Black

"The black guy?"

"...They're our black neighbors..."

"...and the ER nurse was just wonderful, this great black gal..."

Nope, not decades ago. Happened within the last year. And, the weird thing is, it came out of people who I KNOW don't believe, and I don't believe, that there's a racist bone in their bodies. That in itself is different than a relative, but not by blood, who is a bigot but would strongly disagree, even as he explains that when he was a young man, you didn't see people like Tiger Woods on the golf course because, "well, maybe it had to do with economics..."

Uh-huh, the economics of letting them clean the tables in the clubhouse and shooting them if they set foot on the green or if they walked through the 'Whites Only' door. This wouldn't-believe-he's-a-bigot also expressed surprise during a drive through the countryside when he saw a non-anglo couple sitting on the porch of a house: "Dont' usually see them out here."

But I digress.

These other people have never expressed any other statments, nor acted in any manner, that conveyed any leanings toward racism or bigotry. There is that descriptive thing though, and it's a toughy to deal with, because, well...let's digress again into backstory, just for a moment.

Some time during the summer of '71 (could have been '70, but I don't think so; couldn't have been '72, because I'm in basic training in lovely Ft. Polk, LA, by mid-June), I'm the passenger and Ken is driving, we're on the Eisenhower expressway, and we're either headed to Hillside or downtown Chicago. Traffic slows, we're just talking shit or whatever, and, maybe it was a hat or something, but I make a remark about the guy in a car close to us, and Ken asks, "What guy?"

"That black guy there."

"Why do people do that?"

"What?"

"Say 'black guy', instead of just 'guy'?"

The insight and maturity of both the question, coming from a goofball teenager who, like me, wanted to be a stuntman someday (you're fucking kidding me, right?), and his non-accusatory approach to the conversation, was one of those whack upside the head moments. "Why" indeed. The insight I could understand as having come to him as it came to me, from someone else. Not that I can't believe that Ken couldn't have had that kind of insight on his own at his young age, but it just seems more likely, given the time and place, that someone had shared that perspective with him, and they may have presented it to him in the same way: he didn't ask why "I" did that, he asked why "people" do that.

And we all know at least one of the answers: when you're young, and the norm of things is to describe someone of a different color than yourself by ALWAYS noting that other person's color, well, then that's your norm too. At least, that's your norm until someone like Ken comes along. Sadly, as close as were, I haven't a fucking clue where he is today. I last saw him in '76/'77, Kansas City, I think. I even had the opportunity to talk with someone five years ago who knew him intimately for a while, and she said that last that she'd heard, Ken got on a motorcycle one afternoon, took off and never came back.

Here's the thing: I got my perspective on "that guy" thing almost thrity-five years ago, at an age when I could use it as a foundation for the rest of my adult life. The people I'm talking about now, shit, they're in their sixties and seventies. And I can be fairly certain that they are, indeed, not racist, per se. Even though I've known them for between three and six years (not the 'no golf for black people because of economics' guy though...him I've known for, shit, long time...), their description by skin color statments only came up recently. And when they did just throw that out at me as we were talking, it was a bit, well, I guess surprising. Fuck, I don't know...I don't want to say I was shocked...actually, I think I was a little bummed.

See, I think that if you live in a place where either it's a highly diverse population, or in a place where there's a willingness to be diverse, you may become retro-naive, you forget what you had to learn once before.

So, I have another one of those 'swastika' things (an earlier post for those who don't know what I'm referring to; haven't been back to get my truck serviced yet, by the way). I suppose I could point out, like Ken to me, the undercurrent of meaning when they say "that black guy/that black gal", but, it's different when your older. For any of you who might've jumped up on the soapbox and started to take some sort of hard and fast position along the lines of, "You can't coddle them...", as I might have done in my younger, angry-Irishman days, I say this to you: shut the fuck up for the moment. As one gets a little older, one observes that there is far more gray in this world than black and white (geez, no pun intended, really), and one has to find the balance in this occasional mess.

Here's what I'll do, the next time this sort of conversation happens, and that 'black' thing happens, I'll come back to you and tell you how I handled it...or didn't...

I can't help but wonder, though, if the people I know were talking to a black person at a social gathering, and they wanted to point out someone across the room who was of a non-anglo descent, and the conversation partner asked, "what guy?", would they respond with...