Getting Along

A recent essay on race relations relevant to the tragic catastrophe in Ferguson MO quoted anew Rodney King's famous question "Can't we just get along?"  King had been the victim of police brutality in Los Angeles many years ago, and the question poignant and tragic then still hangs in the air of distrust, hatred, confusion, and disdain which mark so much of the interaction of American blacks and whites.  One of the major factors is social unfamiliarity.  How many Americans have reasonably close personal friends of the other color?  Where would they meet?  Where would they interact? Although I have known a few African-Americans relatively intimately in my lifetime, the opportunities are rare.  In my teaching career, black colleagues were almost non-existent, in the neighborhoods to which we moved to improve our children's chances for college admission, there were no black neighbors.  The black students I have befriended often were suspicious of my motives, especially if they were male.  I am so conscious of the iniquities that whites have historically made blacks suffer that every even chance encounter is fraught with my assumption that the black person with whom I am talking hates whites on principle, remembering reading somewhere Harvard's Professor Gates quoting approvingly his mother's "I hate whites," a not unreasonable response but again not calculated to ease the dialogue.  (Makes me think of what a Jewish friend of mine recently said about his father's childhood home in the Bronx where, according to him, his father said the thing he mostly learned was "kill the goyim," spoken in jest, but on another level, uttering a very important truth.)  When I was a teenager living in Manhattan I was picked up and taken home by a young black male who lived with three other young black fellows.  The circumstances for this pickup is unclear in my mind, the details of the evening at their apartment in Harlem altogether hazy, except for the odd sartorial choice of all four of them of boxer shorts with polka dots as household lounge outfits.  We sat about playing poker, then all four prepared for bed in their large one room  apartment with cots set along the wall.  Somehow my friend and I gathered ourselves together in his cot, had sex in a quiet sort of way, and drifted off to sleep (it was a long ago era when the sex supplied a need, and did not inspire a reaction).  In the morning I woke early and since there had been talk of needing provisions the night before, slipped out for the paper and something to eat. The early morning walk to a nearby store was an extraordinary shock to me: all the people I encountered on the street were black!  My midwestern naivete stuns me to this day.  I brought back eggs and bacon and bread, and when my new friends awakened we sat down to a delightful breakfast, and then they had to think of going off to Wall Street, as I remember it, where they worked as couriers.  I never felt the slightest racial tension, either in my repressed self, or in the room.  Ships that passed in the night.  We got along just fine.