Throughout those years, LaDainian reached out to his father, asking, cajoling, and even begging O.T. to get help. LaDainian understood that if O.T. was ever going to get control of his drug use, he needed to get off the Hill and into a stable, supportive, and drug-free environment. O.T., however, refused all attempts to help him.45 Terry said his dad was stubborn: “I know he probably wasn’t going. You wasn’t going to tell him to do something what you wanted him to do, not if he didn’t want to do it. And he’d talk plenty of trash, too. ‘Leave me the f——— alone or you’ll have a problem.’ Yeah, he didn’t play.”46
O.T. lived in his mother’s house, which was now falling into severe disrepair. He didn’t want to leave the place and people he’d known his entire life. Every tree, every well-trod path, every nook and cranny of Tomlinson Hill reminded O.T. of the happiest days of his life. No amount of money or luxury could lure him away. 47 He also knew he could rely on Terry and Terry’s mother, Jewell, who often gave him a meal or a place to sleep.48 He watched his son play football on television but otherwise refused to change his lifestyle.
In the 2006 season, LaDainian set a league record by scoring nineteen touchdowns in a span of only six games and was the first player ever to score three touchdowns in each of four consecutive games. He started in all sixteen regular-season games and ran for 1,815 yards. He caught fifty-six passes for 508 yards and scored a total of thirty-one touchdowns. He also passed the ball for two touchdowns. He protected the ball, just as he had as a child, only fumbling once to the opposing team. The Chargers had their best season ever, with a 14–2 record. The Chargers lost to the New England Patriots in the play-offs, but national sportswriters named LaDainian the league’s most valuable player for the season.49
LaDainian had achieved superstar status and made the pro bowl for the fourth year. The Associated Press named him Offensive Player of the Year and the NFL named him Man of the Year for his charity work, which included football camps for kids in San Diego and Waco. ESPN gave him awards for Male Athlete of the Year, Best Record-Breaking Performance, and Best NFL Athlete.50 Those awards led to endorsement deals with Nike, AT&T, and the Campbell Soup Co., and the latter asked Loreane to be in a commercial with her son.
During the 2007 play-offs, a reporter from the New York Times wrote a feature story about an old slave plantation that bore LaDainian’s name. The reporter tracked down O.T. at Vincent and Julie’s old house:
Standing in his front yard, next to a rusty pickup truck and a car that needs new spark plugs, Oliver Tomlinson sorted through his mail. “I’m looking for Super Bowl tickets,” he said. “I know they’re coming.”
Oliver explains to anyone passing by that his son plays football for the San Diego Chargers and that they are going to the Super Bowl. When it is suggested that they first need to win two playoff games, he waves his hand dismissively.
Oliver lives in a one-story white house on a corner. He watches his son’s games on a television set with a rabbit-ears antenna. He surrounds himself with space heaters. Rain clatters off his tin roof. He has no phone. Among the few decorations on the walls is an unframed photograph of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“LaDainian has asked me to move to San Diego,” Oliver said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into a peanut can. “But I can’t leave this hill. It’s been too good to me. This hill has given me everything I need. The Lord blessed me with that boy on this hill.”51
The story angered and embarrassed LaDainian, because it made him look like he didn’t care about his father:
It upset me because it portrayed it in a way that I wasn’t helping my father. I didn’t appreciate that because they didn’t know the relationship we had and what I had tried to do for him.
