Jump On That Washboard

The Washboard Serenaders, 1934


Liberace playing Dixie

When I was a kid growing up in Sherman Oaks, we never saw Black people, never. Except for one Rams game at the Coliseum, or one Stars game at Wrigley Field, I don't think I saw a Black guy until high school. I believe there were one or two upperclassmen at my school, but they graduated before I ever spoke with them. It was an all boys' Catholic school and we did have a teaching Brother of the Holy Cross who was a black man, Brother Joseph. I also remember seeing some members of SNCC (The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) at a cardboard table in front of Bullocks Department Store on one occasion. They were dressed like preppy college students and were answering questions and giving literature about civil rights marches and voter registration in the Deep South. I remember being impressed by the romantic notion of underdogs fighting for their rights against severely lopsided odds. On our block we probably called them Niggers or Spooks until the mid 1960's. We also called Jews, "Kikes," Chicanos we referred to as "Beaners," there were "Japs," "Chinks," "Spics," and "Greasers." as well. Casting your fishing line at a lake with a float was called Nigger Fishin', and Brazil nuts were known to me as Nigger Toes. Forget that Uncle Remus was on television on Sunday nights and Aunt Jemima was our dream maid/slave.

At my High School we played organized sports in a Catholic league. Some schools ranged as far as Long Beach, East L.A. and Downtown L.A. Before Friday night football games, There would be a pep rally in the auditorium. The cheerleaders and pep club would make banners on butcher paper and hang them around the gym, and later use them at the game displayed on the bleachers. One school which was Downtown and had many Black and Chicano boys playing were the Cathedral Phantoms. We called them the "Spooks," and had cheers "Kill the Spooks," along with similar sayings on the butcher paper banners. Once a hooded white-sheeted figure was even hung in effigy at a rally. Yes, this was a Catholic school in the San Fernando Valley. This would be the early 1960's. In a few years many of us would graduate, join the Army and kill the Gooks.


Why do I even bring any of this up? Maybe just to remind myself where I originated and how. Certainly on television I saw some Black people: entertainers mostly, many of them were accessories in old movies playing maids, slaves, tap-dancers and bug-eyed comedians. By the mid 1960's Dance programs like Soul Train which broadcast from Chicago and then Los Angeles certainly had Black teenagers, but it was left to music and sports--always music and sports. During these same years the Watts riots occurred (1965). I remember one night borrowing my folks station wagon and taking a girl up to the Hollywood Hills. We found a vantage point and watched as South Central L.A. burned far below. I had a stolen cat-gut guitar and was singing early Bob Dylan songs to impress my date. The flaming streets of Watts and South Central were merely a fortuitous backdrop.

Where does systemic racism come from? From people like me I'm afraid. As far as I can see, American social and economic climates during my formative years were solidly racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and class-based. I grew up feeling somehow superior to people I didn't even know. As a White, Male, Christian, Middle-Class, educated American, I felt superior to almost everyone--everyone, that is, except the wealthy, who I grew to despise. I took what we call "advantages" for granted. It never dawned on me that my grandmother was a maid in a Los Feliz mansion, that my grandfather was a house painter and had previously worked at a garden nursery in San Fernando. I'm told my paternal Irish grandfather was often an unemployed salesman with a taste for liquor who died early and left my maternal grandma to live in a small two bedroom apartment with her mother, my great aunt, and her husband. They had followed us from Chicago when my parents moved to Southern California. I often saw my grandmother working at the local pharmacy as a clerk, and later at a cigar and cigarette shop across the street from my high school. There were years my father worked two jobs to make ends meet; and my mother spent some years of my upbringing working a graveyard shift so that she could be home during the day and attend to her 5 kids when we returned from school. I never had any money and began shoplifting clothes and incidentals at an early age. In retrospect, it's hard to believe that I felt endowed with any special privileges which would mark me as singularly special. I was a mutt. But the climate of 1950's America when I grew up was one of suburbs and the unspoken lust for success. Everyone looked for an edge to help carry them up that ladder. Racism was a tonic for white people. Anti-Semitism was a course in Christian fundamentalist ethics, after all, Catholics taught and perhaps still teach that anyone not baptized is condemned to never enter Heaven. Jews were being punished for killing Christ and for the other stereotypes grown into dogma spanning the last 2000 years--unless one needed a doctor or lawyer of course. Competition demands that we twist our method of looking at those we are vying against. We had the Cold War to use as a blackboard of instruction on how to hate others for no good reason, but hate them we did. And each Sputnik launch, or Olympic competition, or Cuban Missile showdown, or Berlin Wall controversy engendered our ability to depend only on "our kind." The space race and nuclear armament deployment were our training in social consciousness. We were selfish, hate-filled, duplicitous global citizens to be feared, and continue to be so.


