Pretending We Just Don't See

The song “Blowin’ in the Wind” was on the radio all summer in 1963, the summer I turned twelve. It reached number two on the Billboard charts. My older sister had the album. On the back cover there’s a photo of Peter, Paul, and Mary taken when they sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I remember thinking the picture was cool. I didn’t know it was a picture of the March, or even that there had been a March. 

At twelve, I liked the song but didn’t think about its lyrics. They’re a series of questions followed by the refrain, “The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” One verse questions war, another racism, and the final one asks how it's possible for people to ignore things that are right in front of them. It’s a folk song, plain but elegant in its simplicity.

Recently, watching video of Senator Ted Cruz giving Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson a hard time during her confirmation hearing, some lines from the song came back to me, “How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free… how many times can a man look up and pretend that he just doesn’t see?”

Senator Cruz seemed incensed about the existence of a children’s book dealing with racism.  The book was in the library of a school that Justice Jackson had been involved with. He questioned how anyone could think babies needed to be taught about racism. He defied Supreme Court nominee Jackson to defend the idea that babies could be racist.

The Senator was performing for the TV, of course, trying to impress his supporters by making concern over racism, and the judge herself, a Black woman, seem foolish. Judge Jackson endured the Senator’s tirade, and the Senate confirmed her nomination. The incident bothered me though because, babies aside, I think young people should learn about racism. Many people think they should not. They say learning about racism will make white children feel bad.

It’s true that the bad guys in the story of American racism are white, but are people afraid that white children will think they’re racist because they’re white? Kids need to learn about white abolitionists and white civil rights activists, some of whom died for the cause, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers who died fighting to stop slavery. Kids need to learn that white skin does not make one racist any more than Black skin makes one deserving of abuse.

It is disturbing that our society once sanctioned slavery. How could a person enslave another person? How could so many do so, and how could so many go along with it? How could it go on for so long? Kids need answers to these questions not silence on the subject. 

If those who oppose education about racism think we can forget about racism now because the bad old days are over, if they think racism is a thing of the past, they are mistaken. Difficult though it may be to face reality, we can’t turn our heads and pretend that we just don’t see.

Any instruction about a difficult subject like racism must be age-appropriate, but why not let kids, even little ones, know that racism exists and that it’s wrong?  Hiding racism, or hiding from it, won’t make it go away. It’s childish to think so.

Watching Senator Cruz feign outrage at the notion of racist babies, my first thought was ‘of course, there are racist babies.’ That’s because I was one.  Obviously, we aren’t born racist, but do most people born into racist families or societies grow up to reject racism? I don’t think so. Not without some difficulty anyway.

**

I became a racist, innocently enough, at age four and remember the moment exactly. I was alone, playing in a room off the kitchen of our home in upstate New York. I could hear adults in there talking about some other people in harsh and derisive tones. I didn’t know who they were talking about but understood the talk well enough to think ‘I’m glad I wasn’t glad I wasn’t born one of them.’ 

I had no idea who ‘they’ were or why these people were singled out for scorn and abuse, but I was relieved not to be one of ‘them.’ I had no idea what color skin ‘they’ had. You might say I was a colorblind racist at that point. 

Racist is a bit of a misnomer. Americans once sorted people by skin color and enslaved those with dark skin, but racism isn’t really about skin color or any other so-called racial characteristics. It's about some people dehumanizing and abusing other people for the purpose of obtaining superior wealth, power, and status. 

Children need to learn that characteristics like skin color aren’t what make us human and that that everyone has dignity and deserves respect. They need to know that it’s not OK to treat others badly for any reason. This is as much for their personal feelings of security and self worth as it is for any societal reasons. 

There are societal reasons, of course.  Racism is corrosive. It destroys community. Much as we might wish it, the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement have not ended racism in America. And it’s not just that white supremacists still spew hatred and commit horrendous acts of violence. Racism has evolved.

Racists today may actually disavow racial prejudice. A new, colorblind racism has emerged. If you wanted to put a good face on it, which I don’t, you could describe today’s colorblind racism as status quo bias, an unwillingness to change things from the way they are. Call it what you will, it serves the same purpose as the racism of old.

