Stuff That I Have Noticed #31 White Supremacy
*Given the recent events in Minneapolis and other cities around the nation the subject of “white supremacy” has been in the news a lot lately and being white myself and not feeling particularly inferior – in the general sense – to my fellow humans, I still do not think that being white makes me “supreme”.
Among the many synonyms of “supreme” my thesaurus lists: foremost, superior, premier, first, greatest, dominant and preeminent. The implication of the phrase is that white people are supreme (in some undefined sense) to people of other races. My observations of life on this planet for almost eighty-five years do not support this idea and since I do not believe that to be accurate I find myself moved to share some thoughts on the subject.
The first twelve years and three months of my life were spent in a small Tennessee city and with that in mind I’ll share an excerpt from chapter one of Three Stages, book one of my memoir trilogy.:
As an only child I spent a lot (most) of my preschool years either alone or with my mom. She had quit her job as a long-distance telephone operator to be home with me until I started my formal schooling. I say “formal schooling” because my mother, Lucy, taught me to read and to do basic arithmetic during those early, solitary years.
My dad … built a sandbox under a big maple tree right outside the kitchen window so Lucy could keep an eye on me. We lived a few blocks from what was known in prewar Tennessee as “nigger town”. A “colored” boy about my age often walked past our house and we became friendly. I invited him in one day to play in my sandbox. That is when I got my first lesson in race relations. Lucy explained to me that there was nothing wrong with “darkies”, they were just different. They weren’t inferior in any way but if God had wanted us to mingle he would not have made them a different color. This was among the first things I was taught that somehow, in the darkest recesses of my immature mind, seemed questionable.
When I was a small child – at three or four – I became aware of dark skinned people whose facial features differed from people like me. And in spite of what my mother said, I realized at some point in later life that I had an “innate bias” (look it up, it’s a thing) with which I was culturally imprinted shortly after I was born. This bias was utterly unconscious and if asked I would have honestly and vehemently denied it. Yet all humans are subject to these forms of social conditioning. I’m confident that you know what I mean because if you look deep within you’ll find that you have them too.
Before 1948, when we moved to Hollywood, I knew and associated with many people of color. But when I found my young self in a large city on the west coast many of these new folks were of “colors” I’d never experienced in insular Bristol. LeConte Junior High School was integrated. And I mean integrated. Chinese, East Indians, our Indians; Holy Shit, I didn’t even notice the (people I then knew as) darkies.
Another excerpt: 1950 visit “back home”
The plump, awkward Benny that had left Bristol two years earlier had evolved into the “V” shaped, muscular and athletic Ben. …
The reunion with some of my old school mates was notable for two reasons. The boys who had mercilessly bullied Benny gave the new Ben both distance and respect. And the first question I was asked about California was, “Do you have to go to school with niggers?” The funny thing about that was that I hadn’t even thought of it. “Colored” kids were not strange to me. Mexicans, Japanese, Armenians, Italians, Indians and such were and I was fascinated by them all.
My reaction to that question put to me seventy years ago may have been the moment when I became cognizant (at least on an unconscious level) of my innate bias. In any case after the effect of that conversation sunk in it became my intention to treat all races and nationalities simply as fellow inhabitants of the Earth and to accept or reject individuals solely on their behavior.
And I have pretty much done that. But, you know what?, that innate bias was and is still lurking, like a Texas blind salamander (also a thing), at varying depths below the surface of my persona. I’m not sure it’s eradicable, it may be immutable like a blood type. But the conscious mind can – and in most of us usually does – maintain control over behavior.
We white people – aka European-Americans – need to fight a constant inner battle against this culturally imprinted innate bias for our entire lives.
The idea for this discourse was generated when Elizabeth and I watched David Letterman’s interview with five time world champion Formula One driver, Lewis Hamilton. Mr. Hamilton is a black Englishman. I didn’t even know that there were black Formula One drivers so this revelation got me started on this racial supremacy essay.
One of the first areas in which falsity of the white supremacy lie becomes obvious is sports. Jim Thorpe, a Native-American, won both the pentathlon and decathlon in the 1912 Olympiad and was declared to be the world’s greatest athlete. Jesse Owens, an African-American, won gold in four events: long jump, 100 meters, 200 meters, and the 4 x 100-meter relay. Those wins made him – much to host Adolf Hitler’s chagrin – the most successful athlete at the 1936 Olympic Games. These are prime examples of physical superiority by non-white men. I need not provide a list of such prowess in sports because we all know most of them. And we remember the old “rules”: Black men can’t play baseball. Black men can’t be NFL quarterbacks or head coaches. Etc., etc., etc..
World War II’s Tuskegee Airmen, an all black unit, formed the 332nd Fighter Group and the 477th Bombardment Group of the United States Army Air Forces. Their awards and decorations included: Three Distinguished Unit Citations, 96 Distinguished Flying Crosses (to 95 Airmen), 14 Bronze Stars, 744 Air Medals and 8 Purple Hearts. Tell me that these men weren’t Superior.
The book and movie, Hidden Figures, tells the story of a group of dedicated mathematicians known as “human computers” who used slide rules, blackboards, adding machines, and pencils to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets into space. These African American female mathematicians were some of the brightest minds of their generation. Before his first orbital flight John Glenn insisted that one of them, Katherine Johnson, personally check the numbers generated by the computer. Her subsequent popularity increased and her calculations were pivotal to the success of the Apollo 11 mission and many others.
One of the most inventive people I’ve ever known is my close friend, Phil Sexton. More than twenty years my junior and of a different, brown “race”, he’s been known to refer to me as his surrogate father and yet he is my superior in many ways.
Phil works for CBS news as a Digital Media Engineer and sometimes video shooter. When he started there his main job was managing the satellite uplink for live feeds from remote (out of studio) locations. I asked how he learned that skill and, as I recall, he said, “I figured it out.”
This did not surprise me. Very early in our friendship (28 years ago) I was directing the video of a concert being shot with several cameras. I had rented a mixer/switcher so I could edit the show live. Neither of us had ever seen the thing until about two hours before the concert and it was delivered without an instruction manual. I was perplexed to say the least. We took it out of the box, put it on the production table, plugged in the cameras and monitor and I went back out to set up the cameras and help with the lighting. I told Phil to figure the thing out if he could.
Less than an hour later I went back to the makeshift control booth. Phil was messing with the switcher and on the monitor I saw a series of cuts and dissolves from camera to camera. I was amazed. Without the manual it would have taken me all day to figure that thing out. Phil had never worked with a switcher before and he had mastered the thing in forty-five minutes.
In my opinion, Phil Sexton is a superior man.
Then of course there are the Obamas: A superior family if ever I saw one.
This is but a small sampling of “supreme” people who were/are not white but the sample suffices to support my point.
Conclusion:
If there is such a thing as racial “supremacy” – which I doubt – the master race is definitely not us white, European-Americans. It may be any of the other “races”.
But around these parts it looks like physical, military and intellectual supremacy may belong to the African-Americans.
* A version of this was published in Daily Kos 17 August ’19
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