History of a colorless man

I’m a white man. I’m not “courtesy white,” either, like some of the very light olive ethnics. It takes generations of living in cold fog and eating root vegetables to produce my kind of white. And, no, I can’t dance, not even a little.

I’ll tell you how white I am. I’m white enough for Pres. Donald Trump to trust me if I were rich and con me if I were working-class or poor. One cap with a Confederate flag on the front is all I need to blend into a “Heritage Not Hate” rally.

And I’m told, most of the time, that I should distrust, or fear, or sneer at Black people.

But if I think about it, no factory with a totally Black board of directors ever sent their manufacturing jobs overseas. The banks that nearly collapsed during the last (but not the final) “mortgage bubble” were not black-owned.

I started working when I was 14, and I have only had one Black boss, and never had a Black male boss. The Black female boss I had was head of housekeeping when I was a hotel janitor.

I have never been “written up” by a Black boss. For those of you whose career trajectory was college to law school to big white house, being “written up” is the process of having some job mistake committed to paper by a boss, signed by you and the boss, and then placed reverently in your “file.” If you are written up three times in 12 months, they fire you. You cannot do hourly work in America without being “written up” at least once. I have never once been interviewed for a job by a Black person.

Of course, your racial mileage may vary, but I haven’t gone out of my way to avoid being supervised by Black people. It just sort of happened, though it is, of course, no accident.

When I lived in Kansas City, Missouri, the city’s population was about half Black, and I used to say that I’d believe we had achieved racial equality when half the diners in my favorite restaurant were Black and half the busboys were white. This did not happen, though the busboys grew more Mexican as time passed. The owners of the restaurants continued to be almost all white. The presence of Mexicans at the bottom of the restaurant ladder didn’t kick the Blacks up a rung; it kicked them off the ladder entirely.

Random stories, I know. Just anecdotes. There’s a good chance my history with Black Americans is just accidental. Your living in a nearly all-white suburb is a happy accident. My history is probably just as random.

It’s a big city problem, anyway. That’s where the “bad ones” live, down there among the abandoned factories that show where the jobs were before the rich white people moved them to China.

A great many yachts and mansions were bought with the money the white people made when they sent the jobs to China, and the gates to many gated communities were forged.

I have never been fired by a Black man, but a white man is ruining my country. A man as white as me.

Marc Munroe Dion’s latest book, a collection of his lily-white columns, is called “Devil’s Elbow: Dancing in the Ashes of America.” It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, GooglePlay and iTunes.