Racism in America, what form does it take in the 21st Century.
From a young age, I had the opportunity to be around strong people who did not judge people by the color of their skin but the content of their character. As a very young child age 3 or 4 my dad’s best buddy was a man named Lonnie Colbert, Lonnie was a hulking figure,the former defensive lineman from Oklahoma State was an impressive man not just for his appearance but his demeanor. Some of my fondest memories involve my dad, a 5’6″ Scot with an accent so harsh I often translated for him, and this gentle giant Lonnie, a 6’4″ 320 man who was so quiet and unassuming with his smooth Oklahoma Drawl, an odd pair for sure. It was the early 1970′s, I remember Lonnie and my dad collecting wood pallets and recycling them for cash, they were both unemployed at the time, two men from different worlds working together to make things better for there families.
A few years later, at age 8 or so I remember going to South Phoenix, and playing pop warner football on Lonnie’s team I was literally the only white kid. I never thought twice about it, it seemed normal to me, why because to my dad it was normal. By the fourth grade my best friend was a black kid named Roy Grey, at Griffith School in Phoenix, I will never forget sleeping over at Roy’s house the night the local rednecks burned the front yard of his dad’s house. It didn’t register to me why it was done until his dad explained it to us a few years later, they were the first black people to move into the area. Back in those days the bigger kids called Roy and I names, but because of the size of Roy’s older brothers it never got to the point of violence.
Racism in the 1970′s in Arizona was the in your face type of racism, something that I did not see again until I attended Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia. Imagine you have just graduated from Ranger School and are going to town with your two buddies, when the local people driving past yell out incredible things and throw garbage at you while you are in uniform, new Ranger Tab and Beret and all! Why did the local idiots do this because I was a white guy walking with a Mexican guy, and a black guy on the side walk, the screams were mostly directed at me. Strange I thought, it was 1985 and people are still like this here? It grew stranger when we tried to get a beer, and were told, “we don’t sell beer on Sunday’s” by a bartender in a bar full of people drinking beer. That was racism in the 1980′s in Georgia.
After leaving the Army, I was attending school in Hawaii when I encountered a new kind of racism, Asian racism directed at me. Subtle and effective, the store owners followed me around inside their stores because I was white, posters written in Japanese warned the Japanese female tourists that white men wanted to give then aids on purpose and that they should not talk to them. My roommate Marshall a lawyer of Japanese decent translated the flyer’s for me, and they were everywhere not ten or twenty but thousands of them and they went up as fast as we could tear them down. That was racism in Hawaii in the early 1990′s.
Fast forward to today, we have a mixed race president from Hawaii, and he actually won an election with the popular and electoral votes. Progress to be sure, yet when he wants to address the nations school children, we get blogs and right wing radio, and tv people talking about “brainwashing”, we have syndicated columnists claiming that the President should be censored, what the hell is this, it’s Racism in the 21st Century, welcome to America. It’s totally hidden behind the rhetoric of partisanship, and rationalized though it is irrational by nature. Imagine the President of the United States brainwashing children with a televised address on the values of education, now imagine I am talking about Ronald Reagan, do you find that hard to believe? If you do ask yourself why you believe Barrack Obama would brainwash your kids? The fact is you don’t really think that at all you are simply a racist, if you don’t like me calling you a racist then change your simple mind, and stop hiding behind the irrational arguments you are choosing to believe because you cannot accept a half black and half white man as the President of your Country.
While I cannot claim to understand what you have gone through as a minority in the good ole US of A, I from time to time have seen it, also because of how I look I get the inside dish from people, people whom I have known for a time in my life, people who are well racists, and will not admit to it. For the most part the things they say are coded, and not direct, subtle and somewhat polished, but racist none the less. Oh, they can’t see it, or simple refuse to admit it to themselves but they are racists deep down. Where does it come from, fear for the most part I think, fear of the black man, the Mexican, the white man, fear of people who are different, jealousy of what they have, rationalized by the words they use and the manner in which they are used.
As a man who married outside of his race, and has children who are half Mexican I see the racism in the schools, in the systems, and in the people I do business with, the thing is no one else does, why is this? My wife’s family hates me for the most part because I am white, so no one is above racism not even those who are often the targets of racial abuse themselves. So what will it take to change America into a country of Americans and not Mexican-Americans, African-American, Asian-Americans, Native-Americans, and white America? This is the question I wrestle with, this is the thing that we all wrestle with, can it be overcome, I am not sure if it can be but it must be. I guess we just need to call out the people who are hanging onto the old ways, each and everyone of us knows one person like this, one person who refers to people by the negative stereotypical terminology, and if we do that if we each can change one mind then we can be Americans all of us, if we can’t then we are doomed to be divided by those who benefit from the artificial divisions that the labels create, what if idiots didn’t run the world?
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