A Story of White Privilege: Coming of Age in Washington Heights
I grew up in Washington Heights, just north of Harlem, in New York City. When I was in my first year of parochial school, 1958, most of my classmates in my class picture were White. By the time I’d completed my eighth year of parochial school, most of my classmates in the class picture were Hispanic: Cubans and Puerto Ricans. One was Black. There were very few Dominicans in the neighborhood at that time. The few Dominicans in the neighborhood were clustered on 172nd Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Audubon Avenue, and in a row of wood cottages on 182nd Street and Audubon Avenue. Dominicans, poor, aggressive and undereducated when they arrived, would later make Washington Heights, what had been an idyllic neighborhood surrounded by forests and rivers, the crack capitol of the world which was easy enough as I-95 a major artery on the East coast, ran from New Jersey over the George Washington Bridge, right through the Heights and then through the Bronx, on its way to New England. By the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, a great proportion of the White families like mine had already moved to the suburbs. I thought the people who left wanted their own houses and front lawns and back yards, but school integration had begun, and Blacks were being bussed to the public schools in Washington Heights from Harlem. I would learn later that White people were running away. In my eighth year of parochial school, 1965, I applied for and was admitted to the high schools of my choice. Unfortunately, the era of rock and roll had begun. After graduation, I attended my last year of parochial school’s summer day camp. I was asked to sing ‘Hang on Sloopy’ over a big Shure microphone to an auditorium full of young boys and girls accompanied by a drummer and a guitarist.
I was making a big mistake. When the song was over, the girls began screaming and my teenage hormones went wild. I begged for a guitar and eventually got one and spent the summer learning to play the guitar while neglecting my Latin declensions. I was expelled from the prep school after my freshman year and my school changed from an exclusive day prep school my father had spent good money to send me to, to New York City’s public George Washington High School, with the dubious distinction of being the first public high school in the city where a student was murdered. It was not long before I was beaten. I had failed to move out of the way of a Black boy a head a half taller than I was. I was almost knocked unconscious but managed to get up. The Black boy towered over me and I screamed at him, but I did not fight back. He was just too big, and I was still unsteady on my feet. After I was punched, all the teachers closed and locked the doors of their classrooms. I will never forget two Greek boys helping me to the bathroom where I cleaned out my nose and washed my face. My nose was badly broken. I was called to the dean’s office. The dean was a Goldberg (or Goldstein, or a close variant) who told me that if I insisted on a written complaint it would have to go on my record. He said I had a “chip on my shoulder” because I didn’t get out of the Black boy’s way fast enough. There was a White cop in the room. He was there to protect the students. He said nothing. There was no mention of my broken nose. There was no indication from the dean or the cop that the Black boy would be disciplined or even inconvenienced.
Before I continue: I recently discovered that a nephew of mine, victim of his parents’ bitter divorce, was beginning to have behavioral problems at a public school in mid-Manhattan. He was acting like a Black kid and had begun to wear a hood over his face. He had been disciplined for punching another kid in the face, but the other kid had first ripped my nephew’s glasses off his face and crushed them under his sneakers. My nephew said something I latched onto right away. He said: “I got a ‘4.2’ for punching the kid who broke my glasses, but a Black kid only got a ‘2’ for pissing in a urinal in the bathroom and pulling a kid over to the urinal and holding his face down in the piss. Was that fair?” he asked. “No,” I told him, but I thought it was very calculating on the part of the disciplinarian and I thought back to my experience at GW, where Black on White violence was legitimized and ignored by the dean and the cop who was there to prevent it.
Now, to return to my story. I went to my next class and a group of Black boys saw my nose and said, “You the guy?” Then they sat on the top of their desks and started laughing and giving one another high fives. The teacher said nothing. No one in the class moved except the Black boys. The teacher waited for them to quiet down before continuing the class. When I got home, I had hardly sat down when there was a knock on the door. It was a police detective dressed in plain clothes. He wanted to talk to me at the 34th precinct. I must have been a strange sight standing there with a bloody handkerchief over my nose and two darkening eye sockets. I remember thinking — this cop thinks he’s just hit the jackpot — and I was taken to the precinct in the back of his car.
When we got there, I was put in a cage across from the detective’s desk. After shuffling some papers, he got up and showed me a Scouting magazine in a clear plastic bag. The magazine had an address label with my name and address on it. He told me that a detective had been critically wounded by a Black man in a basement on 176th Street and Audubon Avenue. After shooting the detective, the Black man had jumped through a basement window to escape. During the investigation, this detective found my magazine in the alley under the broken window. They also had the son of the building’s superintendent John D. in a cage in the other room. The detective told us that he wanted to know if we had anything to do with the Black man, if we knew who he was. He was willing to overlook anything wrong we had done but he wanted the information on the Black man. I had no idea what the detective was talking about, but I did know that I had given a stack of Scouting magazines to my younger brother who still went to the parochial school on 175th Street. Later it was discovered that my brother had distributed the magazines to boys at school. One of the kids lived on the 5th floor of John Ds building above that broken window and had thrown the magazine out of his window and into the alley where the detective found it. My father showed up and after a conversation with the detectives I couldn’t hear, he took me and John D. home. My father seemed to know all the officers. He’d lived in the neighborhood all his life. He grew up at 530 West 166th Street around the corner from the Audubon Ballroom where the Black revolutionary leader Malcom X was shot and killed in 1965. When we got home from the police station, he looked at my swollen nose and Black eyes, put his hand on my shoulder and said: “Now you’re learning.”
