I Might Be a Racist

In 2010, I was in a car accident that totaled my car. I was making a left-hand turn at a major intersection. As soon as the light turned yellow, I started watching the on-coming traffic. First one, then two, then three lanes of traffic stopped. I immediately took the turn, and a car came zooming through the fourth lane and smashed into me, totaling both of our cars.

The driver, a young college student, got out of her brand-new car in tears, then called several of her sorority sisters, and within minutes, she was huddled up in a group of girls who were there to support and comfort her. I was standing on the corner by myself, shaken and late for an appointment. No one asked if I was okay. No one talked to me at all.

When I tell that story, I always comment on the sorority girls.

I never mention the fact that the driver was black. Or the fact that I had a white witness who said the other driver ran the red light and hit me, and she had a black witness who said it was still yellow. 

Be honest. What did you picture when I told you about those sorority girls? Did that picture change when I told you the color of the driver’s skin? If so, does it mean anything about you? I have no idea. However, I do know that I intentionally leave out those details because they're not relevant to the story—unless I mention them, which would imply that they're relevant to me. Leaving them out is one small way I aim to stop stacking bricks on top of the wall between the two races.

How Wide the Divide

That wall is there, whether you see it or not. And I recognize that it’s very possible that you don’t. The wall itself does not run through every neighborhood or school district in our country. It may not run through yours. In some places, it may be only knee high, in others, it’s like the Great Wall of China. However, whether you see it or not, the truth is that our country is riddled with racism. If you don’t believe it, it’s because you don’t see it. If you don’t see it, it’s because you aren’t looking farther than your own backyard. Literally.

I grew up in a fairly racially diverse area in Columbia, SC. In 2011, I moved to Flower Mound, TX, which is a predominantly white area. One Sunday afternoon, I was mingling with some church folk and I was telling a woman about some children I loved back home in South Carolina. I used to take them to church and spent a lot of time with them in my home, in theirs, at the park – as much time as I could, wherever I could. I mentioned that they were African American, and the (white) woman I was talking to put her hand on her chest and said, “Wow, you should write a book about this.”

At the time, I was very amused. (Ok, I still am.) However, the point here is that the race dialogue is going to mean something completely different to her than it does to me. And it will mean something else entirely to my friend Vertele, a 64-year-old black woman I met about eight years ago who calls me “the nicest Caucasian she has ever met.” Vertele grew up during segregation in the south. Even though schools were integrated before she finished high school, she’s still lived in a very segregated culture throughout her adulthood. She still does.

Many people still do. Perhaps more than you realize.

If you live in a predominantly white community, you are living in a segregated culture. If you are living in a predominantly black community, you are living in a segregated culture. If you live above the Mason and Dixon line, you don’t understand the raging racial tension in the south. There are even people in the south who don’t understand what is going on a few neighborhoods over.

I was once talking to a friend of mine about racism and he rolled his eyes and said, “Racism is practically over, Gwen.”

“Really?” I replied. “Why don’t you go find a poor black woman and ask her how she feels about that.”

He said that his neighbor was a poor black woman and she agreed. I laughed and pointed out that if she owned the three-bedroom, two-bath house next door, she did not meet the standard of “poor” I was talking about. I don’t mean “a struggling single mom of two little boys, trying to make ends meet with her job as a retail assistant” kind of poor. I mean living in the projects on welfare kind of poor. There’s a big cultural gap between those two people.

I’m not trying to say that kind of poverty is a product of racism. Although, I’m also not saying it isn’t. The truth is that it’s really complicated, and it’s hard to see how complicated it is with nothing but our own young eyeballs trying to fit all the pieces together. There are many generational factors that feed into the racial tension in our country. It’s not just skin color. It’s the history, the politics, the heritage, the segregation, the ignorance being passed down from mother to child from one generation to the next.

I can’t tell you how many times other white people in the south have openly made racist comments in normal conversation with me. They assume I sympathize simply because I am white, too. They don’t whisper. It’s just understood. It’s shocking and disgusting.

My Ugly Truth

And yet…I have to confess something to you. Something that is extremely uncomfortable for me to admit.

Sometimes, I’m afraid of black people who look a certain way. It’s not because of the color of their skin. Not directly. It’s because I’ve been bullied and physically assaulted because of the color of my skin. I grew up in an area where there was high racial tension and I saw black people lashing out at white people – at me – because of skin color. I grew up in a neighborhood where the kids that stole my bikes (every single one I ever owned) were black, except for one mixed boy named Jason who was like 300 pounds and six feet tall by the time he was 12. I know this because I saw them riding said bikes, but was too scared to stand up and say something. I remember one time when I was out riding bikes with my brother and some friends when a small group of black boys stopped us and tried to take my brother’s bike from him. He refused and when he broke away from the group and rode away, one of the boys threw a huge stick (I’m talking somewhere in the range of walking-stick-size) at my brother, which the boy had been using to threaten by brother only moments before. It hit him hard on the back.

The naked truth is that I’m afraid to walk down the street after dark in my old neighborhood because of the drugs and the gang activity and the violence I know is going on there. I know there are white people involved in all of that, too, but from my experiences in that neighborhood, I was most likely to run into trouble with a black person after dark than I was a white person.

That’s not a matter of opinion. That was my experience.

At the same time, I’ll admit that when the back of my car was shot out with a gun TWICE within seven months in that neighborhood, I assumed it was probably someone from one of the roaming gangs in the area, only to find out that it was a couple of rich white boys from across town who were bored.

The Touch of Racism

Obviously, these kinds of experiences and assumptions are not unique to me or white people. Remember those children I mentioned? I used to take the little girl to a park after church when it was just the two of us. We’d hang out and chat and squeeze in a few extra minutes of time before I had to take her home. One day, when it was just the two of us leaving church, I asked if she wanted to go to the park. She was quiet for a minute, then said, “Is it okay if we go to a different park? And is it okay if when we get there, you just walk really far behind me?” I asked her why and she said it was because people would tease her if she was there with a white person.

Another time, she was having a hard time with another little girl at church and someone let me know about it. I brought it up and she said she didn’t want to talk to me about it because she knew I wouldn’t believe anything she said and I’d only take the other girl’s side because we were both white. (She did end up opening up to me and it was a very tender moment of truth I’ll never forget.)

She was afraid because of the color of our skin. Is that racism? I don’t know. It’s at least a scar left by one of its acid tendrils.

Questions and Answers

I don’t know what it means to be a racist, or not to be a racist. I know that I have deep and meaningful relationships with people of many colors and backgrounds. I know that I don’t care about the color of someone’s skin. I know that I don’t feel inherently better than any other human being on the planet because of the amount of pigment in my body.

On the other hand, I still have to try not to see color. This is especially true now that race relations are becoming more heated across the country and seemingly across the world. I try not to. I try not to assign any expectations or assumptions or beliefs based on skin color, or wardrobe, or religion, or facial expression. I’m not always successful…but I try.

Maybe it’s that effort that defines the line between the racists and the non-racists. Maybe it’s our ability to love across the fear, the desire to know in spite of ignorance, and the hunger for change in spite of white privilege.

I don’t know.

However, I do know that something is broken and we are bleeding. This is not one race vs. another race. It’s ignorance facing off against ignorance. No one wins. I hope that the more we are willing to look at the problem, the more capable we will be of solving the problem; that the more we want to know, the more qualified we will be to do – and the more willing we will be to do it.