Things I Have Really Seen, Conversations I Have Actually Had
By Leonard Zeskind
The Zeskind Fortnight 12
February 24, 2009
If memory serves me right, it was 1970, probably around November. Two white guys in their very early twenties sat on the sofa, each with a case of low-rent beer placed on the floor in front of them. One after another they would pop the top, drink the beer down and carefully put the empty can back in its spot in the cardboard container. We talked about the neighborhood, a desperately poor enclave of white working class people surrounded by blocks filled with desperately poor black working class people. Everybody was looking for a decent job. They told me about their friend newly back home from Vietnam who was shaking his amphetamine habit.
I asked them why they used to drive down one of the nearby streets in the black neighborhood pumping .410 shotgun shells into the front of houses. Neither one of these two young men had an answer. By the time they had finished their cases of beer, however, they had decided that shooting at black people’s homes was just plain stupid.
I was installing vending machine refrigerator motors on an assembly line in May 1972, working near a fellow I will call “Mr. O,” because his last name ended with that letter. He looked a bit like I did with short black dense hair, and was about my age and we became friends of a sort. One day he said to me, “hey, why don’t you come eat lunch with us?”
So I went with him to an area of the factory where about six other dark hair guys are eating lunch and talking to each other in Italian. I sat there quietly, finished my bologna sandwich and then walked back to our area of the plant with Mr. O. “You know I am not Italian,” I said to him. He turned and looked at me and said “Nah.” I said yes it is true, I’m not Italian. Again, he said Nah! So I said, “Yes, I am Jewish.” To which he looked astonished and said, “No man, you can’t be no kike.”
Yes I am, I replied, thinking he seemed completely unaware of his slur. He also did not know enough to realize that the Irish and German white people with grandparents in rural Missouri who lived in my neighborhood considered “Dagos” to be a third race, after black people, to be both eschewed and fought with from time to time. Mr. O and I stayed friends on the assembly line, but when it came time for lunch I usually ate my sandwich with someone else.
It was July 1976, in a steel fabrication factory where bridge girders, power plant systems and other elements of heavy industry were cut from steel plates and beams, and assembled in such a fashion that other men and women working at construction sites in the nearby states could bolt, weld and otherwise erect these pieces into final form.
The day before, I had hung a four inch thick base plate on a steel beam that was 36 inches at the web, and weighed 365 pounds per running foot for a length of 60 feet. It would become a column inside a shopping center somewhere.
Now on this day, I was working next to Luis S., twenty years my senior. We were both classified as first class fitters, which placed us near the top of the pay scale for in-plant iron workers, but only at half the pay scale of outside ironworkers—who worked up in the air and had their own union local. I complimented Luis on his industrial skills, although probably not in any language that I could use here on a family-friendly website. Yes, he said, he was fast with a three pound hammer and a two foot carpenter square, and he could read any blueprint the engineers put down in front of him. But he would never be an outside ironworker, he said, because he was Mexican. Mexicans just could not get a job in that outside local union.
Luis didn’t say it, but I did: black ironworkers could not get into that high-paying local either.
Once I stopped working in heavy industry I started attending meetings all the time. This one was in October 1985. In this room sat about thirty regular Joes and Janes: a farmer, a couple of trade union activists, a lawyer or two, mostly white people, but with a few black folks. Nobody too fancy, nobody elected to office, all of them tough anti-racist activists of one type or another used to talking about racism.
This was a “White Organizers Conference,” intended to make a contribution toward economic and social justice. At one point in the middle of the day, the conversation turned to white supremacist groups. Several of the participants had once been active racists: a former Klansman, a Wallace-era segregationist and other groups less well known. As they talked these aging white men began to cry, some quietly to themselves others more openly, until for a moment there wasn’t a dry eye in the room. During the next five years I would monitor perhaps as many as two dozen Klan rallies in and around Georgia, and I do not remember seeing any white people with tears in their eyes.
Americans talk constantly about race. They eat their lunch by the strictures of race. They buy or rent their homes in neighborhoods decided by race. Race often determines what kind of job they get, or if you get a job at all. Most of these conversations are misinformed.
On those rare occasions when we talk at all frankly about the subject, we all tend to cry.
TZF