I am not a racist because of genetics and environment. I was taught better.
I come from a working class family that settled in the piney woods of deep East Texas back before the civil war. Three brothers came from Georgia and settled along a river. They were poor people, working the land for a living. As interesting note, the county in which they settled, in which I was born, is the only county in East Texas to vote against secession.
My grandfather was a logger. In 1927, at age 12 his father died and he went to work full time in the woods as a water boy, driving a mule cart carrying a water barrel. Over the course of the next 50 years he worked long, hard hours to feed, first his mother and siblings and later his wife and children. He worked in traveling sawmill camps and company towns. His oldest child, my father, was born in a sawmill camp. They lived in converted railroad car houses that were moved from one camp to the next, they bought their groceries in the company store with company scrip.
He would tell the story of working in the sawmill camps where the “the ignorant whites thought they were better than the blacks because the company paid whites a nickel more a week” then he would laugh and continue” ‘course none of us, white or black, had damned thing to call our own but the clothes on our backs.” When we said it was wrong to pay blacks less he said "young'un you’re damned right it was wrong but it didn't stop them from doing it." I understood racism and I understood white privilege. My grandfather made sure all of us, his kids and grandkids, understood that all though he got that extra nickel, it wasn't right.
But he would also tell the story of another sawmill owner, who although “he was rich as Rockefeller, was my friend”, and how he helped him when he decided to buy his own equipment and trucks to bring logs to the mill. Then he was a company, hiring black and white loggers to work together with him in the woods. Paying them the same wages, having them all ride in the front of the truck.
He taught me much. He taught me that the neither the wealth nor color of skin defined the character of a person. What mattered was how they treated others. The white sawmill owner, the white loggers and the black loggers were all welcome to sit at his kitchen table. The metal water cooler on the back of his trucks had only one cup.
I taste that ice cold water and the metallic taste of that cup, as I remember how we kids ran out to greet him and his crew as they pulled into the yard. I learned to say yes sir and no sir not just to him but to the men who worked with him both black and white. And as I went about town with him,(usually in his old tattered overalls-to the dismay of my grandmother) I saw him treat all men and women as equals and worthy of his respect, whether it was the white banker or the black janitor at the feed store.
I was lucky to have him as a teacher. Not just for his example of working hard and taking care of yourself and your family, but as a teacher of equality, common decency and right and wrong.
