Grew Up a Racist

In Berks County

Pennsylvania. And it is really bothering me.

Hopefully I learned from it. A famous man once said, Pennsylvania, a state with two big cities and Alabama in between.

I grew up a racist son of a bitch

Didn’t know any better.

What sticks to a young mind

What that sticks can be unstuck?

When we were little the men who picked up our trash, we were taught to fear them. They were black people coming into our alley. The putrid smell of trash lingered from the trash cans.

I felt like we were at war with a country called Puerto Rico. The parents blamed the spics for everything. Why didn’t they go back to their own country. Don’t go anywhere near the housing projects. They were not a safe place to be.

In our household the moon landing eclipsed the life and death that was Martin Luther King. The space program was indeed exciting.

There was a club in town that made fantastic mouth watering pizza that tickled the senses. The sauce was absolutely perfect. I don’t remember the cheese. I know many people who referred to this pizza place as the WOP club.

The WOP CLUB preferred to not have blacks as customers. This sentence is odd for Berks county where they would shrug their shoulders and say.

“It don’t matter.”

I don’t know what became of the Polish jokes we heard as kids. As a Cub Scout we made Indian war shields out of elongated raw pasta. It didn’t work very well in the rain.

Our grandmother when eating licorice spice drops would refer to them as Nigger babies. As a kid the candy was passable, as an adult it is delicious. The term we should have hated, but it was our grandmother. Our other grandmother predicted the demise of Tiger Woods before there was an actual Tiger Woods.

Let’s play tag -Who is It?

Eena, meena, mina, mo,Catch a nigger by his toe;If he squeals let him go,Eena, meena, mina, mo

We said that shit.

Our high School had about a dozen persons of color. They all lived in the same neighborhood. It was called Furnace Hill. The furnace referred to the place where they burned trash. Most people in town called Furnace Hill -Nigger Hill. It was not a term of endearment. It was a convenient place to burn the trash.

It had predictably come to this.

One day while eating a traditional Berks County hoagie along with a bag of chips, I sat on my break with a woman with whom I worked. I liked her plenty, she was a friend and a great co worker.

She happened to be black.

While enjoying that delicious hoagie with the perfect crust hard roll, I pulled a single chip from the bag. Yes a single chip. It was burnt to a crisp.

I called it a Nigger Chip.

It was automatic without thinking. It was a learned behavior. I said it out loud.

It came out so easily it scared me.

It came out so easily it scarred me.

My friend and I talked. Well she talked and I listened.

It took awhile, yet it changed me, it shaped me to understand how that made her feel.

That may have been one of the more life shaping sandwiches I have eaten in my life.

“Enjoy Every Sandwich” Warren Zevon

And today I see the shenanigans in Pennsylvania politics. They are refusing to seat a Democrat who rightfully and demonstratively won the seat. Why, because a sea change is coming.

And some just can’t keep from being racist. It is their nature. They never ventured far from their home town or their racist way of being.