Racial discrimination was a pretext for slavery and segregation, not their goal. Today, the goal, even if reached by other means, is the same. Colorblind racists seek to achieve superior wealth, power and status at the expense of others’ rights and needs. They disavow racial prejudice even as they undermine efforts to undo it or to remediate its effects. 

When Supreme Court Justice John Roberts' claims that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” he shows himself to be a colorblind racist. Yes, racial discrimination should be illegal, but making racial discrimination illegal will not stop racism any more than making slavery illegal stopped racism. Justice Roberts claims to stop racism even as he kills a program that counteracts it. In another opinion, he claims racism is no longer a factor in voter suppression.

Lately, the number of white supremacists and the number of the violent attacks they perpetrate have increased, but colorblind racism is insidious and may be just as dangerous. Disavowals and condemnations of racial prejudice make it easy for people to pretend they just don’t see the inequality and injustice that colorblind racism perpetuates.

Colorblind racists would have us believe that, since racial discrimination is no longer legal, we no longer need to worry about it. They want us to think that racism is a thing of the past and to forget about it. They complain when historians say racism plays a central and ongoing role in the creation and development of America. They care about what they call their heritage, but that’s a misty kind of thing which they'd prefer we sentimentalize rather than examine.

I do not want to forget that people subjected millions and millions of other people, over hundreds of years, to involuntary servitude, that they kidnapped, tortured, raped, and murdered to impose slavery and segregation, that they stole the proceeds from the labor of those they enslaved and profited from buying and selling people, destroying those people’s families in the process. They did all this to secure wealth, power, and status for themselves.

It's ironic that it’s some in the party of Lincoln who now mock and dismiss concern over racism.  They would have us believe that they oppose racism, even as they pursue power by means of a ‘southern strategy’ based on it. When Senator Mitch McConnell says, “I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago — for [which] none of us currently living are responsible — is a good idea” he is protecting racists’ ill gotten gains, and proclaiming his innocence, but he’s also overlooking segregation, which was in full force when he was growing up and from which he benefited.  He’s seeking to nullify history by saying nothing can or need be done about it. 

It seems to me those who complain that too much is made of American racism are the ones who ‘protest too much.’ They say, for instance, that critical race theory, CRT, is being taught in our schools when it isn’t.   CRT is the theory that racism may be baked into our legal system, like the eggs baked into a cake, and so be inseparable from it. It’s a thought provoking idea for law school faculty and students to explore. Studying the possibility is one way to make sure racism isn’t ingrained in our legal system. CRT isn’t something that undergraduate, much less elementary or secondary school students are taught to believe. Why are some trying to make us believe it is?

Some respond to the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ by saying ‘Blue Lives Matter.’ Of course, blue lives matter, but no one’s saying they don’t. There’s no history of police having been enslaved or segregated, assaulted and murdered with impunity or treated like second-class citizens. Police do difficult and sometimes dangerous work. Most do the work well and bravely, even to the point of losing their lives. But society hasn’t singled out police for subjugation and abuse or suggested in any way that their lives don’t matter. Why say ‘Blue Lives Matter’ if not to challenge the assertion that Black lives do?

Most telling to me are objections to what some call ‘woke-ism.’ Those who object have changed the usage of the term ‘woke,’ which originally was slang for the state of being awakened from ignorance of racism to awareness of it and to awareness of the scope and magnitude of it. Now the word ‘woke’ is used to mock supposedly absurd liberal pieties or to castigate presumed threats to fixed ideas of gender normalcy. 

Why change the word’s usage if not to replace its original meaning and thus erase it?  This is propaganda. They make it sound as if being woke is a bad thing. It may be difficult for whites to face racism and to acknowledge the scope and magnitude of it, but, if we want to stop racism, becoming woke is exactly what we need to do. 

***

My memory of becoming a racist at age four is quite distinct and has stayed with me.  The thought I had then, ‘I’m glad I wasn’t born one of them,’ is racist, but, at four, I didn’t know this.  It’s sad that I learned about abuse at such an early age. Of course, I wanted to avoid it. I marvel now at my four-year-old self, thinking I’d been born into one set of circumstances and might easily have been born into another. 

