The Post-Racial Society Recedes Further

by Lorna Salzman (April 2015)
 

When I was growing up (I was born in 1935), there were very few minorities (none in my public school at all and none that I recall in high school) and very little crime of any kind, or at least not enough serious crime (outside of gangster violence) to make the newspapers (there was no TV). One reason may have been the fact that most people were not well off. My family had no worries when I walked through a long stretch of deserted woods and streams between Douglaston and Little Neck in Queens in order to go to the Little Neck movie by myself. I remember being shocked in 1948, when I graduated from public school (an all-white school) and went on a trip with my parents  to see Williamsburg, Virginia, the reconstructed colonial town. We went to the railroad station and I needed to use the bathroom, and was stunned and puzzled to see two doors: White and Colored. I hesitated of course, without understanding the significance of this, but went into the white one (where I removed my new watch, a graduation gift, and then left it behind on the sink when I came out so it was stolen).

I never heard anything, even a hint, of any kind of anti-black attitudes in my family. My mother occasionally made snide remarks about the Catholic Church (not about Catholics) though they did have Italian-American friends. We never went to synagogue. None of our family on either side was religious or observant in any way. We had a Christmas tree at Christmas. I hung out mostly with Catholics, occasionally attended mass with them and Wednesday night church socials called”confraternity”, and had no awareness of religion. The only things I knew about Judaism I learned in summer camp, where we were forced to sit through services on Friday night and Saturday morning. Two of my campmates, already atheists at the age of 13, tried to plead illness to get out of the services. I learned lots of Hebrew and Israeli songs by rote and even a few Jewish prayers in Hebrew.

The Death of Klinghoffer) as it is of black. But the time is long over for cultural separatism. The use of the term African-American should be retired, if only because it really only applies to the few blacks with one parent born in Africa (like Pres. Obama). One is reminded of a scene from the film Days of Darkness by the great French-Canadian film director Denys Arcand. The miserably depressed antagonist, who works for a huge faceless inflexible bureaucracy, remarks about his black colleague that “il travaille comme un negre” (the French word used by them means slave). His supervisor brings him up on charges of racism. But at the hearing, the black worker points to his arm and says: “Mais je suis negre” (But I am black).

Politics as if Evolution Mattered,” which addresses the intersection of evolution with socio-political policy. 

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