Where have all the racists gone?

I want to talk about our American racists. To start with I'd like to share some personal thoughts about the worlds most famous racists: The Nazis.

I have a strong personal connection with Germany. It includes family, friends, some time living there and a strong grasp of the language.

Jokingly and not so jokingly one could say that German post WWII life could be divided into two parts. Part one, nobody was a Nazi. Part two, nobody was a Stasi. Stasi being the East German secret police. If you have not seen the film, "The Lives of Others" I suggest it.

We all know about the Nazis, or at least we think we do as we get fed a cartoon version of Hitler and the government he led, not to mention the German people. Some is known about what life was like in the east during the division of Germany into a pro west and pro Russian part. Most of it is bad cars, bad food, scary police, the Berlin Wall and bad accents.

After World War Two there were trials at Nuremberg of course. Those were not German trials. As time went on, people downplayed their personal Nazi past, even as West Germany made it unconstitutional to be a fascist. Records were opened, collaborators were publicly outcast, but just being part of the system and holding fascist views was basically passed over.

If anything, it was worse for the Stasi and the members of the East German government mono party state. The records were better kept and they were not destroyed to any great measure. And of course the West is very happy to discuss openly the crimes of the East. Very few have been able to have been "just part of the system" and have lives in the new Germany if you were on the left. The current prime minister, Merkel, being a big exception. A whole generation of people lost jobs, lost standing and were not "unified". They were just taken over by the West.

A lot of German culture today is the result of the dirty business of the Nazi and Stasi governments dragged out into the light of day and examined. Not dragged out into the light of day are the actions of the West German governments over that time. If you are thinking of Nelson Mandela, Bishop Desmond Tutu and a truth and reconciliation commission, you are on the wrong track when thinking about German history. You are on the wrong track for US history too.

I was in Nicaragua when Helmut Schmidt was replaced by Helmut Kohl. My German friends saw a change in the West German policies towards Latin America. The Reagan Administration now had a new friend when it came to being friendly to the US installed Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, other military governments in the area, and the US policy against Nicaragua, Grenada and Cuba. After a while the aid funds for Nicaragua did not flow in the same way. In those days Argentina and Chile had death camps and a mutual political prisoner execution exchange. Other countries from Paraguay to Guatemala had US backed military dictatorships murdering their own peoples. But old Ronnie Reagan had a friend in Germany. Had one in England too.

I was in central West Germany when the boarders were opened. A week later I went to visit Berlin. That was a good time and it was a good thing, but not all was as portrayed in the US media.

In Berlin a woman approached me and my friend at a bar. She asked if we were from the West and was surprised, happily, that I was from the US. Then she said something that has never left me. "Don't leave" She did not want the US, France, The UK and the Russians to leave Berlin. Her thinking was that as the two countries merged, she was expecting the extreme right of each side of the German-German boarder to hook up and create an even larger skin-head neo-Nazi movement. I think she was only half right at most, but in no way all wrong. The East German government was very anti-Nazi as well as pro Russian. That the skin heads were making such gains in the East says a lot. It still does.

Unification came, the wall was torn down, the poor got priced out of downtown Berlin, and the Stasi files relating to spying on their own citizens are publicly available.

Of what the West German secret police and military intelligence did during the entire Cold War, not much was made public. There is no peace and reconciliation in Germany. The West won and the East lost. The East German government is held

up in total disgrace and there was never any movement from the West to do anything other than disassemble the East economically and politically. As part of the "freedom and reform" there was an office called the Truehand (often translated as Trust, and is Savings and Trust, but a look at the German lets you know that the True-Hand has the meaning of those who should-own) The Truehand took East German public property and gave it back to its "real" owners. This led to thousands who lived in public housing, which was most of East German housing, to find themselves tenants of the families from the West who had claimed the spoils. Almost half of the East German workforce was affected. In many cases, it went to the pro Nazi families that fled the Russians who came back as the True Owners. In all cases, two generations had built, rebuilt, maintained and expanded their collective national property only to find that they had not even a lien. If something belonged to the state, the people of that state were not considered stakeholders.

Remember the first part? Nobody was a Nazi? When Germany was defeated the two leaders of East and West Germany had two very different situations. Helmut Kohl was in a Nazi uniform. Erich Honecker was in a concentration camp for political prisoners. Not perhaps the description of those two men you heard on NPR?

