Day 92…
My maternal grandfather was a regional tax collector in India under the British Raj.
My mother was born in Shimla, in the mountains, which was where the British went to escape the heat of the Indian summers.
At its peak, just before World War 1, the British Empire controlled nearly a quarter of the globe and nearly a quarter of the people living on it. It was proudly referred to as “the empire on which the sun never sets”.
During what is called “the Age of Discovery” in the 15th and 16th centuries, Europeans searched the planet for the optimum trading routes and sources of trading goods. They were not driven by the science and curiosity of experiencing new places, they were driven by pure commerce. They wanted tea, silk, rice, porcelain, you name it. Whatever it was, they wanted to get it so that they could sell it and make money.
By the early 1700’s, a series of wars with the French and the Dutch plus the English union with Scotland left Britain largely in control of the colonies in North America. By the mid 1700’s the East India Company had taken control over much of the Indian sub-continent.
At this point in history, the British navy was pretty much unchallenged. Having defeated the French in the Napoleonic Wars, Britannia ruled the waves. Once the British lost the thirteen colonies in America, they used their navy to concentrate their expansion into Asia, Africa and the Pacific.
The British did not rule benevolently. When there was resistance to their expansion, they simply massacred that resistance. They considered the inhabitants of whatever lands they took over as being culturally inferior and, therefore, exploitable. They were peoples. Not people, therefore expendable.
Don’t give in to it, and it will give in to you.
The British in India lived well. They surrounded themselves with Indian servants and, using Indian labor, built European-style houses and buildings - many of which are still standing today.
In the 1940’s the British exported a massive amount of food staples such as rice out of India for its own use. This resulted in what is now known as the famine of Bengal.
Three million Indians starved to death.
The great Winston Churchill said this, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.”
A growing rise of Indian nationalism led by people like Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, who, like the Reverend Martin Luther King, advocated non-violent resistance, finally started having an effect and Britain granted India its independence in 1947. It’s not as if the British suddenly realized that they were wrong and Gandhi was right, it was mostly because all of their resources had been used to fight World War II.
As the war started, fearing for their safety, my grandfather sent my grandmother, my mother, and her brother and sister to what seemed to be the safest British outpost which happened to be South Africa.
In order to control the black population of South Africa which outnumbered them 9-1, the white Europeans had instituted a system called apartheid. This is a Dutch word meaning apart-ness.
Black South Africans were not allowed to interact with white South Africans. They were not allowed to live in the same places. They were absolutely not allowed to vote.
When we lived there, as I’ve talked about before, my Grandfather had several black house servants. They all referred to him as Master. “Would Master like lunch to be served now?”
At five years old, I was referred to as Master Richard.
It never crossed my mind that there was anything wrong with that, but I was five and nobody around me gave any indication that there was anything amiss about it.
The last time, I think, that we went back to South Africa was in 1980 when I was eighteen. Anti-Apartheid protests were common by that time in the US. I was now aware of what I was seeing.
We went with our friends to Location to see where they lived. Several people asked us to take pictures of them in front of their rondaavels - mud huts with conical roofs. I also took pictures of the large signs in train stations that said “Whites Only” in reference to certain platforms. I noticed benches that were reserved for whites. When we went to the butcher with my Grandfather, I noticed the separate door for black people and the inferior cuts of meat that they were sold.
I noticed all of that, but I didn’t do or say anything.
The Americas, once discovered, seemed like a great empty space just waiting for Europeans to move in and make something of. Like the British, the Americans considered the native population of the continent a nuisance. They were in the way. Their lands were taken from them with barely a thought and happily distributed to any European willing to settle there.
It isn’t by accident that the great Western US landscape painters created all of those giant canvases of idyllic-looking land stretching as far as the eye could see and kept them completely devoid of people. There were no people living there - at least not by European standards.
European Americans did everything that they could possibly do to completely exterminate the Native Americans. While they were doing that, they brought over African Americans in chains to work as slaves in their newly acquired fields.
On my father’s side of the family, my history does not fare any better.
