You've Got to Be Taught

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught.

                                                --Lt. Joe Cable, South Pacific

I learned to be a racist when I was eight years old.

When I was a kid, the Oakland A’s were everything.  I could not remember a time when they weren’t winning the World Series.  I could rattle off the names of every player in every position…Sal Bando, Campy Campaneris, Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, Billy North, Dick Green, Gene Tenace.   I don’t think I understood the concept of replay back then, so in my mind Reggie Jackson was always hitting home runs, and Joe Rudi was always robbing them from other players with spectacular leaping catches at the wall.  Always. 

My best friend Vincie and I would play baseball together with a beat-up wooden bat and a tennis ball.  We would be the A’s, competing against an invisible Other Team.  The Other Team didn’t have a name, because in our minds, no other team really mattered.  The A’s would always crush the Other Team with massive moon-shots to left field and brilliant defense.  I can say with all modesty that Vincie and I played dozens, perhaps hundreds of games, and finished our careers undefeated.

The way we saw it, the only other thing happening in the baseball world at that time had to do with some guy named Hank Aaron.  Even though Hank Aaron was not an Athletic (it wasn’t until I was much older that I figured out that the “A” in A’s actually stood for something) Vincie and I were aware of him, because at the start of the season of ’74, Hank Aaron was one home run shy of the all-time record.  The excitement in the country had reached flood stage, overflowed its banks, and inundated every corner of the country before finally trickling through the gutters of Chickie Street where I grew up. 

I remember talking about Hank Aaron with Vincie.  I expected him to mirror the enthusiasm I had observed in my older brothers and their friends, but he didn’t.

“My dad doesn’t want it to happen,” he said.  “He doesn’t want a (black man) to break a white man’s record.”

I don’t know how, but I knew the word he used for “black man” was a very bad word.  Yet here was my best friend throwing it out casually, like a warm-up toss before a baseball game.  It never occurred to me that the record Hank Aaron was about to break had been set by another man.  Babe Ruth was a pudgy guy with a face that looked like a depressed Gerber baby, but the most important fact about him in Vincie’s mind, other than that he could hit home runs, was that he was white.  A lesson had been planted in my young heart, a lesson that said a black man was not worthy of a white man’s record.  That many of our Oakland A’s heroes--heroes we not only admired but often pretended to be--were black, was an irony that was lost on both of us. 

Of course, Hank Aaron paid no attention to Vincie’s dad.  He first tied the record, then, on April 8, 1974, broke it.  I remember watching it happen at my brothers’ friend’s house.  As the ball sailed over the wall and one fan tried to snare the priceless sphere with a fishing net, the room erupted in cheers.  I alone remained silent, conflicted. 

Fortunately for me, and unlike Vincie and Lieutenant Cable, I grew up in a home where seeds like that failed to thrive.  The word Vincie had used was a word I would never hear in my house.  I never heard my father say a disparaging comment about someone simply because of the color of their skin, and I never heard him tell a racist joke. 

But it wasn’t just the things my father didn’t do.  My sister, eight months older than me, was adopted.  My mother and father say they saw her picture--an infant with sad, almond-shaped eyes, her chubby face framed by a black pixie cut--and immediately fell in love.  They knew in an instant that this little girl from a Hong Kong orphanage was their daughter.  When I was a young teen, they told me that extended family protested, asking “isn’t there a white baby you can adopt?” My mom and dad ignored them.

Another lesson came when I was in high school and sang bass in the choir’s barber shop quartet.  I was surprised to learn that my reserved, mechanical engineer dad sang baritone in one when he was a young man.  He said he had even considered joining a national society of barbershop singers, but rejected the idea after he learned they would not allow black people into their organization.  He didn’t say it boastfully.  He didn’t point out that he made this little stand several years before the Civil Rights movement started to gain national attention.  He just said it, because it was true.  These are lessons that were also planted deep in my heart; finding purchase, taking root, and crowding out the one placed there by my best friend in 1974.

While I am grateful to have had parents who would teach me these lessons, I am also uncomfortable with how easily my eight-year-old heart was molded by a friend’s offhand remark.  While racism appalls me now, I must also recognize that I once started on that path, even if I never got too far past the trailhead.  I realize that even now, seeds of arrogance and ignorance and fear are constantly being sown, and I have a responsibility to be vigilant, to weed out evil and lies, and nurture charity and truth.

Bigotry has “got to be carefully taught” as Joe Cable self-loathingly sings.  The good news is that tolerance, respect and compassion can also be taught.  We, as adults, need to pass those lessons down to the next generation.  We need more people like my dad.

I, for one, choose to be one of them.