Prejudice Becomes Personal
- linnieaikensartist
- Mar 21
- 9 min read
I wrote this in 2017 on Martin Luther King Jr’s Memorial Holiday (45 years after M.L. King and several years before the beginning of the "Black Lives Matter" movement of 2020.)
A child of the 60s, I was vaguely aware of racism, but it didn’t really touch my family I
thought. I was under this delusion for much of my young life. I went to schools in Silverlake, Los Angeles, only a mile from downtown. I was a minority as a white girl. We had far more
Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, African Americans, Mexicans, Indians, Armenians and
Greeks than we had “whites”. I only gave it a flickering thought when I had to check race boxes, white, black, … but now I recall words being used around me like “reds,” “brownies,” “yelllas,” and “black as sin.” I was a child and didn’t at the time connect these words to people. My family raised me to treat EVERYONE with respect. To this day, a half-century later, I remember in 1971 sitting in 5th grade, when the teacher showed a reel film of Bill Cosby sitting on a stool in blackness, with a light highlighting him alone, and through the whole film, taking on the role of bigot, he dismisses each race and nationality, even children, women and elderly with the stereotypes our country had given them up until that point. It was the first moment I had ever thought of race at all. It was a brilliant piece of prejudice that has stayed with me my whole life. I reflect now that Cosby had to have been a brave soul to create this film barely 6 years after MLKs stand.
Still, prejudice didn’t carry any real personal meaning until I was in my 30s. My first real
introduction came with relation to Mexican-Americans. By this point, I had been a bilingual teacher by vocation, convinced that all children deserved an education, no matter who their parents were nor how they arrived in this country. I worked hard to learn a new language to understand my students and their parents, of whom a majority of them spoke only Spanish. I taught them in English and helped them retain their home language and culture as well, so that they might be citizens of the world one day. I was confused by the flack I received from friends, people with whom I had gone to college, and from people in my church. The real shock came from words my own extended family members, who'd complained about "those 'wetbacks' taking away our jobs," and I thought, these people are just trying to support their families, and a white person these days wouldn’t stoop to working in the fields or cleaning toilets. I figured they didn’t realize that a lot of these people were actually educated people in Mexico, engineers, social workers, etc., who were fleeing oppression and starvation in their own country. Being non-political at that point, and not really knowledgeable of national or global economics, I could not fathom their perspective. All I could think was, “How could anyone deny a child the best possible chance at an education? We were all wanting a better world, right?"
Fast forward 5 years. Driving down State Street, in Santa Barbara, I had inadvertently
made a small error, like we all do from time to time, and didn’t see someone in my blind spot
and started to change lanes. I had caught it at the last minute, and there was no collision and
no one was hurt. What came next stunned me. The driver sped up around me and yelled at me from his window, “They shouldn’t give you wetbacks licenses! Why don’t you go back to
Mexico where you belong!” and then sped off. Shocked, I looked around me, wondering who he could be talking to, genuinely confused. It wasn’t until I got home and took groceries out of the trunk that I happened to glance at my license plate. AVILA. My recent ex-husband had wanted it. Suddenly, the events earlier became clear. So, this is what prejudice feels like. Minorities receive small little slurs all the time, out of nowhere. That day I decided to keep my license plate, as a reminder to myself to never forget to understand how minorities feel.
The second event happened within the same month I believe. I had been looking for an apartment, because my husband and I had divorced a few months back, and I needed a place for my daughter and I. I didn’t figure that I would have any problem given that I was a
respected teacher in town with a decent income and excellent record. Weeks went by and I
was surprised when I never received a call back on a single application I had submitted. Finally, on one of them, I called them to double check that they had received my application. The woman on the other end paused and then replied, “You don’t sound like a Mexican. Your name is Mexican, isn’t it? Victoria Avila, Right?” Confused at what seemed to me to be a non-sequitur, I impulsively responded, “Excuse me?” I hesitated then went on, “No-o-o, I’m sorry, but does that matter?” “Oh!” A big sigh of relief came from the other end of the line. She proceeded to tell me, as if sharing with a like-minded friend, about the ills of the “inundation of ‘lazy Mexicans’ in our town”, finishing with, “Well, I would be happy to meet you and show you the place.” Having silently listened in disbelief at her unsolicited and unwelcome sharing, I finally found my voice, “You know, on second thought, I do not think I would rent from you if you offered it to me. Thank you anyway.”
About 10 years later, I was confronted with it again. This is the story of a black man from the South, who moved to NY and then to middle America, Alma, Michigan. He is an unsung hero and genius that needs his story told to the world.
In 2006, I spent the summer visiting a friend in the small farming town of Alma, Michigan, an hour outside of Lansing. Kelvin Grandy Grant was a scientist and farmer, with doctorate degrees in both genetics and agronomy, as well as a Juris Doctorate thrown in for good measure. He had been hired by a huge company to oversee the development and growing of disease-resistant corn crops grown for livestock for Northern-Middle America (MI, IN, IL, IA, WI and Southern Ontario, Canada). Putting aside the whole topic of GMOs for now, I will speak to the topic of discussion, race and prejudice.
