Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter twenty-two

As it turned out, I didn’t move immediately into the sorority house. It did finally begin to dawn on me how much money my parents had been and were still investing in me. Time was running out on our lease in university housing, which expired after two years. I knew that my parents couldn’t afford new housing and room and board for me on campus. So I relented and joined them in hunting for a house for us. I learned many years later that Vice Chancellor Blackburn had tried to get my father to buy a house. Daddy told him that they couldn’t afford to because “Condoleezza is our house.” My parents’ investment in me meant that they had no choice but to adopt the itinerant lifestyle of my paternal grandparents rather than that of my mother’s landowning family. They would occupy four different rental properties before finally buying a house in 1979, ten years after moving to Denver. The fact is, my parents probably never made more than $60,000 a year between them. In retrospect, I wish I’d been smart enough to understand that at the time and found a way to relieve some of the financial pressure.

One of my father’s friends had seen a house for rent in a neighborhood not too far from the university. It sounded perfect: three bedrooms and a large living room to accommodate my grand piano. When you own a grand piano it’s like having a child or a pet. You have to have the right place for it, and this was always a major consideration in house hunting.

When we met the landlady at the door, I could tell that she was anxious and acting strangely. After showing the house, she said that she had some other people who were likely to rent it. That would have been an acceptable explanation, but she went on to say that she couldn’t rent it in any case to someone who owned a piano because it might disturb the neighborhood. It was a dead giveaway. She was finding an excuse not to rent to us because we were black. Somehow when you grow up in Alabama you can spot racism at a hundred paces. My parents and I knew immediately what was happening.

My father challenged her. The house had been available only a day before when his friend had seen it. It didn’t make sense to rule out pianos. Did any of the neighbors have stereos? Maybe some even had pianos? “You don’t want to rent to us because we’re black,” he told her. “And now nothing that you do can convince us to rent this house. But I hope you’ll enjoy dealing with the equal housing suit that we are about to file.”

The woman almost fell over backward. No, no, she had just heard complaints in the neighborhood about music, she explained. We were such a nice family. Our piano would be no problem. My parents and I left and we didn’t file suit. My father said that the threat had accomplished its purpose because she’d never discriminate again. He would explain to Dr. Blackburn what had happened, and he was sure that Blackburn would extend our lease in university housing. Daddy went on to say that racism was clearly alive and well in Denver in 1972 and that he preferred the blatant racism of Alabama, for in the South, “at least you knew where you stood.”

I understood that sentiment because I’d experienced this implicit racism firsthand. There was, of course, the incident with my guidance counselor, in which she advised me to try junior college. And then in my freshman Introduction to Government course, the professor had given a lecture on theories of racial superiority professed by social scientists such as William Shockley, who posited that blacks had lower IQs because of nature, not nurture. The professor had given the lecture under the guise of simply introducing us to the literature, but I sensed that he bought into some of the theory. I was the youngest person in the class, but I challenged him. “I speak French and play Bach. I’m better in your culture than you are,” I said. “That shows that these things can be taught!” He was angry and said the next day that I had tried to silence him. I thought this was a ridiculous exchange between a senior professor and a college freshman. But I persisted, and finally I went to the dean and complained, mostly to create a record should the professor decide to retaliate. After a few days the professor asked to see me and then went on to compound the problem by drawing a little graph charting black IQs along the bottom, with those of whites above them. “But sometimes there are people like you,” he said. He then showed my IQ line positioned above both, saying that I was special. Clearly, he didn’t get the point. I left determined to ace his exam, which I did. He told me that he’d be glad to be a reference for me at any time. I’d made my point but obviously never asked for his help.

In this way, Denver was an odd departure from Alabama. On the surface everything was just fine, fully integrated. But underneath—occasionally in a college class, or when we looked for housing, or in my high school guidance counselor’s reaction to my low standardized test scores—there was racism, perhaps unconscious and certainly unacknowledged. We hadn’t left racism behind in Alabama. And in some ways this less explicit form of prejudice was more insidious and harder to confront.

Many years later, when I was asked about my decision to become a Republican, I first explained quite honestly that the choice reflected my disgust with Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy and my attraction to Ronald Reagan’s worldview. But, pressed about the domestic agenda of the two parties, I gave an answer that came directly from my experience with the many forms racism can take. “I would rather be ignored than patronized,” I said, pointing to the tendency of the Democratic Party to talk about “women, minorities, and the poor.” I hated identity politics and the self-satisfied people who assumed that they were free of prejudice when, in fact, they too could not see beyond color to the individual.

Race is a constant factor in American life. Yet reacting to every incident, real or imagined, is crippling, tiring, and ultimately counterproductive. I’d grown up in a family that believed you might not control your circumstances but you could control your reaction to them. There was no room for being a victim or depending on “the white man” to take care of you. That self-sufficiency is the ethos passed down by my ancestors on both sides of the family, and I have internalized it thoroughly. Despite the gross inequities my ancestors faced, there has been progress, and today race no longer determines how far one can go. That said, America is not color-blind and likely never will be.