The depressing effects of stuttering were compounded by my isolation within the nuclear family. Mercifully my father was home only in the predawn hours and late at night. For the rest of the day we were spared his demons. Most of the time the household consisted of my mother, my younger brother and sister and me. It is in and through the family that white supremacy has some of its most psychologically devastating effects. The Black community has long struggled with color consciousness. Perhaps those concerns have lessened these days, but in my boyhood and adolescence they were alive and active. My mother was fair skinned with straight hair. People thought she was white. I dreaded her appearances in my classroom when the Black kids would tactlessly ask “How come your mother’s white?” This was always an acutely embarrassing moment, the presentation of an American racial contradiction impossible for a fourth grader to comprehend or explain. My brother and younger sister also looked white so similar questions were asked of us routinely. Among my older siblings my eldest brother was fair as well, and could easily be taken for white or Middle Eastern, not quite white but close enough to merit special treatment. My eldest sister was also fair with straight hair. Her coworkers thought her white until she made her identity known in no uncertain terms. The older sister closest to me in age was what we called “brown skinned”. But she too had straight hair, an asset at that time among Blacks and whites, added to which she had escaped what were called Negro features, a boon for anyone in America. Only my second oldest brother, sixteen when I was born was darker than me. There was no mistaking his racial identity. He was dark with ‘Negro’ hair, although it became distinctly wavier as he aged.
The older siblings were grown and out of the household, so I grew up the darkest person in the family group remaining at home. This was an unspoken oppression for me. I felt distinctly inferior to the rest, palpably different. How could I not, when Fun With Dick and Jane had reinforced the lessons of TV, billboards, Christmas and Thanksgiving. Everything beautiful, aesthetically pleasing and intelligent was white. My mother, brother and sister were white as far as I could tell. I was brown. Their hair was straight. Mine was Negroid, but with enough curl in it to give hope and spark my mother’s ambition. She spent a good deal of labor, when I was very young, trying to brush it to a sort of waviness with the help of Wildroot hair tonic, a practice I adopted once I was old enough to groom myself. On top of this, once we entered school my brother and sister far excelled me in academic pursuits. I was slow, laborious and hated school, an attitude I maintained until my doctoral studies. The lesson was right out of my first grade reader.
Although my mother forbid my brother to enter white homes where I was banned she did not forbid him to play with children whose parents shut me out. This was probably only fair. Why punish children for the sins of their parents. Equitable or not the lesson was not lost on me. He was wanted. I was not. I may have felt a good deal better had my parents shown less regard for other children and more for me in this particular respect. I say parents, but it was my mother really. My father was not involved in these day-to-day concerns. Mommy ruled the domestic roost, laying down and laws, and except on very rare occasions meeting out punishments which were mainly corporal and frequent. I am amazed when I watch old Leave it to Beaver TV episodes how sexist they are in this respect. June Cleaver is a nonentity who plays almost no role in her sons’ upbringing, referring all decisions to her husband Ward. Things were nearly reversed in our household, probably for the best.
I am certain neither my mother nor my younger siblings entertained the slightest notion of my discomfitures. As they read these words those still living may respond to my testimony with disbelief. There may have been some awareness bred by personal experience among my older siblings. If so they never betrayed it. My eldest brother was an outspoken critic of the color caste, yet he showed no consciousness of how his own fair complexion and devastatingly good looks had advantaged him, particularly with women of all races. I often wonder whether his later adoption of a messianic posture was related to a sense of specialness rooted in his physical appearance.
