On greater and lesser prejudices - the ones we mask, excuse or deny, or blame on our superior breeding.

In 1957, I left my home in suburban San Diego to attend college. Then, as now, my choice was on the list of the top five liberal arts colleges in the United States.  It is currently
ranked behind Williams and Amherst.  Last year, it was number one. 

San Diego was a much smaller town in 1957 than in 2019. Long before September, most local admittees to the class of 1961 knew one another.  Five of us were Convair Management Club Scholars and many of us were in the California Scholarship Federation. Those of us in journalism competed for the same awards and vied for the same scholarship money. I went to college on a Union-Tribune scholarship and a State of California stipend. The rest was a gift from my grandfather who was a gardener. 

 The Fall Semester did not begin until the last week in September, but Orientation began two weeks earlier. The Freshman class was divided into groups of less than twenty, and each was assigned an advisor. During one of the weekends before classes began, our advisor hosted a party at Newport Beach. After the hotdogs and potato salad, and before the toasting of the marshmallows, we sat in a circle and each of us introduced ourselves with a short speech about our aspirations, interests, and family history. 

 I was surprised when one of the male students indicated he lived in San Diego County because I had not seen him at any of the events staged during the application process. In the course of his self-introduction, he revealed he had been raised on the East Coast and had been educated in private schools. He had been living with his mother since his parents separated, but his father practiced law in San Diego. In a group of young people who were for the most part rather full of ourselves, he was even less humble than the rest of us as he spoke. Nevertheless, he was good-looking with a touch of what I considered to be East Coast charm and his pretensions were not that much worse than mine.  He was doing fine until his dialog focused on social attitudes. His family politics were Conservative but open-minded, he declared, and to illustrate the point, he offered the following anecdote: 'On Christmas, my mother invites our servants and their families to the house to collect their presents, and she even lets them enter through the front door.'

I sat in the sand with my mouth open, and so did our advisor. He had been born in China and spent WWII  in Shanghai, in hiding in the house of his mother's servants.  If they had been discovered they would have been executed.  His father was a United States Marine who believed his wife and children were dead. They began life in the US without their mother who was not yet vetted and they lived in public housing. His mother was Manchu and the children looked less Asian than my Chinese granddaughters, but the family was sensitive to issues of prejudice and knew it when they heard it. 

 I am not certain our classmate didn't use the word negroes instead of servants, but his subsequent remarks made it very clear that was what he meant. I decided then he was not someone I wished to know. I suspect he felt likewise. I confess to having obviously plebian attitudes.I do not think I ever spoke to him, not then and not at reunions. Picture Justice Kavanaugh conversing with AOC.

We are both retired members of the State Bar of California and both of us are admitted to SCOTUS. He had a highly successful career in his chosen civil specialty and takes pride in his reputation as a trial lawyer.  I wear my 122 jury verdicts and successes in high profile cases as a badge. However, prevailing in child sexual assault and homicide cases does not get me on anybody's A-list. 
 Perhaps I stored the memory of the Beach Party for 52 years because it was a portent for what I am observing in American today.  I did not expect to find bigotry at my college in 1957, and I likewise did not expect to read hatred in the rhetoric of my friends and neighbors in the United States of America of 2019.  What is especially scary is these are not radicals shouting. These are coworkers, colleagues, relatives, and friends. Nevertheless, attractive, educated, widely respected people whose company the rest of us seek and whose opinions we let shape our nation, are walking on floors scrubbed by those who are barred from entering the house through the front door and no one is calling them to account. And I speak metaphorically as well as literally. 

I had a friend named Rev. Wiley Burton who is now deceased. He and I co-chaired a Hate Crime Task Force in the Morongo Basin in the ’90s. In addition to his ministry, he was best known as the spouse of blues singer Nancy Wilson who also passed this year. He wrote a book called Divided we Stand years before small-house and independent publishing became competitive.  The photos alone make it a valuable addition to my library, but the message it delivers was personal for me because we were soldiers in a campaign against a new rash of hate crimes uncommon to our area, and while we were given lip-service from several quarters, it came with a caveat to be careful of our area’s good name. In other words, there were property values to consider and elections incumbents hoped to win.  We economized our efforts and got rid of the swastikas but not the hate.  Eventually,  we disbanded. We prosecuted one major hate crime and the Feds took credit for it. As compensation, I did get to hear some of Rev. Burton's best stories. And even they had racial undertones.

When Wiley was a young man seeking to make a living in tinsel town, he almost became Rock Hudson’s body double. It was a set-up, a practical joke arranged by Alfred Hitchcock, but no one told Wiley it was a prank. He thought it was a genuine job offer. One look and Hudson approved him. They shared the same good looks, size and formidable presence. Which of them was the better looking American Idol is debatable. But when they told Hudson the model he had selected as his double was black, he was fired on the spot. Wiley never worked in a Hollywood studio again. He spoke good-naturedly about the incident, but I was dumbstruck by its cruelty. Hudson was the butt of it, but Wiley was the Whipping Boy.

 I have a book on my shelf given to me by its African American author,  retired New York Times journalist Lena Williams in which she thanks me for 'Fighting the same fight against Hate, Bias & Ignorance.' The title is It's the Little Things.'   Williams speaks to habits and gestures that annoy, offend, and separate the races, yet appear trivial to the casual examiner and are thus easy to rationalize.  As an armchair historian and historical novelist, I look at vestiges of a culture based on exploitation and conquest as the culprit. The blond news anchor who flips her long straight hair almost in the face of her African American guest and the grand lady who sends a woman of color to answer a door she is forbidden to otherwise use do not consider themselves racists. The same holds true of Alfred Hitchcock, and just about every American politician who can muster a soundbite to explain actions in his or her past.  Hell yes, we have to do better.