Racism On The Comeback Trail

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

When I was 7, I lived in Lafayette, Louisiana, heart of Cajun country, and very segregated. In that whole year our family lived there, I don’t believe I ever encountered a black person. Certainly not at my school. I was aware they existed, but only from seeing them on television. What I didn’t know about was segregation and bigotry, but would catch my first glimpse one Sunday afternoon. Our  family had just gone to church, and afterwards, we went to a downtown department store. At one point, both my dad and I needed to use the bathroom. We walked towards the toilets and I noticed signs saying “White Men” and “Colored Men.” My dad led us to the White room, and I assumed it was because we were wearing white shirts as the reason we were going to the White Men’s room. At the same time, I wondered why they would separate people based on the colour of their shirt. That thought wasn’t much more ridiculous than what those signs really meant. Such was Louisiana in 1958, and while the separate facilities idea is no longer around, the reason they ever existed has never gone away.

It took a few years after that before I understood what the separate toilet thing was about, and my guess is they weren’t completely eradicated until Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights bill in 1964. When you continue to go to schools, as I did in Tucson from 1958 to 1966, where geography was the determining factor, black students were a rarity. Kids were more or less programmed, as Arizona always has been a redneck state, to look on other races as inferior. I wasn’t immune to the feelings of the crowd, but by age 13, I was less inclined to think racial slurs were funny. I had a moment during that age when our PE class was having social dancing instead of regular outdoor activities, probably because it was raining. I asked the one black student in the whole school, named Harriet, to dance. However, the rules of the day were, once you had a partner, you stayed with that partner until someone asked to cut in. Harriet wound up being my partner for the entire period, and it was especially uncomfortable for her, as she knew what was up. Meanwhile,  I was called a “N***** Lover” by my classmates. I felt sorry for her, because I was friends with her. These idiots that were supposed to be my friends made me feel I had done something wrong.

It wasn’t until our family moved to Redlands, California, and I finished my secondary education at a school that embraced an entire community rather than rich suburbs, that I was able to see integration is a good thing, no matter how those Arizona cowboys felt. I didn’t have any black friends that I hung around with regularly, but being accepted by those I knew as not “the enemy” was good enough for me. It was just coincidental that only a few years after high school, my musical taste veered strongly over to the music created by black people, and in the beginnings of my show biz career, my partner and I incorporated the love of that music into our act.

The world of show biz is, for the most part, liberal, and if there was any racism, it came from the spectators more often than from my colleagues, especially when you leave the confines of California or New York. After we broke up the duo act in the mid-80’s, I began a solo career, which sometimes took me to the dark recesses of humanity. I remember a guy in Houston being a totally wonderful guy, buying me drinks, getting me high, and then out of the blue asking me in his Texas drawl, “How cum yew play so mucha thet N***** music?” I managed to answer that one by saying, “Because I love it and would never refer to it in those terms.” He sort of laughed and threw a half-assed apology in.

Better than a club in Myrtle Beach, SC in 2001, my last experience with that kind of US road whoring, where the comics felt free to bandy the racism about, given their audience. “Any black people here tonight” asked the emcee about 5 minutes in, and I knew what was coming. “Now I’m not a racist, but..” and obviously he was going to negate that idea with his imminent words, which I won’t bother to repeat here, but it was stupid to go there when the first comic he was bringing up was black. Still the emcee’s racism emboldened one of the other (white) acts to actually use the forbidden word that I had heard too many African-American comics overuse over the years, in some instances it seemed only because they could.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a lot of that going on in US comedy still. Certainly the mood of that corner of the world hasn’t appeared to progress much in the 18 years since I worked that Myrtle Beach room. I would guess that anti-Obama material would go down well, and anti-Trump material wouldn’t, but I hope I’m wrong. If my former country of residence is really heading that way (and a lot of the world is, too), then maybe those segregated bathrooms will come back, and I’ll have to take note of what colour shirt I’m wearing.

July 31st, 2019



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