The Hawks and the Doves

Uncle Ken's paragraph about the hawks and the doves was spot on, I can relate to that.  As for actually relating to Black people in the real world, that is, working and living in their midst, I haven't done that since I got out of the army in 1967.  Not that I didn't want to, it just never came up.  I didn't leave Chicago to get away from Black people, it's just that city life didn't appeal to me.  My family was actually pretty dovish for the times, and I didn't start to drift into hawk mode until about the time I got out of the army.  I think MLK's march on Gage Park occurred in '66, which was about the time that I noticed the Blacks in our outfit becoming more arrogant and hostile as their numbers increased, approaching the 50% mark just as I was leaving.  That's when I first came to the conclusion that minorities were okay as long as they remained minorities, and I suppose they feel the same way about us.  I wouldn't have a problem today if a Black family moved across the road from me.  My nearest neighbor's house is actually less than a hundred yards from my house.  He is part Native American, and I have no reason to believe that he would be any harder to get along with if he was Black.  Truth be known, most of my hawkishness probably came from reading newspapers and watching television anyway.

There's been a lot of water over the dam since the days of MLK, and I think Black people can live anywhere they want today, but I seem to remember Uncle Ken saying that the Chicago "Ghetto" is still there.  Do Blacks still face violent discrimination when they try to move somewhere else, or do they just remain where they are because they want to?  And what about the Hispanics?  I don't remember any kind of Hispanic "ghetto" back in the day.  And what about the Whites, do they ever try to move into a Black or Hispanic neighborhood?  Apparently Marina City is well integrated, but that's on the North Side, and you know what they say about the North Side.

Actually, I had one Black friend back in the '70s.  He lived in nearby Carp Lake and was recommended to me by a mutual acquaintance.  One day he invited my wife and me to a BBQ party he was having when some of his relatives came up to visit.  He said to bring out daughter along because there would be some kids there her age (about 3 or 4 years old).  We didn't have a television in those days, and it occurred to us that our daughter had probably never seen a Black person in her life.  We discussed whether or not to say something to her ahead of time so that she wouldn't blurt out something embarrassing.  We decided not to say anything to her, figuring that the people there wouldn't hold anything she said against her because she was so darn cute.  Turned out we needn't have worried, she got along famously with those kids and never mentioned anything about their appearance.  On the way home, we asked my daughter if she had noticed anything different about the kids she had met that day.  She said that some of them were girls and some of them were boys, one of them was older than her, and a couple of them were younger than her.  That was all she had noticed.  I looked across at my wife and said, "Do you think we should tell her?"  My wife said "No, unfortunately she'll find out about it soon enough."  I suppose we did the right thing because my daughter has been a dove ever since.