How I became a Racist.

I am posting this in response to a question about racism on another blog. It is a term paper I completed during grad school on the topic of racism, diversity, and oppression, for which I won a school award. I invite you to read, reveiw, and/or discuss.

December 7, 2002



Final Paper: Audio- Taping/ Analysis Project

When addressing personal issues in regards to my own attitude concerning diversity and oppression, I think that it is important to put them in relation to how I felt before the semester, during the semester, and currently. My personal education concerning oppression is extensive. I have always been interested in the causes of racial tension in our society. I have watched several movies and have read many books that are concerned with relations to blacks and whites in American society. My understanding and viewpoints have changed overtime. My understanding and viewpoints will continue to be modified over the course of my life.

During my formative years I engaged in films and books that related the plight of the African-American in our society. I found the topic very fascinating. I read and watched Roots, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Autobiography of Malcolm X in high school. I watched several documentaries on the civil rights movement. I studied the Civil War and the history of slavery in America. I did so outside of the assigned curriculum of the schools I attended. The topic of racial tension in America has been an interest of mine and I have devoted a lot of time in trying to understand this complicated subject. Through self education I developed a great empathy for the struggle of African-Americans in our society.

My empathy paled after I began to discover a bias on the role of suffering in society. I came to be aware that African-Americans were not the only oppressed group in America. Events that would happen later in my life would lead me to read The Redneck Manifesto, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and The Turner Diaries. I wanted to understand the source of the apparent superiority of white culture. Do white people really have an advantage? How did this happen? Where will it lead us? These are some of the questions that I have been pondering in recent years.



During high school I didn’t particularly get along with many African-American students. Then again no one did. They seemed to isolate themselves and would never be friendly unless the exchange was one-on-one. During the “blue collar” period of my life I encountered many African-Americans in the workforce. I can remember on two separate occasions at two different jobs how the influx of African-American workers changed the dynamic of the work place. At each place the company was under investigation from the Equal Opportunity Commission (EOC) because they had only one African-American worker employed at their facility. In each case the black worker was someone who behaved as if they were a “white person.” So there was a concerted effort to find enough African-American workers to fill the standard requirement for multi-ethnicity in the work place. At one point a supervisor came up to me and some friends and stated, “I need your guy’s help. If you know any black guys, send ‘em down here for a job.” This caused an overall resentment from the white and Mexican workers at each place. At the time I was young and didn’t understand their resentment. I argued against the fear of adding African-Americans to our work force. Often I was called a “wannabe,” “wigger[1],” or “nigger lover.”



During the next few years I would encounter and experience some of the things that had caused their apprehension. During their probation period African-Americans were held to a lower standard by management than other workers had been in order to receive permanent placement. The change in policy was not an official one. It was a covert effort by the company to meet EOC standards. Many of the workers resented this and it kept many African-Americans from being accepted by the permanent work force. Many of the African-Americans who were hired self terminated for many different reasons. When the new African-American employees were reproached by a supervisor, they would often “play the race card[2]” to get out of trouble. Most of the time I felt compassion for them. I knew from personal experience that most of the supervisors were prone to racism before the influx of African-American workers. It took over a year at each place before a core group of African-American employees were integrated into the work force. After “quotas” were met, according to EOC guidelines, the company stopped being proactive in its efforts to recruit African-American workers. African-American workers were replaced by a de facto replacement policy. Only when one quit or was terminated was another African-American hired to take their place.

Still, racial tensions ran high. One Friday evening an African-American worker who was placed on our crew for the evening remained in the break room well past the break period. I approached the worker myself in an attempt to have him return to our work station but he refused to listen. A supervisor eventually came by and inquired as to what the delay might be. I told him that we were waiting for the other worker to return from break. The worker emerged from the break room and started shoving me, knocking me down before the supervisor intervened. We were both sent home. The next day I got a telegram telling me that I had been fired. The reason given for my termination was the accusation by the other worker that I had called him a “nigger.” The other worker was fired also because he had physically touched me. I ended up losing my job and career because of a false accusation. The company couldn’t resist the irony of terminating the nigger lover for calling someone a nigger.



So how did I feel about this experience? Overall it reaffirmed some of the stereotypes that I had been warned about when working with African-Americans. I had been their biggest advocate, yet I had been a victim to a ploy that I would often encounter in my personal life as well as witness with others and the media. Is it ok for a people to “play the race card” to achieve their goals? Can we blame African-Americans (who use the race card) after hundreds of years of oppression? There are no easy answers to these questions. I’m not sure if there will ever be as long as there is differentiation among people.

The experience didn’t leave me bitter. In fact I often laugh about “my struggle” with the black man. I have shared the experience with other friends who are African-American and their responses are similar. They agree that there are some African-Americans who will play the race card to their advantage. Some have admitted to me that they have done it when they felt cornered or trapped by what they perceived to be impossible situations. When I asked why they would do such a thing, one friend replied, “Whitey holds all the cards in the deck, we have only one and that’s the race card.” None of them expressed any regret for playing the race card. The consensus is that sometimes “ya gotta do, what ya gotta do.” I guess what I learned is that in any struggle or conflict against oppression there will be innocent victims along the way.



I didn’t let the incident prejudice me. It did make me more careful when dealing with African-American people. I wasn’t the advocate for African-American rights as I had been. I began to see some of the hypocrisy of African-American leaders. I didn’t become a “hater” but I was no longer a “lover.” Often the charge from our peers is that we must all combat racism every time we encounter it (Garcia, 2002). To do nothing about oppression is to participate in the continued oppression of minorities (Garcia, 2002). The lesson I learned was that if you do try to stop oppression you can very well end up lonely, jobless, and broke by the hand you were trying to help. A byproduct of black resistance to white power is the fact that they lose many white advocates in their struggle for equality.

