I was born and grew up in Indiana, graduated from IU and still identify with the term, “Hoosier.” I know Indiana but I do not know, and in fact am sickened by, the right-wing farce it seems to have become.
The state’s appalling “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” quickly revised only four days after its signing by Republican presidential hopeful Governor Mike Pence, weirdly granted not only to actual people, but to corporations and all forms of business, the right to refuse service to anybody on the basis of its (the business’s) religious beliefs. In Indiana, businesses are capable of thought, which can include the choice to espouse various beliefs. Among these beliefs is one insisting that no “Christian” gas station, pharmacy, restaurant, etc. should be forced under law to provide services to people whose personal identities do not meet the approval of the gas station/pharmacy/restaurant’s religion.
Okay, maybe I’ve been gone for too long, but this pathetic nonsense is not the Indiana I carry with me everywhere. In the “real” Indiana there is only one rule – “Do the right thing.” Everybody knows what “the right thing” is, and while it may be done uneasily, quietly, even covertly, it will get done.
Is Indiana racist? Yes and no. Slavery (the enslaved were largely Native Americans and white indentured servants) was constitutionally banned when Indiana became a state in 1816 and the few remaining black slaves of southern settlers were legally freed in 1820, long before the Civil War. Indiana fought for the Union despite, at its southern end where I grew up, its shared border with mostly Confederate Kentucky.
But yes, there was and in places probably still is, racism. Not the Jim Crow sort of the true South, but a queasy, uncomfortable sort that everybody knew was not “the right thing,” but nobody knew quite how to change. The answer was to dress it up and hope that helped.
There had been segregated public schools in Indiana until the practice was legally abolished in 1949, so that by the time I was in grade school I had black classmates. Well, I had one, and his name was Ronnie. His dad was a porter at the train station and my dad knew Ronnie’s dad and thought highly of him.
The schools enforced a rule that demanded a birthday party invitation to every child in the birthday kid’s class. There was no idea of “private” birthday parties. Either everybody was invited or there was no party. And so Ronnie was invited to mine and I to his. Except there was another, silent but zealously observed rule that forbade white and black people from setting foot over each other’s doorsills socially.
And so Ronnie’s mother, dressed to the teeth in hat and gloves, would arrive at our house and hand to my mother a beautifully wrapped gift at my party her son could not attend. But she couldn’t come inside. And for Ronnie’s birthday parties that I could not attend, my mother, also in hat and gloves, would deliver Ronnie’s gift to his mother at their home. But she couldn’t step inside.
It was a fidgety, hybrid racism, although no less cruel for that. And by the time a few hundred kids who’d chafed at the birthday party rule hit high school, it was over. A new black family moved to town, including attractive teenage twins, Jeannie and Joey.
Basketball is a religion in Indiana, and Joey played first string while Jeannie happily taught us all the new dances learned in whatever enviably sophisticated big town they’d come from. So we elected them homecoming king and queen, effectively ending at least one entrenched pattern of racism. The whole town was relieved and the birthday party rule died. Everybody knew it was The Right Thing.
Is Indiana anti-Semitic? Not if anti-Semitism is perceived as The Wrong Thing. All the grade schools had basketball teams, and all the boys (not girls) could play. But in jr. high the only basketball teams were sponsored by the Y. The Young Men’s Christian Association. My classmate Eddie was Jewish, and as a non-Christian he was not allowed to join the Y in order to play basketball. Social death for an Indiana guy!
Eddie was devastated, but the jr. high principal, Tab Tolbert, quickly organized local business owners whose contributions supported the Y (including Eddie’s family) to urge a bit of alteration to the Y’s rules. Eddie was suited up and on court within a week, and a few months later the entire jr. high attended a convocation in celebration of his bar mitzvah. Eddie, in yarmulke and tallit, chanted in Hebrew and everybody cheered as if he were Eddie Cantor.
Hoosiers do the right thing.
Is Indiana homophobic? Again, sort of but not really. Not as long as the “right thing” decorum is maintained. The accountant for my dad’s business and half the businesses in town was gay and everybody knew it. The man was welcomed as a Mason and member of countless civic organizations, He generously supported artistic endeavors and always showed up at diners and functions with a successful woman hospital administrator who may also have been gay. Nobody cared and nobody would have dreamed of refusing to pump gas into their cars on religious principles.
