Throughout history, and I’m sure long before the first historians started carving words on stone or writing on papyrus, human beings have disliked other human beings who were perceived as being different. Different because of the color of their skin or the gods they worshipped or because they came from a distant land.
Long ago this may have been a defense mechanism designed to protect one’s own group from being overrun by another group. In today’s world of instant communication it makes little sense. True, there are still bad people in the world, but they are in the minority and are distributed among all groups.
People used to speak of different races of human beings. As my wife, the genealogist, will tell you, the differences in our DNA are so miniscule that there is only one race of people—the human race. Superficial differences such as skin color are merely adaptations to latitude or other environmental factors (Hitler, are you listening?). Therefore, I will not use the word “race” again in this piece.
The late 1950s were years of segregation and discrimination, even in laid-back Los Angeles. But for a while I was privileged to live in an atmosphere where this was not the case. I was attending UCLA and needed a place to live for the spring semester in 1958. The manager of the Co-op told me he had a room. My roommates would be black and Chinese. Apparently my parents hadn’t taught me “to hate all the people your relatives hate,” to quote from South Pacific, because I said fine.
I quickly found out that this was the norm. A rainbow coalition of male students lived in the Co-op, some direct from Africa or Asia. My Chinese roommate, Pat Wong, had been born in China. It was a voluntary association, because any of us could have lived elsewhere, although the Co-op was one of the least cost solutions to living at UCLA.
We played intramural sports together. I played basketball and softball. My other roommate, Chuck Hollaway, who had played football at UCLA and would go on to play professional football in the Canadian Football League, was the basketball coach.
Perhaps more surprising, we went on outings with the coeds from multi-colored women’s housing units, and danced with them at mixers. I remember scaling the hills of the huge Griffith Park with several young ladies, including a Japanese coed named Joyce who made quite an impression on me. I realize that it isn’t chivalrous to say this, but one reason she made an impression was that as a result of this escapade I developed a case of poison oak that covered most of my body.
I left UCLA after the spring semester (that’s another story) and eventually graduated from the University of Michigan. One more vignette: I found myself bartending at a party on New Year’s Eve 1958 in Palo Alto, California that included professional couples split almost evenly between black and white.
So don’t tell me we can’t get along. And in today’s world of revealed scientific truths, nobody can point at another group and say with a straight face that those folks are different from us. All right, enough preaching. Now get out there and mix.
