It’s hard to believe now that I was ten years old when I first heard of slavery in America—or anywhere, for that matter.  I was in the fifth grade, in 1950’s San Antonio, Texas, and must have been studying the Civil War.  What I remember is not the history lesson but the feeling:   shock that people could be made to work for free, beaten if they didn’t, and not allowed to leave the plantation.  The unfairness, not to say horror, offended my child’s budding sense of morality. 

But that reaction did not mean that I was free of the racism around me.  Its effects came early.  One day when I was four years old, my father and I were walking on a downtown sidewalk in Waco, when a childhood friend of my father’s, a black man a few years older, came walking toward us.  As a boy (I’ll call him Sam), he had lived across the tracks from my dad in the little town of Rogers. The boys became acquainted as my dad walked past Sam’s house every day on the way to school.   In fact, they soon made a point of meeting and walking the rest of the way together, until they parted to go to their separate, segregated schools.  So on that day in Waco, Sam and my dad must have talked for a while until Sam walked one way and my dad and I another.  At that point, so the story goes, I pulled on his jacket and said, “Daddy, did you know he is a nigger?”  I heard that story first as an adult, to my great embarrassment.  Even though I never remember a racist comment in our household, by four years old, I had already soaked up the racism around me.

As I grew up, black people were scarcely in my sight.  There were none in my elementary school, none in our neighborhood.  I do remember, at about age five, going into a department store in San Antonio with my mother and seeing separate drinking fountains for whites and colored.  I didn’t understand the logic:  if the store doesn’t want black people drinking in the same drinking fountain with whites, why do they let them in the store?  Why does the store take their money?

The isolation continued in high school, in late 1950’s Corpus Christi.  There were two public high schools that I knew anything about; mine almost all white, with a few Hispanics, and the one across town with mostly Hispanics.  If there was a school for blacks, I knew nothing about it until one day I went on a volunteer project to the public housing apartments.  It was full of black people, and I was astonished.  Questions began appearing in my brain:  why did I not see black people around town before?  Why were they so poor?  It’s hard now to understand how I could have been so ignorant, but there were no black people in my school, church, or neighborhood.  It was as if the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 had never existed. 

That year when I went off to the University of Texas in Austin, I still lived in a white cocoon.  I remember only one black person, a woman in my swimming class.  But in 1962 I came across a book that was to pierce the ignorance:  Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin, a white journalist who had darkened his skin and lived as an unemployed black man in the 1950’s South.  Although now the book is not considered to be an authentic account of life for a poor black man, it began my education.  It tapped into the capacity for empathy I felt as a ten-year-old child.  Over time, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and so many more, continued educating me. 

On this 400^th anniversary year of slavery in America, I think more and more that language itself, the word race itself, is one of the culprits that keeps racism intact.  The word has become more a hindrance than a help.  There is no biological accuracy in the concept of race.  Color in the so-called races varies so much as to be meaningless.  And even cultural distinctions are becoming permeable.  That is not to say that groups of people do not have distinct cultures, but the boundaries seem less fixed than when I was a child.  So what is left to give the word any credibility?   In my diverse Houston, racial categories do not account for the multiplicity of origins, cultures, and geographical mixtures of people in the city.  In my classes at Texas Southern University, I taught students whose mother was from Japan and father from Nigeria, or mother from Ethiopia and father from France.  So how do we peg these people?  And what is the point of labels anyway? 

The point is that the dangerous word race perpetuates our distinctions among people and helps to perpetuate racism.  It is so embedded in our history that I could not have written this essay without it.  But the ten-year-old child inside me still is horrified at that history and at the role of language in that history.   When people are enslaved, categorized as less than human, and named as a separate “race” that has no biological validity, the word race itself becomes dangerous.  It messes with our thinking.   As the little girl of long ago would say, “It’s not fair!” 

What follows is a brief summary of and a meditation on two opinion pieces in The New York Times, Monday, August 5, 2019:   “Racism is Everyone’s Problem,” by Melanye Price, a professor of political science at Prairie View A & M University, and “Understanding White Nationalism,” by Kathleen Belew, a professor of history at the University of Chicago. http://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion

         In “Racism is Everyone’s Problem,” Dr. Price argues that, in debates, Democratic candidates in should focus on racism not only in terms of its consequences, but also in terms of pervasive white privilege.  In “Understanding White Racism,” Dr. Belewshows that mass shootings are not the goal of white supremacists but are planned as part of a strategy to incite greater slaughter.

         The ideas of these writers may not be entirely new, but they prompted me to think of what they say about white people. Hence, a few questions:  

         Are white people so fragile that we need to enjoy privilege that others cannot?  

         Are white teenagers the only ones who can wear hoodies safely at night and knock on a stranger’s door if their car breaks down? Are we so cruel that we cannot provide all children the basic safety our children enjoy?  

