noun
1.
Since yesterday morning, I have been thinking over this word, and looking back at my life over these 70+ years, thinking about where I have been and where I am right now on this highly charged subject.
a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human/racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usuallyinvolving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.
Growing up in the South as a white boy, then teen and finally adult, anything referenced on this subject was almost always black/white. True, we knew about other races, but these were the people that we lived with, and around, all our lives.
We had a black maid. Her name was Flossie, and she came to our home, from her part of town, on the bus and went back there the same way. As I recall, she was paid to wash, iron and clean. That was who she was, and we kids thought nothing about the arrangement. A lot of the families that we knew had the same situation.
We lived in a section of Chattanooga, I guess just a plain old middle class section. An area of older homes, but well kept up, and, of course, not racially integrated. I remember that there was a "big" section of woods behind our house, and, if we went through that area to the west, we would come to a "colored" settlement on the other side. These folks were not "good" or "bad" or "anything", just different.
There were no blacks in our grammar school, nor junior high, nor even our private high school. There just were not. They had their own schools, and we had no thoughts of their schools being any different than ours, they were just "theirs".
Blacks rode in the back of the bus, had their own churches and sections of town. This was what they "wanted" and felt "comfortable" in. This was "normal".
Growing up in that environment, I just never thought much about it. It was just the way it was. If I saw any inequity, I did not dwell on it, just accepted it.
Even as a young adult, with a growing family, my sense of fairness, did not have race on its radar screen. If our "colored" brethren wanted to move out of the downtown blight, that might be OK, but not in our neighborhood. After all, we had our property values to think about and did not need the crime that would accompany "them".
Even our church had contingency plan if "those" black agitators came one Sunday to "sit in" the service. I was even a part of that plan.
When Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis in 1968, our first thoughts were not about racism or the life of the black folk around us, it was how the possible coming riots would affect our safety.
This was our life. This was normal. All our friends, our co-workers, our church family seemed to feel the same way. After all, we were not prejudiced, we knew some colored people, we actually liked and got along with them. We employed them and treated them good. We just did not know them particularly well.
Fast forward to 2015. Have I changed in attitude or conviction?
I taught and coached black kids in school and sit next to black men and women in church. I am friendly, and I try not to discriminate.
Back in those earlier days, my concern was for me, mine and ours.
Even now, in my more accepting attitudes, is it any different, really?
Searching to know the "real" me.
And praying to God for help.
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