I Don't Get Black

At least, I don't identify as white. I don't identify as any color at all. I'm Chas Warren, husband, father, friend, lover, teacher, geek, reader, writer, and gamer. White isn't one of my roles or one of my relevant criteria. This is true even when I'm the minority. I live in South Korea, but I'm not the white guy (or even the Caucasian). I'm American. I'm the foreigner. I'm fat. But I'm never white.

Unless, of course, I'm with a black person. Then, suddenly, I'm white.

I'm not white at the conscious level. I can't abstract it. I don't "get" white in any way that would be useful to a sociologist.

But I get black even less.

I was raised in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, in a small town that had few blacks. Maybe it had none; I don't remember seeing any who weren't on television.

I learned the same playground games that children seem to play worldwide, the most popular being tag.

When we played tag, all of the children at my elementary school used the following counting rhyme:

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,

Catch a nigger by his toe.

If he hollers make him pay,

Fifty dollars every day.

My mother told me to pick the very best one,

And YOU are not it!

I think most of us knew that the word "nigger" was bad, but we had been taught this rhyme by our parents. Our parents weren't racists, or, if they were, they weren't the horrible type of racist who had murdered Martin Luther King. Our parents were only a tiny bit racist. They weren't like the people in the South, where everybody was racist. We were from the North, where nearly everybody was good.

Neil Armstrong walked on the moon on the year that I turned nine. It was such a big deal that we watched it at school. However -- truthfully -- I didn't appreciate its significance. There were other things that were bigger. The Vietnam War, for instance. I knew that it had been going on forever. I knew that I would be in it. Watching the parade of body bags every night on the news was pretty scary.

But the Apollo 11 moon landing or the parade of body bags wasn't the biggest thing in my life.

What was the biggest thing?

The biggest thing concerned my father's youngest sister, the sister who used to babysit me. At about the same time that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon -- the precise date isn't important -- my aunt did something so shocking that it rocked the entire family.

What did she do?

She married a black man.

At the time, the only black man whose name I knew was Bill Cosby.

I'm telling a lie; I knew who Michael Jackson was, but barely. I heard him on the radio, and saw him sometimes on TV. He was a kid about my age. He was cool, and I liked him, but he didn't make an impression until I was older.

Maybe Michael Jackson would have made a bigger impression if I'd lived with him every night, like I did with Bill Cosby.

Before Bill Cosby became Dr. Huxtable, I loved him in I, Spy . Cosby was a secret agent who spent most of his time chasing villains and beautiful women all over the world, and sometimes playing tennis. If you saw the Eddie Murphy, Owen Wilson movie, please erase it from your mind. The TV series was great.

After I, Spy , he was in The Bill Cosby Show, which ran from 1969-1971. Cosby played a High School P.E. teacher. It had nothing to do with 1984's epoch-making, similarly named The Cosby Show .

After that came Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. I'll discuss Fat Albert later.

I knew who Muhammad Ali was, that he had changed his name from Cassius Clay, and that he had converted to something called a Moslem. That's what Muslims were called back then; Moslems.

I knew who Diahann Carroll was, because I watched her in a TV series called Julia , in which she played a nurse working in a doctor's office.

There was a black actor in a police drama called The Mod Squad , and there was a black actor in a comedy drama called Room 222 . I had an inkling who Aretha Franklin was.

That was the depth and breadth and height of my black universe, until my aunt married a black man.

My formerly non-racist father was furious.

This confused me.

This was the same father who had told me that black people were the same as white people, only black. This was the same father who had recently explained to me that I should say "catch a tiger" instead of "catch a nigger." The word nigger was bad, and he was sorry for teaching me that word.

Why was he suddenly upset that a black man had married his sister?

I'm not sure how great my new uncle was as a husband, but he was great as an uncle. He was funny and kind and he bought me better presents than my parents ever had. I adored him. He bought me a scale-model Wankel rotary engine, with moving parts. It was transparent, so I could watch the parts move after I'd assembled it. I think it was the last model I ever built, but it was the first gift I'd ever received that meant anything to me.

So the first important gift of my life was bought for me by my black uncle, except I didn't notice he was black.

My aunt and uncle parted ways, but not until after their union resulted in my first cousin. My aunt and my first cousin continued their lives in places removed from mine. My first cousin does enter my story again, nearly 30 years later.

