There are some good reasons why “race” and “racism” didn’t seem like a major factor in my life…
- Though born in San Francisco, I grew up in the Sunnyhills neighborhood of Milpitas, which I only recently learned was the first successful integrated housing development in California.
- Both my parents were college-educated and well-spoken.
- My father was president of the school board throughout most of my school years; my mother was active in community leadership as well.
- In 1966 Milpitas had California’s first black mayor.
- I had friends of all races; loved school; and got good grades.
- By high school, my aptitude for music led to opportunities to travel to the East Coast, Canada, and Europe.
- My boyfriends and both husbands have been white.
Soooo….I was a good kid, living a good and happy life, secure in a community that knew and respected my parents and my entire family.
Except…there were subtle things that I avoided looking at closely…
- I never completely fit in — I wasn’t “cool” and I didn’t sound “black”; I was a bookworm and a music nerd — so I didn’t fit in with with the black kids; all my best friends, who I had everything in common with, were white — so I stuck out there because I looked different.
- When I started dating my first white boyfriend, some of the black guys took issue with him dating a black girl and beat him up.
- When the jazz band I was in traveled to Washington D.C., there was a side trip to Virginia where the Filipino keyboard player and I sat on the bus while the rest of the group toured some historic monument in Virginia, where we weren’t welcome.
- Then there was the concert we did at a school for developmentally disabled children in Germany, where one of the children became visibly agitated when she saw me. Between her disability and the language difference I had no way of understanding what she saying, but by the way she kept reaching out to touch my skin I could tell she had never seen a person of color before, which was a very strange feeling.
- My father worked for Lockheed as a systems analyst and was offered a job at NASA, but due to some (racially-motivated) unpleasantness when they visited Houston they decided to stay put in California.
- As a classical flutist, I freelanced with a number of orchestras throughout the greater SF Bay Area. I was somewhat bemused by how often, despite not being a contracted member, I just “happened” to be performing on the concert when they would take their promotional photos, so they had one person of color in the orchestra (the “token”).
- Then there was the time I did a gig at a gated community in Danville with guitarist Eugene Rodriquez. It was a fundraiser for a private girls school, with students from the school doing the serving. At one point, Eugene and I were taking a break at the refreshment table — dressed in formal black and white because that’s what classical musicians wear to gigs(!) — and a woman tried to hand me her used plate! Now remember: the middle school girls are serving at this event. There are no waiters or waitresses in attendance. But this woman’s unconscious logic was obviously that, if a black woman/Latino man were in a mansion in Danville dressed in black and white clothing, they must be there to wait on her! That one rankles to this day…
Of course, I read this over and I think, “Oh come on! This stuff is hardly worth calling racism; I mean, what are you even complaining about?!?”
But that, I think, is what has kept me from allowing myself to acknowledge that I am affected by racism. And as I’ve been writing, more and more of these little memories resurface; none of them major or worth making a big fuss about, but when you add them all together…it makes for a pretty heavy weight.