There’s a group on Facebook for people who lived (or still live, I guess) in Sunnyhills, the neighborhood of Milpitas where I grew up.
From the age of five until I moved out at eighteen, this view of the hills was what I saw pretty much every single day.
Our living room and kitchen windows faced east, so we looked up at the hills constantly. I remember my mother reciting one of her favorite scriptures: “I will look up to the hills from whence cometh my help.”
I haven’t lived in Milpitas since high school (except for a very brief period in my mid-twenties), but seeing this photo today brought back an intense wave of love for those hills.
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.