My father was a very stubborn person, very stubborn but proud of where he had come from, and there was no way he was going to leave the Hill. As many times as I tried to get him out to San Diego to have him see something different, he never wanted to leave.52
The reporter also didn’t know that O.T. was an addict, or that O.T. sold or gave away every gift LaDainian sent him. LaDainian hated how the media portrayed him as an ungrateful son, but there was no way he was going to embarrass his family by publicizing O.T.’s problems.53 LaDainian still hoped that if he could convince O.T. to live with him in San Diego, away from the influence of his friends on Wood Street, he could ease his father into treatment.54
On February 23, 2007, seven weeks after the story appeared, O.T.’s son Ronald drove to the Hill to drive O.T. to Waco. On the way back, a front tire blew out and Ronald lost control. The pickup rolled over and threw O.T. from the cab, killing the seventy-one-year-old instantly. Ronald was launched through the windshield and suffered severe head injuries. A helicopter took him to the nearest trauma center in Waco, but he died that afternoon. A friend of Loreane’s called with the news, and Loreane tried to find LaDainian, LaVar, and Londria.55
LaDainian and LaTorsha were on a plane flying to Tennessee, and LaTorsha called once she saw the urgent text messages. LaDainian cried as he told me what happened next:
I remember my wife answered the phone first, because I think my mom had called her right as we got off the plane, and I [could] see the look in my wife’s face that something was wrong. And she looked at me; I could just see in her eyes that she was saying, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
So I get on the phone; my mom, she says, “Your father is gone.”
I guess it was so hard because I felt like I had failed at getting through to my father, because I wanted him so bad to change his life, but I couldn’t get through to him.56
The couple flew to Fort Worth to pick up the family, and then they all drove together to Marlin. Meanwhile, the national media picked up the story, and soon O.T.’s death appeared on the front of sports pages across the country. Loreane asked her cousin, Falls County sheriff Ben Kirk, to keep the funeral from getting out of hand. Unfortunately, a split between LaDainian’s side of the family and Ronald’s led to complications.57
LaDainian told the funeral director in Marlin to spare no expense, and he planned to have the funeral and burial in Marlin, where O.T.’s friends could easily attend. But Jewell’s side of the family wanted to hold a joint funeral at one of the city’s largest churches in Waco, where Ronald lived. Neither side was willing to compromise, so they scheduled one funeral in Marlin and a second one in Waco, with the bodies returning to Marlin for burial. LaDainian’s side of the family wanted to attend only the Marlin service, but the family in Waco arranged for all of the flowers and sympathy cards to go there. LaDainian received none of the condolences and decided to skip the burial because, between his fans and the media, the cemetery had become a circus. LaDainian thanked all of his friends and fans for their support on national television, explaining he couldn’t write thank-you notes because he had never received their cards and gifts.58
LaDainian buried his father not far from Tomlinson Hill, the place O.T. had loved more than any other. Long after the attention subsided, LaDainian visited O.T.’s grave to pay his respects. In the weeks afterward, LaDainian questioned whether he could have done more to help his father, and the uncertainty tore him up inside.59 He felt emotionally whipsawed by the fact that O.T.’s death had come just weeks after the best season of his career. He took some solace, though, in knowing that his father had gotten to see him play and in having heard his father say, “I’m so proud of you.”
O.T.’s death marked the end of a larger era. For the first time in 153 years, a Tomlinson did not live on Tomlinson Hill.
EPILOGUE
Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance.
—Saint Francis of Assisi
I learned of O.T.’s death from the stories scrolling across my screen at the Associated Press bureau in Nairobi, Kenya. His passing reminded me of our intertwined heritage, and I reflected on how far LaDainian and I had come since our great-great-grandfathers arrived on Tomlinson Hill. After fourteen years spent r
eporting on ethnic violence in Africa and the Middle East I thought about the journalists who must have reported on America’s ethnic convulsions. What had I learned from my reporting on other people’s sins? What did I really know about America’s? What is the origin of racism and hate?
In Africa, I witnessed bigotry based on anything from the color of someone’s skin to completely imaginary ethnic differences. Once I scraped away the false veneer of so-called atavistic hatred, I found cynical politicians promoting a baseless bigotry to gain or boost their power and privilege. While they used skin tone and nose shape to define people, as in Rwanda, DNA research shows there is no such thing as race. Our physical appearance, what so many generations have used to categorize one another, is only a small part of our genetic code, so small that two people of different races could have more genetically in common than with someone of the same race.1 Ignorance is the demagogue’s best friend in these instances.