So, even today I can't say that I'm immune from these ills of difference. I don't believe people who say otherwise. I've heard men talk about women, I've heard Christians or agnostics talk about Jews, I've heard Christians talk about Muslims, I've heard Jews talk about Muslims, I've heard White people talk about people "of color." So when I see Liberace on an old clip from his television show singing "Dixie" with all the anemic blood of a soulless white entertainer, it reminds me where I come from. We watched Perry Como, Lawrence Welk, Ed Sullivan, Andy Williams. The city was constructed of zones or cantons where color codes were strictly delineated, policed either legally or by subterfuge.

I've often heard well-meaning people my age agree that our youth was distorted by a certain lack of perspective, but that the 1960's had somehow alleviated our poor vision. These same people may also have you believe that they were at Woodstock and shared a joint with Abby Hoffman in Chicago at the Democratic Convention in 1968. The myth of the 1960's is just that--a myth. The ones who marched in the streets of large demonstrations usually did so for entertainment and often long after any danger had passed. The dangerous civil protests took place in the South, and those marches were populated by much smaller and more committed crowds than the anti-war marches which came later. Remember that the actual ramrod of the Civil Rights movement in the halls of Washington was not Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Rosa Parks, Bobby Kennedy, Stokely Carmichael,or Malcolm X. It was Lyndon Baines Johnson, a hard-nosed, White, Southern, Conservative Democrat and probable racist himself. A man who gave no more interest to racial equality than he did to killing hundreds of thousands of Asian civilians in Vietnam. The Civil Rights legislation was a matter of political expediency. True, the country made some positive changes during that era, due largely to some of those advocates listed above, but the underlining racism continued. I think certain celebrities were iconic in our small liberalizing evolution: Richard Prior being one, Muhammad Ali another, Dick Gregory, Shirley Chisholm, Angela Davis, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou and others. However,even now with a Black American President we would be foolish to think that the government is by any means different than it was under Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr., Carter, Reagan or Nixon. Capitalism runs our lives, divisive antagonisms run our social orders. We trot out token examples of equality, but refuse to acknowledge our prison system, our judicial system, and currently our Federal abuses against Muslims regardless of evidence or habeas corpus. An American politician, no matter the color, gender, religion, or up-bringing, has entered a pit of unscrupulous cronyism and indebtedness to the powerful. A wise man once called them "cheerleaders of capitalism." Unless we change the corrupt system which elected them to office and which defines them, there is no possibility for a government who's mission is to aid and protect its citizens under equality. Obama is Bush.

Gay and Lesbian politics has made larger inroads partly because it straddles the economic classes of wealth, race and gender. It skirts a heterodoxy because it is a preferential exclusion whose numbers have grown large within the confines of original groups. That is, a gay, white, professional man or lesbian woman that was born and raised in prior classifications has already been accepted or rejected by the old battle lines. A gay infant isn't born into hatred, because they haven't chosen their sexual preferences yet, whereas systemic racism involves the infant even before birth. Pregnancy and birth rate being chestnuts which are often tossed into the fire by the Conservative Right to attack America's ethnic minorities. This excludes the argument of genetic disposition to same-gender sexuality, but I've never believed it's an altogether important distinction. Though certainly there is suspicion and inequality in the view of our dominant culture toward "queers" regardless of their age.

As for the YouTube music clip of The Washboard Serenaders from the early 1930's, didn't they rock? Wasn't there an infectious groundswell of emotion in the kazoo and washboard, and a Jazzy/Jive coolness to the piano and vocals. Fuck racism, fuck superiority, fuck terminal self-involvement--LET'S DANCE!

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