My wife and I ate dinner with a friend of ours last week. She had a baby a couple months ago, and I hadn't seen her since that happy event. She likes to consider herself a "revolutionary", a conservative journalist, so she often taunts me with tidbits she figures will shock me.
"You're so ultra-liberal, this probably wouldn't even matter to you," she began. "But Alan [the baby's father] and I were talking about this the other day. I asked him if it would bother him if our son brought home a black girl as his fiance, or at least serious love." She paused, hoping for an initial reaction. I played my poker face.
"You know, Alan's a pretty liberal guy." Well, he's from cracker stock, but he smokes a good quantity of dope and voted for Clinton. Close enough, I guess. "And he said that would bother him. I think it would bother me a little, too."
Now, my friend is a complex character. She regularly derides the practice of "political correctness" when she's on the wrong side of it, but in other instances, such as not using derogatory racial terms, she's all for it. Not unlike a lot of people. But she does define herself as a conservative, and based on her question, I assume she meant that deep in the heart of every conservative is some form of bigotry. That's a whole other subject.
I answered by saying that, indeed , such an occurrence (if I ever have a child) wouldn't bother me in the slightest. My wife concurred. And then we probed a little deeper.
The recent disturbances in St. Pete have made discussions about race "the thing", and our friend proceeded to say that she thought there was little that could be done for the residents of south St. Pete, because "they're lazy. It's a cultural thing."
Now, she has many friends at her job who are black. She doesn't consider them lazy at all. In fact, she doesn't even think of them in terms of being "black". She's very familiar with them, and so her attitude toward them is based on personal interaction, not blind assumptions about race.
But she would not likely venture into a store in south St. Pete alone in the daytime, much less at night. The people who live in that area, white and black, are generally less educated and poorer than the people with whom she is used to associating. And she is uncomfortable in their presence, because she perceives that anyone of the lower classes (and this is an objective economic term, not a judgment on these people's humanity) automatically wants to take what she has from her for themselves.
Is this some sort of weird guilt manifesting itself in an odd way? Or just fear of the unknown? Well, probably parts of both, as I found out when I attempted to deflate her broad stereotyped views.
As a person who has lived in good and bad parts of cities and towns, who grew up with a number of black and hispanic friends and who most consider to be very "liberal" on any given social issue, I do understand how poverty can perpetuate despair, which in turn perpetuates poverty istelf. I knew kids who planned on dying even before they grdauted from high school, and I knew kids who drank their way through school, figuring that life wouldn't be any better if they were sober.
When you're stuck in that mindset, almost nothing is possible. Our friend has lived in both Los Angeles and New York, and is well acquainted with the reality of gang violence and high crime areas. She doesn't blame the criminals' blackness (and face it, a lot of them ARE black) for their situation. She blames the society in which those kids grew up. At some point, the blame probably gets back to her, but she doesn't really want to think that far through her theory, and so she simply places the blame at the start (which is also the end of another cause, of course).
Plenty of folks I know would call my friend a racist for having some of these ideas. But the situation is much more complex than that. She merely fears the unknown, which is, of course, a form of bigotry. She also has a high sense of social stature, and, whether or not ultimately right or wrong, the presence of a black relative does the same thing to the social standing of white family tree as the presence a black family does to the property values of a white neightborhood: it brings it down. I'm still appalled by advice the friends of my wife's parents gave us when we bought a house in south St. Pete: "You don't want to live there. Black people live there." But all this is also an incontrovertable fact.
At least a vast majority of us agree that it is wrong to judge people solely on the basis of race. Actually practicing what we preach will take a lot longer to accomplish. But the best way to get the ball rolling is to talk, even if that talk makes some people uncomfortable. In St. Pete, anyway, the myth of a color-blind power structure has been shattered. Now all of us can actually get down to the hard work of actually accepting people who hold different views, take different actions and yes, look different than we are.
Impossible? Maybe. But I'd rather work and fail than sit on my ass and watch my society burn.
Jon Worley has been contacted by many home-security system telemarketers in the past week. One actually said, "You know, white people in your neighborhood are really at risk." He told them to fuck off.