Memories of the future: The big lie of racial violence in America

I don’t remember many of the names of my classmates in high school. After all, it’s been more than fifty-five years since I emerged from that formative institution.

I do, however, remember two names quite well. So well that I will probably still recall them vividly during my final moments on this earth. They were Ulysses D. and Lonzo J. They were both black boys at my high school and they lived in the small rural community that my mother taught school in.

The former, Ulysses, was a wiry little guy with a crimped expression caused (no doubt) by his bad teeth. The latter, Lonzo, was big, stocky and muscular and probably weighed about 185 pounds. Together, they managed to implant in me an enduring (if unconscious) bias against blacks.

I was, you see, the only son of a grammar school teacher who affected the sort of upper class airs that these kids instinctively hated. Ma was well educated (graduate degree from a prominent women’s college back east), the product of a white middle-upper class family tracing its roots back to the Magna Carta, and unfortunate in having lost her husband (my Da, aged 72) when I was only 4 years of age (this was back in the late 40s). Of French-Huguenot/German ancestry, Ma probably reflected the sort of natural disdain for poor, uneducated people that cultivated members of her white Anglo-Saxon social background inherently looked down on, but there she was, a single mother who had unexpectedly lost her husband, trying to support herself and her small child as best she could, in a small rural community located the cultural wilderness of California’s Central Valley.

As an experienced teacher, she was fortunate to be able to quickly get back into the educational system when Da passed and soon landed a teaching job where teachers were desperately needed to help educate the many offspring of California’s desperately poor ‘Dust Bowl’ refugees, themselves the renowned subjects of some of John Steinbeck’s most evocative writing. It was not, however, an easy transition for her, as she suddenly found herself trying to span that yawning chasm that exists between highly educated people and ignorant little savages who seem to take pride in flouting their ignorance (i.e. children of the town, whose poor white parents were mostly migrants from Oklahoma & Arkansas…colorfully known variously as ‘Oakies’, ‘Arkies’ and ‘Ozarkies’ by the upper classes).

It wasn’t an easy task, nor fulfilling and rewarding, since the residents of that small California town were divided into thirds: one third lower & middle-class whites, one third Hispanic farm workers, and one-third poor blacks. The town, divided as it was by the Southern Pacific rail line, literally had its proverbial 'right' and 'wrong' sides of the tracks, with the middle class whites on the western side and all others on the eastern side of the rail line.

It was a rather dramatic contrast to venture across from the genteel side of town across the tracks to the poor part of the community. The upper & middle-class white section of town was characterised, as one might imagine, by well-maintained streets, nice homes with green lawns and lots of late model automobiles everywhere. Once across the demarcation line, however, it was like stepping back into some poor Southern anti-bellum black community, with ramshackle, tar-papered shacks, dirt yards and scores of small, dirty children playing as well as they could with cast-off refuse and bits of sticks. Everywhere there were chickens and roosters scratching about in the dry soil, apparently owned by no one and everyone. Big, mean dogs were also in evidence although somehow they tended to ignore the chickens (fortunately, most of them were locked up in yards behind equally rickety fences) and preferred news delivery boys.

I recall that side of town quite well, since I had had to take a newspaper delivery job with routes scattered among all those run-down homes. Ironically, many of those poor folks had newspaper subscriptions, but it fell to kids like me not only to deliver the papers every day, but to attempt collection once a month from people who seemed to think that papers should free and frequently didn’t pay the bill.

More than a few times I remember debating whether or not to risk entering those yards with their scrawny, barking dogs, or stay on the safe side and try to explain to the route manager why I couldn’t collect. The few times I feared his nasty disposition more than that of the dogs, I collected dog bites rather than dollars for my trouble. Of course, the reason why I had those awful routes was the fact that new delivery kids were always started off at the bottom of the pecking order, given the worst and most disreputable parts of town to deliver papers in, and at that time I was the newest of the new.