For the next ten years, my black universe shrunk to the stars of TV sitcoms.

Black sitcoms in the 1970s confused me then, and they confuse me now. They confused me because they were black. I, Spy -- a product of the 1960s-- wasn't black TV. Bill Cosby was a secret agent who happened to be black. In The Bill Cosby Show -- which began broadcasting in the 1960s -- Cosby was a P.E. teacher who happened to be black. Diahann Carroll in Julia -- which also began broadcasting in the 1960s -- was a nurse working in a doctor's office. She wasn't a black nurse working in a doctor's office.

The black sitcoms of the 1970's reversed that.

Good Times was about a black family surviving in the ghettos of Chicago. From this show, I learned to associate "black" with jive-talking buffoons. All black women were fat, unattractive, and worked as maids. All black men were chronically unemployable. My apologies to Jimmie Walker, Esther Rolle, and John Amos.

Sanford and Son was about 30-year old Lamont Sanford and his junk dealer father, Fred, who lived in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. At the time this show was first broadcast, the Watts Riots were fresh in people's minds, having occurred less than a decade earlier. In the Watts Riots, 34 people were killed, 1,032 were injured, and 3,438 were arrested.

Nearly every episode of Sanford and Son focused on the backfiring of another one of Fred's money-making schemes. Fred's sister-in-law, Esther, was a deeply unattractive woman whom Fred compared to King Kong and Godzilla virtually every time she appeared.

Sanford and Son confirmed that all black families lived in impoverished, violent neighborhoods and that most black women were ugly.

What's Happening!! was about three black teenagers and a collection of other characters who lived in Watts. Of the six, three were obese. Of those three, two were unattractive women. The lessons of Good Times and Sanford and Son were thus confirmed.

There was one notable exception: The Jeffersons , which featured an affluent black family. It ran from 1975-1985, overlapping by one year the sitcom which changed everything

I am talking, of course, of The Cosby Show .

The Jeffersons was about an affluent black family from Manhattan. The Cosby Show was about an affluent family from Brooklyn. Note the crucial difference? White America tuned in to The Jeffersons to watch a black sitcom. White America tuned in to The Cosby Show to watch a sitcom.

Neither show was about ghetto.

There are two important types of ghetto. The first is a slum occupied by minorities. The second is any segregated group, regardless of literal location. The first is a physical ghetto. The second is a social one.

In the 1960s and again in the 1980s, Bill Cosby presented families who weren't in the ghetto, either physically or socially. In the 1970s, Cosby ventured into the ghetto -- specifically, into a fictionalized version of the North Philadelphia neighborhood where he grew up -- in the animated series, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.

Fat Albert did something that no American program had done before. It introduced black kids to white kids. For the first time, children of all social classes were watching the same program, and the stars of that program were black. The children watching Fat Albert may have understood ghetto as a location, but they didn't comprehend it as a condition. They hadn't yet learned to socially compartmentalize.

The white kids who watched Fat Albert later watched The Cosby Show.

Both shows were transformative. Without them, Whitney Houston would never have been beautiful.

Never beautiful to White America, that is.

In the 1970's and before, white males couldn't publicly admit to finding a black woman attractive. Good Times, Sanford and Son, and What's Happening!! virtually guaranteed that If a white man commented on a black woman's beauty, it had to be accompanied by the words "exotic" or "Jungle Bunny." Those words added distance. Sometimes, a white man would say, "Shes pretty, for a black woman." That qualifier added distance.

The supermodel Iman was referred to as exotic a lot. ""Jungle Bunny" seemed reserved for Tina Turner.

It wasn't until Whitney Houston's music videos that most white men were able to freely refer to black women as beautiful. No one called her exotic. No one called her a Jungle Bunny. No one said of her, "Shes pretty, for a black woman."

At about the same time that white men were noticing Whitney Houston, they were noticing Lisa Bonet. Lisa Bonet was the actress who played Denise Huxtable on The Cosby Show, Dr. Huxtable's eldest daughter.

Denise Huxtable transitioned from jail-bait to legal at about the same time that Whitney Houston released "Greatest Love of All", her biggest hit until then. If the Internet had existed then, Bonet would have been the focus of the same sort of creepiness that Emma Watson has recently endured.

Bingo! Two black women who young white men could admire in ways that are especially important to young white men.

Before white culture embraces something, it has to co-opt it. This happened with rock music, it happened with hip hop, and it happened with standards of beauty.

