At least I hope I’m a former racist. I know that as a young boy in grade school and later in high school, I was assured by my father that the European civilization, of which the United States was a part, had achieved the highest level of all the cultures of the world. It was not difficult to prove in those days (I was born in 1923 and graduated from high school in 1940) because at the time, in spite of the depression, America and Europe appeared to be more advanced in technical matters than China, Africa, and most of South America. We celebrated the wheat that we ate, which, my father believed, made us smarter than the people who ate rice or other grains.
We spoke better English, too, at least in Kent County, Michigan. I read somewhere that Negroes spoke with a drawl because their tongues were thicker than our “white" tongues. Of course, I knew that white southerners also spoke with a drawl. I attributed that fact to their having been raised and taught to speak by Negro nannies, who implanted their own speech defects on the white children.
In fact, in my second year at college (Michigan State) I met and befriended a very tall, slender black-skinned boy from Haiti. His father or uncle was the Agriculture Minister of Haiti and the boy, Bertony Vieau, (I’m not sure of the spelling) was an Ag major. At one time he and I had a discussion about the structure of the mouths of Negroes. I insisted that they all had thick tongues that made them speak with a drawl. I was so sure of accuracy of what I’d read that I didn’t notice that I was speaking with a young black man whose native language was French and who spoke English with a French accent. Later I realized that Bert must have thought I was the stupidest person alive!
I can’t name the time when I realized that my ideas about African-Americans were somewhat incorrect and that the instruction that I was given that the only difference between a white person and a Negro was the skin color. I came to this way of thinking while I was still in college. After graduating I went to work in Washington, DC for the Naval Research Laboratory. One of my bosses was a southerner named Robert Colson. We discussed the relative attainments of blacks and whites and he would in good humor tease me. He would point out to other workers that I would argue that I was no better than a Negro and he would try to convince me that I was.
Even though I would advocate equal treatment of blacks and whites I still had a certain prejudice. Someone once asked me if I would marry a Negro woman. I responded that I would not because they looked ugly to me. It was not until I saw some beautiful Negro girls that I realized that they were not “ugly.” At least some of them were beautiful. Of course my idea of beauty at the time was the European woman, with thin lips, an oval face, and a rather pointed nose. Even with a black skin such a woman would have a beautiful face.
Most American Negroes are descended from slaves who were purchased or kidnapped from Western Africa. People from that area tend to have the thick lips and the flattened noses that are characteristics of many American Negroes. On one of our trips, my wife and I were eating in a restaurant in Washington, DC. Two girls waited on us. Their skin was coal black and they had features like Europeans (thin lips, etc.). We talked with them. I noticed that English was not their native language. It was Amharic. They had recently come from Ethiopia.
I think the first time I realized that Negro girls could be attractive was when I was watching a show, probably on television. In the show three of the performers were young black girls. They looked cute to me if not actually beautiful. Their motions and their song were rather sassy, like those of teen-age white girls. I can’t remember anything else about the show and I don’t remember how old I was when I saw it.
For what it’s worth, that’s my confession. I’d like to claim that I remember some traumatic experience that dispelled all of my mistaken racial attitudes. As I think about my life I remember certain things that happened, something that I said, something that someone said to me. There are no specific things that happened that caused me to have a drastic change of mind. I don’t know how I got over being a racist. I just grew out of it.
