I’ve been thinking about learning and unlearning racism.
Six months ago, I re-read A Raisin in the Sun, which I’d first read fifty years ago. Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, turned into a brilliant 1961 film, is about a working-class Black Chicago family in the 1950s struggling to find a dream, a way out of their generational poverty.
A scene from the 1959 Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun, featuring Sidney Poitier in the role of Walter
I grew up in a white world. During my childhood and adolescence, I lived in a family and school and church culture that was almost entirely white, in which many shared a vocabulary that hardly knew the proper name for any racial or ethnic group. In each of these environments, the presence of any person of color, but especially of a Black person, would have stopped conversation and, in private, required an explanation. (For my best friend, from his fiancé’s family, What do you mean you want a Black teammate to be one of your groomsmen?) By my late teens, having mingled with Black basketball players in locker rooms and courtside and in one casual friendship, I was trying to figure out how different I was or, maybe more honestly, to figure out how different Black people were from me.
After recently revisiting the play and the film, it wasn’t the differences that captivated me. I was surprised at how much the Younger family, around whom this story is centered, was so much like the family I grew up in during those same post-war years. Yes, my family didn’t face the racist structures that forced the Youngers into a contentious battle with their new white suburban neighbors (neighbors like we would have been had Black people moved in next door). But within our two families the dynamics were hauntingly familiar.
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We were too many people in too little space and always felt claustrophobic. They were five people crowded in a small Chicago apartment filled with the stresses of poverty and dreams deferred. Ours was similar: Mom, Dad, five of us kids, and sometimes my grandfather, in 800 square feet in Hollywood. Like them, we had one bathroom which people fought over or waited in line for, shouting Come on!! to the current occupant. Mom and Dad shared one of our three bedrooms; my brother and I shared a twin bed when my grandfather was with us on the couch; my three sisters crowded into the other small bedroom (their closet was a carnival of shoes and clothes that sent their girlfriends into gales of belly-laughs). Dad or Mom made a daily trip to the market with whatever money was available that day, to get whatever was cheap enough to feed eight of us. A cupboard near the kitchen was filled with clean laundry which you ironed when you needed something. Ominously in both families, a constant flow of alcohol often ignited the constant stress into shouting and, too often, into slapping and punching. I'd always thought of Raisin in the Sun as a work of Black literature, about a Black family, which of course it is - but I now see it also as a story about families like mine.
In 1949, ten years before A Raisin in the Sun debuted, South Pacific, a musical composed by Richard Rodgers with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, opened on Broadway. It reflected the experiences of American GIs, just four years home from war, on the conflicts around race they discovered face to face in their various theaters of war, in this case with Pacific Islanders. When Ensign Nellie Forbush, a white nurse, discovers that her lover Emile’s children are of mixed-race lineage, she decides she cannot marry him.
Ezio Pinza & Mary Martin in the original Broadway production of South Pacific
Lieutenant Joseph Cable, white like Nellie, must come to terms with the prejudices he’d have to overcome to marry brown-skinned Liat and take her home to his family. He sings this bitter truth:
You've got to be taught
To hate and fear.
You've got to be taught
From year to year.
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear -
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught
To be afraid
Of people whose eyes
Are oddly made,
And people whose skin
Is a different shade.
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught -
Before it's too late,
Before you are 6 or 7 or 8 -
To hate all the people
Your relatives hate.
You've got to be carefully taught.
We are naturally aware of race. We must be taught to be racist, and that's a lesson we learn not just explicitly, but implicitly from the culture that surrounds us all the time. It's a lesson we absorb before we know we're absorbing it.
In the early 1970s, by the time I had a family of my own, we lived in an all-white neighborhood where the only Black people our children saw were the trash collectors who came to our cul-de-sac each week; our pre-school kids and their playmates would stand on the curb and wave to them, and they grinned and waved back. One Saturday at the nearby supermarket, my wife was pushing one of our children in a grocery cart when a Black man they'd never met pushed a cart up the aisle. Our child spoke up immediately: Mom, look, it’s the trash man. Children see such differences. At home and in school we teach them the difference between colors– red and green, blue and yellow. So it’s no surprise when they recognize differences in the color of people’s skin, but they're also absorbing the roles and the hierarchies that are implicit in this experience of color: my white parents own the house, and Black people collect our trash.
A white-only southern California suburban neighborhood in 1963 (Photo Credit: Los Angeles Public Library via Curbed, “The 1963 Fight Against Los Angeles’ White-Only Neighborhoods”).
I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that by the time I was in my fifties and had been an activist for several decades, I was quite content with my level of insight and my behavior in circumstances where race was an issue. I had friends and family members of various races and ethnicities, was teaching in a progressive church in which we were deeply involved in social justice issues involving race, and as a family we gave our money and our votes to causes that improved the prospects of racial justice. I felt like I was a pretty good white guy.
At a large family gathering a decade ago, our daughter overheard me telling a story about our dear friends and mentioning that they were an interracial married couple, black and white. Our daughter pulled me aside later in the evening, reminded me of what she’d overheard, made it clear she thought it was not cool, and asked me why I’d noted the race of my friends.
I knew one answer immediately: in the world I grew up in through my twenties, thirties, and forties, having Black friends was evidence of my openminded, open-hearted character; and because the most volatile justice issue through those years was race, it was of particular importance to demonstrate my inclusive character by having Black friends.
What I knew immediately after our daughter’s observation was that my comment wasn't about my friends, it was about me. I was demonstrating that I am a properly progressive Christian, one who makes company with the marginalized as Jesus did, which of course means that Jesus would be pleased with me for this inclusive stance. Having an interracial couple for friends meant that I was a good person, and maybe more importantly, a good white person.
It turns out there are no awards given for Best White Person
I've thought about this moment many times in the intervening years, and I've realized that there's another layer there, one deeper than my need to feel good about myself. When I mentally categorize people based on their race, I’m perpetuating the culture’s bigoted assumptions that it is race that most clearly defines them. I'm carrying out some white narrative that says my primary task in the friendships is to acknowledge their pain, make company with their struggles for justice, and rescue them from this ungodly plight.
When these interracial friends of mine have family and faith, habits and social experiences that are just like mine, why do I define them in terms of race? Why are they my Black friends? After all, they are as educated as I am, as hardworking, as successful. They’ve been through the blessings and curses of parenthood in ways so similar to mine that we've held each other’s hands through long sieges, and laughed with relief when our kids avoided the worst consequences of their choices. We worship in the same upper-middle-class community, share interests in wines and single-malt scotches, Ella Fitzgerald’s arrangements of The American Songbook, and dedication to sports teams (though I still don’t understand how he can be a Steelers and Clippers fan and not a Forty-Niners and Warriors fan). Their daughter, like ours, has a doctorate and, like ours, is a successful and happy professional adult.
As I discovered in re-reading A Raisin in the Sun, pain-filled differences do not blot out our common humanity, and we are wise to make camp in what we share while not denying our obvious and sometimes painful differences. I cannot stand outside our racist culture but must acknowledge that it is the river I swim in, and that it affects how I think and feel and act. Wherever I find myself in this bigoted culture, the goal is not to eliminate differences but to acknowledge them, then to give every person the right and the opportunity to be exactly who they are. Everyone is a person, regardless of my comfort or discomfort with them. Differences exist. The moral value we assign to these differences? Made up!
Cast of A Raisin in the Sun (Photo Credit: Friedman-Abeles/New York Public Library)
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