Russell Morse

I always felt as if I had to prove myself. I had to fight anyone who challenged me — not because I had violent tendencies, but because I was prejudged as a sucker by the color of my skin. White equals “weak” in urban schools today. So if my friends were stealing, I had to steal more. If they were fighting, I had to jump in and hit harder. The only white men I admired growing up were Italian gangsters. I must have watched “Goodfellas” 50 times trying to perfect the accent, dress and attitude of my role models. I altered my mother’s maiden name slightly to make it Italian, waiting to be initiated into the underworld. The call never came, but in pursuing it (wearing a double-breasted pinstriped suit and two-tone shoes to my confirmation) I became even more confused about my ethnic identity.

It may be hard for some people of color to understand, but I was plagued by an inferiority complex because I was white. I felt cursed by not being given an identity. With no particular cultural values from either side of my family, white seemed empty — the absence of culture. I also knew, from my friends, and from what I learned in school, that whites were the problem with this country. We’d stolen land from Indians and Latinos, enslaved the Africans, forced the Chinese to build our railroads. It seemed to me that all the despair in America was solely the doing of the white man. Why did I have to belong to that group? If a group of black kids beat me up in the schoolyard, I assumed I deserved it because my ancestors had enslaved their ancestors.

In the years that followed, I fell in with a racially diverse group of delinquents and felt as if my problems had been solved. Finally, I belonged. But I had only traded one set of problems for another. When I was sent to juvenile hall, the abuse I suffered based on my skin color brought my self-hatred to a boil. (It’s no accident that James William King, the white supremacist convicted of killing James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, became a violent white supremacist in prison; prisons are incubators of race hatred today.)

I’m 18 now, and finally coming to terms with being white. I got help with my anger, and my addictive personality. I live in a mixed race group home and have found a “brotherhood” there that transcends race. I’ve also learned, in the new California, that every race needs to struggle with a tendency to favor its own. Watching the Chinese sue the NAACP over access to schools; looking at data showing rising black-on-Asian hate crimes; witnessing the regular squabbles between Latinos and blacks in California high schools; it’s become clear to me that white people have no monopoly on oppression and cruelty.

One thing that helped was my mother giving me a book, “The Color of Water,” by James McBride. It was billed as a black man’s tribute to his white mother. But what came across to me was how loving the author’s mother was, which mattered much more than her race. The book started a long healing process that continues today. I learned to pay little regard to my parents based on their blood, but rather to concentrate on their love and the fact that I am a piece of each of them.

But my own experience has made me wonder: Are whites who commit hate crimes today more likely motivated by white supremacy, or white self-hate?

Good question, Hawaii. Is it gonna be bitches indeed. We’ll have to investigate.

Hawaii and I shuffle through the pod up to the classroom in our county-issue orange pajamas and flip-flops. Upon opening the door, however, we realize that instead of bitches, we’ve got two of the gayest, whitest, squarest hippies in America on our hands. In sweat pants. But it’s too late. We’ve entered the “calm zone.”

Nothing left to do now but sit cross-legged on the floor with our fellow inmates and listen to the spiritual musings of our sweat-panted man Jerry and his friend, the Michael Bolton of yoga. But it’s cool.

“Stretch it out, motherfucker.” This is what thugs must say to themselves as they sneak into downward dog. It’s what I say to myself. “Don’t be a bitch. You can do this motherfuckin’ backbend. Maaan, Michael Bolton can do this shit.”

I look around nervously and spot a dozen men from my unit contorting themselves in a serious effort to appreciate the “calm zone” — because, of course, outside that door is no more calm zone. Outside that door is psycho zone.

Giant corn-fed white boy goofy teenager is smoking ice with the shadiest Mexican in California, standing on a toilet seat ducked low enough for the deputy to miss it. That toothless Italian is messing with the fat comic book nerd ’cause he borrowed a chapstick without asking. My 400-pound Samoan neighbor is crying to the tiny Filipina nurse for some methadone because it’s day three without heroin and he’s drenched in sweat. The gay Filipino is trying to handle the gun-smuggling Chinese ponytail at Ping-Pong (the winner gets a clean set of laundries or a porno, depending).

It’s a circus out there. But this is the calm zone.

