It's rare
that anybody in the Trump family makes me laugh, but Donald, Jr. actually
caused me to audibly chuckle yesterday.
Good son
that he is, he was (again) defending his father and among many things he
said was to state that he didn't understand all the comments about his
father being a bigot because he was the least prejudiced person you'd want
to meet. "Just look around the walls of his house," he said, saying
that there were all sorts of pictures of his father with African American
people. They showed some of them and they all looked like they were
taken at social gatherings, where Senior has his arm around this or that
famous African American and both are smiling.
Surely that
proves it!
I suspect
my father would have thought of himself as non-prejudiced, but that claim
was put to the test when my sister became friendly with a guy who worked on
the cable cars and he asked her to go to the movies with him. My
father went to the cable car museum, found the guy, and told him he was sure
that he was a very nice guy, but he felt that the races weren't meant to mix
and that he could not take his daughter out.
It was some
time later when he encountered a member of the Black Panthers and apparently
they had an argument about race. My father apparently insisted to this
guy that he wasn't prejudiced at all, and to prove his point he invited him
to come home with him and he would show him his Art Tatum records.
Tatum was a god to my father and he had all of his records.
But I suspect if Tatum wanted to take Karen to the movies my father would
not have let him.
Hearing him tell this story later, Walt and I decided that
the only reason the angry Black Panther guy didn't beat him up was because
he was laughing so hard at this old white guy trying to prove he was not
prejudiced by showing him records of African American jazz musicians!
(I often wondered how my father felt about that date with the
African American cable car guy when my sister brought home her girlfriend
and announced she was a lesbian.)
There were times when I wished I could talk to Karen about
our upbringing. Watching the Trump faithful and hearing the terrible
things they say about any non-white person, watching their children repeat
those words, it makes me wonder how Karen and I didn't grow up with a
predisposition to hate non-white people.
Though she worked with an African American man whom she
considered a friend and whom she obviously loved, I always shuddered
watching football games with my mother because she was sure to point out
many, many times how many black men were on the team. She seemed to
pay more attention to the color of the players than the actual game itself.
It was worse when she married again. Fred was a nice
man who treated her like a queen and she loved him so much so I never said
anything, but he and I crossed paths many times. He was prejudiced
about everybody. One day when we were alone and my mother was
at the store, he had terrible things to say about the gay community until I
finally stormed out of the house saying "You know you're talking about my
sister."
He and my mother had a big RV and they loved to go on trips.
How she loved those trips! They invited me to come along once when we
were headed to a quasi family reunion in Oregon. It would be 3-4 days
in the RV and it sounded like fun. By the time we got home, I just
wanted to get away from him. He talked about every ethnic group in the
world and always used the pejorative term for talking about everyone.
What was worse is that my mother echoed what he said and laughed at his
offensive jokes. I didn't really forgive him, but I didn't want
to confront him because of how my mother felt about him and how happy I was
that she finally had someone who loved her. I just avoided him
whenever possible after that.
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