My grandmother’s father fought in the Spanish-American War and ended up being posted in the Philippines. When she was two years old, my grandmother and her mother joined him and made their home there.
The United States was in control of the Philippines from 1898, the year my grandmother was born, to 1946.
Like the British in India, the Americans in the Philippines lived very well. My great-grandparents had three Filipino house servants as well as a Chinese cook. They were never able to live with that kind of luxury while they were in the US. Not before and not after.
Throughout the period of US occupation, the Filipino people constantly fought for their right to rule themselves. The Philippine-American War was fought from 1899 to 1901.
About 4,000 American soldiers lost their lives in that conflict. Nearly 20,000 Filipino soldiers lost theirs in their fight for freedom and famine and disease claimed the lives of at least 200,000 Filipino civilians.
During the Depression, in Virginia, my paternal grandfather worked as a lawyer in Lynchburg, Virginia. He was, apparently, often referred to as the N--- Lawyer. Most of his clients were, what he called, colored.
It was not like he was a champion for civil rights. He was just starting out and during the Depression with jobs and money so scarce, African American clients were all that he could find. He needed to put food on the table.
Often, his clients would not have enough money to pay him so they would barter with food for his services. Afterwards, there would be a knock on the back door of the kitchen porch and somebody would be standing there with a live chicken or a sack of potatoes as payment.
By the time my sister and I came along, my grandfather was already in his 60’s. He was a kind man with a deep gravely southern drawl that was wonderful to listen to. He sang bass in the church choir. He was extremely well respected in Lynchburg and some of his clients continued to let him do their taxes when he was well into his 90’s.
He maintained relationships with some of his African American clients throughout his life. They always called him Mr. Hester and, to the best of my knowledge, when they came to call, they always came to the back door.
I remember my grandfather talking about one such client with admiration and calling him a good N---. My, by then, Yankee father jumped all over him and asked him not to use that word in front of my sister and me. I’m pretty sure that my grandfather’s response was, “But he was.”
I am a product of all of these people. Whatever success I have had in life began with them. My entire existence in this life and all the advantages I have been given have been built upon a solid foundation of continual institutional racism.
That I loved all four of my grandparents is completely immaterial. They didn’t create racism, but as far as I know, they didn’t question it much either. They continued driving the machine forward in the same way that their parents and grandparents did before them.
And I am its beneficiary.
The President has planned his first re-election rally back from the COVID-19 shutdown to take place in Tulsa, Oklahoma on June 19.
In 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma was the site of one of the worst massacres of Black people in the history of the United States. A mob of white people attacked and destroyed nearly 35 square blocks of Black-owned residences and buildings from the ground and from the air in private aircraft. It is estimated that somewhere between 75 and 300 people lost their lives that day.
June 19, more commonly called Juneteenth, celebrates the day that the people of Texas found out that Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves from bondage two years before.
If there was ANY question at all, prior to this, as to what the Republican party in the United States feels about the racial issues confronting this country, this should answer it once and for all.
I didn’t think I was capable of being shocked by anything this President did anymore, but I was wrong.
We do not need to follow in every single one of our ancestors’ footsteps. No matter how ingrained or how easy it might be to just step into those same footprints, we must forge our own paths. We must.
The past is the past. We cannot change it, but nor can we forget it. It requires constant vigilance to keep what we were born into from being the only thing that guides us forward in our lives.
We can change the future. And dear lord in heaven are we going to fuck up as we try to do just that. Nothing we do will be perfect and some of it will be naïve and some of it might cause offense and some of it will be downright stupid.
If we are to face the future with any hope of success, though, we must begin to address the issues of the past that we have allowed to permeate our present.
I will let the great Maya Angelou have the last word, today, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
I thought to myself how courageous of Richard to write this
now
I realized for myself
COVID stilled me
and gave me the opportunity to look at myself and my world and the people I relate to how and why
George Floyd’s murder
stilled me to see what I never saw before even though I thought I did
COVID made the
Space and Stillness
to see
what I may not have really
seen
if I were
busy being
busy....
I believe we can have a better tomorrow
I can do that
today
❤️🙏