This being February, I wonder if most people I know have a fond memory of a mixed-race friendship, if not a current relationship they value. Is there such a friendship in your experience to give you pause?
As a teenager, my most intriguing traveling buddy was an unflappable 16-year old girl named Pat Hill from Harlem, New York City. I say unflappable because she was the only black student in a Catholic girl’s high school in the early 1960s and appeared no worse for wear. In the cafeteria, by the lockers, in the gym, in the classroom, Pat held herself with Zen-like poise, impressive for anyone navigating their teens.
Pat and I connected as fellow travelers because we dated guys attending a Catholic boy’s high school in Mount Vernon, New York, teammates on a varsity basketball team.
Makeup
During the basketball season, Pat and I met at the bus stop after school, hiking up our pleated uniform skirts well above the knees. As we headed for a game, we sat in the back of the lurching bus for a long ride, applying eye shadow, liner, mascara, blush and lipstick and coaxing our hair to heights that would never pass muster during school hours. A pretty girl of few words, Pat could issue a warning shot to any guy coming on to us by lifting her artfully curved eyebrow. Most guys knew enough to "read the brow" and back off.
Royalty
Once we arrived at the Mount Vernon high school, Pat and I shared another unique experience. We strode onto the basketball court like royalty, acknowledged with whispers and nods by those in the know about our elevated girlfriend status. They made way for us to climb up into the bleachers to sit among the other nobility, a.k.a. steady girlfriends of the team's players. There, as the announcement of players' names ricocheted from wall-mounted speakers, we clapped for our boyfriends in the possessive manner of steadies. We might as well have been on an American Bandstand field trip, minus Dick Clark.
As the clock ran out and the scoreboard racked up points or didn't, we stomped and clapped and cheered to the squeak of sneakers turning on the wooden court and referee whistles sending players to the foul line. The official cheer that sticks in my mind (though it may have been for another boyfriend and another team) was, “Hey, Red. Hey, Black, You look so good to me. Het, Hey, Hey, Red, Hey, Black…” Whatever the lusty cheer, our experience proved exhilarating.
Socializing
After a game, we’d wait outside the locker room for our boyfriends and all head to a pizza parlor. We squeezed into a booth where we nibbled at perilously stringy cheese slices and sipped our Pepsi's, being of that generation. We listened to post-game talk until the boyfriend-girlfriend connections sparked and put an end to locker room chatter. At that point, we all could have been strangers on the same bus.
On the one occasion I visited Pat’s home, I sensed her parents didn’t quite know what to make of me, so rare were such encounters between the races. It seemed we began with an awkward etiquette that precluded revealing real opinions. Revelation came over the course of an afternoon. Trust felt merited.
Leaving their beautifully decorated brownstone near the north end of Central Park, I wondered why anyone had the gall to look down on Harlem and all its black residents. The Hill family had achieved more than most of my neighbors. I figured such snobbery was borne of a lack of experience.
Half a Century Later
Over the years, I’ve treasured such friends of the road I met at a New York university when earning a masters and other friends in New York, California and Florida workplaces, particularly in Information Technology, where race is of no consequence behind the screen. In each case, we had the benefit of shared experiences on which to base a relationship.
Still, for the most part, I’ve lived in predictable real estate silos, some exurban and far removed from predominantly black neighborhoods. Church relationships rarely involved the mixing of races - save New Year’s Eve celebrations at Manhattan’s egalitarian Riverside Church. In my small Florida city, I attend exercise classes at the YMCA with women and men of all races, have sung in choruses with black fellow classical-music aficionados and connect with people of disparate neighborhoods when making phone calls during Democratic political campaigns. Progress, considering the divide existing between races since 1619 with the landing of the first slave ship.
Thinking It Through
In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, the author describes how humans are prone to make a decision "in the blink of an eye" about whether an encounter with a stranger is safe.
He reports that when white people in a study were shown numerous photos of accomplished black individuals such as Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, their attitudes toward blacks changed for the better, compared to the wariness they described after seeing numerous photos of blacks engaged in criminal activity. When all you notice produces a sense of wariness, the blink of an eye tells you to be on guard.
In The Body: A Guide for Occupants, by Bill Bryson, the author said racial differences can be narrowed down to "a sliver of epidermis."... human skin's reaction to sunlight. "Biologically, there is no such thing as race."
Thought: Those of us who've experienced mixed-race friendships - in school, sports, church, work, the military - can mark a personal Black History Month by recalling how exhilarating feels to be with a friend.
View from Here by Ed Morrisey