“By pretending the world was virtually problem-free, my family culture left me grossly underprepared to solve problems.”
The 50s and 60s were a time in America unlike any before or after. We had won a war (with the uncredited assistance of Russia who lost 10 million men and 14 million civilians to our 410 thousand men and some civilians), there were no real economic challenges (Soviet Russia was a political challenge, but who knows how much of it was hyped up to win votes?), we were prosperous and confident and expanding. Scouts and YMCA and camping and museums were all out there for our entertainment and enrichment, and we simply consumed all the new things of the new age and the new world
Questions
What were some of the major economic, political, demographic, and pop culture trends from ten years before your birth until age twenty?
Ten years before my birth WWII hadn’t yet concluded. The atomic bomb was developed and used twice; the Soviets through espionage stole the plans; and that led to hysteria in America in the 40s and 50s, an hysteria that attacked liberals and people pursuing peace. American fought the Soviets and China in a proxy war in Korea that ended up with a 60+ year stalemate. Black Americans started fighting more vocally for their rights—with so many returning black soldiers, there was a growing demand for equality that expressed itself in various movements in the 50s and early 60s, culminating in the great Civil Right Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Concomitant with the movement and the legislation was the eruption of black communities in urban centers as the gross injustices of life became too much to bear. The students of the 60s began to reject the definition of American patriotism as meaning support for endless war, and American parents grew scared of turning into an America that didn’t look like what they expected. The great men of the 60s were cut down by bullets and bombs. Kennedy, Evars, Malcolm, King, another Kennedy. The Republican Party changed its political positions and base to snap up the Solid South in their response to civil rights and civil unrest, and Nixon went from winning an enormously triumphant election to being forced from office a year and a half later. The Beatles revolutionized popular music with extraordinary new methodologies and the Rolling Stones made enormously successful emotional, gritty connections with their fans. Color TV became popular, and we entered an age where black Americans began to have representation on TV. The 30 years started with standard airplanes with the same general design as the previous 20 years, and then we landed on the moon in 1969. (The same night when the third Kennedy was in a car where a young woman drowned.) The conservative Christian church was largely silent as the general air of progressivism was everyone’s expectation of the good life and the God-blessed life of BOMFOG (the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God).
How did they show up in your life?
We lived in the suburbs of Los Angeles and simply went along for the ride. While I can remember the deaths of the Kennedys, Evars, Malcolm, and King because I read the newspapers and watched the TV on my own, I cannot recall much actual discussion of the convulsions going on. Even the conflict in Viet-Nam, which was taking a notable turn in 1965, was not discussed. By the time I was a senior in high school, I was expected to go into the service if my number came up. I saw boys go off to war from high school and come back broken, or come back in boxes. Still, we never actually talked about that.
How do you think they influenced your beliefs?
Like the author, I was raised in the safety and comfort of expectations that all would be well. I would succeed at whatever I tried. I did not have to work hard to succeed, what with so many doors open to me. I could just apply for any job and expect to be interviewed & perhaps even hired. Also like the author I was totally unprepared to handle any of the hard discussions. In our family we had survivors of the Great Depression in America and the Great Revolutions in Europe (Soviet, German). But we did not really talk about any of this, and we were kept safe from dangerous thoughts.
For most of my life I believed that there were no real problems. I mean, yes, there were problems, but they were easily solved by people expressing their common beliefs. One thing that fits in here is how I saw the racial divide in America. It was too bad that black people didn’t have fair or safe lives, but if they just asked for their place at the table, good-hearted whites would give them their place, and everything would just be fine. I didn’t understand—and barely comprehend, even now—the enormous affect of deep-seated racial animus there is in white America, in clean, white, suburban America, in church-going, God-honoring, faithful, reverent America. I could not—and that became would not—believe that white people were really that bad or that wrong.
This still affects me, and I am tempted every day to go back to my pleasant dream-like state where we do studies and read books and share our thoughts, and no real work needs to be done because decent people will rise up and do the right thing. They’re just waiting for someone to say that special word so they can go “aha!” and change their ways.
But racism is deeply, stubbornly, thoroughly, deliberately embedded into our American psyche and our roles in whiteness. It is not just a single attitude or a single behavior. It is the whole mess that has been grafted on, or melded with, saturated into.
