From the ArcaMax Publishing, Clarence Page Newsletter:
http://www.arcamax.com/news/clarencepage/s-638057-994302
Just as I begin to think that our society has outgrown ridiculous
racial prejudices, some throwback comes along to try to prove me
wrong.
For example, you may recently have heard about Keith Bardwell, a
justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana, who refused to
marry a mixed-race couple. Why? He says he was worried about the
children that such a marriage might produce. On what planet, I
wondered, has this man been vacationing for, say, the past 40 years?
As Bill Burton, deputy press secretary to this nation's biracial
president and himself the product of a racially mixed marriage, said
to reporters aboard Air Force One, "I've found that actually the
children of biracial couples can do pretty good!" Yes, they can.
But we don't need to wade into the rural South to find racial
throwbacks to the nation's bad old days. Look for example, at how
students from Washington University in St. Louis recently set
Chicago's barhopping community abuzz by filing a civil rights
complaint against a popular North Side nightclub.
Six black students were denied entry to the Original Mother's bar in
the Division Street nightclub district. This prevented them from
joining a pre-arranged party of more than 100 of their fellow students
inside.
Why? The bar has a "no baggy pants" policy, they were told. That
wouldn't sound so unreasonable if the bar actually had a "no baggy
pants" policy. But a white student who put on one of the black
students' jeans was admitted, no problem, according to the news
accounts.
A spokesman for the Original Mother's later pointed out that some
other blacks were admitted that night, according to the Chicago
Tribune, but that didn't clear up the mystery. The bar cited security
concerns based on Chicago police reports and baseball caps worn
backwards by two of the black youths. Yet Regis Murayi, 21, treasurer
of the university's Senior Class Council, said his pleas and proper
identification did no good. He was kept out of a party that he helped
to arrange, apparently because of racial stereotypes.
Sounds familiar. During my own young-and-single days in Chicago in the
1970s, reports of saloon segregation in "singles bars" made occasional
headlines and were investigated by a variety of state and local
authorities, including Republican U.S. Attorney James R. Thompson,
before he was elected Illinois governor.
One whistleblower at the time, Gregory D. Squires, wrote a
confessional story in the Chicago Sun-Times about how he was
instructed as a white bouncer and waiter in a north side watering hole
to politely shoo black clientele away.
The bar was not on Division Street, but its owners had learned the art
of singles-bar management in that street's popular nightclub district
before opening a little club of their own. The tricks included theme
parties, T-shirts, softball teams, a ski club, a clean women's room,
free champagne for women on special nights -- and keeping black men
out.
The Mother's discrimination complaint sounded familiar to Squires, now
a George Washington University sociology professor and author of six
books on civil rights issues. One often-used ploy to turn somebody
away, he wrote, was to pick out an item of clothing -- like jeans --
and tell the would-be patron that it wasn't allowed.
I knew Squires because the bar he wrote about happened to be one that
I frequented at the time. Although he changed the names of the bar and
everyone involved, I can now report that I was the black guy in Greg's
account. The bar's owners had given me an unofficial pass, Greg wrote,
because he had not seen me hitting on the white women. He must not
have been paying much attention.
"He insisted later that he was not a racist," Squires recalled. "But,
he said, 'Can you imagine what this place would look like if he let in
every shine who wanted to come in?' " Right. That's a funny thing
about racism since the 1960s. Hardly anyone wants to admit to it, even
as they express it.
Yet, Squires was reluctant to make too much of the persistence of bias
in bars. He would like for us to look beyond individual discrimination
cases to understand historical roots and structural inequality that
has built up huge racial disparities in wealth, education and income.
That's true. Unfortunately group inequalities too often bounce back as
negative stereotypes against individuals -- even in the age of our
nation's first black or, if you prefer, biracial president.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage(at)tribune.com, or write to him c/o
Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, NY
14207.