Black Lives Matter

My Racist Mother

And the riot in Washington

It was either 1966 or 1967. I don’t remember exactly. The family did a lot of sight-seeing during the two years we lived in Maryland. Our parents wanted us to see the glorious landmarks of America. All across Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Virginia we took countless weekend trips.

(One of my favorite trips was to the Hershey chocolate factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania. I remember drooling as I watched Hershey Kisses being made. My least favorite trip was the one to Gettysburg. The vibes were just awful.)

The destination we traveled to most was Washington, D. C. With so many landmarks it took several trips to see them all. Our first few trips we saw most of the monuments and we even toured the White House. I was hoping to catch a glimpse of President Johnson but, of course, it didn’t happen.

Our father had been to the Smithsonian museum a few times before we kids were born and he desperately wanted us to visit it. He talked about it a lot and it was not long before I was dying to see it. When the weekend came when we planned to return to Washington to visit the Smithsonian I was very excited.

But things did not go as planned. First we drove through Washington to Arlington to see John F. Kennedy’s grave (boring) then we drove back into Washington to go to the Smithsonian. With my father driving, my mother in the passenger seat, and the four kids squeezed into the back seat, we were driving through Washington when a riot broke out.

We didn’t know what was happening at first other than that there were police cars with wailing sirens whizzing by everywhere. My mother turned on the car radio and found a station with news. That is when we found out that a riot was going on. The news reporter stated where the riot was but we didn’t know the streets of Washington that well so we didn’t know how close we were to it.

My mother started freaking out, screaming at my father, “Go! Go! Go! Faster! We’ve got to get the hell out of Washington as fast as we can!”

As we sped down some avenue I kept looking down all the side streets to see if I could spot the riot. I had seen riots on TV but never in real life.

We finally made it out of Washington without being killed by a riot — and without getting to see the Smithsonian. I did, however, get to see an ugly side of my mother that I had seen before and would see many times afterwards.

For the rest of our time on the East Coast we kids kept asking to go back to see the Smithsonian but our mother always replied, “Absolutely not! There’s no way in hell I will ever step foot in that black city again! Hopefully soon we’ll be moving out west where there aren’t so many black people.”

My mother was the most racist person I have ever met in my life. She is the main reason that I am NOT racist. Her racism was so ugly that there was no way I could be like that.

But she was not just a racist. She was a white supremacist. When she was a teenager she kept a framed photograph of Adolf Hitler on her bedside table. She adored him. She devoutly believed in the same white supremacy that Hitler did.

During the course of my childhood I heard my mother say hundreds of times, “If only Hitler had won the war the world would by a much better place.”

I was a kid but I wasn’t stupid. I knew that if Hitler had won the war then my parents would never have met and I would never have been born.

It wasn’t just black people that my mother hated. She hated every single human who was not white. She also had extreme hatred for Hispanics and Orientals. Of course, she also hated most white people. She hated Russians, Italians, Greeks, Scandinavians, and, most especially, the French and the British. She basically hated any human who was not of German descent.

Her heart was exploding with hate (and fear). As we kids got older none of us ever had any of our friends over to the house because we were so embarrassed by our mother. (And my mother certainly never learned that I had dated a black girl for a few months.)

Our father was not a racist although he pretended to be whenever his wife was nearby. When she was within earshot he would say racist things but over time I realized that was just to please her. Spending time alone with him, away from HER, I learned that about half of his friends were black! He was never racist when not in her company. Of course, none of those black friends ever came to the house. He never brought any of them home for the same reason we kids never brought any of our friends home.

My dad’s hypocrisy bugged me as a kid. Why didn’t he stand up to her racism? His behavior perfectly illustrates the difference between being ‘not racist’ and being ‘anti-racist.’

My mother learned the truth, though, when he died. I was off hitch-hiking across the country at the time so I did not even know of his passing since no one knew how to contact me. So I didn’t attend the funeral. But my siblings told me about it.

My mother was under the impression that my dad had almost no friends — especially anyone who was not white. She was beyond freaked out when well over 300 people attended his funeral. And almost half of them were black! According to my sister she almost fainted from the horror of black people attending her husband’s funeral. Seriously, I wish I had been there to see that.

I am proud to say that my daughter grew up without any racism. So much racism is passed down from generation to generation. Thanks to my mother I was emphatic about putting an end to that.

Copyright by White Feather. All Rights Reserved.

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