The West Germans, now the united Federal Germans, have a couple of secret services. The name I like most is the "Constitutional Protection Service". Those files are not open. I can not go to an office and see if I as a US citizen living in Germany arriving directly from years in Nicaragua was under any kind of government surveillance. In the US we are supposed to have such rights under the freedom of information act, and Germans have similar rights. We all know about the limits of those rights as we have come to accept calling lines crossed out of a report by the Orwellian bureaucratic term "redacted".

It is not the German racists I am worried about. It is our own.

We in the USA had a much longer period of mistreatment of African Americans than South Africa. We did not have death camps as the Nazis did during their short lived government. (14 years?) We did have lynching during the entire Jim Crow era and afterwards. Before that it was just legal to kill a slave, so we do not know. Some were just left in the forest to die when they became too old to work.

It would be very hard to think of any other historical event that long and that cruel. Except the near total genocide and ethnic cleansing of the natives peoples, also committed by us.

We have been listening to our 50 years post I have a dream speech talk and I ask "Where have all the racists gone?"

There was no speaking of the truth. There was no reconciliation.

There were not evan any trials to speak of. If we look at the white mobs on the historical footage ask yourself "How many were arrested? How many tried? How many went to jail and for how long?" We all know the answer: Damn few.

There were all kinds of racists and they committed all kinds of crimes. There were thousands of lynchings, which is murder, and few trials. There were a whole number of property crimes against blacks, and a whole number of assaults of different kinds. There was official apartheid in the South and riots in the North and West agains blacks and Asians among others.

And now, nobody was a racist. Not if they can get away with claiming that it was not them. Think of that when you think of foreign affairs. Nobody a Nazi, nobody a Stasi, nobody a Kluxer.

It is kind of easy to point at the racists who fled to the Republican Party and found a new home there with new language to mask the goals. Old racism also found new justifications. We made what black people did more illegal than what white people did and suddenly black people committed more crimes.

Taking away all the industrial jobs? Nobody did that.

Mandatory sentencing? Oh, something had to be done about those horrible drugs? Funny how poor people and minorities that over represent among poor people were such criminals. Not the crooks of the securitized mortgages or the savings and loan scams before that.

Seems like there are some crimes that can keep getting committed and not punished. Racism is sort of like corporate crime. Nobody did it. That was then, this is now, we get beyond it. That is what our fellow Americans say when they are getting away with a crime: "We need to get beyond that, we can't live in the past" Could you imagine if I robbed a bank with a gun and tried to weasel out of responsibility that way? Could I try to tell the judge that that was history and we need to live in the present?

Yet we tell ourselves that about racism.

Sure is easy to have our black president and blame those republicans and folk with southern accents. Harder is to look into our own families, our own past and our own racism.

I'll try.

Nigger was a word my family used. My grandfathers both used it. My father used it at times even though he was trying to turn a new leaf since he was in Korea. At times he mocked a black southern accent and did jokes that involved black people not having much education. Most of the time he did not.

He told me when I was a kid, about the time that Martin Luther King Jr. was killed when I was 10 years old, that he had first heard MLK talk on armed forces radio in Korea. He told me that MLK had said that segregation was "immoral" . That meant a lot to my dad. He had been taught the opposite, in school and in church he had been taught that segregation was morality itself. The idea was the segregation led to peace and development for the two races and it was Christian.

For him to hear segregation called "immoral" was upsetting and more upsetting was the fact that MLK was right. This made him question something he had thought he knew all his life. In Korea my dad was a Lieutenant in the Marine Corps. He had black sergeants in his unit, under his command, who were much better soldiers than he would ever be, and he knew it.

Despite his background and his teachings, and at times his own thinking, my dad became anti-discriminiation. My mom's family had always been so. I still grew up hearing a lot of prejudiced things said about the races. Yet it was my father who pulled the chain of the local KKK in the Moose Lodge by inviting the commander of the local Marine Corps base to speak. The man had dark black skin and three general stars.

I try to do the same. Despite my own prejudices, I try to work for what I think is right. Mine are a little different than his, but it was from this family I first learned about black people.

Ours was and is a family divided.