Actually, it happened with standards of beauty in reverse.

Modern black women don't have black hair. They haven't for generations. Do you think that is Beyoncé's real hair? Nope. Rihanna's real hair? Nope. Oprah's real hair? Nope.

If you are a modern black woman, the odds are that you relax it with sodium hydroxide, or pay a lot of money to have expensive hair pieces attached to it.

As I've mentioned earlier, I had little exposure to blacks outside of television. My first cousin and my uncle weren't in my life long.

That changed when I joined the US Air Force, and discovered that being black really did involve differences. Black people weren't white people with different complexions.

In Basic Training, approximately half of those airmen who shared my barracks were black. I treated them as white guys with black skin, as I'd been raised. That's not how they treated me. I was a whitey, a honky, or a cracker. I'd never been called any of these names before. They weren't pejoratives that I knew, so I wasn't offended.

Within the first few weeks, I learned that the majority of the black airmen really did prefer women with big butts. This flabbergasted me. I wasn't flabbergasted because their preference was different from mine, but I was flabbergasted because something that I had always believed to be a stereotype was apparently true.

During the ten years I spent in the US Air Force, I only experienced one racial incident.

When I was a Sergeant, my boss was a black Staff Sergeant. We didn't get along particularly well, but I had never attributed it to race.

After a minor squabble, he said to me: "Go on, say it."

"Say what?" I said.

"You know you want to call me a nigger. Have some courage; just do it."

I was flabbergasted all over again. I'd never used the word nigger as a pejorative in my life. I still haven't. I'd never heard it used as pejorative except for in tasteless jokes and in films depicting racist yokels. It had never occurred to me that anyone still used that word with serious offensive intent.

Fast forward about a dozen years. My life was so busy during this interval that I didn't have time to be confused. Besides, I was no longer in the Air Force. Blacks again existed primarily on television.

I'd come to accept that there might be some cultural differences between white people and black people, but I didn't process it further than that. I was a multiculturalist; white people and black people were different in some ways. If there was more to the subject, I didn't have enough leisure to think about it, and I barely cared.

Then I met a Kenyan, and my first cousin again, and things changed.

The Kenyan I met at university. I don't think of him as "The Kenyan," I think of him by his name. I call him "The Kenyan" here to protect his anonymity.

I'd known the Kenyan for several years, when suddenly he stopped being so laid back. He'd always been laid back, before. I asked him what had changed.

"I get it, now," he said.

"What do you get?" I asked.

"I get what it means to be black in America," he said.

So we talked about it. I'll paraphrase what her told me.

In Kenya, he didn't identify as black. He didn't identify as any color at all. Then he became a graduate student in White America. I say White America, because the university we were attending was in a state in the Pacific Northwest that was almost exclusively rural, and largely dominated by working-class whites, most of whom were politically reactionary.

He was suddenly black at the conscious level.

Shortly after my dialogue with the Kenyan, I met my first cousin again. We don't meet each other often. She usually lives in San Francisco.

Without knowing of my dialogue with the Kenyan, she told me a similar story about herself.

In San Francisco, she doesn't identify as black. In the Pacific Northwest, well-meaning elderly white woman pat her hand, and say to her, "it must be hard for you, living in this part of the country, being black."

As my first cousin told me this story, my black confusion increased and subsided simultaneously. It increased because I remember it once more for the first time in a long while. it subsided because I had just gained a sliver of understanding.

I am still confused by black, and here are a few of the reasons, some in the form of questions.

To my eyes, Vivian Green and Lauryn Hill are just as beautiful -- with their natural hair -- as Rihanna or Beyoncé with their unnatural hair.

Most black women apparently disagree with me. There is a movement among black women to “go natural,” but these women are still in the minority, and probably always will be.

Could Condoleeza Rice have been Secretary of State with natural hair?

In 2008, skin whitening products were valued at $43 billion.

On an episode of the Tyra Banks show, I learned that some black women bleach their babies. Yes, really.

I have a friend who is a roving university psychologist. In other words, her services are shared by several universities as she commutes from one to the next.

Over coffee one day, she told me that young black women were some of her most frequent -- and troubled -- patients.

According to her, a black woman dating a white woman is a sign of success, yet for a black woman to date a black man is anathema.

Of course, I have no way of knowing whether this is true, but it adds another layer of confusion.