For some reason, my current train of thought brings me to Mrs. Stevenson's class in eleventh grade. Chemistry. Warwick High School in Newport News, Virginia. The Raiders. 1979/1980.
Should I talk about integration or not? That is part of what this story is about, but not entirely. Suffice it to say that in the early 1970s the city of Newport News was subjected to court-ordered busing. Really court-ordered busing. The city leaders at the time would have preferred the separate but unequal status quo, but a judge ordered otherwise. This first affected me personally when I was bused in the third grade, but that is another story.
By the eleventh grade things had changed, but they had not. We were whites and blacks in the school system, pawns of intolerant adults who only allowed this mixing under court order. Not everyone perceived things that way. Perhaps more importantly, or unfortunately, in the heat of the moment of racial tensions that abstract reality often got lost in day-to-day survival. I don't know what that means.
Mrs. Stevenson was a black woman, our chemistry teacher, I would guess about 25 years old. It is hard to guess someone's real age when you are looking back on it from the perspective of being seventeen years old. She was pretty cool as teachers went, and once told us she'd been to a Hendrix concert.
For the first twenty minutes or so of class each day, she would go around and check people's homework. This was a fairly long time for an hour-long class. Soon Bobby and I began playing chess during this time, while Bobby, John, and I would talk. As a joke I want to say that we had a real rap session and related as youths. Mainly, this was the late 1970s: both tenuously connected and yet mostly disconnected from the 1960s. I won every game of chess. I was in the chess club and had studied the game, and so Bobby really did not have a chance. Nonetheless, it was a pleasant enough way to pass the time for all of us.
At that time there was an expression going around, ``be white.'' It basically meant be civil, be reasonable, be decent, and had various other connotations of rational and reasonable discourse between individuals. For instance, if you were haggling about something you would urge your partner in the haggling to ``be white about it.''
Well, with the expression being so popular and Mrs. Stevenson being so laid back it was bound to happen. One day Mrs. Stevenson said something and a student in the class replied, ``Oh, be white, Mrs. Stevenson.'' We all thought it was pretty funny. The fact that she was black was a part of the joke, or course. To her credit, she basically shrugged it off.
Now I think back on that. I know quite well what we meant at the time about ``be white.'' The problem is that the term now strikes me with extreme irony. I wish I had a word that could capture what we meant at the time, without any racial references. But the behavior we attributed to white people turns out to be only a myth, a way that some white people would interact with other white people they perceived to be in their same social class.
We were not taught in school that just a few years earlier blacks were finally granted the right to vote without interference. We heard almost nothing about the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered. If we did, it was without the context of the basic Constitutional freedoms he was fighting for. Social class was a powerfully taboo subject, and still is. Americans pretend to be classless.
We certainly did not learn in school about things like COINTELPRO. When the ``good white people'' were forced by court orders to integrate their schools and treat blacks as equals, they publicly spoke out and accepted their ``defeat.'' What really happened is that the programs of repression ``went black.'' That is, the programs became covert and secret. They were still publicly funded, government programs.
This was the perfect solution. It would allow the spokesmen of the day, and later, to some extent, spokeswomen of the day, to stand up and piously proclaim the politically correct dogma. They could talk and yammer all they wanted, knowing that the forces of segregation had secretly merged with the forces of plausible deniability.
Then we come to today. The categories of earlier times may not mean as much now. There may be some blurring along the edges. But the general patterns are the same. It never was just black and white, though that was a good divide and rule ploy that meshed well with racism and a history of black slavery.
Today the economy is good (God). That excuses anything. That distracts the minds of working people as well as the wealthy. A few dissidents being tortured is just the price we must pay. [Why do I worry that the sarcasm will not register?] The fundamental difference now between us and, say, China is that we are more prosperous. At least that is what they indirectly tell us.
I don't know why I felt the need to write and post that memory of my eleventh grade class. I could probably figure it out if I worked at it.