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I Didn’t Have White Privilege Growing Up in Inglewood
LAX exit sign on 105 freeway. Los Angeles, California Photo credit: Shutterstock.com
It took thirty years to build the Century Freeway (later named the 105) that cut through Inglewood on the way to the Los Angeles Airport. Three governors, including Ronald Reagan, toured the site. In the interim between the planning and completion, the 119th block, a few blocks from my house, was purchased and made into low income housing. Suddenly, we were integrated. Not just black and white. But those who successfully lived through the horrors of the depression and World War II and set out to make a new, prosperous life in the tract-house suburbs of the early 1960’s and those of single-woman families on welfare in the projects.
When black children appeared in my class in third grade, I didn’t think very much about it. In those years, the bigger divisions were between those who ran fast and were good at sports and those — like myself — less blessed with speed and coordination and perpetually picked last for the team.
As fifth grade evolved into pre-adolescent angst, I instinctively avoided the particular black boys who struck me as angry and unpredictable – those who demonstrated kinetically upside the heads of underdeveloped white boys what Muhammad Ali was going to do in the next fight.
My parents never spoke against black people as a race. On the other hand, mom and dad were genuinely perplexed at the violence of the Watts riots. How could the rioters not see, as my parents did, what destroying property ultimately achieved? And my parents didn’t understand bussing. “Why don’t they put money into improving the schools and after-school programs instead of putting all that time and effort into moving kids from one place to another and getting home late?” Asked my mother. “And all because some judge somewhere ordered it!”
By the time I transferred two miles up Crenshaw Boulevard to the junior high school, all of the elementary school friends I grew up with had moved away. The crime rate rose. Iron bars were going up on windows. I was a minority. I would overhear from the other room as my dad got blockbusting calls from realtors wanting to list while he could still get his investment money out of his house.
I really wasn’t interested in race relations or black power. I just wanted to go to school and play with my friends. To be safe, I hurried home after school. The angry ones who pretended to be Bloods and Crypts took their time.
But you never knew where they were in the neighborhood. When I went to a friend’s house after school or cut through that hidden parking lot on the way to the movie theater there was genuine fear that I would turn a corner and find myself in their hornets’ nest. Or sometimes it would just be an unsupervised corner at school or after a Laker’s game at the Forum when I was shoved aside and my pants slapped down for lunch money.
I wasn’t thinking one gloomy afternoon as I wandered my bike through the neighborhood to 119th street. Before I knew it, I was surrounded and jammed in by other bicycles. My mistake appeared to be that I was an isolated white kid in “their” neighborhood, a weak lamb among wolves. The time consisted of shoving, intimidation, various threats to my body, and other bravado, and the demanding of pocket money. They took a special interest in my knit ski cap, oddly popular at that time in the Southern California weather. Finally they released me with a threat of kicking my “skinny white ass the next time” they saw it. I rode away humiliated and without the hat.
My mother, a stickler for time, demanded to know why I was so late and what was going on. I made the mistake of telling her and giving her names. She picked up the phone to call the school to report the harassment and the stolen hat.
I begged her not to call. I pleaded, but to no avail. My parents still lived in a world of rules, order, and authority.
The next day, I was waiting in the outer office of the school vice principal with Tyrone, the leader of the gang that jumped me. He shot daggers at me with his eyes, a mere glimpse of the angry volcano inside, and he punched his hand menacingly. As we walked into the inner office, he shoved me said, “Keep your lies straight.”
In the office, I was made to tell the story as Tyrone peered angrily into space. When the vice principal asked Tyrone why he would do such a thing, he just blew it off. He acted as if the vice principal, who was black, should know and understand the oppression and the pain and the seething resentment that transcends the trivial inconveniences of a whiney white boy. After the exchange, the vice principal turned to me and with a sigh and a shrug — I felt like she was preparing to deliver a death sentence — and said, “You’re just going to have to learn how to fight.”
I hurried home as fast as I could that day after school but my effort was not sufficient. The gang had the taste of red meat in their mouth and they were on their bikes and down the street ahead of me in no time. They confronted me outside the Brolly Hut, an independent hamburger shop. They jammed their bikes around me and with the fury of their fists began to beat on me. I looked up helplessly with pain for somebody, for anybody, to help but all I saw was excited students, peering through the window and munching on French fries while watching the show. At last, my rivals had had enough and rode off. I picked myself up, the diners returned to their conversations, and I quietly peddled myself home.
