when i was quite young, probably nine or ten, my maternal grandmother gave me "the talk," a lecture that most white children of my generation who lived in the south of the usa heard at some point in their lives. now, my "mamaw" was a kind, considerate person, in most respects a political liberal, a believer in the role of government in improving the lives of the people it served, but on one particular point she, like many, perhaps most, adults in this country held views that were inconsistent with her other ideals. she was a racist who felt it her duty to pass her beliefs on matters of race on to her children and grandchildren.
i well remember her saying to me that, while one must always treat black people with courtesy and kindness, "colored" people were our inferiors, incapable of the same mental development as whites. she cautioned me to always remember that when dealing with a person of color. she and my grandfather ran a mom-and-pop grocery store on the edge of the "quarters," the area of her town where most black people lived. most of her customers were black, and i watched her and my grandfather as they waited on them. true to her word, she always behaved with courtesy and kindness to each one, engaging in an easy banter with them as if they were old and valued friends. part of this was, no doubt, because her livelihood depended on them returning to her store for their groceries and paying their charge accounts at the beginning of each month, but it appeared to me that she had a genuine affection for them, many of whom had been her customers their entire lives.
later in life as i looked back on my beloved grandmother, i wondered if she really believed the words she had expressed about the inferiority of people whose only real difference from us was that their skins were darker. like many of her peers, she was able to hold two opposing views on the matter of race simultaneously. she would have been among the first to decry injustice against a person of color, and yet she would have insisted one could view another as a human being without believing that other to be one's equal. this notion has become ingrained in our national psyche, making it incredibly difficult to rid ourselves of its insidious presence. this awful inheritance of the evil of slavery colors much of our country's life and politics. no white person here can imagine what it must be like to be black in the usa. many of us have worked our entire lives to rid ourselves of the racist thinking that has been pervasive for so many generations, but no matter how hard we try, we still have no idea of the black experience in our nation.
i look back over my life and remember instances when i have used words fraught with racist undertones in the minds of black friends and acquaintances and puzzled over why those words were offensive. they were perfectly innocuous to me and had a completely different meaning. for instance, in a conversation with a person of color, i used the word "minority" in the sense of referring to the opposite of majority. yet to her, that word was a reference to her race, and she took exception to what i said. in her mind, i was talking about exclusion, while in my mind there was no racial connotation at all. it was as if we were speaking different dialects of our common language. in another instance, i remember with shame intervening in a fight between some boys from my neighborhood with other boys who were strangers to the neighborhood. the neighborhood children were white, and their opponents were black. as i stopped the fighting, i ordered the black children to "get out of our neighborhood." they stopped and stared at me, before running away. as soon as the words came out of my mouth, i realized that what i had said was racist, though it wasn't my intention. in the minds of the boys, both black and white, i was saying that the black children didn't belong here in a "white neighborhood," that they needed to return to the "black part" of town. that incident continues to haunt me as a reminder that no matter how hard i work to rid myself of racist thinking, those words of my grandmother from so long ago still inhabit a dark part of my mind. any white person in this country who believes that racism has been banished from his or her mind is wrong. it is inescapable and the ugly outpouring of it that the election of donald trump has unleashed should convince any person that racist thinking continues to be something that we must struggle to overcome.
may we be honest with ourselves when we consider matters of race. may we work to see all people as our equals, regardless of the color of their skins. may we recognize our shortcomings and seek to make amends for them. may we see that we are all human, with good and bad residing in all of us, and that the bad can only be overcome by honesty and lovingkindness. shalom
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