Speaking of Racism

When I was in the 9th grade, I lived in Memphis, Tennessee. I attended East High School, which was 99% black. In fact, I think there were four white boys in the whole school. There were no white females. I recall the day I entered my first class - I got there after the year had started - and saw a sea of brown faces looking at me when I came in the door. I'm sure that my eyes got as big as saucers. I may even have looked at my hand to verify that I was visibly different from everyone else.

That year totally sucked. I was in a fight an average of once a week. I lost almost all of them. Once I even had my head kicked into my locker door as I was kneeling in front of it putting books in. I never knew who did it. Why did it happen? Because I was white, as evidenced by the "white m-er f-er" I heard after my skull bounced off of the locker. That's what most of those fights came down to. I was different, so I was a legitimate target for attack. Throw in that I was short and skinny, and hey, why not go after the small white kid? I know what racism feels like, which may be a big reason why I react so poorly to evidence of it.

I was reminded of this last night when I saw something in a movie that I had never seen before: racism by non-whites in a film. The movie was "Friday Night Lights", and it is clear that the coaches for the all-black Dallas team are racists. There is even a black referee who makes a clearly incorrect call in favor of Dallas, and while we don't know if he saw the play correctly, the white referees were afraid to contradict him for fear of looking racist. What is the single biggest evidence of the Dallas coaches' racism? They believe that they will not get a fair shake if they don't have black coaches. They think that white referees will be racist.

If you want a simple definition of racism, it is this: believing that a group has a deficiency, ANY deficiency (including the deficiency of being a racist) because of their 'race'. I had never seen racism on the silver screen by anyone but whites before, and I think it is a credit to the writer of the movie that the scene was there.

The fact is that no one is inherently different in any significant fashion (beyond their racial pysical attributes) because of their race. This is evident in the clear fact that anyone, of any race, can be a racist pig. We are all equally capable of sin, because we are all fallen humans. Racism ignores that truth, and is reprehensible in anyone. Those who do it around me are likely to see me forget my committment to peaceful engagement.