6 YEARS AS A WHITE GUY IN THE GHETTO

This page will be about my life in the 1970’s as the only white guy living in a black “ghetto”; meaning there were at times gun shots, killings, pimps and prostitutes around. Me coming and going off on foot, since I had no transportation, was always emotionally questionable.

I lived with a black person; started small time businesses together, learned my abilities were natural in construction and landscaping.

I wondered why the black people I met and came to know during these times at home, seemed more real (authentic and expressive) and interesting than those white people were overall in my suburban background. I felt odd about this, being essential seen as all white myself. (As a side note for my non-African readers, be aware that some 70% of human genetic diversity comes from our African distant relatives. In that respect, they are the human majority.) I began to see how the traditional white cultural presuppositions were inhibiting and denying whites, like me I presume, from their full expressive abilities. (And perhaps to some degrees, sub cultures act in ways counter to the majority as an affirmation of unique identity.)

A life altering transcendental experience happened to me in this ghetto neighborhood that altered my agnostic view of life forever. That one night on the street was the singular most dramatic and revealing in my life. What I was “allowed” to sense was nothing less than a miracle made for me. I was agnostic at the time, and after, purely amazed at being able to share life with all that is, seeming to know an alternate reality surrounds us constantly. A privilege to “see” through something Grands eyes for one minute, left me floating in a new world for days. This all from walking into what seemed to be a violent confrontation for me, with a large gang signaling trouble as I approached.

SOMETHING LIKE A REAL HOME

An older Black man was one of the friends of my friend. He was quite a philosopher, sometimes going on non speaking stints for long periods. He said he did that for a year once. He seemed to make a study of how such a stance was reacted to by anyone. We would at times “jamb” together, playing guitars and singing the blues in front of the wood burning stove. My guitar playing was rudimentary, the blues not requiring much when it is in its meditative phase waiting on words. I am a much better singer now than then.

Out on the street, however, I always seemed and outsider. I counted on my right to be free as the only thing that I trusted to keep me relatively safe. It was a bit of a roll reversal. I got to know how some Blacks had long felt in White neighborhoods. And how well could they trust this American right to be free?  How has freedom not overcome suspicion, leaving freedom of being itself, questionable as a right?

It astounds me that as we claim to support freedom here and there and everywhere in the world, yet in some neighborhoods, no matter who you are, even the president-alone, your only safety is an abstract right to be free. As for women walking alone, your freedom can be at the mercy of someone else’s dysfunction.

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