Many have asked whether our species has a biological predisposition to fear or hate based on appearances. In a world where intermarriage is not that rare, how do people determine who to hate and why? Modern racism, it turns out, is not that old and was never universally accepted.
Ancient Greeks and Romans did not use physical attributes to judge civilizations; instead, they judged cultures by their achievements. The complexity of Ethiopia’s civilization and military strength earned them greater respect from the Greeks than did the Slavs or Germans, who the Greeks considered barbaric. The word slave is derived from Slav because they made up the majority of Greek slaves.2
Christian doctrine before the Enlightenment taught that all of mankind descended from Adam and Eve, and many Christians believed that environmental conditions accounted for the different races and appearances. They believed that since we all came from the Garden of Eden, we must share the same innate godly qualities. This is why so many Christians became abolitionists.3
SCIENCE AND PSEUDOSCIENCE
European intellectuals did not begin ranking races until the eighteenth century, when biologists and philosophers sought to classify literally everything on earth into a hierarchical system known as the “great chain of being,” or more elegantly in Latin, scala naturae, the “stairway of nature.” The stairway started with God at the top and worked its way down, a concept traced to Plato and Socrates. Intellectuals during the Enlightenment sought to fill out the chain by using the relatively new sciences of biology and anthropology.4 Early anthropologists sought to explain differences between the races using classical definitions of beauty and the scientific method.
The Enlightenment was also a period of European expansionism, and explorers made their first visits to Africa in advanced sailing ships carrying firearms and hardened steel swords, which contributed to the Europeans’ sense of superiority. European culture also considered the color white a symbol of purity, while equating black with evil. The fact that many Africans were Muslims also contributed to Christian bigotry against them.
A German physician named Franz Joseph Gall pioneered the study of the brain and believed that by measuring the size and shape of the skull, and mapping the bumps, scientists could accurately predict a person’s intellect, personality, and character.5 Phrenology developed alongside physiognomy, the study of the face, which claimed to explain an individual’s behavior and personality.6 These pseudoscientists believed that the less European a person appeared, the more inferior he or she was. Early anthropologists placed whites at the top of the hierarchy and decided blacks should go on the opposite end of the scale, just above apes, which Europeans had also first seen in Africa.7 When Susan Tomlinson Jones first stepped on Tomlinson Hill, these ideas were widely accepted.
POWER AND PRIVILEGE
Until I got to Africa, I really didn’t understand the power of my white skin to give me privileges denied to nonwhites. Shopkeepers and bureaucrats always sat up when a white person walked into the room and would order the African they were helping to get lost and empty the chair so I could sit down. When Kenyan police set up roadblocks to shake drivers down for bribes, I could confidently refuse to pay and know they’d wave me through. Even when I was broke and loitering, security guards at fine hotels always let me through, but they chased equally impoverished Africans away. My skin indicated that I was wealthy and potentially important, and I was always treated that way.
Upon returning to the United States, where whites are the majority, I came to see how easy it is for white Americans to dismiss their privileges. After all, if a person is one among many, he tends to compare himself to others like him. What such people don’t see, and often willfully refuse to accept, is that white society has preserved privileges for itself while subtly denying them to nonwhites.
To overcome these prejudices, prosperous blacks rely on conspicuous displays of wealth to signal to whites that they belong in expensive restaurants or in the finest hotels. I can show up to a top restaurant wearing a three-hundred-dollar suit and expect service, but a black man knows that to get equal treatment he needs to arrive in a sports car and a one-thousand-dollar suit. That’s the power of whiteness.
Many white Americans ridicule African-Americans for being paranoid and accuse them of playing the race card to cover up their inadequacies. As an American who has worked in countries where people hate the United States, I’ve felt the heat on the back of my neck from people staring at me. While a soldier in Europe, I could sense hostility from Germans who showed me perfect courtesy but still somehow made their distaste for me clear with slow-motion service, the roll of an eye, or the click of a tongue. These observations are not paranoia, scientists call them microaggressions.
