Racism in Your Neighborhood!

A little background.

My mother, who is half Lebanese Arab, and my father raised me to be tolerant and colorblind. Race, they said, doesn't matter. One of my first friends was a girl named Elizabeth (no relation to my wife) who happened to be black. I was, at most, around 4 years old at the time, and it didn't matter what color her skin was. We were friends. And that's pretty much how I've lived my life.

In high school, when the KKK came to Tulsa for their annual rally and cross-burning, the city council decided to skip the usual protest organization (I suspect because of budget constraints) and issue a "silent protest," which essentially amounted to doing nothing. A local group decided to organize an informal protest, got a permit to assemble at the park, and invited the community. Over one thousand people, including myself, responded. There were all kinds there - goths, skaters, blacks, whites, (American) indians, Asians, businesspeople, students, hippies, churchmice, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, you name it. More people turned out for this "informal" protest than ever turned out for a city-sponsored one. When the Klan drove up in their trucks, with their little white hoods, we stood our ground and wouldn't budge. They shouted, they screamed racist remarks, and threw things and spat. And eventually, they left.

That was the last time the Klan had an organized meeting in Tulsa in several years, and I feel somewhat responsible for that positive development in Tulsa's history.

After college, I took a job as a social worker in the North Tulsa DHS office. Tulsa, like many southern cities, is still distinctly racially divided, in this instance at or around Admiral or Pine streets - anything north of there is "black." This section of town was destroyed in 1921 during what has become known as the Tulsa Race Riots, although they bear little resemblance to other "race riots" such as those that occurred in Detroit or South Central LA. The Tulsa Riots began when a black elevator operator was accused of groping a white woman. He sat in jail and, of course, the whites showed up and asked the jailer to turn him over so they could string him up from a tree (that's what Southerners call a "good lynchin.'") At the same time, a black mob showed up to defend the kid. Somehow, as often happens when two angry mobs collide, violence began, and the whites spent the next couple of days burning down North Tulsa. The governor dispatched the National Guard, who set up machine guns west of town. Their instructions were to maintain order by any means necessary. When they saw people running around like crazy among the burning buildings in North Tulsa, the national guard shot them. Gunned 'em right down. Turned out, most (heck, almost all) of those people were blacks trying to escape the flames or save their homes from being destroyed. Some estimates say almost a thousand people died in the 1921 riots.

So that was North Tulsa. And yet, my black co-workers and my black clients had no problem with me being white. I got my first Kwanza card working at DHS. I helped people overcome many of the stigmas still associated with being black in the South. Although the riot was long over, the broken trust was still there, and I'd like to think I helped at least one or two people overcome that.

Fast-forward to this morning, when a black kid comes to our door to sell us a subscription to the Seattle Times or the Seattle PI, both of which are owned by the same media conglomerate. We had a subscription to the PI for a while, found we never read it, and cancelled. They delivered the paper for months after we cancelled it, even though we made repeated phone calls to cease. Eventually, months later (I'm not exaggerating, it was a good three months after we quit paying them), they finally stopped wasting papers. So, Liz told the kid that we had trouble with the PI and we weren't interested. Then, she informed him that this is an apartment complex that doesn't allow solicitations (it isn't). As she closed the door, he called her a "white bitch."

It's not that he called her a bitch that got to me, it's that somehow, in his mind, race entered in to this brief exchange. Somehow, her refusing to buy a paper subscription superseded the fact that we weren't happy with the PI. It superseded both of our personal lives, the things we'd done and the bits of good I'd like to think we've both brought to this world, especially in terms of race relations. It showed that he was the exact opposite of the color-blindedness I've been raised to believe in since the day I was born, the kind that allows 4 year olds to play together and not even realize we were of different "races."

So understand, when I wanted to lunge through the door and punch him in the face, it was partially because I thought he might need a bit of an education in real racism. I thought he was the exact antithesis of the kind of progress I'd like to see. And, it was for the simple fact that this fucking moron couldn't help himself enough to recognize that race played zero role in Liz's conversation with him. That's really it - he couldn't be bothered to help himself. He saw a white person, not a person, and somehow tied that to her race.

It's sad, it's pathetic, and it really makes me wonder why I bothered to try. It sure would have been a lot easier to sit at home than get spit on by the KKK, and whatever I did that day, this dipshit's response would have been the same.