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flattered I remember standing outside for a minute just to soak it in.A couple of years later, When Cassius Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali on March 6, 1964, two days after upsetting Sonny Liston to become heavyweight champion of the world, I totally got it when he explained he didn’t want to carry around a “slave name” anymore.Separate and Unequal I looked around and saw a country that was supposed to be integrated, but that was actually divided into sections of Black and white. I could see it in the groupings of Black and white kids in the cafeteria and in the bleachers in school. I could see it in the clustering of Black communities and white communities in the towns around where we lived. I could see it on Saturday mornings when I watched Soul Train, where pretty much everybody was Black, and just too “bad” to even attempt to emulate, although more and more white kids tried, and have been trying ever since. Comedian George Carlin used to joke that when you sent a bunch of young white Irish dudes into prison to mingle with Black street guys, the white Irish guys came out walking and talking like the Black guys — not the other way around.Reading Up On Race Why is that? In a small book I discovered somewhere along the way with the curious title, “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer took a shot at explaining it, expressing certain views that have been echoed some six decades later by Ta-Nehisi Coates in “Between the World and Me.” The common concept has to do with the impact and ramifications on Black men of living life under the constant threat of repressive, racist physical aggression.The Black man in America, Mailer wrote, faces the perpetual presence of impending death at the hands of powerful white authority beyond his control. This reality seeps into the psyche and can manifest in ways that appear contrarian, distinctively out of step with the norm. “Indeed,” Mailer wrote, “if one is to be a man, almost any kind of unconventional action often takes disproportionate courage” (see Ali, Tommy Smith and John Carlos, Colin Kaepernick). “So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living in the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries.”Mailer was making the case that the advent of white Bohemians, Beatniks and Hipsters of the late 1950s was a white version of the anti-establishment, rule-breaking, live-for-the-moment, free-form jazz aura of the American Black man. This marked the rise of what Mailer called “The White Negro.”This idea resonated with me: Out of the desperation of enslavement, discrimination, inequity and the high risk of untimely death, African-American evolution has spawned such distinctive and infectious arts and attributes as jazz, Black poetry, urban slang, funk, rap and hip-hop, and, more generally, the style Mailer described in 1957 as “Hip.” Today we might simply call it “kool” with a k, “kickin,’” or “badass.”“You Like Me!” And so it was that when I reached graduate school and worked in the career services office at my university, smack in the heart of one of the country’s most notorious Black urban centers in North Philadelphia, I was tickled pigment-fluorescent pink when Gwen, a Black woman in the department who became my first African-American girlfriend, introduced me to her teenage cousin Kenny by saying, “Marty ain’t nuthin’ but a white nigga.”Roz, another African-American woman in the career services department who was my supervisor, struck up more of a brother-and-sister relationship with me that proved to be an encore of my kindergarten friendship with Winnie. We’d talk for hours and sometimes go on weekend getaways together. One time, as we strolled along the New Jersey shore in the dead of winter, she told me about her childhood in South Carolina. Because her skin was so dark, she said, she was sometimes shunned by lighter-skinned Black kids. She said her mother told her she’d have a hard time finding a man because Black men always wanted to find mates who were lighter-skinned than them.Roz became a loner as a child, as I had been. “I invented an imaginary friend I called Jabbo,” Roz said. “I would make up conversations with Jabbo and confide in him and tell him things I was feeling that I couldn’t tell anyone else.”I felt privileged that she shared this story with me, and wondered how many others she’d revealed this painful part of her past to.Roz invited me to join her and a couple of her Black women friends to a dance at a giant hall in Cinnaminson, New Jersey. We walked inside the expansive building and I found myself surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of Black people, with me, the little white speck in the sea. But surprisingly, I wasn’t all that uncomfortable, especially when I l

