Race, racism, how you act, how you are expected to act, peer pressure, how you dealt with it. More Ramblings from Randy.

I was raised in my youngest years, from birth to eight in Grand Rapids, Michigan. My parents divorced when I was five in 1960. No big deal as it was the newest rage back then. I won't bore you with a lot of the details that most of you already know, because this is an article about race and the absurdity of racism sometimes. My parents were not racists (both of them have passed away, my father more then 17 years ago a few days before Thanksgiving at 63 and my mother a bit more then a year ago on New Years Eve at 80). When they divorced I was only five and had been exposed to only other White people (and no racism), because that was my family and the neighborhoods we lived in. I saw my father every other Sunday with my three sisters with his new wife and her two sisters who I loved almost instantly (the sisters, my step-mother was or distant and none of them were racist, but again in a totally White environment).

When I was six my mother entered into a lesbian relationship with a wonderful, but like mom a real party fun, hell raiser woman named Janice. All of us kids loved her. Of course since none of us understood sex, so it wasn't until I became an adult and asked mom about it that I was sure that her and Janice were lovers. Fine with me as I have no bigotries toward that at all and am just sorry that they had to hide it back then and couldn't have become more open and maybe have even become a full time couple. Again, no racism. However then my mother became involved with someone who can only be described as evil. On parole for murder at the age of about 24 after beating a guard to death with a pipe in a Juvenile Home at the age of 16, he turned 17 in Michigan Maximum Security Prison in Jackson, which at the time was the largest walled prison in the world. A real zoo. He was an extreme racist. It was the very first time I was exposed to the idea that some people thought that there was a difference between White people and Black people. Of course I still didn't know any Black people, but Jerry and his fellow prison White Supremacist biker types sure talked about them often, when they were playing cards and drinking or listening to music and shooting heroin or robbing liquor stores or gas stations or wherever or stealing cars to buy more booze or heroin. I don't believe that I ever saw one of his friends without a handgun. When they would play poker all night (unless one went broke and needed money) and drink, they would set their guns down, each next to their own open bottle so they would be more comfortable. Every time Jerry left our apartment he had one. Just in case he needed money or to kill nigger he used to joke. I didn't get it.

Anyway after that nightmare I moved out to the White countryside with my father and Step-mother, with my three sisters and two step-sisters. I went to a one room school house (K-12 in one room with one teacher (in fact my sister Sandy and I were the entire 2nd and then part of 3rd grade (she is a year younger but I had failed 2nd grade because I was out of school sick most of the year and for other personal reasons) until we were joined by a twin brother and sister named Randy and Candice who was called Candy. So for the next three years our entire class was Randy, Randy, Candy and Sandy). Then a completely White school in Hopkins for 6th and part of 7th and then my world changed in an eye opening way I never even saw coming.

I moved to Battle Creek with my mother and her new husband (a dweeb) All of a sudden I was not only around Black kids, I was integrated in a school that was about half Black! I not only had even never known any Black people in my life, I had never known any other Black kids, which meant that I had never had any interaction with any! I was incredibly confused! I didn't have any idea at all of how I was supposed to understand or deal with this and there was no one in my life to give me any help or guidance! I felt like I had suddenly been tossed into another planet and told, deal with it! I went to the school guidance counselors and the looked at me like I was an idiot when I asked them what I was supposed to do to fit in. I talked to teachers, but they were too busy just being happy to get through the day with as few inter-racial fights as possibile (which I REALLY didn't understand) to answer an of what I needed to know. All of a sudden I was faced with another race that I knew not a single thing about. A culture that I didn't understand and a lot of other White kids who expected me to reject this different race, to shun them and everything about them, in order to be accepted by the White kids who were from my neighborhood, but they couldn't even tell me why? It became clear very quickly that they didn't have any idea themselves of why I was supposed to hate these Black people that I didn't even know and had never even been exposed to before! None of it made any sense! It was dizzying! It was STUPID!

