Confessions of a Recovering Racist

I am a racist. I say this with the acceptance and regret an alcoholic identifies him/herself at a twelve step-meeting. Acceptance and regret are vital to getting better. And I do want to get better.

I am surprised by how often I hear people – from public figures to members of my own family – say they are “color-blind” or just don’t pay attention to race. I can’t really speak for anyone but myself, but regardless of how many friends I have who are “black,” or how ridiculously unscientific I find the whole concept of race to be, or how much I want to be one big, happy, human family, I can’t ignore the truth of who I am. I was “wounded” as Wendell Berry has said in his book on racism, The Hidden Wound. The damage was done, and the scars still burn.

Like a victim of childhood abuse, I relive it regularly. I hear “lock the door” sometimes when my car rolls to a stop near a black pedestrian. I hear an older relative warning me not to play with the “nigger dogs” (puppies belonging to a black family at the baseball park). I hear it being explained to my fourth grade self that black people are no different than white and that that I should be kind and polite to black children – as long as I don’t bring one home with me. I hear myself singing  “red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight,” then coming home from Sunday school and watching black families being attacked by police dogs and sprayed down with fire hoses on TV. And I hear my seventh grade girlfriends whispering that if you sit by a black girl she’ll cut off your ponytail. I hear even worse things in my head sometimes that I am too embarrassed and ashamed to tell.

Lest you think I grew up in a wild-eyed, red-necked family of card-carrying KKK members in the middle of Southern Nowhere, let me set you straight. I grew up in fairly large, mainstream cities in Florida - Jacksonville, Gainesville, Ft. Lauderdale - among folks who looked and acted pretty much like everyone else, who considered themselves "good Christian people" and tried to love their neighbor as themselves. My parents sincerely wanted us to grow up to be good people. They grew up in a much more overtly racist culture than they raised us in. They did their best.

But still I grew up in a broken, wounded world, and I am a result of that upbringing. Like an abuse victim, I have to fight the tendency to abuse; and like every human being I have to face squarely the fact that the possibility is within me. One cause of blindness to our own racism is that we are simply surrounded by it, like the air we breathe. We inhaled it every day with the others “like us” - in and out. Living in this culture, we can no more say we are not racist than that we are not “materialistic.” It got to us, it gets to our children, and it is an uphill battle to fight it. I mean we have to swim as vigilantly upstream against racism as we do against unconscious consumerism and other “isms” we want to stand against. Otherwise, away we go.

I have mixed feelings about “Black History Month.” In a perfect world, black history would be part of “American History” and “World History.” In this world, it has been and is often left out. But I am glad about the opportunities it affords me and my family to learn more, and hopefully to shed some more of the detritus of the past. I want to be a part of the healing of myself and my community of the damage that was done to all of us – the limiting of our understanding of who “we” are, the narrowing of our vision of what we might become, and the lost possibilities for friendship and real community. It is time.

Starting this Saturday, here in Gainesville, the Dismantling Racism Initiative kicks off with Remember the Titans, the first in a film festival of race-related films which also includes Race: The Power of an Illusion, The Tuskegee Airmen, Eyes on the Prize, and The Great Debaters – followed by discussion by members of the Dismantling Racism team.  Other events can be found here.

Comments

[Robert]

I admire you for sharing this - it takes courage to admit to and more so to challenge it as you do.

Our backgrounds sound similar - our societies have far more in common than either would admit to.

I find in my life I am careful about admitting to what I am as too often, when you tell someone you are South African, they only see the label and the stereotype, and not the person standing in front of them.

Thank you for your post - it was insightful and thought provoking.