My Path to Trying to Be an Anti-Racist activist
My Path to Trying to Be an Anti-Racist activist
I was born in NYC in 1946 to Jewish immigrant parents from Poland. Nazis murdered most of my father’s family. The Holocaust was a topic that pervaded our household atmosphere but was not discussed. My father was bitter and my mother loving, but mournful. They bore the burdens of immigrants in a strange land in the aftermath of a genocide. Even so, I learned the dangers of racism and was spared the false innocence of too many Americans, who pretend shock at the evils of the world.
For a while, my father owned and operated a laundry mat in the East Bronx. Black and Brown people comprised most of the neighborhood. My father was a racist. He often complained about his ‘schvartze’ (the Yiddish version of the n-word) customers. This disturbed my brother-whom generally I didn’t get along with—but who alerted me to various forms of racism. When school integration began in NYC, I remember he and I escorting my younger twin sisters to school.
My neighborhood was segregated by block with most Black people living a block and half away. In my academically tracked classes at school, there were no Black students. I became friendly with the son of the Black super in the next apartment building. He was easygoing and a good friend, though his family suddenly left town. There were many rumors, but I never heard a believable story, and never saw or heard from him again. I began to play basketball, which occasionally took me to Harlem, where a quicker and more dynamic style of play predominated. For me, this offered exposure to a different culture than what I grew up around.
Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) was a senior when I entered high school. I knew him only by reputation, but later found out we were mentored by the same teacher. The civil rights movement was erupting. Although I engaged in a few pickets of White Castle and other civil rights targets, I was hardly an activist. That changed in college.
I began attending campus meetings of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) during my first year at Columbia. We engaged in many pickets and supported cafeteria workers at Columbia. I also became concerned about the American war in Vietnam. Still, my main concerns were studying Sociology, English lit, and hanging out with friends.
In my junior year, out of curiosity, I went to hear Malcolm X speak across the street at Barnard. I was skeptical of media coverage of the Black movement and wanted to see for myself what this controversial leader had to say. First of all, he had a great sardonic sense of humor. He mockedwhite pretensions and establishment assumptions. I remember he said something like “You talk about minorities, but you know in the world white people are a minority.” This struck me because while this was obviously true, I had never thought that before. I had taken for granted that minorities meant people of color. It clarified to me that even I could be, and had been, brainwashed.
For the next three summers--I worked in Project Double Discovery, an Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO) program. The program brought numbers of ‘underachieving’—mostly Black and Brown—students to the Columbia campus for the summer. We were only a few years older, and in many ways less experienced, than the students we were supposed to be mentoring. Living for a couple of months together allowed me to experience some sense of NYC Black and Brown life: its thrills and its challenges.
There were also a number of Black counselors in the program. This marked the first time I worked with more than one or two people of color. Music, b-ball, and humor dominated the project, but there was obvious tension between Black and white staff. This tension erupted during a trip to DC—which I didn’t happen to be part of. Notably, at the 40th reunion of the 1968 campus rebellion, a number of the Black students who had been Double Discovery Counselors described life at Columbia as among the most troubling and racist environments of their lives.
This has been Part I of an essay series by Mr. Howie about his journey to anti-racism education. Part II on the weare blog.
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