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Saturday: I was unable to sleep more than about 4 hours. I have a nasal septal deformity and severe nasal allergies. I've been a mouth breather and snorer since teen years and have had sleep apnea since my thirties, a condition that worsened with age and gaining weight. In my forties and early fifties I drank about 20 cups of coffee a day, right up to bedtime without realizing that I was using it to stay awake in the day.
In 1996 and 1997 I started to have REM intrusions during waking hours. I could be writing a progress note in a patient chart and look more carefully and see that I was writing gibberish as I started to dream while working. I got a sleep study and started on a night-time respirator called CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure). With obstructive sleep apnea, the soft tissues of the mouth and throat relax during sleep and cover parts of the airway leading to snoring and eventual occlusion so that air cannot be moved into the lung. As the oxygen concentration in the brain declines, a distress signal is sent to "WAKE UP AND BREATHE." This happened to me tens of times an hour so that I never go to the deeper stages of sleep. The CPAP is adjusted to provide enough pressure to keep the airway open at all time. The pressure varies depending upon the individual's degree of obstruction.
Well, the pressure of my device had to account for my hairfever and swollen nasal tissues. Lately, however, I am taking hefty doses of corticosteroids that work wonders for reducing inflamed tissue. The result is that the quarter inch pipe that directed a stream of hair into my nose has expanded a one inch pipe (using a plumbing analogy)...too much air and now my sinuses are filling and I'm sneezing when sleeping. I haven't figured out how to reprogram this particular machine (manufacturers tend to keep this a secret from users) and so I'm trying to reduce the flow in various mechanical ways without full success.
The steroids also give me a "high" with more energy, less desire to sleep, voracious appetite, etc. My blood sugar has doubled. I must continue these meds for the next few days, then I'll try to do without.
I also feel a warmth in the balls of my feet and toes and wonder if this is a reflection of the peripheral neuropathy which can interfere with treatment, sometimes described as a severe burning. In my case, it just feels like my normally cold feet are covered with magic slippers.
I was warned that the medication that I am taking to avoid nausea was constipating. I may have overdone it with a laxative last night. Three times and counting.
In discussing nausea, a hospice physician told me that marijuana is frequently useful for nausea and loss of appetite. The oncology fellow confirmed that pot was often effective and that they would provide me with documentation if I desired, but he said that he didn't think I would have a problem at any dispensary. I'll keep you posted about this.
Sunday: It is 36 hours since I finished my first round of chemotherapy. I can't say that I'm aware of any major side-effects up until this point. I remain on a very large dose of dexamethasone and I have not needed any pain medication in more than 24 hours. There are a few minutes of pain that are a 6/10 or 7/10 but they subside quickly. I imagine the pains to be my medications stabbing away at tumor. Since dexamethasone, a corticosteroid, is strongly anti-inflammatory, I'm thinking that most of my pain has been my body's inflammatory response to the growth of tumor pushing around on other structures in my chest.
Corticosteroids (like prednisone and dexamethasone) and Non-steroidal Anti-inflammatory drugs (like Ibuprofen) are ulcerogenic. I'm already taking omeprazole to decrease acid production. Trying to reduce my Ibuprofen is an attempt to spare my stomach to the greatest extent possible under the circumstances. I can put up with a certain amount of pain to reduce my risk of developing a peptic ulcer.
It is a clear morning in Morro Bay at 4:30 A.M. I can see the milky way despite a bright street lamp less than 100 feet away. My zenith is between Castor-Pollux and Orion. The Big Dipper is very bright to the East. Looks like it will be a beautiful day. They all feel beautiful to me.
Racism: Dedicated to Steve Groark
This is a complicated subject for me to approach--so complicated that I doubt that I have enough time left in my life to organize my thinking in the most effective manner. That leaves me with another option, and that is to just free associate to some extent and hope to make some sense of it. So here goes.
