My Racism
My skin is about as white as it can get. Analysis of my DNA asserts that 100% of my known ancestors are from the United Kingdom, northwestern Europe, Germanic Europe, Norway, and the Baltics. Needless to say, I sunburn easily.
My upbringing, education, and career were also largely white — white privilege with little exposure to people of color. Although my father commuted into New York City for work and had a more urban experience, nearly all of my time growing up in the 1950s and 60s was spent in suburban New Jersey in a mostly white bedroom town. My elementary school had no black students. My high school graduating class of 212 had three black students. They lived in the southern part of town among a handful of families, literally on the other side of the railroad tracks. Italians were the only significantly sized ethnic group in town, but they lived mostly south of a state highway that ran through the middle of town and served as a demarcation between the lower and middle/upper classes. My family lived on the north side. There was a Chinese family who ran the downtown laundry that washed and pressed my father’s white shirts. After I left New Jersey, I went to prestigious universities for my undergraduate and graduate degrees. In both I encountered less than a handful of blacks, either as classmates or faculty. And then over a 35-year professional career in universities, research institutes, and hospitals, I again could count fewer than a dozen black colleagues.
My parents were born in the early 1920s. My father was raised on a farm in Delaware, a border state in the Civil War, my mother in the same New Jersey town I grew up in. They were politically and socially conservative. They also used racist language and conveyed racist attitudes in our home. My father used the n word. He once returned from a vacation in Alabama and spoke of a “lovely meal served to us by a colored fella.” I think he believed “colored fella” to be an upgrade. When my mother saw a black man fishing in the Charles River outside Boston she said, “I didn’t know there are catfish in the Charles.” She was serious; I was amazed. Was she really this ignorant? Prejudiced? My parents’ mindset was not restricted to blacks. Non-WASP ethnicities of any kind were the targets of derogatory jokes.
My parents may have been products of their era and environments, but I joined into their racism despite the “awakening” of the 60s. I never spoke to any of the black students in high school. I was not antagonistic; I just had no contact with their world. But I did call a high school classmate as a “Jew.” I knew it was offensive but still thought it was OK to say — I just didn’t like him. I told racist jokes. In college, we referred to a Japanese student as the “hip nip” because of the stylish way he dressed. I thought it was all normal.
With the passage of time I thought I changed and believed I was past any traces of racism. Then one day, well into my professional life, I was at lunch with co-workers and we were talking about a black leader of the organization we perceived to be incompetent. Out of nowhere I said this person “could be replaced by a monkey.” The intellectual part of me knew better, but it just came out of my mouth. The people around the table, both peers and subordinates, were stunned. Here was organizational leader making an openly racist comment. I was both embarrassed and angry that I had so bluntly revealed a foul part of who I am. I wasn’t quite as far along as I thought.
**
The murder of George Floyd and the subsequent eruption of Black Lives Matter on the national conscience leads me to recall my past and struggle again with the dark threads of racism still running through me. My social and political values have fallen on the left side of the spectrum for over 40 years. My background in science teaches me that skin color, ethnicity, and religion are irrelevant in assessing any human, yet racially charged, knee-jerk reactions still jangle around in some primitive part of my brain. I wish it wasn’t so; my politics say it shouldn’t be so; but after 67 years, it seems to be part of my hard wiring.
I am not alone. Racism is alive and well in 2020. Ohio State Senator Steve Huffman recently asked if “African Americans or the colored population” are harder hit by the coronavirus because they “do not wash their hands as well as other groups.” The statement felt simultaneously familiar and like a tipping point for me. My father could have said this. I could have said this somewhere in my past. The Italians in my hometown were “greasy”; it’s an easy extension to say blacks don’t know how to wash their hands. Now I found Huffman’s question jarring and repulsive.
I am not at the epicenter of the problem — the policemen who knelt on the neck and back of George Floyd until he died, the white supremacists who ran over and killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in 2017 — but I am part of the problem. I see the world from an exclusively white perspective. I now live in Vermont where blacks comprise under 2% of the population (the national average is about 12%). I can express sympathy for the plight of black people, but I am also the white person Chris Rock was talking about when he said, “No white person wants to change places with a black person. They don’t even want to exchange places with me, and I’m rich.” (1)
Slavery may have been abolished over a century ago, but black people remain segregated economically, socially, and in opportunity. Substantial focus is currently on police behaviors in Minneapolis, Atlanta, or any number of places, but police brutality is only a symptom of the problem. As Jon Stewart said, “The police are a reflection of a society. They’re not a rogue alien organization that came down to torment the black community. We use the police as surrogates to quarantine … racial and economic inequalities so that we don’t have to deal with them.”(2) The police also didn’t create the economic systems where the net worth of a typical white family is ten times that of a typical black family.(3)
Maybe recent events will provoke change for our nation, maybe for me. The national conversation continues to be difficult and conflictual. We have a president who has dedicated four years to fostering racial and economic polarization, and white people as a whole have a far longer history of not listening to or understanding the plight of people of color. The white world is largely safe, why change it?
There seem to be small but positive steps taking place since George Floyd died, with both whites and blacks with visibility speaking honestly and openly, but it’s early in what has proven to be an intractable problem. We’ll see. I know my own demon, a lingering tumor of racist judgments, won’t just vanish. I have plenty of work to do. I can put a sign up in my yard or march in the Black Lives Matter protests, but any real transformation for me will need to be internal and not evidenced simply by a banner I might wave. I need to engage in honest conversations with people of color. My white perspective alone will obviously not be enough. I have no idea what that conversation looks like, my upbringing and education gave me no tools to frame that conversation, but I need to figure it out.
It is unlikely I can cleanly excise my racism, but I can try to retain the shock of recent events and the uncomfortable knowing that brazen racism is still out there. Maybe that shock and knowing will help me shrink the tumor.
(1) HBO (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJmvfbDdhFg)
(2) Jon Stewart is Back to Weigh In; New York Times Magazine; June 15, 2020
(3) Examining the Black-White Wealth Gap; Brookings; February 27, 2020 (https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining-the-black-white-wealth-gap/)
