There’s lots going on in the world this week, but I want to write about white male privilege, and my long road to understanding how prevalent it has been, and still is.
I was born July 12, 1949.
I grew up In Southern California during the 50s and 60s. Jim Crow was solidly in place in the deep south.
The fiction I grew up under was that California wasn't racist, but outside the occasional movie or TV show I don’t think I saw a Black person until I was in my teens.
I remember walking up my street towards my high school, and there was a young Black man walking toward me on the sidewalk. “There’s something you don’t see every day,” I thought. As I recall he walked straight ahead, avoiding eye contact.
To this day I wonder how he wound up in my all-white (with a sprinkling of Asians) neighborhood.
I never saw him again.
There were no black kids in my schools. It wasn’t until I got to high school that I shared hallways and classrooms with Hispanic students. They came from a neighborhood across a main drag that was universally referred to as “Taco Flats”.
I’m not proud of this, or the fact that these kids were referred to as “Greasers”. We didn't know any better.
Most of them had their own style of dress and a lot of them spoke some variation of Spanglish in the hallways. They stuck together and I stayed out of their way.
There were other cliques, the Choral/Theater kids, the Cheerleader/Student Government kids, who were all on the honor roll, the Surfers, the Jocks and, my group, the weird kids. Today we’d have called ourselves nerds.
In general, for self preservation, we tried to stay under the radar of the Surfers, Jocks and “Greasers”.
But, as I say, there were no Black students.
I never wondered about this, it was just the way things were.
I was definitely NOT an honor roll student. I hated school and did the minimum I could get away with and still pass my classes. Nobody had ever heard of Autism Spectrum Disorder in the late 50s and 60s, but I’m pretty sure that explains my poor performance.
I was labelled lazy, unmotivated and a daydreamer. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do the work, I just didn’t see the point. Occasionally I’d try to study, but my mind kept wandering.
Despite my poor grades I did very well on standardized tests. I was in the 99th percentile for everything but math, and even there I was in the 75th percentile.
And I was a white male. I suspect this is the reason that I was accepted to multiple colleges during my senior year of high school. I graduated in June of 1967.
We were a long way from being, rich, but my parents were well-off enough off that they gave me a full ride at San Diego State College, now San Diego State University.
I didn’t know it at the time but Dad had to take a second job repairing TVs to pull that off. He told us he took that job to learn how to fix color TVs because Mom wanted one and he didn’t want any electronics in the house he couldn’t fix himself.
Long story short, I had a really good time partying in San Diego and Tijuana and a really bad GPA.
Dad pulled me out of SDSC and told me I’d be going to Long Beach State and living at home for my second year and living at home so he could keep an eye on me.
That didn’t work out so well either. I spent most of my time at CSCLB arguing politics in the Student Union with a guy named Dana Rohrabacher who headed up a group called Young Americans for Freedom.
I was enamored of a young woman in YAF who decidedly did not reciprocate my interest.
It was lots of fun, but in order to get decent grades you need to actually go to class, so I bombed out at CSCLB also.
That summer I worked for a service, valet parking cars at various venues in Orange County while my brother Kip, who had just graduated high school, worked at Hughes Aircraft Company. Dad was an executive there and helped him get the job.
Towards the end of the summer Dad sat me down and asked me what my plans were. I think my reaction was something like, “Plans?”
He was not pleased.
A few days later was watching TV when all of the sudden a Hughes employment application was shoved in my face and Dad’s voice said, “Fill it out!”
So, Kip walked out of Hughes on a Friday, on his way to academic success at Cal State LA, Stanford and the Rand Corporation [show off], and I took his place on Monday.
This was a revelation to me. The work was easy, there was a break every two hours (15 min in morning and afternoon and a half our for lunch) and there was no homework or studying involved, and I got paid $3.15/hr with a 5¢ cost of living raise every six weeks. This was good money in 1969, minimum wage in California was $1.65.
Dad wanted to start charging me $75/month(!) in rent. That pissed me off so I moved in with a married couple with a two-year-old son who I met through one of my sister’s friends.
There were some tough times because of layoffs, I worked as a handyman for about a year, and once I had to move back home because I got ripped off, but I always got re-hired and I eventually got my own apartment, a series of halfway decent cars and started living as a relatively responsible adult.
