to
one of the elementary schools on the "black" side of town.  Attendance was required,
and being so new and naieve, I didn't know enough to skip out on it.  After the
pep rally, I and two friends started walking back toward home.  The three of us
were walking along when one of my friends said "don't look back, but there's a
bunch of kids that are looking at us pretty intensely back at the corner".  Well,
of course I turned around to look, and sure enough there were about 8 or 10 black
kids hanging around on the corner and looking our way.  They were pointing at us
and laughing.  My other friend mentioned that he thought we were in big trouble.
He looked back and this time the gang of kids was running towards us so we took
off running.  We made it to the railroad tracks before they caught us.  Again, these
were kids that were in the 15-16 year old range.  They surounded us, intimidated
us, asked us why a bunch of white-assed honkey mother-f'ers were on "their" side
of town, called us some other names, and then proceeded to beat the shit out of
us.  I got away with only a black eye, a cut lip, and some bruises.  One of my
friends ended up with a dislocated shoulder and a broken nose.  The other had
a concussion and stitches from a brick to the head, along with other cuts and
bruises.

For the next couple of years I never allowed myself to get cornered by black kids.  I
stayed in large groups of white kids, and so forth.  By the eleventh grade I had
grown a lot and was then 6'3" and 230 so nobody messed with me too much one on one.
I tried out for football and made the team.  I was one of only three white kids
on the team and we took a lot of shit from the black kids who insisted that we
had only made the team because we were white (there might have been a grain of
truth to this, since there weren't many white kids who would try out for sports
at the school).   The only time I ever got expelled from school was for fighting
with a black member of the team over a stupid incident where I accidentally
hit his with a football that was thrown badly (he wasn't looking my way) and his
friends all egged him on with taunts like "are you going to take that kind of shit
from some honkey?" and so forth.  So it was essentially a racially oriented fist-fight.

Once I was out of high school, I went to work at the Ford Rouge plant, a huge
auto complex in Dearborn.  I worked on a line loading windshields into a washer.
I and a co-worker would grab each side of a windshield and load it together.
My second day on the job, my partner was a black guy.  He continually gave me
shit, saying things like "you can't stand it to be working with a black man who
makes more money that you do, can you?".  Basically, he was trying to provoke me
to get me fired before I got into the union.  I took a fair amount of shit from
him until I cornered him in the parking lot late one night and told him I'd
cut his eyes out if he didn't lay off.  After that, he always found a way to
work with somebody else.  Basically, I was finding that the only way to deal with
intimidation was to escalate it until the other person either backed down or
it errupted into a true fight.  It never went that far.

It didn't take me long to figure out that working on the line at Ford was not
for me.  I joined the army to get money to go to college when I got out.
This was the first time I had the chance to meet and know people from other
areas of the country.  I was absolutely shocked at some of the people I met.
A guy I ended up becoming very good friends with was a black guy from Memphis
Tennessee.  I soon discovered that there was a very big difference beteween
the black people I had encountered living in River Rouge, and the people
I was meeting from around the country.

After leaving the army, I attended college in Detroit.  I had matured some since
high school, and I had a different attitude toward people in general.  At school,
I found some black people to be like the people I had encountered earlier on,
and some who were friendly, intelligent, and enjoyable to know.  Later on, I moved
to Florida and once again I found that the black people I met, worked with, lived
in a neighborhood with, what ever - they were very different than the people I
encountered in Detroit.  Gradually I began to lose some of the prejudices I had
built up - prejudices like feeling I had to become immediately defensive when I
encountered a black person, that they were going to immediately hate me because I
was white, and that some pain-in-the-ass type of experience was about to happen.

I've now been away from Detroit for over 9 years and I have to say that my current
attitudes are very different from those I had living in the Detroit area.  I dont'
think at all about someone's race when I interview them for a job, I live in a
highly multi-cultural area and I enjoy it, and I abhore racism in all its forms.
Yet, when I go back to Detroit things really are different there.  I haven't lived
in Newark, or Boston, or east L.A. so I don't know what things are like in other
areas of hightened racial tension.  But it isn't the same everywhere.  I don't
ever want to live in an area like that again.  But, my experiences from high school
and college do make me awfully sensitive to suggestions that I must be racist
because I am white.  My experience was that I have been beaten up, verbally abused,
threatened, harrassed, and intimidated based solely on the fact that I was white.
So sometimes I get overly sensitive at certain things.
I guess my only parting question would be this - what can happen to start to difuse
the racial tension in some of these hot spots around the country.  The way things
are in Detroit, people hate each other on both sides so much that nobody wants to
try to figure out what went wrong and fix it.  The attitude of some blacks is "
"We'll f'ck up any whites who come in our neighborhood" and the attitude of some
whites is "let 'em come into my neighborhood and I'll burn their ass out".
This is sad.  And then there are people like me who don't want to be caught up
in that whole cycle, so they move away which only leaves behind the asshole.


Xref: sparky soc.culture.african.american:12967 alt.discrimination:5346