Huffington Post: Bob the Electrical Worker

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-candaele/bob-the-electrical-worker_b_140024.html

Kelly Candaele
Posted November 1, 2008 | 04:15 PM (EST)

I don't know how it's possible to get more working-class -- or as Americans prefer to describe people who work with their hands, blue collar -- than my father. My father, Robert, didn't finish high school and even a modicum of economic stability eluded him until he became a union electrician in the mid 1960s. Before becoming a union member, my dad bumped around from job to job, painting houses one month, working as a janitor the next.

There is an awkward psychological tendency to romanticize the struggles of parents, substituting only virtue for what they could have only regarded as painful and sometimes shame producing economic difficulties. But there is one area of my father's life that I do not view through rose colored glasses -- how he dealt with the issue of race.

My father was not a sociologist. He did not attempt to analyze the various factors that either increased or decreased the likelihood of racial tension in a community. I'm fairly certain he never heard of the term "white skin privilege," a phrase in academic vogue in the 1960s. He believed that blacks had "gotten the shaft," as he put it, in the United States. From that premise flowed the concern that his kids understand some of the implications of that history.

He had a simple philosophy that he expressed consistently. Treat everyone with respect and dignity no matter what their skin color or background. I remember loud arguments he had with his brother in law -- a Navy man from San Diego who was not exactly enlightened about the potential for interracial solidarity. His brother in law's comments about civil rights and blacks in general, were not pretty.

In Lompoc, located in a rural area near the ocean north of Santa Barbara, we only experienced the aroma of the civil rights movement during the 1960s. Politically at that time, the demographics of Lompoc matched the demographics of the state. The percentage of registered Democrats to Republicans and the percentage of Latinos -- (primarily from Mexico back then) -- and African Americans matched the overall California numbers. In a sense, Lompoc was the Peoria of California. In elections -- the voting results from Lompoc consistently matched the statewide returns.

While there was a significant African American community, you had to take the hour long drive south to the University of California, Santa Barbara to get a sense that a significant civil rights movement was underway. While not entirely immune from the larger tides of history, there was a feeling that critical events happened elsewhere.

FULL story at link.