Hi, I’m Bruce, and I’m a recovering racist.
It is an astonishing dissonance in a nation allegedly based on equality, that there is a group of our citizens who are assumed, simply by virtue of appearance, to be less. Less trustworthy. Less educated or educable. Less moral.
When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state, and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of that old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
Are you a racist? If you saw two tall teenagers together, similar in all respects except that one is black and one is white, who would you assume is the better basketball player? Do you tell racist jokes or listen to them without objection? Do you have close friends whose skin color doesn’t match yours? Do you visit their homes? Do they visit yours?
My name is Bruce, and I’m a recovering racist. I grew up white in the South of the ’50s and ’60s. Most of the schools I attended were segregated. And, despite the liberalism of my parents (Mildred, our devoted maid, did, after all, sit down for lunch with the entire family), I have rarely had more than superficial contact with men and women with skin darker than mine. Of course, there’s my marathon buddy, Jesus. But, in truth, Jesus is as much a product of the white culture as he is of the Hispanic.
The racism that lives just beneath the level of my consciousness was brought home to me a few days ago when I took a race bias test called the Implicit Association Test (http://buster.cs.yale.edu/implicit/index.html). This online test flashed words and photos of black faces and white faces on the screen of my computer monitor, and I had to quickly categorize these as “good” or “bad.” Because I had little time to think about my responses, my unconscious beliefs surfaced. My test results revealed that I had a strong preference for white.
I was overwhelmed by this revelation. I felt sick to my stomach. I felt a sharp pain in my heart. I left my computer and went to lie down on the bed. I wept. My wife, Shonnie, came in to see what was wrong. I drew her close to me, I’m not sure for how long.
You see, I consider myself a generous, conscious, compassionate man who supports justice and equality for all. I knew I sometimes stereotyped folks (black man driving a new Cadillac = drug dealer), but I believed I was conscious enough to catch these malicious thoughts and then refrain from acting on them. Little did I know that lurking in my unconscious mind was a strong prejudice based on skin color, a prejudice that white is good and black is bad. And since that prejudice was unconscious, how could I possibly refrain from acting on it?
OK, so I’ve had this painful insight; now what am I going to do with it? Rationalize it away? “That’s not so bad. Everybody else does it too.” Push it back down into my unconsciousness and forget it? Find someone to point my finger at, someone else to blame—my parents, my teachers, American society, the media? No, not any longer. It’s time to take responsibility for my beliefs and my actions. It’s time to help bring down the racial divide, starting with the one that lurks inside my mind.
Thursday, May 18th, 20001 Comment »
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[…] 4) I consider myself to be both a racist (albeit a recovering racist) and an anti-racist. This is actually NOT a contradiction in terms once you know what I am really talking about. […]
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