In 1988 I moved to a small town in South Carolina, not far from where my paternal grandfather had grown up. In enrolling me at the local high school, among other paperwork my parents had to indicate whether they did or did not permit the principal to administer corporal punishment. Also, in those days they kept records of the racial balance in every classroom.
On the day of the census in 1990, my homeroom teacher faced an awkward situation: The form called for a tally of the number of white students and the number of black students. In what category, we asked her, would she put the one student who could not, by any reckoning of the universally-understood meaning of those categories, be counted as one or the other?
She said she’d figure something out.
Immigration has since radically changed the face of the South, but we all still know exactly what we mean by black or white. Everyone else who lives here gets described by their ethnic origin, more or less. But blackness and whiteness, cultural constructs though they are, continue to be the way we describe the people who fit into our original two categories.
[Observe though, that in our diocese, for example, we have black priests and African priests, white priests and polish priests. Our cultural construct is very much tied to our local culture.]
Because we’re talking about racism, and because the thing I know about is white people, we’ll stick with the words that southerners use. Allow me to reassure the reader: Though the history behind the cultural construct is sordid in the extreme, the words black and white, as used in the language by southerners today, are in no way inherently derogatory. The words can be used in an insulting manner, but the words themselves are not insults.
***
So I was down in St. Matthew’s for a volleyball tournament. Calhoun County is part of SC’s Corridor of Shame, which means that the academics are dismal and the athletic facilities are merely adequate; there is no monstrous brick archworks surrounding the football stadium, like you find at the rich schools.
The school sits at the very edge of town; on the drive in we saw only frost-covered fields, and lines of bare trees against the pink-purple dawn. Later, at a break before the semifinals, I lay outside under an enormous sky, the sun warming the west-facing brick walls of the school, and watched the clouds go over. Every now and then the voice of a farmer carried over from the crossroads where he had parked his truck.
It’s beautiful country. You see why people stay. But if you mean to make any kind of living after graduation, you’ll probably have to leave.
***
Bleachers are the bane of my existence. Back inside the gym, the first game of the semi-finals was getting started. I found a spot down low in the stands where I could stretch out and lean against my backpack and not be completely uncomfortable. I was the only one in that section; my daughter was sitting higher-up with her teammates, waiting to be called to warm up for their game.
A young man (black, as it happened) came and sat on a chair by the wall near where I was sitting. He had the school logo on his jacket, and I guessed he was there helping with the tournament in some way. A little while later another young man (also black, coincidence) showed up, dressed the same way – black warm-ups with the school logo in red – and took a seat near us. More of these young men started to arrive, filling out the seats in the bleachers around me. They greeted one another, subdued but not solemn. While they sat, they indulged odd snatches of conversation, barely audible.
I eventually learned that they were the basketball team. Varsity, if I’m any judge of the ages of teenage boys. They were gathering to travel to an away game.
There was something unusual about the group that I’m not supposed to notice, because I’m a middle-aged white lady: These young men, all dozen or so of them, were all that impossibly deep black-brown color that makes you think of Africa. It would have been merely very beautiful, except that I think it had a bearing on what was being said up and behind us.
***
Southern rural black culture is complex. It is influenced by the popular culture and informed by some 200 years of comings and goings, as is the wider American black culture. What makes the culture in a place like St. Matthews distinct, though, is that it is also informed by some 200 years of staying put. Sitting there among the boys on the team, you could sense that complexity but could never hope to unravel it.
Once or twice the guys ask me a question about the volleyball tournament, and I answer them. Otherwise we keep to ourselves. They are unconvinced when I try to persuade them to cheer for my daughter’s team, if they should still be around when her game starts. Boys can be so shy that way.
***
The popular media have plenty to say about black teenagers with guns, but you don’t hear stories like the one that happened in the Calhoun County High School gymnasium that night.
One of the boys sitting against the wall of the gym leans over to his friend next to him and shows him a picture. Eager. Happy. I can’t see it from where I’m sitting. I’m the closet person to them. His friend says, “Is that a real gun?”
I know right away what cultural divide I’m looking at between those two boys. The south is complex.
“Yes, it’s real,” the first boy assures him. And then he explains, several times because his friend is just not getting it, “What I really want is a 12-gauge pump action.” He stands up and gestures the pump-action on the shotgun he can’t quite afford.
“You hunt?” I ask him.
“Yes ma’am.”
If there were a Redneck GRE, we would take the data sets Economy and Geography of Calhoun County, and the fact Wants a 12-Gauge, and be able to answer without difficulty the question that I ask next. I ask it anyway, because I’m an idiot* with a compulsion for small talk. “What do you hunt?”
“Deer.”
I want to see the picture of the gun, curiosity, but I realize it will only demonstrate my utter inability to make intelligent conversation on the subject of inexpensive hunting rifles. Small talk never was my strong suit.
We go back to watching the game. I answer a few more questions about the format of the tournament and how the scoring works.