Recently I had a conversation with a friend who was talking about the low crime rate in Toronto when compared to Jersey City. Immediately out of my mouth, unobstructed by any attempt at censorship by my frontal lobes, came "I'll bet there is a much lower black population in Toronto." I didn't have any evidence at hand to prove the truth of this statement. It reflected a deeply held belief on my part that cities, at least in the U.S. with large black populations are likely to have high crime rates. AND THIS IS THE ME OF AGE 67 AT THE TIME. I didn't like looking at this. How big a racist does this make me? It made me think more about my view of race during the next few months that followed this conversation.
My Upbringing:
I grew up in White Washington, D.C. My mother's family had been in Maryland and then D.C. for many generations. My father's family was from New York and included a Jew and a Native American. It was more diverse culturally and New York City was more culturally diverse as well. The word "nigger" would have been as common a description for a black person in our household as the word "colored," especially from my mother. She told the story of being about 6 years old and "this colored boy came up to me and grabbed me between the legs." I ran home and mother told me not to play with "coloreds." She viewed "colored" as having loose sexual morals and probably attributed that to race rather than economic situation.
As a child, I remember seeing black children chased from Turkey Thicket playground and my mother explained that only white children could play there, no niggers.
Nigger was a common word for blacks in most of my mother's family. Recently, I was listening to a tape of my aunts and uncles made in about 1980. My godmother, Kay, was describing an event from 1932 when she and her husband were looking "for corn liquor that the niggers always made in the woods back there."
My father was more urbane--Negro more often than Nigger when he was younger, but he became more upset when attempts to address racial imbalance were imposed by law. When drunk, my dad also had bad things to say about blacks who had been in combat in his areas during the war. A tank unit that was manned by blacks had opened fire on his unit and several of his buddies had been killed in a friendly fire tragedy. He claimed also to have seen incidents of terrible judgment--driving tanks and trucks into streams at non-fording positions and creating problems with extracting the armor from the water.
My father was capable of taking his impulses to immediate extremes. I remember being driven to school one day when he was cut off by another car. He whipped that Dodge into second gear and caught up to the black man driving the offending vehicle. Dad rolled down the window at a light and yelled, "Look! A chimpanzee that can drive!" My ears were red and I was humiliated to be in the same car.
Later in life, during the Nixon years, he gravitated to groups that opposed school busing when my brother was in a school to be affected. Dad was also critical of the work habits of minority summer students hired under government mandates at his office. He said that they were a joyful group to be around, tried very hard to please, but had minimal clerical skills, didn't know the alphabet for filing, had a terrible command of both spoken and written English, etc.
In our grade school yard, Nigger and Kyke would have been commonly used words for African-Americans and Jews. When my 7th grade nun tore all of the books and papers out of my desk because it was such a mess, she told the class "It looks like a nigger shanty." There was an occasional black student in our suburban Catholic school, but never in my class and I had no chance to interact on a person to person basis at regular intervals until high school.
This attitude clearly flew in the face of the religious doctrine that we were being taught in school. All were equal in the eyes of God. Why make the distinction on earth?
But the old order was creaking and coming down oh so slowly. In the book "Mississippi Mud" which describes the flood of 1927, it looked just like slavery--the imprisonment of black men by shotgun toting whites to work on the levees as the water rose. This was more than 60 years after emancipation.
Integration was forced upon the armed services in the 40's over the objection of much of the brass. Hubert Humphrey's 1948 Democratic convention speech laid down a gauntlet and the Southern Democrats rebelled and remained a block that could defeat attempts at Equality Legislation right up through 1965. The Civil Rights activities of the 50's and 60's focused the attention of the white majority and the rest of the world on the plight of black America and things began to stir. The assassinations of blacks in the 1960s and finally Martin Luther King in 1968 brought the rage to the surface and it spilled over in generalized rioting in large cities.
