Reconciliation Day

It is so difficult, heart breaking to learn about all the wild angry vicious responses time and again to people of another race, mostly white on black, and all the time escalating when I know no person of color with whom I can commiserate, try to understand what can be done to ameliorate the horrendous situation of suspicion and hostility between the races.  There are no persons of color in my life, no way that I might meet someone down here in Sarasota Florida where the black population is minimal and for whatever reason no person of color ever seems to frequent or work in places I go, like Publix Supermarket.  And if I were to meet such a person would we immediately talk of problems?  I went to a high school where there was one black person in the whole school population of possibly five or six hundred students  He was a very handsome successful athlete, but also smart.  His mother was an educated woman who kept a home in which black students from the University could find a sanctuary off campus.  Larry, my high school acquaintance had to keep his distance from the girls in school, although the athlete boys liked him.  No one invited him to their home.  He and I had a clandestine intimate experience in the back seat of cars because I was gay and he was horny, as those things have gone on since the beginning of time.  We sat in post coital repose often and for some time over a period of ten years, talked of many things but never about what it was we were doing nor about the black and white of our social situation. When I was in college my sister was dating a black guy from Des Moines, whose father was a very successful lawyer in that city.  My sister wanted to invite him to dinner, my mother, though horrified, assented as long as a black woman accompanied him to our house.  When our cook brought in the roast--it was Sunday midday--she took one look at the dark faces at the table, set the platter down and announced "I ain't servin' no niggers," and left the room  All of mother's worst fears were realized, but everyone after laughing a bit, acted as if nothing had happened.  A few years later Mother who was president of the school board had occasion to meet with Larry's mother about an issue of interest to the meager black community of the town. She asked the woman to join her for dinner at the most prominent restaurant in the town.  Never had a black woman been seated in that restaurant, but never had one been invited to dine there by one of the most formidably prominent town figures.  Thus did mother "integrate," as they say, this first class restaurant, but no relationship developed between the two women.  My oldest sister who had put a finger in mother's eye by marrying a Bronx Jew whose parents were more comfortable in Yiddish than English, later on took up with a black lover.  He was a Xerox business executive all ties and suits, self made on the GI Bill, who had decided he needed to be true to his race and picket at a local rally and met my sister--an old hand at rallies and protests.  They lived together for ten or fifteen years until his death.  He had a little problem with a homosexual as a sort of brother in law, but overall, he was tolerant and friendly and like most males totally impersonal in our relationship.  His guy-guy life was going bowling with his friends every Thursday, all of whom, curiously enough, were white.  I think about South Africa's "Reconciliation Day" and what it would mean here. I shudder at a class I taught to a largely Latino and African American group the theme of which was the plot line of the collapse of power from the Iliad and War and Peace to Gone With the Wind, and my students remarking that there was another context in this last beside Scarlett's family's collapse, that the slaves suddenly free would have another take on the story even if the author did not highlight them.  It was a very belated beginning of my study of the horror of the postwar south from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Act.  I am a firm believer in massive recompense for black suffering and deprivation all those years, just as the Germans made payments to Jewish communities after the war. Henry Louis Gates cites approvingly his mother's dictum "I hate whites."  Fair enough, I say, but where do we go from here?