Apologia to my Father
How a Russian Jew helped an African American professor understand her father’s wisdom
I wasn’t going to address this, but I read something in the New Yorker that set me right. It was Gary Shteyngart’s New Yorker piece “Growing Up in the Soviet Union.” He related an experience he’d had in his native Russia which directly related to an experience I’d had with Dad, a Vietnam War vet and former high school principal.
When my parents were in their mid-eighties, I quit my twenty-year university position in Texas and came back home. I lived in their neighborhood, where they could see my backyard from theirs. I drove them to medical appointments, and took care of other family business, while teaching university courses part-time.
As I’d drive them to Golden Corral, my dad’s favorite restaurant, he would notice a derelict White person on the street, pointing out that person and apropos of nothing, say, “He thinks he’s better than you.” The first time he said it, my brow furled confusedly as I queried, “What?” to which my father repeated and expanded, “He thinks he’s better than you. You’ve got all this education. You teach at the university and he’s on the street, but he thinks he’s better than you.”
Quite frankly I did what I hate when my only niece does it to me. I blamed it on his age. I thought he might be losing it a bit, because he never really discussed race as we were growing up. He’d discuss some strange incident in his life, like being super competent at his job as a career soldier in the quartermaster’s office, and being passed over for promotion. His immediate superior would put him in for promotion, but apologized that the powers-that-be just weren’t ready yet. Maybe someday things would change. Later, as I read more about American military segregation practices, even after official desegregation, I could put the pieces together and Dad admitted that race was the issue.
Or there was the time in the first year of desegregation in my Tennessee hometown, when my White seventh-grade English teacher wouldn’t ever call on me, even when my hand (the only spoon of chocolate sauce on the vanilla ice cream sundae that was our class) was the only one up. Even when all the other kids would point out, “Yvonne knows. You could call on her.”
When I told my dad that I didn’t think Miss Riggins liked me, he stared and barked out in true military fashion, “You’re not there to be liked. You’re there to learn.” But then as I slumped away in disappointment, he added, “You just keep raising your hand.”
Again, much much later, I put the pieces together along with many other pieces in those early days of desegregation and shocked myself at the realization that I had encountered racism. “But, but,” I mentally stuttered years after the fact, “I was a good girl. I made good grades. I didn’t get into trouble. I was the first female and first black band president. I even made the National Honor Society as a junior!”
I didn’t understand racism then. I didn’t understand the “color over accomplishments” mentality. I didn’t understand the desperate need among some Whites to retain their myth of superiority. I believed in the Dream (and even now, like the Cowardly Lion, I’m chanting to myself “I do believe in the Dream. I do, I do, I do.). I’d just thought some of them were crazy or confused or even, maybe, stupid. Indeed they were, but they were also racist.
But these days Dad was getting more forgetful and his much-younger brother had even convinced this inveterate lover of driving to limit himself to short trips about town, so I regularly drove him and my mother to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner with my sister’s family fifty miles away. I put his words on his age.
But then I read Shteyngart’s essay and rethought my thoughtlessness. Here’s what he said about an experience he had at a train station in St. Petersburg:
The song was coming out of an ancient tape player next to a bedraggled old woman selling sunflower seeds out of a cup. She examined my physiognomy with a sneer. At the time, this seemed like just a typical Russian scene, the nation’s poorest citizens bristling at their humiliation after losing the Cold War, their ire concentrated on a familiar target, the country’s dwindling population of Jews.
He then goes on to say:
Putin’s team has discovered that racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism bind people closer than any other experiences. These carefully calibrated messages travel from Cyrillic and English keyboards to Breitbart ears and Trump’s mouth, sometimes in the space of hours. The message is clear. People want to rise from their knees. Even those who weren’t kneeling in the first place.
So, belatedly, I began to think, really think, about what my father was saying. And because of a Russian American Jew, an African American woman now understands more about the universal nature of racism. What I now think is a modification of what Dad pointed out.
I think those hope-bereft White derelicts and fearful rural Whites and emotionally stunted White incels need to think they’re better than me, not because it’s true, not even because they believe it’s true, but because it’s all they have left. Sorry, Dad, you were right.
And because of my expanded understanding, even though I’ll still be a bit nervous walking into all-White environments that never-before caused me any concern, and even while I’m wondering just how many of the people in this space, in this former(?) Confederate, birthplace-of-the-Klan red state voted for the Klan-endorsed candidate, I can nonetheless hear a few trembling notes of sympathy playing on the strings of my spirit.
