Cultural Baggage
 

By Ron Briley
 

  The application was in the mail. Damn good essay focusing upon growing up as the son of a sharecropper, and how I responded to the racial prejudices of my family and culture. How many red necks, peckerwoods, and good ole' Southern boys who went to the political left do they have applying? I'm a cinch to be selected for the NEH Institute on the civil rights movement. And Cambridge and Boston will be so cool. The family will stay on the Cape, and I can see them on the weekends. And the Red Sox will be in the pennant race.

  But I was not a first round draft pick. Instead, Harvard rejected what I assumed was their most outstanding white sharecropper applicant. After initial despair, coupled with the possibility of spending the summer either with my in-laws on Cape Cod or working at the school, I discovered, to my amazement, that I had been traded.

  Instead of spending my summer vacation at Harvard with the contending Red Sox, I had been optioned out to Madonna University and the hapless Detroit Tigers. I was invited to study Forging the Urban Identity with Detroit as the prototype. But the location of the Institute was some place called Livonia. Was it in Eastern Europe, near Slovenia and carved out of the crumbling Yugoslav Federation, or was it a reference to Sylvania and Freedonia from the classic Marx Brothers film Duck Soup? Either way it sounded like some God-forsaken place in the middle of nowhere.

After three weeks of personal investigation and extensive readings, I remain convinced that my initial impressions of Livonia were right on target, but the jury is still out on Detroit.

  When I told family and friends that I would be spending a month in Detroit, they immediately expressed their condolences. And, of course, my mother, who rarely moves from her television perch, peering at CNN, feared for my safety. Although she has not departed from the state of Texas in over thirty years, her television experience has well educated her to the dangers of Detroit and other rust belt cities.

  And even among my better-educated and seemingly more liberal colleagues, there was apprehension and concern. For Detroit has an image problem. Although a few have traveled to the city in recent years, they recite the litany of horrors in which contemporary Detroit is encapsulated: crime, drugs, devastation, boarded up buildings, vacant lots, weeds, and most threatening of all, Black people.

  What is the source of these images? For many White Americans, Detroit is viewed from the perspective of the 1967 uprising. Pictures of angry Black people looting and turning over police cars, with flames leaping to engulf the city. Yet, these images of Black rage fail to acknowledge the lack of economic and housing opportunities for Black Detroit, as well as the "riot" casualty figures which are predominantly Black, not White. Yet, fear obscures our view. Detroit is the setting for the futuristic Robocop in which the city is dominated by outlaw elements, typically Black, and a killing machine is needed to restore order--or is that the White order.

  What do I see? The urban blight is there among scenes of beauty. The city has tried to attract investment and people to downtown with casinos, a couple of trendy blocks and shops called Greektown (But I fail to see the Greeks.), and a gaudy new baseball stadium, which lacks the integrity of Tiger Stadium and has the God-awful corporate nomenclature of Co-merica Park. A sense of community is further hindered by the city's dependence upon the automobile. Locals proudly refer to Detroit as the motor city, even though the automobile corporations have abandoned them. Yet, Detroiters boldly, and probably foolishly, cling to Mr. Ford's invention, which pollutes and separates people into their own little speeding cubicles. There is no mass transit, but there is a people mover with tiles and art exhibits--but no people. And I'm stuck in a place called Livonia. Exiled just the way many surbanites have trapped themselves in their sterile environments.

  But what of the people in Detroit who strike such a note of fear in the suburbs as well as with my mother living in distant Texas. Yes, they are Black, and many possess an attitude which frightens Whites. But I feel no fear. Am I just a stupid White boy who assumes that his White privilege will keep him safe?

  Or is it my cultural baggage? I seem to have nothing in common with the African-American urban experience. Brought up in prejudice and poverty, I was taught to shun (or perhaps hate would be a more honest rendering) Black people. Our Southern high school did not integrate until my senior year in 1967. But I had integrated the summer before my senior year, when my family was one of the few White people to qualify for and accept employment with Lyndon Johnson's reincarnation of FDR's Neighborhood Youth Corps. In the summer of 1966, I dug graves in Childress, Texas with three young black men. I doubt if they remember my name. But I will not forget Robert Gilmore, Robert Alexander, and Billy Cannon. I have not seen them since high school, but they were my teachers and rescued me from fear.

  First generation literate on my father's side of the family, I had no intention of attending college until the intrusion of the Vietnam War. Seeking a college deferment in a university with open enrollment (for a mark of D was just dandy with me during my high school years.), I discovered the pure joy of books, reading, and scholarship. It was a wonderful world of which I had only dreamed. Yet, this embracing of intellectualism increased my sense of alienation from my background of Whiteness. Despite the privilege of my white skin, I developed a sense of identification with "the other"--which in the Black and White culture of rural West Texas placed me on the colored side of the racial divide which also included shades of Native American Red and Latino Brown.

  To quote Robert Heinlein, I felt like a "Stranger in a Strange Land." Although picking and chopping cotton in my youth, I found no joy in the landscape of rural West Texas and sought to breathe free in the city. I challenged the fundamental values of my culture, and like Huckleberry Finn; I was going to hell. Striking back at the racism into which I had been immersed, I questioned religion, capitalism, and patriotism. I fathered a child and was married at seventeen. I stubbornly stayed in school and pursued my love of books; panhandling and surviving on hot water, ketchup, salt, and pepper from the local McDonald's from whose premises I was banned. Estranged from my culture and roots, I found/created my own position of "the other."

  I have mellowed over the years. Some of my youthful anger has departed from me. Yet, I still feel estranged, and I have probably worked hard to maintain this stance. While I profess radical politics, I teach at a prep school and live a rather conventional life style. And I am preparing to become a father again at the ripe old age of 52.

  So what does any of this rambling have to do with Detroit? It is of course egotistical, but in some strange way I identify with the city. By this I don't mean that I want to become Black. I'm much too White bread to embrace Black culture and hip-hop. However, I have developed a self-perception of "the other." And I am defiantly proud of this identity. It is something I feel in Black Detroit. There is devastation and blight, but there is still a sense of pride and defiance. Somehow, I connect with this sense of otherness and rather than fear I wear a coat of comfort in Detroit. There may be no mass transit in Detroit (but the best ribs I have ever tasted), but there are proud people who continue to defy the labels and boxes in which the dominant culture seeks to place them. In a strange sort of way, they are my kind of people, challenging and confronting the people movers of the world. My trade to Detroit by the NEH was fortuitous as I play out another long hot summer of my life.