After eighth grade graduation, my dad finally joined the flight and we moved out to Huntington Beach. It sickened my mother to leave, because she loved the house in Inglewood with its fruit trees and practical layout and memories of neighborhood hide-and-go-seek. But that was all gone.
After that, I finished high school, got a college degree, got married, had children, and my parents moved to Arizona and ultimately passed away. Looking back, I don’t cast my early life in the racism narratives so popular today. I have since had black friends, coworkers, and bosses who never treated me with the kind of disrespect that Tyrone and his friends did.
More recently, I watched a documentary on the state of black Americans since Martin Luther King, Jr. In the documentary a black teacher spoke disparagingly about the continued segregation of the inner city. He authoritatively blamed the white privilege of people like my father who moved somewhere else, leaving those like Tyrone behind.
There is no doubt that I had privilege. I was privileged to have two sets of immigrant grandparents (German-Catholic and Russian Jewish) who came to America as racial and religious minorities and carved out a living in a time when their ethnicity and beliefs were despised. I am privileged for a father who used his GI bill privileges (earned by his service in World War II) to get a degree, and a mother who went to community college. My patents jointly determined to provide a way for their children. I am privileged for parents who stayed together in spite of their profound incompatibilities, because they knew that a stable home would serve me better.
Those who speak the loudest about race seem to think privilege is a zero-sum game. That in order for there to be black privilege, white privilege has to be diminished somehow. But privilege isn’t a zero-sum game. The world may not be everyone’s oyster where nothing is impossible, but it isn’t a dead end either. In America, there are yet opportunities to be found and ways to make it.
Those who blame my dad never explain exactly why it is impossible for Tyrone to take the bus up to El Camino Community College or to join the military, where he can be trained with life skills and possibly obtain college tuition.
There is no doubt there is yet a profound problem among the urban poor. Nevertheless, blaming people like my dad doesn’t help. It only fuels destructive resentment. Any solution is going to have to include a way to help the Tyrones of our country to get out of the generational quagmire of thought that dates back to the 1960’s and the institutional racism that government programs helped foster. The solution must nurture a Tyrone to see that America still has opportunities even as it had for my minority immigrant grandparents.
Unfortunately, the loudest voices of race would prefer that my dad never left Inglewood. That I was made to stay and embrace the anger and resentment. That I just learn how to fight.
Published in Culture
Walter Williams used to sub for Rush and had Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele on as guests. They talked of their childhood and growing up before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They never said the Civil Rights Act was a bad thing, but always said they were glad they grew up before that era. Those that want to get out of the cycle will get out. Those that want someone else to do the work, won’t. How much easier it is to blame another for your failures.
I grew up all over the country, mostly in working class neighborhoods, and never had a racial incident. Times have changed.
I don’t minimize the effects of prejudice and the mistrust Black Americans have for systemic mistreatment in the past. It was brutal and horrible. A permanent stain. I just don’t think there’s much more that we can do as a society to get rid of them. The major work is done. We can’t erase the past, no matter how many statues are pulled down. There will always be prejudice and those that hate someone else for any number of reasons. Laws can’t change that. Education can’t eliminate it. “Privilege” has a formula: marriage before children, graduate high school, get a job. As Williams and Sowell have said many times, the Great Society destroyed the black community in ways that slavery and prejudice were not able to do. Slavery and prejudice couldn’t break their spirit, their courage or their deep family bonds, but welfare and eliminating fathers could and did. So, like it or not, the responsibility now has to be shared, fair or unfair, it doesn’t matter. Only by taking responsibility for our lives can we be truly free.
Instead of tearing down the “privilege” that some people have, how about working on building up in others what gives the “privileged” “privilege.” Encourage marriage instead of incentivizing single motherhood. Encourage active fatherhood. Incentivize work instead of incentivizing non-work.
As with so many policies that are discussed, too many think the solution to a disparity is to tear down the top instead of building up the bottom (with the features that enabled the top to become the top). We have the same problem with countries, too. Underperforming societies persist in dysfunctional cultures and legal systems, instead of adopting the features that make successful societies successful.
My father in law worked on teaching young men of the ghetto carpentry skills as part of the Century Freeway project . It was as much a welfare project as a public works project.
The kids you described in the full on intensity as juvenile thugs had a choice. They could behave like bullies, beating on a single white kid because they had the advantage, or they could choose to ignore you. Or they might have chosen to become friends.
