No, not those sixties. The ones Black people lived in. I found out about those other sixties, the ones where the Civil Rights Movement touched only the cream, the Talented Tenth. My vantage point was coming into the sixties as a working-class White youth but straddling the world I was born into and the world of African-Americans, then known in the broader society, as The Negro.
What I want to lay out here is the circular development or lack of development in the society regarding Black people. Again, most people reading this will not think of that Negro sixies but of the wild and loose sixties home to unprecedented change at a time when unprecedented did not get used in every sentence, nor will they easily accept the notion that not that much has changed for the Negro, nor for Black people. How is that?
Over the first ten years of my marriage in which I include our two year courtship and engagement plus another three years before we moved out of South Phoenix, observation after observation left me puzzled. ……………………..
The above was written May 20 of this year and I was waiting for something to put a cap on it and here it is:
Why was it so simple to see the massive division between Black and White people in the society while both Blacks and Whites talked as if wasn’t/shouldn’t be/wouldn’t be/can’t be any reality to it. Blacks felt – and here I’m drawing on many conversations and interactions – that there was no barrier to full integration except segregation, but they did not or could not articulate what was happening right then since by the late sixties and the seventies a lot of those barriers were falling with little integration. The Whites just didn’t notice Black people – Ellison’s The Invisible Man.
As a decade or two passed and instead of these two pillars of American society merging, there seemed to be a parting of the ways, not just due to a very small number of Blacks urging some kind of separation, but even White and Black ways of talking, i.e. dialects of the vernacular, were being measured by linguists and seen to be pulling away from each other. What gives? That is, what was giving? Fast forward to yesterday, i.e. Sept. 6 Saturday 2025, I’m reflecting on the following day about my wife’s cousin’s funeral. About two hundred people, all Black except me and eventually another guy also married to a cousin of the deceased, which deceased was in no way engaged in anything that might separate her from White people or anyone else, viz. a youngish person at 60, a church lady, a working person. Yet with a full age range present from babies to ancients like me, a Saturday so work colleagues could easily attend, no neighborhood segregation in her residences, nothing but the fact of her relatives naturally being Black, too…….. but wait! Why were there no other White spouses of relatives?
The simple fact is that our society is still massively segregated and that is due not only to the legacy of segregation which my wife and I experienced personally in our youth but also to its on-going legacy – nay, continuing stream as fresh White Americans are brought into consciousness that “Blacks aren’t like us” plus immigrants made aware of the caste system here. Chief Justice John Roberts of the Supreme Court snidely proclaimed that the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race was to stop discriminating on the basis of race, a reductio ad absurdum of probably the most complex social problem of our society and history. He is the “no problem here” guy incarnate, refusing to admit to any problem of race while living a society riven by race, notably in the justice system at the pinncacle of which he rests.