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My father died six years ago last month. He was 97 years old, having lived most of his life the way he wanted, a tenacity admirable at times, stubbornly foolish at others.
Dad remarried after my parents divorced. My stepmother, Olya, had three sons who matched my brothers and me closely in age.
In the late 1950s they bought a home in the growing development of Vienna Woods on the edge of suburbia in Northern Virginia where my brothers and I still lived.
It was a modest, three-bedroom house on a small, single lot purchased in the $40,000 price range.
In the sixty years that my father lived there Dulles Airport was built out in Chantilly, the Capital Beltway was opened less than a four-mile drive away, Interstate 66 passed within a few blocks and was accessible within a mile, and the Washington Metro had a station, also within a mile.
The edge of suburbia was now forty miles out near Fauquier and Loudon counties.
My stepmother had died 21 years earlier when my father fell at home.
Falls for the very elderly are frequently fatal. Dad died two weeks later.
I was the executor for his estate. Realtors began falling out of the sky. One told me he could list Dad’s property for $550,000. Before we could sign anything, a neighbor’s friend who lived on the street behind Dad’s expressed interest in buying it for her mother. She offered the same amount the realtor had.
We brothers all agreed to accept her offer. Along with savings and investments Dad left us a sizeable legacy.
Some paid off debts and mortgages, one helped his daughter and her spouse start a wine business, one used it to pay for his children’s education, some invested it.
Real estate in Vienna had turned into a handsome investment.
At least for some.
Some never got the chance to invest in Vienna.
The were no Black people living in Vienna Woods in the 1950s and 1960s. I never saw a Black person at any of the community pools or county parks. I never saw a Black person working in the markets and stores along Maple Avenue.
I never saw a Black person shopping in those stores or using the public facilities.
Vienna Elementary was segregated, as were all schools in Virginia and the South. I have no knowledge of the quality of education that was afforded Black children, but I don’t fool myself with the notion that it was separate, but equal. Just separate.
I didn’t see my first Black student until my sophomore year in high school. She was a single speck in a sea of white.
There are no Black individuals like my brothers and me who were left a financial legacy by parents who bought into Vienna Woods. They would have never been welcome.
There were no grandchildren whose education was enhanced by such a legacy. No grandchildren who got a leg up in starting their own business.
This was not a reality peculiar to just Vienna, Virginia.
If I were still teaching in public school and related this experience, I suppose I would be ferreted out for teaching “Critical Race Theory.” Maybe Governor Youngkin would have me fired or fined. Youngkin’s Executive Order #1, his first official act as governor, had defined “critical race theory as ‘inherently divisive concepts” that portray one race, sex or religious faith as inherently superior, or teach that an individual is inherently racist as a result of his skin color.”
Critical Race Theory is defined in Wikipedia as “a cross-disciplinary examination – by social and civilrights scholars and activists – of how laws, social and political movements, and media shape, and are shaped by, social conceptions of race and ethnicity.”
And examining the concepts of this theory is something to be scared of? Sounds like some people are afraid of being caught with their slip showing or their fly down. If you’re not a bigot what are you worried about? Truth only hurts the miscreant.
Truth challenges the rest of us.
So-called C.R.T. is not even broached in public school.
I have yet to read or hear a cogent argument that explains the evil of “Critical Race Theory.”
But then, how does one make a cogent argument about a belief arrived at irrationally from the conspiracy hysteria that seems to grip so many?
I’ve heard the specious statement that “Critical Race Theory” is a communist plot, which only assures me that the speaker doesn’t understand communism either.
If we want to outlaw divisive theories, let’s go after those that apparently have their roots in the mindless gossip on social media.
When people stop murdering Black gatherers at a church prayer meeting or stalking Black shoppers at a Black neighborhood grocery store, maybe we can begin to believe that racism is really a thing of the past.
Then maybe we can get righteously hysterical about a real problem in our schools, the proliferation of guns that has led to so many school and college shootings!
That would have made a much better and more relevant “Executive Order #1.”