Getting home at the end of the day’s paper delivery, more often than not with some dog bites on my legs as campaign medals, I would find Ma completely unable (or unwilling) to spend much time fussing over me, since her work with the little savages at school would invariably send her home each day filled with barely repressed, seething frustration. Emotionally depleted by having had her hands full of small kids at school, my own emotional needs were often bypassed or superseded by the day’s trying events in the classroom. Instead of getting a few tender words of encouragement and sympathy, I usually served as a mute juvenile witness to her day’s full store of anger and irritation over having to (as Ma would put it) “…make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

But all this is merely backstory. Getting back to ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Lonzo’, I suppose I was marked from the start as an easy, ‘soft-target’ by many of these unruly black kids, who had had to sit in Ma’s classes as she tried to inspire their interest in learning something about the broader (white) world their parents had brought them into. Most grammar school kids tended to dislike public school subjects as a rule (or at least this was the case in small, rural California Dust Bowl & migrant farm worker towns of the early-50s), but the minority kids, including the poor migrant children and the blacks, absolutely hated this mandatory immersion in a white cultural environment that tended to emphasize just how ‘ignorant’ and disenfranchised they were in the more privileged honky society.

Despite the fact that (as Californians) we all attended the same public schools, regardless of social class, race or cultural background, I don’t recall ever having been much troubled when I was in grammar school myself. It was only when we all hit the halls of high school that my own unhappy experiences with black kids began. Ulysses and Lonzo had both passed through the grammar schools, as had I, so they were quite well acquainted with Ma and her thinly veiled social class biases, and there I was now in their classes, the son of that reviled honky bitch. It doesn’t take much imagination to determine how their resentment spewed forth upon me, once her classroom experiences were well behind them and I was now available upon which to exact latent revenge.

I should say here that I was probably an easy target of their vitriolic puerile racist angst, since I was a fairly mild-mannered, polite and unoffensive kid who had been ‘properly’ brought up to observe white social conventions and respect those who were senior to me. After all, in white upper middle class America one was taught early-on that table manners were important, courtesy a serious obligation and polite regard for others requisite in all younger people. If I had stepped out of line anywhere along that particular path of proper white upbringing, such deviations from the norm would have been quickly corrected with whatever appropriate punishment was determined by my equally strict and stern uncle (a doctor). To say I was therefore extremely well-behaved, courteous and friendly is understating things. In short, I was wide open for the sort of vengeful grudges Ulysses, Lonzo and their cohorts had nursed throughout their 8 years of grammar school.

Consequently, many of the experiences I had in high school were quite unhappy. I recall all too distinctly the verbal insults, insinuative aspersions cast my way and the vague threats of physical violence that might be forthcoming if I allowed myself to be caught somewhere alone and unaccompanied by any of my own friends. Those experiences were more unhappy than they might have been simply because I was a somewhat naïve, sincere kid, who had difficulty understanding the first thing about mean-minded ignorance. Least of all that which was racially tinged & social-class inspired.

At after-hours band practice and in the dreaded daily gym sessions (PE each day), I was resigned to taking cheap shots and hostile jabs from these young black goons, who were by now finally achieving something for themselves in school sports. Ulysses had become a fairly good sprinter on the track team, whereas big, brawny Lonzo was now a popular half-back on the school’s football team. I suppose this success at something, even it were of purely physical nature, conferred upon them even more propensity to want to ‘get back’ at their hated teacher’s kid, and ‘get back’ they did.

All of the foregoing is just a small and concentrated impression of the worst of my high school experiences…the experiences that started me out as a child having a basic distrust and unconscious dislike of ALL blacks. Looking back on it all now, I understand where my unconscious bias against blacks came from, but from what I have been witnessing in American society over the past 40 years, those encounters were astoundingly prescient in preparing me for an understanding of the present racially based unrest that is now ripping America up, down & sideways.

Fast forward from high school to college and my service in the Air Force. In college and also in the Air Force (Vietnam era) I had little or no contact with blacks, since in those days educational standards had not yet been lowered sufficiently (in accordance with political correctness’s mandate that we need to pretend completely incapable minority kids MUST attend college or their precious self-esteem will suffer impermissibly) to find many blacks in either institution. Of course when Vietnam hit my generation right between the eyes, blacks were welcomed into the military (principally the US Army infantry, for use as cannon fodder in VC rice paddies) gladly, but the US Air Force back in those days tended to attract and prefer smart white kids, fancying itself an elite high-tech organization with higher standards & requisites than the Marines or the Army. Blacks were, consequently, far & few between in the Air Force of that period (unlike today). The few blacks I did encounter while serving as a medical specialist were senior NCOs who were about as ‘OREO’ as you could get (black on the outside, white on the inside); in all fairness they were excellent people, well-educated and in most cases even-handed, well-qualified, balanced and friendly to a fault. But then, they subscribed to white mainstream values...

