Months ago I took a test online, and was dismayed but unsurprised by the results. It wasn’t a Facebook test to tell me which drywall anchor I was, and wasn’t based on my preferences or common knowledge. It was more like those Psychology Dept. tests you volunteer to participate in when you’re an undergrad who needs a few bucks. And like a scale, it told me what I suspected but didn’t want to know. I’m fairly racist.
I have always lived in the South. Like most white people my age, I grew with a strange cognitive relationship with the Civil War and the history of this region. On the one hand it’s immersive, so I felt pretty knowledgeable. On the other, it’s almost completely wrong. (Maybe it’s like growing up in Canada and believing hockey is the most popular sport in the world.) The casual racism was so ubiquitous that it didn’t occur to me to question whether or not it was true. It was like the humidity.
When we moved to Charlotte in the 70s, it was during the busing/school desegregation era, and was the first time I would be going to public school instead of parochial school. It was also the first time I saw adults express racism with ugly passion, and was old enough to know that was not right. (An aside: as much as I complain about the nuns, they were the first adults who introduced the idea that racism was not just wrong, but evil; and in true nun fashion, they were smart and sure about it. I was in parochial school with exactly one black person, whose father was a dentist, so the real-world illustrations were not in my field of vision. But full marks to the nuns on that.)
I cannot un-be the sum of who I am, but I can live with awareness, and act with intention. It makes me sad and ashamed that I can’t say I’m not a racist, but I can say I’m trying not to act like one. For a person who doesn’t believe in original sin, it’s bitter medicine.
I have been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates since he blogged regularly for The Atlantic. He writes and speaks often about anger, and I believe him. I know he’s not writing for the edification of white people because he’s been very clear on that point. But he writes with so much grace that it has been like having a film rinsed off the surface of my eyes, and I can’t help but be overwhelmed with gratitude.