It changed me completely. I mean COMPLETELY! Not only was I exposed to this new race and culture, I was drawn to a large part of it. I was admittedly seduced by part of it, especially the music. The first time I heard a song by Aretha Franklin I was FLOORED! AND THEN AL GREEN! OMG! I mean come on! The Temps! The Four Tops! Stevie Wonder! Marvin Gaye! Billy Paul! I had never been exposed to this incredibly wonderful music before and it invaded me! It was like tasting honey for the first time! I felt like I had been deprived of something all of my life! I couldn't figure out how I had missed this! I suppose that looking back this should not have been surprising. I mean it was like I had been eating only one kind of food all of my life and here, all of a sudden, was a whole and huge new cuisine that I didn't even know existed and much of it was delicious! It was like hear was a huge table full of food that I didn't even know existed, but suddenly I was starving for and could not feed myself fast enough on! I stuffed myself through 8th and 9th grade, to involved with my binge eating to notice how I was being seen. How I was being perceived. By both the White and Black kids I knew and was going to school with.

In high school I was just what I thought was a savvy 10th grader (high school doesn't start until 10th grade, not 9th, in BC) moving through a gang filled school, Mr Cool in downtown Battle Creek, Michigan and it suddenly hit me! I really didn't fit in on any side at all? In any group at all. I didn't know why I hadn't noticed that before. I had been so busy stuffing myself, gorging myself on this new thing that I had never been exposed to before, that I had kept my eyes closed to some hard facts. That I only had three or four friends of both races and I wasn't really close to them. I suddenly felt like I was a conditional friend to them. And all others of both races were staying away from me. I am White, but most of the White students didn't like me because I discovered Motown/Soul music and was BLOWN THE FUCK AWAY and it was just about all I would listen to. They thought I was being too Black. Too much like a nigger and some said so (which did cause some blood and some suspensions). I had a really, really, really abused early 1965 Mustang with a 289 and a 4 speed and I used to give a few friends a ride to school from our neighborhood. I had wired an 8-track (which had just come out) that I had bought cheap from questionable sources and had jammed up under the passenger dashboard with a cement block, into the radio system (non-stereo) and played Soul music on the 20 to 30 minute drive to school. At first a few bitched, but I told them the could always take the bus, because it wasn't like the were paying me gas money (I was frying french fires for that four nights a week and on Saturdays). Still I could tell they didn't like it, so less then half the year into school only one was still riding with me.

So at a racially angry and divided high school at the beginning of busing a White kid whole loved Soul music was looked at funny by other White kids, because they were being taught by nothing more then stupid peer pressure that they had to stay separate from the Black students, who were being taught by the same ignorance that they had to do the same! So most of the White kids didn't accept me and stayed away. Yet, since I was White, the Black students didn't know what make of me either, especially since I wore my very, very naturally curly hair in a big Afro (ala Art Garfunkel) with a pick (a wire or hard plastic fork style of comb for those who don't know) stuck in it or in my back pocket. I even walked with a small what was called then a "pimp" like strut, like George Jefferson from the TV show "The Jefferson's". They didn't now if I was just being me (I was) or if I was mocking them somehow?

I mean the racial split between between the White kids and the Black kids at BCCHS was so defined and so fucking stupid   in the 1972/73 school year when I was 16 and in 10th grade, that the fact that I smoked Kools (which I started on because my dad smoked them and I wanted to be like him because he was a hero of mine, besides, I really liked them best), meant that I was, if you believe this or not, smoking nigger cigarettes! I mean it! At BCCHS White kids HAD to smoke Marlboro Reds in order to be accepted! You had to smoke the socially acceptable, peer pressure cigarette to be considered acceptable as a REAL White student! Only niggers   or wanna be's at BCCHS smoked Kools!

I just could not feature any of this. I was sixteen and had been smoking pot on and off for nearly three years and I don't now if it was that, but the whole thing just made me look at both sides as demented somehow. Sure I hung out with mostly White kids because they were from the same sort of blue collar, working class segregated neighborhood that I was from so I saw them on weekends and in the summer, but I also had some Black friends from school that I hung out with sometimes, but only at school and I'm not sure if they just didn't think it would be safe for them or me to be around each other too much or in their neighborhoods. I realized that I couldn't deal with it much longer. I had to change. Besides school was a bore. It seemed like an inner city school was geared to the lowest common denominator (a phrase most of my classmates would not have understood as their life goals were to graduate and go to work at Kellogg's or Post or Eaton, Yale and Towne, Valve Division, making nothing but car valves for the rest of their lives until they retired and died, but what the hell, they got UAW pay ).

