The War of the Races

You're about to learn something horrible about me.

I'm a racist.

The good news is that I can admit it, and more importantly, that I can strive to fight against it vehemently.  When it springs up in my life, I try to cut it off at the root.  That's easier said than done.  But I'm learning, and I think I'm growing.

I remember watching an episode of Oprah where that was basically her point - that we're all a little bit racist, and that it's OK to admit to that when you're working to understand your racism and where it comes from, and learn to recognize it for what it is.  It's a totally different thing to ignore it and embrace it as "truth."

Here's the really sad part, though.  There was a time in my life where I was not open with myself about it and trying to fight it, but rather where I gave into it heart and soul.  Ironically, perhaps, it was at Booker T. Washington High School - a so-called "magnet" school because it sought to attract white students to a "black" school to balance the number of black and white students (leaving a much smaller and unbalanced portion for members of other races).  In my freshman year, I had several wonderful black friends who were closer to me than most any of my white friends at school save perhaps one (and all of those mentioned, black and white, will be reading this, I think).  Yet I still harbored a disdain - not for those who were my friends, of course, but for everyone else.

Now, there's some issues I won't get into that caused me to hate a large portion of the population there anyway.  But this had nothing to do with those issues, I think.

Rather, I came from a culture that emphasized white supremacy without necessarily intending to.  My parents had a friend who unabashedly used the N-word, so I was surrounded by it constantly.  I learned to believe that "there are white n......s and black n......s".  I was told it was wrong for white women to marry black men, and I remember being mad when I had to compete with a black boy for a white girl's interest.

I already mentioned in a previous post that I had been taught to hate and fear the poor, but it's impossible to ignore the racial component that was attached to it.  There was a distinction in Tulsa between the north side and the rest of town; the north side of town notably more highly-populated with African-Americans than in other sections.  The fact that this is notable was also not lost on me.  The block I lived on growing up, despite being in Tulsa itself and in a lower-middle-class area was entirely white, until one black family moved in, which of course was a sure sign that the neighborhood was going downhill, even as impressive as it was that this black family was "trying to be white."

My church had no black members until around the time I was starting college, and then it was a single couple.  In fact, until I made a fateful trip to Indianapolis in 2005, I had never been to a church with more than one or two black families in attendance.  (I call it a fateful trip because it's what started the dominoes falling to the left in my heart, but I'll talk more about it later)

Politically, I heard and repeated the idea that blacks were attacking whites. Black people wanted our jobs without having to be qualified for them, so they invented Affirmative Action and racial hiring quotas.  I was highly angered by the fact that a black person who is less qualified for a job could get hired over someone who was more qualified simply by virtue of being black.  I was annoyed that the NAACP existed to promote black rights - and I perceived it as being an organization that only pushed for black rights, despite its apparent intention to support multiple races - while seeming to denigrate white rights.  It even got to the point where I believed it was wrong for an organization like that to exist, when an NAAWP (National Association for the Advancement of White People, of course) could not exist without being lambasted as racist itself.

And so it was that I believed there was an orchestrated national "war on whites."

If you've been paying attention to the news, maybe you see where I'm going with this.

But in my sophomore year, I genuinely hated black people, and I saw them as the problem causing my family to be poor, causing America to be turning into a liberal hellscape, causing me to lose out on scholarships and relationships and opportunities.  As I mentioned in that same previous post, it became a "me vs. other" situation, and black people were the other.  I began hanging out with a guy in my classes who was unabashedly racist, who talked angrily and in hardcore racist terms, about how blacks were killing us and destroying our opportunities and how he wanted to join the KKK.

I didn't want to go that far, because even with that racist upbringing, I believed "true racism" to be something uniquely bad... as if it was something I didn't personally condone, because I didn't believe myself to be racist.  I was just following everything I thought I knew about the world to its logical conclusion.

It got so bad, that I started questioning why segregation was bad, why slavery was bad... I thought it'd be a better world if we could ship all blacks back to Africa, and all gays to the moon while we're at it.  Then we could be pure, and Christian.

I'm better now, but before I get into why, I'd like to address what brought all of this up for me.

Representative Mo Brooks, from Alabama, had this to say on Laura Ingraham's show:

This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else. It’s a part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things. Well that’s not true. Okay?

Which Ingraham seemed to support:

No, they’re playing the ‘race’ card. They’re playing the ‘race’ card just like they’re playing the ‘war on women’ card. This is what the left does. But I just think that phraseology might not be the best choice. (Link).

You see, on the political right, there really is the appearance of a "war on whites," which Ingraham identifies in more "acceptable" language as "playing the race card."  That appearance is based on this concept that blacks:

1. Steal jobs from white people through Affirmative Action
2. Steal money from white people through Welfare (because the poor person who stays home to have babies for welfare money is always black, in the stereotype taught to us)
3. Steal education opportunities through education quotas and scholarships
4. Steal white women from white men (because us white guys are all owed hot women, and only white women are hot.  Got it?)
5. and sometimes just straight up Steal (by virtue of the "all blacks are poor criminals" stereotype)

It wasn't until the Spring of 2005 that that started to change for me.  Oh, my racism levels had been declining since high school - since I was no longer surrounded by black people, I was no longer facing them as other on a 6-hours-per-day basis, and so somewhere along the way my hate was somewhat replaced.  Not completely, of course, but lessened.  Then I took Linguistics at college.

