A Young Person's Guide to Race in America

There was only one black pupil in my elementary school, Sandra Lucas, and she claimed to be Spanish. She wasn’t given a hard time because she was gorgeous, desired by all the boys, envied by all the girls. There was one black pupil at my junior high school. His ticket to non-harassment was his athletic brilliance. I was a fervent fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who included John Roseboro, Junior Gilliam, Maury Wills, and the Davis non-brothers.

My parents weren’t hateful people, and, as Jews, knew what it was like to shunned for their ethnicity, but they weren’t exactly progressive in their thinking. My mother had briefly had a black girlfriend in high school in Minneapolis, but had worried that others might think less of her for it. My dad told me that black people had natural rhythm, but that property values plummeted in neighbourhoods lots of them moved into. He was uncomfortable with the thought of my little sister ever dating a black guy.

I think the first black person I actually spoke to was Charlie Neal, then the Los Angeles Dodgers’ second baseman, at an autograph event at a local department store. I like to imagine I addressed him as Mr. Neal. I admired a great many black ball players. At the time, the Los Angeles Times sportswriters always took care to point out when it was a rookie of colour about whom they were writing.

Two years later, I had more contact with black people when I worked as a busboy in Ted’s Rancho Restaurant, on Pacific Coast Highway between Santa Monica and Malibu. The place employed two black dishwashers. The tiny, wizened, and inconceivably ancient (probably around 50) one invariably found something amiss with the tubfuls of dirty dishes I’d lug into him from the dining room. Twenty seconds after I’d placed a tubful in his work area, and hurried back out to keep my custies’ water glasses and butter dishes filled, his voice, full of rebuke, would ring through the restaurant. “Young man!”, with the second word pronounced MAY-un. During my entire career as a busboy, I don’t think I ever delivered the dirty dishes in a way that didn’t annoy him.

I actually became friendly with the other guy, Collins Hall, who, by dint of being conscientious and hard-working, was promoted to chef, to the infinite chagrin of the redneck asshole who presided over the kitchen. This was during the summer of Selma and the three civil rights volunteers being murdered in Mississippi. I thought myself ever so noble for assuring Collins that I didn’t hate him because he was black. He said, “Why, thank you, sir,” non-rhotically. It wasn’t until years later that it dawned on me that he was being sarcastic. We remained pretty friendly in spite of my being a clueless little dickhead.

I was fired from Ted’s for being a rotten busboy, and went to work selling admissions to the big parking lot at Zuma Beach, 16 miles up Pacific Coast Highway. I was surrounded at work by rednecks. There was much talk of Martin Luther Coon, and of how Lyndon B. Johnson wanted to force decent, fragrant white folk to live next door to malodorous Negroes, though my colleagues pronounced the word rather differently.

My first girlfriend’s family lived in north Malibu next door to a guy who tried to put together a group of vigilantes to go up into Watts, whose inhabitants were rioting, and shoot rioters dead. My first might-have-been father-in-law was a good guy, and declined the invitation.

At Santa Monica High School, classes were supposedly segregated according to academic aptitude. There were classes for those likely to go on to higher education, and classes for those who probably wouldn’t, and classes for those who required remediation. I was unmistakably higher education material. In my three years at Samohi (from which Donald Trump's Secretary of Xenophobia Stephen Miller would graduate decades later), I was in a grand total of one class for which a black kid was deemed sufficiently brilliant. One interacted with other ethnicities only in PE. 

A black family moved into my neighbourhood, a desolate semi-ritzy real estate development on the mesa up a very steep hill from Ted’s Rancho Restaurant. Its patriarch owned a pharmacy in Santa Monica. My impression was that property values didn’t plummet. I don’t think anyone spraypainted racist slogans on their garage door.

In adulthood, I had brief flings with two black women, and repudiated all forms of xenophobia, including, but not limited to, racism, homophobia, and misogyny. In 1988, Ed, the abstract expressionist friend who'd taken me in after the collapse of Marriage 1.0, was driving me and a work colleague acquaintance of his down to San Francisco when Other Acquaintance began spouting off about niggers. I demanded that Ed let me out of the car. We were on Highway 101 in Novato, and he wasn't pleased about having to get off the freeway.

Why thank you, suh.