The Girl On The Bus. This Is Too Long, But Here Goes

I was raised in a world where African-Americans and white persons did not mingle, taught to be unfailingly polite if ever I encountered one, but to know that there was no way that we would interact socially.  I was exceptionally friendly with the woman who worked off and on for my mother, but then we knew our boundaries.  I had a peculiar friendship with one black kid in my high school, a hero of the football team, whose sexual needs I satisfied on a regular basis for years, but with whom I would never do more than nod at school, for me because of his race and for him, because knowing me in any way would be a scandal amongst his fellow athletes (years later at college a black student who enjoyed me sexually wanted to become friends, and I sadly resisted not understandng that a straight athletic male might think a gay male  was his social equal).  When my older sister started college in my hometown and rebelliously, dangerously, adventurously started dating a Negro, as such a fellow would have been called then, my mother insisted that a black girl join them on any public outing so that the situation would not be so obvious.  When my sister pushed the envelope and insisted that Mother invite him to Sunday dinner, the black girl came along as well.  When the black woman who also cooked for us entered with the first course and saw the couple she set the tray down, and left the room, and the house. I remember being terrified, of mother crying and leaving the room (as it turned out she later went to Elizabeth's house in the other part of town, and the two of them sat crying, according to her, over the misbehavior of the new generation.)  My oldest sister, broke my mother's heart by aggressively dating Jewish boys while in college, and then marrying into that demographic, as they say.  Much later on, as a divorced woman, when Mother was safely in her grave,  she took up with, although never married, a black fellow who rose from privation to be a minor executive at IBM.  In the years I knew them as a couple I never knew him to have one black friend or associate, and certainly at his funeral the only blacks in attendance were his family.  By this time I was familiar enough with African-Americans, if only because my first wife's best friend was a black woman, not to mention the number of black males I have encountered as sexual partners through the years, familiar through the telling of their constant humiliations in the job market, on the street. Having been hounded by the police myself for suspicious public homosexual behavior, I knew to be on the lookout for them, rather than imagining they were my friend.  All this is prelude to last Saturday when I boarded the bus in Manhattan, and I frantically looked for a seat near the front, reserved indeed for the elderly and incapacitated, because I am always terrified of losing my balance when the driver resumes his forward motion.  Luckily some middle aged person was quick to vacate a seat, and I sank down grateful.  And then I noticed that next to me sat a very young, very hip black girl, perhaps all of nineteen, in one of the seats reserved for the elderly and moreover the bus had stopped again and the aged and the infirm seemed to be pouring on, while all the time she sat immobile.  No one said anything, the tottering folk, nervously held on, I said nothing though I was enraged.  Usually I am not above asking people to give people seats, I know that in Manhattan lots of people are able to do that, particularly where we were, on the Upper West Side.  No one said a word.  Never have I had such a powerful expression of what? the immense fear? or distaste? or  hatred? that whites feel for blacks.  I remember when I taught at Lehman College a group of male black students almost tearfully described to me running as a group to catch a subway and the riders already aboard shrinking in obvious terror.  I thought of Cambridge Massachusetts when I was a graduate student and my fear of the teenaged working class Irish boys out to beat up any effete Harvard student who crossed their paths, and I thought of how I would not hold my seminar at the CUNY graduate center if it fell on St. Patricks day when the boroughs' toughs descended on Manhattan to beat up what they presumed were gays.  I told those black guys at Lehman that if a crowd of African-American teenagers were coming down one side of the street and Irish-American teenagers on the other, I would instinctively and immediately cross over to the blacks, such was my acculturated fear and loathing of the other group.  And I think now of the Cambridge Massachusetts cop of Irish descent who  asked the African-American Harvard Professor Gates to step away from his front door when he saw him fumbling his keys and trying the door in the dark of the night.  Was this racial? was the officer doing his duty? was the very haughty Professor Gates over reacting?  was it Cambridge near Harvard Square where to be of Irish descent does not have the cachet that being black has? That moment will always be a parable of uncertain meaning for me about black/white relations, about class distinctions, about doing your duty, about fighting back, which just gets me back to the black girl on the bus.