
Monday, January 16, 2017
Martin Luther King Day
Today is MLK jr holiday, so designated by the federal government, and acknowledged by government entities across the land in varying degrees of enthusiasm and commitment. Sarasota where I live is a southern town, and although there is no legal segregation black people live in one particular part of the community and you don't see them often in the other parts. That there is some conscious segregation occurred to me last year on this date when I sensed that the town was not honoring the holiday in any special way, and then I happened to be driving for a few blocks on Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd and turned on the corner that borders park and saw that it was fillled with black people gathered around a band shell, and this was a celebration, but it was not centered in the downtown where the perky shops are. In other words the city fathers were treating this holiday as a"black' event.That, of course, is partly because Sarasota is jammed with really rich white people for the most part; where they go I don't really go, either, like St Armand's Circle, for instance, a place filled with pretentious boutiques where the merchandise is way, way beyond my price. In fact we don't really go out to the boutiques which make up downtown Sarasota. It always saddens me not to see middle class blacks in restaurants the way you do in New York City. My brother who lived his life in Iowa and was entirely racist in an amiable sort of way marveled when I told him that in Manhattan it was possible to see black males all over the place with pin stripe suits and briefcases. Yesterday I was in a yarn shop here in Sarasota with our house guest and it was a delight to see a tourist from Atlanta, a black woman, dressed to the nines but not aggressively over dressed, with a really good diamond on her finger. And she and I, we talked about a booklet with patterns for men sweaters on a display table. I yearn for more interaction which once I had in my youth when I gave sexual pleasure to a football player in my high school and we used the occasion to talk randomly, which I had again when my sister took a black male as her partner and he was part of my domestic life until he died ten years later. And then there were random black hustlers. I think it is easier for gays to walk across the color line. One of my greatest teaching experiences was at Lehman College in the Bronx where my lecture classes were routinely filled with at least forty often fifty percent black persons. But here I am at eighty six and I have no acquaintance, nor a friend of color, except for my wonderful trainer at the club who is of Puerto Rican ancestry and can't speak Spanish--I love it!--and claims he is black in the sense of being part African. Well, yes, I see, and he is right, people forever label him as black, even an uncle an Italian-American married to his blood relative, and having lived in Italy I can see this: never met so many racist people, fearful of the dark skinned ever so handsome and beautiful Sicilians. I love it that the Africans are arriving in numbers into Italy off the boats from the coast of Africa. It will shake up the population. Sadly the same mix up really does not work easily in the United States since the horror of slavery and the evil Reconstruction period has never been digested as the Holocaust years have been acknowledged in Germany.
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