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ined up in the long queue for food and drinks and no one said boo, gave me even a slight nudge or made any threatening comments.Where Have All My Black Friends Gone? When I left graduate school and went out into the working world, I never experienced anything else like my time in North Philly. At best I’d have one, or tops, two Black co-workers or staff, and we always got along well.During my years working as an expat in the Swiss city of Basel, Black faces grew even scarcer. Although I did meet and become very good friends with a Black opera singer, a Julliard-trained bass-baritone named Kevin Short who’d performed multiple times at the Met.He told me he moved to Europe for broader opportunity. “There are a number of cities in the U.S. where audiences just won’t accept seeing an interracial relationship acted out onstage,” he explained. My wife and I went with a friend to see him perform in Wagner’s The Flying Dutchmen at an opera house in Bern. In one scene, he basically simulated sex with a white diva under the spotlight. When the curtain closed the audience showed nothing but appreciation, rising for a standing ovation, as I recall.When I was apprehended by police for walking down the street wearing baggy Michael Jordan gym pants and a hoody — a style the officers said was often worn by Eastern European criminals coming over the border to rob houses in Basel — Kevin basically said, “Welcome to the club.” He told me he got stopped all the time — at the train station and other public spaces — and asked what he was doing there, if he knew where he was going, etc.On Feb. 15, 2017, I returned to my home country and found it in horrible shape, particularly as far as race is concerned. White friends told me they were ashamed of their race, that they felt guilty about systemic racism, and that they felt obliged to personally do something about it.Heated Exchange Despite my Afrophilia, I’ve pushed back, resulting in some intense exchanges. I have done nothing in my lifetime, I’ve argued — nor, to my knowledge have any of my ancestors — to discriminate against or disadvantage Black people. Have I benefited from “white privilege”? Relatively speaking, yes. Having come from a family of meager means, I was less fortunate than many much wealthier white kids, and I’ve had my share of obstacles and setbacks to overcome to get where I am today. But I did NOT have my color working against me, making things that much harder.Where do I stand on my own personal blame and recompense? And in my heart of hearts, what accountability do I feel falls on Black people themselves?When I consider the latter question, especially in light of the all-too-common stereotypes of gun-toting Black teen gang members shooting up the streets and killing one another in cities like LA, Detroit and Chicago, I find myself confronted by controversial and unpopular thoughts. I’m reminded of a quote I read recently in the obituary of Joe Clark, the ruthlessly disciplinarian African-American principle who brought order and excellence to the largely Black East Side High in Paterson, New Jersey. Samuel L. Jackson portrayed Clark in the 1989 biopic, “Lean on Me.”According to his obituary, Clark, who died at 82 in December of 2020, said in a “60 Minutes” interview, “Because we were slaves does not mean that you’ve got to be hoodlums and thugs and knock people in the head and rob people and rape people. No, I cannot accept that. And I make no more alibis for Blacks. I simply say work hard for what you want.”If it’s not an untenable proposition in this woke world of ours, I believe categorically that systemic racism is real and needs to be eradicated, and I believe what Joe Clark said, too.My recent correspondence about race with a white woman friend and contemporary has revolved around the conundrum of these two seemingly conflicting points of view. “No one in my family ever talked about this” (race relations), she wrote. “You and I have already moved the needle just emailing back and forth.”“I agree that you and I had no direct responsibility for systemic racism,” she conceded, “but that’s not an excuse to do nothing. Write something about this,” she hammered me. “Be a mentor to a Black child. You’re not going to change the world, but you will contribute to making things better. And if enough of us do that, things will change.”That’s where we’ve left it, for now. I hope what I’ve written adds something meaningful to the conversation. I hope the conversation continues, and that it gets more open, and that people are less fearful of being punished for deviating from the restrictive woke narrative. It has its place. But so do other constructive points of view. Let’s air them.</article></body>

Aging White Boy Spends National Black History Month Pondering His Lifetime of Race Relations

Coming closely on the heels of a horrific year when African-Americans have suffered so disproportionately and visibly from the coronavirus, videotaped police murders and declining life expectancy, according to the latest CDC report, Black History Month falls at a moment when systemic racism in the U.S. is impossible to deny. As a white Jewish boy who grew up in a redneck rural part of New Jersey in the early 1950s, a little before the civil rights movement and long preceding the awakening of the country’s Caucasian conscience, I’ve found myself spending the month revisiting my lifetime of relationships with Black people.

How, I’ve asked myself, can my country have wound up in this disgraceful place, especially after decades of apparent progress — at least in terms of Black success in sports, business, the media and popular culture? And we’ve even had a two-term Black president and now a Black woman vice president! How can opportunities have remained so out of reach for so many Black people in fundamental aspects of American life, such as education, healthcare, housing, judicial equality, employment and compensation? And what degree of accountability do my white peers, generally, and I, personally, bear for these inequities? What can we reasonably be expected to do to redress them?

Regardless of whatever discrimination, disrespect or discomfort I’ve encountered in my life as a minority in a traditionally white Christian country, I’ve never taken a step in a Black person’s shoes and can’t claim to know what it’s like. I’ve learned a lot, albeit indirectly, from books, movies and plays throughout the years, and from being a news junkie. But most of what I know about Black lives comes from my personal relationships, of which there have been too few. Those that stand out in my mind, though, have remained permanently etched there.

