Films About War

[Eleanor Heidecker]

Inever knew my grandfather; he died when I was just three. My memories of him are hazy, some constructed by flipping through old photo albums and watching grainy home videos, some peered at through the haze of seventeen years and the eyes of my toddler self.

Grew-up in Connecticut suberb, worked in Private Banking, retired to gated Fla. community. My life was and is not an integrated one. I vote Democratic and love supporting programs that give opportunities to those who may not them; but, my life on a daily basis monochrmatic.

I am compelled to convey to you something of which I was informed about fifty years ago when I visited a private resort with a group of African-American families in Kentucky. We were visiting from Missouri. One family conveyed to the rest of us an experience which they had the previous year, 1963, when taking a motor excursion through South Dakota from St.

Did I mention that in the fall of 1954 Harper was integrated by four brave young girls? Many at Harper made the lives of these young African American students a kind of hell. I wish I knew their names. I wish everyone knew their names.

As the son of a brown Puerto Rican father and a Hungarian mother, I had fair skin and dirty-blonde hair as a kid. One lazy Saturday afternoon I was in need of a quarter to replace the Spaldeen that had split in half from overuse. Knowing that Pops was in his favorite watering hole, I went to The Half-Moon to seek some small change. I walked into the bar, announced my predicament as Pops was flipping me a quarter. One of the other patrons had a hard time believing we were related and challenged my father with a dollar bet. After the bartender backed up Pops, I ended up with some loot for ice cream to boot.

I offer no response and he starts reeling off all these overseas countries. The stranger is on his 5th or 6th country, I get up, leave the barkeep a tip, walk out of the bar without a word, and ride off on my motorcycle.

My mom, 2nd generation German/Hungarian grew up in northside Chicago. She never went to school, church or had any black friends. When she was almost 90, I moved to South Carolina and took her with us. She moved into an Assisted Living Facility and her first friend was Evelyn, and she was black. They were better than sisters. Evelyn told my mom stories she often repeated to me about discrimination, and mom told Evelyn about her life. They were wonderful friends.

When I was 23, I was robbed on the street in Princeton NJ by a black man wearing hosiery over his face. During that same period, my house was burglarized twice by a group of black men. I only know they were black because I loved a little black boy in the neighborhood who used to come to my house in the afternoons. He came to my place of work during the second robbery to tell me what was going on. He also told me my spaniel puppy had got out

In 1973, I went to work for the first black school superintendent in Ohio as his supervisor of school/community relations. He was inundated with challenges: local politicians tried to bribe him for control of the $49K annual budget; an elected Board of Education member (controlled by local and state politicians) slandered him on a local call-in radio program; a white group, Citizens for the Rights of the Majority, fought his every effort to bring unity and quality education to the entire system.

My job was handling the media for the superintendent. The morning after my first Board of Education meeting, my secretary put a radio in my office tuned to the local talk show. I heard the maverick Board member, on the air, attacking the superintendent and lying about what had happened at the meeting. My secretary said this happened after every meeting.

The superintendent and his supporters fought for four more years with some major victories. However, both he and I were burned out by that time, and we resigned from our jobs in 1978. I went to California, he to another school system.

It had been a misunderstanding. The same thing happened when I was in college and the only white male in a Black Radicalism in the 20th Century seminar at Columbia University. Because I was training for a marathon and the class was held in the later afternoon, I often rested my head on the table during the 2 hour sessions. A couple of students interpreted my behavior as disrespectful to their history. I was just tired from running so much.One way to deal with racism today is to engage in honest and maybe even painful conversations about all the issues, large and small. Share stories and listen to stories. And truly try to understand what others experience. Maybe an open session with all the students in the class would have helped me be more sensitive.

I am a retired officer from a large department in the northeast. Following over 20 years of service my experiences revealed a dominant and persuasive police culture that condones and rewards racist and gender violations on a significant scale. That is not to say most officers are racist, they are not. The systems and agency protocols from which they provide police service however, are and have been thoroughly inundated with policies and mind sets from the distant past. We have evolved from rubber hoses and indiscriminate beatings, but not from a contention that police are better informed and prepared to instruct communities on how they are to be policed, and not the other way around. In the end then, it is police management that needs revision. Twenty first century cultural and technical realities demand twenty first century perspectives on policing. When such leadership emerges, we will begin to see effective changes supporting both community and officer safety.

Today, 65 years later, I do not accept any racial comments or slurs without a comment that their attitude is wrong and harmful. I live in a rural, white and Hispanic community with very strong racial attitudes. The educational levels are mostly high school graduates and it shows. I love the area but we do feel isolated because of the political and racial differences.

America has stagnated if not declined. Until this blight is reversed, racial tensions will not improve and most likely deteriorate. It is very disheartening as well as illogical but admittedly, it is a fact.

Today interacial relations are much more common. I have taught many children from interacial families. The neighborhood where I grew up which was all white is now interacial and multicolored. To me it seems and feels like a natural progression in a land where equal opportunity is supposed to be a stake.

Our challenge is to work together with black women who adamantly resist joining white women to fight sexism, and whose distrust of and hatred for us outweigh the reality that only the power of numbers will make us safe.

I am compelled to convey to you something of which I was informed about fifty years ago when I visited a private resort with a group of African-American families in Kentucky. We were visiting from Missouri. One family conveyed to the rest of us an experience which they had the previous year, 1963, when taking a motor excursion through South Dakota from St. Louis. They made the excursion in order to visit a national park which I believe, was Yellowstone. The family of four (man/wife/two daughters) stopped at a restaurant near a national park in order to get something to eat. This fine, upstanding family who I knew through my church was told in no uncertain terms that they were not welcome in or near that town. I do not recall that the family told us that the management refused them service. However, they did tell us that the restaurant owners had to summon the state police to escort them out of that town. They, both the family in question and the restaurant owners were in fear for their safety. The apparent reason for the summoning of the police was that the situation was on the verge of escalating to riot proportions. This was, as you may recall, the year that the controversy over civil rights was the likely factor which induced certain citizens of Birmingham, AL to dynamite a church full of blacks and also kill four black girls.

I grew up in Detroit. My first bike was stolen while I was riding it. I was mugged when I was eight. One of the apartments I lived in with my mom was across the street from a crack house. I learned how to swim at a dirty little beach that was right across the Detroit River from the heavily contaminated site of the now-defunct Uniroyal Tire Factory.

Watching the film Half Nelson, which depicts the relationship between a drug-addicted white teacher and a neglected but resilient black student, probably makes many people uncomfortable. The title (which comes from the wrestling position in which the dominated opponent is stuck but isn't in complete submission) describes the dilemma of the film's characters, but it is also a mirror for viewers. It's never pretty seeing people struggle, and Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), Drey (the amazing Shareeka Epps), and many people in their lives seem stuck. Who wants to witness likable people falling apart, doing unlikable things? Who sits comfortably watching a great kid ignored or manipulated by adults, even adults who care for her?

As a teacher with twelve years of experience in the classroom, I probably cringed more than noneducators watching Half Nelson, not just because of predictable inaccuracies (we see Dunne teaching only one fifteen-student class) but also because teachers know how Dunne's self-destruction would impact his students. Yet my strong revulsion came with a flicker of recognition. I think Half Nelson is important. The film hits sensitive nerves about instruction, race, inspiration, and relationships, and though it has incongruities, this is a movie you see not because you know you'll agree with it but because it forces you to examine your ideas.

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