Why We Won't Talk Honestly About Race - Harry Stein

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Stepin Fetchit. But this man had such dignity! I never forgot what he said about this dual life he had to live: ‘The only reason I’m alive today is that down South I shuffle, I say, Yassush, yas m’am.’ Otherwise, he said, they’d have lynched him a long time ago. It made such an impression on me!”

      And when my parents told such stories, they made quite an impression on my two brothers and me, too, as did what we heard from our more progressive teachers. My fourth-grade teacher in particular, the wonderful Mrs. Levin, talked ceaselessly about prejudice. She’d have us sing “You’ve Got to Be Taught” from South Pacific, and her rendition of the poem “Incident,” by Countee Cullen, had such a powerful effect on me I can still recite it by heart more than 50 years later.

      Once riding in old Baltimore, Heart-filled, head-filled with glee; I saw a Baltimorean Keep looking straight at me. Now I was eight and very small, And he was no whit bigger, And so I smiled, but he poked out His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.” I saw the whole of Baltimore From May until December; Of all the things that happened there That’s all that I remember.

      Still, by then my father had a successful career going in capitalist America, we were living in an affluent, all-white neighborhood in suburban New Rochelle, and the only two black kids in my elementary school were the sons of the United Nations ambassador from Ghana. So my brothers and I couldn’t help wonder sometimes: What’s going on here? Because pretty much the only Negroes our family had anything to do with on a day-to-day basis were the ones who worked for us—Edward, who did occasional odd jobs around the house and drove my older brother to Little League practice, and the various young women from the South who were our housekeepers. Among these, we grew especially fond of one who stayed a couple of years with us when I was approaching my teens. Her name was Del, and one evening my older brother and I, partly to be pains in the ass, but also because we meant it, began pressing our parents about her. Why was it that she was “Del,” while they were “Mr. and Mrs. Stein”? Why, for that matter, did Del serve us dinner, but never sat with us at the table? In their youth my parents had picketed Gone with the Wind for its portrayal of black people in general, and the black servants in particular, and it was clear this line of questioning made them extremely uncomfortable, which was highly gratifying. But to my mother’s credit, she at least tried to formulate coherent answers. That wouldn’t be the kind of relationship Del wants either, she said, such familiarity would make her uncomfortable. When we went on to press them about Del’s salary—if memory serves, less than a hundred dollars a week—she argued that that was the going rate, in fact more than the going rate, and infinitely more than she could make down South, and let’s not forget she also got room and board.

      At that point, we relented. It was fish in a barrel and just too pathetic.

      Listen, I don’t want to overstate this—both my parents are gone now, and can’t defend themselves. And no one can doubt their good intentions. For in this regard, as in many others, my liberal parents truly were par for the course. Just about everyone we knew had a black maid, which is surely why within their circle their small hypocrisies were so rarely challenged. This is not to say that the young black women living inside those large white homes were ever demeaned or mistreated. To the contrary, many were almost members of the family—emphasis on almost. The family of one of my friends had a “girl” named Willie Mae—it always made me think of the great center fielder for the Giants—who stayed with them for decades, so couldn’t really have been a girl at all. Nor, apparently, was it all that different even in parts of the country where most people’s parents regarded Communists with roughly as much sympathy as did Joe McCarthy. Alabama-born Howell Raines, the deeply unpleasant individual who would go on to become the top editor of the New York Times, wrote a 1991 piece for the paper’s Sunday magazine about what he had learned of life as a child from his family’s devoted black maid. His “early relationship with Grady,” as Raines later recalled, “prepared me for the civil rights story and made me receptive to it perhaps in a way many white Southerners might not have been.” The piece won a Pulitzer Prize, and it may truly be said that, in all the long history of that degraded award, none was ever more of a gimme. (It is somehow—what’s the word: fitting, ironic, unsurprising?—that the ever-smug Raines would ultimately lose his vaunted Times post in the wake of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal for having tolerated in a black reporter practices that would have led to instant dismissal had he been white.

      Still, mixed as Raines’s motives surely were, his enthusiasm for the civil rights movement was certainly genuine, for it was the great moral crusade of all our young lives. As a 14-year-old, in 1962, I joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to do my bit, which consisted of occasionally picketing the speaking appearances of alleged racists, but more often of getting together to hold hands with other young activists to sing songs like “Down By the Riverside” and “We Shall Overcome”; and it was exhilarating to believe we were connected to the earthshaking events unfolding every evening on TV in places like Mississippi and Alabama. My father, for his part, actually flew down to Alabama to take part in the final leg of King’s legendary Selma to Montgomery march.

      As it happened, we had our own mini-civil rights crisis in my hometown of New Rochelle, precipitated when a cohort of parents at the all-black Lincoln School insisted that the city, instead of erecting a new building for their elementary school-aged kids, bus them to the all-white schools in the better parts of town. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People soon came aboard on their behalf, and the battle lines were drawn: the black parents, the NAACP and their liberal white allies, including us, versus the other white parents, whose arguments for preserving the neighborhood school system we naturally brushed aside as cover for racism. In short, it soon got ugly, literally neighbor against neighbor. In the end the fight went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the busing advocates at last prevailed. By then I was in high school, long gone from the schools in question—and within a system where, ranked by academic merit, kids like me rarely had more than a couple of Negroes in our classes. But stories of the newly integrated elementary schools were everywhere being spread by wide-eyed younger siblings, a fair number of whom were regularly getting the crap beaten out of them by their new classmates.

      Still, as good liberals, who had time to dwell on actual consequences? We were caught up in the grand sweep of history, change, even when it was just for its own sake.

      Actually, the rough stuff wasn’t nearly as much a surprise to us kids as it seemed to be to our parents. Though we’d been raised to believe Negroes were like us in every vital respect—why else would you have to be carefully taught to love and hate?—somewhere along the way we’d come to grasp that some of them weren’t exactly like us. I’d personally figured this out back when I was eight or nine, and our parents would drop us off Saturday afternoons at the movies on Main Street. More than once, I was accosted at the soda machine by black kids demanding, with a show of menace, to “borrow” a quarter. The first time this happened I remember thinking, in my naiveté. Borrow? But we don’t know each other, so how will you pay me back? But I was quickly led to understand that was not the transaction they had in mind. Relatively painless as those encounters were, at the time they were pretty scary. I mean, there were some crummy kids in our neighborhood—chronic liars, cry babies, bullies, and fools—but no actual robbers!

      Not that I ever bothered to tell my parents. I must’ve understood on some level that while I’d get some sympathy, there’d be no satisfaction, and I might have to endure an “explanation”—a suburban version of the young Woody Allen’s father’s defense of the cleaning woman caught stealing in Annie Hall: “She’s a colored woman from Harlem! She has no money! She’s got a right to steal from us!”

      In any case, in the immutable way these things happen, I came to share their understanding that, having been so deeply wronged by history, black people were always to be given the benefit of every doubt. By the time I was in college, Vietnam may have been atop the agenda as an animating campus issue, but race was not very far behind. Like every other right-thinking white kid, I seamlessly went with the new direction dictated by posturing black activists. Sure, King had been fine in his day, but that day was done—now

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