Growing Up At Ground Zero of American Apartheid

First, some historical and cultural context.

I was born in Hampton, Virginia, in 1970. My family—both sides, mother’s and father’s—had migrated there, with thousands of others, from eastern North Carolina (Ahoskie, Windsor, and other parts of Bertie County, one of the poorest places in the state, and all along the western shores of the Chowan River) to Tidewater, or Hampton Roads, as it is interchangeably known, in southeastern Virginia in the early part of the 20th century.

They sought a better, more comfortable life and employment opportunities in and around what would later be referred to, by President Eisenhower, as the military industrial complex. We are Scotch-Irish and English, with surnames like Bottoms, Cowan, Lowe, and Carmines and a supposed North American arrival date of 1755 (departing Liverpool?), but with plenty unknown about our background. An aspect of American origins and identities is that they are sometimes only partially built on an edifice of sturdy facts or reasonable and nonexpedient interpretations. The world, in human terms, becomes the set of stories you believe about the world.

I awoke into consciousness—into cognition and retrievable memory-making—as a child during the time of busing and school integration in the mid- to late 1970s, and my mother, for some of that time, was a public school bus driver. She was one of only several Southern white people whom I had never heard say something negative about a person solely because of the color of their skin. Like many women at that time and from the white working class, she finished high school and assumed she would be a secretary, or, possibly, if she was willing to do a bit more schooling, a nurse or a teacher. She was intuitively smart and had a huge emotional intelligence and compassion, particularly toward children. She took me with her on the bus most days when I was a little boy. I had a firsthand view of one of the outcomes of civil rights in action without understanding any of it.

From the ages of five to ten, the time of the memory-based stories I present in what follows, I, of course, knew nothing of Southern race relations, or of how we arrived at the tense, binary racial situation I inhabited, or why. I was a product of history, as we all are.

The grim absurdity and devastation of American racism, the underlying white supremacist history and values and beliefs and actions and laws in the South and beyond, have been held in place by fantasies and by fear. “Racism is taught in our society,” popular writer Alex Haley famously wrote, “it is not automatic. It is learned behavior toward persons with dissimilar physical characteristics.” To paraphrase Barack Obama paraphrasing Nelson Mandela, children are not born racist. Yet an Australian ethnographer and cultural studies scholar presented me with a question not long ago that strikes me as almost a Zen koan: Why is organic non-racism so hard to find in the world?

In my American world, white people, even economically insecure and working-class white people without clear and easy access to power, have benefitted from racism—that is just a large-scale systematic and historical fact in regard to housing, schooling, employment, structures of wealth acquisition, and our legal system. I also think it has been damaging in some deep ways, just as holding onto a set of lies and illusions over time can bring about spiritual suffering and mental illness, setting forth, to borrow a phrase from Antonio Gramsci, “a great variety of morbid symptoms.” I believe pursuing truth is, or should be, a kind of North Star of human progress, and to ensconce yourself, partially or completely, in delusion, or pettiness, or meanness, or cruelty, or indecency, or unethical or immoral behavior, is a sure way to make yourself lost and sick, and of course the same holds true on the larger scales of communities, regions, and countries.

It is statistically true that most Americans—across races and ethnicities—don’t know that after the Civil War, after the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 (citizenship rights) and 1875 (equal treatment in regard to “public accommodations”), after the 13th Amendment (against “slavery and involuntary servitude”) and 14th Amendment (equal protection under the law) and 15th Amendment (voting rights) to the United States Constitution, the hope during Reconstruction of promised equal rights for black citizens—former slaves and their offspring—was shown to be empty words and toothless laws only.

In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the United States legalized “separate but equal” facilities and services, which was separate and obviously catastrophically unequal, legally stripping African Americans of many rights and cementing the social and cultural condition of privilege and institutionalized racial supremacy for one group and racial subjugation for another, which I only began to learn about, in any specific historical sense, in my early twenties by reading W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, a work given to me in college, where I studied English literature and journalism, by a white travel writer, memoirist, and literary journalist. That book shook me ethically, morally, and spiritually. One aspect of my privilege was that I didn’t need to know my country and region’s history because it had never been weaponized against me; it had, in fact, been weaponized to protect me.

The United States was built by people of many different backgrounds. The land was colonized beginning in the early 17th century and then conceptualized in the late 1700s as a nation by white, male Europeans on Enlightenment notions of freedom and liberty, of Christian morality, of cleansing through punishment, and of redemption as both possible and sought. Most Americans quickly condemn, as we should, crimes against humanity in other parts of the world (Germany, Italy, Russia, South Africa, Uganda, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan, Syria, etc.). Yet it is hard, even now, to fully acknowledge our nation-state’s own deeds. (The state of Texas—only one example of “white washing” as common practice—doctored its required high school history textbooks, in 2015, to suggest that slaves were “workers” remembered fondly by land owners for their songs and folk tales.)