Scientists watched how people of different groups interacted to see what was happening to make minorities detect hostility where none was obvious. They documented tiny verbal and nonverbal snubs that members of dominant groups displayed toward people in the minority group. Classic examples are the white woman who clutches her purse tighter when she sees a black person, or the hostess who seats a black couple next to the kitchen when there are better tables available. People who are part of the dominant culture will show microaggression against anyone they perceive as “the other,” whether from a different race, country, culture, or gender.8 The person who perpetrates them usually doesn’t notice what he’s done and denies acting out of prejudice. Oftentimes, the victim will not realize what happened, either, but that person will still feel vaguely humiliated. The person who recognizes the microaggression feels even more like an outsider and a second-class citizen.9
Microaggressions are not limited only to social niceties, and if unchecked, they can ruin the lives of minorities. That woman who unconsciously clutches her purse when she sees an African-American might work as a personnel manager for a major corporation. When she looks at a job applicant, she may react unconsciously when she sees a black-sounding name on a résumé or interviews someone with a black-sounding voice. She doesn’t think of herself as racist, doesn’t intentionally make racially motivated decisions, but she also doesn’t recognize her racist behavior. She will insist that she doesn’t care if someone is black, not realizing that denying the role race plays in our society is itself a microaggression that negates some individuals’ real experiences of discrimination.10
Some leaders routinely call for an end to affirmative action, an end to political correctness, and an end to talking about race. A white woman in Marlin told me that since I wasn’t alive during slave times, there was no reason to confront that history. In my research, I found that people love to embrace their heritage until they’re asked to talk about America’s racist history. Few people are ready to publicly acknowledge that their ancestors murdered, raped, and maimed others to maintain a racist regime that guaranteed their and their offspring’s prosperity.
Writing this book profoundly changed how I feel about my homeland and led me to question the factors behind my successes. Did my elementary school teachers give me more attention because I was blond and blue-eyed?
Did the army promotion boards relate to me more than to black soldiers because I used proper diction and mirrored my white superiors? Did I get my first journalism job because I was a white man in Africa, someone fellow foreign correspondents could better relate to? Was my success largely because as a white man I could more easily gain access to the big stories in Africa and the Middle East? The answer can only be yes to all of these, and it’s because of my ancestors. Whites born into middle-class or wealthy homes must acknowledge that they started out in pole position.
When examining the history of American race relations, one can focus on the progress made by the brave and talented few or focus instead on the thousands of racial injustices that take place every day. What one should never do, however, is assume that progress is constant and inevitable. The history of the Ku Klux Klan and the push-back of African-American economic power shows that setbacks are possible. The embers of our racist past are far from cold, but they are easily extinguished.
A CURE FOR RACISM
Many bigots say the hatred and disgust they feel is powerful, and the strength of that hatred gives them certainty in their feelings. The impulse to hate feels instinctive, which again raises the question, Is bigotry part of our nature, or the product of nurture? The answer, neuroscientists are discovering, is both.
Humans can recognize a person’s skin color, gender, age, body shape, clothing, cleanliness, and an enormous amount of other information in just a few milliseconds. Depending on our analysis, other parts of our brain will react. When average people are shown a photograph of a homeless person or a drug addict while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, or fMRI, the insula of the brain lights up. That is the part of the brain associated with disgust; the normal parts of the brain that react to people shut down. The test subjects’ brains don’t conceive of those people as fellow humans. When researchers showed white American men images of unfamiliar black men, the amygdala activated. That’s the limbic part of the brain, which is associated with the processing of emotions, such as fear and vigilance. White men looking at images of blacks also didn’t use the parts of their brains normally activated when looking at white faces. Whites also had a more difficult time remembering the faces of black strangers than those of other whites. The more people look like us, the more our brain reacts positively, while the less familiar the face, the greater the hostility.11
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