It took me until my 50s to finally realize that a lot of the people I grew up with are racist. It was even more disappointing when I had to accept that I'm one of them.
Now, let's be honest: Dallas in the '60s & '70s was no longer filled with people walking around in white sheets, but racism was still one of the things that bound the city together. My hometown has a brutal history of racism. In 1916, Dallas was the first Texas city to impose housing segregation by race. In the '40s and '50s. state and federal highways were built with the public goal of separating black and white neighborhoods. Like so many cities in the South, the further south you drive, the more black people you see, and the fewer white people would even venture.
The West Fork and the Elm Fork of the Trinity River, the longest river in Texas, that river separates South Dallas from North. Drive over it in the '60s and '70s, and you realize "white people are not supposed to be here." Drive around streets like Sun Dial and Deep Valley in the '60s and '70s, the streets that hold my childhood memories, and you realize, "This is the safe place where white kids deserve to grow up."
In the '60s & '70s, there were public schools for us white kids and public schools for those kids who weren't white. More than 50 years ago, a judge ordered that to stop, forcing Dallas into a moment of yellow school buses packed with black and brown kids rolling into "safe" white neighborhoods. I don't have the police records, but I suspect that before that judge ordered them on those buses, there was a much higher likelihood of those kids being in a police car in those neighborhoods than being in the classroom.
It was 20 miles from my public elementary school to the elementary school those black kids were bused from, but it could have been the distance between Selma and Boston. Good parents, caring parents took their kids out of public schools in the "safe" white neighborhoods. It was so severe that the local newspaper had front-page article after front-page article on "white flight". We went to private schools, even more white than the desegrated schools we fled from. Schools with names like Heritage or Good Shepherd or St. Monica, classrooms that felt like safe havens from the yellow buses filled with black kids, hallways that we navigated like those highways meant to separate white folks from black folks.
We were racist. I'm still a racist. Maybe we are all a little less so, but that is just not enough.
It took me 40 years since I sat in that classroom at Good Shepherd to admit to myself that it's not just my conservative Christian classmates who suffer from the sin of racism. Most people know that racism is wrong. It’s one of the few things almost everyone agrees on. We can easily make our “I hate racism” opinions known, but we are mostly just looking for moral high ground, or for pats on the back, or to win friends and influence people, or to prove we’re not like those people, or maybe we are just saying what we’ve always heard everyone say.
There's a lyric in a song I've been obsessed with for a while, a song by Jon Batiste called Worship. It's more of a chant than a lyric, more of a mantra than an anthem:
We are born the same
Return to that place
It's only you that makes me all I am
We are more alike than we are different - our ontology and our anthropology more alike than different. It helps me to remember that we're like photocopies of each other, instead of being from different libraries. Same blueprint, same quirks - "we are born the same". It's like when you find out your weird habit of organizing your shirts by color is something your friend does too. You think you're unique, but then - boom - same humanity, same oddity.
I believe in progress, that we can return to that place. I have to. I believe in the inherent goodness of 98,3% of all human beings. But I am aware that the words of Dr. King are as true or more true nowadays as they were when he said them. For the entirety of the 39 years that Dr. King lived, there wasn’t a single day when the majority of white Americans approved of him. After he was assassinated, 31% of the country felt that he “brought it on himself”.
In a letter he wrote in a jail in Birmingham, Alabama, written in the year I was born, Dr. King wrote:
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s greatest stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is… the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”
Be careful of a good, white, moderate like me and so many of the folks I live around nowadays. Be careful about the intentions, the verbiage, and the voicing that we have. Be careful of people who won't admit our racism. I won't. I listen to the podcasts. I watch the TV shows. And I still live where I live. I do what I do. I have the friends that I have.
For the last few months, the lyric "It's only you that makes me all I am" pops into my head in those quiet moments late at night, when the world's asleep and I'm wide awake, trying to crack the code on why we're all here. It's kind of beautiful, in a weird, interconnected sort of way. I'm lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, and my brain is running a marathon. It's like we're all ingredients in some giant, cosmic chili recipe. If you're a vegan, NOT a chili recipe....or maybe even NOT a vegan chili recipe.
It's about how it's only through others that we become who we are, about returning to that place, about rivers and streets and classrooms that stop dividing us into the tiny, ordered numbers instead of the big, messy humans we are. Our first and most important identity is not male or female, MAGA or progressive, American or Russian, black or white, red state or blue state, rich or poor, influential or obscure, but human. We are more alike than we are different. It's kind of simplistic, like one of those filmstrips we watched at Good Shepherd, but it took me way too long to face the fact that it's gut-wrenching when you work to live it out.
Freedom isn't order; justice has a chance to start every day if I confess that I am still a racist.
We are born the same
Return to that place
It's only you that makes me all I am