This Obama Thing

This whole ObamaJeremiahWrightRace kerfuffle of the past week has got me thinking. No I’m not writing about politics here and yes I do have an opinion, but I’m not sharing it with you. I reminisce about growing up in an inter-racial household. You see, I’m the inverse of Steve Martin’s character in the Jerk, you know he’s born a poor black child and discovers Montovani and becomes white. I was born a poor white child until I discovered James Brown and his Famous Flames.

That and my Mom married a black man in 1965. I think it was 1965 anyway. I was eight and my brother was three. The year prior to their marriage, we lived in a section of LA just off of what is now Martin Luther King Blvd. Back then MLK was called Santa Rosalia Blvd; we lived on a street just below Baldwin Hills called Hillcrest Ave. My mom, my brother and I were the only white kids around I’m pretty sure. If my memory serves me correctly (Mom help me out here), there were some white folks still living there – mostly retired. I remember our neighbor across the hall used to race midget cars and give me STP stickers. But by and large we hung out with the black kids in the neighborhood. The neighborhood was working class poor, and this was what we could afford while we waited for my Mom’s divorce to be finalized.

One day, my Mom came home with this portly black guy with a hat, little did I know then that he’d become my stepfather within a year. I admit it was strange to me on a number of levels, conflicted over my real father (whom I didn’t miss, but may have had some sense of loyalty too), being the oldest have my authority being usurped by an outsider, and just being completely different in skin tone. So I was a bit suspicious.

But he eventually won us over.

Snippets of memories come back to me. Walking to Mr. J’s record store at the end of the street to by 45s – James Brown, The Temptations, Smokey, the Four Tops, the Delfonics, the Chi-Lites… Walkin’past the brothers in pork pie hats and the most fabulous Italian knit shirts that to this day I cannot find. Conques and doo-rags were still in evidence.

A year later we moved up the street to Baldwin Hills. To put it into TV parlance, it was kinda like being the Jefferson’s – not for my step dad but for me and my brother. What a difference a half mile makes because on top of that hill lived an affluent, professional predominantly black community. The white folks had fled to Ladera Heights, Trousdale and Beverly Hills some time back. This was a neighborhood of physicians, businessmen, and professionals who got to where they were through education, diligence and hard work.

A brief side note: My stepfather graduated from Columbia University at the top of his class to become the first black anesthesiologist in the US, his brother was a high school teacher in Brooklyn and his sister created the first African studies program for a University (whose name escapes me) in the US and incidentally was a friend to Maya Angelou.

I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this expository, certainly not an historical record of my childhood rather I think the texture of my “black experience”. You see my experience was not of the angry black man, although there was plenty of it bubbling up, the Watts Riots I, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, and Eldridge Cleaver – my life in that milieu was more like a hybrid version of the Huckstables; which to Cosby’s great credit showed America that we really have very little differences in what we want out of life.

We were all middle class kids raised on middle class values going to middle class schools.

And I’m surprised that we’re still talkin’ about race some forty years later….

I remember the 8th grade parties slow dancing with the girls with the light down low, and Mom (not mine) flickin’ the light switch and giving us the “look”.

I remember having a crush on a lovely black girl named Valerie, and passing her note asking if she’d go steady with me only to have her laugh and show the note to her friends who also got a big kick out it.

I remember my Mom dropping me and my buddy Marvin off at the 5th Avenue theater in Morningside to see some movie, and the gang bangers (the Crips) pouring in through the back doors and stealing our popcorn – we were absolutely terrified.

I remember the day my Dad starting wearing platform shoes – that was the day I grew taller than him. Pursuant to that remembrance, I used to tell him at the dinner table how I tall I was and he used to say “What do you want to be – a basketball player!”

I remember the poster of MLK I had with his I Have A Dream speech and MLK’s picture and showing it to my Dad and telling him how much he looked like MLK. To this day, I wonder if he was complemented or chagrined (as in you all look alike, which was certainly NOT how I meant it).

I remember how much he loved La.

I remember him telling me to get a job 30 days before I went to boot camp.

I remember how much he loved Amalthea.

I remember how life turned on him – became too much for him to bear and him turning to alcohol.

I remember how he lost everything.

I love him and miss him.

I think that’s where I’ll leave this off.