Today, kids locked into the wicked world of the inner city gang turfs often do not have any way out. Author Elizabeth George penned an exquisite and heart wrenching tale about how a child becomes a thug.
That book is titled: “What Came Before He Shot Her.” Her editor and publisher tried to discourage her from writing it.
I had troubled dreams for an entire week after I read it. Every time the news has a story on, “Young mom shot and killed by random gunman,” with a sub header, “No one knows who it was” I am jolted back into the reality of that book.
Because someone knows who it was. It might be her 12 year old nephew knows, as he recently failed to participate in some local henchman’s plan to rob an elderly lady. On account of this failure, his aunt was targeted. And if that nephew doesn’t change his attitude and go all in on gang activity, he might lose his uncle, or a younger cousin next time around.
I am so happy my “white privilege” allowed me to pass all those exams in college so I didn’t have to study.
I am so happy my “white privilege” was recognized by the Navy, so they let me drive a submarine without any training.
I am so happy my “white privilege” allowed me to marry a blond haired, blue eyed white woman without my having to be a professional athlete.
But most of all, I am so happy my “white privilege” allows me to be happy instead of angry all the time . . .
Good post. I am not sure what the argument is here. If white people didn’t leave then our high crime rate would have more diverse victims?
When I was a kid in the 70’s, my grandparents lived in Irvington, NJ, a small working-class city right next to Newark. As a six and seven year old I would run around their neighborhood without fear. By the early 80’s crime rates started to go up and my grandparents sold their house and moved into a small apartment in the suburbs. Yes, there was a correlation between the rising crime and the increase in the town’s black population (and find the answer to “why?” and you can fix this). If that were not a fact then there probably would not have been as much “white flight.”
Eventually, Irvington ended up showing up on charts for things like highest murder rate per capita. My grandparents had the privilege of selling their house for peanuts and severely downsizing in order to afford to live in a more expensive (but safer) area. Were others really hurt by Grandma’s actions?
Yes.
Many of the race hustlers would have us believe that the only reason the poor black areas have problems is because the rich white people don’t do enough for them, and that is because the rich white people are remote from the problems. So yes, by their [faulty] logic, if there were more white victims of the problems in the poor black areas, the rich white people would fix the problems of the poor black areas. The rest of us know that is not true.
There is, however, a neighborhood social cost to the decision by the father of @davidbsable to move away. The other boys in the neighborhood lost an example of a functioning family with a responsible male at its head. But that is not a race issue. “Successful” black families were also moving away, for the same reasons the white families were moving away, leaving these areas with a lack of examples of functioning families with responsible male adults in the household.
My lefty son-in-law has said that the biggest privilege our 2 year old grandson has is that he is a white male. No. Our grandson has enormous privilege, but it’s not mostly because he is white or because he is male. His enormous privilege comes from being born to married parents in a town in which the social norm is married parents with children, in which at least one of the parents works at a job that requires them to take responsibility for their work, and in which the norm is for parents to read to, to play with, and to converse with each other and with their children.
Super!
Sounds just like my jr high school in the mid 70’s.
When I first moved back to the West so I could be closer to family, I taught at a school in a “difficult” neighborhood. I was an experienced teacher, an experienced mother, and an optimist. Silly me…
One year I had a student who was a serious behavior problem. I’d phone his mom and talk, and I’d meet with her after school. So she said she’d come and sit in class one day to help me. I thought that sounded great. Again, silly me…
Of course her son’s behavior improved because mom was there. But what she really wanted to discuss was that “other children acted badly” and I wasn’t all over their moms!!
So, nothing I said anymore had any effect because her son wasn’t the only kid who didn’t act right all the time, and so I shouldn’t complain, and what about those other children, and I’m just the meanest teacher ever….
I found another school the next year. One with more two-parent households.
People forget just how terribly the busing programs were run. Forcibly integrating public schools led to all sorts of violence. The story as to why my parents homeschooled all six of us children is that one day in the early 90s my older brother came home from school with a big slash in his back. The school did nothing, and none of us ever went to public school again–even after we’d moved to Northern California. I’ve always said that if liberals wanted to make busing work, they should have sent their own kids to those schools so they’d be properly motivated.
The zero-sum privilege rhetoric arises from critical race theory. Every critical [X] theory is a front for Marxism, deployed in the wake of the (white) working class failure to join the student radicals, now tenured full professors and multi billion dollar foundation leaders, in the streets to overthrow capitalism in 1967-8.
