Telling It To My Uncle

MY GRANDPARENTS WERE ALL BORN around 1890. They began life in horse and buggy, then in childhood made the jump into high tech model T, undoubtedly all agog. The last one to die was my maternal grandmother, who lived until 1971, and said she was amazed that during her lifetime americans had transported themselves from horse and buggy to spaceship. And no, she was not among the freak crowd who pretend that apollo was a hoax staged in the nevada desert.

Warmly I remember my grandmother's victorian values. Never attired in anything other than an ankle length dress with long sleeves, no slacks nor sweatshirts. To miss church was a matter of great concern. To be anything but a christian was unthinkable. And her racism was so deeply ingrained that she didn't even know it was racism. She used the term "nigra", thinking it politically correct. It went without saying that they were inferior, in some vague way or other, but the proper christian attitude was to let them live peacefully on their side of town, to never bother them, nor enter their churches.

Her youngest son, my uncle, is now eighty nine years old, and still working, partly because he has a spendthrift wife, partly because he has no idea what else to do, and partly because his love of money is so great, and his disdain for idleness greater still. The discomfitting thing about him is the degree to which he has retained the values with which he was imbued in the nineteen twenties. He overcame christianity, but not racism.

In the nineteen sixties I remember his frequent use of the "N" word; back then, racists were not ashamed of their racism,  as they are now. He still harbors his, but denies it, obviously ashamed of it, aware of how anachronistic it is, which might be regarded as a positive sign. In our modern color blind culture we do not realize that racism was so deeply ingrained in the public psyche that the thought that it was "wrong" never entered anyone's mind. To be a "racist" was common sense; to have a patronizingly generous attitude about the right of people of color to exist was progressive.

George Washington bought up all the land he could find, eventually owing a good portion of the state of virginia. He then oversaw its cultivatin by the slaves he had married into when he expediently married "well", slaves to whom he later gave freedom, unlike Thomas Jefferson. With nowhere else to go, impoverished squatters roamed around his vast estates, looking for something to eat. King George the first considered these people to be no better than cats and dogs, and he said so. (Methinks he had it backwards.)

President Teddy Roosevelt considered everyone in the world except germainc aryan white folks inherently inferior, and thought himself magnanimous by offering to bring civilization to them all through american conquest. That he once won the Nobel Peace Prize for hosting a peace treaty  signing for a war he the great war monger engineered is one of history's funniest jokes.

We may be on the verge of another quantum leap forward of human awareness. It may be that within the lifetime of our current crop of children we will finally realize that the very concept of "race" is a hoax, perpetuated by pseudo intelletucals with too much aristotle in their blood. Seven billion people, seven billion different skin colors. Go ahead, put your forearm next to that of any other homo sapiens on earth; never will you find an exact match. But don't try telling that to my uncle.