My curtains were usually old sheets thumbtacked to the wall, my bed was a but I had really good stereo equipment, a killer record collection and lots and lots of books.
As I matured and found subjects I was actually interested in I eventually acquired an AA in Electronics in my mid-20s and, a BS in Computer Science in my mid-30s.
Now, imagine I had been born to a Black family in Southern California. Due to real estate redlining my family would have been limited to less desirable areas. Instead of Manhattan Beach, Northridge or Garden Grove we probably would have lived in South LA or Compton.
Dad was trained as a Radar Technician, then Radar Operator and finally Radar Instructor in the Navy. I doubt there were many African Americans in his training classes.
Then, when Dad got out of the Navy he went to a trade school to learn TV Repair on the GI Bill, which was not available to Black servicemen.
By the time I was four or five his radar and TV repair experience got him a job at the Hughes Aircraft Culver City plant.
The GI Bill guaranteed home loans such as the one Dad used to buy our Manhattan Beach home were also unavailable to Black servicemen.
So, if I’d been born Black it’s very likely we would have lived in rented housing. That’s no way to build generational wealth.
Schools in minority neighborhoods did not attract the best teachers, and good paying jobs were generally not available to minorities, so both parents were likely to have to work to pay rent.
Even without understanding the learning disability I had I got a lot of support from my parents and teachers. This would have been less likely if my folks were both worn out from working all day and my teachers were, shall we say, less motivated.
It’s likely that I would have been considered to be, in the parlance of the day, retarded, and there wouldn't have been any kind of services for a poor, retarded Black child.
Many Black families are still struggling because the playing field 75 years ago was a long way from level. To get anywhere a Black or other minority person had to be much, much smarter and work way harder to get anywhere in life.
It was very difficult to generate generational wealth by purchasing a home and/or getting a decent education. Not to say it didn't happen, but it was way easier for white folks.
I’m not saying that things are as bad as they were in the 50s and 60s, but the playing field is still not level.
For decades I could not see this. I was basically born on first base and thought I’d hit a single while minority kids my age were relegated to being the bat boy or cleaning the locker room.
What started turning me around is discussions I used to have with a Black engineer at a networking company I worked for. It was a small company, and as far as I know he was the only Black employee. In my experience tech companies tend to have mostly white and Asian employees, even today.
In any case, one day he told me he needed to sit his sons (11 and 13) down for “the talk.”
“Birds and Bees?”, I asked.
“No, staying alive as a young Black male”, he said.
This rocked me. It’s not something I’d ever had to deal with.
At one point he asked me how often I’d been pulled over by the police, handcuffed and sat on the curb while they searched my car.
“Never”, I said.
It had happened to him multiple times, even into his 40s.
Here’s a respectable engineer working for a good company, making more than I was and living in Irvine, CA, and he was still getting rousted by the police.
If you happen to be white, especially if you’re male, and you don’t think you have benefitted from white privilege, try to imagine how your life would have gone if you’d been a minority.
White privilege exists.
Many folks seem to think life is a zero sum game and that the only way they can get ahead is to keep minorities down.
But that’s not the case. If everyone is paid a living wage or better they’ll put money into the economy, allowing folks to start businesses and hire more folks to put more money into the economy in a virtuous circle.
From what I understand that’s how capitalism is supposed to work.
But if mostly white, mostly male, mostly Christian rich folks sit on their behinds investing inherited money and reaping the rewards from giant companies that see “stockholder value” as their prime responsibility we’ll see, well, pretty much what we have today, a very few very rich people, many, many folks who are living paycheck to paycheck and one emergency away from homelessness and a few, mostly white middle-class families like mine.
And I now understand that if my folks hadn’t had the money to allow me to “find” myself for two years in college, and if Dad hadn’t had the pull to get his ne’er-do-well oldest child a job, my life would have been a lot different, and not in a good way.
It’s likely I would have gone into the military and gotten my ass shot off in Southeast Asia.
At this point I don’t know how to permanently level the playing field, but one way to start might be to vote for candidates who understand what it’s taken me decades to learn.
I hear there’s a guy running for president who was born on third, stole second and claimed he stole home.
Don’t vote for him.
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