Winnie and Me Consider my childhood friendship with Winfield Reed. At just under 5 years old, I entered kindergarten, spending part of the day away from home for the first time in my sheltered life as an introverted boy with no brothers or sisters. Suddenly my mornings on Monday through Friday began with a recitation of passages from the New Testament, followed by a mandatory class singalong to “Jesus Loves Me.” An acute feeling of being strangely and uncomfortably out of place hit me like a gust of icy wind. But the notion of the teacher doing anything to help cultivate an “inclusive” environment that made children like me feel safe, or free of perceived aggressions, whether they be macro or micro, was an unthinkable concept. Consequently, I suffered anxiety and alienation that I was able neither to understand, nor articulate to my parents.

When recess came, I gravitated to Winfield, and he to me, like little versions of Forrest Gump and “Bubba” Buford Blue in the classic film — a couple of outcasts drawn to one another by their invisible bond of isolation from the crowd. Winnie I would walk way out to the farthest reaches of the baseball field and play catch. Once he let me try on his glove, and I never forgot it. Ancient looking, it struck me as being from another era, maybe passed down from his grandfather, the tan leather inside darkened to a crisp and feeling course as dried snake skin.

As a little kid who never knew a Black person, I remember thinking that the feeling of my hand in this mitt felt like the essence of Blackness. I remember thinking I’d experienced something special, almost mystical, and I felt forever attached to Winnie. I don’t remember us talking much — just feeling quietly connected — and that was enough to link us for life in my mind.

Finding My Bad Self I was never as close to another Black person until all the way into my twenties. But in between I acquired an enduring taste for African-American style, swagger, athletic prowess, R&B, soul and funk music, and simply superior dancing ability. When Joe Billingsley, a super-cool African-American kid in my 6th grade class spied me outside the gym before a school dance wearing my new pair of shiny black, pointy-toed loafers with a thin leather bow where the penny slot would normally be, he casually commented, “Those shoes are bad, man.” He had to explain that meant sharp, but once he did, I was so flattered I remember standing outside for a minute just to soak it in.

A couple of years later, When Cassius Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali on March 6, 1964, two days after upsetting Sonny Liston to become heavyweight champion of the world, I totally got it when he explained he didn’t want to carry around a “slave name” anymore.

Separate and Unequal I looked around and saw a country that was supposed to be integrated, but that was actually divided into sections of Black and white. I could see it in the groupings of Black and white kids in the cafeteria and in the bleachers in school. I could see it in the clustering of Black communities and white communities in the towns around where we lived. I could see it on Saturday mornings when I watched Soul Train, where pretty much everybody was Black, and just too “bad” to even attempt to emulate, although more and more white kids tried, and have been trying ever since. Comedian George Carlin used to joke that when you sent a bunch of young white Irish dudes into prison to mingle with Black street guys, the white Irish guys came out walking and talking like the Black guys — not the other way around.

Reading Up On Race Why is that? In a small book I discovered somewhere along the way with the curious title, “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer took a shot at explaining it, expressing certain views that have been echoed some six decades later by Ta-Nehisi Coates in “Between the World and Me.” The common concept has to do with the impact and ramifications on Black men of living life under the constant threat of repressive, racist physical aggression.

The Black man in America, Mailer wrote, faces the perpetual presence of impending death at the hands of powerful white authority beyond his control. This reality seeps into the psyche and can manifest in ways that appear contrarian, distinctively out of step with the norm. “Indeed,” Mailer wrote, “if one is to be a man, almost any kind of unconventional action often takes disproportionate courage” (see Ali, Tommy Smith and John Carlos, Colin Kaepernick). “So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living in the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries.”

Mailer was making the case that the advent of white Bohemians, Beatniks and Hipsters of the late 1950s was a white version of the anti-establishment, rule-breaking, live-for-the-moment, free-form jazz aura of the American Black man. This marked the rise of what Mailer called “The White Negro.”

This idea resonated with me: Out of the desperation of enslavement, discrimination, inequity and the high risk of untimely death, African-American evolution has spawned such distinctive and infectious arts and attributes as jazz, Black poetry, urban slang, funk, rap and hip-hop, and, more generally, the style Mailer described in 1957 as “Hip.” Today we might simply call it “kool” with a k, “kickin,’” or “badass.”

“You Like Me!” And so it was that when I reached graduate school and worked in the career services office at my university, smack in the heart of one of the country’s most notorious Black urban centers in North Philadelphia, I was tickled pigment-fluorescent pink when Gwen, a Black woman in the department who became my first African-American girlfriend, introduced me to her teenage cousin Kenny by saying, “Marty ain’t nuthin’ but a white nigga.”

Roz, another African-American woman in the career services department who was my supervisor, struck up more of a brother-and-sister relationship with me that proved to be an encore of my kindergarten friendship with Winnie. We’d talk for hours and sometimes go on weekend getaways together. One time, as we strolled along the New Jersey shore in the dead of winter, she told me about her childhood in South Carolina. Because her skin was so dark, she said, she was sometimes shunned by lighter-skinned Black kids. She said her mother told her she’d have a hard time finding a man because Black men always wanted to find mates who were lighter-skinned than them.

