| My father was a racist. Not just any old racist but an equal opportunity bigot. One-half Scotch-Irish and one-half German, (a heredity bastardation worth noting) he was raised in deplorable poverty. He grew into a hateful man that used every racial slur imaginable for anyone different then himself. Odd for someone who was a college graduate.
I grew up in a primarily white suburban middle class neighborhood in the southwestern tip of Ohio, on the Kentucky and Indiana borders. My father wasn't the only racist I knew, not by a long shot, but he was the one racist I had an everyday interaction with. Every national incident from 1966 to 1980 I witnessed living in the house of a racist.
Every local event from 1970 to 1980 was open for criticism; our Jewish neighbors to the right who then became our Japanese neighbors proved to my father that the house was cursed. Our backyard neighbors from India bothered him for unknown reasons. Then in what was the final straw, a black family moved into the neighborhood two doors down, 'lowering the property value'.
My one and only black friend (with whom I used smoke shit loads of pot, skip school, and go to the art museum with), was never allowed to drive in my neighborhood. He would have been pulled over by a white cop friend of my fathers. He had to drop me off two streets over from my house because the one time my mother saw me get out of his car she physically attacked me the second I walked in the door. As she hit me, she screamed "nigger lover" repeatedly. When my father came home, he said I was filthy and didn't talk to me for a week. I was 15.
My high school was mixed in a very different way. Half the kids were from rich upper middle class families and the other half came from severely poor white homes. I had one friend whose family was so poor that they lived in a motel room down the street from the school.
But my parents had found a neck of the United States where they could have it all; racism and southern white elitists. My father made a great living in Cincinnati as a senior vice president and trust officer of a national bank. He never, not once associated with anyone other than those like himself. All he ever saw was a true mirror reflection of his core values.
Ignorance is taught, no doubt, but it also takes a belief in yourself and a willingness to walk away from all that you know in order to rise above the cesspool of hate. It's easy to be a bigot. It's real easy. It's harder to walk away. Why I am not a product of that environment is because it fundamentally freaked me out. I left Ohio in the spring of 1980. I've been back only a handful of times. At first, it was to see a few friends and then in the past fifteen years it has been only twice. Once when my father died and once when my mother died. There are many reasons I've never wanted to go back and they didn't all have to do with my parents.
When I was growing up, the "black folk" lived on the Westside of town in an area call 'Over-the-Rhine' a once thriving German part of town. But much like what happened to The Bronx, someone had a great idea to build a major highway through it, cutting the area off from downtown. The rich Germans moved out, white poverty moved in. When the blue-collar jobs left, black poverty rummaged through what remained and made a home.
By the mid 70's life in 'Over-the-Rhine' was much like any African-American part of a racist city. Fucking horrible.
Over the years, clearly Cincinnati grew into a racial ball of hate. The first nationally recognized bigotry came from a gal named Marge Schott. I'm sure you've heard the name, now here's the highlight reel.
In the late 90's Marge Schott was the former owner of The Reds, who much like my father, was an equal opportunity bigot. African-Americans, Jews, the Japanese and gay people were always on her hate list. It wasn't even a hatred, so much as a totally lack of understanding as to why these people even existed. The only break from my dad's creed was that Marge sympathized with Adolf Hitler. My father was a WWII vet, so that ruled out the Nazi party.
The best sum up of Marge comes from Wikipedia, (citations included)
Charles "Cal" Levy a Jew, and former marketing director for the Reds, stated that he'd heard Schott refer to then-Reds outfielders Eric Davis and Dave Parker as "million-dollar niggers." [2]
...Levy also alleged that Schott kept an old Nazi swastika armband at her home and claims he overheard her say "sneaky goddamn Jews are all alike."[3] The next day, Schott issued a statement saying the claims of racism levied against her were overstated and that she didn't mean to offend anyone with her statement or her ownership of the armband. On November 29, Schott said the "million dollar niggers" comment was made in jest, but then stated that she felt that Adolf Hitler was initially good for Germany and didn't understand how the epithet "Jap" could be offensive.
During the same season, a former Oakland Athletics executive assistant, Sharon Jones, is quoted in the New York Times as having overheard Schott state: "I would never hire another nigger. I'd rather have a trained monkey working for me than a nigger," before the start of an owners' conference call.[4]
[2] Bookkeeper' started it all
[3] http://reds.enquirer.com/1998/10/102598sabo.html
[4] topics.nytimes.com
Stepping back from that, lets move forward, shall we?
After decades of racial profiling African-Americans, false arrests, suspicious police activities and a general good old boy civil servant network of corruption, finally in 2001 the city erupted into a race riot after a white cop shot an unarmed black man as he ran from the police. For three days, the city went nuts and it was all televised for the nation to see.
I hate telling people I grew up there.
Now, as I attempt to get my head around this, Cincinnati has helped elect an African-American for president. 52% of the people in Hamilton county voted for Obama. 52%! I NEVER thought I would see this day. Never, ever, never ever, ever. Ever.
Physically one would have to drive almost an hour north to find another county in Ohio that voted Democrat (Montgomery county in Dayton) or two-hours east (Athens county in god-awful-nowhere), where Ohio University is located near the West Virginia border.
Ohio voted blue in all the major metropolitan areas; Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, Akron, Cleveland and Toledo. The rest of the cornfields are red and my guess probably pretty pissed.
In a state where one out of every ten homes has a black lawn jockey and small town fire halls still fly the confederate flag along side Old Glory, racism in Ohio is far, far from over. BUT for this one moment in time, the state that fucked up the election in 2004, turned blue.
When Obama was giving his acceptance speech, I thought of my father. It would be easy for me to shrug it off and assume that he would have snorted out some racial slur about the country is going to hell in a hand basket, but I wonder. Since we are influenced by those around us, and given the obvious evidence that something has changed in Hamilton county, maybe my dad would have lightened up and inch or so.
But then I remember that I never did. I have never lightened up, and in fact, I have become more intolerant of narrow-mindedness as the years pass by. I'm a forty-five-year-old lesbian and I would like to be able to marry my partner in the state that I live in. I demand partner benefits, social security benefits, inheritance and any and all 'perks' that straight folks get.
I am a liberal who has had one massive headache for eight years. I am an American who watched the towers fall and then proceeded to be repeatedly embarrassed of my country and for my country.
I am a woman who on average makes less money then my male counterparts. Sometimes, a lot less. I've watched Republicans 'tolerate' me and have kept my mouth shut to avoid physical altercations. I cried when the towers fell, I cried when we went to war, I cried when Bush won in 2004. I've been basically upset for eight years.
But on November 4th 2008 as I sat on the couch hovering Oreos with Martha, I watched through tears as this country elected a Democratic African-American as their President. I'll be damned. |
