Recollections of Discrimination

How society deals with race relations specifically and discrimination in general changes over time and discrimination negatively impacts everyone including the segment of society that is doing the discrimination. Discrimination is a lose-lose proposition although there are some who say that dealing with adversity improves the moral character. On this last point, I was recently recollecting on my experiences with the issue of discrimination in an effort to determine what impact my experience as a white guy in his 50's had on my world view.

When I was about 5, I used to spend part of the summer with my grandparents who lived in a small community in the hills of Pennsylvania. Not that it came up often, but occasionally a black person would appear on TV or be in a newspaper photo and my grandmother would refer to them as 'darkies'. She never said it with any malice; it was just a term used by an older woman who, I don't think, had ever met a black person but I recall feeling without understanding why that the use of the term 'darkie' was wrong. In the section of Syracuse that I grew up in, there were very few blacks. I never really wondered why there were so few blacks and just assumed that since the section of Syracuse I lived in wasn't a particularly good neighborhood that the blacks just chose not to move there. My father bought a laundromat in the late 1950's which was located across the street from the 'projects' in Syracuse. As I recall, there were about 5 ten storey, red brick buildings entirely populated by blacks. The laundromat had a self service section in the front with coin operated machines and a drop off section in the back where people would drop off their dirty clothes and my father and 1 employee would wash, dry, fold and sometimes deliver the cleaned clothes. I recall going to work with him during the summers and on several locations finding that someone had started a fire in one of the machines or vandalized the business. No problem though. He filed claims with the insurer and fixed things up and was back in business. I just assumed that there were some bad people around and never saw it as a race issue. Eventually, however, his insurance was dropped due to the number of claims and then, during the race riots of the mid 60's, he was completely burned out, went out of business and over the subsequent years paid back the business loans out of his own pocket.

I graduated from the State University of New York at Buffalo where I had an academic scholarship called a Regent's Scholarship from the State of NY which was based on my performance on a state exam. When I received the bill for my senior year, it no longer had a credit for the scholarship because, as it was explained when I asked, the Regent's Scholarship had been replaced with a grant program that was for women and minorities. I graduated from university in 1975 which was a time characterized by long gas lines and high unemployment. I went to a campus interview with one of the large banks, I don't recall which, and the interviewer said that although I had excellent credentials that he couldn't be promising. He explained that his company had cut back on hiring and he had been instructed only to refer women and minorities for company interviews.

While in Buffalo, I occasionally went into Canada. I never had any trouble getting into Canada but almost every time, I had a hassle getting back into the US. The US border patrol would pull me over to the side and do a search sometimes even putting a dog in the car. They never found anything wrong but seemed to enjoy giving us a hard time. I was a college student with long hair, had a 1959 Volkswagen bug on the hood of which I had hand painted the album cover from King Crimson album In the Court of The Crimson King. I wasn't an artist but did a pretty good. Someone carrying drugs or other contraband would have kept a lower profile but even then I knew that my paint job and long hair would attract the ire of those who for reasons unknown to me hated 'long haired hippies' with a passion. The irony was that I was an economics and political science major and was fairly conservative. I didn't have much money so saved on haircuts and really just liked the band King Crimson. I guess this was a type of profiling.

Upon graduating, since I couldn't find a position other than sales in private industry I decided to go for a federal civil service position. At that time, professional federal civil service jobs were filled based on, among other things, your score on an exam called a the PACE Exam. When I took the exam, since minorities were under represented in the federal civil service, minorities were awarded an extra 10 points out of a maximum 100 based on their minority service. I scored 99 or 100 in each of the sections and was hired by the Department of Labor (DOL) in Washington, DC.

While at the DOL, I parked my car in the basement parking garage which, although a government building, was operated by an independent contractor. One day, the supervisor of the parking garage assaulted me so I went to the DC district attorney and tried to have him arrested. The DA explained to me since the guy who punched me was black and that since I was in DC, the jury would be black and judge would probably be black and that since I was white there was no way that I could possibly win. I kept pushing it so they agreed to investigate and the guy who punched me gave them a list of 15 people who would testify that I had attacked him and his 2 friends. I weigh about 150 lbs and each of them was about 225 so it would have been stupid to do this. In any case, they contacted all 15 of the people on the list and every single witness either was fictitious or said that they were not a witness to the event. The DA decided to prosecute because, I think, that they were PO'ed that they had been lied to rather than that they believed that they could win. In any case, the black jury working under the instructions of a black judge found the black defendant guilty of assaulting the white guy.

The point of the above experiences, and they are many more, I didn't look at the issues as black/white issues. The blacks that burned my father's business were just bad guys who would most likely have been a problem even if my father had been black. The preferential gender/race policies that negatively impacted me were most likely developed by a bunch of white guys who were legitimately exercising their authority to correct a larger problem that my personal employment. The jurors who convicted the guy of assaulting me just happened to be black but were fair minded people who took their civic responsibilities seriously just like any other.

I think that many people take things that negatively impact them too seriously and consider the issue too narrowly. Sometimes, for the greater good, we have to look at the big picture and accept the fact that the world doesn't always function just for our individual benefit.