On November 5, 1952 I began delivering newspapers for the Washington Times Herald which was soon absorbed by the Washington Post. For the next 8 years, I read most of the news during brief work breaks from carrying and tossing the papers. I could follow what was happening in the racial pushing and shoving that was occurring politically. Communism and Race were the big issues. The Post was a liberal paper and stopped identifying the ethnicity of crime perpetrators. In Northern cities, there was a white flight to the suburbs after the great migration of blacks from the south during and after World War II in their search for better economic opportunities. Conservatives and the FBI often managed to view the search for equality as part of a communist plot.
Whites were realistically concerned about loss of property values in neighborhoods where a black family moved in. Whites believed that there was a conspiracy afoot, something called "blockbusting," where an outside group overpays for the first house in an all white neighborhood with the result that remaining house values are reduced and the "ice" has been broken so to speak. Real estate agents routinely denied rental and sale opportunities to blacks. Laws and mores were changing but not very fast. It looked fast if you were white. It was snail's pace if you were black.
The most shameful racially significant event in my early life occurred when I was 12 at a boy scout camp on the Chesapeake Bay. Our troop was all white. Our neighboring troop all black. We did activities together, warily at first, but more enthusiastically as the week went on. At a campfire event, I was sitting next to a black camper, a kid that I had interacted with canoeing. In the course of talking about someone outside of the immediate group, I said; "Oh, he's just a nigger." Immediately I felt a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach--that old familiar feeling from the chaos in my own family at age 6--and the attempt to apologize to my neighbor froze in my throat. I couldn't look him. I swallowed and pretended that I hadn't said anything, but I didn't look his way for the rest of the function and it felt like my ears were burning. I avoided any eye contact with him for the rest of the week. I realized that I been incredibly hurtful and I was ashamed...and it still feels shameful when writing about it now. I didn't have enough strength to even apologize to him.
In our household, my father became interested in the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr. and bought a book or two in the mid-fifties. My father was also upset at the foot-dragging that occurred after the Brown vs Board decision in 1954. He believed that integration had to be encouraged and that the races had to be able to "fit together" in some way. He had the usual bias against interracial marriage using the same general types of arguments that the fundamentalist religions use against "mixed marriages."
He said that the smoothest solution to Brown vs. Board would have been the immediate integration of a grade a year. It probably would have satisfied the court as deliberate speed so that by 1966 all secondary schools in the U.S. would be integrated. Instead, states fought implementation for years and one of our nearby Virginia counties closed its school system in 1957 rather than admit blacks.
Reading the Post everyday kept me informed about the struggle, but it was intellectual and didn't touch the heart. My high school was integrated, but there were few blacks. Nate Adams was our reigning Greek scholar in high school. I met him in 9th grade. He had an excellent mind and terrific work ethic. It made an impression on me with respect to the inherent mental potential of blacks.
However, in 9th grade I had a very colorful history teacher, Father Burke. We all loved him. I think he was probably the early political mentor of Patrick Buchanan and William Bennett. The following vignette is my first memory of Father Burke.
Father Burke, I still love him
It is my first history class in high school. History is my favorite subject. When it was introduced into the curriculum in 4th grade, I had read my entire year's worth of material by the third day of school. Who would my teacher be?
About 5 minutes late, an elderly, paunchy, white-haired man in a rumpled cassock entered the room. Instead of going to the front of the class, he went to the back and opened up an enormous window. He took the stub of a cigarette out of some inside pocket and lit it up and puffed away. He had not said a word. All of the students were craning their heads to see what was happening. Finally he spoke. "What's the matter? Haven't you ever seen a white man smoke?"
He was a stimulating teacher. The class was ancient history. Out of five days of class, ancient history would have been mentioned twice--very briefly on Friday when he handed out a list of 10 questions that covered a section of our textbook. We were expected to be able to write a sensible essay on any of those questions by Monday. This required about 15 minutes of class time on Friday. On Monday, the session was devoted to writing two or three ten-minute essays. This required about 30 minutes.
