With the sudden (and long overdue) demise of the Battle flag of the Confederacy, I like to think that more folk are looking at racism and thinking about how to end it. At the very least, I have been thinking about that. It occurs to me that there are some little examined areas and choices in our lives that allow racism to slink along under the surface, without ever dying off, as it should. To illustrate this, I am going to give some examples from my own life.
Take the horrible racist jokes that were told to me as a kid, and to the great shame of my adult self, I told to other kids. Things like “A guy goes into the gun store and asks for their most powerful rifle. The owner sells it to him and asks him what he is going to shoot with it. The guy replies ‘Cans’. The shop owner is surprise and says ‘Cans?’ The guy says, “Yeah, you know, Afri-cans, Mexi-cans, Puerto Ri-cans.”
Like I said, horrible shit, but that is what went around in my school and neighborhood as a child. And it is not like I was a kid in the ‘50’s, this would have been ’74-’75 time range. If my parents had heard them, I would have been in deep shit, they would have been horrified. Yet this racism was out there, it was so atmospheric that, even though I knew it was not okay to look at people that way, I still laughed and passed on that casual, heinous racism.
The point is, while I truly believe that racism is taught and is not inherent, the teaching does not all come from the parents. It can come in the form of kids telling other kids jokes they heard their parents or other adults tell and get a laugh. Today there is not a chance in hell that I’d tell any kind of racial or religious joke, I’ve learned better and am an adult, but how many years did this kind of casual indoctrination towards racism take to weed out?
Another place where racism is tolerated is in families. My Dad’s family was from West Virginia with Dad being the youngest. As such, it was steeped in the higher level of racism that growing up in Appalachia in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s one would expect to see. By the time I was a teen I was getting more and more sure that racism was completely wrong and one thing that I was not going to have around me was any tolerance for the word nigger.
I remember sitting in the kitchen of one of my Uncles and arguing, aggressively, with my Aunt because she had causally called someone a nigger. She was making that bullshit argument that the word did not only refer to black people and I was having none of it. I looked to my Dad for help, but got a neutral stare. Later on, I called him on it and was told that, yes, it was always wrong to use that word, but that there was no chance of my changing my Aunt or Uncles mind about it, and that it was not worth having constant family arguments about.
I left that talk with a feeling that I could not identify for years afterward. It was the realization that my Dad, in this area, was a coward. He would hammer people outside our family over racism, going to the point of ending friendships with people over it. However, inside his own family he did not have the courage of conviction to make the point and, at the very least say to his brothers and sisters and their spouses that they could think anything they liked but they would not use that kind of language around his kids.
As I’ve reached the age he was when he said that, I can give a little more nuance to what he said. He was trying not to have a fight that would come up time and again within his family. They might be really flawed, but they were family and as such will often get a pass on issues that we would not give to someone from outside the family. That does not make it any less cowardly, but I do understand it better.
How many people in this country have the same situation? The overtly racist relative, who is not challenged on their words, and so showing the younger members of the family that this kind of behavior is, in fact, tolerable? How many make the choice for harmony inside their family at the cost of racism continuing for more generations?
Finally there is the issue of having the courage of our convictions and living with the cost. I have (or rather had) a friend I grew up with, we went to school together, my Dad was good friends with his parents and so on. S. and I don’t agree on a lot of things, but I always figured that we’d be on the same page about racism. This week I found out differently. On his Facebook feed he has been defending the Battle Flag and making all the stupid argument about heritage and pride and such (which is damned odd given that we grew up in Michigan, not the South). I called him on it, and after a bit of an argument I am no longer his friend.
The thing is, before this I’d have described him as a good guy, if more than a little misguided by conservative media. S. takes it on himself to shovel the walks of the three elderly couples that live on his block. He just goes and does it, because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. He watches out for the little kids in the neighborhood and to my certain knowledge has patched more than a few skinned knees. Until today I’d have been 100% sure that if I was in some kind of trouble that physical violence was required that he’d be there, kicking ass because we had been off and on friends for the last 35 years.
I had a choice; I could have made excuses or taken my Dad’s construction that I can’t change his mind so I can just avoid the fact that he has racist attitudes. The thing is, if I do that, then it feeds this pattern of racism that is so destructive to my nation. Will telling S. that I can’t be his friend and will not interact with him again because of his racist views change his mind? I doubt it, but if the cost of racism is low, in terms of friends and family, then why would anyone ever change? Maybe, just maybe knowing that he lost my friendship will make him take a moment to think about his racism.
So, what’s the point of all this? So glad you ask, gentle reader! My point is that while we celebrate the demise of a symbol of hate, racism and white supremacy we have to look deeper if we truly are to live in a post-racial society. It is not enough to work on the problems in the criminal justice system; it is not enough to call for the harassment of hate groups and their vile spew.
If we are to have that post-racial society, we must look to what are children hear from other kids, we have to be strong and, at the very least, make those in our own family who would express racism so uncomfortable that they stay silent for the sake of family unity. And finally, we must be strong in public; there can be no tacit acceptance of racism, even if the person is otherwise exemplary. Racism can not end until it is fought and exposed as the empty hate it has always been.
The floor is yours.