New Mexico Mercury

Race and racism are back on the national agenda due to the furor over the killing of the black Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, the acquittal of his killer, the more than 100 demonstrations across the United States recently and President Obama's dramatic declaration that he could have been Trayvon Martin 35 years ago.

These emotional events, producing a roller-coaster of passions, have reopened the temporarily suppressed debate over what it means to be white or black in America.

Against this background, there is, I believe, new relevance to an essay I wrote in 2008 after Obama's election as President, an essay that is a chapter in my anthology published last year, A Reporter's World: Passions, Places and People. The piece has attracted some attention and has been used by Albuquerque Public Schools to teach students about racism. I have not altered the original essay.

I was, as they say, born and bred in the Deep South. So was my mother. My father grew up in Alabama, where his father and mother spent most of their lives. My father told me of how, as a child, his father took him to lynchings where they watched officially sanctioned vigilante mobs torture, dismember, burn and kill blacks.

My family and I spent most of our vacations in a backward rural town in north Florida, a place where blacks were paid 50 cents to vote for the sheriff who regularly beat them up.

Growing up in Atlanta, then a country town of 50,000, I never met a black who was not a servant. I never had a black playmate or schoolmate. I loved an old black man who did yard work for my family and mourned when he died of drinking poisoned moonshine. I thought of him as a friend, but my parents made it clear they did not.

When I went to high school in New Hampshire, among the 750 students, there was precisely one black boy, a kid named Bo Howard. Bo was a year ahead of me in school, a tall, slender track and football star who didn't fulfill the myth of the black athlete: He was brilliant and went on to go to Harvard University. In school, he was almost as friendless as I was, a fact that helped draw me to him.

After college, I settled in southern Maryland, an extension of the South populated mostly by immigrants from North Carolina. There, I met my first wife, a woman whose extended family filled a desperately impoverished and race-baiting corner of southeastern Georgia. The days I spent there were among the most depressing of my life.

In the early 1960s, I became editor of a weekly newspaper in Leonardtown, in southern Maryland. Leonardtown was a county seat with about 1,500 residents, including a tiny, totally segregated black enclave. One Saturday night, a group of black men came out of a bar and staged a mini-riot. The town and the county reacted as if World War III had just begun.

Later, in imitation of what was going on throughout the South, a handful of blacks staged a sit-in at the all-white drugstore lunch counter. I joined them, and a few days later, the owner of the newspaper fired me.

I served in the Army in Georgia, Florida and Kentucky. As a draftee, most of my fellow soldiers were blacks, but black and white GIs lived separate lives, or at least as separate as the claustrophobia of barracks life would allow. Socially, the twain never met.

One of my military assignments was at Fort Benning, Ga. I lived in nearby Columbus with my family. Columbus had a national reputation for only one thing—having one of the most vicious anti-black police forces and one of the most bigoted political elites in the nation. Later, the town, like some other southern communities, reformed and became something of a model.
After leaving the Army and later my wife, I settled into an odd corner of Washington, D.C., where I had a biracial couple as my neighbors and close friends, and through them came to know an obscure biracial scene. There was even one bar where the regular clientele consisted entirely of biracial couples.

I fell in love with a white woman who was married to a black man and who had children with several white and black fathers. For the first time, I got a glimmering of an understanding of how the races could be united as well as segregated.

I joined various national groups fighting for desegregation and racial equality. I gave some of them small amounts of money. I fancied myself as emancipated.

But whenever I walked down a street near my apartment and saw a group of young black men hanging out on a corner, I crossed the street to avoid them. I was never attacked. I never had any reason to believe I would be. But they were young and black and male, and I was alone and white. Those bare facts were enough to inspire fear.

I began to think of leaving the East. I spent time in San Diego, where I met an elderly black man who told me without apparent irony, “This is the only place I have ever been where I don't feel black. I just feel like a person here.” The remark opened a new window on the black world for me.

I moved to Santa Fe where I became friends with Hispanics and American Indians but where blacks were hard to find.

My new wife and I spent two years in West Africa, in what was then the world's second poorest country, Niger, and traveled through a dozen African countries.

Blacks were our friends and colleagues. Everything we did there, including teaching at the university, we knew blacks who did it better. This was a black country run by blacks where whites were only guests who were there to serve the interests of the black masters. This was a black continent where whites were aliens. Black children would sometimes flee in panic at the sight of a white face. Whites, not blacks, were the devils. In popular lore, white was bad and black good—the opposite of the color code, the code of black hats and white hats, on which I was raised.

This was a black world where whites had to learn the lessons blacks grew up knowing, the lessons of how to live here. We learned what we needed to know to survive; we learned a lot, but I wish I had learned more.

Once a black told me, “For you Americans, life is a good thing, a valuable thing. For some others, it is a bad thing. For us Africans, life just is. It isn't good or bad. It just is.”

So has gone my journey of seven decades. I was born and bred to be implicitly racist; then I was self-consciously antiracist. I was proud that some of my best friends were blacks. I became ashamed of such errant nonsense.

Today I know that, for me and for most of those who grew up alongside me, racism is, as a black long ago said, as American as apple pie. Racism, in the sense of the primordial consciousness of race, or difference, is something I cannot avoid.

But it was with joy so profound, so deep inside my being that it is inexpressible, a joy on the verge of tears, an awareness of the historical rightness, the moral justice of the moment, that I watched the first black man in American history become the nominee for President of a major political party; and it is with joy as deep, with fulfillment as profound, with reverence and awe, that I await Jan. 20, 2009, for I can no longer imagine Barack Obama not becoming the man who will help lead us out of the centuries-long nightmare into which slavery plunged us all.