I'm not racist; are you?

Everybody is scrambling to prove they're not racist is like a box car race we used to have on Saturday afternoons when we were kids but instead of bragging rights we get to keep our houses businesses cars Unburned and get a badge with a fist on it to signify we're members of the correct kind of club

even the National Football League which was been the symbol of white macho for God knows how long have had it balls cut off so that we're getting lectured by the coach of the Seattle Seahawks about our questionable history when he probably failed history in high school and probably never got far enough in college passed the door to the showers

Dolly Parton who milked money out of redneck pockets for decades has decided to save her Lily-white ass and pretend she never was a member of white supremacy when she clearly was.

The Dixie Chicks play the race is game two celebrating their southern heritage until they saw a new bandwagon to jump on and now they're just the chicks nobody will want to listen to artists who write songs for the politically correct up North

We have of course Obama visiting the players the national basketball League to encourage them to protest a mass rapist and so Stokes up even more fires in the streets by refusing to acknowledge who the real racists are and they aren't the people you would otherwise suspect

some idiot down in New Orleans has decided to put a black face back onto the box of pancake powder after years of stripping off the black faces of popular foods in other products because some guilt ridden white executive assumed nobody would like to see a black face on any product unless it happened to be King Obama.

The New York times desperate to make up for its one-time support of slavery now uses a capital B on black and a skewed history of slavery that makes even the biased reporting looked tame

the most violent member of the antifa and BLN are white and may many or teachers who carry their white guilt back to the classrooms pathetic sad silly people who take to be part of some oppressed class putting on invisible blackface more offensive than the kind they crucify other people for .

dare I tell anyone that I once put on blackface as a Halloween costume when I was seven years old?

Keeping the home fires burning

Even when you stay silent you ain't safe

someone will stick a fist in your face

and tell you to support them or else

they make assumptions about you

based on the color of your skin

they envy you for the clothes you wear

the car you drive, the home you live in

they blame you for things you didn't do

would never do or think of doing

until now

they riot in the streets on the least report

of some possible atrocity they won't walk back

Even when facts prove them wrong

you can't walk back burning someone's business

and black lives do not matter

if the business they burn is owned by a black man

even the press won't walk back

 Having claimed this time that an “innocent black” man

 was shot seven times in the back in front of his kids

when the man shot had raped the mother of his kids

stolen her car, wielded a knife and wouldn't put it down

despite repeated commands by the police to do so

starting a riot is like starting a forest fire

a lot of trees burned before someone manages to put it out

the fire keeps on burning because media keeps on relighting it

searching for some new “innocent” black men to exploit

so that they can make headlines

the fire keeps burning because it is convenient

for some leaders to use it to

clear away the forest for their own behalf

encouraging sports people to sit out games

when everybody knows the shooting was justified

It didn’t start with Uncle Tom

It didn't start with Uncle Tom

or even the black men

who pretended to be white men

who owned slaves in the south

it started in the heart of Africa

long before any black man

saw a white man to blame

black selling black

 slave owner being slave

 in a Madness that had most of the continent

enslaved at one point or another

so that when the Muslims came

 to take 14 million black men

nobody thought much of it

or when the Portuguese

saw the Muslims making money

they wanted their share,

then the Dutch, the French, British

and finally, Americans

black Kings sending black bodies

to the coast to be sold

friends, enemies, ex-lovers

even their own children

Kings angered when they heard

About Quakers in the west

Who wanted to stop

This flow of black gold

Kings who sent their victims along

In long chain lines to the coast

many not surviving the journey

many arriving so starved

that black agents for white slavers

killed them on the spot

or let them get thrown into the sea later

after disguising their frailty

Black kings who knew and could care less

as long as they were not the ones on the ships

in some cases, selling their own sons

into slavery or unwanted wives

This did not start with Uncle Tom

or even the Native American Indians

who had their own black slaves

or freed blacks who pretended to be white

it didn't start with white people at all

but in the rotten heart of Africa,

and black kings who got rich

until the west finally put a stop to it.

