Dealing race cards from the bottom of the deck

My name is jailbee and I'm a racist.

I've never attended an AA meeting, but in the movies, the AA speakers always begin by stating their names and declaring they're alcoholics. This implies the foundation of the recovery process is ownership of reality. Some people decide their lives would be better if they weren't alcoholics; mine would be better if I wasn't a racist.

I'm a member of the baby boom generation and I've lived practically my whole life in Texas. Locating myself in space and time helps me understand why I'm a racist.

When I was a little boy, there weren't many (if any) black people in my world. I remember seeing separate water fountains in public places, with signs saying "White" and "Colored." My peers explained to me this was for health reasons, and that I should only drink from the White fountains so I wouldn't catch something. There were black people in a few movies I saw, including one called Something of Value (1957). It was about the Mau Mau uprising in Africa, and one scene depicts a brutal attack on the home of a white family. That movie scared the hell out of me, and parts of it stayed with me a long time as a vague, near-subconscious fear and mistrust of black people.

All the public schools I went to were segregated, and LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in July, just as I was making the transition from high school to college. There weren't a lot of black students in my college classes, but there hadn't been any in the public schools I attended.

In 1967 I went to summer camp at Fort Sill, Oklahoma; I wrote about the experience in a post last year. The name of this blog (A Hot Water Sandwich and Mosquito Juice) originated in a remark made by a black guy, one of two who shared my tent and with whom I established quick friendships. That was the point at which I began to contemplate racial issues. Until then, I'd simply accepted racial segregation as the way things were, and didn't think about it too much.

I've often written about the importance of movies in my life, especially during my younger years. In the 1960s, Sidney Poitier made a series of outstanding films that concerned interaction between black people and white people. In 1957, he'd been in Something of Value, the picture that had disturbed me so much, but the movies he made during my college years (A Patch of Blue, In the Heat of the Night, To Sir With Love, and Guess Who's Coming To Dinner) shed a whole new light on things. In my world, Sidney Poitier deserves recognition for his achievement in promoting my acceptance of black people, such as it is, by making the thought-provoking films mentioned.

The military was among the first fully integrated organizations I joined. During my brief tenure on active duty, again at Fort Sill, I had four close friends, one of whom was a young black lieutenant from Philadelphia named Donald Scoggins. Don was one of the nicest, smartest guys I ever met. A few weeks ago, out of sheer idle curiosity, I entered his name in Google and learned that he'd had a successful career and became a prominent conservative Republican. So there you go.

My first professional job was as a high school teacher in the thriving metropolis of Navasota, Texas. The public schools in Navasota had only recently become fully integrated, and I had an opportunity to compare the levels of academic achievement between the white kids and the black kids. I'll just say that overall, there were some pretty stark differences. More food for thought.

By 1968, when I was a young adult, I was figuring out that racial issues were more complicated than I'd originally believed. In 1972, I began what wound up being my life's work: I was hired as a caseworker by the Texas Department of Public Welfare. I quickly learned that when it comes to being poor, there isn't much difference among white people, brown people, and black people.

Gradually, the primarily white TDPW workforce began to absorb more minority employees as the agency was required by federal law to broaden its hiring practices. After two years as a caseworker, I'd been promoted to a supervisory position. Now I was in first-line management, and was routinely required to objectively evaluate the job performance of employees on my staff. I'd learned that poor people had a lot in common despite racial differences, and I determined the same was true among the people I supervised. Some of my best workers were black and some of the worst were white. Job skills, work ethic, and aptitudes hadn't been distributed exclusively along racial lines; in my agency, competence couldn't be predicted based on skin color.

After the lifetime of experiences I've just summarized, it boils down to this: When it comes to race, I have conflicts. I have a good idea of where I want to be, but I'm not there yet.

Now, my babies are having babies. My kids aren't kids anymore, but are young adults. We grew up in different worlds; they started out with assumptions about race that I only began to make after I'd reached college. When it comes to racial tolerance, they got a huge head start on me.

My daughter the artist and I have discussed this at great length on several occasions, beginning years ago when I was telling her my expectations about who I hoped she would marry (a man with pigmentation close to her own). She found it hard to accept the boundaries of what I considered my personal comfort zone, and at that point I realized the only answer I could give was that I was a racist. There was no other honest way to put it.

Dad, why are you a racist ? That was her next question, and one that's nearly impossible to answer in a way that makes sense to someone who grew up in her world.

I eventually struggled through a rationale based on historical context and a notion of generational transformation. Based on historical events such as slavery, emancipation, and the civil rights movement, racial issues in our society have evolved gradually from where things stood in 1800 to where they stand today. Each generation seems to be incrementally more tolerant than the preceding one; on the bigotry scale, I'm less prejudiced than my parents and more prejudiced than my children. That's not much, but it's the best I can do.

The reason this stuff is showing up as today's discussion topic is the Obama campaign for the Democratic nomination. Unlike Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, Obama has emerged as a black man many Americans can picture as a president of the United States, especially Americans in my daughter's generation. Even people in older, less tolerant generations understand he's a viable candidate; now they're being forced to define their own comfort zones. Most voters have never had to think seriously about a black president. The choice has typically been between two white guys, Jesse or Al having fallen by the wayside after the early primaries.

Even a lot of virulent bigots will deny the racist label. The ones that don't are often seen wearing tan uniforms and swastika armbands. Social evolution has reached the stage that to be a racist is just unacceptable. Rather than admit they don't trust a black guy in a White House, many voters who are out of their comfort zone seem to be falling back on excuses like Obama's limited experience or the radical views of his preacher. This is bogus because many of the same people weren't making the inexperience argument when W was running, or criticizing remarks made by his advocates in the televangelist hierarchy. I realized long ago that there are limits to the consistency you can expect from conservatives.