Belated Endnotes of an Integrationist

By Patrick Hall

It’s going on fifty years since I found myself working in a boarding school in Northwestern Alaska with Yupik Eskimo students. St. Mary Boarding School had been a fixture in the town of St. Mary’s predating the First World War. St. Mary’s was more of a small village. If my memory serves me correctly, the population numbered less than 400. That all changed in August of each school year when over 300 Yupik Eskimos (or Innuit) students arrived from various Bush Alaskan villages such as Chevak, Scammon Bay, Russian Villages, Hooper Bay, Mountain Village, Pilot Station, Bethel, and Tunnunak. We even had a student from as far away as Little Diomede Island. At the time Little Diomede belonged to the United States while Big Diomede Island seated less than 800 meters away, was part of the former Soviet Union. From a historical perspective of the Cold War, both the Soviets and the United States seldom interfered with the indigenous habitants “back and forth” of these Bering Sea communities since their primary identity was neither Soviet nor American, but Inupiat or Innuit.   To underscore the latter point, one day I was helping a Yupik student in the school library to fill out her application to attend a University in the lower forty-eight. She asked me quite honestly whether Chevak, her home village was part of the United States.

I remember the day, I arrived at the school in the back of the open-air pick-up Truck that had shuttled me and other employees from the airfield. All of us, teachers, library media staff, and other support personnel were buzzing with enthusiasm for our new jobs. We found the Yupik people to be very kind and generous.

Since it was a boarding school, the environment fostered a close relationship between students and staff. The students saw us as teachers during the daytime. At night we were cast into the role of surrogate parents since many of us, including this writer, lived in the dorms with the students as dorm Prefects.

As times and the months passed, I began, or maybe we all began to look beyond the ephemerals of skin color and social customs. I discovered, that even a young black man, brought up in an urban environment of the 1950s and 60s, I shared more commonalities with these people than differences.

It has become far too fashionable, if not dangerously trendy, in the current multicultural and DEI movement to stress differences over commonalities. The greatest ongoing damage posed by identity-based politics or diversity equity and inclusion catechumenates is, that it encourages people to see themselves as belonging to separate tribes or a mysterious “other.” Being a proud American is just too passe, if not considered culturally and politically anathema. As a result, one wouldn’t be caught dead identifying themselves as a card-carrying integrationist. The term has been discarded, if not hopelessly distorted by constituencies on both the left and right. Democrats and many “controlled opposition Republicans” have long ago purged the term integrationist from their socio-political canon. The fact is that the idea in its heyday stood for something we as a nation, “as human beings” need more of.

Integration meant open dialog among different groups. It challenged an entire generation of Americans to recognize and confess the fears that our skin color, language, sexual and class associations arouse in one another.  In more practical terms integration meant choice for millions of Black Americans, who previously had very few choices in the way of jobs, housing, education, and the freedom to go anywhere in this country without running into the ugly apparition of segregation.

When I was a child in the 1950s, we sometimes visited relatives in the South. Through a child’s eyes, I enjoyed the long road trips through the North and states below the Mason-Dixon Line.  Since I was one of twelve children, which sometimes included one of my uncles and his family, our trips took on a caravan atmosphere. Also, remember that in the 1950s, the interstate highway system was not yet complete, so it made what today is an 8–10-hour drive to Virginia, Maryland, or the Carolinas into a two- or three-day affair.

During these sojourns, we would stop to eat and rest along the side of a road or in a park which I thought was great fun. But even as a child, I noticed that my parents and my older siblings (whom I often referred to as the 1930s and 1940s kids) were less enthused about these extended road trips.  As many blacks over the age of 60 will attest, one couldn’t just stop at any Holiday Inn or restaurant back then.  We simply did not have that choice as Negroes. Rest facilities were legally (or illegally) segregated throughout the South and parts of the North.  Unless you happen to know where a motel that catered to Negroes was located, like the establishment one of my great Aunts operated in Benedict, Maryland, you rested wherever you could.

Sidebar: I hesitated for years to relate the story of two of my older brothers returning home to Rochester, New York from a road trip that started in North Carolina. Of course, in the Southern states, you still would run into a lot of “colorful, if not dangerous rednecks.”  I believe my brother Thomas had driven down to Fort Bragg North Carolina to pick up my brother Martin after the completion of his Army Basic Training.  It was late at night, and my brother Thomas was driving, when Martin started to hysterically scream for Thomas to stop the car. Martin then jumped out of the vehicle, ran about thirty feet in front of the car, and kneeled to kiss the road. Now mind you this was late at night or early morning on a semi-deserted highway.  What precipitated Martin's theatrics was they had just crossed the Mason-Dixon line in Southern PA, and Martin thought it was a good time to celebrate returning to the less segregated North. Also, my brother Thomas inferred that Martin might have had a few too many beers earlier that evening. But let’s not talk about that!

 Racism and segregation were still unfortunate fixtures in many parts of our country back then.

This is not to say that we live in a world free of racism and hate. We certainly do not! But things have changed radically in my short 73 years.  My children and grandchildren live in an America that despite some racial and/or ethnic discord, is much freer and offers both liberty and opportunities that my late mother born in 1910 could only dream of in her youth. What remains so galling is, that many Americans of African descent have been brainwashed, if not groomed by the professional racism industry, headed by Black Studies Professors at our Universities, and organizations like the NAACP, Black Lives Matter, and the Congressional Black Caucus to see otherwise. Their goal is to keep racism alive. An extraordinary amount of money, power, and fame is still to be garnered by the black political class. They love to be viewed as edgy, hip, and down with brothers in their perpetual fight against white racism. Without it, they would be out of business and would have to seek gainful employment elsewhere.
 
An Unnoticed Betrayal
Sadly, I am more than aware that this message will not play well nor resonate with the present-day Civil Rights leadership who betrayed the early integrationist philosophy decades ago by substituting group entitlement for individual rights and self-determination. Integration in its truest sense is synonymous with liberty. I as an individual, and not a black or white person have the inalienable rights that our Constitution so eloquently speaks of. This does not mean that as an integrationist I am obligated to associate with whites, blacks, Asians, Native Americans, gay or straight. But it has always implied that I have the freedom to do so without hindrance from the government or the growing number of grievance constituencies, that are becoming all too ubiquitous.

Politicians like Jim Clyburn (D-SC), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) as well as duplicitous if not disingenuous Barrack Hussein Obama all know that public policy in modern politics is too remote and complicated to create and maintain a connection between leaders and the led.  Since the 1970s the black political class and a growing list of other grievance factions have learned that identity and tribal affiliation are what matter now. Pushing an integrationist philosophy or mindset was no longer lucrative nor a pathway to manipulate people.  

Years ago, I remember seeing Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr on a news program addressing the need for Americans to find what we shared in common and not exaggerate our differences.  As the years have passed, I find myself admiring the simplicity of his words. It is far easier to express dislike or hate for a person or group than it is to see how similar we all are.  Many times, we are “pathetically similar.” But we choose not to see it!

The latter takes effort and most of us (including black folks) would rather harbor and nurture prejudices or hurts since that is the easier road. In looking back on my experience with the Yupik and Inupiat, as well as a similar experience while working with the Cheyenne and Crow at the St. Labre Indians School in Ashland, Montana, I was taught a lesson that I have tried to pass on to my adult children and hopefully my grandchildren.   As an integrationist, as human beings, we will always be more similar than different.