Sherman’s March on Paterson

Not until many years later would I come to realize the irony of having a black kid from Paterson have his his parents name him Sherman -- after the general who set the south to blaze, and a few years after I met him, blacks would burn down Newark just as Sherman burned Atlanta.

Sherman was the black kid from the Alexander Hamilton projects in Paterson who had joined the Green Beret marching band with us, telling us how much he loved to drum.

That was before Watts set the tone for each summer to follow, before Newark, before Detroit.  even before anyone knew what it meant to set your own neighborhood on fire in protest against what they claimed white people did.

These riots – especially Watts, Detroit and Newark-- scared the white community on the border of Paterson just the way that Haiti riots had a century before had scared the South and destroyed any kind of reconciliation or even reform.

The massive Abolitionist Movement – that was far larger than the one in the north that pushed the Union into the Civil War – simply evaporated and a climate of dread gripped whites in and out of Paterson, including the Jews who worked so hard to help with the Civil Rights Movement, so that many sympathetic to the plight of blacks began to wonder if they’d made a mistake.

The Six-Day War in 67 turned many blacks against Jews because blacks seemed to see Arabs as oppressed people, even though they are the ones that spent the greater part of a century trying to drive the Jews out of Palestine, painting Jews as oppressors even though many of the Jews had been instrumental in overthrowing Jim Crow. Part of this was a perverted form of a Muslim faith invented in the ghetto of Newark, which Malcom X would later come to reject, but not many of those who became leaders of the Black Panthers.

Kids then, none of us knew anything about any of that in 1964 when all we wanted to play music together and Sherman seemed to know more about playing music than any of us did.

He was small and fast and ran his way up Lakeview Avenue from the projects to Saint Brendan's for practice every afternoon when we were done ran all the way back.

He liked me and Dave though looked a bit odd standing next to us, Dave at six foot two and me at five foot eleven when he was only about five foot three.

We didn’t talk about race except for him to tell me his father didn’t like white people. I said my uncles were scared of blacks.

Even when the riots started -- and the looting, and the shooting -- we did not think it had anything to do with us. It all seemed remote, the way the war was and the marches in the South. We saw nobody with Billy clubs or fire hoses.

All that was on tv - until it wasn't.

When we saw Newark burn, we all got scared.

We all knew those streets from those rare times our families took us there to shop -- whole blocks razed as if Sherman's name sake had passed through on his way to the sea.

In my house, we waited for Paterson to burn -- and Passaic -- with us caught in the middle and my uncles with guns at every window, waiting for the riot that never came, fearing the looting of our family store that did not transpire.

But travel to Paterson and Passaic became more dangerous and nobody knew went near Newark at all until later when the draft got us, and then we only passed through the place on our way to Fort Dix and some to Vietnam.

The gangs I remembered from when my mother and I lived in the projects in 1959 and 1960 roamed openly by 1967, no longer competing with whites, but hating us, looking for victims most of whom were not white. Black gangs fought Latino gangs for turf no white man wanted.

Sherman stopped coming to practice - too dangerous for a black face in a white neighborhood where police suspected everybody and constantly feared a riot that never came.

But there were mini riots -- mostly among Latinos.

It was during one of these that I last saw Sherman. He hid behind one car on Market Street and I hid behind another. We saw each other, nodded as if hoping each of us might get out of there alive.

But we ran, he went one way and I another destined never to cross paths again.

“Mug Me!”

Frank, my best friend, has a sign on his back that says, “mug me” and somebody is always willing to oblige – especially growing up near Paterson.

He was that foolish kid that decided to save bus fair to get downtown on weekends by walking down the back road from Haledon passed the Christopher Columbus Housing projects where the black and Latino gangs lived.

Nobody talked about 400 years of slavery when the black gangs greeted him, they just told him to pay up or get beat up, and he always complied, hanging over the money he’d saved up during the week so he could see a movie at the Fabian or the U.S. Theater. The Plaza on Union Avenue have been safer since he didn’t need to go passed the projects to get there, but the movies there sucked.

You would think that after the first mugging, Frank would have learned his lesson. He did not. He made that trip again and again, each time fully believing the gangs wouldn’t be there waiting when they always were.

