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I AM AN American who was born before the schools were integrated in the South. I am a midwesterner who went with his mother on a trip to Washington, D.C., and my cousin’s company driver showed us the sights, but when we stopped for lunch at Howard Johnson’s he explained he couldn’t go inside because they didn’t serve colored people. “But you’re with us!” I said. “I know,” he said, smiling over my head at my mother, “but they don’t know who you are.” Inside, I asked my mother why they wouldn’t serve him. “They have their own nice places to eat,” she said. I don’t believe she was particularly upset on his behalf.
The first time I noticed that people had different colors of skin I was a very small boy. Our family laundry was done by a colored woman on Champaign’s north side. She was our “warsherwoman.” Downstate you pronounced an invisible “r,” so we lived on Warshington Street. I sat down on the floor to play with her son, who was about my age, and he showed me his palm and said it was as white as my palm. I noticed for the first time that the rest of him wasn’t.
In Catholic grade school, there was a colored boy named Donald in my class—that was the word we used, “colored,” although “Negro” was more formal. I remember the class being informed by a nun that he was “just as precious as the rest of you in the eyes of God.” I believed most of what the nuns told us, and I believed that. It made sense. Some years later it occurred to me to wonder how he felt when he was singled out. He lived in a house across the street from our playground and got to go home for lunch. Donald studied with us, played with us, and I gave him rides on the handlebars of my bike. Only slowly did his color become more—important? is that the word?—to me.
There were Negro students at Urbana High School, and I knew the athletes because I covered sports for the local newspaper. I didn’t know them, you understand, in the sense of going to their homes or hanging out at the Steak ’n Shake, and I don’t recall any of them at the Tigers’ Den, the city’s teen hangout in downtown Urbana. They did attend our school dances. There was a kid who wasn’t an athlete, whom I liked, and we talked and kidded around, but in those days, well, that was about that.
Strangely, during this time the “idea” of Negroes was on a wholly different track in my mind. I read incessantly during high school, and I met them in the novels of Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. I read Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. So I had this concept shaping in my mind that bore no relationship to what was going on in my life. It was theoretical.
This is not a record of my reading but of my understanding. Racism was ingrained in daily life in those days. It wasn’t the overt racism of the South, but more like the pervading background against which we lived. We were here and they were there and, well, we wished them well, but that was how it was. At this time it was becoming clear to me that I was not merely a Democrat, as I had been raised, but a liberal. When Eisenhower sent the National Guard to Arkansas, I defended him against some who said the federal government had no right interfering. So that was my political position. But where were my feelings centered? Theory will only take you so far.
In college, my understanding shifted. I attended the National Student Congress every summer, and during one held at Ohio State, two things happened. I gave a dollar to Tom Hayden and he handed me my membership card in Students for a Democratic Society. And one night during a party at Rosa Luxemburg House, I met a Negro girl and we went outside and sat in the backseat of a car and we talked and kissed and she was sweet and gentle and she smelled of Ivory soap. We fell asleep in each other’s arms. We met again maybe ten years later in New York City, recognizing each other on the street, and had a drink and talked about how young we had been. In my inner development, I had been younger than she knew.
Those were the days of the civil rights movement. We linked hands and sang “We Shall Overcome.” We protested. We demonstrated. Among the students I met at those student congresses were Stokely Carmichael, Julian Bond—and, for that matter, Barney Frank. They were born to be who they became. I was still in the process of changing. My emotional life was catching up to my intellectual and political life.
Later in the 1960s Negros became blacks. As a movie critic, I could watch that happening. The new usage first appears in my reviews around 1967 or 1968. Afros. Angela Davis. Black exploitation movies. Black is beautiful. Long interviews with Ossie Davis, Brock Peters, Sidney Poitier, Abbey Lincoln, Yaphet Kotto. What point am I making? None. It’s not as if I sat at their feet and learned about race. It’s more that the whole climate was changing, growing more free and open, and the movies were changing, too.
At some time during the years after the day I sat on the floor and looked at that little boy’s palm, something happened inside me and I saw black people more clearly—and brown people and Asians as well. I made friends, I dated, I worked with them, I drank with them, we cooked, we partied, we laughed, sometimes we loved. This is as it should have been from the start of my life, but I was born into a different America and was a child of my times until I learned enough to grow up. I do not propose myself as an example, because I was carried along with my society as it awkwardly felt and fought its way out of racism.
When I proposed marriage to Chaz, it was for the best possible reason: I wanted to be married to this woman. Howard Stern asked me on the radio one day if I thought of Chaz as being black every time I looked at her. I didn’t resent the question. Howard Stern’s gift is the nerve to ask personal questions. I told him, honestly, that when I looked at her I saw Chaz. Chaz. A fact. A person of enormous importance to me. Chaz. A history. Memories. Love. Passion. Laughter. Her Chaz-ness filled my field of vision. Yes, I see that she is black, and she sees that I am white, but how sad it would be if that were in the foreground. Now, with so many of my own family dead, her family gives me a family, an emotional home I need. Before our first trip out of town, she took me home to meet her mother.
I believe at some point in the development of healthy people there must come a time when we instinctively try to understand how others feel. We may not succeed. There are many people in this world today who remain enigmas to me, and some who are offensive. But that is not because of their race. It is usually because of their beliefs.
One day in high school study hall, a Negro girl walked in who had dyed her hair a light brown. Laughter spread through the room. We had never, ever, seen that done before. It was unexpected, a surprise, and our laughter was partly an expression of nervousness and uncertainty. I don’t think we wanted to be cruel. But we had our ideas about Negroes, and her hair didn’t fit.
Think of that girl. She wanted to try her hair a lighter brown, and perhaps her mother and sisters helped her, and she was told she looked pretty, and then she went to school and we laughed at her. I wonder if she has ever forgotten that day. I never have. It shames me.