America as a nation, for some time, has been able to say, at least speak the words, that race is a wound in the American psyche. We can acknowledge that. Even conservative whites in the South—and I know many—can accept Frederick Douglass’s and John Brown’s idea that slavery is America’s “original sin.” The trouble is with directness, clarity. Some words are like harshly revealing mirrors held too close to the face.

For instance, we relegate to a distant, detached past that the white Supreme Court of the United States, in the Dred Scott ruling of March 6th, 1857, written by Justice Taney, regarded black people as an inferior and subordinate class of beings; or that black people were inspected for purchase like farm animals; or that black people were regarded as three-fifths of a human and two-fifths of a beast; or that for centuries a white man killing a black man registered, among most otherwise law-abiding whites, as the moral equivalent of killing a horse or a good farm dog; or that black women and babies were used, regularly, as money and credit in exchanges among whites (including our country’s leaders); or that hanging a black person in the first half of the 20th century (reliable statistics on U.S. lynchings exceed 4,000) was an event not so different in kind and practice than people now gathering around a big-screen TV to cheer on someone pummeling someone else in the Ultimate Fighting Championships on pay-per-view. I remember reading a notice in the pre–Civil War archives of a Richmond, Virginia, paper for a missing slave who could be identified by the thick scar tissue around his wrists and ankles from shackles.

The above, along with contemporary realities like de facto educational segregation, unequal criminal sentencing among black people and white people for the same charges, lopsided statistics on police stops and shootings, and coordinated red state efforts at voter suppression, are unpleasant facts, sickening facts, causational facts haunting present and often passively constructed statistics on poverty, education, wealth, family and community stress and breakdown, incarceration, health, and mortality. White people in America, white people in my South, seem to have perfected complex social psychological methods that deflect our attention from facing our relationship to these facts every second of every day. I think of it sometimes as an impressive magic trick. I’m still trying to figure out and describe how it works.

I went through 12 years of public education at ground zero of American slavery and lived inside its deformed and deforming effects and magical thinking and mystifications and white self-protective propaganda without ever—not once—hearing about civil rights or hearing the phrase “Jim Crow” inside a school building.

If, as a boy in Tidewater, Virginia, I could have sifted through the layers of time beneath my feet, I would have found that on my patch of land, my place, my home, my secular and spiritual site of comfort, Plessy v. Ferguson, among a thousand other laws and policies and practices and beliefs and assumptions and attitudes, helped calcify injustice and American apartheid, and then normalized it to such an extent that white boys like me could walk through this world of injustice with smiles on our faces, accepting what had been wrought without pangs of conscience or perhaps even notice.

I didn’t know about the Gray Commission, formed by Governor Stanley in 1954 to attempt to insure integration was not enacted in Virginia after the Brown v. Board verdict, which led to the Stanley Plan, a white supremacist set of statutes meant to keep African Americans out of white schools and also curb the legal influence of the Virginia NAACP.

I didn’t know about Massive Resistance, the “plan” and all-out assault through the courts on equal rights proposed and promoted by Virginia Senator Harry Byrd.

I didn’t know about the power of the KKK in Virginia, especially in the first half of the 20th century, or about an African American church bombed in Richmond in 1966.

I didn’t know about the Southern Manifesto, signed by 101 politicians, mostly Southern Democrats, in 1956, not long before Southern Democrats began moving away from the Democratic Party for the Republican Party because of civil rights and later the nomination of a Northern Catholic named John Kennedy for president.

I didn’t know about George Wallace, whose independent platform for president in 1968 was essentially racism against black people, or about Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to cynically divide anxious whites (my family and community) from blacks to gain power and then use that power not to help those working-class whites but to try to cut their social “safety net” programs brought about in the New Deal (a communist idea, according to many newspaper columnists) and further disenfranchise them (the old “poor whites voting against their own interests,” which Du Bois pointed out in the 1930s) while deflecting their legitimate resentments back toward nonwhites who were, so the political story went, taking their resources and ruining their country, a meme that, of course, continues to play out to this day and has spawned complex networks of fact twisting, mendacity, epidemic delusion, deeply unethical and powerful media and messaging, and an explicitly and vocally and proudly racist presidency.

I didn’t know about the first go-around of the “silent majority” and “America First,” the latter made famous before World War II by anti-Semite and fascist sympathizer Charles Lindbergh and which was a reference to protectionism and also an America where white, Christian, male cultural, social, and political power was total and righteous and ordained by God, a version of God, in my view (and I grew up Methodist), twisted into a convenient political shape and projected out of human need and self-referentiality.

This was the context, the backdrop, of my life as a white kid who lived in a little brick house in Hampton, Virginia, and whose mom, who really needed the money, drove a bus full of African American kids from a poor neighborhood to a once all-white school during the time of busing.

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Excerpt adapted from Lowest White Boy. Used with the permission of the publisher, West Virginia University Press. Copyright © 2019 by Greg Bottoms.