Connecting racism to the American experience
by Jerry Bone
As a European American growing up in a small, all-white northern town, I had every reason to be as ignorant as I was about race and racism. I learned from history books that taught the supremacy of European culture and ignored the accomplishments of people of color. I heard stories about the dark, dangerous folks who prowled big cities and made life miserable for tourists and theater-goers. I learned to pass along the jokes I heard—sordid, silly stories about stupid, sex-crazed and drunken minorities whose behavior was forever, it seemed, befuddling the wise and just white townsfolk.
Occasionally, I was warned about those I would be well advised to fear—Puerto Ricans, mysterious people who spoke a foreign language and ate strange food, and Jews, with their strange customs and who "you just couldn't trust" in a business deal. From the movies, I learned about treacherous Indians—nemeses of heroic white cowboys and honest frontiersmen.
It would be far too simplistic to say I changed. The truth is, we changed—that is, America changed. No one who lived through the civil rights movement could claim to have been unaffected by the graphic images of black suffering and white anger on TV. Who could ignore the police dogs, fire hoses and beatings? Throughout the land tears were shed—and hearts were hardened.
The effect those TV images had on me was immediate and lasting. I saw the police out of control, not the crowds. In the '60s, I saw for the first time that whites were not preserving noble traditions or defending law and order, they were methodically and cruelly depriving other people of their rights as Americans.
Since those days I have been trying to understand this American racism, what makes it unique, how it affects other aspects of American life. I still have more questions than answers, but I have learned a few things.
First, I know that racism was created to serve a purpose. Even before the African slave trade, Columbus and other Europeans enslaved the "savages" they "discovered" in the New World. Under the aegis of cross and crown, the unfortunate natives of the Caribbean islands were forced into servitude by Europeans. The cruel racial division of labor in the New World continued through legalized slavery into the Reconstruction era, which was quickly dismantled when former slave owners and Northern industrialists realized that sharecropping and sweatshops were far more profitable than slavery. It was no doubt hoped that this new system would keep minorities in bondage forever. Even when unions rose up to challenge capitalism and demand justice for the "working man," things did not improve. With few exceptions, blacks were not invited to join their union brothers.
Which brings me to another thing I learned about American racism—it is always changing, adapting to new realities. Just when you think you've got a handle on it, it changes. It's easy for the majority to call it something else. We can move our kids to private schools, deprive public schools of adequate funding, and then declare that integration has been a failure. We can fill the jails with young men of color and say it's only because we're fighting crime, or drugs. We can justify racial profiling in the name of homeland security.
Racism. I don't pretend to understand it—but as a white person living in a country whose reach apparently far exceeds its grasp—it behooves me to try to understand it. We live in a world overwhelmingly non-European—and poor. Increasingly, our fate will be determined by the way we interact with these people. If we cannot, or will not, make sense of our racist past, if we cannot even admit it, if we continue to treat those "others" as if they and their children are not as important as we are, we are in for some rough going.
Racism will not go away by itself. It will not go away if it is called something else. It will not go away if we assume that "civil rights" reserved for only the relatively affluent will translate eventually into "justice for all." Racism will only go away if we admit it exists—and work to end it.
(Jerry Bone is an organizer with the Commission on Religion in Appalachia.)
May 15, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 20
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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