This chapter* opens with a provocative quote by the author:

“‘WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ALL THE INDIANS?’ I asked my mother on a Friday morning ride home from the library.”

Gotta tell you, this not a question I had growing up in the 50s in the middle-class white suburbs of Los Angeles and Orange County. “Where are all the people of color?” I did not ask because for me the world was white. I cannot remember a single person I met before the mid 70s who was black except for our neighbor’s maid, and I tell you this with a sense of shame and embarrassment that I never knew her name, and never was curious to know.

My schooling did not press this issue, that we were sailing in a sea of whiteness with a distant shore of indigenous and other people of color. I can say that we saw filmstrips of the Pilgrims and Squanto and the good relationships between English “settlers” (we never dove into the audacity of sailing 3500 miles to claim a land that already had inhabitants but that the kings and queens of Europe decided, with the pope’s blessing, could be colonized as free homesteads). We learned of the Founding Fathers but did not investigate how it was that many of them became rich and influential (hint: black chattel slavery). We knew that the portraits in each classroom of Washington and Lincoln, separated by the clock, and with the American flag to the right, were two people who made this nation, but we were taught (to the best of my memory) of the positive things. Washington led the nation in revolt and the establishment of the new nation, and Lincoln led the nation through a time of trouble that was a recommitment to the new nation. But—I honestly cannot tell you whether in my years between first and twelfth grade whether we had any serious investigation of American origins. In our California history classes we built sugar cube representations of Spanish missions and studied El Camino Real (my house at one point was on the this road), but even though the representation of the friars and their indigenous workers was shown neutrally (“Look. Godly men from Spain got these natives to peacefully submit and work for them in their agricultural endeavors!”), there was perhaps not enough emphasis on the Spanish military that enforced this peaceful subjugation.

What we learned was that what we were in the 50s and 60s is what America always was, from the beginning. (See Dr. Kendi’s book “Stamped from the Beginning” for a great summary of this history.) It was right and natural and good. Our family lived in an all-white suburb (to my best knowledge), one of the ring of suburbs around the core of Los Angeles/Long Beach. As children we went to an all-white school and went to an all-white church (again, to my best knowledge—there may have been people of color there, but I don’t remember them). Our school was named after a Spaniard who served as “expeditionary leader, military officer, and politician” (Wikipedia), the primary road we lived nearby was named after a “Mexican colonial soldier and patriarch of a prominent Spanish Mexican family in the early days of Las Californias and Alta California in present-day Southern California” (again, Wikipedia), many of the towns and roads had Spanish and Mexican names, but we had supplanted all that with the white suburbs of a prosperous Southern California. (I could not tell you the names of the indigenous tribes that the Spanish and Mexicans supplanted before the California Republic w/o going to Wikipedia. As far as I can remember or describe, these people have no towns or roads named after them.) The Chumash are mentioned, but the tribes/languages of my own region are erased—Wikipedia says they were the Tongva, which I never knew until just now.

We erased the history of these people, and we erased these people, and as Lincoln said, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” There was some fudging of the facts even in this grand statement. North America was a land of mystical, invisible savages, loosely arranged, and sparsely populating the continent, and in some strange way they simply gave way to white colonists except when they caused trouble and needed learning (see Custer and even Lincoln’s treatment of rebellious natives).

All this is to say—we were ignorant by choice. The choice was our cultural system, and we just didn’t know enough to know that we’d been had.

This chapter does give the author’s experience (on the East Coast, where there is slightly more awareness of the BIPOC—black, indigenous, and people of color). “Who are these people who are in our murals and coins and names? Where are they now?”

The answer from her mother was the answer of her culture: “No one knows, but here is a story I know and that I will repeat to you.” You must read the chapter to understand this, but I’ll give you an idea here: her mother (who is not an enemy here or a target, but just another member of white society) repeated a story that made sense and that had been told to her: the indigenous were weak and dangerous and barbarians, with their own savage customs and languages, worthy (this is a key point here!) to be conquered and erased. As the author says of this story-telling “She couldn’t tell me any of [the true history] because she herself had never learned them.” Her mother absorbed without much question the stories she was told, and she handed these stories down to her children in confidence that these stories were factually true.

Like most of us when we learn stories at our mothers’ knees, we absorb them as true without analysis because we are young and impressionable, and they form us as we are now. Those people are weak and inferior and savage, worthy of conquest, by (the kicker) we who are strong and superior and civilized. The good people. The worthy people. The people that God picked to conquer this land in Jesus’ name. There is no “white” race. There is no supremacy. There is just us, the winners. We’re both normal and neutral. The default.

Did my parents say it this way?