In reviewing the tape made earlier in the semester, I heard a lot of anger. I have always treated African-American people with dignity and respect in spite of my history with them. During my career in the field of corrections I often helped African-American inmates with their problems when dealing with a system they had difficulty understanding. Many times my efforts were appreciated. Many times I was made fun of or spoken of derogatorily by both blacks and whites. For the whites I was still a nigger lover. For the blacks I was a dumb liberal white boy whom they felt they could manipulate. They learned that while I was sympathetic I was unwilling to sacrifice my well-being for their greater good. I felt that I had found a balance with my attitude with the black man. I would help where I could, listen when I was able, but I wasn’t going to jeopardize my lifestyle or health for the noble idea of equality. However, my sense of balance with minorities was shaken to the core on an October evening earlier this year.



While working in a prison you can receive a lot of verbal abuse, some racial, some sexual. “You just let it roll down your back and keep driving,” to make use of an urban phrase. I was working security at Grizzly Stadium that Friday night in October. Though built for baseball, after the baseball season the stadium hosts high school football and other community events. This particular evening was a contest between Edison and West Clovis high schools. To reduce the chance of violence between students a barrier was created to keep fans of the schools separate while they were in attendance. This was a nightmare to enforce as several people believed they had “life or death” reasons to cross to the other side. It was well into a frustrating evening when I was approached by a well-dressed African-American couple who appeared to be in their 50s. I politely told them that they couldn’t pass to the other side. The following exchange went something like this:

“I’m with the media,” spoke the distinguished looking African-American gentleman angrily.

“I’m sorry sir, but I’m going to need to see some credentials,” I labored politely.

“You touch my wife and I’ll kick your white ass.”

“Excuse me?” I said. I was positioned blocking their egress, the woman in front of me, the man behind her.

“You heard me, you white punk!”

To say I was stunned was an understatement. Here was someone who looked like they had some education, dressed like they were comfortable upper-middle class people (I found out later that he is a former city council member). Yet he was issuing hateful language toward me for just doing my job. Before I could sort through my feelings a security person from the school district approached me and said it was ok for them to pass. I begrudgingly let them pass, as it was the schools’ event. Grizzly security was there in a support capacity to protect the property, not crowd control.



My amazement soon turned to anger. It had been a very frustrating evening and I began displacing my anger on others. I turned to the school security person and told them that the school district should be ashamed at how poorly they were running their event and the poor attitude of school district personnel. He wanted to argue the point but I just shook my head and began to make way to the employees’ office to turn in my equipment. I was so frustrated that I was ready to quit a job that I had grown to love during the summer. I was going to self terminate. I would realize later that this must have been the feeling that had been experienced by the African-American workers whom I had seen self-terminate before. My supervisor caught me before I had left, and talked me into staying. After I calmed down, I decided to stay. As far as I remember no one ever tried to stop an African-American from walking off the job in my previous experience.

Since that October night I can honestly say that I have been more racist than at any other time in my life. I think the fact that I was the victim of hate language by someone whom I perceived for being a person of higher acculturation had more of an effect than anything else I had experienced at the hands of African-American people. I tried to reason my hateful feelings away. I told myself that I had merely the barest taste of what minority people experience every day. I told myself that it was a learning experience and that I should be drawing strength from the experience. I’m an educated person, I should be able to rise above, right? Wrong— all I could feel was hate every time I saw a black person. If they were on TV, I would change the channel. If I saw them on the street, I would greet their gaze with a look of disgust. The anger that I felt for one person, would become an anger that I would direct at an entire people.



It was then that I began to truly understand how it must be to be black in America. No movie, book, or documentary could ever educate me as to how it feels to be hated and persecuted because of the color of your skin. I had been hated and oppressed for being white by blacks before and had never given it a second thought. This was the first time that someone of color, a leader in his community, had shown overt racism toward me. My whole life, self-education, and philosophy had been reduced to two words, “white punk.” It took experience to give the feeling a reality for me (Memmi, 2000). I had to give into my hate before I could begin to heal. That is where I am at right now, the healing stage.

I didn’t have any hate toward African-Americans when I was beat up by one in high school. I didn’t have any hate toward African-Americans when I lost my job to a lie. I don’t carry the same amount of hate today that I did for those first few weeks after the high school game. Time heals all wounds. However, racial wounds are perpetrated every day on African-Americans in “White America” (Cyrus, p. 12). My empathy for African-American struggle for equal rights has been tempered by age and experience. It is still there, but it is a much quieter voice.

Racism is not something that I was born with. Racism was not something that I learned in my home growing up. Racism is something that I learned from black people.



References

Cyrus V. (2000). Experiencing race, class, and gender in the united states. (). Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Company.

Diamond, J. (1997). Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies. New York: W.W. Norton

Garcia, B. (2002). Classroom lecture and discussion. Social Work 216, California State University, Fresno. Fall semester.

Goad, T. (1997). The Redneck Manifesto. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Haley, A. (1965). The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press.

Haley, A. (1976). Roots. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Harper, L. (1960). To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: Warner Books.

MacDonald, A. (1996) The Turner Diaries. New Jersey: Barricade Books.

Memmi, A. (2000). Racism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1]Bastardization of the term “white nigger,” implying a white person who wishes to be or lives like an African-American person.

[2]“Playing the race card” is when a person of color uses their skin color to gain special consideration.