Isn’t It Time To End Racial Distancing?
We crossed paths during the COVID lockdown. Outdoors while in line retrieving our mobile coffee orders
Me, African-American. He, White.
Neither of us was wearing masks.
I noticed that he had an Ohio State hat on. A fellow Buckeye, I thought.
So I said hello and discovered that we’re both originally from Columbus, Ohio
We then proceeded to chat a bit awkwardly, unconsciously maintaining a 6ft distance because it was windy out.
His name is Jeffrey Kass. And here’s what I’ve learned about him in the ensuing days.
For starters, he’s an author, lawyer and community activist residing here in Denver. He’s also a writing machine, having authored over 100 articles over the past 25-years on race, culture, politics, law, and religion. He is also a national speaker that’s spoken to both local and national audiences on intellectual property and scores of other issues.
Jeffrey has also been involved with civil rights issues for the better part of his professional career, serving on the boards of the Anti-Defamation League and Urban League in St. Louis.
But one of his biggest crowning accomplishments is the book he authored entitled “Oreos and a Pack of Marlboro Lights.” He sums it up best in his own words:
‘It is a collection of true stories, essays, and even a poem, which have only been lightly fictionalized to protect some of my innocent—or should I say guilty muses. The book is intended to entertain, make you laugh, and even make you say a few “oh s...s!” To instigate, to inspire, to think, to challenge, and to deep dive into the psyche. To a few times make you reflect on your own life. The stories span many years and cover a wide variety of subjects including relationships, race, religion, and coming of age matters.”
I just finished this “no-holds-barred” gem and can honestly say that it’s the bomb. That’s all I’m going to say about it right now as I invite you to check it out yourself. Here’s the link so that you’re not pulling up packages of Oreo cookies while doing a Google search.
Last week, a theme randomly popped into my head:
Racial Distancing
I mentioned it to Jeffrey and he agreed to write a piece about it. So here it is in its entirety.
By Jeffrey Kass
There’s a lot of talk these days about what the new normal will be like after we emerge from this corona mess. Work from home more. Fridays off. Washing hands more. Maybe even recycle or ride our bikes more to be earth friendlier. Support local businesses. Spend more time with kids.
Not a lot of talk about racial issues these days. Maybe the media is not as focused on these sorts of incidents. Maybe fewer people are driving so there haven’t been as many people stopped for driving while black in the wrong neighborhood.
Maybe it’s just because we’ve always tried to pretend racism either is a thing of the past or isn’t all that bad. Or confined to the fringe KKK types.
I was recently reminded of when I was in sixth grade. I only knew one black kid. His name was James. He was studious and smart. And other than the color of his skin, he was basically the same as the rest of our twenty-six white classmates and one Asian kid.
James spoke the same way as we did. Lived in the same white neighborhood as most of the other classmates. He liked the same cartoon characters. He played on our little league baseball team, although he wasn’t that coordinated. So he mostly sat on the bench.
None of us kids really thought much about his color. He was just James. Smart, straight-A student James. He later would go on to be valedictorian at our high school.
It was 1980 and the big talk in the Columbus, Ohio public school system was desegregation. I didn’t know what this meant at age eleven, but I overheard my parents discussing how Judge Duncan ordered the schools to develop a program to integrate.
They eventually called it bussing. Where black and white kids would have to take school busses to different school districts away from their own neighborhoods. The goal was to make the schools a tossed salad of race.
So when I showed up for Sixth grade at Yorktown Middle School, I had new bussed-in classmates. Lots of them. James was no longer the only kid with darker skin. Half my class was, and they were nothing like James.
Some were smart. Some were dumb. Some spoke with some sort of slang affect I had only heard the few times I watched the sitcom Sanford and Son. Many of my new chocolate classmates were good at sports.
They didn’t all like the same cartoons, though. Instead of going to video arcades each weekend, they largely preferred roller skating rinks. Every Friday night at United Skates of America. Me, I had never even been rollerskating.
Most of the kids were from the inner-city Columbus neighborhood known as Olde Towne where my mom taught Fifth grade. Boarded up homes. Occasional loud stereo systems blasting out of early model large American cars with broken mufflers. Oldsmobile Cutlass Supremes. Chevy Novas.
Always a few people just walking around the streets smoking cigarettes. At least that’s what I saw the few times Mom took me to her school to help make her bulletin boards before the year began.
