My Whiteness ... Part II
Part I here
White in Arkansas
Once I moved to Searcy in sixth grade, I lived in an all-white neighborhood again, but closer to town. My father managed a Goodyear tire store where he had one black man up front in sales and service, and a few black men in the bays. The school was integrated, according to the law, but the tracking was evident. Whites were in a few "gifted and talented" classes, blacks made up the majority of the on-level and "remedial" (whatever they called it back then) classes. We had a few black students in our class, but it was certainly a majority. My math teacher was old and white and my English teacher was older and whiter -- she had, in fact, been the math teacher's elementary teacher. The science teacher was young and white and didn't know how the heart worked. I asked her once what kept the heart beating forever and she had to come back the next day and tell me it was electricity, which pretty much blew my mind at that age (I've always been slightly electrophobic after spending so much time at my grandmother's old house where the fridge on the back porch wasn't grounded fully and trying to open the metal door while barefoot always brought the wrong kind of tingle. Instead of fixing it, of course, my father would just tell me to wear shoes. That's the way the Martins work -- instead of fixing, we adapt.).My social studies teacher, though. He was a young black man. And tall. I think it was his height that always impressed me more than anything. He was also my first male teacher I had ever had. I did something once ... speaking to a girl or something ... he brought his ruler over, made me hold my hand out, palm up, and whacked me once. It did its job, I guess, because that's the only time a teacher ever hit me. Or I got better at by covert talking to girls strategies. No idea what I learned in his class, don't remember anything of the curriculum. But I remember his ties. He wore a tie every day -- probably the professional dress code -- and I wasn't used to ties as my father rarely wore one that I can recall. I can't say that Mr. Social Studies Teacher [hereafter MSST] had any impact on my perception of whiteness or non-whiteness. He was a good teacher, as I felt that all of them were (except the old English teacher; she should have retired long ago and everyone knew it). What's important here, is that MSST must have watched me and the other white privileged kids (and let's not lie to ourselves -- the white kids were in one advanced track, remember, and 95%+ of the black kids were not) with some kind of clairvoyant knowledge, knowing fully well what was happening here -- the school system institutionalized an "otherness" without our permission. They certainly had our parents' permission, of course, else the Board wouldn't have been all white, the teachers wouldn't have been majority white, the English taught to us wouldn't have been Standard [Southern] American English, the stories we read wouldn't have been about mostly white boys and girls, the women behind the lunch counter wouldn't have been 100% black, the social studies curriculum wouldn't have been designed to reinforce the holiness of the American experiment, etc. We didn't see it, but MSST must have. I would like to talk to him today.
Mills, in "White Ignorance," discusses how privileged groups remain ignorant of the situation of minority groups, and ironically how the minority group is actually more aware of the privileged group's character and nature:
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| Mills, Charles. "White ignorance." Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (2007): 11-38 (17). |
In other words, I lived in a bubble -- again, it was a white neighborhood, a white church, an all-white Boy Scout troop, a white-dominant class where we traveled from teacher to teacher as a cohort, only mixing [sic!] with other students at lunch. MSST was the only black person in my life to that point who had so much time to observe me and other white kids ... and I'm sure he learned lots. We, on the other hand, just went on our way, congregating with white kids even when we had a choice. I don't remember having black friends that year. It wasn't a choice. If I had chosen, my parents wouldn't have minded. It was just that we were never in a social group, even in an "integrated" school, where friendships would have been created.
Working Class, Poverty Class Arkansas
The next year we moved to Jamestown, Arkansas, population Martin family, and attended Desha ... school. The whole school district was on one small campus. My class had 21 students in it. Not classroom -- the entire freakin' grade. Everyone knew everyone's business, and everyone knew I was a Martin (family history; another story). In Texas, we have AAAAA schools. This was a BB -- two B -- school. And it was a BB school instead of a single B school because the gym had a bathroom -- some schools didn't (I'm serious). |
| Desha School, est 1949 (but those doors don't come from 1949). Now closed. |
Everyone in the entire school district in Desha, White County, Arkansas was white, but most were terribly poor. Farmer kids. Kids of ministers of small Protestant congregations. Kids from families whose parent/s were on-again, off-again employed. My father had received some promotions in Goodyear by this time and we had bought land from my grandmother on top of Jamestown Mountain so we were perhaps the most kids in school and the other kids knew it. I liked most of them, except for that one girl who slapped me in the face for no reason. I learned to spit like a man that year. Basketball and track were the only sports for miles, and the entire town came out to watch the boys' basketball team in the old gym (manufactured from old WWII materials) every Friday night. It was the only thing to do. At all those games, never once did I see a black athlete on the court -- home or visitors -- and never once did I see a black parent in the bleachers.
In the private schools, we may have been working class kids, but we weren't poor. In Grenada, there were certainly poor whites and blacks, but I don't remember seeing that. In Searcy, the same. But in Desha I was really aware for the first time that these kids were dirt poor. They couldn't come up to my house to hang out because often their family didn't have a car, or only one care. They wore the same jeans day after day. I remember the boy in the changing room with the holes in his underwear and the other boys laughing. I learned then that underwear had to do something with social acceptance somehow -- if something as mundane as underwear could shame a boy, what does that say about the importance of clothing -- as choice, as necessity -- to our fitting into the tribe? Whacked.
So, class privilege, but still segregated from anyone of color. Of course there were no Latinos there, and no Asian Americans either. Just whites. Just Protestants. Just Americans (I don't know if my nativity ever came up).
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| US Census Bureau |
This shows the percentage of blacks in Arkansas in 2013. White County and Independence County (Desha) are in the north east, but in the yellow, uncolored [sic] areas shown on this map. According to the Census Bureau, fewer than 10% of the counties' populations today are black. No surprises. Batesville, the largest town-calling-themselves-a-city is the second oldest city in the state and prides itself for the ancient homes with oak-lined streets, where the high school kids hang around the car wash on weekends except to make a quick trip to Dairy Queen, then back. Very Footloose kind of town. Importantly, though I didn't understand why people were poor, I was exposed to poverty close-up, more than I had been previously in Memphis, Grenada, or Searcy, though the poverty was certainly just as potent. Here, however, I was in the same classroom with poor peers, but because they were all white, I likely hadn't learned or associated color with class yet. It just "was."
Next time -- Texas ... and Race Becomes Real.
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