Knuckleheads We Were Not

I suppose it would be disingenuous or clueless to suggest that I grew up in a community devoid of racism, but ... at least overt and undeniable examples of it were few and far between, and, as a result, when they did come, they were almost more confusing than anything else. Of my five or six very best friends, at least before I moved to Germany at the age of 10, one was Cuban, one was Chinese-American, and two were African-American. My neighborhood was working class and diverse, and all the kids played together, had sleep-overs, and hung out pretty consistently. Perhaps some families noticed and were made uncomfortable with it, but mine certainly didn't, and wasn't.

And, as I mentioned in my book, while growing up as a rabid sports fan, many of my favorite athletes were people of color, including the pro football and basketball players we all pretended to be on the playgrounds (OJ Simpson and Dr. J), as well as my favorite Detroit Tigers (Aurelio Rodriguez and Ben Oglivie) and my favorite Michigan football player (Dennis Franklin). I guess I can't say I didn't notice they were Black, but I don't remember paying much attention to it. I simply didn't care one way or another. (I also idolized Larry Csonka and Bob Griese and Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, who were all white).

When you're 7, you can idolize a career .237 hitter

I recognize that all doesn't necessary prove anything. There's that amazing scene in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing where Spike, in character as Mookie, challenges his co-worker Pino (John Turturro) to explain why he (Pino), is so dismissive and offended by Blacks, when so many of his favorite athletes and musicians are, in fact, Black.

from Do the Right Thing

So I recognize that saying "my favorite musician is Black" and "I had Black friends growing up," doesn't prove much.  And I'm sure there are myriad ways I subconsciously reflect cultural assumptions and stereotypes. I'm just saying, for what it's worth, I at least wasn't aware of treating friends of color any different than white friends, or of thinking of them differently. Who knows?  

Hmm. I began this post actually just meaning to provide some context before transitioning to my actual point, but then became aware of how it sounded and started backpedaling. I should, I suppose, delete this all and start again, but it's ok. You can join me on my mental journey. 😊

Ironically, this was going to be a short post. It just occurred to me, recently, that, even though the four/five of us in our apartment in college — me, Aaron, Doug Baker, and Chris Cantu, plus Doug Karsch in the summers — where all white, with predictable middle-American, middle-class, pedestrian interests (including a lot of sports, both playing and watching, multiple episodes of "Cheers" each day, and pizza), in fact, especially in terms of the movies we liked, we were surprisingly progressive.

I suppose a lot of that came from me — even in this essentially pre-VCR stage, my love of movies was long-standing, and in high school I often spent Friday or Saturday nights at one of the on-campus-movie-society showings of older or foreign movies like Yojimbo, What's Up, Tiger Lily, Notorious (which I remember seeing at the Michigan Theater with Aaron), The Big Sleep, and The Navigator.

Once in college this interest continued, and I became the head of the student film society at the University of Michigan, with an office at the Union, where I was able to book and show movies like Bulldog Drummond, The Maltese Falcon, The Lion in Winter, and The Navigator.

No, not Flight of the Navigator. New Zealand, not Hollywood.

Quick Digression:

It’s funny, now that I think about it. I had a very bourgeois and middle-class appreciation for movies. I liked them, and I had seen enough, over the years, that I could spot references, cinematic cliches, and specific sources of inspiration that most of my friends couldn’t (or weren’t interested in). I was hardly an aesthete or a snob — I enjoyed Die Hard and Aliens as much as my friends did, and I was never particularly engaged by the avant-garde. Still, several of my friends, over the years, have annoyed me by mistaking my ability to speak somewhat knowledgeably about movies for some kind of nose-in-the-air attitude about my opinions. More than one has said, “well, I’m not like you — I only care about whether I enjoy the movie or not.” Forcing me to say, “you think I … apply a higher standard than that? You think I’ll be critical of a movie I actively enjoyed? You think I’ll sniff disapprovingly, while sneering, “well, sure, it was entertaining, if that’s all you want."??? 

Entertaining and engaging is/are the standard(s) for everyone, obviously. It may be, of course, that people who have seen a lot of movies are actively impressed by a smaller percentage of them than those who haven't — which is true with any form of human endeavor. But the question of whether or not I like a movie is separate from whether or not I enjoy movies I like, if that makes any sense.

Digression over. 😀

Back to the Point (finally):

What does this all have to do with Prague, you say?

Nothing, really. I just found myself thinking how surprising it might be to some people that the four or five young men in our small apartment on Geddes road in Ann Arbor during college, though in all apparent ways fairly sterotypical in their “guyness” — straight, white, hormonal, and athletic, who loved playing, watching, and talking about sports pretty much all the time — also made a point of seeing John Sayles’ Brother from Another Planet and Spike Lee’s She’s Gottta Have It when they came out on VHS, and saw Lee’s School Daze, John Singleton’s Boyz in the Hood, and Kid 'n Play's House Party in the cinema when they came out, both times clearly being in the minority in the movie theaters at the time. (An experience I had, even more pronounced, when I was one of maybe five white Americans in an otherwise all-Black Boston screening room when Juice came out several years later). The idea that those movies were "not for us" never entered into our mind.

Eh. I don’t claim we were unique, or in any way revolutionary. I just found myself struck, last week, at the unlikeliness of us four young, white, Michigan-football-loving, middle-class Midwestern men knowing who Mars Blackmon was and quoting him to each other years before most of America was introduced to him. And proud of us for it.

I guess all this boils down to: We were fairly traditional and boring, back then. But knuckleheads we were not.