The not so funny thing is our own pothole-infested street wasn’t much better. The four blocks of streets surrounding our house on Shenandoah Drive hadn’t been repaved in at least two decades. But our neighbors were all white. Lower middle-class laborers.
An occasional semi-truck Peterbilt cab parked four doors down from our twelve-hundred square foot one-car garage house. Cars on blocks, with neighbors sometimes underneath them doing repairs that never seemed to get finished. And lots of Republicans.
We were shunned as the only family with a foreign-made vehicle, with our Caucasian-colored Japanese Datsun 210. Everyone else only bought American. After all, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Oh, and lots of American flags. Our neighbor Mr. Edwards actually had a twenty-five-foot flag pole in his front yard like the kind you see outside of schools. We were the only Jews on our street. Heck, we were the only Jews I knew who lived in a neighborhood like ours. We also were the lone Democrats.
I wasn’t afraid of our new classmates, unlike many of the other white kids. But I was definitely curious. Who were these dark-skinned kids? They were different and I wanted to know why.
“Hey, I’m Jeff. What’s your name,” I asked the five-foot nine sixth grader sitting next to me in homeroom the first day of school. Terrence’s skin was way darker than James’s. “Terrence, but my teammates call me Big T,” he responded with a wide smile.
Over the next six months of homeroom, Big T and I talked about everything eleven-year-olds talked about. Television. Sports. Girls. Our families. Music. More girls.
But I watched Superman and Wide World of Sports. He watched Fat Albert and the Harlem Globetrotters. I had listened to the Eagles and The Cars. He was listening to Michael Jackson and New Edition. I enjoyed Andy Griffith and Happy Days, while he was busy laughing hysterically at Good Times and The Jeffersons.
I played baseball. He played basketball. He knew how to dance. I could barely do the bunny hop. And on and on it went. I had no idea there was an alternate universe just a forced bus ride away.
The other new kids I met, Leonard, Talia, Sharice, Theo, and Ben to name a few, pretty much liked the same things as Terrence. Sure, they all had their own unique flavors, but the black kids lived in a world I was only now discovering.
It wasn’t just new music or different television shows, though. There was something about these kids that was fundamentally different. They had a deeper laugh. The way they hugged and greeted each other. How they smiled.
The way they clasped hands in a you’re-really-my-brother kind of way. The comfortable and relaxed way they spoke to each other. A camaraderie among them that I had never seen before. I knew they had something the rest of us didn’t, and I wanted in on the secret. I devoured every morsel of education from my new friends and remained in awe of their world.
Fast forward thirty-plus years and that bussing experiment catapulted society into an integrated workforce. Black and white laborers working side by side. In factories. On construction sites. In restaurants.
Professionals, too. In law firms. Banks. Advertising agencies. So you’d think that once we got to know each other, we’d all just connect like I did in Middle School. The problem, though, is we never integrated after 5:00 p.m. in this country. For the most part, black folks return to their neighborhoods. White folks return to theirs. Virtually nobody spends time in each other’s homes.
Reminds me of when I was on a panel with the noted black intellectual Dr. Cornel West back in 2018. We were discussing race issues in front of over 100 wealthy mostly white male CEOs. At the end, there was a question and answer session and one CEO of a tech company, his personal worth over $100 million, asked this in the most genuine tone:
“What can I tell my kids so they are less racist than we are.”
I paused. Contemplating his use of the phrase “less racist,” even though he didn’t mean the way it actually sounds.
“Well, first, our goal isn’t to be less racist. It’s to not be racist,” I started with a smile, half reprimanding him and half letting him know I knew he didn’t mean it that way.
“Here’s the thing,” I continued. “You can’t tell your kids to not be racist. If you tell your kids to be honest, and then one day at AMC Movie Theatres you tell the teenager selling you tickets that your daughter is 11 so you can save an extra $1.50 on the movie when really she’s 12, you just undid all those be honests. In fact, you taught your kid that you can lie even to save $1.50 on a Frozen 2 movie ticket.”
I continued:
“It’s the same with race. Telling your kids don’t be racist. Don’t be racist. Don’t be racist. But then in your house, only white folks are ever at your dinner table. You’ve essentially taught your kids that it’s ok to keep black folks separate. At a distance. To treat them as less. Not welcome in your home. Not part of regular society.”
Even places where some blacks live among many whites, a friendly hello every time your neighbor Alfred walks outside to water his lawn isn’t enough. When did you have Alfred and his family over for dinner, or to family functions? A smile isn’t enough. Hello isn’t enough.