Being a Despised Minority

We have been talking about opening up a discussion on race on Crossleft and even though race had a major impact on my young life I have thus far been pretty quiet. Many of things that were part of my experience are not what those of the Left like to hear. The right and the Republicans listened though and that is why so many working class whites have been voting against their best interests and going with the Republicans for many years now.

I did my blog on “The Day AFTER Dr. M.L. King Died”. The comments haven’t been coming in yet, so I don’t know how much smoke I will take on that. After that day the neighborhoods that fed into my High School lost White people at an incredible rate. White flight continued out of Detroit steadily. The Jr. R.O.T.C. Program did Its job of grooming working class kids, Black and White for the military and I joined the Army shortly after graduating from High School. My parents and other white neighbors joined together to try and calm things, to smooth things over so that people didn’t give up homes that they had lived in for years at rock bottom panic prices. Real estate people went door to door and called incessantly trying to create panic. Later the neighborhood group joined with some of the new Black residents in an attempt to stabilize the neighborhood. They failed. I went in the Army in 1969 and by 1970 my younger brother and sister were getting bullied and pushed around and told by Black kids to get out of the neighborhood. Our house was broken into twice. My family became a hated minority in a neighborhood they had been in for years. My parents had to move to protect their children. This is the sort of thing many Progressive/Liberal folks don’t like to hear. They want to hear that White people move out of their neighborhoods when Black people move in because the White people are prejudiced. It is much more nuanced than that.

I returned from Vietnam and applied for a job with the city of Detroit. Affirmative action was brand spanking new. I had spent the last few months of my 13 months in Vietnam as an on the job trainee social Worker. I was taking care of heroin addicts. I had had to work hand in glove with medics and the physician. I thought it was pretty interesting. I applied for Detroit’s Emergency Medical Services (EMS). I hand delivered my application to a city personnel person doing a jobs outreach of some sort. She looked at me and my application and handed it right back. She said ’We aren’t taking applications from White People”. Yes, it happened. The city got smarter after a lot of complaints from White people and just took the applications and didn’t hire the whites unless they had to. Do I know what it is like to have a job application tossed back at me because I am the wrong color, yes. Many won’t validate experience though. We have to balance all the wrongs of the past, they would say. I sympathize with those Black folks in the South that were told not to bother to apply for a job because of the color of their skin, it happened to me. It was a horrible experience .Some would even be happy that it happened to me, “See, now a White guy knows what it feels like“. But I had never discriminated against anyone. At 22 or 23, all I knew was I needed a job and I wasn’t going to get considered because of the color of my skin.

Later I was in college and wrote for Wayne State University’s newspaper, “The South End”. I was assigned to cover the Coleman Young campaign. I got to know a lot of the players in the campaign and they sweet talked me into hanging some leaflets and campaign literature on doors in White neighborhoods. I did and participated in my first political campaign. Coleman Young won the election and went on to be a controversial Mayor of Detroit for many years. I asked about the victory celebration, I wanted to go. I was told by one source that White people wouldn’t be allowed into the victory celebration. I went higher up the ladder and was told that it was really lower echelon White people that couldn’t come but there was a small party for us elsewhere. All Black campaign workers could come to the big party. I wrote a story about it for “The South End“. It wasn’t published, the editor was a radical and that information didn’t fit her mind set. Thus my life of White privilege continued.

I became a Detroit Firefighter shortly after that, getting tired of starving on the G.I. Bill.A Black friend from the old neighborhood , whose Dad worked in a factory, just like mine,did just fine in college with all tution , fees, and books paid for.A rich kid from Grosse pointe, a wealthy suburb of Detroit, drove to Wayne every day in a Mercedes. He got a free ride beacuse his rich Dad's accoutant cooked the books and by the times he was through with his Dad's tax returns, they were poverty stricken. In the fall of 1979 I had a fire near my old neighborhood. I didn’t usually work that neighborhood but some other firefighter had called in sick and I had to work there that day. It was particularly hot fall day. A two story flat was on fire. I carried a heavy set Black woman on my back down the stairs of her two story flat. I had put my oxygen mask on her. The EMT’s took charge of her from there and I removed my heavy fire coat. I filled my helmet up with water and put it on my head so it would cool me off. I was still gasping for air when a rock hit my helmet. Blacks had thrown rocks at me previously but I had never got such a good hit. I stood up full of anger and rage and there was this cute, little kid about 4 years old, and he said “Get the F---- out of my neighborhood, whitey.” The anger left and I had my moment of Zen. I said to myself “Yeah, whitey, what are you doing in his neighborhood” . Plans started to roll then and I left Detroit in 1980, tired of being a despised minority.

I am over the pain of those years in Detroit. Faith in God and love and people has helped me overcome it. I know there is hatred on both sides. I even understand that some cities like Detroit have to have a work force that reflects the ethnic/racial makeup of its city. A majority white police force, for instance, in a city like Detroit, that is 80% plus Black, is a disaster waiting to happen. Was it easy understanding things like this back then? No. And many Whites still don’t understand.

The Left lost many working class Whites with stories similar to mine because they dismissed all racial strife as simply being due to White prejudice. Can we bring these White folks back into the fold? Is the only way to heal the pain spiritual, as mine was, or is there a secular political solution, also?