I remember when I lost my dad. I don't mean when he died -- that was many years later when he never woke up after heart-valve surgery. The hospital workers kept letting my mother, my sisters and I in for short visits throughout the day which consisted of us quietly watching his unconscious body slowly turn purple as it lost the ability to absorb oxygen. Somehow we were supposed to be deriving comfort from this, or perhaps we were supposed to be a comfort to him despite the obvious fact that he was deeply comatose and utterly insensible, which was probably a good thing. I went through about three rounds of this before I gave up and left. My father was gone and staring at his near-corpse wasn't helping anyone. I've never regretted that decision.
No, the time I'm thinking of was when I lost my dad the first time. I remember he was driving me somewhere. That happened a lot because I stubbornly resisted getting my own car until I was 21. I'm bad with remembering dates, but my guess would be this was sometime around my last year in high-school or my first year in college. Just after both my parents had become Reagan Democrats in 1980. We were just making small talk, and I was probably answering his queries with grunts and monosyllables. I believe he brought up the subject of crime and criminals. Some criminals, he said he had come to realize, didn't seem fully human. If you just look at their faces, he continued, they look like throwbacks. Like apes.
I was an extremely white boy growing up in the affluent white suburbs of Palo Alto. My unearned privilege wrapped me like a warm security blanket inside a panic room inside a gated community. But even I recognized that he was talking about black people. He was using the same language as people I'd read about in US history. Even I could recognize racism.
My father and I never had much in common. Although he was an engineer and chemist he always considered that his career, and instead he truly enjoyed sports and the outdoors. I liked science and movies, while sports I hated with the heat of a thousand suns. He mostly thought the things I liked were stupid. He thought Star Wars was fine but not that big a deal. He tried to get me do sports at various times in my growing up which would always end in disaster. Sometimes when I would watch Creature Features Friday nights as a kid he'd sit down and start to watch with me. I would kind of hold my breath hoping he would enjoy the movie and stay. Sometimes he did watch all the way to the end, and even though he would make fun of it afterword I could tell he'd kind of liked it. It was validating.
But one thing I'd always felt we shared was our morality. After all he and my mother raised me -- where else would I be getting my sense of right and wrong but from them? They were, as far as I can be sure of anything, in favor of fairness, truth and honesty, and especially justice, including racial justice. I know they were because I am. There's no reality where my parents are secret racists so secret that they keep it from their own children. My father was a good person. "Was" being the operative word.
I once called a dinner guest of theirs racist. My parents hosted many large, raucous dinner parties when I was growing up in the 70's. At some point after my sisters left for college I was also invited to join, although the parties were more demur by that point. One night it was my parents, this one guest who I think was a relative of my mom, and myself. She had a southern accent and was telling a story of some kind. I forget the details but in some sudden moment of clarity I said "That's racist." I explained my view and I recall my reasoning being pretty sound (I think the event in question would be closer to what we today call appropriation). She was furious (because being called racist is the worst form of racism) and launched into a defense based on the premise that she had also felt pain because of racism. I apologized and the conversation moved on.
Later my dad thanked me for apologizing. I understood that -- I could have ruined the evening and I was raised better than that. He also said that he thought my argument was interesting. That he had never thought about what she was talking about being a kind of racism. He said he would think about it more. That made sense to me because my father did not want to be a racist.
And yet here we are, a few years later, him talking like a racist. Not just racism but the absolute worst kind of 19th century-style garbage science. I was stunned. I remained silent, and the conversation moved on.
Looking back I see what must have happened. Reagan won his campaign by using racist dog whistles. While it was still many years before Fox News the right wing media machine was getting revved up. That toxic, racist, garbage ideology was starting to seep into the mainstream, into places like quiet, affluent Palo Alto, where it started to poison the minds of otherwise good people like my father. There was another party, quite a few years later when I was out of college and reasonably successful, when my mother told me that dad was happy. He was happy that all his children had turned out to be "contributors," that we were contributing to society. It meant nothing at the time but now looking back I can see it. He was talking about "makers" vs "takers", that hideous Randian belief that only capitalists deserve their wealth and everyone else is a leach. Even back then it was poisoning an otherwise good man's mind.
I don't blame him. This wasn't his fault. He was corrupted and damaged by a system we built ourselves or allowed to be built. It can and must be dismantled before it robs more children of their parents. I will always remember my dad as a good man, and I have at least absorbed some of his love of sailing.
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