Termites in the neighborhood and we did not even know it.

By Paul V. Montesino, PhD, MBA.

I came to the United States in the early sixties. I had not been in Miami, Florida, for more than a week when I took my first ride on a public bus. I observed, on the way to the inner city trying to get a job, that all the blacks who rode the bus went straight to the last seats on the vehicle even though there were many empty ones to choose from. Not only was it common practice, but no one seemed to mind or be bothered or even notice. It was then that I remembered that blacks and whites lived under different rules that were based on the color of our skins. I hate to admit that I felt better in the foolish belief that I was not supposed to behave like those folks who went by me to sit on uncomfortable noisy seats over the bus engines in the hot Miami sun because my skin was lighter. For a silly moment I felt blessed.

I did not find the job I wanted and I moved to Massachusetts never looking back. Not having seen any other blatant or subtle discrimination in my new home until the infamous Boston School busing crisis developed in the nineteen seventies I forgot the significance of that first trip in a bus that was a symbol of all that was wrong in America at one time. The years went by and I finally finished my first college degree with honors. Not high honors mind you; simply honors. My college inducted me in their Honor Society and I was invited to have lunch with many other inductees and the association’s administrative officers. It was a lunch I would never forget.

I was sitting next to the man who had just stepped down from the presidency of the organization. I felt honored again. He, a man obviously in his late sixties, was very pleasant and complimentary to me for my educational achievements. Then he got into a question I have heard thousands of times before: “Where are you from?” These days I have developed a nasty habit of responding with an unexpected answer: “I am from planet earth, where are you from?” Then I was not so sure of myself to say that big truth and responded with another smaller truth: “I am from Cuba.”

Now, remember, this guy was the most senior officer of this educational group. He looked at me as though I had shown symptoms of a contagious disease. His response went something like this: “You know, I have lived in Dorchester all my life and there are many Cubans there who live on Welfare.” I was not sure about how many Cubans lived in Dorchester or how many were on Welfare but I was sure that Welfare was not an institution designed exclusively for Cubans or any other nationalities or races for that matter. And before I could mention that fact he gave me an unwelcome description of all the economic and social consequences of Welfare that I neither needed or wanted.

He finished his eloquent garbage, took some deep breath and asked me the next big question, one that I really welcomed: “And, what do you do for a living?” Not wanting to disappoint him with an articulate answer about my bank officer status then or the social need for a Welfare system that is there to help those in trouble that he might not have welcome or understood and might have detracted him from his illiterate statistical rubbish I shot back: “Oh, my family lives on Welfare.” You don’t want to know the rest or extent of his shock because he did not open his mouth even once after that. The man went mentally AWOL.

But before I move to the end of this story I want to visit another related experience, this one more fresh. A recently widowed woman I know decided to sell her home not long ago. Her husband of many years had passed on recently, she was getting older and sickly and could no longer live alone or afford all the utilities required by a house built for a family of five in the nineteen fifties. The mortgage was already paid so she was sure that the sale price would be enough to keep her free of any serious economic worries through the remaining of her aging life and even leave something behind for children and grandchildren after her death. She was surprised, actually shocked, when she found that her goals were not to be reached any time soon.

The house inspector had come to inspect the property and discovered that the house was infested with termites, many as a matter of fact. The woman and her family reacted as any concerned person would and did not want to believe the man at first. They even thought that the inspector was trying to get her to lower the price or any such shenanigan in complicity with the buyer. It took the visit of another inspector hired by the lady to convince herself that the termites were indeed there. She was not going anywhere until they did. How they could have grown to such extent through the years without anyone suspecting it added to her aggravation. The husband, of course, was gone and could not answer that question. Well, the story does not end there. The house was fumigated and eventually the woman sold and moved out.