Whatever anyone else did or didn’t feel, whatever they assumed about my sense of self, whatever they knew or pretended not to know, for as long as I lived in that family I lived as an outsider, pretending to fit in just as I did in the outside world. Things were not helped by my brother and sister laughing at my stuttering with my mother occasionally joining in. Or their disparagement of my intellectual abilities. My father was fond of ridiculing my younger brother from time to time, accusing him of having no artistic talent and a “big head”, presumably compared to his long narrow one, calling him a “little Jew” because he saved his money conscientiously preparing even then for college. In defense my mother normally replied, with a sort of guttural smirk, “At least he doesn’t get bad grades like Ronald.” On these occasions she would paint me as shiftless and irresponsible at the ripe old age of eight, compared to my brother’s uprightness. This delighted my brother and no doubt discomfited my father, but the effect on me was devastating. It was one more indication of how insufficient I was compared to the rest. Not only was the comparison exceedingly harmful, but the fact it was made suggested a hierarchy of valued children. He could be elevated at my expense because he was intrinsically worth more than I was. Whether the assault was conscious or not it had a lasting and devaluing effect on me. Yet years later the same woman chided her neighbor for comparing her youngest son’s poor grades with his brother’s academic brilliance. Nor was I complimented when she frequently referred to me when angry as “a big ape”, but never used that phrase to my brother. I recall the mingled feeling of rage and shame. It was an extraordinarily hurtful epitaph. I lived with a burning sense of the injustice of my situation without any idea of how I might change it. In fact, I did not think it could possibly be changed and often thought of running away but that option seemed to offer no real resolution and entailed a lot of discomfort, misery and even danger. As you may gather in those days I had very little resolution. Sometimes, I thought if only I could make my case to an objective outside authority they’d understand and rectify my situation. The absurdity of this wish was not apparent to me at the time. Nearly all authorities were white. They would have rejected my complaint with alacrity and a good deal of scolding. Any possible Black authority, such as a minister, would have reinforced parental authority and condemned my waywardness. Few Black adults would have seen anything remiss in my parents’ behavior. Far from it, they would have accused me of ingratitude towards parents who were putting a roof over my head and giving me what my father liked to call “a good foundation.” Black culture was as full of denial as my family and tended to reduce every problem to the bottom line.
I was left to struggle on my own. What puzzled my young mind was how my mother could be quite sensitive to the woundings of race, and was what one might call a race conscious Black person, while she could become self-deceiving when it came to the oppressions of color. This gave me great insight into how white people are able to willfully unknow so much when it comes to white privilege. She was distinctly unsympathetic whenever her eldest sister, the only dark child among her fair skinned white looking sisters, complained of her childhood trauma. She seemed not to understand the painful woundings my aunt had sustained when her entirely white looking mother with little or no Black ancestry, would never take her out in public, preferring to be seen with my mother. She focused instead on her own innocence as a child rather than admit the privileged position she enjoyed at the expense and pain of her darker sister. Among themselves the other sisters would ridicule my aunt, having judged, without much of a hearing as far as I could determine, that “she ought to get over it.” This vintage American reaction, self defensively intensified within the Black community where strength and self-reliance are primeval virtues, reminded me of how Irish and Italians reject Black demands for compensation by bragging of their own immigrant ancestral sufferings and their triumphs despite discrimination. My aunt was fond of me because I was darker. I understood how she felt but resented the special attention she paid me because it felt like when mother used me to get at my father. There seemed no escaping race in one form or another, even children were not immune to the transparent machination of adults.