But this was a long time ago. So what’s happened?
Is Indiana full of religious fanatics? It would seem so, although again it’s necessary to look at the root of “doing the right thing.” That “thing” arguably derives from the Golden Rule, often attributed to the figure of Christ although in fact it is an essential tenet in every known religious or ethical system. Hoosiers, as I know them and am, want to treat others as we wish to be treated, and probably were first introduced to the idea in churches.
Lots of churches. Denominational identity was big when I was growing up there, and everybody knew who was Presbyterian, Catholic, Jewish or whatever. There was no judgment; it was more a matter of, again, that frenzied need to know the right thing to do. If you invite your Catholic neighbors over for barbecue on Friday, be sure to grill a few catfish filets because they won’t be able to eat the ribs!
But somewhere along the line Indiana seems to have fallen prey to a right-wing creepiness that’s antithetical to both churchly and secular Doing the Right Thing. At least a sufficient number of people with sufficient power have managed to pass a law that makes a laughingstock of my home state and trashes what I know to be its core identity.
Indiana is strange, a relatively unknown place and culture within the larger American one. It’s a jumble of at-times old-fashioned agrarian mores in the south, and old-fashioned immigrant mores in the north, but essentially it’s sort of stalwart. A significant number of Hoosiers may be floundering in a maelstrom world spinning too fast, and for a moment may have grabbed on to the unstable bit of sociological flotsam that is right-wing fundamentalism, but I hope it won’t last.
Because it’s not The Right Thing.
abigail padgett 
Great post, Abbie. Loved it. My dad’s family from Anderson and later he lived in Evansville, where my step mother still lives.
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Who knew you had Hoosier roots!? Fantastic!
Hi Abbie,
Thank you so much for writing this. I know Indianians, and have not known this about your state,even though it is next door to my state of Ohio. My Lover/partner, of 12 years, Melody, who died a few years ago, was from Fort Bend, Indiana, as is her best friend from High school, Philip Banks. They were each other’s Prom dates in school. Protecting each other from the consequences of being gay in that population.
It is my belief that having this stooped scuffle over queerness in that state is perfect. There is such a large population in the midwest, who have such a wide range of prejudice, and they don’t even know it, and would heavily disagree with anyone who would accuse them of that prejudice. Indiana is the perfect place for this to have happened, because, as you so aptly pointed out, Indianians do the right thing, in the end. Mid-westerners abhor prejudice, but cannot see themselves, and where they exist on the prejudice continuum. Mid-westerners feel superior to the racial prejudice in the Southern states, but can’t see how prejudice exists in more subtle forms in their homeland. I attended high school in rural Ohio, just outside the city limits of Canton. We had 2 black families in our neighborhood. . . but we were not prejudice. Go figger! The black folks in Canton had their own neighborhood. But we were not prejudice. Right. We knew the Anthony Family because they lived about half a mile down the road from us. Mr. Anthony’s wife had died and he was raising his two girls together, by himself. My father was a totally nice guy, and loved to pick up hitch hikers on our way into town, mostly because he loved adding new people into our conversations in the car. Mr. Anthony had no car, and so we often picked him up on his way into town. It was his belief that all are created equal, and his actions supported that. I understand that if there is a population is different from the one you are exposed to, you will have prejudice, and my folks wanted to make sure that that was never passed on in our family. ON the matter of queerness. It just did not exist, and that is one of the many reasons why I had to leave that area. Gwen
Good points, Gwen. The Midwest is really a complicated and uncharted territory of subtle prejudices as well as epic decencies. We’ve both been gone for so long that our views are hardly current, and yet I think our experiences back there are a reliable litmus. There’s more good than bad in the heartland, and Indiana’s terrible law is nothing but a manipulated and transitory fluke. Still, I feel some shame over it.
This should be on every editorial page in the country.
