Pretending Does Not Cure Racism

It’s been a long a long time comin’. But I know a change gon’ come.”- song by Sam Cooke (A change is gonna come, 1964)

Many well-meaning and normally fair Fayette County citizens believe that they are not racist when in reality they are. I know … many of my local acquaintances and friends fall into this category.

Childhood upbringing is a large part of the problem. If you hear your parents talk about an African American as “one of the good ones,” then you come to believe that all the rest can automatically assumed to be “bad ones.” When this biased attitude is reinforced by your social groups (“they are all lazy”), the child ends up growing up with a negative, skewed point of view that is difficult to modify. 

However, this phenomenon is also a direct result of white children knowing very little about the history of black people in America over the last several hundred years, which is why I am advocating an accurate course in black history be a part of every Fayette County high school’s mandatory curriculum.

In the late 1970s, I worked and carpooled with a retired Army Colonel who lived in Peachtree City. He is now dead, so I feel free to repeat this story.

He told me that there was no need for any affirmative action at all. The Civil Rights Act passed (he opposed it) and now everyone was on an equal footing. So, there was no need for affirmative action, everyone should simply compete. I tried to explain to him the other side of the issue, but he refused to listen. And he made sure his family felt the same way. His son moved to Idaho to be in an all-white area.

I had forgotten about this incident until I recently had a disturbing conversation with another vet … a sincere, caring and bright person … who essentially said the same thing. “Per him, we do not need affirmative action, blacks can just work harder.”

Both were native Georgians, brought up in Georgia public schools. Both men had a simplistic view, ignoring history, making it much easier for them to justify their own bigotry while denying being racist.

I use is a foot race analogy. If one runner has his/her feet tied together for the first half of the race, one cannot expect him/her to be competitive. Unlike the majority of the current members of the Supreme Court, we cannot accept the totally incorrect assumption that African Americans were suddenly treated equally after the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act. They were not and have faced a straight uphill climb to just catch up.

Under slavery and even afterwards, African Americans struggled against nearly insurmountable odds. They had no capital or assets. They never got the 40 acres and a mule the government promised. They were strongly discouraged from getting an education. 

In the 70s I saw very young black children picking cotton in Woodville, Mississippi rather than going to school. The schools that they did attend were substandard and segregated until 50 years ago. Blacks could not get hired for professional jobs even when they were qualified.

In the early 1970s, I worked as an industrial management engineer. I was a consultant in a large rural North Carolina mill which had profitability issues. A white manager indicated to me that one line worker was far better than the rest. He was black, as were all the line workers in that area. I suggested he be considered for the line supervisor opening. The manager told me that he could not promote him because he needed someone who the other workers would respect. When I questioned him, he said, with no proof, that black line workers would never accept a black supervisor.

When Muddy Waters sang “I’m a man,” black people understood that what he is saying is- don’t call me “boy”. Very few whites in Fayette County or elsewhere understand this fact. There is just no easy answer to the riddle of how to eliminate racism but having the history of African Americans taught in our local high schools would be a good start. I know that someday change is going to come.