Roz became a loner as a child, as I had been. “I invented an imaginary friend I called Jabbo,” Roz said. “I would make up conversations with Jabbo and confide in him and tell him things I was feeling that I couldn’t tell anyone else.”

I felt privileged that she shared this story with me, and wondered how many others she’d revealed this painful part of her past to.

Roz invited me to join her and a couple of her Black women friends to a dance at a giant hall in Cinnaminson, New Jersey. We walked inside the expansive building and I found myself surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of Black people, with me, the little white speck in the sea. But surprisingly, I wasn’t all that uncomfortable, especially when I lined up in the long queue for food and drinks and no one said boo, gave me even a slight nudge or made any threatening comments.

Where Have All My Black Friends Gone? When I left graduate school and went out into the working world, I never experienced anything else like my time in North Philly. At best I’d have one, or tops, two Black co-workers or staff, and we always got along well.

During my years working as an expat in the Swiss city of Basel, Black faces grew even scarcer. Although I did meet and become very good friends with a Black opera singer, a Julliard-trained bass-baritone named Kevin Short who’d performed multiple times at the Met.

He told me he moved to Europe for broader opportunity. “There are a number of cities in the U.S. where audiences just won’t accept seeing an interracial relationship acted out onstage,” he explained. My wife and I went with a friend to see him perform in Wagner’s The Flying Dutchmen at an opera house in Bern. In one scene, he basically simulated sex with a white diva under the spotlight. When the curtain closed the audience showed nothing but appreciation, rising for a standing ovation, as I recall.

When I was apprehended by police for walking down the street wearing baggy Michael Jordan gym pants and a hoody — a style the officers said was often worn by Eastern European criminals coming over the border to rob houses in Basel — Kevin basically said, “Welcome to the club.” He told me he got stopped all the time — at the train station and other public spaces — and asked what he was doing there, if he knew where he was going, etc.

On Feb. 15, 2017, I returned to my home country and found it in horrible shape, particularly as far as race is concerned. White friends told me they were ashamed of their race, that they felt guilty about systemic racism, and that they felt obliged to personally do something about it.

Heated Exchange Despite my Afrophilia, I’ve pushed back, resulting in some intense exchanges. I have done nothing in my lifetime, I’ve argued — nor, to my knowledge have any of my ancestors — to discriminate against or disadvantage Black people. Have I benefited from “white privilege”? Relatively speaking, yes. Having come from a family of meager means, I was less fortunate than many much wealthier white kids, and I’ve had my share of obstacles and setbacks to overcome to get where I am today. But I did NOT have my color working against me, making things that much harder.

Where do I stand on my own personal blame and recompense? And in my heart of hearts, what accountability do I feel falls on Black people themselves?

When I consider the latter question, especially in light of the all-too-common stereotypes of gun-toting Black teen gang members shooting up the streets and killing one another in cities like LA, Detroit and Chicago, I find myself confronted by controversial and unpopular thoughts. I’m reminded of a quote I read recently in the obituary of Joe Clark, the ruthlessly disciplinarian African-American principle who brought order and excellence to the largely Black East Side High in Paterson, New Jersey. Samuel L. Jackson portrayed Clark in the 1989 biopic, “Lean on Me.”

According to his obituary, Clark, who died at 82 in December of 2020, said in a “60 Minutes” interview, “Because we were slaves does not mean that you’ve got to be hoodlums and thugs and knock people in the head and rob people and rape people. No, I cannot accept that. And I make no more alibis for Blacks. I simply say work hard for what you want.”

If it’s not an untenable proposition in this woke world of ours, I believe categorically that systemic racism is real and needs to be eradicated, and I believe what Joe Clark said, too.

My recent correspondence about race with a white woman friend and contemporary has revolved around the conundrum of these two seemingly conflicting points of view. “No one in my family ever talked about this” (race relations), she wrote. “You and I have already moved the needle just emailing back and forth.”

“I agree that you and I had no direct responsibility for systemic racism,” she conceded, “but that’s not an excuse to do nothing. Write something about this,” she hammered me. “Be a mentor to a Black child. You’re not going to change the world, but you will contribute to making things better. And if enough of us do that, things will change.”

That’s where we’ve left it, for now. I hope what I’ve written adds something meaningful to the conversation. I hope the conversation continues, and that it gets more open, and that people are less fearful of being punished for deviating from the restrictive woke narrative. It has its place. But so do other constructive points of view. Let’s air them.