One of our grandfathers invited us all to come to his 70th as a family reunion. I was coming from the farthest. My girlfriend Jojo was also invited. Before we flew down from Montreal, my grandmother called me and asked if Jojo was white. She was still invited if she was not, but warning would be helpful. Jojo is a white French Canadian who speak English better than I do. At some point she and I were invited to have dinner with my grandparents. I had told Jojo of the question if she was white, but not gone into much more of my family or US racism because I did not really know that much about it. Dinner was in front of a TV. The first locally elected mayor of Washington DC, (who I think was named Washington) was in some kind of trouble. My grandfather blasted out "they wanted home rule and now they got it" To explain he turned to Jojo and explained that the district had a "government of the niggers, by the niggers and for the niggers" The rest of the reunion we about equally well.

Moving to the US to the Bay Area was supposed to be moving to the most liberal part of the country. Maybe it is. Maybe not when it comes to race relations.

In the years that I have been here and been politically active, one constant has been

the historic mistreatment of black Americans. Chronic and endemic substandard eduction, equally substandard public services, discrimination in employment, especially harsh and discriminatory treatment by the police and courts, to name a few, are part and parcel of the fabric of life in Oakland California. As far as I can tell that runs across the whole country the same. There are many Oaklands out there.

In Oakland, things started out on a bad footing. Minorities were not allowed to live in the whole city, there was anti black and anti chinese movements, anti-black police officers were recruited. We may be home of the Black Panthers, but we are also part of why Black Panthers were needed.

And where did it go? in the 70's the police were on a campaign of making some kind of change. Today there are many police of color. Few of those police even live in this town.

In the US today a sociopath belief in personal greed is in, and solidarity between people is out.

In a world where caring for the poor, helping the sick, protecting the weak and educating the young is second to the market and the worship of funding it is hard to figure out what is hurting African Americans and Mexican American because of racism, or just because of anti social economic management and government decisions. What is clear is that none of it is easier for black folk.

It is easy to loose the racists in that greed and foolishness.

Especially when we never reconciled, never opened the records, never told all the truth. In Germany you can see the Stasi records, in Oakland we do not see the OPD records of the same periods. We are not looking over what happened, hearing the full truth and reconciling, even forgiving. The Oakland Police, the Alameda public services, the State of California all have at "that is then--this is now" public attitude. There are all kinds of black employees in local government where before there were none. So we are told to "get beyond that"

But when did we stop being unfair to people of color? How do we get beyond that if we never stop?

Are we beyond that? Go visit a black school. Go visit the Juvenal detention center. Go visit a job fair. Then we can talk about being "beyond that".

Barack Obama has a job, most Oakland youth of his color do not.

And nobody is racist?

My first job in the Bay Area was working for a machine shop in Albany. I started on nights. After a couple weeks I was moved to days. My job was on big equipment running machines large enough to put a car on. I was doing OK but this was something I had never done before. I asked questions before fucking things up. That is what a good machinist should do. Curtis, the night foreman had shown me some of the equipment and its quirks. Those were lathes, machines that spun metal and cut it round. But on days those machines all had people on them so I was moved to the mills where the metal was clamped down and cut flat. The top dog in that section was on vacation, so I worked his mill. Next to it was Ron working on a machine that did both the spinning, albeit slowly, and the milling. I turned to Ron to know where things were and how things were normally done. We chatted a bit. We had snorkeling in common. I told him that I had been on staff for a couple weeks on the second shift, or he knew.

Ron did not know me from Adam. He did not know a damn thing about my background, politics, family or anything other than what I looked like and my accent.

"How was working for the nigger on nights?"

He would not be the only one. Others would refer to the lunch trucks as being either the "spic" truck or the "chink" truck. Some of the helpers were biker types who were strident in their hate.

That place only had 2 other black employees that I saw over the next years. One was a very good welder who they gave the very worst job and laid off as soon as it was done. The other a so-so machinist with a really bad attitude that I used to give a ride home to, as I also did for one of the bikers when the court took his license away after yet another DUI. The floor boss explained to me that they did not hire blacks because if you fired them later you could be accused of discrimination. I told him that the answer to that was just not to discriminate and have open standards to judge employee performance. He stopped talking to me about that and most other things. We had a couple people working there who would not have kept their jobs if reviewed, but were part of the old crew. They also had a boss' son who really should not have been driving a forklift.

So where did the racist go?

Nowhere. We are right here. It is time to tell some truth. We need to reach out and reconcile.

And start to heal the many many wounds.