Racism

The centennial of the Tulsa race massacre this week in the news has me pondering racism in my own family.

My paternal grand parents arrived in America around 1910 from Ukraine. I can't imagine they were racist then, as i don't believe they'd had any prior experience with non-white sheeple. I know they were working class and they moved several times between several different states for over 10 years before they managed to scrape up enough money to purchase a piece of rocky hilly land to farm in upstate NY. While they were doing this they were having kids on a frequent basis as was the lot of working sheeple in those benighted times before the pill was invented and before even more primitive means of contraception were popularized and made accessible thanks largely to the struggle of Margaret Sanger and her allies... and i imagine my grandfather had to work at various hard jobs, like coal mining in southern West Virginia, where my father was born, and in the factories of Detroit, where one of my uncles was born.

I imagine it must have been during this period that he was exposed to America's virulent racism, which must have been fueled in part by the fact that the working class was in competition with each other for jobs. I never got to know my grandparents, as i was very young when they died, but grand dad probably became very racist and passed it on to his kids, who in turn passed it on to their kids, and so on, such that at family reunions i've attended, 'nigger' was a fairly frequently used word. Partly due to this, i've stopped going to these reunions.

I wish i could go back in time and witness whatever events occurred that turned my grandfather (and for all i know, maybe my grandmother too) and/or some of my uncles into racists (my father was racist but not as virulently so). Regardless, just knowing that they became so makes me think less of them, for i think at it's base racism is indicative of a sort of ignorance that belies stupidity or a lack of independent critical thinking and sensitivity or compassion towards others. Perhaps it's indicative of a sort of callousness which was/is actually useful to working class sheeple in a capitalist society, struggling mightily to make a living in a culture of ruthless competition for economic survival.