Just after spring break in 1972 George Wallace was shot and BCCHS exploded in violence. I am not even sure anyone really knew why. The racial tension was high the whole school year because of busing. Before busing my sister and I were supposed to go to a school about 3 miles from our house in Bedford, Michigan but it was not to be. Instead we went to BCCHS, which was all of the way downtown. There were lots of fights in the hallways between classes almost daily and the school was divided up into some White and Black zones. For instance there was a really nice student lounge, with a jukebox pool tables, a dance floor and such, but no Whites were allowed in there. It wasn't really a rule because it really was open to all students during their "break" hour during the day, but everyone just knew it. No White students were allowed to eat in the cafeteria either, because that part of school belonged to a Black gang know by the absolutely stupid name of the Peaknucklers. They had it on their jackets with a Pinochle hand of cards and everything. I thought they looked like clowns. Black students were not allowed in the front hallways toward the downtown area or anywhere on the sidewalks in front of the school, because it was understood that White students (and teachers) parked their cars across the street from the front of the school, went downtown at lunch to eat and during their "break" hour". The bulk of Black students walked from the nearby Black neighborhood and most had no cars. The ones that did parked them in the Field house parking lot. Oh at the field house (we had a real nice one), White students got the swimming pool, the tennis courts, the baseball field and the bowling alley (10 lanes!) and Black students got the basketball court and football field. Anyone crossing through the others territory was watched and if they stayed too long, beaten.  No one argued about it as it was simply understood. It was fucking stupid!

This is one of the reasons that I wrote my other "Ramblings Piece" about deciding between the Air Force or the Priesthood. Because the conditions there were simply intolerable. Here I had been raised missing this incredible Black culture, with it's fantastic music, food, history and some really, really hot girls! And I was being told, by both races, that it was suppose to be off limits to me because I am White? Why? Where does that come from? How can that make any sense in anyone's mind? In the years since my family has become very inter-racial. Four of my female cousins are married to Black men and one is married to a man from Thailand. At one of our family reunions I took my girlfriend at the time Doris who happened to be Black and not one raised eyebrow. Nothing. It simply did not enter anyone's head to even think anything about it. Total unquestioning acceptance. That is how it is supposed to be

And besides how can a man be a racist when it means cutting so many sexy girls and women out of the picture? I figure that if I was a racist, that would have reduced my potential girlfriend target number by at least two thirds or more! THAT is not for me! I mean there are so very many sexy women of so many different races why cut out any because of the stupidity of bigotry. I once told a man that worked for the same boss that I did in Oklahoma in a bar that I was once in love with and almost married a beautiful woman in Michigan and then I mention offhandedly that she was Black. And then this asshole said he only slept with humans. Our boss jumped up at that exact second and stopped me from from breaking the guys face and that fucking idiot honestly didn't know why I was pissed or even upset!

Anyway, I joined the Air Force and found that, while there was still SOME racism, it was so very minor. We were all Air Force Blue on the inside. Dating women of different races was not even blinked at. Hell some men joined the military for a chance to MARRY a woman of a different race or culture. The same went for accepting people of different gender preferences. I mean everyone who was paying any attention knew who the gay men and women serving were. It just was no big deal. In the Air Force it was not complete bliss, but it was like diving into a nice cool pool of water after a long walk through a desert. Yes in Basic Training some of the Black men I trained with teased me that I was the Whitest Black man that they ever met. Either that or I was the b Blackest White man the ever knew. No one cared when I bought a ghetto blaster and walked around listening to the O'Jays and walking like George Jefferson like I still do. When I get in my car the SirusXM is always tuned to the Classic Soul station and my wife is OK with that, just like my last two wife's were OK with me enjoying the best of Black culture, even though I am White.

What the hell, who says you have to stay within what society or others in your race say you have to stay within the boundaries of your race. That you can't adopt part of another racial culture as yours also. Back in L.A. my wife used to stop at a place in South-Central on her way home from work called "The Soul Food Kitchen" and pick up the most incredible chicken, collared greens, biscuits and sweet potato pie and we would pig out while listening to the best of the Temptations. Were we trying to be Black? Of course not. We were just swimming in that cool pool and enjoying it. Mmmmmmmmmm  Don't let anyone tell you that there is something wrong with race mixing on any level at all. If they do, then they are bigoted and no real  friend of yours. Fuck 'em. I honestly believe that all of the different races and cultures are here for all of the other races and cultures to enjoy, participate in, bath in, soak in, gorge yourself in the food of and join with on the very deepest spiritual level. I am still angry I am 60 years old and I am still pissed that I missed out on race and culture mixing for the first 14 years of my life! If you haven't, then take the plunge!

Randy Snyder