I never mentioned any of this as a child. How could I? I loved my mother and had great sympathy for her because she was mistreated by my father and lived a frustrated life. For all of her woundings she was my North Star, a source of unquestioned stability and self-worth. Though never affectionate she could be supportive by her lights. When my dog died after a horrible bout of distemper and meningitis she slept in my bed all night. Yet she had blamed me for the dog’s illness in the first place though she was unable to explain what I had done wrong. I felt guilty nonetheless. Just as I remained deeply distraught for weeks when she called me a “disgrace to the family” when I was falsely accused of trying to steal a book at the elementary school book fair. The condemnation resonated powerfully with my already well entrenched feelings of inferiority as a ‘colored’ boy. Because the whole world suspected I was always on the verge of some malfeasance, it was hard not to believe they must be right. Despite my own knowledge of my undoubted innocence, I could not escape a profound sense of unworthiness. Once again merely being who I was provoked condemnation. Those things stay with a child. The book fair incident has remained with me for over six decades. No doubt my mother was driven by the notion of respectability hammered into her by her parents, a sense of propriety meant to arm colored people for life in a world that cast them as worthless. One must not drag the family or the race down by acting like a negro. In her eyes, that is what I had done. I had acted like a common lower-case negro. The lessons were too well ingrained for her to recognize how harmfully they were distorting her interaction with her own child or to regard him as an individual worthy of defense against a false charge, no matter the consequence. The imputation of misconduct was equivalent to a guilty verdict. If I had been arrested for stealing I would have been cast into the outer darkness as a lost soul. It is ironic, but in respect of race Blacks and whites are very much alike, each living within the narrowness of a horizon they jointly conspire in keeping closed.
There was in all of us an overwhelming tendency to self-deceit where it came to the woundings we experienced at the hands of white society and by my parents’ perpetual warfare. The prevailing family ethos was only weak and ungrateful people dwelt on problems. A lifetime of illusion was preferred to paying serious attention to one’s own injuries. This was called being strong. “She never complains” was the highest tribute one could pay to someone dying of an incurable illness or struggling with honest poverty. It made no sense to me. What was the advantage of silently enduring wracking pain that would only end with death, or hiding the depressing effects of one’s destitution? The cult of not complaining is a way of deflecting consciousness from the inequity of the system we live beneath, while masking this self-deceit as stoic heroism performed in the face of adversity. The noncomplainant is celebrated as a model person, an exemplar who refuses to impose their suffering on others, and thereby forcing them to face unpleasantness whose causes would be difficult and even risky to remove. These Anti-Jobs affirm our fearful wish to be predetermined by something more powerful than ourselves, something we can accede to, bow down to and serve even if it is adversity and disease.
My eldest brother who’d been drafted into the Korean War as a very young man was the rare example: a person who paid serious attention to the psychological wounding of race, family and America, a Job who loudly complained when and where it was necessary. His breach of faith with the phalanx of silence was dangerous because it threatened the family’s collective affirmation of the discontents of life as if they were the Given Circumstances of a play. He was a liberating voice articulating concerns most of us recognize as crucial today but which gained him the reputation of a troublemaking near-do-well back then. He interpreted my father’s violence as a reaction to the frustrations of American racism and race-bred self-hatred. It would, he argued, have a negative impact on the younger children. He opposed our going to church and Sunday school where we were being brainwashed and taught to feel guilty about normal sexual urges and pleasure of any kind, and he was right. Later, in the sixties, he wore a kind of Afro hairdo and encouraged me to do the same. Like Malcolm X he preached Black liberation by any means necessary. All of this was seen by most of the family as evidence of a problematic character. If he did suffer some congenital flaw, his condition was not regarded sympathetically as a problem we should help him resolve by love and nurture. He became my mother’s favorite cautionary tale for what to avoid, the model of an irresponsible and undisciplined person. I was often compared to him in these terms, an analogy I spent years disproving. Worst of all he was painted as weak, one of the most damning accusations in my family. In this we were quite typical of colored people. The idolization of strength, specifically the ability to overcome obstacles to achieve one’s goals, or merely to survive is a national cult. America’s folk heroes epitomize this value. George Washington, Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson are remembered for their toughness, relentless determination and physical stamina, not for habits of compassion, charity or intellect. The national fixation on toughness seems natural to Americans. Isn’t it strength that allows an individual to keep going despite difficult circumstances, to rise above unfairness, even injustice to build a fulfilling life? We heard a lot in the sixties of the need for strong Black men. We hear today of the need for strong Black women. On the face of it there seems little to object to. On the contrary it appears laudable to praise models of strength. After all, Black people had to be strong to survive slavery and Jim Crow. They must be strong today to overcome the injustices and barriers in their way. Weak people fall by the wayside and cause problems for their families, friends and communities. Strong people hold things together and put their back to the wheel of progress.