The gangs mistook him for a rich kid since he came from the direction of wealthy Wayne on the hill, refusing to believe the white families living in Haledon were nearly as poor as the black families living in North Paterson.

The gang was always disappointed at the paltry amount of cash Frank handed over and roughed him up anyway, shaking out his pockets until they realized he didn’t have more than he said he had, and only then did they let him go.

When it finally occurred to Frank that the gangs would not go away, he decided to expend some of his previous funds on the No. 14 bus that went down West Broadway into Paterson only to find the Latino gangs waiting for him when he got off the bus, taking the rest of what he had, forcing him to walk back up the hill for lack of bus fair to get him there – pissing off the black gangs when they stopped him and found he had no money at all, beating him up for disappointing them.

Frank fared no better in Manhattan when he started to go there, always finding himself on the wrong street at the wrong time of night, confronted by black gangs, white gangs, as well as bikers, all of whom thought he was somehow better off and holding out on them, sometimes beating him up just to make up for the lack of cash he could give them out of the paltry pay he got working at the Little Falls Laundry.

He got beat up so often, he stopped reporting it to the police, who stopped believing anybody could be as unlucky as he was, they always encouraging him to move back home with his parents rather than chance the tough streets of New York.

He even got mugged on his own block near Avenue A and East 5th Street, once even when he was in the doorway to his building. He got mugged so much by so many people when he walked around the block to visit me on East 5th Street, his girlfriend convinced him to move back to New Jersey into some mostly white neighborhood where he stood out less, and to take a job at some mostly white factory here he might keep more of his paycheck than he would working higher paying jobs in Paterson.

He stopped taking the bus to New York City when a black gang cornered him in the Port Authority men’s room where he might have died had he not been wearing the watch the post office gave his father upon retirement, worth enough for them to let him keep the bus fare back to Jersey.

Confessions of a Racist

This is a book of poems, essays and memoir that I have been collecting for years. Some have been published before and some are extremely controversial. I have left out the larger pieces simply because of lack of space. These shall appear in the print version when I finally send out the manuscript. This is ongoing. So I'll be adding as I go along. Check back often

Samba, the Bandara

no justice no peace

Oriental is a bad word

"Statues" of limitations on being white

Lynching of History

I'm not a racist; are you?

Keeping the home fires burning

It didn't start with Uncle Tom

 Nigger Town

Black Lives Matter

 The battle of Charlottesville

Turning ghettos into Gettysburg

 Proud and Gray

 Spitting in MLK's face

 Mug Me

 The real racists

All the news that's fit to print

Sherman's march on Paterson

Making us racist

Black lives don't matter

Pickett's charge

Paint it black

Black Privilege

White privilege is a crock

Reparations for slavery?

How not to sound racist

A history lesson for statue-stealing bigots

Some ironies of American Slavery

Statues, bullets and bullshit

When good guys are bad guys

Stupid people tearing statues down

White people power

1- Nigger Town

White boys don’t walk River Street after dark – that snake of a road that runs along paths that George Washington once strode, separating Bunker Hill from Wrigley Park the way the river itself separates the North Side from Downtown.

Straight Street might kill you, the way Governor Street would. But no place kills you quite as dead as River Street will, a holy hell white kids from Wayne call “Nigger Town,” where they will shop for drugs by day, but rush through by car after dark.

Wayne kids got lots of names for streets down here, Spickville for Market Street, Jew Land for Broadway where it cuts through to the East Side.

River Street runs from the foot of the West Broadway Bridge to the top of First Ave, like a switch blade cut across the forehead of Paterson.

Nigger Town is so run down black kids boast that they were the first to talk on the moon, with potholes so big they swallow the rich kids cars if they drive too fast coming through, scared kids trying to get across the river to Haledon Avenue through the blue collar world to their own world on the very top of the hill.

But white kids might drive through here after dark, but none will walk here even on a dare – not unless they’re crazy like me, needing to prove something to myself if to nobody else, the black kids refusing to laugh because they’ve got something to prove, too, all of us finding out that blood is blood regardless of what color skin it comes out of.

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