Of course not. And likely no one else had parents who made it this blatant, because it is likely that few parents could see it this way. It was the story they were told, it made sense and it accommodated them, and so it was passed down to us as it was passed down to them. World without end. Amen.

The thing to understand here, for me, is that this was largely done as an inconsequential decision. Our parents were not deliberately spreading these mistruths and unqualified conclusions. This is just what we all accepted as “true.” All of this came from our culture, and we absorbed it and then participated in protecting it and further establishing and spreading it. Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, white accomplishments and leadership—this is just how it was, and it was right.

So the hard part here in this discovery is that we have to untangle ourselves from our past and our parents. Not because the past is to be forgotten, but because that past is mostly irredeemably wrong and corrupt. Not because are parents are bad or devious or cruel (in ways that are otherwise exceptional to the human race!), but because they were handed down “fruit of the poisoned tree,” and we need to re-establish what is true, whether or not it means we must break from what our parents told us.

Lordy, I am not saying hate your parents or erase the past. Not at all. I’m saying we can simply do better and make better choices. Our managed history and our parents are the result of centuries of work to develop a narrative of white superiority. Our parents did the best they could, mostly, and so we can honor their work and love in raising us while also saying “there is more information here that we can process.”

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Questions

What stereotypes about people of another race do you remember hearing and believing as a child?

My parents were mostly moderate about issues of race and religion. I grew up Protestant although my mother had been raised Catholic. We attended a moderate Protestant church (Methodist) and somewhere around the sixth grade I aligned myself as a Presbyterian & started attending that church on my own. My parents did not use racially abusive terms, and we kinda got the message that these terms were strictly forbidden in our house. On the playgrounds and streets I did hear abusive and crude terms used for people of color (terms I won’t mention but You Know What They Are), and I am fairly certain that I never used them myself—but memory can often excuse our past by fogging the details. I can’t say that I ever heard anyone around me suggest that people of color were directly inferior or not worthy of attention and respect, but I also did not hear any suggestion that they had been somehow disfavored & would need to be incorporated into society, including education and politics and businesses and religion. It was enough, I think, that we maintained a separate happy existence. My mother was in some ways extraordinarily receptive to people of other cultures, and my father was a kind, honest man in most public dealings who also could not bear to physically punish his children. (A fault that his children exploited terribly and effectively, I’m ashamed to say.)

I was blithely innocent of any abuse meted out to other races. The Civil Rights Era occurred during my childhood, from the very early public years of Dr. King to his death in 1968 when I was 14. I saw on TV terrible things, but mostly I was mystified by the events—why were people in America being treated as savage animals to be met with firehoses and dogs? I could understand the terms being used—“We want to vote!”—but to be honest I had no idea of what the significance of this was, and it seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to give to people. I did not understand the own indigenous/Spanish/Mexican culture that was around us, whether in history or as current issues—a class trip once a year to Olivera Street in Los Angeles was enough culture for us.

I won’t speak ill of the dead, but there was one area where a family member did have an unreasonable fixation on racial or social issues, and that was anti-Semitism, but as far as I can tell, our response as children was to simply disbelieve it and not accept it. We treated it as a harmless affectation. In fact and in truth my best friend at 14 was a Jewish boy who was kind and quick and smart and good, and if I am anything today that is like him, then it is all because of his influence and not my own goodness. To see God through the lens of someone else and their religion was a good thing for me.

It really wasn’t until I went to Dallas in 1973 that I saw the extreme divisions in person. Sure, I saw this on TV, but it didn’t make sense to me. It was disconnected reality, much as TV commercials were disconnected from the programs. Black American being abused and attacked by the police, white people talking about Russia, and so on and so forth—it was just a series of scenes that I never assembled into a puzzle.

Were you ever encouraged to question stereotypes?

I don’t think so. I don’t think my parents ever made overt statements that questioned stereotypes. I think it was just simply understood that other people had their circles of influence and we had ours. My memory is very hazy here, but I think my father may have explained some of the issues of the Civil Rights Era to me. I was an early reader, though, and was reading the newspaper on my own by the age of four, so he may have simply let me discover for myself what was going on. I can say with more confidence that while I absorbed the information, I did not form an objective set of opinions that I was aware of. I was honestly bewildered by the riots after Dr. King’s murder, and it took me decades to understand more of what a catastrophe that death was to all of us, but most especially to our black brothers and sisters.

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• For context on this series, see my kick-off post here:

http://stephenmatlock.com/2019/01/if-i-love-you-i-have-to-make-you-conscious-of-the-things-you-dont-see/

To follow along with the others, see also:

Di Brown “Nixie” at https://dianabrown.net/blog-challenge-waking-up-white/

Dawn Claflin at https://dawnclaflin.wordpress.com/