All of the rest of class time was devoted to either a discussion of current events, or Father Burke's view of modern American history and political thought. I first heard the ditty about Franklin and Eleanor from Father Burke: "You kiss the niggers and I'll kiss the Jews. We'll stay in the White House as long as we choose." Likewise, a joke about the three most recent U.S. presidents as of 1957. "Roosevelt proved that you could be president as long as you wanted. Truman proved that ANYONE could be a president. Eisenhower has proved that we don't really need a president."
Father Burke believed that the U.S. had pursued an Anglophile foreign policy under Roosevelt, that the most serious threat to the U.S. was communism and that Lend Lease to the Russians had prevented the Germans from grinding the Soviet Union to a pulp. He viewed this as a terrible mistake. I don't recall him talking much about the holocaust. He believed that our policy toward the Japanese was a deliberate provocation and thought that Pearl Harbor was a cover up--that Roosevelt knew that an attack was imminent and failed to fully buttress American exposure there.
I had heard all of these arguments in discussions with my father since an early age. I wasn't particularly moved by them. However, I loved the give and take of Father Burke's class. No matter your position, you were always treated with respect. We loved his vulnerability, the fact that he was willing to say "bullshit" to the expected manner of teaching his class and going his own way.
Now the Jesuits monitored their schools in a very systematic fashion. Auditors would sit in on classes, generally without notice, and observe teaching methods. One day Father Burke came in early to class. He was cleaned up nicely. No growth of beard, hair trimmed, fresh Cassock. He sat down and made a little speech.
"Boys I'm too old now to be sent back to the Phillipines. You need to help me. A little bird has told me that someone will come in during this class and observe what we do. Today we will be doing history. Please open your books to page 137. Now, I will begin to read from the chapter. From time to time, I will look up and ask a question about the material. You can participate whether you know the answer or not. If you don't know the answer, raise your left hand. If you are sure you know the answer, raise your right hand. I will call on one of you. If you are wrong, don't worry about it." We were happy to participate in the ruse.
By the first year of high school I had read about the intellectual giant, Frederick Douglass, and his relationship with Lincoln and had read biographies of most well-known American black scientists and educators, such as George Washington Carver, Booker T Washington and Charles Drew. My reading didn't extend to the Abolitionist literature or materials about the Underground Railway, although I lived in the State in which Harriet Tubman was born. Another student in our high school was Darryl Hill, a track and football athlete who went to the Naval Academy, but transferred to the University of Maryland as a sophomore and integrated the Atlantic Coast Conference in 1963. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darryl_Hill_(American_football)
However, the N word was in common use in our high school. One of my friends had a policeman for a father. I stayed over at his house one night. In the morning as we made ourselves breakfast, I noted his father's clothes and holstered side-arm hanging on the chair. I asked my friend if his father had ever shot anyone. The answer was yes. He had "shot and killed some nigger" in a gunfight.
In my childhood what boy could not see the power of Jim Brown, the beauty of Willie Mays, the basketball revolution brought by Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain. Despite all of the evidence from these experiences, the following vignette illustrates the continued naivete of my thinking after two years of exposure to a marginally integrated educational system:
Herman's Market
In 1957 I started high school in a black neighborhood in Washington, D.C. There were no white neighbors. As 9th and 10th graders we were not permitted to smoke cigarettes within a block of the school. This left us with two choices. We could walk a couple of blocks south on North Capitol Street to the People's drug store and have coffee or a coke and smoke at the lunch counter. Or we could walk 1 block west to Herman's Delicatessen at 1st and Eye Northwest. Herman's it was most of the time.
Herman's was also a common destination for many of the black children on their way to school. Herman sold large 1-cent oatmeal cookies. A few cookies and a pepsi were the usual breakfast for many of these little children. So there were generally 6 to 10 white high schoolers dressed in coats and ties smoking their cigarettes while a stream of little children did the Herman Fast Food morning run. Herman stood there with his cigar talking up a storm mostly about his son who was studying podiatry. He told us of a junior student who had been expelled for farting at an assembly at Gonzaga a few years before. He had all the gossip accumulated over the previous few years.
