I was a member of a private, all-white swim club as a child: [View All]

[callous taoboy]

This was in my home town in Texas during the late 60's up until the mid 70's. I wasn't aware that the club owner was a racist, or that my dad may have had racist (or at least elitist) leanings for paying a membership fee at this pool when there were at least three other public pools in our town and it was widely known that our pool was whites only (this information I found out much later). During my childhood I didn't understand racism, but I picked up on the tension between blacks and whites in our town, as well as the unofficial segregation. Never heard my dad talk down about people of color, never heard him say the "N" word and I know he thinks that word is unacceptable. Yet, our neighborhood was all white as well, and, as a consequence, the schools I attended up until high school were 99.5% white, and when I made it to high school I found out that there were unofficial "White" and "Other" parking lots. I had friends on the block that would toss out the "N" word as an insult, ("N-lover" was a particularly harsh insult). I tried using the "N" word a time or two as a kid but even back then with limited knowledge I had a feeling that I was saying a bad word. It was confusing: Think about all of the overtly racist images you absorbed watching cartoons and how, as a child, the "N" word conveys those grotesque images, yet saying the word, for me anyway, felt taboo. You think we spent one second learning about people of color in school? Maybe Harriet Tubman. I didn't harbor any ill-will toward non-whites while growing up because, in my world, non-white was a non-issue. Tragic. You just stayed on your part of town (or parking lot), a town which was the scene of public lynchings of black men on into the early part of the 20th century.

When I was a young voter I was surprised, though not really shocked, to hear my dad say, "If Jesse Jackson gets elected you can bet that every black man in the country will have plenty of change rattling around in his pockets." By this time as a young adult I was already heading, shit running as fast as I could, toward open-mindedness and understanding.

I recently went back to see some of the old haunts, including the pool where my dad would take me swimming. The owner is long dead and the pool has been filled in and turned into a used car lot.

My dad is living in a retirement community that is, of course, mostly white. I sure wish I could be close friends with my dad, and I'm not sure why that hasn't happened. I wonder how he reacted to the recent news regarding children being turned away at a "white" pool.