It’s who we are.
As a black man in America it’s easy for me to fall back on this: every decision made in America has a racial component to it. I said that once to a Canadian friend and she nearly left me at the restaurant table in disgust.
A passion of mine, motor racing, has taken me to many places where I’m a curious novelty. There are stares. The obvious question: “You’re not from around here, are you?” There’s the city in Texas where I was chased out of town by some good ol’ boys in the requisite black pickup. That was a long time ago. But then there was the evening when another Texas good ol’ boy blew his cigarette smoke in my face, followed by a fellow Texan who tossed me the keys to his Cadillac pickup outside a hotel. He expected me to park it for him but his wife intercepted the keys and scolded him as they argued into the hotel. Both incidents were within the same half hour less than five years ago in Austin, Texas.
These are common incidents across America. One night in Pasadena, a California man pulled up outside a restaurant and jumped from his car ready to confront me and a friend who didn’t move to open the door for his wife and park his car. I guess my stare caught his attention.
Our images of racism go immediately to quick-draw cops and marching, chanting Nazis. But racism is endemic to America. It’s part of our fabric. It’s who we are.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It’s the start of the second paragraph in the nation’s Declaration of Independence. It might be one of the boldest, most powerful sentences ever written. The man who wrote it might have put his pen down and returned home that night to rape his black maid servant and beat the black men who served his Virginia estate.
In fact, it’s in Virginia not long ago where we’ve learned that statewide elected officials, including the Governor, have posed in black face or under a Klan robe. To make matters worse, according to the Washington Post, Virginia’s first lady handed out balls of cotton to black students during a recent tour of the governor’s residence and asked the students on the tour to “imagine being slaves.” I guess you have to be from Virginia to understand.
The point is that racism is a part of who we are as Americans. Denying that for nearly three hundred years has kept us from dealing with the bad seeds that gave birth to the nation.
We’re taught that racism comes from a position of power. That could be another myth. Power is a reflection of human weakness. American racism is a national state of mind.
