Round and round I ride the same carousel but now I am with a future president of the United States

What it took to make me a “Liberal Elite”

Peter Ashlock
Aug 22, 2017 · 7 min read

I find the term “liberal elite” to be simplistic and inadequate to the current public “conversation”. Considering the economic privilege and power wielded by those who head corporations and governments, most especially those in Washington DC in 2017, I feel far from anything elite, with a single exception. I am white, educated and comparatively middle class, depending on whose income barometer you use, but privileged is a fact few of us can escape.

When I was a child my mother had grown up in a neighborhood of immigrants that had slowly changed to become dominated by an influx of African Americans who had come for jobs in the war industries at the end of World War Two. By the time I was born those jobs were gone and these people were mired in poverty.

It took years to grasp the meaning of white privilege because in my isolation and naiveté I had no grasp of what constituted that good fortune. It took years to understand incrementally just how that worked.

In the fifties where I lived there was little visible or obvious to me as a chld about the horrors of racism or segregation. By 1959 I was in junior high school with other children, who were black, but they were often sullen and angry, and adolescents are a handful in the best of circumstances. I didn’t really grasp why they were so angry and had my own problems with bullies. At twelve I was a lonesome outsider due to the absence of my loving father, an artist with a progressive, socially liberal intellectual outlook, so I was frightened, isolated and depressed in general. In the fifties a “broken home” was looked upon with condescending pity but soon it became a norm. For many children it was a cross to bear. Conformity was paramount, no matter what took place behind closed doors.

In our neighborhood the family next door flew the American flag at every possible occasion due to being the family home of a doctor and nurse who had met during the last war. They vigorously supported Barry Goldwater in 1964. Not far away was an American Opinion bookstore where the John Birch Society proudly flew the flag and sold their literature. The presumptions of entitlement were distasteful to me, but I did not know why.

I had briefly shared a class with a single black child in the sixth grade and I now wonder if this child perhaps had a parent who was a domestic servant in the area, but such matters were beyond my grasp. No one in my neighborhood had anyone like that who worked for them, that I knew of, and our neighbors seemed superficially liberal in their outlook, as far as I could tell at that young age.

I read about the issues of desegregation going on in the south in the newspaper and as my teens progressed during the sixties I found myself hanging out with black boys who were more accepting of me, as I became more engaged in the music scene that was then emerging around blues and folk music. We all just wanted to find our way to happiness and acceptance.

I am ashamed to say that I didn’t really begin to understand the nature of my privilege until a casual conversation with two black men after I was forty. I mentioned my grandparents, and having pictures of their families and knowing where they were born and raised. They looked at me politely and commented that they had no such information and that it was common for many black people to not have much connection to their past due to frequent disruptions in their lives, their having to move and all the problems of family dysfunction common for those with limited money or resources.

I was chagrined because I suddenly grasped what they meant and I was immediately embarrassed by my ignorance. One of the men had attended the same high school I had, a continuation school where children and adults finished their high school education. I had specifically asked to go to this school, a radically defiant act at the time, because the school was used as a threat at the big main high school where I had come to feel alienated and an outsider due to my own social issues and problems at home.

My mother, I was coming to realize, was anti-Semitic and racist, not in the in-your-face way of white supremacists but in the passive genteel manner of “nice” white people, who harbor some attitudes that are not very nice at all. Coming home with one boy when I was thirteen, my mother asked me if he was Jewish, to which I replied, blankly, that I didn’t know and in fact I honestly could not tell one fair skinned person from another and did not much care. She said he “had the map of Israel all over his face” and I recoiled inwardly at the grotesque slur that I did not understand other than to recognize it as something sinister and wrongheaded.

I look back now, almost fifty years later and realize that my mother was a garden variety ordinary lower middle class woman who was consumed with an obsession to be upper class and have everyone know it. That mattered more than being a good person and doing the right thing regardless of circumstance. Though she had a college education, she was the face of conventional ignorance and white privilege.

I did not know that in our town there had been red lining by real estate agencies, mandated by state law, to prevent the sale of homes to people of color in white neighborhoods. Among the privileges of our town were better schools in better neighborhoods, the assumptions that one would go to the local university, and eventually live in an ever grander style, thus glorifying people like my mother and her values. There was however a first class Public Library that everyone enjoyed and the run off of events from the university that dominates the town was available to everyone.

The assumptions were that men in particular would go to the local university, after fulfilling military service, and you might even be “privileged” to work in physics and contribute to the research to improve the atomic and hydrogen bomb that was developed there. If you did not do this, you would never get a decent job, have no social standing and be looked down upon as a social failure. Thus were the seeds of doubt sewn that led to teen aged rebellions.

The nineteen sixties disrupted all the previous assumptions of the age. On the front doorstep of our town, were full blown riots, marches and protests. Welcome to Berkeley, California in sixties. We were on the front lines of resistance to the hypocrisies of racism, the Vietnam War, women’s rights, gay rights, and the rights of disabled people. White people who had enjoyed the fruits of all the labors of those who had been exploited did not care to relinquish their privileges. At the moment, I did not feel privileged, but rather caught in between the righteous anger of the new revolution of those who would come to be called liberals and leftists, and my need to find an authentic path to understanding and not just blindly accept the new revolution as another spoon fed rhetoric, not so different from the countless hypocritical defenses I had found unacceptable in the past. Next would be the trendy show of Mao’s Little Red Book, to show what a good liberal you were. I found this intellectually dishonest and distanced myself from those who felt a need to shower the world with their new “liberal” beliefs.

Suddenly all the frustrations and anxieties of the era were on display but for me without a great deal of understanding, other than the very simple and easy to grasp fact that people are people and the color of their skin is irrelevant as a factor to our general equality. Clearly war was wrong and capital punishment cruel but I really did not understand much and more detail would not be revealed for another few years.

Once I had survived my adolescence and gotten into art school I took a class in Black Literature where I was assigned to read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and came to realize that there was a rich heritage of African American writing of which I had been completely oblivious. Later I would read books such as the Autobiography of Malcom X by Alex Haley and The Land Where the Blues Began by Alan Lomax, to find vivid portraits of all I had been sheltered from.

After all the turmoil of the sixties and my struggle to find an appropriate education I patched together a life where my income has been consistently closer to the bottom of the ladder than the top, but despite terrible marriages I was still able to bring four magnificent boys into the world who all prosper and appear to know what it means to be decent men. That is what privilege and success looks like to me.

Despite the horrors and dysfunctions of my family life, coupled with being sexually molested at sixteen and spending a few days in a mental hospital at twenty, I came to terms with the fact that I was not gay, just angry and acting out. I needed to understand for myself who I was and what I believed and not be told what to feel or think.

Every person has the right to follow their heart and mind into the wonders of our world, to find knowledge that excites them. My father had afforded me the privilege to discover my passions. Despite my mother’s foolishness, I found a path, however slowly, to understand the grandeur of human equality. So apparently that makes me a “liberal elite”.

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