85
Howard Stern tells a similar story of his time in Freeport, NY when that Long Island town was being integrated. His parents refused to move, despite the beatings and shakedowns he suffered. They finally relented halfway through his high school years and moved to Garden City.
It sucks when the children suffer the effects of their parent’s virtue signalling.
I love Elizabeth George. I’ll have to look that up.
I have met many Tyrones of all races, mostly whites. What the racist grievances people don’t get is the issue is cultural not skin color. Skin color just makes a easy hook to hang it on and history to blame it on.
Thomas Sowell has detailed in his most recent book, Discrimination and Disparities how black-Americans had the same complaints about poor blacks moving into their neighborhoods. “We want to make something of ourselves, these guys just sit on the stoop all day, deal drugs and don’t study.”
Jews in New York and Cantonese in Hong Kong have had the same complaints with regard to population with high crime rates and low educational achievement. Ain’t nothing new.
Well, maybe one thing is new. The poor Jews and the poor Cantonese eventually became wealthier and more bourgeois. I doubt the same happened for Tyrone or his kids. That to me is the real tragedy. When my nieces start to vote, will the Democratic debates be all about how unfair America is instead of the endemic violence and dysfunction among communities of young men without fathers? Will my grand nieces have the same situation. It’s been fifty-five years since the Civil Rights Act. We aren’t making the progress we want to as your story so eloquently summarizes.
1967-68, the white working class people were waking up early each morning to get to their jobs in the auto industry or the steel mills. So they didn’t find it necessary to overthrow a system that was allowing themselves to support their families with one paycheck, buy a second home where they could spend three or four weeks of vacay time each summer fishing and swimming, and save for the kids’ college funds. Plus they easily bought new cars, and had health insurance through the employer.
I’m pretty skeptical that things were that easy. Everything I’ve heard but can’t remember is that things have gotten better for working class people (provided that they worked.) All the cars we have now are better and while health insurance is a big pain, our healthcare is lightyears ahead of healing sick people than it was in 1967.
Do you have any solid economic data that lays out the argument that the regular Joe was better of in 1967.
Don’t want to speak for CarolJoy, but my take on her comment was that a blue-collar household, with one wage earner, was generally able to have a decent (for the times) house, a decent (for the times) car, have decent (for the….you get the idea) health insurance and health care, save some money, and maybe send a kid or two to college. For a good portion of the population, that seems to be out of reach today.
This is absolutely true. The first PhD course I took focused on Biblical Theory versus a list of other theories including Marxism, Secularism, Feminism, etc., in the 1960s. Not yet born in the 60s, my first assumption was that these “other” theories must surely have represented the fringe. I mean just how many people could’ve backed these ideas? (Naive assumption on my part.) Fast forward to the first democrat debate. I watched them on the stage somewhat aghast…oh my…they all believe the “other” theories. Apparently there has been no awakening in the last 50 years and instead a festering movement to make unsupported theories true…or at least if you say it enough, everyone will eventually believe it. Sprinkle in some “dark psychic forces” at a debate, or an ex-counter-intel person on morning television equating numerology with flag protocol. No wonder we get to a zero-sum privilege…just say it enough (especially on tv) and it must be true!
The end of the Cold War freed the communists from the living example of the ussr. The western communists always chafed at Russian leadership in the Comintern anyway.
There is rampant racism now in our public schools. the cause? An underlying belief touted by misguided sociologists, psychologists, and other education gurus who believe that black kids are too dumb or or perverse to learn how to behave themselves. It is these theories that are profoundly racist, not to say, stupid. From K on the kids are deprived of the precise skills that would foster their social success. Thus, in the name of avoiding racism, these vulnerable kids are left to flounder.
Read this excellent Quillette article by Mary Hudson who taught in New York City schools to see how it works.
EDUCATION, MUST READS, RECOMMENDEDPublished on February 10, 2019
Public Education’s Dirty Secret
written by Mary Hudson
“Dark psychic forces” was probably the least dangerous idea promulgated on that stage.
Nicely said, and true.
This was a fun quote from the article:
They didn’t seem to know that they had very little chance of getting into anything but a community college, if that. Sadly, the kids were convinced of one thing: As one girl put it, “I don’t need an 85 average to get into Hunter; I’m black, I can get in with a 75.” They were actually encouraged to be intellectually lazy.
Sowell has been speaking to this for a long, long time. Nothing quite like incentivizing the worst behavior, and expecting good outcomes.