A Pilgrim’s Digression

When I was a kid growing up in West Virginia, on Sunday mornings I’d get up early to watch the Three Stooges and Little Rascals on one of the network stations. I’d get up so early that the only thing on the channel would be a test signal. Yes, we had cable, but the old guard stations weren’t 24/7 yet.

NBC, ABC, CBS still had a sign off time, usually following the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and usually including the playing of the Star Spangled Banner to a fire works presentation and followed by hours of white noise (if you’ve ever seen the film Poltergeist, you know what I”m talking about; after seeing that movie as a kid, I was always afraid to watch white noise, or snow as we called it, on TV).

Well, on those Sunday mornings when the station would finally come on the air, it always began with a slide show of typical West Virginia scenes, set to the tune of John Denver’s song about West Virginia, “Country Roads.” Covered bridges, small towns, mountain vistas, the New River Gorge bridge…

Only thing is, I couldn’t understand a lot of the words. I was still at that early stage where I had trouble understanding the lyrics to music. “Mountain mama,” became, in my mind, something between “Mountain Humus” and “Mountain Hummer.”

I didn’t know what humus or a hummer was–we didn’t have either in West Virginia, at least in polite, rural society. But that’s what it sounded like. Also, there is the fact that I didn’t realize that the song was actually about my state. I thought it was about a woman, maybe John Denver’s grandma, because he kept talking about “her.”

“All my memories / Gather round her…”

And not to mention he hears her voice in the morning, as she calls him. That has to be his mother or grandmother. Who else wakes you up in the morning to get you ready for school?

Anyway, I’ve got West Virginia, and another Mountain Mama, Hillary Clinton, on my mind today.

There’s a lot of debate about why Clinton is going to do so well in the primary today–some polls have her beating Obama by thirty or more points, the most recent Suffolk University poll putting her at 60% support to Obama’s 23%. The elephant in the room is race, which apparently Clinton can’t mention without being pounced on. Her comment about the “hard-working, white Americans” who vote for her has been interpreted by pundits and black politicians as coded racial language. It’s as if she’s saying to white people, “Vote for me, I’m the white candidate.”

I give her the benefit of the doubt, on that. She was probably just stating a fact, the same fact that every pundit and news anchor has stated all throughout this campaign: white voters vote for Hillary Clinton by an overwhelming margin. West Virginia is a majority white state, ergo…well, you can infer the big margin of victory.

No one knows the extent to which votes for Clinton are racially motivated. People don’t admit to race being a factor in their preference for Clinton over Obama. It could equally be said that those of us white people who support Obama are voting for him out of racial guilt–but none of us will ever admit that, either.

There is an elephant in the room.

The extent to which overt, virulent racism has been driven underground, out of public discourse, has had an unintended effect on how little we actually talk about race outside of academic settings. It’s a cruel irony, really. Cruel, because when you can’t talk about something, when it is all but forbidden for fear of causing offense or opprobrium, it breeds resentment. And resentment is a key component of racism.

Silence also allows those who want to ignore racism to say that obviously we worked out all our race issues in the sixties, because we don’t have neo-Nazis burning crosses or marching in the streets. And white people don’t use the word “nigger” anymore. At least, not in public, and perhaps only occasionally when in private, with family and friends.

Modern racism is covert and easily denied.

The anecdotes I am going to offer are just that, anecdotes. This is not to be taken as evidence that all West Virginians are racist, or that all white people have these hidden, racist selves that they only reveal in private, to one another.

To this day, my grandfather will occasionally use the word “nigger” and talk derisively about black people. As recently as two weeks ago when I visited, he had something to say not fit for my ears, let alone the ears of my seven year old; so far, he has been at least mindful of our wish not to have Brendan exposed to that kind of language. Myself, I grew up hearing him use the word “nigger” in dinner table conversation. For a long time, because of Grandpa, I thought that Brazil nuts are properly termed “nigger toes”; my Mom corrected that nomenclature some time afterwards, telling me to never, ever say that word. Ever. They are Brazil nuts.

I remember once when I was a teenager, Grandpa was talking about an uncle of his who had moved from his neighborhood in Cleveland because “the niggers moved in” and drove the property values down. He wanted to get out while he could still earn a profit on his home. “Niggers” don’t take care of their property, don’t care what it looks like, and turn wherever they move into a ghetto, Grandpa said with authority. This was also the subject of his tirade when we visited two weeks ago.