As a child, growing up white in white America in the 1950’s, no one taught me to be a racist.  They didn’t have to. Until I recognized and consciously rejected racism, I was a racist by default.  I didn’t hate anyone. Just living in the world that white Americans had created and inhabited at the expense of Black and Native Americans, oblivious and indifferent to the harms these people had experienced and the resulting difficulties they continued to experience, qualified me as a racist.

I grew up watching TV Westerns in which white people were heroes braving the frontier, and the red people whose home it was were casually called ‘savages’ and were usually the bad guys. No one in my immediate family used the N word or spoke contemptuously about people of color.  Hearing such things, which I did, I knew they were wrong.  On the other hand, I never heard about the Sand Creek or Wounded Knee massacres. I never heard about Emmett Till, Little Rock, Arkansas, Rosa Parks, or the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, and I never saw my parents confront anyone for being racist. 

That conversation I overheard in our kitchen when I was four took place in 1955, a year after Brown v. Board of Education.  My parents were, no doubt, in that kitchen. Maybe they were talking with neighbors about the Brown decision. The times were changing. I like to think my parents changed with them.

In the early 1960’s, my mother, a housewife entering middle age, read The Feminine Mystique and decided to go to college.   When I was twelve, she gave me a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.  I read it, and we went to see the movie.  I think this was supposed to be a lesson on racism, but it’s not what caused me to become woke. 

It’s almost funny, looking back, how I didn’t get it.  Harper Lee’s depiction of racism in the novel is obvious and accurate. I may not have understood that most of the good citizens of Maycomb County were racist, but I understood that Bob Ewell was. His racial hatred was outside of my experience, though, and I reacted to it like people do to a danger that’s so remote they can act like it doesn’t really exist.

As an adult, I became an English teacher and Mockingbird was sometimes in the curriculum.  The book isn’t about the falsely accused Tom Robinson, the racist Bob Ewell, or the occasionally anti-racist Atticus Finch.  It’s about a little girl, Jean Louise Finch, understanding abuse and becoming woke. 

My family moved to Louisville, Kentucky the year I started high school . We lived in a high-rise apartment building downtown, and I attended a progressive pre-K through twelfth grade prep school in the suburbs to which I commuted everyday on city buses.

Most of the people on the buses I rode were Black.  They worked as maids, gardeners, and handymen in whites’ homes in the suburbs. I liked them and enjoyed riding with them every day.  I can only imagine what my bus mates thought of me, a white boy in a jacket and tie, reading all the time and smoking cigarettes.  On the bus, I was among strangers and could smoke, which made me feel grown up. Everyone smoked. My companions were friendly. I felt like I belonged. 

Like the rest of the country, Louisville was struggling at the time to overcome its racism. Riding the Fairmeade buses every day, I saw who ‘they’ were, and, in their circumscribed lives, I saw how the us-them racial divide served to favor ‘us.’

When I started ninth grade, my class of thirty was all white, but the school admitted Black students for the first time. When I arrived for tenth grade there were only four students in my class.  The school closed at the end of that year, a casualty of its progressive challenge to the status quo.  The Brown decision was forcing Louisville’s public schools to integrate. My private school had violated the unwritten law which was still very much in effect.

In the spring of my tenth grade year, Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Louisville during Derby Week. He came to support open housing advocates protesting Louisville’s segregated housing. The idea was to show that Louisville cared more about the horse race than it did about the human race.

I wasn’t interested in the Derby and didn’t attend, but my mother’s aunt and uncle, who were like grandparents to me, came to visit and to go to the Derby. I was excited to see them. They flew in on the same flight as Dr. King, and they were excited to have traveled with a celebrity. 

A year later, I was staying at their house overnight on a tour of colleges I might attend when Dr. King was killed. My uncle reacted to the news by saying “Good, now they ought to go out and get H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, and some of these other guys.”

