My first best friend was black in South Bend, where there were at least 10% to 15% black Americans. We walked shoulder to shoulder passed race riots at Washington High School. He lived across the street from WHS. But we moved when I was in 6th grade. That new town was a nearly all white community of 6500, a few POC families, 70 miles from any other community with more than 2% of POC.
Although I felt I was racist immune. Then I wrote about my childhood friend 20 years later. Another 15 years after that, I realized how riddled I was with bias, mostly implicit, but some was explicit without being publicly known. It was clouded by my hubris.
I even heard it in my father who fought racism in South Bend in the 1960s and early 70s. Racism is insidious. He became great a friend of my best friend's father, the only black family for years in our neighborhood. Yet he harbored racist beliefs and ideas.
I taped 20 hours of conversation about his life in 2001. When I re-listened to all of it for a 3rd time in 2012, I finally was hearing it. This was from a person who in that same taped history talked about defending two jewish sailors from a mob of other sailors in 1943, when he was 17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwDriB0I0To&t=2s
Racism is an invisible metastatic cancer of the social system. My dad, a great guy overall, fought lifelong for the rights of people with disabilities, had it in various parts of his brain, seeping out only in specific instances, but it was there. Therefore, I know I am not immune, never will be, and still am susceptible.
It angers and frustrates me, but it also humbles me, which is likely the only way I would be fighting against its ravages. Once you think you are immune (or it is not in your bones), it is hard to come down from that feeling-superior belief.
Remember if you get angry, when someone says you have white privilege or are racist, you are. White people are racist, period… in small ways, or an ugly way, or somewhere in the middle. The society we have created and controlled for 400 years has given us no other option or escape.
Only the strong can consume that truth, and without anger towards those who point it out, humbly work to wear it away, and the faster, the better. RTC