“Fixing” racism isn’t going to be a set of Ten Things I Can Do Right Now to Stop Racism and Start Loving My Neighbor.
I’m aware of how I sound when I am around people of color & in all earnestness I talk about what I’m doing. I’m aware that I sound ridiculously naïve and arrogantly unwilling to learn. All I can say is this, in as much honesty and sincerity as I can muster. I am doing the best I can. Don’t give me a break, but give me a chance.
For context on this series, see my kick-off post here:
To follow along with the others, see also:
Di Brown “Nixie” at https://dianabrown.net/blog-challenge-waking-up-white/
This chapter: http://dianabrown.net/waking-up-white-chapter-4/
Dawn Claflin at https://dawnclaflin.wordpress.com/
Chapter 4 Optimism
I was 20 years old in 1966. At Air Force bootcamp, Montgomery, Alabama, two of the officers who instructed us on war, and the economics of war in Vietnam, had been in the air riding B-52 bombers on the way to Russia at that critical moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis when Khrushchev backed down. That was my scariest moment.
Fast forward to 1993 when our family returned to Terceira, Azores, Portugal to show our daughter Rebecca where she was born. We learned from a Baha’i jeweler how his had been the largest file folder in held by the fascist secret police at the neighboring Island of San Miguel. At the top of the file was a note that said, “No problem, they are idealists”. The folder was thick with Baha’i pamphlets and booklets.
Key word, fascist. In the 1960’s, news reports and talk shows had us believe that Spain’s Franco was a joke. Is he still dead? What I didn’t know until my current read “The Snow Gypsy”, by Lindsay Jayne Ashford was the mass murders by death squads not only of gypsies (as Jews), but entire cities wiped out all across Spain. Inquisitors ruled Spanish and Portuguese crusades since 1437, and the slave trade. The Island of Terceira where we lived held the plunder from the America’s, away from the Spanish armada.
Reread the story of Ernest Hemingway, and “the Sun Also Rises”. Hemingway was assisting as a spy for the U.S. Navy escorting tankers and cargo ships between Cuba and the Florida Keys, sitting in Cuban bars listening to communists brag about their plans.
How conservative Christian doctrine changed with publication of “The Kingdom of the Cults”. I found the book in a Lutheran Church library. Was shocked at the false statements about the Baha’i Faith, and also Mormanism.
After the 1993 Parliament of World Religions in Chicago, a truly interfaith group met monthly at the Minneapolis Council of Churches. The President of the Council met with us. He had interviewed the author of “The Kingdom of the Cults”, who admitted his false statements, but would not retract.
What happened to Baptist Church authority around the year 2000? Only recently did I learn that women could no longer stand in the pulpit, read scripture from the lecturn, or teach Sunday School. Is the American Baptist Assembly responsible for the hard line that promotes supremacy. One on one it is possible to have interfaith dialogue without evangelizing. I see this as the most critical political challenge in the next three years.
Huh. I’m interested in your experiences with “Kingdom of the Cults,” by Dr. Walter Martin, I believe. He spoke at our church for a week-long presentation on various cults as compared to small-“o” orthodox Christianity. I also attended his lectures at Melodyland Christian Church. He was quite popular in the 60s and 70s as the “Bible Answer Man.”
I followed along with his presentations, and learned stuff I didn’t know as a young Christian/teenager, but I was actually surprised to learn what orthodoxy was.
I’d be curious to find out what Dr. Martin changed his mind on.
Ravi Zacharias, I see, has become a co-author or editor of his book.
The book itself does a great job of summing up the beginnings of various sects and cults in America, although it does display a bias (as do all books) based upon the author’s own life and experiences. I think his dismissal of Rev. “Ike” Eikentrotter, for example, was too glib and hasty, choosing to go after not just his theology but his economics.
People may want to have theology speak to a certain set of beliefs in their minds, but IMO people opt in to a religion because it addresses felt needs or confirms felt biases. I’d like to see that explored more, but Martin’s book isn’t the place for that.
Your last paragraph guts me, resonates with me. I too know how ridiculous I sound. But I’d like to be given a chance.
We’re doing the best we can. When we fail–let us know. We’ll try to accept the correction and continue working.