🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
"Ohio is a place where you can't really be racist unless you really, really try," Katt Williams, a Cincinnati native, recently told fellow Ohioan Arsenio Hall during a Netflix special. "Because your neighbor on the left is Black and your neighbor [on the right] is white. That's how you grow up. And if you grow up like that, it's a very difficult process for you to end up racist."
It was like he was describing my life. I grew up in Cleveland's Collinwood neighborhood. Throughout my childhood, the north side of our neighborhood was predominately white and the south side (where I lived) was predominately Black. But both sides tended to meet in the middle, for a whole host of reasons; grocery stores, libraries and schools gave us all ample opportunities to interact with each other on a regular basis.
You might say that what we lacked in racial integration was compensated for by what united us from a class point of view. Collinwood was a working class neighborhood, and middle class, working class and poor families were all part of the community.
This is not to say that there was no racism in my neighborhood, but like Williams told Hall, the few members of our community who were racist had to work really hard at it. They were the outliers. When everybody is a part of the same struggle, what unites you begins to matter more than what divides you.
Nowhere did I see this more than at the elementary school I attended on the neighborhood's north side. It was a private, Lutheran school that was attended by a cross section of students from both sides of the neighborhood and nearby suburbs. My family struggled to pay the tuition to keep me in that school, which meant that everybody around me had more money than me. But the disparity was not profound. Most of us were either struggling or trying not to struggle.
It was at that school where I, a little Black boy from the south side of town, met a little white girl from the north side and embarked on a 30-year friendship with her while the world changed around us.
Her name was Diana Lash and I met her in kindergarten. We became inseparable immediately. In a neighborhood where interactions between Black and white were common, no one batted an eye. Where I come from, this was normal.
Diana and I stayed in the same school for the next eight years. While things were never perfect for either of us, we had a fairly normal and innocent 1990s childhood. As we became older and outside influences began to infiltrate our Power Rangers-Saved by the Bell infused bubble, we clung even closer to each other, trying to hold on to our sense of normalcy.
But things were changing. Deindustrialization and the job displacement that came along with it began to take its toll on the working class neighborhood that we called home. As the years progressed, more and more parents began leaving, looking for better opportunities elsewhere.
One fateful day in the 7th grade, Diana came to me with heartbreaking news: She was leaving too. She didn't want to go. She was devastated. This environment was all she knew. She wanted to finish elementary school with us, and we only had one year left. But it was not to be. As she left for what was supposed to be greener pastures, we stayed in touch. After all, we wrote "Friends Forever" in our yearbooks and we intended to keep it that way.
But once again, the world changed around us. Though Diana and her family escaped Collinwood's slow deterioration brought on by disinvestment, she moved into what would eventually become ground zero for the drug epidemic in Northeastern Ohio. Diana went from a Lutheran school environment that protected us from many of the dangers lurking outside to a public school environment that was a free for all. Her battle was with addiction began early.
I know because we stayed in touch throughout the years as Diana because one of the hundreds of thousands of Americans struggling with sobriety. I spoke to Diana as recently as last summer. We reminisced about old times. I didn't know then that it would be the last time I would speak to her.
On May 14th, 2022, my childhood best friend passed away.
We still don't know the details of her passing. And yet, like our early childhood friendship, to me it bespeaks a struggle that transcends race.
107,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in 2021, a horrific statistic from a crisis now plaguing Black communities at equal rates to white ones. Our friendship and Diana's untimely death exist in the real America—the one we don't hear about, whether the joys and the agonies, the pleasures and the pain, transcend racial and political divides.
As I processed the shock and devastation that news of Diana's passing brought me, I wondered: What kind of world are we living in now? Is a bond like ours, a story like ours, even possible in today's America?
Black and white, rich and poor Americans no longer live next to each other. We have far fewer opportunities to interact with one another. Racially, it sometimes feels like we are more divided than at any time during my childhood. The deterioration of working class neighborhoods has accelerated. The class divide is now a chasm.
As things on the south side of Collinwood got worse and worse, I eventually—reluctantly—left the neighborhood, too. But my hope is that fate isn't sealed for the ones I left behind me.
As I mourn my lost friend, I can't help but mourn the America that gave rise to our friendship, which now seems as distant as the last time I spoke to Diana.
Darvio Morrow is CEO of the FCB Radio Network and co-host of The Outlaws Radio Show.
The views in this article are the writer's own.
