Words of Hate

I'm tired today. Too much Christmas shopping this weekend, too many things to do in general. I'm tired, and I'd planned to make my day a relaxing one. Drop off my son at school, spend the day with my daughter, indulge in a cup of coffee and a book during nap time. No blogging, no thinking, no doing. Sunshine and happiness topped my day's agenda.

Then I woke up this morning to a story in our local press describing a sign that a man had posted declaring that "no negros" were allowed in his business. The man doesn't hate all Black people, he explained. He's just had a problem with a few of them, and so he's going to take care of that by preventing anyone else with brown skin from entering. Well, okay then. As long as he doesn't hate all Black people.

So much for sunshine and happiness.

It would be easy to read this story, shake my head, mutter a few words to myself about the absurdity of this type of thinking, and move on with my day. To tell myself that he's just an anomaly--a blip on the radar of a post-racial world. The problem is, he's not. Whether we like to admit it or not--whether we know it or not--too many people continue to judge our nation's citizens by the color of their skin. This guy's not all that different from a lot of people. He's just ballsy enough to say it out loud. And if there are people like this who continue to believe that it's okay to post crap like that for all the public to see, imagine what people are saying behind closed doors.

So I can't just shut my eyes and move on. I'm raising a son who is going to encounter this type of thinking. He's going to bump up against people who think he is dumb or violent or lazy just because his skin is brown. It's my job to do everything I can, anything I can, to fight against this. And that means speaking out against words like these and calling them what they are: hateful, and ignorant, and shameful.

Most people who read this will agree that this man is out of line. Most will see that it's not okay to prevent people from coming in your door because they don't share the color of your skin. When racism is this extreme, it's pretty easy to see. What's harder to see is the more subtle racism that runs through our nation's blood. The kind that leads to Black men and woman being followed in stores more often than their Caucasian peers. Or stopped by the police for no reason. Or put in jail more often. Or blocked from living in certain areas by being denied mortgages despite ample income. Or placed in special education more frequently. Or called for job interviews and hired less frequently despite having equal credentials. The reasons for these phenomena are multi-faceted and complex, of course. But at the core of it all is the pervasive and often unseen belief that looking at a person's skin color will tell you about that person's character.

If you are Caucasian, it can be hard to see this subtle, systematic, everyday racism. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means that means that asking those of us who live in the majority to see the white privilege from which we benefit is like asking a fish to see the water he's swimming in. It's hard to see it when it surrounds and pervades your very existence.

But even if you can't see it, you can often hear it. Listen carefully. You'll hear it in the jokes made at family parties. Or in the casual comment that suggests that the family down the street isn't taking care of their yard because they are Black. Or in the off-handed suggestion that the Hmong teenager down the street is probably in a gang. Or when your uncle theorizes that black people are poor simply because they enjoy living off welfare. Or when people ask me if my son is smart. (And yes, they do). It's there. We all hear it. Now we just have to speak out against it.

It's not easy to speak up, of course. Most of us were taught that it's not polite to talk about race. Its uncomfortable. And more than that, speaking out puts us in a vulnerable position. We risk rejection, bad feelings, arguments. We risk making others uncomfortable. We risk losing friends. We risk offending family. We risk a lot by speaking up.

But the price we pay for not speaking up is greater. When we don't speak up, we end up condoning a world where it's okay to believe that the color of your skin actually means something about who you are. A world where we start to believe that "other" is scary. A world where it's okay for a man to post a sign on his door that says "no negros allowed." A world in which a man like that is not shunned from his community for posting such a sign but instead benefits from the attention he receives. A world in which I will soon have explain to my beautifully innocent son what "negros" are and why some people don't think they should be allowed in their stores, because I can't protect him from the realities of that world much longer. This is the price we pay when we don't speak out. And it's not a price I'm willing to pay.

Okay.

Enough of that darkness.

Excuse me while I go look for some sunshine.

“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” -Martin Luther King Jr.