         Are we so stingy that we cannot pay a bit more for vegetables so that the workers can earn a living wage?

        Are we so frightened that some of us still don’t want to live near people different from us?  

         Are we so dumb and untalented that we require special advantages in our careers?  

         In much of American history, the implied answer to these questions has been yes.  Were we really that frightened and fragile?  Maybe it’s time we white people take a look at ourselves.

  There isn’t much to look at when I do water exercise at an indoor pool, except a hackberry tree visible through the glass doors.  This tree stands alone in a large rectangle of grass surrounded by sidewalks.  There is nothing else growing here; small plants could hardly withstand the powerful lawnmower that regularly goes up and down the grass.  But the hackberry survived. At one time, it was a young shoot of a thing, growing from a seed perhaps carried by the wind or lying dormant in the earth, and grew in spite of whatever lawn care happened.  I have never heard of anyone planting a hackberry tree in these parts.  They are considered trash trees, which come up unwanted, vilified, pulled up. 

          Over the years and through countless hours of moving in the water, I have watched the hackberry through its seasons, through the yellowing of fall to the quick leaf-dropping of winter and the tentative first bright greening of spring.   The tree reflects the weather around it:  in drought its canopy is small and thin and leaves drop early; this year, with ample rain, it spreads a wide circle of thick green.  Now, in mid-summer, the tree seems not to be changing; it looks the same every day.  But its apparent sameness is illusory.  Processes are occurring that will seem to have happened all at once when the leaves turn yellow and orange in two or three months. 

          A few days ago, I noticed the wind shaking the leaves and wondered where these winds had been.  Did they come from the Sahara Desert, along with the winds that recently caused Paris to reach 108 degrees?  Did they come across the Gulf of Mexico and pick up droplets of water that had been recycling around the earth for eons?  Did they contain oxygen that had been released when the first green things appeared on earth?  How much carbon dioxide did these winds carry?  If we knew, would we heed their warning? 

          Like the hackberry, the earth may seem changeless at a given moment, while all the time it is not.  Something is happening out of our sight—just as my body, as it moves in the water, is changing out of mine.  Would that I, and we, might summon the hackberry’s resilience.

  Henderson and I didn’t finish the Willie Mays book that morning.  After my awkward attempts to explain why people were so mean to Willie just because his skin was brown, like Henderson’s, he wanted to take a break.  But Mommy, my daughter Karen, continued listening to Henderson read before he went to bed.  All went smoothly until the section in the book where Willie was drafted into the Korean War.

           Here was a new world of contexts unknown to Henderson:  “What does drafted mean?”  It means that men are called up to fight in a war.  “Why was there a war?”  Well, two countries couldn’t settle their differences and got into a fight. “But why?”  I don’t know; they just couldn’t.   Maybe they were fighting over land or money; they could be fighting over many things.   “But you’re not supposed to get into fights.  You’re supposed to use your words.”  How many times had Henderson been told to use his words? 

          The final reduction to absurdity—and to adult hypocrisy—was evident to this eight-year-old.    His inevitable, personalizing, next question “Will I have to go to war?” had no real answer.

Just a note to accompany this new post:  I want to thank Stacy Cantrell, dear talented and accomplished friend, for designing this blog and making it happen.

          The Willie Mays book from the library had to be returned the next day, and much remained unread.  This was the last chance to find out what happened to Willie.  So grandson Henderson and I sat on the sofa and he read to me.  At eight, his reading skills are good, but the Willie Mays story holds a world of contexts unknown to him—what major leagues are, who the Yankees are, what “rookie” means.  So, non-sports-fan that I am tried gamely to fill in.  But then we came to a line about baseball teams not hiring black players when Willie was a boy.   Henderson accurately pointed out, “But he’s not black.”  And the picture on the page, indeed, was of a brown, not a black, child.  So I tried to explain that black doesn’t mean black; it means brown, and white doesn’t mean white; it means beige.  Hard to explain to a literal-minded eight-year-old.  This San Francisco grandson of mine has lived among all colors of skin, has a black mother and a white mother, and has little, if any, concept of race.  At least he doesn’t indicate that he does.  He responds to people by his direct experience—who will play with him, who is too busy, which kid plays well with others on the playground, which kid is a bully.  And he has a strong sense of fairness:  “Why were they so mean to him?”

         How to explain the concept of race, let alone the history of slavery and all the rest of it, to a child who is still innocent of such hard facts?  I don’t want him to have to know this history, but I can’t protect him from it.  Will he internalize racism?  What will he think of his white grandparents when he learns of slavery and Jim Crow?

        In a few years, he will have to be coached on how to behave around police.   Like black parents in this country who have witnessed their children’s loss of innocence as their view of the world darkened, I am afraid for him.  And angry that a beautiful child has to be sullied by the world around him.