I don’t recall her name, but I know she deserved better.
In the late 1970s, Pat and I were living in New Orleans where I was doing doctoral studies. Both Pat and I had jobs: she as a teacher, I as the assistant manager of small store in one of the city’s upscale malls. One fall, needing to hire a new clerk, the manager and I conducted preliminary interviews of applicants. I interviewed a young woman who was bright, smartly dressed, and well-spoken; in her first year at a local college, she needed a part-time job to stay in school. I arranged an appointment for her at the main store on Canal Street where she could be interviewed by the owner (whose family had opened the store in the early days of the Civil War). A little over an hour after she left, I received a call from the owner. He was irate. After admitting I had sent the young woman downtown, he said, “Don’t you ever send a black person down here. We aren’t going to hire a black to work in our store!” With that, he hung up. I spent the rest of the afternoon wondering if I was about to be fired.
Racism. Four decades after that experience, racism is still with us. I’d like to think things are better, but are they? Some things have changed. A few years before my experience in New Orleans, I worked in a restaurant supply warehouse, supervised by a man who left to become Springfield, Missouri’s first black police officer. When we moved to Ohio, twenty years later, Columbus had a black chief of police. Local stores are managed by men and women of all races. The nation has had a black president. And Marvel has black superheroes.
During those years, I have performed mixed-race weddings, seen black doctors, and worked with an African American deacon. Still, racism remains part of our culture. And, so I must occasionally ask myself, “Am I a racist?”
It’s a complicated question. I have a friend—a white, thirty-something female—who offers an argument something like this: If you say you aren’t a racist, you probably are; if you say you are a racist, you probably aren’t. Huh! And don’t even attempt to say, “I try to be color-blind when I deal with people.” Apparently that attitude belittles the distinctive and proud African American heritage. I (white male, remember) face charges of white privilege. I think I understand what that means but I’m not sure what I can do about it—assuming it exists. Now, I discover I am susceptible to something called “white fragility.” (Were such notions thought up by sociologists, of whom C. S. Lewis was especially wary?) Folks who talk of such things believe they see racism everywhere.
And they’re always watching. If I choose the longer line at the grocery store where the checker is white, unlike the checker with the shorter line; if I question the opinion of the doctor at the “urgent care” who happens to be black; if I avoid eye-contact with the black man boarding the plane, hoping he won’t sit by me—I am likely a racist. Pretty obvious. Maybe.
If skin pigmentation were the only criterion shaping my behavior and attitudes in those situations, racism is almost certainly involved. But, what if previous experience has taught me that clerk with the shorter line is the slowest clerk in the store; what if the doctor didn’t listen when I told her (note the subtle avoidance of sexism) about my previous experience with this rash; what if I don’t want to talk with anyone about football and my potential seatmate is wearing an “I-bleed-scarlet-and-grey” sweatshirt? For each instance, I’ve offered a potential paradigm shift that may alter any assessment of my behavior.
Am I a racist because I would hesitate to walk down Columbus’s Hague Avenue at 1:00 am? Some might say yes, but I suspect many blacks in Columbus would hesitate to walk that same street in the middle of the night, festooned as it is with shot detection equipment. America’s problem is that those same blacks suspect they would face curbside interrogation by the police if they took a midnight stroll around Worthington’s green; while the police might be content with my explaining I was getting some air after a long evening of writing. We whites, who live here, might like to think better of our little town but we might be ignorant of what blacks endure.
Shortly before moving to New Orleans, I was working at a large store in Houston, one of three full-time employees in the luggage department. Then, the store hired a young black man named Wayne to work part-time with us during the Christmas season. The department manager, a retired Army Sergeant-Major, told him, “Well, we’ve never had a colored person work in the department but I’m sure you’ll do fine.” As soon as Wayne and I were alone, I apologized for what the manager had said. “That’s alright,” Wayne said, “I never try to correct anyone over fifty.” I wondered if I would have had that much patience. Now that I’m well over fifty, I wonder if there are black, Latinos, or Asians who patiently ignore my faux pas.
But Wayne said something else. “I don’t even try to correct my grandmother,” he explained, “when she makes a stereotypical remark about white people.” While anti-white racism (or at least racial stereotyping) is unquestionably found amongst blacks, I can’t allow myself to be distracted by it or, worse, allow it to excuse my own racism—or the racism of my fellow-whites.
I can think of only one incident where I was a victim of racism. Again, the setting is New Orleans, at the seafood counter of a large grocery store. Pat and I were next in line, a black woman behind us. When the clerk—black—finished with the customer before us, she asked the woman behind us what she wanted. Pat and I were surprised but didn’t say anything. The next week Pat used the experience to explain to her students why line-cutting is unfair. Pat hadn’t mentioned the clerk or the other customer’s race but a black co-worker who heard the story asked. When Pat said both were black, her co-worker explained, “She could have gotten a lot of flak from other blacks in the store if she had been seen taking a white person ahead of a black person.” Now, the racism I experienced cost me about five-minutes, the racism some blacks face might cost them their livelihood or even their lives.
Of course, that took place decades ago. And things are different now, yet somehow the same. Racism somehow seems to be passed on from one generation to the next.
I’ve studied history most of my life. If I could change anything about American history, I would have the early experiments with slavery fail, fail so spectacularly that Americans never again attempted to use slaves. The Civil War would have never occurred. There might have been sectional issues in American politics, but they wouldn’t have focused on slavery. There would have been no Christian leaders scrambling to justify “the peculiar institution” by distorting the Bible. Segregation and the quest for white supremacy would not be seminar topics. Juneteenth would just be June 19th. But you can’t change history. Some of America's great Christian leaders were slave owners or proponents of slavery. Racist interpretations of the Bible were taught in pulpits; I heard them. Our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents endorsed “Jim Crow” laws and believed schools should be segregated. I attended a high school with more than 3,000 students, all of them white. I never met a black person until I was in college. But don’t assume racism belongs to the Builder/Buster generations; the list of celebrities who’ve lost jobs for racist tweets includes many who are in their twenties or thirties.
Racism is complicated. I don’t need a PBS special, a journal article, or a book to tell me it’s complicated.
Truth is, the more we talk about systemic racism, white privilege, or white fragility the worse we (white people) feel about ourselves. And, the worse we feel about ourselves, the better we feel about ourselves. We are enamored with guilt. But guilt accomplishes little. Never has.
But, surely, the decision to treat people fairly is the first step on the road to ending racism or, at least, my racism. But apparently that’s too simple. We want a more complex answer. Still, if Christian love prompts me to love everyone—to seek the best for others, regardless of their skin color—I will want every man and woman to have the opportunity to achieve their highest potential, I will insist access to good housing and employment be available to all, I will challenge local government to police the police, perhaps through citizens’ review boards, I will vote for candidates who do not judge others by their color or their accent, I will plot to undermine the unjust structures holding people back, I will seek to be a welcoming neighbor. All of that will come from the decision to love.