After my Air Force service I ended up back in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I began working in hospitals in the East Bay and attending UC Berkeley (whilst living in that city’s Spruce Street neighborhood just north of the campus). As an avowed war protestor who had gained my ‘leftist liberal street creds’ as a uniformed member of the organized opposition to our involvement in Vietnam, I felt right at home in the ground swell of civil rights and anti-war sentiment that regularly rocked the campus and its vicinity.

Although still not perfectly comfortable around blacks (the lingering vestige of childhood experiences already referred to), intellectually I had no trouble accepting the sentiment that underlay the passions of the youth movement: equality for blacks and 'US out of Vietnam'. I was still young, of course, and just as susceptible to idealistic causes as any other youngster in his early 20s. And so I became involved in ‘the movement’ as much as my full-time work in hospital laboratories would permit, attending the protests, rallies, marches with Mario Savio at Sproul Plaza and so forth. Evenings found me at the local coffee houses and favored leftie hang-outs (such as the ‘Starry Plough’ pub on Grove Street, now renamed as Martin Luther King Avenue, and ‘Juan’s Place’, a low-key and covertly political Chicano restaurant in Berkeley’s 4th Street industrial section) with Irish-American cohorts and anti-war students. I even had a few black friends in Berkeley, in fact, but all were well-educated, thoughtful intellectuals taking classes on the campus. I was therefore encouraged to adjust my instinctive childhood bias towards blacks somewhat, since they were in fact among some of my closest confreres at that time.

The other side of the flipped coin of circumstance would occasionally land face-down, however, and one incident in particular occurred during a protest march that rather suddenly escalated into a clash with both campus and city police on the upper end of Shattuck Avenue. Fancying myself as able to help by attending to some of the many ‘wounded’ (who had received injuries at the hands of police batons) protestors, I walked around in my white lab coat, carrying a medical bag with bandages and other items (gas mask & a helmet). At some point, I had wandered a bit far from the actual violence and seem to recall I was walking back to my VW so I could go home & get ready for work (an evening shift at the Providence Hospital lab), when a sinister & tough-affected black guy came up to me and demanded my car keys. Fortunately, despite my inherently easy-going inoffensiveness and the fact that we were one-on-one (rather than several-against-one), I had enough presence of mind to refuse him and started to walk away. I suppose I was either lucky or convincing enough in my rejection of his demand to put him off whatever plan he had to rough me up, and walked quickly around the corner, losing him. Despite this, all my earlier childhood phobias about being the target of undeserved black violence came flooding back in a flash. This incident also remains burned into my memory, for I have always lived my life mindful of the need to unfailingly treat others as I would my own self, that is to be kind, generous and friendly to all without qualification. My basic take on life was (and remains) that I would never willfully harm an ant upon the sidewalk. Subsequently I quickly find myself aghast whenever I find myself the target of undeserved animosity by others. ‘Indignant’ ? Angry? Naive? All of the above.

After those early decades of my life had concluded, I found myself in many unique locales (such as China, Europe & the Southwest Asian nee ‘Middle East’ region) doing many interesting things (as an expat) with a wide variety of others from all over the world. One very close friend whose name was Sayed and a cardiac perfusionist at the time (like me) was from Sudan (later a sanctuary for Osama bin Laden). As black as the blackest African, Sayed was one of my most trusted friends, but in attitude, outlook, behavior and affect Sayed was about as far from a so-called ‘African American’ as one could possibly be.

Pausing here to look at my word count, at 2500 words, I feel thne need to justify the foregoing circumstances & events principally as necessary context within which to understand what follows: namely, my contention that racial violence in America is, as it has been for some time, on an alarming rise throughout the nation. Most profoundly, the events of the past two years involving incidents in which young black men have been shot by law enforcement officers have brought this widespread if invariably understated social concept to the forefront of everyone’s awareness, as the nightly news media broadcasts report incident after incident in which ‘innocent and blameless young black men’ have been singled out as undeserving targets of police violence. Call it post-Ferguson fallout, if you will, but everywhere the shrill outcries of ‘Black lives matter!’ and ‘Don’t shoot!’ by protestors are echoed throughout the media, reporting on the black back-lash to the events of Ferguson, Missouri.