“Hard Work, Clean Living.” This was his motto. He was a self-made man, who had
started as a mechanic and tow-truck driver in the Southeast, USA, where he had been born in 1957 on a farm and learned farming. Half African-American and half Tuscarora Native American of North Carolina, where his grandmother was the then current matriarch of the tribe, he told me childhood stories of the KKK burning a swastika in the lawn of his home on two different occasions and burning down their Baptist church around the corner. He had served in the Marines 8 years and came home to get an education, working his own way through Howard University, then “the only university that would welcome blacks in the South,” he told me. He did this while living part of that time in the boiler room of the university with his young daughter because he couldn’t afford to rent an apartment.
After obtaining a degree in business, he became impassioned to figure out a way to keep his tribe from starvation and help sustain them financially. With his farming background in the back of his mind, this led him to the goal of creating a disease resistant corn crop that would survive and prosper in North Carolina for his tribe. After his ex-wife remarried a well-off medical doctor, his daughter moved to live with her, and again, Kelvin returned to school. He moved to New York, and working his way through Cornell University and Syracuse University simultaneously, Kelvin obtained his 3 doctorates within 1 year of each other. Later, doing well in his profession, he became a town commissioner and benefactor to many, set up scholarships for African-Americans at both Cornell and Howard, and was a part time instructor at Alma College while he worked as a scientist. I provide this as a backdrop for the event and other related events that would unfold in his life as an African-American living in Midwest.
During my summer stay in Alma, we were enjoying an outing to the coast of Lake Huron. He had a large black early-model Chevy Suburban, which he had used to move from New York to Michigan, as well to sleep in the back when a motel wouldn’t rent a room to him when he traveled for his job. I, oblivious and ignorant to what he was really saying, didn’t even question it. We had slept in the back of our Chevy Carryall for much of my childhood, so I thought nothing of it. Several miles out of Alma, we were stopped by the police. With a bull horn from behind, we were ordered to get out of the car and place our hands where they could see them. Heart racing and eyes shocked and panicked, I looked to Kelvin. He told me he was so sorry to put me through this and said we needed to just be calm and do it. Now my mind was racing trying to imagine what kind of crime he might have committed to “put me through this”. We got out of the car.
The police slammed Kelvin face-first against the truck and with a billy club at the back of his neck, and frisked him. Kelvin said nothing. The other officer stood by me and frisked me too, without the face slam and billy club, then stood back and asked me if I was okay, “Ma’am,” and if I was being transported against my will. Confused, I looked at him, then Kelvin, then said, “Of course not. I was here visiting from California and we were going for an outing to the coast.” He had me tell him who Kelvin was, even though they had already run his plates and found him clean, I guess. A little indignant, I told them how his name was Dr. Kelvin Grant and that he was a lawyer and scientist for the well-known company in those parts. Even despite that, the second police officer, went through the back of the truck, which was basically empty, while Kelvin was still being pinned to the truck and told not to talk. Eventually, finding nothing, they had to let us go. They followed us about 20 miles before turning off. For long moments we sat in the truck, driving in silence, me shaking from the
experience, never having been remotely treated like that in my life. Kelvin finally glanced at me and said gruffly, “Are you sure you want to get mixed up with a black man? This is what my life is like. I have gotten used to it, but you might not be able to handle it.” I learned from him that at least once a month this kind of thing happened to him.
I had my first experience at how different thinking was in the Midwest. It was nothing like California or New York. Most other places in the US, he told me from experience, were just like this, or worse. Over the course of the summer I heard many more stories of the prejudicial behavior toward him by other scientists and company men. He told these stories matter-of-factly, almost dispassionately. He never argued with them or got angry, but he refused to toe the line and dress like an “uppity white scientist” with the farmers. He wore old overalls and walked the fields in camaraderie with the farmers, earning their friendship and trust, so he always had the most farmer buy-in of all of the scientists in all five states. He consistently had the highest rate of returns and patents on new drought tolerant and disease resistant corn hybrids, but despite all of this, he never earned the respect of his colleagues nor the company. He was like the golden hen that they needed but didn’t want anyone to see or know about. It wouldn’t be good for the company image.
While we had actually become engaged on the coast of Lake Huron on that fateful day,
the romantic relationship never came to fruition, basically due to geography, but also, in part
due to the fact that he strived to live by the Torah, which necessitated certain limitations on me as a woman; well that, and he asked that I get rid of my little dog. That was never going to happen!! Never-the-less, I deeply respected and admired him, and we stayed friends until his untimely death in 2014. I still have a deep respect for him and am forever grateful for what he taught me in the value of persistence in the face of adversity, the very real persistence of prejudice and discrimination in our country still, and how to still keep a pure heart and love others who are ignorant and cruel, always giving back to others and one's community and country. He was another of those examples to me to never judge a book by its cover, a man by his skin color,
… nor a man by his coveralls.
Painful, yet what a wonderful tribute to Dr. Kelvin Grant. He is smiling at you from Heaven Linnie ♥️