***
18-year-old boys with guns, some of them black, are the people who liberated Europe from the Nazis. They are not children. They are young men, strong, capable, passionate and at times heroic. If we infantalize such men, we don’t therefore keep them perpetually eight years old; we get, instead, toddlers in grown-up bodies. If you’ve ever spent the afternoon with an unhappy toddler, you know that adding two-hundred pounds to the equation is not a winning prospect.
The coach arrives, 60-something, massive, stern. Black as his team. He greets the them each in that same low tone they use with each other. You sense that he is fully aware of his responsibility to his boys, and to their parents. The players are disciplined. Manly, if boyish about the edges. The coach checks on a few details in the office, then the team rises on some silent order and leaves to catch their bus, no dragging, no delays. The boy who was sitting behind me wishes my daughter’s team good luck, and I wish him likewise. And then I’m alone again in the stands.
Afterwards, my daughter tells me about a conversation that took place while I was sitting there among the guys. She has a teammate who has no filter, a rambunctious child who says whatever she’s thinking. We’ll call her Chatty. They have another teammate whom we’ll call Trusty, because she’s on the short list of people my daughter will let hold her phone.
Chatty, scandalized: Your mom is sitting down there talking with the basketball players.
My daughter: Um. Yeah?
Chatty: But they’re black.
Daughter: So?
Chatty: They’re black basketball players.
Trusty: I’m black. And I played basketball. And you talk to me. She can talk to whoever she wants.
That more or less ended it. Like I said, no filter.
***
The thing about that conversation is that my daughter’s teammate, who couldn’t turn off her brain-mouth connection if you installed a switch on the side of her face, was just saying what she’d learned to think.
Since I spend time around unsupervised white people, I get to hear racist blather. And thus, when President and Mrs. Obama were all in the news talking about acts of perceived racism, I knew they were not entirely wrong.
It’s an error and an injustice to accuse all white people of racism. But it would be a lie to say that in 2015 American racism is a thing of the past. It isn’t.
I’d like to talk about some of the nuances of what that means today.
***
Because racism is real, it breeds hypersensitivity. Non-racist white people worry that this or that innocent action will be mistakenly perceived as racist. Black people who have experienced genuine racism elsewhere may erroneously attribute to racism an action that had some other explanation.
There exists also a kind of background-racism, thoughtless and unintended, in which our paradigms are informed by stereotypes. Thus when President Obama, dressed in suit or tuxedo, is confused for the valet or the waiter, it would be a mistake to assume the person who mistook him necessarily believed, “It’s impossible for a black person to be a politician or businessman, he must be service-staff.”
Rather, there’s an underlying set of race-based generalizations that make one more quickly jump to the conclusion that the black guy in the tux is the waiter, rather than looking for more subtle cues as to the man’s position. (GK Chesterton wrote a Father Brown mystery that hinged on just such ambiguity.)
It’s racism, but different than the sort that burns crosses in front of black churches, and different from the sort that says white ladies don’t talk to black basketball players. Unlike those latter two, at times the mistake might have nothing to do with racism at all.
So let’s talk about the basketball players.
***
Most of the racist white people I know would recoil in horror at lynching or arson. They bear no ill wishes towards black people as a class, they just happen to disdain the bulk of them. What these white folk are, in fact, are elitists. Black people whom they know, and whom they discover to be intelligent, fiscally responsible, polite, well-spoken, accomplished, tasteful – all per whatever standard the beholder decides to apply – they aren’t the problem. It’s those other black people.
It’s a muddled up discouragement at certain real social problems, combined with bad upbringing and a general need to feel superior to somebody.
Indeed, the modern American white racist is just applying a bungled version of our national moral system, in which right consists of what I do, and wrong consists of things demonstrably worse than what I do. Sin is the other side of the line between me and my inferiors. Sure I do this, but that guy over there does it much much worse.
For all we claim to be egalitarian, Americans are consummate snobs. Be assured, the white folk I know who spew racist nonsense, and others who take their elitism in more sophisticated forms, would be just as put off if I sat with a group of white people who in some obvious way failed to meet spec.
***
The funny thing about this kind of racism, this elitism, is that I have seen it cured. I have seen a man fall in love with a woman who, to all outward appearances, was the wrong color and tasteless into the bargain. The kind of woman who would have been the butt of racist jokes. But somehow he meets her in just the right way, so that he gets to know her – kind, intelligent, generous, witty, resourceful, hardworking, a treasured companion. And suddenly a whole world opens up to him. Her people become his people, and he’s proud to be part of it.
This was always the cure, and it still is. To the extent that Americans are stuck in our snobbery, it is only that we haven’t yet sufficiently fallen in love.
*UPDATE: Reader Theodore Seeber observes that a better guess would have been that he hunts birds. We thus garner additional proof of who in my household brings home the venison, and who just makes the stroganoff.
Artwork: Postage Stamp, Kyrgyzstan (http://www.stamp.elcat.kg/english/98.html) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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