From Social Action

Variety musings about my long slow growth of cultural awareness. Emerging from the sleepwalk of white supremacy. An important strand in the realm of social action.

7/29/18 After watching City of Gold, the wonderful documentary about L.A. Times food critic Jonathan Gold, who died last week.

The film conveyed his inspiring view of multi-ethnic Los Angeles. I realized that where I grew up in West Hollywood was white, mostly Jewish. And where I lived from age 11-18, in a newly built San Fernando Valley suburb, was just white. My experiences in 1962-72 of Stanford, the Bay Area counterculture, and the Farm were mostly white. But then where I lived for the next 28 years was one of the most intensely diverse neighborhoods in the country.  When Rebecca was going to Hobart Elementary there was a feature story about the neighborhood in a national magazine that described it as the new Ellis Island and said the families at the school spoke something like 50-60 languages, I can’t remember the exact number now.

9/29/17 Expanding night time thoughts

In the middle of the night some of the things I saw during the day that were meant to raise awareness about white privilege came back up. I saw, if not for the first time then much more clearly, how I knew in my counterculture plunge that I was always safe, that I could go home again.

A sense of the connection between white privilege and my hippie days.
How white the farm was.
How Jews became white folks.
I read it later. It explains the cohort of Jews with which I was just white.

As an aside, I read The Way of Zen in high school
It was a fascinating curiosity that resonated deeply but was a little too exotic to break through the surface of mainstream American culture for me. I was raised on jazz and also read Kerouac in high school. So I had a stream of influences that were subversive to the white American hegemony.

The Stanford Western Civ course was required of all Freshmen. We didn’t give it a second thought. It was obviously foundational to the whole enterprise of Euro-American supremacy in ways I didn’t think about at the time.

Cutting edge of empire
White privilege, empire, and extractive capitalism
Tom Harrell and I bonded on (African American) jazz
Michael Ventura’s essay on slavery, voodoo, jazz, rhythm breaking up white culture (Hear That Long Snake Moan).
Hippies with LSD drawn to indigenous culture.
Cultural overlay melted off, leaving Thomas Berry’s genetic core.

They had us read The Aims of Education by Alfred North Whitehead during the summer before entering. As I wrote in question 4 of the Stanford section of the Antioch portfolio

“I was convinced that I was entering the mainstream of the dialog of the western intellectual tradition. After a short while I started to feel more like I was at a huge playground for the overprivileged. Almost everybody seemed to be much richer than most of my friends at home had been, and they all seemed to be just playing around until they could take over the reins of their parents’ companies. I became very disillusioned with the potentiality of the university as a social critic. There wasn’t the high tone of honesty and intellectual excitement that I was hoping to find. And so I just gave up and decided to join the party in my own way.”

 I encountered Maezumi Roshi and Zen Center in a primarily Hispanic neighborhood. A little Anglo enclave surrounded by Southern California Hispanic culture. Living in that neighborhood was an immersion process. In addition our family had daily contact with a Mexican-American family across the street because Rebecca’s babysitter was Mommy Elba Escalante and her daughters. That was my first experience of truly cross cultural life. Very enriching for all of us.

While living in that neighborhood I began teaching in primarily Hispanic ethnically mixed public schools, which I did for the last 13 years of my work life. It was a huge contrast with about the same period of time in corporate management.

Then my family became multi-ethnic. My brother Randy married Marie, an African-American woman. Our daughter Rebecca married David, whose parents are from Nicaragua and Mexico. Silas (their son, our grandson) is growing up in a rich cultural mix.