I am a 58 year-old white man, the product of poor, white and racist parents. I’m not proud about that racist part, but that’s what they were, and it does no good to hide or try to sugar-coat the truth.
From an early age, I struggled with how to respond to racism’s ugly underside. I knew racism was wrong, and I knew it caused unspeakable pain and anguish in people of color, but it was difficult for a kid like me to make a stand against racism in a home so steeped in racial animosity. Plus, my dad was a dictator, so saving my own hide was always my chief concern.
Fortunately, there were people that crossed my path over the years, both literally and figuratively, who demonstrated that there was an alternative path leading away from racial bigotry, and that made my own racial journey possible. During my journey, I’ve learned numerous important lessons, but the most important one is that fighting racism is a lifetime endeavor, even for those with the best of intentions.
My journey in racial understanding began on a sunny afternoon during the summer of 1963, on the cement steps of my inner-city childhood home, where two six-year old youngsters were in hot pursuit of the Candy Castle, the winning destination of the childhood board game known as Candyland. One of those youngsters was an adorable little black girl named, Sharon, who wore her ebony hair in pigtails and brightly colored bows, and never missed an opportunity to flash her million-dollar smile; the other youngster was me. Sharon was having an unusually good run of luck that afternoon, and I was not well-schooled in the art of good sportsmanship or managing my growing frustration. When Sharon reached the Candy Castle for the fourth time in a row, I’d had my share of losing for one afternoon and retaliated in the worst way possible – I called Sharon the N-word and threw the game board down on the sidewalk.
A second later, Sharon’s face melted into tears, and in the milliseconds that followed, I learned a gut-wrenching lesson about the pain that hateful words can inflict on another human being. I’ve seen a lot of pain during the fifty-eight years that I’ve walked this earth, but none of it shattered my world worse than the sight of my childhood buddy sobbing uncontrollably as she ran down the street towards her home.
I picked up the game pieces and quietly went inside my house, hoping that the dust would settle and all would be forgotten in a day or so, but I was wrong, and fifty-two years later, that memory it still as strong as ever. You see, I hadn’t counted on Sharon’s father being the fiercely principled man that he was, and I certainly never expected to see him at my front door, but minutes after my vicious verbal attack on Sharon, there he was, proud and tall, knocking on the screen, demanding justice, demanding an apology and demanding respect. Lesson learned – there are some things in life worth making a stand against.
My dad went outside first and I heard him talking with Sharon’s father, who relayed the facts as he’d been told, with total accuracy I must confess, and it pained me to listen to that story all over again, and hear what I’d done to hurt his daughter. My father yelled for me to come outside, which I did, and he told me that I owed Sharon and her father an apology. I gave them one, but I’m not sure whether they thought I was sincere or not. I do remember Sharon’s father looking at me with a stern expression on his face and saying, “Young man, you’re better than that!” and then he walked away.
That could have been the end of that incident, but it wasn’t. When I followed my father back into our house, and we were well out of range of any outside ears, he turned to my mother and said, “Who does that [N-word] think he is, coming up here telling me how to raise my kid?” The next lesson I learned that day was one of parental hypocrisy. Sadly, it would rear its ugly head again five years later.
On the night of April 4th, 1968, my twelve year old sister and I sat huddled together in tears at the top of the stairs in our inner-city row house. We were supposed to be sleeping, since it was long past bedtime, but neither of us could sleep given the jubilation that was happening downstairs. What was the reason for the celebration? Well, my parents were watching news reports of the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. You’d think they’d won the lottery, although I’m pretty sure the lottery didn’t exist back then, except perhaps in the Shirley Jackson short story bearing that name. It was hard to hear my parents cheer about another person’s death, and another family’s agony, and hear the depth of hatred emanating from their mouths. My sister and I knew we’d lost a kindred soul in Dr. King’s death, we just didn’t know how to express the words, and so we wept, and never spoke of that night until decades later.
On morning, approximately two years after the King assassination, I was in the process of delivering our local Sunday newspaper morning when a young black man in his mid-twenties conned me into showing him the way to a nearby bus station. He said he wasn’t from the area and needed assistance because he was bad at remembering directions. Because the station was on my paper route, I altered my delivery routine and agreed to guide him while I continued delivering papers. About halfway into our journey to the bus station, the young black man withdrew a knife from his coat, wrapped his arm around my neck and dragged me into a nearby breezeway, where he raped me at knife-point, and then left me naked to find my way back home. Despite the subsequent efforts by police to identify and apprehend my attacker, the man was never found.
Last summer, as I was driving through the downtown community where I live, I was stopped at a traffic light and a young black male in his mid-twenties started crossing the street in the crosswalk. I studied his face absentmindedly for a hint of recognition of the man who raped me, and that’s when something profound struck me. For the past forty-four years, I’ve been scrutinizing the face of every mid-twenties black man I’ve ever met to determine whether he was my attacker. You can do the math. If my attacker were still alive today, he’d be around seventy years old, and yet for all these years I’ve been subconsciously questioning the guilt of every young black male who crossed my path. That’s how latent and automatic racism can be, even in a person who understands its ill effects and strives to battle racism’s ugly head whenever possible.
I’m constantly reminded that there’s still a long way to go in the battle against racism. It’s a lifetime endeavor.
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