Dear loyal reader, I hesitate to tell you this. But I have lately detected in myself stirrings of the personal growth variety. And they have caused me to doubt certain ideas I have promoted in this magazine for years — like that policies of enforced race and gender equity are foolish.
It began a month ago at a movie theater near my home in Bethesda, Maryland. I took my son Nick to see Remember the Titans, starring . . . you know, the dignified one, Denzel Washington or Tom Hanks, I can never tell them apart. Anyhow, the movie was the extremely true story of an integrated high school football team in 1971 whose members overcame hatred and prejudice to achieve racial harmony and a state championship. Nick said he thought the film was “okay.” I had a more intense reaction. This movie literally changed my life.
You see, the football players in Titans were students at T. C. Williams, a Virginia high school five miles from the rival school I attended at about the same time. Only nothing in this extremely true story was as my memory had recorded it. I had remembered Northern Virginia in the early 1970s as an anodyne and placid suburb. I had remembered us as mostly white. But I had remembered having black friends, too, one in particular who played for my high school’s football team. And I hadn’t remembered this being an issue. In fact, I’d thought that any kid who tried to make it an issue would have had the snot beat out of him by his dad.
But I had been deluding myself. First, as the movie points out, back then all of us had thick southern accents like Gomer Pyle. And we didn’t cotton to “race mixing”; the movie is quite firm about that. Our parents rioted against integration and threw bricks through black people’s windows and called them “monkey.” Also, I couldn’t have had a black friend on the football team, because unlike T. C. Williams, my high school, Annandale, had a formal whites-only sports policy. It says so right there in the screenplay. And again, Titans is an extremely true story, not in all its picayune details, but certainly, as Al Gore would say, where the “big things” are concerned.
The biggest thing, of course, is the worst: I must have been raised a redneck. “Mom,” Nick asked when we got home from the theater, “how come Dad’s high school didn’t allow black kids to play football?” An excellent question, my son.
That my racist childhood must be distorting my politics became clear to me at Nick’s next Little League game. Another parent happened to ask how I would be voting in November. I like to lie low about such stuff, so I tried to evade the question. But my body language tipped him off that I might not vote for Gore. “You’re a fascist,” this fellow blandly informed me. At first I was incredulous. I’d not been taught that voting Republican made a man a fascist. And then it occurred to me: That is precisely the kind of civics lesson those white-hooded crackers would have withheld from me in social studies class back at Annandale.
I have been stewing about these revelations, as you might imagine. I have decided to make penance for my previous sins. And I have already settled on my first move.
Directly across the street from my house, there is a thick woods owned by the Burning Tree Country Club. A while back, Burning Tree became locally notorious for its refusal to admit women. To me, the controversy meant nothing: Let the ridiculous geezers smoke their cigars in peace, I thought. But our county council members, none of whom grew up in Deep South ignorance like me, knew better. So they hiked Burning Tree’s real estate taxes through the roof to pressure the club to open its doors.
Now, finally, it appears that the club is going broke. But rather than buckle to unisexualism, Burning Tree has chosen to raise money by selling off the woods outside my living room window — to a large corporation which plans to replace the trees with a gigantic commercial retirement complex. I will oppose this plan with every fiber of my being. It will destroy the resale value of my property, but that really has nothing to do with it. Rather, multi-cultural anti-fascist that I have become, I am concerned that the local golf course not be allowed to subsidize its horrifying discrimination against women. This is twenty-first century Bethesda, Maryland, after all, not Jim Crow Annandale.
Come to think of it, twenty-first century Bethesda, Maryland, doesn’t appear to “allow” too many black kids to play on its high school football team, either, and I must remember to write Mr. Washington — or is it Mr. Hanks? — about that. Also, if I can’t defeat the retirement complex before our zoning board, I must remember to write to Al Gore about the endangered insects that will lose their homes if the damn thing gets built.
I promise you further reports on my personal growth. Even if I have to publish them in the Nation.
DAVID TELL
