On Racism, Louisiana, and St. George Part 3

Y’all know, I’ve really been thinking hard about what to write about, but I keep coming back to a few stories that seem to typify my experience as an adult.

When I first was planning my move to Baton Rouge, I searched for apartments.  As I did so, a helpful apartment manager told me “Don’t look north of Florida Blvd”.  I remember asking why, and getting a vague response.  I soon learned that north of Florida was the *black* area of Baton Rouge (although, there are others).

My ex-father-in-law is incredibly racist, as are my ex-brother-in-laws, to the point I asked them to stop saying the word “nigger” around me.  That garnered a few strange looks….

A person I used to work for said one of the most racist things I’ve heard – he was explaining how he knew a black man who had 4-5 girlfriends and would travel between them.  “But that’s okay, because the rules are different for *them*.”

That same man would tell me how great the race relations were in Baton Rouge, how everyone got along, “Until the Black Panthers came here and got them all riled up.”

I know that many of the poor black areas of the city are considered a food desert.

I’m honestly getting a little depressed as I write these things.  It’s been 50 years since the Civil Rights era in the city, and we still have de facto segregation.  Our public schools are abandoned by the middle class, we’ve destroyed the public transportation system, and Shreveport of all cities, managed to pass a non-discrimination law for LGBTQ rights before us.  Shreveport!

Holy shit, people.  Shreveport is the buckle of the friggin’ Bible Belt.

And now we have the St. George movement.  People who want to further an agenda of separation and exclusion.

Not much has changed here.  Not much at all.

On Racism, Louisiana, and St. George Part 2

At the ripe old age of 18, I decided to commit my life to God and go to seminary.  Now, what my protestant readers need to understand is that Catholic seminary is broken up into two stages:  Philosophy and Theology.  Otherwise known as Minor Seminary and Major Seminary.  In secular terms, minor seminary is your undergraduate work, while major is your masters work (and you do end up with a bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts from an accredited university and a Master’s in Divinity).  My coursework in seminary consisted of lots of philosophy – classes in Logic, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Aristotle, Kant, Descartes, etc, etc, etc. We had arm loads of literature courses, religion courses, and (this is probably a surprise to any Protestants out there) very little scripture classes.  Scripture was actually broken into two classes – New Testament and Old Testament.  That’s it.  6 hours of scripture.  It doesn’t bother me, but I bet some of the Protestants out there are surprised.  🙂

The really cool thing (I think) about seminary was in the way they arranged the course work.  Once we hit our junior year, we were taking 17 hours a semester, but all the classes were interrelated.  So while we were studying Medieval philosophy (Aquinas), we were also studying Medieval Literature (Dante & Chaucer).  We were taking Medieval history at the same time.  And thus the curriculum progressed up to Contemporary Literature, Philosophy, and Catholic religious thought.

In seminary, there wasn’t the aggressive racism that I knew back in Marksville.  It was present, but found different targets – mainly the Vietnamese students.  You see, the Diocese of New Orleans has a large Vietnamese population and they sent many of their sons to be priests.  A few of the white students looked down on them.  I remember one conversation when a person complained about a dirty plate (lots of the Vietnamese students worked in the Refectory as part of their work study program – I did too, actually, my senior year).  The student in question said something to the effect of, while picking at a piece of dried on crumb on a plate, “Those dirty Vietnamese can’t clean worth shit”.  He may have used a common racial pejorative, I honestly don’t remember, but it would be well within this person’s character.  (I heard him once refer to a Benedictine sister who worked at the seminary as “That fucking cunt of a nun” merely because she didn’t wear a habit*).

But if I start telling seminary stories, I’ll be here all night.  I’ll give y’all a teaser and say that seminary, for all the shit that happened there, probably saved me from the completely bat shit, fucked up version of Catholicism that I grew up with.

My story picks up again when I move to Baton Rouge.  The shit really hits the fan at that point.

*A habit is the special religious garb that a nun or monk or brother wears.

On Racism, Louisiana, and St. George Part I

Wow.  I just reread my title. (I wrote the title, and then walked away and then came back).  Am I going to end racism and solve race relations in the heart of the Deep South?  Nope.  Am I even going to be able to articulate a path toward a promised land of racial unity?  Lulz.

What I can do is tell my story of a white dude growing up and living all my life in Louisiana, from small towns, to the Northshore, to Baton Rouge.

I was born in Leesville, LA.  While it’s a small town, it was home to a military base – Fort Polk.  When I lived there, it was home to the 5^th Mechanized Infantry Division; that division has since moved to Ft. Hood and Ft. Polk is a readiness training center for troops headed overseas to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq.  This is an important point – I went to school with people from all over the country and many of whom had been overseas.  This wasn’t your typical insular small town, and as a result there wasn’t as much racial tension as I encountered when I moved to Marksville.  To be sure, there was some.  It’s Louisiana, after all.  But I honestly don’t remember the raw hostility and outright racism that I found as I moved around the state.  Leesville also didn’t have the de-segregation issues in the schools.  There were no private schools, and there were only two elementary schools which fed one middle school (5-6^th grade), a junior high (7-8^th grade), and one high school.  Everyone in the town went to the same schools.  This, I think is a very important point.

My own parents had their issues, but fortunately racism wasn’t among them.  I never heard the “n-word” from any family member.  And, at least while I was growing up, they didn’t engage in discussion about blacks vs. whites or disparage other ethnic groups.

When the family moved to Marksville, however, things were very different.  The first thing I learned was that there was a black Catholic Church and a white Catholic church.  Within ½ mile of each other.  Then I learned that they still had (and the practice continues to this day) a prom for the blacks and a prom for the whites.

Here’s how the whole black/white prom thing worked.  The “official” school prom was boycotted by the white students.  On a separate night, they held a private dance at a hotel in Alexandria.  My family moved to Marksville in the summer before my Junior year in high school.  I was a social misfit – I didn’t really fit in anywhere at this point.  Once I learned of the prom system, I was horrified.  So, the night of the “black” junior prom, I put on my only sport coat and slacks and went.  Now, I have moderate social anxiety, and going to a dance where I knew exactly zero people was, frankly, terrifying, but I did it.  I went in, paid some money, stayed about 30 minutes, and then left.  I guess, if this were a movie, that act would have started a great thaw in the race relations in the school that would have transformed the community.

It wasn’t a movie.

Nothing happened, mainly because the political, educational, and religious leadership of Marksville isn’t really interested in changing things.  I remember railing to a teacher “How come the rest of the Servant Squad wasn’t there as well?”.  But I forgot – this is a strain of Catholicism that is comfortable in it’s racism and refuses to challenge injustice.  The status quo is status fine to them.

And if this was a movie, then I’d remain unchanged and continued the good fight against the racism in my community.

But it wasn’t a movie.  I drank the kool aid, and because my identity as an individual was less important to the group I was forced to join (more on that later), I gave up.  I sold out.  I became that which I fought against.  My senior year found me, at the same time, intending to go to seminary to be a Catholic priest, and attending the white prom, with all the Servant Squad.

Y’all wanna know what it’s like to sell out?  Intoxicating.  You’re finally one of the group.  You’re accepted, comforted, and understood.

It’s all a lie.