A Darker Past

 

Broadway & 6th, Los Angeles, 1956

Part I. GROWING UP IN LOS ANGELES

I was born in Los Angeles in 1938. My dad, and mom, and brother and I lived in a little 2-bedroom home, in a modest neighborhood off West Temple St., about 2 miles west of downtown LA. I walked, or ran to my elementary, middle, and high schools. My father’s flower shop was in what was then the Elk’s Bldg. on 6th Ave. When I was in my teens I’d walk there after school and help out until closing.

 

The house where I was born in 1938 in LA

I didn’t give much thought to what I would do after high school until I was in my senior year. By then it had dawned on me that playing running back on the USC Trojans wasn’t in the cards. I graduated from high school in 1956 when my playing weight was 140 lbs. The Trojan’s running back that year was C.R. Roberts, who at 6'3" and 202 lbs, with a sprinter's speed, set a single-game rushing record against Texas in 1956 that stood for 20 years. I didn’t learn till much later that when the USC team arrived in Austin for the game, Roberts and other Black players were denied hotel accommodations because they were Black.

C.R. Roberts (#42) leads USC to 44 - 20 win over segregated Texas in Austin

I also didn’t know about LA’s racist past. Although California entered the union in 1850 as a free state, it didn’t take long for the growing White majority to systematically create racial segregation, largely through restrictive covenants that prevented property from being bought or sold to non-Whites. They also did it through eminent domain, when mixed-race communities like mine were split off from White communities in more affluent neighborhoods by freeways. My street was cut in half by a stretch of the Hollywood Freeway (US-101) built in 1954, preventing me from racing down the hill on my fat-tire Schwinn bike into the ritzier Silver Lake Gardens neighborhood.

Building the Hollywood Freeway, 1950

 

Freeways not only bisected neighborhoods, they aided the exodus of Whites from the increasingly brown and black neighborhoods in around downtown LA. This “White flight” led to an organic racial segregation that in turn, led to abandoned properties, urban decay, crime, and the “inner city” schools that suffered from insufficient funding due to the diminished tax base, one of which I attended.

Granted some Whites stayed put, but this didn’t mean they accepted the possibility of a more diverse community. There were pockets of resistance, sometimes violent, that became known as “sundown towns,” so named because Blacks and other persons of color who might be working there had to be out before sundown or face unpleasant consequences. Anaheim, home of the “Magic Kingdom,” was one of some 100 sun down towns in LA. I didn’t know this growing up in, El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles, roughly translated, the “City of Angels.”

Part II. LIVING IN THE SHRUB-STEPPE
 

Columbia River, Richland, Washington

It goes without saying that LA wasn’t the only city, and California wasn’t the only state where individual prejudices were translated into physical, legal, and social barriers. In fact, such barriers were endemic in the union that formed from the free and independent states that ultimately became the United States of America. They are still with us.

I left LA LA Land in 1961 and headed off on a twenty-year sojourn in the United States Air Force. There was a lot going on in the social fabric of the country whose Constitution I had sworn to defend "against all enemies foreign and domestic," as well as in the military itself; a military that up until my 10th birthday, had been segregated. I was blithely unaware of the military's fits and starts in its efforts to integrate and ensure equal opportunity, often fighting the vocal opposition of members of Congress, who objected to the military's intrusion into what they considered a strictly domestic matter.

I started paying more attention when President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 (like everyone else I've talked with about this, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I learned about his assassination). One was pummeled by the seemingly endless shocks and calamities of an America embroiled in an unpopular war in a land far, far away, while fighting its own war at home in an effort to "ensure domestic tranquility;" a war that goes on to this day.

All these many years later I am a resident of Kennewick in a shrub-steppe area of Washington that belies its “Evergreen State” monicker. My city, hacked out of the brown hills along the Columbia River is one of the original three cities in Benton and Franklin counties that make up the Tri-Cities. These cities were sundown towns. I was already on my second assignment in the Air Force in 1964 before the first Black family was able to rent a home in Kennewick. According to the Tri-City Herald, property records in the counties are still being found that contain racially restrictive covenants.

D-Reactor, Hanford Nuclear Reservation, ca 1945

The Tri-Cities mushroomed out of the desert like the bomb Hanford, as part of the Manhattan Project, helped create. According to the National Register of Historic Places (OMB No. 1024-0018), Black workers recruited to Hanford by the prime contractor, DuPont Company, were disappointed to find Hanford "deeply, systemically discriminatory and segregated." Unlike Whites employed at Hanford, Black jobs were classified as temporary.

It isn't easy for people to admit that systemic racism exits in American society. Yet we fought a civil war over the right of Americans to own and profit from the labor of slaves imported from Africa. That war ended less than 160 years ago. I believe the collective mental block stems primarily from two things: first, people don't understand what "systemic" means; and second, people feel that admitting its existence is somehow a rebuke to them personally. Another problem that exists in some regions of the nation is state imposed amnesia.