For the moment, corn-fed white boy is right next to me. He is pointing his chin at the fluorescent-lit ceiling, eyes gently closed, and twisting his torso toward the Pacific Ocean. So is orange-dreadlock gold-teeth kid over in the corner. And so is oily, scabby, HIV-positive, always hungry or sleeping “Hawaii” — my celly and best friend in this motherfucking circus.

My back is against the wall and Michael Bolton is leading us through the most serene, magic, flying-bullfrog fantasy forest I’ve ever floated by. I won’t say that clocks were melting down the chalkboard, or a majestic toucan flew through the room, but time passed. And it passed without “Fear Factor” or baseball or Ultimate Fighting or beauty pageants or tanks, tanks, tanks on television. There’s also no beer or heroin or stolen cars or bruised wives or hungry daughters inside the calm zone.

Gently, we float back out of the forest and past the safe zone. We find ourselves stomping back through the circus, under the suspicious gaze of those who have not joined us — “What they be doin’ up in there, man?”

Up in there, I saw serenity in the faces of needle worshippers and droopy dog-eyed wife beaters. Fuck Ultimate Fighting and the whole three-ring “Fear Factor.” I saw serenity.

Still floating, I cross the threshold of my cell, tumbling into my cardboard-thin mattress like a mountain of miniature marshmallows. My eyelids fall again and I half smile just as corn-fed whispers to me, “Man, yoga is weak. That shit don’t do nothin’.”

Copyright Pacific News Service

As a generation, we’ve been searching for meaning. We’ve been looking for a reason to care about something. Our parents united in protest against Vietnam. Our grandparents came together to fight fascism. We couldn’t find anything better than sweatshops and Starbucks to be upset about.

Brad Pitt in “Fight Club” told it pretty well. “We have no Great War. We have no Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual one. Our Great Depression is our lives.”

But now we understand that we are Americans. We understand the significance of our privilege because until it was threatened, we didn’t know it could be any other way. We want to protect it. We may not know who we’re fighting yet, but this is our Great War.

In all likelihood, though, it won’t come to that. Every time I tell someone I’ll go if I’m drafted, they say, “We don’t fight wars like that anymore.” It’s true.

For one, we don’t know who the enemy is. Most likely, it’s not a country, state or people. The perpetrators have no real military or territorial objectives. So while our grandfathers fought a real enemy — Nazi Germany and its allies — we fight an enemy not directly associated with a government or even a war.

I don’t want to kill some guy with the misfortune of being a citizen of a scapegoat country. America is rightfully angry, and my fear is that that anger will be misdirected. Civilians in another country will be killed, just as they were killed here. And that idea stifles some of my patriotism.

If I join the Army, I’ll probably end up doing airport security until I’m 35, rummaging through baby strollers with an M-16 on my back.

But I’m ready. I don’t know that I’ve ever called myself an American before. I was too busy griping about what young people in this country gripe about — poverty, injustice, racism, and an inflated military budget (which doesn’t seem like such a bad idea now). All that’s been swept aside.

There are, however, people in my classes at San Francisco State University that have used this as an opportunity to talk about how America had it coming. True, we’ve bombed and slaughtered all over the globe, but the only reason these kids are in a position to say this stuff is because they’re white, upper-middle-class college students — they won’t be the ones sent off to fight. They’re lofty, Orange County-expatriate idealists. All they know how to do is rebel in the unoriginal mode of the neo-hippie faux revolutionary.

I don’t believe that we should scapegoat a nation. I don’t believe that we should kill civilians. I’m not in favor of military expansion. But now I am down with America. I’m down with the cops and the firemen. I’m down with the soldiers. I’m down with the National Guard. And to a certain extent, I’m down with George W.

I can’t say a part of me isn’t wishing this happened a year or so ago, when my man Clinton was still in office. There are a thousand reasons I dislike Bush, which I will not list. But there is one reason I embrace him — like it or not, he’s our man. And Tuesday night was his inauguration. The attacks have served to legitimize his presidency.

As our president addressed the nation, a friend of mine got excited, nodding his head and pumping his fist. He is first-generation Salvadoran-American, but Tuesday night, he became as American as John Wayne. When CNN ran footage of Palestinians celebrating, he shouted at the screen. “You won’t be laughin’ when the bomb lands on your nose, fool.”

Wednesday was not exactly like Dec. 8, 1941. Young men were not lining up at recruiting offices. But they were waving flags on freeway overpasses and cheering police officers in the street.

In my entire life, I’ve never seen young people cheer the police.