I’ve been blessed in my life to have friends and
acquaintances from all of the peoples of the earth. Men and women from of every
race, color and creed. (Note: technically I don’t think that I have ever known
a Zoroastrian or an Eskimo. There’s an implied racist remark in that last
sentence. Did you catch it? It’s getting harder and harder to avoid them as
people seem to be getting more sensitive.) But anyway, I have gotten to know a
wide variety of God’s children, that’s safe enough to say. I have paid
attention, too, and I have learned a lot. Not only about them, but about myself
as well.
As hard as we may try to be the people that we wish to
be, we are, all of us, stuck with being the person that we are. In my case, that
means being a fully paid-up member of the white, patriarchal hegemony. The
person that I’m stuck being is, therefore, more or less racist. I accept this
more on information and belief than on any conscious evidence. I despise racism
in all of its manifestations, and I am not aware of any prejudices that I carry
where they would be accessible to my conscious mind, and I would rather eat a bug
then to say anything that would make anyone uncomfortable on account of their
ethnic information, but I have had occasion to see it in myself over the years.
Implicit racism, the experts call it. Hopefully less frequently manifested as
time has marched on, yes, I’m fairly certain of that. Even after extensive
self-examination and various educational experiences, however, we are stuck
with being ourselves.
The thing is, I take it as a given that anybody who was
born and raised white in America has benefited from that whiteness in hundreds
of ways on thousands of occasions in the course of their lives. Everyone treats
you better, everyone is more polite, and you are much less likely to run afoul
of the police. Those are the facts, even if you may never have realized it or
actively wielded the privilege. Accepting the privilege, either consciously or
unconsciously, puts you automatically in the “racist” category, even if you may
score at the “less” end of the “more or less” scale.
It’s hard for us to see these things ourselves, even
though it is constantly happening all around us. We are too close to the
phenomenon to view it properly. It manifests itself in the small, innocuous
details of our preferences. They may be visible to others, and if we are lucky,
the others may share their wisdom with us.
I have received lessons over the years from men and women
whom I knew well enough for them to give me the gift of honesty. They have
calmly, almost lovingly, pointed out that some small aspect of my thinking was
rooted in invisible racism. Take Jose’s lesson, for example.
Jose was from one of the Spanish speaking islands in the
Caribbean, one of the ones that is not Puerto Rico. We worked in shops that
were a few doors apart on the main drag in that part of Queens, and we both
used the service available at the other shop. We hit it off, I believe, because
we were both clever and because we both existed at the same wavelength of the
wise-guy continuum. (We were both also in our mid-twenties and rather handsome.
That did not hurt.) It was probably important that we were both music lovers,
and we both had extensive record collections, although our collections were as
different as night and day.
I had close to a thousand LPs by then, and most by far
were by white rock and roll acts. There were a handful of jazz records, quite a
few Reggae and Afro-Pop records, some classical music, and a few double
handfuls of soul records, and some James Brown, and I loved Graham Central
Station. The crossover, salt-and-pepper acts were also represented, like Sly
and the Family Stone, and Jimi Hendrix. Overall though, it was a pretty white collection.
There were no Latin records in my collection at all when I met Jose.
Jose, on the other hand, had almost five thousand records
already, and all but about twenty were Latin music. He had a handful of soul
records, and two LPs by the Rolling Stones*, a few jazz records, and the
remainder were all of the varieties of Salsa music. It was an amazing variety
too, when you thought about it. There were all flavors of Newyorican Salsa,
O.G. Puerto Rican Salsa, La Música from Cuba, and all of the other Hispanic
Caribbean islands were represented, including Jose’s, and a surprising number
of records from Columbia and Venezuela, plus many sources that escape me right
now. They ranged from very big, very jazzy Salsa bands to one record from Cuba
by a band that consisted of four musicians: drum-kit, congas, bongos, and
timbales. That latter act got an amazing amount of melody and harmony from
those drums, and of course all of the rhythm that you could ever need. The
effect was startling. The effect of that whole collection on me was, in fact,
startling.
We got to discussing all of this one day. I think that
the conversation started by me noticing the two Rolling Stone records. I had
picked up a few Salsa records by then, you know, Fania All Stars,
top-of-the-pops Newyorican stuff, Ray Barreto.