The problem is, all too often, the strength we worship comes at the expense of sensitivity to the manifold injuries we suffer through life. When strength obscures or trivializes those injuries in order to rise above them we’re apt to forget the injustice of the injury itself, and to regard those who succumb to them or even to take them seriously as weak. As a nation we seem to focus more on the exceptional individual rising above oppressive circumstances than on the circumstances themselves. This is neither coincidence nor irony but cause and effect. Focusing on the strong reduces systemic political-economic problems to matters individuals should address on their own without involving society. For the so-called strong this can be an effective path to success. But for Black people as a whole and for the majority of Americans the mythology of strength is self-defeating. It creates a feeling of inadequacy and guilt in those who are not ‘strong’ and frustrates the mobilization of massive popular movements for radically progressive social change. This is one of the reasons Americans are terrified by the word socialism, although the overwhelming majority of them would fare far better under a socialist political economy. Not only do they fear the bogeyman of communist tyranny that has been conflated with socialism for propagandistic purposes, but their deeper emotional reaction is the dread that any collectivist political economic system would drain their individual strength. They fear socialism’s alleged ability to undermine moral fiber. We’ve been socialized, as children, through marbles, chestnuts, hide and seek, to regard income and wealth inequality as the rules of the game, their acceptance as marks of mature, well-adjusted and strong characters, who get along and ‘move on’ rather than dwell on unpleasantness.
My parents and siblings with one or two exceptions adhered to this national mythology. No doubt, if I’d voiced my feelings of injustice and repression they would have elicited anger, outrage and derision. So, I kept my humiliations to myself and lived as a secret stranger in that household. Where early on the family group had facilitated my search for possibilities of myself and encouraged their development, it now frustrated and forbid that expedition. Even now I cannot help feeling as if I am betraying something by speaking truthfully. Such is the extraordinary power of white supremacy, and the national culture of self repression, that it can reach into the privacy of family life, distort and pervert a child’s developing sense of identity and leave the adult defenseless against unmerited guilt. Such is our complicity that we willfully ignore the signs of oppression in our own children, transmuting them, self protectively into character flaws. Perhaps it would have been too much for my parents to recognize behavior they characterized as irresponsible and wayward as reactions to the oppressions of race, in as well as outside of the home. To do so would have questioned the identities they lived in, which, despite their severely narrowing effects, allowed them to raise a family. They were nothing if not strong.
Like many children, I blamed and punished myself for feeling weak and inadequate. Model building was one of my great passions, always pursued at the risk of being thought impractical and self-indulgent like the eldest brother. He had been a master model airplane builder as a child and was pointed to as the archetype of failure. But modeling was an activity uniting creativity with a kind of practicality. It took patience, skill and determination to build a successful balsa airplane that actually flew. Mine never flew particularly well. As I got older I turned to model ships. For Christmas of my fifteenth year I received a model kit of the British clipper ship Thermopylae. It was the most complex model I’d attempted, involving the antiquing of the hull in stages over several days and threading standing and running rigging through tiny blocks and tackles with a pair of tweezers. It took a month to complete the project. What I had then was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship which I proudly displayed on the mantle over the fireplace. Some weeks later I was once again the butt of jokes and derision about my artistic, allegedly “happy go lucky” temperament which brought me to tears behind closed doors. In anger and humiliation I smashed my beautiful ship to pieces. It was not the first time I’d responded this way. There was a cutting board made for my mother in woodshop and an earlier model airplane destroyed for similar reasons. I was possessed by a sense of self-loathing I was too immature and too repressed to understand. I lashed out, not at my human provocateurs, who I was constitutionally incapable of confronting, even if I could have understood what was happening to me, but at myself through my own creations. There seemed something at once squalid and treacherous about my feelings. I had been taught not to feel sorry for myself but I could not help doing so and often secretly cried from some deep wounding I could not entirely identify, while the sense that the little family were somehow to blame created a deep feeling of guilt. I knew they could not help looking like and being who they were. I felt sorry for them, because they too seemed out of place, awkward and deficient in their own ways. I had no idea about anything like emotional honesty and openness. We were trained to believe emotions were dangerous demons to be controlled at all costs, usually at the price of our emotional wellbeing. Talking about emotions empowered their deviousness so I kept doubly quiet. None of us had any sense of the liberating power of open communication or the healing effects of coming to grips with truth.
