You Can’t Do What Your White Friends Do, You Ain’t the Same As Them!
My parents grew up in the segregated South during the 1940s and 50s. As young children who passed into adolescence and on through to early adulthood in 1959, they witnessed a world where opportunities for African-Americans were far and few in between, but also where violence against blacks was plentiful and vicious, often deadly. They saw the end to World War II, the beginning and end of the Korean War, Truman’s order to desegregate the armed forces (Executive Order 9981, July 26, 1948), Eisenhower’s federalization of the Arkansas National Guard (Executive Order 10730, September 23, 1957) to uphold the rule of law (Brown v. Board of Education) to allow the Little Rock Nine to attend Central High School, and the lynching of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, by two ferociously ignorant racists, on the basis of a lie told by the victim (Carolyn Bryant Donham) that was allegedly recanted 60 years later.
My father shared stories of growing up, second of 13, in Port Gibson, Mississippi, performing menial labor tasks and attending school whenever a lull in his duties to help provide for a large, agrarian family came about, with dreams of going to college and becoming a doctor. Upon his 18th birthday on January 28, 1959, he promptly joined the U.S. Army (the only avenue available to a young black boy of his time), using that opportunity along with his G.I. Bill to move his family consisting of a wife and three boys (in 1967) to Milwaukee, Wisconsin and (after the birth of my twin brothers in 1969) enrolled in an innovative minority dealership program offered by the Shell Oil Company in 1972. This program put him on the path to entrepreneurship and by the end of the 1970s into a middle-class suburb, owning three gas stations and auto repair shops, and a sense of self-worth and purpose that growing up in the South never afforded him.
Always the first or only black family in our neighborhood, my brothers and I were never in want of friends to play with. Our house was always the epicenter of activity, where all would congregate to play baseball, kickball, tennis, and football (depending on the season). My mother would keep pitchers of red Kool-Aid around for us to consume and she would dispense love and discipline as evenly among the neighborhood kids as she would with her own brood of five.
As much as my parents worked to shield us from the world they grew up in, the world was not as protective. I grew up in 1970s Milwaukee, a city that was slow to accept school desegregation as a fact of life until after attempts to overturn a judge’s order were exhausted in 1975. It was a city where black students were suspended or expelled from class at rates much higher than their white counterparts, where opportunities to take AP classes and improve our chances of getting into an Ivy-league school was limited to a select few (I was one of the select few). A city where the pugnacious practice of redlining kept blacks in their Northside neighborhoods of crumbling tenement shacks and falling apart 1940s-style tract homes west of the Milwaukee River, while whites enjoyed better schools and roads east of that same landmark we used to euphemistically refer to as Milwaukee’s natural color line.
Being one of a handful of African-Americans living in my neighborhood meant I had no one to turn to and express my anxieties and fears after a race riot broke out at my high school in October 1979 (making us the lead story on the ABC Nightly News broadcast that evening). A mob of students akin to the MAGA white supremacists who staged a domestic terror attack on the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, rampaged through the halls of the school during homecoming week, fueled in part by misinformation, lies, and half-truths about what we Blacks were going to do to the neighborhood (the one I lived in) and how we would cause property values to drop as a result of the city’s decision to forcibly bus students from low-income schools to the outer fringe, better staffed and funded suburban schools.
I had no one to turn to about stickers I found posted on a telephone booth next to the grocery store my mom would send me to frequently to pick up needed staples. The sticker proclaimed Niggers Beware! and was put out by groups like the American Nazi Party, White Aryan Resistance (WAR), White Student Union, and a league of other white supremacist groups who in those days operated freely and with impunity throughout the country. I learned from my mother not to question whites in authority such as teachers, principals, and police officers if I were ever to be stopped, searched, or questioned because I “fit the description” or was perceived to have broken some code or norm, even though I never got in trouble with the law as a teen.
I was editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper, captain of the debate team, was drum major in the marching band during my junior year (and played first chair clarinet in concert band and orchestra), wrote for the yearbook, was published in our annual literary journal, played soccer and baseball, and otherwise worked every other available hour at my father’s gas station with my older brother. There was no time to get into trouble because I grew up under the auspices of the hidden view of an all-knowing, omniscient being who would report my transgressions to my parents for a swift and sometimes brutal punishment.
The stark duality of my existence continues to this day as I often struggle between what it is I am permitted to do in this world and how I am perceived by others. No longer a child though a child of the 1970s, I have had successes and failures in equal proportion. I raised children and have missed measured periods of their lives which cut a hole in my heart still to this day. I have dealt with serious health issues and continue to live to fight another day, worried sometimes about my impending mortality, but also grateful for what I have been able to accomplish and see.
One of the lessons from my childhood that I have always carried with me is something my parents would say to me and my siblings. Although we lived in a manner that was better than most, particularly as compared with my African-American peers with who I attended school, we were always cautioned not to do as our white friends did. Our skin color was a marker that could not be discarded at the end of the day and what they did and could get away with, we simply could not. We were not the same as they were. This lesson was painfully reinforced on January 6, when the apparent privilege of an alleged outraged and a widely misinformed group of rioters took the cause of freedom and justice (as they perceived it to be) and attacked one of the very symbols of freedom and justice in this country. Their fit of rage, anger, and impetuousness resulted in 6 deaths (as of this writing) hundreds of arrests, and a near disaster for a country amid its 245-year-old experiment in democracy.
What is galling to many of us who are not majority white (and let me add male and unduly pissed-off) is the difference in how the rioters were treated in comparison to the BLM protestors who were tear-gassed and arrested with brutally aggressive and indiscriminate force on June 1, 2020, to clear a path from the White House through Lafayette Park for POTUS to pose for a photo-op in front of historic St. John’s Episcopal Church. The church has always been a gathering place for the faithful of Washington, D.C. (for nearly 205 years), where every president from James Madison to Barack Obama (and, surprisingly, even Trump) has attended service at least once. The excessively geared up, over-the-top, cowboy, take no prisoners stance taken by law enforcement and the military on June 1 was largely absent on January 6. It is not hard for one to surmise that the complexion of the skin of those seen in opposition was not the same, bringing about two vastly different (and equally tragic) approaches to crowd control.
When law enforcement horribly missed the more than obvious signs toward the violence that took place at the U.S. Capitol, enflamed by Trump’s own words and those of his son Don, Jr., Rudy Giuliani, L. Lin Wood, and other right-wing extremist agitators who fomented a modern-day overthrow of the political system not seen since the Boston Tea Party (December 16, 1773) or the Parisienne storming of the Bastille 16 years later (July 14, 1789), the true face of American exceptionalism and white supremacy appeared. Investigations will ensue to uncover the true nature of this organized attack on this country’s sacred house to discover the roots of an inside job fueled by those who hold deep-rooted white supremacist sentiments and hostilities toward others seen as a threat to their entitlement and privilege. Some of us saw this day coming long before the enraging, embarrassing, and deeply troubling mob’s entreaty upon the Capitol grounds ever took place.
Sadly, what I take away from all of this are the words my mother patiently taught my brothers and me to keep in mind growing up African-American in a white majority world, “You can’t do what your white friends do, you ain’t the same as them!”