The lesson began when I started commenting on the
instrumentation of Salsa. The music in general emphasized horns to a much greater
extent than I was accustomed to. I mentioned that I was totally okay with saxophones,
but that a little bit of the trumpet was enough for me. I much preferred the sax.
Jose turned his head slightly, laughed a little, and said, “that’s racist,” in a
conversational tone.
“Really?” I said. He shrugged his shoulders and through
another little laugh said, “yeah.”
We didn’t really tackle the idea in detail, although I
might have said something about I guess there’s just been a lot more sax in the
music that I’m used to. He let it go. I was obviously warming up to Salsa, and
there was a whole lot of brass in that, so maybe Jose was satisfied that
progress was being made.
In the decades since, I have considered this idea in
detail. I have come to the strong conviction that Jose was 100% right in his
indictment of my preference. This is how implicit racism sneaks up on you.
Consider the song at the top of this post. When “Whispering Bells” was a pop
radio hit**, I had only a child’s awareness that black Americans were involved
in the record business. That was 1957, and by then I owned records by Chuck
Berry and Little Richard, and I had seen their photos and I knew that they were
black. I knew that many of the Doo-Wop acts were black, and I loved that music
as well. I was also a big fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers at the time, had been for
years already, and I knew for a fact that many of them were black. I was okay
with all of it, but being under the age of ten, however, I had never grappled
with the meaning of this diversity.
The point is that “Whispering Bells,” and
most of the other radio hits of the time, featured saxophone solos, and that
became the sound that I was comfortable with. The key being, “radio hits.” Referring,
of course, to the radio stations that a white boy from Queens would be listening
to. It was very lucky for me that those pop stations were remarkably integrated
at the time, as it related to the artists. I loved all of the New Orleans
records that made the Billboard Chart, and almost all of them featured great
saxophone players. Saxophones were part of the popular musical landscape until
they were finally squeezed out by the electric guitar, but there was hardly a
trumpet in sight, unless you were a jazz fan, which I was not. The only jazz
that I really liked was created on guitars (Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell) or
the Hammond B3 organ (Jimmy Smith). I loved James Brown, but I didn’t examine
the line-up of his band. All of that came later on anyway. My white experience
carried me into my mid-twenties without exposing me to brass instruments in
music that I really loved and identified with (with the exception of Sly and
the Family Stone and Graham Central Station, where the rhythm was much more important
to the band’s sound).
You could not say that my passive experience of the music
in the air around me carried with it any racial animus, but my preference later
on for the sax over the trumpet was, in fact, implicitly racist.
Jose is still my friend, and in fact he is still teaching
me valuable lessons. He lived in New York for a long time, and had a marriage
to a beautiful and rather wonderful Puerto Rican woman that lasted, let’s say, quite
a while and produced two wonderful daughters. Jose is on his own now, and has
moved permanently back to his Caribbean island. We chat now on Facebook. He
lives far from the beach in the mountainous interior of his island nation, in a
small city that I had never heard of, and he regularly posts videos of the
location. Some he shoots himself; some are “chamber of commerce” videos, meant
to publicize the area and maybe generate some tourist action. It’s a beautiful
place, and it reminds me in all of its details of Thailand (except that people
drive on the right side of the road). If not for Jose, I would associate his
country only with baseball players, like most Americans would, I’m afraid.
The only sensible response to the implicit racism that is
in our hearts is to smile ruefully, accept it, and do the best that we can to
spot it when it comes up. To spot in in the distance, before it can do any
harm. Before it can embarrass us, and before it can cause any distress in
others. Perhaps if we can all do this, the world can move forward from the
dismal racist swamp that it is still mired in. That would be nice.
*I have noticed over the years that the Rolling Stones often
show up in record collections where they are the only white rock and roll act
present. I’ll just put that out there for you to consider at your leisure.
**Whispering Bells was a hit for the Dell Vikings, which
had the distinction of being an integrated Doo-Wop act. That was, let’s say,
uncommon at the time. This fact was lost on me until much later.
No comments:
Post a Comment