I recall standing at Herman's after the death of a well-known Negro preacher (wealthy one at that). Were there any that were not wealthy that were reported in white newspapers? I was asking the older black children at Herman's if they intended to go to the viewing of Daddy Grace, the dead preacher? As if all blacks would have been members of his congregation. Talk about hasty generalization. But it reflects the extent of my ignorance at the time.
http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aah/grace-charles-manuel-sweet-daddy-1881-1960
I guess the point that I am trying to make is that I came by my racism honestly. It was inherited from my childhood culture. Just like the brainwashing of religion, that early influence was hard to shake and parts remain active today.
Like many of my generation, my first sexual experience was with a black prostitute.
The Lady of Sty
I had my first sexual experience in the company of George, the son of a D.C. policeman, in the Spring of 1962 during my Freshman year of college. He was home for the weekend and I was driving a our family 2nd car, a Hillman Husky. We headed to D.C. where we could drink beer at a hangout near Catholic University. After a couple of beers he said, "Let's go, I want to show you something. "
He directed me to the area around 14th St. It was about 11 PM and there was a lot of activity on the street with cars at slowed paces and men running up to the cars for conversations. There were garishly dressed women on the street as well. George rolled down his window and began talking to one of the black men dressed in a tank-top shirt. George turned to me and said, "Pull over and park. I did." I now realized that George was looking for a prostitute. I was a virgin and totally out of my element. I was scared but I had some additional courage from the few beers. I didn't even think to tell him that I was angry that I had not been included in this decision making.
The pimp introduced us to two black women, one more attractive than the other. I intrinsically knew that I would be with the chubby one with the large sty on her right eye. The pimp led us into a row house. In the front room several black men were playing cards. They were friendly and asked us if we wanted drinks. I told them that I wanted a condom. My friend gave me a negative head shake but I insisted. I had done enough reading and heard enough stories from friends in the military to know enough to keep myself as safe as possible. It would cost me a dollar and I had to wait several minutes while one of the men left the house to go find one. George went upstairs with his "date." My date was very friendly and I followed her up to the 3rd floor to a bedroom at the front of the house. The room was relatively bare. There was a brass bed against one wall and a short dresser against the wall next to the door.
She told me to put $5.00 on the dresser. I told her that I was a few cents short of that. "That's okay then, but we're supposed to get $5.00." There was a sheet on the bed. The pillows were uncovered and showed raw ticking. I took off all of my clothes. She didn't get fully undressed, just hiked up her skirt around her waist and pulled off her panties. Despite my anxiety, that was more than enough for an erection. She knew a lot about condoms and I let her put it on.
I had no idea of what I was doing, but she got me started. "Don't touch my hair." Probably the condom was cheap and thick, but I was coming nowhere close to a climax and I was 19 years old, very horny, very sweaty, and still going strong after what must have been more than 10 minutes.
Finally she said, "Just give me a minute, honey, I have to use the bathroom." She got up and left. I got out of bed and stood there at the head. There was minimal illumination in the room from the outside street lights. I waited and I waited for her to return. Then the door opened and a light went on.
There was a naked bulb hanging in the middle of the room. There were no curtains in the room. I was naked, with an erection, wearing a condom in full view of anyone walking down the street. I was looking into the kind face of an elderly, black man. He looked at me quizzically as if to ask "What are you doing here?"
I backed a little away from the window and said, "I'm waiting for her. She said she'd be right back"
"Oh, no, son. She right down there on the street right now. She's not coming back."
I turned off the light, got dressed and went down to the car. George was already there. He told me what a "great fuck" that was. I didn't say anything. I was still in shock from my very recent nude public exposure, the white guy wearing the even whiter condom.
That was my first sexual experience and my last session with an acknowledged prostitute. My revenge on George was hearing of his treatment for Gonorrhea shortly thereafter.