To anyone with no great penetrating insight, or to someone not possessed of the ability to see beyond the smoke & mirrors of the PC crowd of breast-beating, leftist liberal progressives, it would seem as if all white law enforcement officers are hell-bent on a racially motivated, thinly disguised and deliberate campaign of wide-spread genocide against black Americans.

To hear the media report things (or to listen to leftist liberal black groups' outraged protests) one would think that there is a sinister intent behind all the shootings of young black men that borders on acts of overt criminality by our law enforcement agencies.

In fact I myself have often wondered about what was REALLY going on here, since until very recently I have always been considerably left of center in my political leanings and have in the past tended to regard those on the conservative right as being more profoundly narrow in their attitudes and outlooks than those on the left. No longer!

I do recall, however, sitting at home these many evenings as the day’s latest racial outrages unfold on the tube and lecturing my poor, long-suffering wife on what I intuitively feel is the REAL underlying current here, namely the fact that violence of this sort is not, nor has it ever in recent decades been, the result of blind white racial bias or race-directed hatred. But in arguing that, I found myself self-correcting a few long held assumptions: principally that although there is indeed racial hatred in evidence, it isn’t white hatred targeting blacks, but the reverse: black hatred directed at whites (and also towards Asians & hispanics, to a lesser degree)!

Does that proposition seem preposterous? Does that surmise seem unbelievably impossible? Not quite.

Very recently I obtained a copy of an interesting book, while searching for another (a book totally unrelated to race relations). That book is titled ‘Don’t make the Black Kids Angry’, by Colin Flaherty. Flaherty is a reporter and the author of several exhaustively researched books, all directed towards dispelling the glib, self-righteous & sanctimonious myths and PC conviction that indict white violence against blacks. Frankly, Flaherty has solid brass cojones to even dare suggest that instead of misdirected white violence against blacks, the real issue is black violence against whites and mainstream white culture. For every honest individual out there who feigns to utter this belief, there are literally whole legions of left-of-center liberals who would gladly rip each others’ throats out to tar & feather Flaherty for such sacrilege!

Another of Flaherty’s books (titled ‘White Girl Bleed a Lot’) deals with the same subject: a profoundly strong conviction among young blacks that unconstrained acts of antisocial behavior are not only warranted, but legitimised by their feelings of racial persecution on the part of the white culture they exist within. Both books are remarkable in that they painstakingly catalogue the facts for each incident involving 'innocent blacks being shot by white cops without justification'…the facts that demonstrate clearly and shockingly what many of us have intuitively felt for a long time: that the repressive, smothering dogma of leftist liberal culture we are enslaved by is ignoring the actual truth—perhaps even aiding and actively abetting that subterfuge—that white liberals have encouraged a culture of black entitlement and permissiveness in which blacks are ‘allowed’ to engage in lawless activity with the covert encouragement of the white liberal left!

In each instance Flaherty details (and the two books are filled with supportive facts & hard documentation...in fact more than a thousand pages to that effect) this phenomenon that plagues modern American society to an unsettling degree.

Basic logic & common sense alone would suggest, for instance, that not all law enforcement officers harbor a pathological hatred of blacks, and yet this is the politically correct lie that has been foisted off on the American public by leftist progressive cadres and an informational media that has a trenchantly strong leftist liberal tradition.

In fact, in almost EVERY incident involving a police shooting of a black person, the aggravating incitement leading up to that confrontation has involved the black person engaging in what any reasonable person would have to consider provocative acts of overt violence & lawless behavior. Innocent and blameless people do NOT reflexively run away from a policeman, nor do they vehemently resist when stopped for questioning, recklessly thowing out attitude and expletives freely.

