Between 1910 and 1970, it is estimated that more than five million African Americans migrated from the rural American South to northern cities. Perhaps, not so surprisingly, I didn’t learn about The Great Migration, until I took Black American History 200 during my sophomore year in college in 1982. Ironically, it was this same year in which I was paired as a roommate with a young white woman whose hometown was Plainfield, Indiana, a small town of around 9.000, none of whom were black.
My roomie, whom I’ll call “Lisa”, was a cheerful, blue-eyed blonde, who didn’t seem at all bothered by having a black roommate, but she confessed to me that some of her friends from high school learned of her roommate “situation” (those were her exact words), came running up to her when she returned to Plainfield for her high school homecoming weekend, asking with deep concern, “Are you ok?” To her immense credit, she related to me that she found their questions ridiculous and assured me that she told them not only was she “ok”, but that as a freshman, she enjoyed having a sophomore roommate who knew a bit more about the ins and outs of campus life. The following summer, she invited me to her home for a weekend, where we went bowling, played tennis in the park, and I accompanied her and her family to church and Sunday dinner at Ponderosa. We met up with her friend “H” a super sweet but rather masculine-looking young woman, who sported sports jerseys and a baseball cap (to hide the fact that she pulled out her own hair), drove a sporty little yellow Mazda that we nicknamed “the Bee’s Kees” and who was probably non-binary in an era when even as 19 to 20 year-old college students, we didn’t yet know what that term meant.
Lisa and I roomed together for the next three years and when I graduated, she vowed that she would move out of the dorm for her senior year because she “couldn’t imagine sharing our room with anyone else besides me.” During our second year together, her father built us bunk beds and a very cool “entertainment” center which occupied the side of the room where my bed had previously been. A sofa, TV, 1980’s boom box, my aquarium with tropical fish, and a cupboard for university student essentials: hot ai, r popcorn popper, panini sandwich maker, and the stash of “Better Cheddars” and “Cheese-Its” that I used to consume by the box in those days when I enjoyed the metabolism of a blast furnace and my weight never climbed about 120 pounds in spite of late night snack attacks.
Lisa and I had all kinds of discussions at night as I lay in the upper bunk. We talked about school, dating, frustrations with our parents and siblings – all pretty standard college co-ed talk. However, we also had some conversations of a deeper nature. In college I suffered from clinical depression and struggled at times with the pre-Prozac era anti-depressant medications that campus health service prescribed for me. There were also times when we discussed issues of race and now, forty years later as I watch race relations and civil rights for people of color evaporating from afar, (I moved to Mexico in utter disgust with when millions of my “fellow Americans” elected Donald Trump to a second term) I can recall one specific conversation which has caused me to wonder if those whose heart’s desire is a white Christian Nationalist America, truly understand what they are advocating for.
Early in our time together as roommates, Lisa and I were talking about our high school experiences. Although our high schools were similar in size, I hailed from Terre Haute, Indiana a small city of about 70,000 in the 1980s. Although, Terre Haute was and remains predominantly white, about 20% of the city’s population were people of color. According to 1980 census data, Plainfield, Indiana was only about 7% non-white, and unsurprisingly, Lisa could not recall there being any black students in her senior class at Plainfield High School.
In classic 19-year-old naivete of the pre-social media, pre-internet 1980s, I remember asking Lisa what she thought about living in an almost entirely white town. Was it ideal? Did everyone get along? Without any black people around was there anyone at the “bottom” of that world. Her answer genuinely shocked me. I remember that she told me that classism and religious discrimination were a thing. Less affluent white people were at the bottom of the totem pole; from her description it sounded as if white trailer park residents in her hometown were regarded as being on par with the black people who lived in the projects in mine. She also related how there were older family members who disapproved of her relationship with “G”, her high school boyfriend. Lisa belonged to a Baptist church, but “G” was Italian American and Catholic. Wait? What? My confused mind sputtered as if on the verge of a major short-circuit. There are white people who don’t even like other white people?
Some MAGA-loving white Americans currently like to go on discussion forums like Quora and Reddit and make openly racist assertions such as, “If all the black and brown people left, the U. S. would be a much better place. Violent crime, prison populations, poverty levels, homelessness, people on welfare, and prevalence of HIV/AIDs and other STDs would automatically decrease. IQ and school test scores would increase. Go Trump! Make America Great Again!” However, I wonder if MAGA has considered the fact that human beings seem predisposed to establishing hierarchies, and without black and brown people to serve as society’s scapegoats, would they themselves be in danger of falling to the bottom rung?
Despite having white skin, there was a time in the history of the U.S. where the Irish, Poles, Italians, and Jews struggled because of their “otherness.” Additionally, in 2025 income inequality is worse than it has ever been. Are low-income white Americans really prepared to occupy the place at the bottom previously occupied by people of color? Hierarchy can even exist among the wealthy in the “Old Money” vs. “New Money” debate, where rich people who have inherited great wealth may show contempt for venture capitalists such as Mark Cuban and most of the other Shark Tank cohorts who parlayed their humble beginnings into piles and piles of “new money” through a combination of good ideas and smart investments.
I’ve said before that unintended consequences are contributing heavily to the problems that plague American society today. Deporting immigrants is hurting American farmer who rely on their labor. The “America First” posturing as led to a drastic decline in international tourists coming to the U.S. on vacation. If we look back as far as 1987, we could argue that the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in journalism is perhaps the biggest culprit in terms of the erosion of trust in practically everything and everyone.
Sadly, I don’t have a definitive answer to this problem. Ideally, if people could slow down and do a better job of thinking things through, perhaps we could understand that there really is no good reason for anyone to be forced to live at the bottom of the heap. America has become a precipitous game of Jenga on a cosmic scale. If we don’t stop pulling out the block at the bottom, the whole tower is likely to collapse.
quietlyradical 