Steve Groark
Steve was a classmate at Gonzaga. He was tall, thin of of face and body, with long, spindly fingers that I always noticed when he held his long Pall Mall cigarettes. He had a very fine hand tremor. He was originally a friend of my chum, Johnny Robson. Both of them had parents that were a little less controlling than my own, so they had spent some time running around D.C. to various drinking spots. Steve was verbally teased by our classmates who would often pronounce his last name GROARK very quickly in a low pitched voice that placed the accent on the last syllable so the it sounded like a frog croak. He never seemed to complain, and often pretended that he didn't notice.
Although Steve's parents were quite conservative, the neighborhood of Greenbelt, Maryland was not. Several liberal arts teachers from the University of Maryland lived around him and Steve gravitated to their children. He was very much into jazz and other elements of black culture. He frequently went to the Howard theater to see performers and was often one of the few whites there.
He introduced us to a coffee house/beer joint called "The Cave" at 14th and U NW. It was a popular hangout for Howard University students. There was a regular jazz group of students from Howard, the JFK Quintet, who played on weekends. There was a powerful folk singer, Valentine Pringle. The beer was expensive at $.75 a bottle (minimum wage was less than a dollar an hour) but it had a great atmosphere, wonderful entertainment--just a great date when you could scrape up the 10 bucks that it was likely to run.
Steve collected records and had eclectic tastes, mostly jazz and blues. I accumulated some black gospel music and Porgy and Bess which I enjoyed trying to sing when off by myself walking down an empty road or out in the woods. My father's cousin Olive had a large collection of 78 RPM records including early Nat Cole and the Wilbur Sweatman Jazz band among many others.. During the freedom rides of the 1960s I wondered what would have happened if Nat Cole and Lena Horne had gone to a white's only restaurant to eat. Would celebrity have mattered?
I was curious about the history of blacks who refused to return to the U.S. after World War II because of the live and let live attitude toward race that was easier to find in Europe. I was ambivalent about the case of Paul Robeson, all American Football player, actor, opera singer. It seemed to me he viewed Russian communism favorably based upon his experiences with "equality"--a single issue in view of the belief in justifications for killing in the name of a materialistic religious belief about the nature of man and the endpoint of history. Ambivalent or not, how can you not love this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jrPhY1GHNQ
Steve was the first white person I knew to be a serious student and fan of African-American culture and to be totally comfortable in the presence of blacks. He and I got closer as the result of an adventure in our senior year of high school. A requirement for graduation was the completion of a retreat at a Jesuit facility. It was done in lieu of three days of school and, judging from the reports of my classmates, may have been a last big push to gather more priests for the flock. There was a lot of big talk among us of sneaking off during some night and finding the local action, but believe me, this place was so isolated that the only action would have been farm animals.
We were supposed to be observing the rule of silence but there were some breaks allowed. Steve and I went outside the first night to smoke a cigarette and he began a conversation. He was very upset. His family was in turmoil. His brother, who was in the Navy, was engaged (or had married...I can't recall) a girl from Bermuda who was black. Steve's parents were pushing to destroy the relationship and it looked like his brother was about to accede to their wishes.
After we finished talking, we tried to re-enter the house and were met by the retreat-master. We apologized for missing the bell. He said he would talk to us in the morning. However, at breakfast he made the general announcement to the entire assembly that two people were being booted.
The retreat master had said he would discuss this with us in the morning. He never did. We were told to pack up and we were driven to the end of the estate driveway that abutted US Route 301. We hitch hiked back to D.C. and reported to the headmaster. He listened to the story and said that we would have to show up at school and do class work for the next two days in lieu of time at the retreat. He told us that the retreat was a requirement for graduation and we would have to go with another group. He then dismissed us.
Three months after he called us back into his office. He told us the retreat master insisted on an apology before readmitting us for a retreat. Our headmaster, Father McHale, surprised us when he said that he didn't think we owed an apology. He dismissed the requirement for completion of the retreat.