Thanks, Lindy. Surprisingly, there are some who would not agree with you. 😉
Abigail,
The National law, as you know, was ambiguous as to what was a person and the Indiana law clarified it based on Indiana’s own definition, but
by defining the issue as left wing or right wing , that in itself creates ambiguity.
After all,most of us except extremist ,are not raving Communists or Birchers, we are much more complex and I for one do not want to be labelled because it,s not that simple.
As you described, Indianans will mostly do the”right” thing without having to try to define it exactly.
I truly believe that this is a tempest created by individuals trying to disrupt
the core values we as individuals try to live by.
As long as we can “air our dirty laundry” and you can post your blog, there is hope.
First, you’re right about the language. On my car is a bumper sticker that says, “Reject the right/left paradigm.” (Which isn’t really a “paradigm,” but the idea’s there.) And then I go ahead and bandy around terms like “right-wing.” But what other term is there? What word or phrase reflects that set of ideas? I’m sure to fall under the rubric of “left-wing” despite, as you say, being much more complex than that, so I do understand what you’re saying.
And I agree that this is a tempest created, not by individuals but by highly sophisticated political organizations, not to disrupt values but to gain power. The values themselves are being manipulated and distorted.
Example. In today’s NYT a woman who owns a bakery in Martinsville, IN (where my uncle was once minister of a country church), said that on religious grounds she thinks gay marriage is wrong and so wouldn’t want to provide a gay-wedding cake. But she also said that she’d agonize for a long time over a polite way to tell the couple! THIS is the core cultural value, not her individual view on gay marriage. This is absolutely a Do-Right Hoosier, a good, thoughtful person who may be frightened and confused by a rapid cultural change, but whose deepest concern is for the feelings of those who would be hurt by a personal choice that in reality she would never be forced to make. No gay couple would go to a Christian fundamentalist baker for a wedding cake! Her quandary is an artificial construct created by a political machine that manipulates her fear in order to get votes and gain power. And my point is that her “core values” are ultimately stronger than any transitory political manipulation. Left alone, she’ll do the right thing. Left alone, she would have all along.
Thank you for writing this. I grew up in Arkansas–where the right thing had a different slant. Mostly good people who wore blinders. White kids were told that Black kids had a separate but equal school to attend–and that it, unlike ours, was air conditioned. I don’t imagine any of the parents ever checked this separate but equal school.
We must be about the same age. The first Black kid came to our high school when I was in high school. I went to school with Billy Clinton. Some of my students in the 90s were looking at my yearbook and could not believe he had gone to a mostly segregated school. They said they could not vote for him because of that.
Some things change and some do not.
Arkansas is another state about which nobody (well, the media) really knows much despite the the Clintons. The media focus on NYC and Los Angeles, creating an unrealistic “national” image against which the rest of the country often seems a quaint backwater of corny and/or savage ideas. And sometimes that’s true, or at least appears to be true, as in the recent Indiana mess. But I’ve thought for ages that these embarrassing events are more the result of skillful Republican manipulation and a complete Democratic incapacity for understanding heartland cultures than of any real heartland misanthropy. Of course there are ill-educated, racist, sexist, homophobic, religious fanatic, etc. people in Indiana and Arkansas and everywhere else, but they are NEVER the majority. When they seem to be, it’s because some more general cultural set has been manipulated to produce fear and resultant bad social policy. Convincing people to take those blinders off, like your white Arkansas folk back when, requires a gentle, courteous hand in the heartland. And absent that gentle hand, another can successfully urge leaving the blinders on.
And yep, I’d guess we’re close in age and thus possessed of vast wisdom. 😉 A shame nobody’s asking us how to run things, isn’t it?
I know that uneasy racism. It existed in New Jersey and New York, too. My father was friends with the hardware store owner, who was Jewish, but he was generally anti-Semitic.The New Jersey town we lived in was zoned against Jews. My African-American friends could not eat in certain New York City restaurants. I was fired from my school teaching job in 1953 at least partly because I danced the merengue with a African-American man, who was probably gay and could do a fantastic imitation of Esther Williams but also was highly respected in town for his work with the American Friends Service Committee.
