I grew up in a white world

If you’re white and of a certain age your experience might not have been too different from my own. I was born in the Bronx, New York City and I assume there were a lot of people of color there. My parents, my father fresh out of the service, moved out of the city soon after I was born and into new subdivisions on Long Island funded by VA mortgages and the GI Bill. The goal was to leave behind apartment living and city congestion for single family homes and green lawns.. and, not so much by chance - white neighbors.

In Glen Cove, Long Island all the neighbors were white; all the kids I played with were white, everyone at my school was white. To my memory, I never saw a Black person for the first 12 years of my life.

I had a paper route and rode my bike and delivered newspapers every day after school. And I remember when we finally moved up to an even more upscale neighborhood in Great Neck, Long Island and put our home up for sale one of my paper route customers, a little old white lady crossed my palm with her 30 cents subscription payment for the week and told me “you tell your parents not to sell their house to any of those “n—-“ and she used the n word.

I don’t really believe in race. It was the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) divided humans into four races: European, American, African, and Asian. Imperialists, colonizers, slavers, and eugenicists quickly put his divisions of humanity to work to justify racial hierarchies, usually with White people at the top. We often base our ideas of race on skin color as a marker of classification and division. In the U.S., historically, the White (European) race enslaved the Black race (African), tried to kill off the Red race (American) and exploited the Yellow race (Asian). But there are no differences scientifically between the races. We all belong to the same human race. Race is an invented social construct.

My latest book just came out last month “In Search of The Thin Man” a study of the Thin Man novel and the six movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles. https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/in-search-of-the-thin-man/

One of the things I noticed in writing the book was the white world devoid of Black people in the novel and the films. Hammett set the Thin Man novel in New York City. African Americans, some 200,00 of them had moved north from the South between 1917 - 1925, to New York as part of the Great Migration. You could not walk the streets of Manhattan in 1933 without seeing a Black person. But we must presume Hammett saw none, since none of the novel’s characters are Black. The producer and director who set the first Thin Man movie in New York saw none, since no Black actor appears in the film. In the movie, we don’t see any Black people walking in the streets, entering the stores, or sitting in a park reading a newspaper. They are unseen. They are whitewashed out of the picture.

If you played a drinking game where you drank only when you saw a Black actor in any of the six Thin Man movies , unlike Nick Charles, you’d be stone cold sober to the end. Why whitewash the world? Because White people felt more comfortable in a monochromatic world. The Golden Age of Hollywood, 1929-1941, I found, could be called the White Age of Hollywood.

So Carl Linnaeus drew up the four races but it was historian Theodore Allen who wrote “The Invention of the White Race,” a book I recommend to you which shows how race was not only socially constructed but constructed historically to justify white supremacy.

According to Allen, and his book is two volumes of densely researched history, the white race was invented in Virginia in 1676, 100 years before the American Revolution.

At that time there were English colonies up and down the Atlantic seaboard of what would become the United States of America.

The colony of Virginia was under the rule of an elite of wealthy British capitalists who bought up large tracts of land for tobacco plantations.

A British emigre who was cut out of this elite, one Nathaniel Bacon, published “A Declaration of the People” and called for others to join what became Bacon’ Rebellion against the colonial Governor in Virginia

Laboring class people, free, indentured, and slave, white and black joined together to fight the plantation elite, they were “English and Negroes in Armes.” European Americans and African Americans together.

This dangerous challenge to the status quo was met by 1,000 Troops dispatched from Britain and the rebellion was put down.

But how to prevent future upheaval - simple: divide and conquer.

The rich whites won over poor whites, says Allen, by making race, not class, the marker of status.

So the settler elite created laws to make Black people hereditary slaves and banned manumission and miscegenation.

Writes the historian Edmund Morgan: “the answer to the problem [of preventing a replay of Bacon’s rebellion]...was racism to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks by a screen of racial contempt” through the propaganda of white supremacy.

“Thus,” writes Allen, “was the white race invented.”

White freedom in the colonies rose as Black slavery also rose.

After 1700, according to Princeton Historian Thomas J. Wertenbaker “every White man, no matter how degraded could now find pride in his race.”

Slavery made white liberty possible - this explains how Washington, Jefferson and slavers generally could espouse freedom and liberty and inherent rights for themselves and for all white people and maintain slavery for Black people. It is no accident that 4 of our first 5 Presidents were slave owners and all of those four came from Virginia.

Today we still live with their invention of the white race.

When I announced tonight’s meeting on the online list serve Next Door Neighbor the following conversation ensued:

Greg: Those of you that think you're racist should attend their meeting.

Charlotte: They don't see how this is perpetuating racism. These topics are something we had moved past as a society. The media and government just CANNOT let go of reminding people of their differences and have done a good job ...creating hostility between races. It's by design. Divide and conquer. ...they have brainwashed the youth into believing being white is inherently bad.

Greg: When is white history month? I don't think the racists allow that. [and] They hold meetings with people talking about race...... I have been here for over 50 years and have experienced no racism. In fact ,the opposite. I have enjoyed a life here among Hispanics, Indigenous people and a few black friends .... Don't let these people bring their racist agenda here.

Nancy: I grew up w/ friends of all colors & cultures. We never talked about race. It wasn't an issue & shouldn't be now. Fort Bragg forever

Dennis:There is no racism in Fort Bragg.

If there is no racism in Fort Bragg it is indeed a city on a hill, a promised land unlike any other city in our country.

And yet we look awfully white - not unlike that suburban subdivision where I grew up.

According US Census 2020 for Fort Bragg we are:

Non-hispanic white 57.8%
Hispanic 33.2%
Black .2%
Indigenous 3.3%

So, in fact, we are majority white but with a large Latino minority of ⅓. And our public school students are at least 50% Latino. Our under 35 years old population is likely over 50% Latino.

But our School Board is 80% white. And our City Council is 80% white.

Look at the timeline of our area history:

• 1856  Mendocino Indian Reservation is founded

• 1857  Fort Bragg is built, US Army troops are stationed here and the Fort is named for Captain Bragg

• 1867 The Reservation and Fort are abandoned

• 1876 Confederate General Braxton Bragg dies

• 1889 The city is incorporated and named Fort Bragg.

But why? Other local place names changed why not Fort Bragg? Not far away The Corner became Kendall’s City which became Booneville which became Boonville

What was happening in 1889? Nationally, we were in the period known as the Restoration as southern whites chased so- called ‘scalawags’ and ‘carpetbaggers’ out of the former secessionist states. These were, in fact, the first civil rights workers who traveled from the north to educate and protect newly freed Black people. The first civil rights period, known as Reconstruction, was ended by the Compromise of 1877. Federal troops were withdrawn from the former Confederate states and these states set about reasserting white control, and deposing black senators, congressmen, and city councilors by barring black people from voting, by lynching, and the night-riding Ku Klux Klan.

Our town fathers named our city Fort Bragg to assert white supremacy, to let Indigenous people know that they honored a genocidal Fort and to let Black people know they were not welcome in a city memorializing a Confederate General and enslaver.

And that is why to do the necessary work of anti-racism we have to change the name of Fort Bragg.