One afternoon, my family was gathered at my uncle Neil’s house on 176th Street between Wadsworth Avenue and St. Nick, two blocks west of John Ds house where the cop had been shot in the basement. I walked into the kitchen where the men were sitting. My uncle Chubby (Milton Schneider) was there, and my uncle Neil (Logan) was there, and my father “Dickie” was there. I walked in whistling the tune “Mr. Bo Jango” which was big on the charts at the time. The men looked at me and began to laugh. My father said, “Don’t you have anything else to whistle?” Then uncle Chubby who had driven a bus on the M5 route which traversed the east side from Washington Heights to lower Manhattan and went through Harlem, said to me, “Mr. Bo Jangles got on my bus and wouldn’t pay the nickel fare. When I reminded him to pay the fare, the sonofabitch tried to slit my throat” and they just looked at me. My jaw dropped; my whistling was over.
Later, a few of the women and young girls came in from the living room and clustered around my father to hear him sing. He had been in the Marble Collegiate choir as a boy and sweetly sang Ave Maria for them.
The following year, my uncle Chubby whose throat Bo Jangles had tried to slit, was in the hospital with his third heart attack. During the night he pulled all the tubes out of his tired body and died.
Not long after that, my uncle Neil who lived those two blocks west of John Ds on 176th Street was attacked in the vestibule of his building, steps from his front door. A Black man stabbed him 16 or 17 times, then robbed him, and left him for dead, but he survived. He walked with a cane after that. When I was 20, my father had to expel a trio of underage Black teenagers from the bar on the northeast corner of 180th Street and Audubon Avenue where he bartended on weekends. They said they would be back. He stayed in the bar all night long with “Twig” the owner, a middle-aged man who walked with a limp. My father was 42 years old. He was protecting the bar and his friend Twig, waiting to see if the Black teenagers returned. I was in a tent near a hiking trail in the woods of Harriman State Park 60 miles north of the city. When the Black boys came back Saturday morning with a pistol, my father went outside to greet them, and they told him to get on his knees. He told them: “You wanna’ shoot, shoot.” So, they shot him, and he turned and walked back into the bar and collapsed on the pool table. It took him 3 days to die. I’ve since heard that Nicky Barnes, a notorious Harlem drug dealer had been giving guns to underage Black boys because when they murdered someone they were tried as juveniles, saving their older brothers many years of jail time.
My brother and sister and I used to get a birthday telegram every year when we were kids. It was from a Black man, a homosexual my father knew who had moved to California. The Black man would return to New York on business occasionally and call my father. They would drink together. He even took my father to 181st Street and bought him clothes once. I never met him, but I know my father, who rarely talked about himself, probably saved his life.
I remember my father in Mennona’s Tavern on 170th street and Amsterdam Avenue talking to an elderly Black woman in a navy dress, White hat, White gloves, and a string of pearls around her neck on a Sunday afternoon. They were engaged in lively conversation laughing and sipping from beer glasses.
I remember “Figgy” Figueroa, a big Cuban Black man who always wore a traditional Cuban shirt. He had a gold tooth. He was a pharmacist, owner of Bavero’s Pharmacy on St. Nicholas Avenue and 177th Street. He sponsored the Tu Sabes, a baseball team in the Puerto Rican American Baseball League. My father was their star pitcher. Figgy would massage his arm before and after their games with liniment because my father pitched his heart out, every game. My uncle Eddie Pyke, who lived on Dyckman Street in Inwood, was their right fielder. He would routinely catch high fly balls holding his glove behind his back. Larry Lavin of 175th Street, was their gifted shortstop; three White men, with the palest most beautiful blue eyes, like the sky, who were happy to play serious baseball with their Puerto Rican and Cuban friends. Three or four Puerto Rican women would always be standing with their fingers through the links of the chain link fence between home plate and first base jumping up and down screaming, “Deeckie, Deeckie, Deeckie!” every time my father pitched the ball.
