High Price by Carl Hart

Author:Carl Hart
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2013-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

Getting ready to go out and party in England while in the air force.

In 1986, in the United States there were isolated protests against Reagan—and in the United Kingdom, a much more visible revolt against Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher—but it all seemed pale in comparison with what I’d missed during the black power years. I didn’t realize what was going wrong at the time in the States.

But being in England did give me a vital distance from which to analyze America. Though Britain was no prejudice-free paradise, its obsession with class and its early abolition of the slave trade made its racial politics different from ours. I wasn’t constantly facing people who dismissed me before they’d even talked to me there. And English white women certainly didn’t view black men the way American whites did in Miami. In fact, American military personnel—including blacks—were seen as having good jobs and greater opportunities than were available to the British working class. Our economic prospects were viewed positively, which was far from the case in South Florida.

Back home, one of the most conspicuous forms of racism I’d observed was related to interracial romance, particularly between blacks and whites. So when I started to date Anne, a tall, soft-featured brunette whom I met about three months after I arrived in England, I was especially aware of our respective races. As a boy, I’d always had to hide the brief encounters I’d had with white girls in high school and junior high. It was clear to me that seeing them publicly would bring nothing but trouble, so I stayed away. If I’d been on the street or in a store with a white girl in Miami, we would have run a gauntlet of stares and muttered remarks or worse. However, in London and even in smaller British towns, no one seemed to care. I moved in with Anne not long after we met.

And although she felt she had to diligently work to prepare me before she thought I’d be ready to meet her parents, her concerns about how they’d see me were about class markers, not race. Anne came from the British upper middle class. She was seen to some extent as the family fuckup because she didn’t go to university. Her father was an aviator for the sultan of Oman and her parents spent most of their time in that country.

But as an American airman, I was seen as a “good catch” because of the economic opportunities open to me through the military and by virtue of being an American citizen. Compared to the Brits she’d dated previously, I was a definite improvement. Her parents didn’t even object when I moved in with her to the family home. They had a huge four-bedroom house in Wootton Bassett, a suburb of Swindon; it was where I’d been headed when I was pulled over by the police that night. To assuage their slight discomfort about us “living in sin,” I paid rent.

Before Anne introduced me

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