I was stunned. In that moment, this man who I loved and knew as a kind, loving person turned into someone I didn’t know. You might say I became woke in that moment. I guess I’d been naïve. No doubt I still am naïve because even now, decades later, I’m surprised that racism is rampant, is resurgent, in America. Let’s be honest, though.  Everyone knows. Everyone knows colorblindness can be a ruse. Everyone knows babies are innocent, and Senator Cruz’s feigned outrage is not.

****

One day, shortly before we moved to Louisville, I walked into the living room of my best friend’s house and found his mom there reading The Fire Next Time.  I thought it was cool that I had the same name as the book’s author and thought I’d read the book sometime. When I did, in college, something in its opening chapter confused me.

My namesake begins by putting American racism in the context of all of human history, during which, he says, most (but not all) humans have shown themselves to excel at wreaking devastation and death on one another.  Then he says, “It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” 

Slavery and segregation were obvious, egregious crimes. Clearly, the racists responsible for the devastation and death produced by those things were guilty, not innocent. And, besides, how innocence could constitute a crime? 

Now, I think of un-woke people like Senators Cruz and McConnell, denying racism and dismissing concern over it, but then I thought of Thomas Jefferson who’d been able to declare it self-evident that “All men are created equal” while, at the same time, enslaving people. 

Racism allowed Jefferson to believe he was innocent. If Blacks were not people, he wasn’t guilty of abusing people when enslaving Blacks. Jefferson was innocent in the eyes of the law, in the eyes of society, and, most importantly, innocent in his own eyes because he and seemingly everyone was able to believe the lie that those with dark skin were sub-human. It’s not that the crime wasn’t there but that people would not see it. The innocence conferred by this magical thinking “constitutes the crime” in the sense that it is the thing by means of which the crime proceeds.

Today’s colorblind racists proclaim their innocence of racial prejudice while doing things like rescinding the Civil Rights Act’s pre-clearance requirement thus allowing states to implement voting regulations that discourage people of color from voting and allowing them to gerrymander voting districts so as to discount Blacks’ votes.  They assert that Blacks are unfairly advantaged when the opposite is the case. They strike down affirmative action policies, which address the effects of segregation, on the grounds that affirmative action is race-based but do nothing about legacy admissions which are effectively affirmative action for whites. They would have us believe these actions are taken to eliminate, not perpetuate, racism.

Colorblind racists base their supposed innocence not on self-deceptions of racial superiority but on rationalizations about individual freedom. Their object is the same as that of racist enslavers, though, and people of color are affected by their actions negatively and disproportionately, if not exclusively. Colorblind racists also disregard the humanity of working people, wage earners, and laborers in general. It’s not that these people are less than human but that they are lesser humans, “losers,” inferiors. 

Colorblind racists see themselves as ‘makers’ not ‘takers’ and as ‘job-creators.’ They believe their advantages and abilities give them license to disadvantage and disparage others. Success makes them proud, not grateful. They blame problems like drug addiction, unemployment, and homelessness on the supposed laziness or weak character of those who experience these things, thus absolving themselves of any responsibility to others. Like the racism that enabled slavery, colorblind racism results in radical economic inequality and political injustice. 

Freedom, for colorblind racists, is not matter of everyone’s ability to live dignified, productive lives but of their ability to possess superior wealth, power, and status. They see our government not as the instrument of everyone’s freedom but as a threat to their own. Freedom for them is the absence of responsibility to others. They don’t want community. They want control.

Racists today wrap themselves in the flag and accuse their critics of being un-American when they are the ones seeking to weaken democracy and to disable our government. For them, “government is the problem” because, through it, we can act to help people in need and can respond to problems that affect us all.  Such action impinges on colorblind racists’ plans for themselves. 

We still inhabit the “house divided” that Abraham Lincoln sought to unite. Our house will be divided as long as Americans refuse to see and to repudiate racism, however it manifests itself.  Most people at the time of slavery did not enslave others yet everyone had either to reject racism or to go along with it.  So it is with us today. We aren’t children.  We have to choose.  Will Americans choose democracy, freedom for all, or will we choose Dixie in some new incarnation?  Old times there are not forgotten.  All we have to do is look away.

“Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob Dylan, Performed by Peter, Paul, and Mary