A NJ town zoned against Jews and NYC restaurants where African Americans were not allowed to eat? For heartland “liberals” the east coast was in some ways (erroneously,from your report)seen as the model for advances in social justice. It’s so weird to see how bad things were in our own lifetimes!
Having enjoyed your books for quite a few years, I am not surprised to enjoy and agree with your above piece. I too came from Indiana, but my Indiana was a town in PA where the mores were much like your state of Indiana. We too were thoroughly intermingled and careful to respect each other’s beliefs and traditions. In my town black folks, (with some less affluent white folk,) lived in a separate area, until the new Dir of the Social Security office moved to town, bringing his black family. They couldn’t find a house to buy–funny thing. So the Chamber of Commerce, led by a wonderful Irishman named O’Hara, simply bought a house for the Director and resold it to him. To the best of my knowledge, that was the end of red-lining.
It was the right thing to do.
Loved your story about the chamber of commerce buying the house for the black family and effectively ending red-lining. Social change happens slowly, but it happens precisely in this way – when people like your O’Hara and crew see some heretofore sort-of-acceptable-but-uncomfortable injustice and change it! And I’m familiar with Indiana, PA, having known Tim Cobb and Donna Jean Wilkerson since kindergarten. They were married after high school and moved there. Maybe you knew them, or their kids, in which case it is indeed a small world!
On the subject of getting to the Interesting Parts about “due to my religious beliefs, I cannot…” one should read up on the Satanic Temple, who has been finding the sore spots and poking them. The article http://jezebel.com/satanic-temple-72-hour-abortion-waiting-period-is-agai-1701520935 shows just how the “religious beliefs” clauses are really less than religious, and certainly trying to impose religion on “what belongs to Caesar”, i.e. our government, and sometimes our Constitution. They’ve done a few other things to annoy those who want to claim they’re being persecuted for their (Christian) religious beliefs/practices, and they don’t seem to care who says what about them, good or bad.
Will check out the Satanic Temple, although as p.r. the name was probably ill-advised. 😉
Abigail, I appreciate your efforts to balance the media slant on Indiana. I do not believe that the general public supported the religious right’s anti-gay legislation, but Indiana is a tea party state, and what happened here is something the religious right specialized in; the tyranny of the few through funding from people like the Koch brothers. On the up side, the silver lining in this incident is that it destroyed Gov. Pence’s presidential aspirations, and hopefully his political career in Indiana. But you never know.
I wanted to correct your perceptions of racism in Indiana. Historicaly, Indiana is a Ku Klux Klan state, and in fact the KKK headquarters were in Martinsville for a long time, and the Klan still has a lot of power in this state. I remember when I was going to graduate school in Indianapolis, locals from Bloomington would warn people not to stop at the coffeeshop on the highway outside of Martinsville on their way to Bloomington because of the violence prone racists that hung out there. Now, of course, that coffeeshop/diner is gone, and there are several fast food places near that location, but historically speaking, the 1980’s isn’t even the blink of an eye. People often think of Bloomington as being a liberal town, but that is largely due to the presence of Indiana University. Bloomington is not solely a university town, and once you get to know the actual city, not the cultural developments attached to the university, you discover that it is a racist little backwater town. Essentially, southern Indiana is the American south, with the exception of little pockets of normalicy.
Thanks for your thoughtful response, Susan. Of course I know “southern Indiana is the American south” at least in some ways. At this very moment I have a mess of cooked collard greens in my fridge. 😉 And yes, southern Indiana, the Heartland in general and small towns in general tend to be “conservative.” Those values aren’t always bad, but for some reason seem easily co-opted and twisted by people like the Kochs whose barely-masked agendas are nothing but power-grabs. It’s impossible to understand how intelligent, educated people like the Hoosiers of my childhood are blinded by silly, superficial campaign issues behind which those in power are poisoning the environment, sending thousands to die in ill-conceived and ultimately pointless conflicts and systematically stripping everybody (except the powerful) of the very rights conservatives claim to hold dear. I don’t get it, but keep hoping sensible people, Hoosiers like those with whom I grew up, will wake up!
It sounds like you’re still in Indianapolis. Love to hear more about what’s going on back there!