For the past several days, we have witnessed a similar metaphorical national situation that has been created by the controversy of the Illinois Senator and presidential contender Barack Obama and his relationship or ascribed responsibility with the incendiary comments made by his long time church pastor Jeremy Wright. While I write this piece I am not interested in Mr. Obama’s presidential ambitions, Mrs. Clinton’s or Mr. McCain’s for that matter. That is not the purpose or the intention of this article. In other words, this is not about supporting one or the other or making judgment or speculation about motives here. I am an independent thinker and voter and I have the freedom to choose the person I believe can move us forward and I am not yet at a point in this process where I can put a name or a face to the one I will select as our 44^th president. I have, however, other serious issues at hand that I would like to share with you.

Much has been made about this preacher and his association with Senator Obama. I have been to and dealt with many black organizations in my life and I am fully aware that the African American community, like the Latino community does, has many issues still outstanding that we of a different race or socio economic composition cannot even imagine, issues that we would like to see ignored or silenced, passed over so to speak, so as not to be mortified. Black churches are not branches of some structured organizational pyramid based somewhere in another European country where the guides on subjects to discuss every Sunday are scheduled dogmatically. In these churches the pastor and his or her community are the church and what happens around them and their lives is the subject of the sermons. Lives where there are men in jail, women who have no husbands, there is crime, poverty, guns and Aids. Not knowing the specifics of what this pastor said, or should have said or how it should have been said or his tone or what Mr. Obama heard throughout the years or should have heard as he grew up, I have a sense that this case is not much different from the story of the woman and her termite infected home above. Follow me please.

We, of course were shocked to hear someone talking like the Reverend Wright did. And it brought all of us to confront, by association, the man who at the present time represents the first serious attempt of an African American who not only dared to believe that he could be elected President but also thinks he could pull it out. What has happened to all of us who thought or said that race does not matter any more, or that Senator Obama is somehow a different kind of African American, whatever that means, or that we have fallen for his oratory or his chutzpah enough to be able to ignore his skin shade so far, is that we have discovered that our racial house still has termites.

It does not show on our walls, our conversations, our statistics, our discourses of equality and hope amongst educated people sipping on a glass of Chardonnay, but it is still there. We had been looking at Senator Obama through a glass created by our honest desire to be just and fair to him on our conditions and he has broken that glass and has made with its pieces a mirror where we are seeing our own true stereotypical images reflected. As Stevan Harnad in his famous character Pogo said, “I have seen the enemy and it is us.”

I don’t know, and I don’t care, where Senator Obama’s campaign is going to go. As I said before, I have not made my mind yet about who will get the vote. We don’t even know who the Democratic nominee is going to be. But I am sure of one thing: if we vote for him because he is black, or don’t because he is, or do vote for Mrs. Clinton because she is a woman or not because she is, or vote for Mr. McCain because he is white or a male, we will have shown that the depth of the termites in the fabric of our society is getting worse, not better.

Yesterday, approximately forty years after I “enjoyed” lunch with the president of my Honor Society, I had an opportunity to see human relations first hand one more time. I was in a line to get a cup of coffee at a local shop when the guy in front of me, a man who must have been in his late seventies or early eighties, walked away and sat on a bench to enjoy his snack. As he opened the bag with trembling hands that betrayed an incipient stage of Parkinson’s Disease he discovered that the attendant had neglected to grill the sandwich as requested.

He returned and broke in front of me interrupting my order and offering all kinds of unnecessary apologies to me for his actions. I told him not to worry at all and to go ahead. “I can wait,” I said patiently. While the clerk, a young man of Latino extraction, went back to the grill to finish the incomplete order, the old man made a comment: “They don’t know what the hell they are doing…” And then, to complete his lesson in judgment about the human condition I obviously was waiting for, he added: “…you should see the other store on …street. Well,” he said with sarcasm, “foreigners!” I did not know what to respond to a man his age. Not trying to disguise my Spanish accent I replied ”Sir, We are all foreigners in the world.” He smiled sheepishly and walked away with his grilled sandwich, his trembling hands and his prejudice, one that I bet may have been around all his life. I am not sure how long the poor fellow has to live, but there are some of us who live our lives in vain and don’t even know it. And there are others who live with termites under our floors and would never recognize them either.

And this is my point of view today.