Being Wrong About Race

Back when I was editorial page editor of the Pine Bluff Commercial, it was clear from the day I got to town that I was one of those wild-eyed integrationists who was out to mix the races, destroy Our Southern Way of Life and defy the divine origins of racial segregation. And I was hopelessly Jewish, too. To all of which charges I pled guilty, and not only declined to throw myself on the mercy of the court but -- horrors! -- hoped to make the courts colorblind, too. Until one day, some day, we would all overcome together.

The bill of particulars was long and all too exact. I had been seen attending services at black churches where racial segregation had been denounced and boycotts and sit-ins and demonstrations planned. I was spotted circling the block as black protesters outside the Saenger Theatre had been hustled off to the hoosegow by the police. I was a thoroughly subversive character with no intention of reforming. If I wasn't some kind of Communist, I was surely a Republican -- another dubious distinction back when the South had one party (Democratic), one crop (cotton) and one issue that was never discussed in polite society (race).

You'd think I would have known better, having spent my earliest, most formative years being reared above my folks' shoe-repair shop on Texas Avenue in Shreveport, La., when racial segregation (at least during the daylight hours) was enforced by custom as well as law. Everybody on Texas Avenue, aka the Greenwood Road, knew where the white stores, shops and offices ended and where the black ones began -- just after Mrs. Ferris' confectionery. The color line was so clear it didn't have to be drawn, it was just understood. Up the street from my folks' place of business there was an isolated black lawyer's and black doctor's office, but they were outliers. The black business community began in earnest where the avenue took a turn after the Murovs' furniture store and ran on and on until after the old Charity Hospital rose on the horizon and the proper segregated division between the races was formally restored.

The first American music I can remember hearing in my baby bed was "St. Louis Blues" as its notes drifted down Texas Avenue. I didn't understand the words any more than I did those of my father's prayers in Hebrew, but they were planted in my mind early and refreshed every night, if not perfectly:

The music, complete with words beyond my ken back then, had come from the vibrant African-American business zone up the avenue. And years later I would follow the music up the avenue into a carbon copy of the white downtown, only darker, the same only different. For there was the black movie theater, night club, pharmacy, funeral home, barber shop, beauty salon, dentist, newspaper (the Shreveport Sun), pool hall, beer joint and just as many churches per capita. It was like entering a photographic negative of all the pictures I could see in the respectable Shreveport Times or less than reputable Shreveport Journal ("the white man's paper") in that long-ago day. But all of that wouldn't be necessary in the great millennial day when we the enlightened would do away with segism and all its trappings. Or so I believed and encouraged others to believe.

Yep, the great day was surely coming when all our kids would go to the same all-city high school, root for the same Pine Bluff Zebras, and the notion of black and white neighborhood schools could be left to the dead past as we all lived happily ever after. Historically black institutions -- whether schools or businesses or neighborhoods or athletic teams -- might all be swept away, but black folks were supposed to be so grateful for the coming of racial integration they wouldn't mind. Oh, what a fool this mortal be.

Forgive me, Lord, for I knew not what I did. That's not the only place I went wrong, and surely won't be the last. But the day is coming when that sweet chariot swings low and carries me away to the damnedest family reunion I can imagine. I don't fear death, for the judge in my case, blessed his name forever and ever, loves me. The fix is in. Though I could scarcely imagine such an outcome when I went wrong.

A big problem is that where once the idea that the color of your skin said something of inescapable importance about who some folks were and what they could be, or even ought to be, was a gate to keep some out the very same concept is now a gate to keep them in!

The whole idea of blackness once used against blacks by some whites is now advanced by some blacks “for blacks”.

What this can mean for black persons is, at least in part, that where they were once free in their minds, that which sought to oppress them being more or less external, and so they frequently lived like it (going about their lives and building a future for themselves and their families inspire of external pressures), that now too many are oppressed from within, from things like what Scripture calls “strongholds”.

While one can point to the flocking of blacks to the north seeking often nonexistant jobs the truth is that that dislocation WAS NOT enough in itself to cause the present troubles.

Rather it was the accepting of radicalism about race (seemingly tied to radicalism about politics and even of religion with the NoI or what would eventually rot into Black Liberation Theology), the switching of who was manning the gates I’d mentioned above, that festered and about the time that SOME blacks started burning down their own communities and driving away the jobs the whole community depended on — decades after the last time mobs of rioting whites had burned down a black community — the course was set in many communities for the present troubles.

Consider ...

Whereas before if a black was highly successful despite the effort by some whites to keep the gate closed they were celebrated. They weren’t accused of acting white because they were highly educated or unashamed capitalists.

And the rhetoric of advancement, outside of radical circles (and sometimes even within, for the sickness either wasn’t fully advanced or else those who were already consumed by it may have realized it wouldn’t sell well ... yet), reflected the wholesomeness of those seeking to escape oppression from without by excelling, by succeeding, by, to be blunt, overcoming.

But once the radicalism had not just taken root but fully flowered: then we started seeing the broader acceptance of this idea that being black, as set forth by those now using the gates trying to keep people IN, meant in part not acting too white and especially not believing too white.

I know that sounds absurd, and it is, but leftist radicalism breeds absurdities in people no matter their race. Consider the anger we now occasionally see at “cultural appropriation” and sometimes, if not oftentimes, by the same folks who rail against so-called Oreos (blacks who revile other blacks for not being black enough).

Even me writing this post will offend the race radicals because the gatekeepers keeping the people in have even less use for Terence’s wit and wisdom than did the segregationist of old. Namely: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.” or “I am human, nothing that is human is alien to me.”

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