I could go on. It’s easy to say “well, this is a man of a certain generation; he isn’t representative of the current generation poised to boost Obama to the White House.”

Certainly Grandpa is of the generation that Obama has had a hard time winning over. He was born in 1932 and came of age in the late forties, early fifties. He’s a Democrat, but a different kind of Democrat.

I recognize, with regret, that I am drawing an ugly portrait of a man I care deeply about. I merely want to illustrate that a “hard-working,” white man can have racist tendencies underneath his salt-of-the-earth exterior. I have seen the same tendencies in my grandpa’s friends and brothers, in at least one of his sons, and to a lesser extent my own Dad. I hope I haven’t insulted Grandpa, or West Virginians who might believe I am encouraging readers to generalize about the whole state. I thought it was interesting, and perhaps telling about white sensitivities, that Obama took the most flak in his Philadelphia race speech for “insulting” his poor, white, racist grandmother.

Obama was merely admitting what a white person cannot, or is not willing, to say. Around the dinner table, in the privacy of our homes and in our circle of friends, sometimes we say things that don’t reveal the most enlightened aspects of ourselves. We aren’t talking about people who would go out and join a KKK march. Somehow, I’m not sure that covert racism is much better in the long run, though.

Silence on a subject breeds denial, as witnessed in the Catholic church sex abuse scandal. Denial was also on full display on the radio this morning, as the hosts of the WMAL morning show were talking about a Washington Post article titled “Racism Alarms Obama Backers,” and to a man (all white men, by the way) the three hosts were dismissive of the article as either a political trick to garner sympathy for Obama, or as an insult to white people, suggesting as it does that many white people deny race as a factor in how they vote, while surreptitiously voting because of race. As one host put it, obviously Obama is winning, therefore racism cannot be a major factor in this campaign.

That WashPo article seemed to have been written mostly about Indiana and the racism Obama supporters encountered there. I suspect a similar article article could be written about experiences in West Virginia.

I’ll leave you with one last anecdote. My maternal grandmother lived in a rural community called Lowdell. “Community” is probably stretching the meaning of that word beyonds all bounds, because Lowdell was merely a church, a one-room school, a general store, and several farms. One time in the early eighties as we drove along rural route 11 to pay her a visit, we saw a black man alongside the road. He was walking fast, his jacket pulled up over his head.

My Dad said, “What the…what’s he doing out here?”

Dad slowed way down; the pedestrian picked up his pace and hunkered down underneath his jacket even more.

“Should we call the police when we get in?” Dad asked.

My Mom hadn’t said anything up until now, but she said simply, “Why?”

Dad seemed perplexed, “Well, what’s he doing here?”

“I don’t know,” Mom said, shrugging. “Maybe his car broke down.”

“What’s he even doing driving out here, though?”

“I don’t know,” Mom said, exasperated. “He looks scared.”

Dad drove on, our old Dodge Dart putting this apparently bizarre scene in the rear view.

Given memories such as that, I don’t know how I escaped succumbing to the same world view as my elders. I attribute my present attitude in large part to my Mom who, for whatever fortunate reasons, did not adopt the racist tendencies of her family and the people around her. I also attribute my growth to public education, which for all its faults corrected a lot of the ignorance with which I was surrounded. One of the reasons I have gradually drifted from the Republican party is the hostility towards public education in the conservative movement. I know too well what public education did for me, and I won’t disrespect the teachers who helped raise me by denying them or the bureaucratic system which brought me under their tutelage.

On the other hand, some kids who were in the public education system weren’t so lucky. I remember in middle school another boy once said to me, “When I’m old enough, I’m going to join the KKK, like my Dad.” He routinely used the word “nigger” as well, and he was not the only boy in my school who used it. There were no black kids in our school, nor any black teachers or administrators, by the way.

My anecdotes could easily be dismissed as memories of a time now almost a quarter of a decade in the past.  This is a different age, certainly.  However, that boy who wanted to join the KKK is my age, of the generation supposedly offering Obama the core of his support. He still lives in our hometown in West Virginia, but he also dropped out of High School a few years later, so whether he votes at all is somewhat in doubt. But if he does vote in the primary today, I wonder if race will be a factor in his decision?