Perhaps the most notorious poster child of all for this phenomenon was Ferguson’s own ‘innocent black child, brutally slain by a policeman without cause’: Michael Brown, who instead of being that cute little kid the media photographs all portrayed him as (taken of him as a little boy), was actually 18 years old, six feet four inches tall and 290 pounds! With a local rep as a belligerent troublemaker and fresh from having roughed up a convenience store owner who objected to his taking things from the store without paying for them, Michael Brown was about as innocent as the Zodiac Killer. 'Unjustified homicide' by a policeman? Hardly. But Brown is just one of the most heavily publicized ‘innocent little kids’ whom the left would have us believe are being callously predated upon by white racist cops.

There are hundreds, thousands more young black males (& also females) involved in getting back at whitey. The case that Flaherty makes for this is sobering, shocking and profoundly upsetting, for it clearly documents what so many people have for so long suspected: that blacks feel that their prior history as white slaves fully justifies any and all social outrages that they may perpetrate; essentially that violent criminality is completely justified by their status as a ‘formerly’ oppressed cultural minority people (so they feel).

Tragically, the vast preponderance of American whites have become so brow-beaten and socialized by virtue of outspoken leftist liberal ‘shaming’ (read Kristen Powers interesting book about this...see below) processes that most whites fear even suggesting the possibility that our poles are reversed: that the real culprits are not bigoted white law enforcement officers, but politically racist and duplicitously encouraged young blacks who have bought the leftist liberal progressive propaganda hook, line & sinker. For that matter, I know almost no one (speaking from personal experience) among my white friends who would dare to suggest in any mixed company that blacks are regularly getting away with figurative murder in perpetuating & inciting these violent encounters. Most are so cowed by the prevailing PC wisdom (that presupposes collective white guilt) that they are literally scared shitless to even bring up the matter in public.

The same sort of political correctness dogma that encourages the lie that lawless black thugs and juveniles are lilly-white, innocent little saints may also be seen at work with regard to other highly sensitive and grossly controversial areas of contentious social debate. Discussions about Judaism and Jewish/Israeli affairs regularly come under heavy censure, with all open colloquys about Jews and Jewish affairs slamming to a halt the minute that damning incendiary phrase ‘anti-semitism’ is flung out. At such a moment, the possibility of conducting an intelligent, open discussion of any such politically sensitive subject is brought to an abject and instantaneous closure. Fortunately, a number of fearless individuals who nevertheless dare to utter such sacrilegious statements have written several excellent books in which these left of center liberal falsehoods and unrealities have been resoundingly put to the lie.

Chief among them are Goldberg’s superb ‘Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change’ and Kristen Powers’ ‘The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech’. Now, add to this list of powerful assertions to the contrary (of leftist liberal social-political deceit) Colin Flaherty’s highly recommended books, ‘Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry’ and ‘White Girl Bleed Easy’.

I won’t bother to repeat or reiterate any of Flaherty’s arguments and/or cite his documentation here, since I'd rather that you made the effort to acquaint yourselves with them through his books and draw your own conclusions. I guarantee they will open your eyes and move you to do as he has done…dare to make the figurative assertion that ‘the emperor is NOT wearing any clothes’. It will further encourage you to explore a nasty, nagging suspicion that many of us have had for years, that all-pervasive PC leftist liberal dogma is encouraging young blacks to racially target whites (and asians & hispanics) as objects of their puerile and impotent outrage over their perception that they themselves are the TRUE victims. Meanwhile, they continue perpetrating acts of inarguable violence against basic American social conventions and laws.

Looking back now, I can readily recognize this ignorant sentiment in the actions of my principal high school nemeses, Ulysses D. and Lonzo J. By the way, in the event anyone is interested in their eventual individual outcomes, both did NOT manage to get past their early ‘bad starts’ in life, although I derive no personal satisfaction at all from that knowledge. On the contrary, thanks to them, today I remain one of the few former liberal ‘lefties’ who refuse to buy off on that tissue of deceptions and untruths that we call ‘politically correct leftist liberal progressivism’.

Aloha nui loa, me ka malama pono!

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Suggested Books:

1) Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change, by Jonah Goldberg, ISBN-10: 0767917189

2) The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech, by Kristen Powers, ISBN-10: 1491591722

3) Don’t make the Black Kids Angry, by Colin Flaherty, ISBN-10: 1508585024

4) White Girl Bleed Easy, by Colin Flaherty, ISBN-10: 1938067061