Racism

My dad was born in Alabama in 1922. He was a racist. I never blamed him for being a racist because that was the culture he grew up in and lived in for his childhood and teenage years and many of his adult years. No one at that time thought of themselves as being racist. They merely lived in the world in which they found themselves. They conformed. If they did not conform, they would have been ostracized by friends and family.

But my dad was never a hater. He didn’t hate Black people. He merely thought White people were superior in certain ways. He worked with Black co-workers. He visited their homes and knew their families. Sometimes he took me with him (I was a teenager then) when he visited the home of a Black acquaintance.

I graduated college and was working as an electrical engineer when, on a certain weekend, I went home to visit my parents. It was a Saturday morning when my father said, “Grab your volt-meter. We have an air-conditioner to fix.”

My father was an air-conditioning and refrigeration mechanic. Some of his co-workers were Black. One of those men was a deacon at an all-Black church. The church was situated on a lonely country road. The Black church deacon had told my dad that his church’s air-conditioning system had quit working. The church did not have enough money to have the a/c repaired. It was the middle of a hot summer, and my dad thought about all those Black church-goers sweating in that stifling hot church every Sunday morning, and he knew that he had to do something to help. So when I came to visit, he decided that he, an air-conditioning mechanic, and I, an engineer, would be able to get that church’s a/c working again.

We arrived at the church and got to work. No one else was there. In a couple of hours we had the a/c repaired and working, and we left. Dad never asked for nor would he have accepted any money—the job was pro bono. My dad did it because at heart he was a good guy. He was still a racist, he still thought White people were superior in certain ways. That was his upbringing and it was ingrained into him until the day he died. But he was never a hater. I think that is a distinction that is worth remembering.

There are a lot of racists and I’m sure some of them are Black, and some are Asian, and some are White. But being a racist—believing that your race is better is some ways than other races—does not mean you hate other races. It doesn’t mean that you wish people of other races harm. It doesn’t mean you would treat them unfairly. We may not be able to change a person’s thinking, but we may be able to change a person’s behavior—if that person is a decent and fair-minded person at heart. And I think, and I hope, that most people are decent and fair-minded at heart. Even racists.