This experience was my eternal bond with Steve Groark, but I don't think that I ever really knew him. There was a quiet suffering there and an awkward desire to fit in but an inability to make more than feeble overtures. I visited him a few times during my last year of high school and met his friends whose bohemian values and behaviors made me very nervous. Even with his group of friends, Steve very much stayed on the periphery, more an observer and often clumsy when trying to participate. I think this is the way he was in high school as well.
I next ran into him at the University of Maryland in 1963. He had originally started school in Iowa in Mathematics but transferred back to the state school to study literature. He had managed to rejoin his group of friends who had become involved in attempts to integrate eating places in nearby Laurel, Maryland. Even though I now had a friend involved in the Civil Rights Movement, I wasn't able to see it as my business or my moral obligation. The thought of confrontation with the red neck toughs of my race frightened me. I'd been scared of these people since escaping from the Smiths down the street at age 8. I wanted no part of the violence. I thought that things were moving in the right direction with or without me.
Although the King Rally in 1963 occurred within 10 miles of my house, I decided to watch it on television and was surprised to see some of my white friends from Catholic University out in force. I had no strong political convictions at the time. By the time I started medical school in 1965, the rhetoric of the Nation of Islam seemed foolish and the increasing stridor of the more radical elements of the movement scared the hell out of me.
I had started high school located in one of the tough black ghettos of Washington, D.C. but there did not appear to be great animosity between the races in 1957. At age 14 or 15 we could walk a few blocks from school to Ollie's bar, a black establishment and buy beer, or go to Buster's Hamburger Shop and chow down for a dime a burger. Steve Groark routinely went to the Howard Theater and many of us went to mixed restaurants and bars such as "The Cave." I felt safe walking all around Washington, D.C. until graduation from high school in 1961.
But things were changing. How could African-Americans not be upset about their treatment by the white government? Waves of immigrants had arrived in America and had managed to filter up into the middle class. Why hadn't blacks managed to do the same? Clearly they had been treated as less "American" than immigrants who passed easily into the military services.
I was a white male who had been the beneficiary of a system stacked in my favor. I was also capable of enough empathy to realize how angry I might be to have been born black into such a system. Given such anger, where would I likely direct it if I could? After seeing a race riot with black on white violence in the fall of 1962 and after my brother was beaten by a group of black teenagers because of the school jacket he was wearing, I believed that I was seeing physical evidence of that anger.
As the political turmoil increased, I was having my own set of struggles with medical school, the need to make money, a new family, turbulence in my marriage, etc.
**********
this is a long post which I'll break here... around this general thought...
One of the benefits of death to our society is the wiping away of misinformation. I believe that my attitudes toward race are, to some extent indelible and primal with attitudes laid down at such an early age, that they are not removable. I think these indelible and primal "filters" for reality, can immediately come to the surface when I am in a strange situation. Now, I've learned generally to compensate for these racist, stereotypical biases, but the fact that they exist in the first place will have some effect on the outcome of an encounter.
I have talked about race. But I know that I have a bucket list of false beliefs running around in my brain. Death removes those kinds of opinions and belief from the world and is a major change agent. Change is necessary in order to work toward a better world.
My daughter's world in terms of racial stereotyping was much different than mine.
Kristin Sohr and Bobby Waxman in 1973 or 1974.
Hey Eric,
ReplyDeleteI agree with your point about those early indelible attitudes and beliefs. In my case they require constant vigilance and mental workarounds so to speak.
Back when Charlotte was in elementary school, she came home after the first day and she was running through the names of the kids in her class. She came across one name and it sounded very urban and not white to me and I asked if her classmate happened to be black. Charlotte looked at me like I was a simpleton (I was) and replied "No Dad, she's not black, she's brown."
And I just had to smile. It really hit me that here she was, growing up in a place (very important) and time with none of the race baggage that I had accumulated.
Hey Eric. I'm thinking of you. I just wish your beloved Redskins were doing better since my beloved Eagles are doing so poorly. You take care. Dan Gordon
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