Racism then and now

A few years before anyone had heard of Selma and Martin Luther King I was dropped off at Elora Public School to begin my formal education. I was the only kid in the school who didn't speak English. The language that I did speak wasn't always welcome in the homes of my schoolmates barely a decade after the war, so those were lonely years.

Elora was a white-bread tight-assed Presbyterian town at the time. There wasn't a unwhite family in the place, let alone a black kid in the school, so it's no surprise that when my little pure white perfect princess girl classmates went out to skip rope at recess, one of the more popular skipping ditties went like this:

way up north 
where the niggers shovel snow
one shoved a shovel
up the other niggers hole
one called the doctor 
but the doctor couldn't come
so the poor nigger died
with a shovel up his bum


This rhyme today can be neither written or spoken, so read it aloud a few times, and you'll be helping bust  two taboos at once. When the girls went double dutch they'd have to say it twice as fast. Even at the time it was considered somewhat naughty. I recall there were certain stern-faced playground monitors who'd call the children on that one.

Like I said, Elora was all white. White people even ran the corner store. Bird's Variety. One day some catholic kids jumped me on the way to the store and relieved me of my candy money. That was the big cultural divide, catholic vs. protestant. I didn't get it then and I don't get it now. We're all white and we all love Jesus. The only way we knew who was catholic was because the catholic kids went to the catholic school. But it's fucked up Ireland for five hundred years. I'm happy to report that when I got a little bigger I extracted more than an equal share of payback.

In those days you still had guys with no legs nicked-named Stumpy pushing themselves along the sidewalk on mechanic's creepers. War vets. There'd always be a guy like that outside the Iroquois Hotel, sometimes selling pencils, sometimes just with his hat out, sometimes just passed out. Don't know why it was called the Iroquois. They'd got rid of those people a long time before.

We don't see our no-legs war vets sitting on the sidewalk selling pencils anymore. The little girls who sang way up north grew up to be liberals and activists and hippies and feminists. There's even (almost) peace in Ireland, for Christ's sake. We've come a long way baby.

There's a lot of self congratulation going on in America these days. MLK's anniversary and all that, and haven't we come a long way and aren't we great. Why lookie here, we've got a black president don't you know!?

The first black president has become the lame duck president of all time. Why? Because there's a great big slice of middle America that is determined to cut him off at the knees no matter what he does. When Reagan raised taxes or H.W. raised taxes or Clinton raised taxes or when any of those white presidents raised the debt ceiling, middle America might not have been happy about it but life went on.

Not any more. We've got the first black president, don't you know, and there's a great big slice of middle America that just wants to see the nigger fail.