I remember passing the Audubon Bar where my father was shot years later and finding him in the midst of a crowd of New Jersey kids, who would drive over the George Washington Bridge to drink because the minimum age in New Jersey was 21 and the minimum age in New York was 18. He was firmly holding a brawny teenager, a “jock” in a high school football jacket, against a car. Other boys stood around them. My father and the jock were red-faced and sweaty, and my father’s face was bleeding. My father was holding tight to the Jersey kid who struggled to get free to hit him, but my father was talking to him as gently as he sang Ave Maria in my aunt Virginia’s kitchen. He kept repeating, “You can’t beat up your sister. She’s your sister. You can’t. You can’t.” The jock’s sister stood off to the side, in a knot of her girlfriends. The Jersey kid’s sister had run away from home to live a lesbian lifestyle which was not accepted at the time, but my father thought it was more unacceptable for her brother to lay a hand on her, and he pressed the angry boy until he was subdued, and they went back into the bar to talk.
When I went to visit my father at Jewish Memorial Hospital, which was a third-rate hospital off Broadway, at the bottom of its long descent into Inwood, I asked him, “Where were the cops, dad?” He weakly whispered, “The cops are paid not to come.” I’ll never, ever forget the last thing he said to me. He said, “Nice guys finish last.” It didn’t occur to me until years later, why the cops might have taken my father to the old Jewish Memorial Hospital (eventually closed) instead of Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, where they normally took their own and where Malcolm X was taken when he was shot. They might have been afraid my father would rat on them because of the money they took from Twig, and they wanted him to die, but I’ll never know. I only know my father would never rat.
After my father’s death in Jewish Memorial Hospital and bearing the burden of his disappointment with me for being expelled from prep school, I needed redemption. He had always said, I would be a writer. I set out to do my father’s will. I wrote every chance I got. I wrote a journal. I wrote letters for people. I wrote copy for the local church, and press releases for a local community group, and finally, after many years of writing at every opportunity, I got a break from Samuel T. Francis in 2003. Sam Francis was possibly the greatest political scientist in the United States at the time. He had advised Pat Buchanan, who was running for president in 1996, that he should champion the immigration issue. Pat Buchanan didn’t listen to him and lost in the primaries. Donald J. Trump championed the immigration issue in 2016 and won the presidential election, and the Marxists have stepped up their revolutionary timetable because President Trump has threatened to make America great again and America’s greatness is not in their plans. Sam Francis solicited my literary defense of Christianity for the last book he edited, Race and the American Prospect. He died suddenly in 2005, a year before the book was released. He was kind to me, and a great editor. I am privileged to have met him and worked with him.
With their control of the public-school system and their indoctrination of our children, denizens of the Left are, by design, drafting poorly educated, poorly disciplined feral Blacks to serve as cadres in their Marxist insurrection. The propaganda from Hollywood, academia, the press, and the courts portrays White Americans as racists while steadfastly refusing to report the extent of Black on White crime. It is only with the ubiquitous cell phone that we now get a glimpse of the extent of the violence perpetrated by Black people on one another and on White people, but increasingly, mesmerized by the Marxist propaganda cabled to the TVs in their living rooms, rising Black anger is settling on White people. While Black on White violence is deliberately under reported by the media, White on Black violence is magnified a thousand times.
Until we realize that the media lies and propaganda do not constitute free speech and act on our realization, until we hold the media responsible for driving the Marxist revolution, until we wrest Hollywood, the public school system, the Ivy League universities, and the courts from their grasp, the Left will continue to educate the masses to hate us. That hate is driving their revolution.
The Occidental Quarterly published my essay ‘Niche Theory, Population Transfer and the Origin of the anti-Semitic Cycle’ in 2007. In that essay, I predicted the riots.
Consider for a moment the campaign of demonization of the European American Christian majority and its culture that we see in the media, academia, and legislated from the bench. What if this campaign mirroring the public vilification employed by ardent and merciless communist regimes is completely successful here in North America, not now perhaps, but in a generation or two, something for our grandchildren to inherit? Imagine an economic downturn of Blackouts, food shortages, and riots in which all law enforcement niches are filled by media-molded unassimilated immigrants and indigenous psychologically prepared minorities: law enforcement personnel conditioned to believe that the people they’re sworn to protect are noxious bigots who deserve the violence they suffer.
I was wrong. It didn’t take a generation or two. It’s happening now, in front of our eyes, on the TV we watch in the comfort of our living rooms, sheltered in place from a pandemic. Clueless White and Black people are finally marching together, but they are marching with Marxist anarchists, who ply their murderous trade anonymously among the ranks of the peaceful demonstrators. Valiant policemen are shot in the head because the provocateurs know they wear bulletproof vests; our own ignorant masses, stimulated by the Left, seem to be bent on the destruction of the greatest country in the free world. I watch as White people and Black people, useful innocents once perhaps, but useful idiots now, participate in the destruction of the only real utopia the world may ever know, oblivious of their march toward the gulags and the mass exterminations of the Marxist nightmare that claimed a hundred million lives in the 20th century because evidence of the scourge has been erased from the school curriculums.
https://www.unz.com/article/a-story-of-white-privilege-coming-of-age-in-washington-heights