To the extent that I thought about the future at all as a teenager back in the ’50s, of one thing I was certain: The noxious issue of race relations in America would evaporate by the time my own life ended. At some point, I reasoned, the whole silly notion of judging people by their skin color would make no more sense than judging people by their hair color or their eye color.
My logic seemed flawless:
First, my bigoted elders would die off, to be replaced by my idealistic contemporaries. While our seniors complacently congratulated themselves for licking the Great Depression and Hitler, we young Turks would tackle Civil Rights and gender equality just as soon as those old mossbacks stepped aside.
Second, an unprecedented influx of Latinos (which had begun with the first Puerto Rican immigrants around 1950), not to mention Asians, muddle the simplistic Black-white racial dichotomy that had preoccupied Americans since the Civil War.
Third, the growth of racial intermarriage would render it difficult if not impossible to label people by race. If Americans came in many different shades of whiteness or blackness, how could you tell who was what? And why would you bother to try, any more than, say, you would bother about distinguishing Methodists from Baptists, or German Jews from Russian Jews?
Kierkegaard on Lutherans
It all came to pass much as I had predicted. Except….
The whole noxious issue of race relations is still with us, maybe even worse than before.
So where did I go wrong? You may choose from one or more conclusions:
1. Dan Rottenberg was a foolish optimist as a teenager and still is.
2. How was I to know that my own idealistic generation would include charlatans like Michael Milken and Donald Trump? Or that succeeding generations would produce rabble-rousers like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones?
3. Racial divisions persist because it’s easier to judge people by their looks than, say, their politics or their religious beliefs.
4. Racial animosity persists in the U.S. more than, than, say, in Canada because of America’s 350-year legacy of slavery and racial segregation.
5. Every society, even those lacking racial minorities, feels a psychological need to define some group as outsiders. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The whole rationale for diversity in education lies in the recognition that real growth begins when you realize that other people don’t think the way you do. As Kierkegaard observed, “If everyone is a Lutheran, then no one is a Lutheran.” He meant that the only way to test your values is by comparing them to someone else’s. (Or think of the joke about the Jewish man who, cast away alone on a desert island, builds two synagogues, explaining, “That synagogue I wouldn’t go to.”) At the first meeting of my block organization in central Philadelphia, my diverse neighbors found common ground by telling lawyer jokes— the one group not represented among us. If there were no bigots or haters in America, we’d probably need to import a few.
My color-blind high school
6. The issue of race in America has actually changed over the past 70 years.
America's most blatant social evil in the ’50s was not racism (that word hadn't yet been coined) but race prejudice— discrimination on the basis of skin color. The notion that people could be excluded from schools, jobs, neighborhoods, theaters, or restaurants solely because of their skin color seemed outrageous to any fair-minded person. The obvious goal, it seemed then, was a color-blind society.
That was one aim of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, which operated the Fieldston School, a wonderful progressive private high school that I attended in the ‘50s. Fieldston responded to the larger society’s race prejudice by seeking to create, within the school's walls and grounds, something approaching the color-blind ideal. It still brings tears to my eyes to recall the Ethical Society leaders’ passion to eliminate the evil of race prejudice.
The flaw in their approach, of course, was that precisely because the Black kids at Fieldston had suffered racial discrimination, their life experiences differed from those of the whites. But they couldn’t talk about those experiences, because any recognition of differences among Blacks and whites was implicitly verboten.
Once, in a conversation over lunch, circa 1956, my Black classmate Julie Adams made a passing reference to “what would happen if I got on a bus in Birmingham." She was greeted with an awkward silence. We whites simply weren't supposed to acknowledge that Black kids, being Black, might be dealing with issues different from our own.
I presumed that my Black schoolmates were as grateful as I for the extraordinary experience of a Fieldston education. Their frustration at having to sublimate their cultural identity never occurred to me. At our 50th reunion, Julie— who, as Julie Strandberg, was the founding director of Brown University's dance program for five decades— set me straight.
"When no one else was around," she said, "the Black kids used to gather under the stairs for mutual support and sanity."
So— now that I’m no longer a teenager but an octogenarian, what’s the moral of this story? T.S. Eliot said it: “We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/, and know the place for the first time.” Of course, in 1995 Eliot was exposed as an anti-Semite. And then in 2003 a scholar persuasively argued that Eliot wasn’t an anti-Semite. And today the consensus among Eliot scholars is that readers will have to decide the matter for themselves.
Best to keep exploring.