Frank Rich:White Like Me

[Doctor_J]

My particular historical vantage point is a product of my upbringing as that odd duck, a native Washingtonian whose parents were not in government. The first presidential transition of my sentient lifetime, Kennedy’s, I remember vividly. Even an 11-year-old could see that the sleepy Southern town of the Eisenhower era was waking up, electrified by youth, glamour and the prospect of change.

But some of that change I didn’t then understand. J.F.K.’s arrival coincided with Washington’s emergence as the first American city with a black majority. Many whites responded by fleeing to the suburbs. My parents did the opposite, moving our family from the enclave of Montgomery County, Md., into the city as I was about to enter the fifth grade.

Our new neighborhood included the Sidwell Friends School. My mother, a public school teacher, decreed that her children would instead enroll in the public system that had been desegregated a half-dozen years earlier, after Brown v. Board of Education. In reality de facto segregation remained in place. Though a few African-Americans and embassy Africans provided the window dressing of “integration,” my mostly white elementary, junior high and high schools had roughly the same diversity as, say, today’s G.O.P.

I wish I could say we were all outraged at this apartheid. But we were kids — privileged kids at that — and out of sight was out of mind. Except as household help, black Washington was generally as invisible to us as it was to the tourists who were rigidly segregated from the real Washington while visiting its many ivory marble shrines to democratic ideals.

More:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/opinion/18rich.html?_r=1

[struggle4progress]

1. John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me was quite shocking to us white liberal kids when it came out

http://books.google.com/books?id=ObTddfcqk2gC&pg=PA15

... Decherd Turner, the greatest librarian in Texas and a lifelong, passionate liberal ... was a friend of John Howard Griffin, who in the 1950s used chemicals to darken his skin and described how he was treated in Texas and the rest of the South in Black Like Me, a book admired by W H Auden, among others. After it was published, Griffin, fearing for his life, moved in for a time with the Turner family in Dallas ...
An unperson in Texas
Michael Lind
Published 13 October 2003
http://www.newstatesman.com/200310130020

I actually met both Decherd Turner and his wife Margaret Ann (who play an incidental role in that book) many years ago. Decherd had originally been a minister before becoming a librarian (first at SMU and later at the University of Texas), but did not learn until quite a long time afterwards that they were the Turners mentioned in Griffin's book, which I had earlier discovered in the library. The Turners both died early in this century, one soon after the other.

[Frances]

2. Thanks for the links

I read Black Like Me in the 60s. It was an enlightening book. Wish the author could see the inauguration tomorrow.

[sduke97]

5. lol

[MH1]

7. ?

post-count builder, or wrong place?

[struggle4progress]

9. It's a typo: it should read "but I did not learn until quite a long time" &c&c

[Captain Hilts]

3. DC is still pretty segregated along these same lines of race and income. nt

[underpants]

4. As is Richmond

whites simply do NOT go to public school. Part of the cost of living in the city itself (we have cities separate from counties) is the cost of private school. Well some do send their kids to magnate schools.

Richmond is about 8 miles by 10. You have $1 million homes 4 blocks from "the hood" we even have our own poor white neighborhood (Oregon Hill-I lived there for a year) and it is all the same.

I knew some social workers who were open in saying that they tried to take their kids-their clients (almost all black) to "the other part of the city" so they knew it existed. 8X10 miles...if that.

[Captain Hilts]

6. VERY true. I know Richmond pretty well. nt

[ProgressiveProfessor]

8. You should have heard the squealing about 10 years ago over gentrification in DC

Urban, mostly liberal whites were moving into traditional black neighborhoods, buying the older homes and fixing them up. Activists were upset over the loss of color (their words, not mine) in traditional black neighborhoods. There was a clearly racist external Op-Ed piece in the WP where the author accused those of selling to whites of being race traitors and claiming that the city had an obligation to keep those areas black. The elderly residents were upset because the furor was making it harder to sell their homes and retire out of the district. It was amazing to watch at the time