In consequence, the family became a form of self-incarceration rather than the liberating community it could have been. By ignoring the unspoken lies supporting the illusion of harmony we foreclosed the possibility of authentic emotional engagement with one another and imprisoned ourselves within ourselves. Then we concealed our dishonesty behind the mask of familial love and piety. Any attempt to penetrate behind that façade provoked instant condemnation as a disrespectful, selfish, ungrateful and disloyal child. My eldest brother rose to the challenge and earned for his heroic efforts the stigma of being an irresponsible whiner, persistently put before me as the example to be avoided. The structural and emotional situation left no avenue for the honest expression of one’s emotional state. My parents were rather austere authority figures whose sense of personal dignity seemed more important than the emotional stability of their children. All compromise was on our side. They were never granted the blessing of being compelled to explain, an act that could have freed them from the iron restrictions they labored within while they tore each other apart trying to get free of influences they denied existed. It seemed ironic that my father, who frequently called on God for an accounting of his sins, never called on us to discover his own. My parents’ sins were common to all of us in this land of illusions, the refusal to question the complacent assumptions they based their lives on, and the typical American aggressively hostile rejection of any attempt to get them to do so. It was an attitude and conviction they learned at the hands of their parents and grandparents. Their particular guilt lay in defending what they had received as if it came from the hand of God. I could never imagine entering into any kind of dialog with them. We never did. The example of my eldest brother lay heavily over my youth, as a chastisement, a cautionary tale and a warning.
This is what American families, I cannot speak of any other, inflict upon their loving members. One learns to avoid questions to get along. One ceases to object and to ignore contradictions, for it is apparent that to take exception cannot be limited to the case in point. It will uncover, inescapably, fundamental disagreements and divergences, so one keeps quiet and accedes. With stronger willed and aggressively defensive people one’s acquiescence is marked. To them we appear of one mind, which makes future objections all the more disruptive, as if all along you’ve baited them towards some final, deceitful trap. One gives up trying and adopts the self-serving lie that they’re far older and more permanently fixed than anyone ever is. Eventually the claustrophobic absence of authentic communication becomes insuperable. One simply stops talking and accepts whatever explanation for disengagement they choose to select.
In this domestic environment, which really is America in miniature, all that was left to blame was myself. The art and talent, the sensitivity to light and line, the rapture of creation that produced those models was evidence of what was wrong with me. Smashing my beautiful ship was a severe self-punishment for being what I was. Just as I had stopped farming for similar reasons, I now abruptly stopped model building. I stopped painting. I stopped writing too, closing off my most immediate routes to the wilderness so vital to my survival. When you come right down to it, I stopped myself. It was a kind of living suicide, in which I entombed myself in a sepulcher of my own creating, every bit as life denying as those in the colonial cemetery that had depressed me, emerging just long enough to minimally function before returning like the living dead to my native soil.
Photography Credit: Jason Rice (detail)
Ronald Richardson is an associate professor of History at Boston University where he was hired in 2000 to rebuild the African American Studies Program which he succeeded in doing, and ran the program for eight and half years. He is trained in European cultural intellectual history, political theory and comparative global history. Currently he teaches The History of Racial Thought, Modern Japanese History, Blacks and Asians: Encounters Through Time and Space, and the Theater of History, a workshop in using history as source for theater and film scripts.
