Yes, I am. Is there a 12-step program for me?
I grew up in the Sixties in a lily-white neighborhood, in a area of western Houston known as Spring Branch. The closest thing we had to ethnic diversity in that white-collar oil and gas 'hood was a white family that had moved there from Brooklyn and another from California. There were no black children in school, and maybe a couple of Hispanic kids. I knew no people of color growing up. All I really knew about such people I learned from my parents.
Mom grew up in a town of about 5000 in DeSoto Parish, just to the south of Shreveport. Mansfield has a dichotomous history: there was a major Civil War battle fought there in April of 1864 (it was a Confederate victory), and it was the birthplace of Vida Blue, Cy Young award winner and six-time All Star. My grandfather was a rancher who also worked part-time at the Texaco station in town. He was a confirmed segregationist. He typically referred to black folks as "nigras." He was the type who would get up and leave the room if a black person appeared together with a white person on TV. I saw him do this more than once.
Pop, as my sister and I called him, had a working relationship with a black man whom he called, simply, Black. I do not know if that was his actual name, or if that was what my grandfather chose to call him. I would not doubt if it were the latter. Pop hired Black to do odd jobs around the ranch - baling hay, clearing brush, that sort of thing. It seemed to me to be a good working relationship, but there were very clear boundaries to it. When Black came to the house, he always had to come to the back door, and he never, ever set foot inside. I suppose Pop only hired a black man to do these odd jobs because he couldn't find a white person to do them.
There were cross burnings in DeSoto Parish when I was a kid. The grown-ups never discussed such things openly with us, but we would overhear a great deal. I remember once hearing a story about a white man driving down a back road and getting jumped by a gang of "nigras." Most likely this was apocryphal.
I spent a lot of time in that town growing up, especially in the summer. We would roam around, or foot or on bicycles, but there was a part of town where we were told we could not go. You can imagine what it was called. I never saw it, ever.
Racism there was like the pine trees and the red dirt. It was part of the landscape. The march toward integration was of course resisted vehemently. The town stopped maintaining the public swimming pool when it appeared likely they would have to start allowing the black folks in. They gave it back to the kudzu rather than open it up to the "coloreds."
The public schools were abandoned in droves by the white folks, who put up parochial schools on the outskirts of town. These buildings sprung up across the state overnight when integration became the law of the land.
My dad was from Arkansas. He always rooted for the Razorbacks, though he never went to school in Fayetteville. I recall one football game on TV that we watched with an uncle or cousin, and my dad saying at the start of the game "looks like it's our niggers against their niggers." This was somewhat out of character for Dad, who usually made an effort to shield us kids from such language. He got angry at my mother once for making fun of the way the bagger, a black man, at the Rice Food Market had pronounced "oranges."
Mom to this day calls African-Americans "coloreds," as a rule. It's "the colored man" or "that colored lady." In my college years I liked to try the "what color are they" line on her, and usually got a cold stare in return.
Once when I was maybe nine or ten and verging on awareness of goings on in the world like race riots and civil rights demonstrations, I asked my mom "what's wrong with black people?" I was questioning why so many people seemed to have a problem with them. She answered "nothing, really, but you wouldn't want to have one for your best friend."
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Twenty years ago I moved to Colorado with my wife, after living my whole life up to that point on or near the Gulf Coast. At my new job I soon became friends with a gay man and a lesbian woman, and after I had been there a while, they told me that they had been apprehensive when they heard where the new guy was coming from - they had pictured me driving up in a beat-up pickup truck with a gun rack and Confederate flag decal. That was probably the only time in my life I experienced prejudice personally, but I didn't even know about it when it happened...
Dad died on Christmas Day last year after a long and difficult illness. The last words I said to him were "I love you, Dad." I felt no need to repudiate or denounce him.
Thirteen years ago our daughter was born, and I think we've done a pretty good job of raising her to be colorblind. I am proud to say that one of her best buddies in school is a black girl. She's a very sweet kid, and the two of them have done sleepovers at our house and at her house. I am not proud at all of the fact that I was nervous about those sleepovers. In fact, it makes me angry to realize that I must be far less colorblind than my daughter, far less than I like to think I am.
I've spent my whole adult life making a conscious effort to overcome certain aspects of my upbringing, not the least of which is all that I've written above - but I'm not there yet. Lord help me, I'm not there yet, but I'm trying.