In Barack Obama’s historical—and just plain gutsy—speech on race in Philadelphia, he asked us to start the conversation we have avoided to our detriment as a nation. He asked us to face our discomfort and make the kind of frank admissions that he made that day as a starting point to an honest, open and overdue discussion of race. Black people responded with stories of racism both overt, convert and still very much alive in our society. White pundits applauded the "audacity" of Obama’s speech and agreed that, yes, we really really need to have that conversation. There is still racism, they said. We need to address it, they said. Who among them started by admitting their personal stories of racism, the depth of their own prejudice? How are we to talk about something to which one half of the folks in the discussion will not admit? Where is the white half of this "conversation"?
So, I guess I’ll start. I’m a middle-aged, rural white guy with some college. I grew up in a small town in northeast Ohio. As you might guess, there were few blacks in our town. Many of them lived on a dirt road outside of town, in the lowlands close to the river. Most of the people down that road were poor. The area was so prone to flooding that the road was known locally as "Frog Alley". That nickname became a synonym for the black part of town.
My contact with blacks when I was a kid consisted mostly of watching the high school football team and the Jeffersons, Mod Squad, and Good Times on TV. I passed a couple of black kids in the hall in junior high. But I never spoke to them. They were quiet and kept to themselves.
My father, a World War II vet, spoke openly of his disdain for blacks. He didn’t like to watch those n***er shows, as he called any TV show with a black person in it. But he tolerated us watching if there was nothing on he wanted to watch. For some reason, he gave Sammy Davis Jr. a pass. I can only guess that any friend of Dean Martin’s was okay with him, as long as he was properly deferential to the white guy and non-threatening. (Hard to be threatening at 5’4" and 135 pounds) Pop had no use for blacks and told us stories about the bad part of town in Cleveland, where he worked. (Many people in my town commuted to work in Cleveland, 40 miles away) The near East Side, especially in the area of East 55th, was legendary among the whites I grew up with as the most dangerous place a white person could go. To hear them talk after the riots of ’68, the Mekong Delta during Tet was a Sunday Stroll compared to walking down East 55th as a white person alone.
I absorbed all this, but I couldn’t quite put it together with the blacks I saw on TV. Jim Brown seemed a handsome man, a great athlete, well spoken and a hero to Browns fans. As a budding football player, Allen Page of the Vikings was a personal hero of mine. I just couldn’t see what harm these folks were doing to me or whites in general. When my father called Martin Luther King "that trouble-making n***er", I couldn’t put that together with the passionate, articulate man I saw on TV. I didn’t completely understand the anger and hatred of blacks by the white people around me. It hurt me when they called people n***er.
But I absorbed some of the lessons. As I got older, I was fearful to go Frog Alley or the "black part of Cleveland." I was more watchful, uncomfortable to pass a black man on the street. When I got to high school, I became a star player on the football team. I was surprised to learn I was as good an athlete as the black players I faced, although I was always intimidated and imbued black players with remarkable skills before the first snap. Some were good players, some I dominated, but that intimidated feeling was always there before a game against black players and took a long time to shake.
For a short time, I almost slipped into overt hatred of black men. I joined the Army with a friend just out of high school. That was the first time I was exposed to a number of black men and lived in close proximity with them. But for most of us during boot camp, it might as well have been two separate armies when we got off duty. Whites went with whites, blacks with blacks. My friend and I got assigned to different units at our regular duty station in Hawaii. But I went to visit him on weekends. One day, I found him in a bathroom near his room, attending to a bloody nose. He’s gotten in a fight with a black guy. I never did find out what precipitated the fight, but as I was talking to him, five black men came in the bathroom. We got our asses kicked. I didn’t even know these guys or why they attacked us. My friend never told me, but he must have said something to piss them off.
Still, I never came to hate black people the way I have known others to. I wish I could tell you why. But that distrust, however deeply submerged, is always there, especially for black men. I’ve had close friendships with men Hispanic men, an Asian Indian, and a Filipino, but no black friends.
I did go to school with Don King’s son. He graduated with me, was a star basketball player for our school (public school. Don’s no elitist), and was generally a good guy. Funny and easy to be around. But I wouldn’t say we were friends. He became a boxing manager and promoter like his father. After I got out of the Army, I saw him in a local bar and we got stupid drunk together. He wanted me to start boxing. His argument was that I was a good athlete and white. He could make me a decent boxer, get me twenty wins (a couple even legit!), and I could be the "great white hope" that made us both insanely wealthy. I thought it over when I sobered up. I passed on the chance. I didn’t quite trust Carl. After all, he was Don King’s son. And he was black.
So where am I today? I don’t know. I feel great sympathy for the suffering inflicted on blacks by whites throughout our country’s history. I am a Democrat in large part because of the efforts made by the party to set things right from the Civil Rights era to now. I voted for Barack Obama in the primary and will support his bid for the Presidency. But my very bones still bear the stain of racism. I’ve done my best to scrub it clean, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get it all out. Maybe if I have a chance to actually have that conversation with a black man, that might help. One thing is certain. I won’t find out if I don’t join that conversation.