Invisible Man: Undercover at a Greenwich Country Club. Flashback in History 8/17/1992
Invisible ManWhy did this $105,000-a-year lawyer from Harvard go to work as a $7-an-hour busboy at the Greenwich Country Club
From the August 17, 1992 issue of New York Magazine.
I drive up the winding lane past a long stone wall and beneath an archway of 60-feet maples. At one bend of the drive, a freshly clipped lawn and a trail of yellow daffodils slope gently up to the four-pillared portico of a white Georgian colonial. The building's six huge chimneys, the two wings with slate-gray shutters, and the white-brick façade loom over a luxuriant golf course. Before me stands the 100-year-old Greenwich Country Club—the country club—in the affluent, patrician, and very white town of Greenwich, Connecticut, where there are eight clubs for 59,000 people.
I'm a 30-year-old corporate lawyer at a midtown Manhattan firm, and I make $105,000 a year. I'm a graduate of Princeton University (1983) and Harvard Law School (1988), and I've written eleven nonfiction books. Although these might seem like good credentials, they're not the ones that brought me here. Quite frankly, I got into this country club the only way that a black man like me could—as a $7-an-hour busboy.
After seeing dozens of news stories about Dan Quayle, Billy Graham, Ross Perot, and others who either belonged to or frequented white country clubs, I decided to find out what things were really like at a club where I saw no black members.
I remember stepping up to the pool at a country club when I was 10 and setting off a chain reaction: Several irate parents dragged their children out of the water and fled. Back then, in 1972, I saw these clubs only as a place where families socialized. I grew up in an affluent white neighborhood in Westchester, and all my playmates and neighbors belonged somewhere. Across the street, my best friend introduced me to the Westchester Country Club before he left for Groton and Yale. My teenage tennis partner from Scarsdale introduced me to the Beach Point Club on weekends before he left for Harvard. The family next door belonged to the Scarsdale Golf Club. In my crowd, the question wasn't "Do you belong?" It was "Where?"
http://nymag.com/news/features/47949/
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goddamn and just think, this demeaning type of existence is still with 'us'. And now, again, all the way down to the lowest white garbage pickup person, are all white people able to claim and be acknowledged by these type 'country club, entitled assholes' as a more valuable human being than say a real man, with class, character, integrity and principle such as a true POTUS, Barack Hussein Obama. Unlike the sock puppet potus of 'shadow prez bannon', we have presently. White entitlement is disgusting, demeaning to all 'others'. Damn disgusting ass class/caste system we have here in ameriKKKa, always have had.
And by the way, this type OP, these days, won't get much mileage, here. A lot deny racial inequality in favor of economic equity as the problem, instead of the truth that both are the problem. I have seen a pre-post election drift toward the center right, by many citizens of this disjointed country. Many are not not concerned that the king of all country clubs and country club mentality, as described in OP article, is now potus and serious about putting ALL not white, male, minority bootlicker and/or KKKristian 'back in their place' because the are not of the superior race
But I thank you and appreciate this so timely OP.
Extremely enlightening concerning the ongoing white supremacy/entitlement headaches all POC must contend with in the good ole usa