Civil rights protest in Kennewick, 1963

I attempted to describe systemic racism in an opinion editorial I wrote for the Tri-City Herald during Black History month in 2023. At the time, I was lamenting the clamoring over Critical Race Theory, and the claims by some that CRT was being taught in Washington's K-12 schools to shame White students. This was nonsense, as anyone who knows anything about CRT will tell you; a fact the Herald stressed in their own editorial.

In my editorial I wrote,

We can come to understand how components of racism are interconnected: If you deny a Black person a quality education, you negatively impact their employment opportunity, degrade their health care, confine them to renting in low quality housing, expose them to criminal elements, perpetuate racial disparities in law enforcement, and then “red line” them from neighborhoods with good schools.

I recently ran across a June 2020 article by then Managing Editor of Tumbleweird, Logan Moonman, in which he traced the history of blatant racism in the Tri-Cities and more deftly than I, showed how systemic racism manifested. Moonman wrote;

Through subtle and not-so-subtle racism alike, restrictions on loans, neighborhood covenants and cooperation between landlords, real estate agents, the police, and others, racism physically shaped the way the Tri-Cities was formed.

Moonman went on to say to that;

Knowing our local history simply gives us more context for what people mean when they talk about systemic racism.

Part III. WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T CALL IT CRITICAL RACE THEORY!

In October of 2021, I wrote an article titled, "How Critical Race Theory became a Thing." In it I pointed out that Christopher Rufo, a former director at the Discovery Institute — a place where despite what you may think, no one has a sense of humor — was tipped off about diversity training by a disgruntled Seattle City employee, and Rufo began researching the basis of the training. Rufo hit upon Critical Race Theory. He has tweeted (@realchrisrufo) that, 

We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.

Rufo threw his distain for diversity training into a petri dish, spit in a dash of dialectics, and a cup of conspiracy, whipped it into a froth and voila! A previously obscure theory debated by legal and social scholars in institutions of high learning, became a rallying cry for conservative demagogues.

Shortly before his defeat in the 2020 Election, Donald Trump, seeking a pivotal political issue to rally his base, issued an executive order excluding from federal contracts any diversity, equity, or  inclusion training interpreted as containing “divisive concepts,” race or sex "stereotyping,” and/or race or sex "scapegoating.” Among the content considered “divisive” was Critical Race Theory.

Christopher Rufo at DeSantis side at an Anti-Woke rally

Ron DeSantis made "anti-Wokism," and opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion, the focus of his successful 2018 run for Florida Governor, and has employed Chris Rufo as his chief strategist in rooting out any vestiges of DEI or CRT in Florida's public education, up and down the school system.

DeSantis appointed Rufo one of a new Conservative Board of a Trustees of New College of Florida. The newly-appointed Board then ousted the sitting college President, Patricia Okker, and replaced her with Richard Corcoran, a close ally of DeSantis.

Under the new board majority, the college denied tenure to five professors who were already previously recommended to receive it. Following this, a third of the college's faculty departed. Between fall 2022 and fall 2023, the college lost 27 percent of its student body. In the 2023 U.S. News and World Report rankings of top liberal arts colleges in the country, New College dropped 24 spots compared to the previous year.

Christopher Rufo said, "The takeover of New College has changed the dynamics of America’s culture war and, if successful, will provide a model for conservatives across the nation."

Ron DeSantis said, "In Florida we are taking a stand against the state-sanctioned racism that is critical race theory. We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other."

Unfortunately for DeSantis, Donald Trump coopted CRT, and DEI in his bid for the 2024 Presidency. DeSantis never grained traction in the campaign, and dropped out of the race, subsequently endorsing Trump. He can rest easy in the knowledge that despite his ignorance of the issue, Donald Trump will make CRT whatever he thinks his base wants to think it is, and DeSantis can continue his war against Woke, without interference from a new Trump Administration.

"Getting critical race theory out of our schools is not just a matter of values, it’s also a matter of national survival. We have no choice, the fate of any nation ultimately depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down and they must do this, lay down their very lives to defend their country. If we allow the Marxists and Communists and Socialists to teach our children to hate America, there will be no one left to defend our flag or to protect our great country or its freedom." Donald Trump, March 12, 2022

 

All this sturm and drang over diversity, equity, and inclusion, the imagined insidiousness of "intersectionality," the indoctrination of secondary school children to hate their White race, is at best a distraction from the serious issue of systemic racism, and at worst, an outright and organized attack on freedom of thought and expression.

Turning a blind eye to injustice is in effect collaborating with its perpetuation; with the public policies, private practices, and institutional systems that build and sustain disparities in opportunities and outcomes. Turning a blind eye to history blinds us to why things are as they are, and risks us returning to a darker past.

___________________________________________

Addendum

It is particularly unfortunate that Gender non-conforming, e.g., LGBTQ people, have also been targeted by the Anti-Woke "warriors." Last March the Florida Legislature passed HB 1557, the “Parental Rights in Education” bill, also dubbed the Don’t Say Gay bill. Here in the shrub-steppe, the Kennewick School Board passed a resolution strongly opposing two bills in the Washington Legislature related to books and curricula on historically marginalized and underrepresented groups, including, LGBTQ people.