What I learned there forced my eyes open for the first time to some of the reasons why things existed that I didn't care for.

For instance, one of the things that annoyed me about black people was their use of language, what a school in Oakland termed "Ebonics."  It sounded stupid and sloppy in my ears, and was the surest way to distinguish between a "real black" and an "Oreo black" (what I called, in those days, people I perceived as "black on the outside, white on the inside").  But a video we watched detailed the story of a young African-American inner-city girl who was about to graduate high school and had the opportunity for a full ride to college.  She spoke "white American English" (as I had previously seen it) to the camera, to describe her conundrum.  When she talked at home, around her extended family and around her friends, they thought she was trying to be something she wasn't when she used the Midwestern Dialect she had learned in school.  And as they thought that about her, they wanted less to do with her.  To avoid losing that connection with her family and her identity, she covered it up, slipping back into the dialect she grew up with.

I began to understand that America is constantly demanding that of other cultures - that they strip away their heritage and join us in "speaking English."  As I began to understand how my opinion of language was flawed, I began to deconstruct the rest of my ideas about race as well.

This was especially true on my trip to Indianapolis, where I visited one of my dearest friends in the world, someone who always surprises me by how loving she is toward those groups I had so long hated.  I admire that love and her devotion to serving her communities.  We drove around the inner parts of the city, and she showed me how wonderful and amazing downtown Indy was becoming.  Then she started showing me some of the neighboring areas - run down, impoverished, but with buildings being replaced at a startling rate.  The gentrification of the area was forcing poor people out, by rising costs of living and rising property taxes.  And they didn't have anywhere to go.

Then she took me to church with her, and it was one of the coolest churches I've ever been to.  It had integrated itself, willingly.  This church, Crossroads Bible Church, had roughly 50% black population, 50% white, and everyone was seated together, worshiping together, dancing in place and shouting "Hallelujah" together.  It was amazing to be a part of, if only for a day.

As I say, the work is not done, but it is something I continue daily to confront and challenge so I can change for the better.  Part of what has helped is to learn some truths about the things I used to believe:

1. Black stealing jobs via Affirmative Action.  If that's true, they've really done a crappy job of it, as the unemployment rate for blacks is 11.4%, compared to 5.3% for whites.  Now, you could claim that Asians have done well at "stealing our jobs," as their unemployment rate is 4.5%.  But that probably has a lot to do with racism as well, and the belief that Asians are better at scientific fields, are harder workers, etc.  (Link)
2. Blacks stealing money through Welfare.  Blacks are more likely to be on Welfare, it's true, but there's an economic reason for it.  Median income for whites in 1990 was 36,915 per family.  In 2009, it was 62,545 per family, an increase of 69.4%.  Blacks, on the other hand, earned only 21,423 in 1990, and 38,409 in 2009.  It increased by 79.3% in those 29 years.  So, while black families are gaining income increases faster than whites, the pay is still abysmally small.  When pay is not equal, is it any wonder than blacks would need Welfare more often than whites?   (Link)
3. How about education?  In this wonderful National Journal article, they point out that
   

   12.4 percent of black college graduates between the ages of 22 and 27 were unemployed. For all college graduates in the same age range, the unemployment rate stood at just 5.6 percent. The figures point to an ugly truth: Black college graduates are more than twice as likely to be unemployed.

   So we still have a long, long way to go... Oh, and just for kicks, here's some more interesting stats: blacks are now more likely than whites to earn Associates degrees, earning 13.7% of all Associates degrees despite accounting for 13.2% of the population.  And they're not much less likely than whites to earn Masters degrees - they earn 12.5% of this higher level degree.  Doctorates, however, are a major concern - only 7.4% of Doctorates go to blacks.  (Link)
4. Oh... and blacks are LESS likely than whites to receive scholarship funding.  6.2% of whites and 4.4% of blacks receive scholarships.  Given that, it's pretty darned impressive that 12.5% of Masters recipients are black.  Whites do receive less money than blacks, on average - about $300 less.  Whoopy.  (Link)
5. Yes, people are more likely to get married to someone of another race.  But maybe you just need to be a little bit more like Eugene Levy's character in Bringing Down The House.  Seriously, though, blacks are the race most likely NOT to be chosen for mixed marriages.  And in online dating, blacks are the race least desired for potential dates.
6. Crime is a huge issue - way too huge for me to begin to challenge... there are many issues involved, from the income and hiring inequality mentioned above, to gang violence, to a cultural perception of "thuggery" that makes us see all blacks as dangerous and leads to police and vigilantes killing "1 black man ... every 28 hours" in America (Link). 

Basically, it's a huge issue... but the fact of the matter is that whites are clearly in power over blacks, and still continue to abuse that power.  Laws to try to negate that abuse of power should not be confused with bullying in the opposite direction.  They are not reverse racism, as I once believed, any more than standing up to a bully at school is reverse bullying.