“I don't have a racist bone in my body!”
I've heard this sentence, or some variation on it, occasionally over the years. It's always made me uneasy, because I don't feel like it's true for myself, and am skeptical of the assertion in others. In the early ‘70s, I grew up in Center City Philadelphia, and went to the local public school. The Albert M. Greenfield School was brand new when I arrived for first grade, and was supposed to be a model of racial and social integration. In many ways, it was, and I loved the school and got along just fine with most of my classmates, both black and white. From the black kids, I learned about afros and black power and cool hair picks with a fist on the end. I learned that there were all kinds of black people, from nerdy Edgar Baskerville who always dressed and talked like an english professor to Muhammed Abdullah, who was raised by American Muslims in the Louis Farrakhan/Malcolm X mold. There were gregarious kids like Todd Gates, who always had a smile on his face, and quiet ones like Kevin Little, whose family clearly didn't have much money, but who knew how to throw a birthday party. (That's where I learned of the phenomenon of Angel Food Cake, a magical dessert previously unknown to my people.)
All that's to say, I had a fair amount of experience with African Americans as a kid, certainly much more than I do now that I live out here in the country, where people of color are few and far between. But not all of those early experiences were positive. A lot of the less fun stuff was garden variety conflict between kids over toys or access to the jungle gym, but some of it was traumatic. I was seven, and walking down the street near my house when a young teenager coming the other way suddenly punched me in the face out of nowhere. Or the time when I was five and I watched two big black guys snatch my mother's purse. Bless her heart, she wouldn't let go, and I stood terrified as they dragged her down the street away from me until the strap broke and they ran off. Or even just the time I was at a friend's house and he described how his daddy would whip him with an electrical cord if he misbehaved.
Now intellectually, I know that those kind of behaviors have nothing particularly to do with skin color. Unresolved trauma and crushing poverty can cause anyone of any color to lash out or resort to theft. But to this day I still have muscle memory. If I'm walking down the street, a black guy coming the other way makes me feel different than if it's a white guy. That racism is part of me. I don't like it, and wish I didn't feel it, but I can't deny that it exists.
Not everyone has been individually attacked by a black person, but we've all been assaulted by the images in our media showing scary black criminals and prisons full of black faces. That has an effect. Pretending it doesn't, or imagining that your good relations with the black folks you know somehow erases that effect is naive and leads one to think that racism is just for the white hooded crowd. All of us have some innate “fear of the other” or “stranger danger”, and we all use our intellect at various times to override those primitive instincts. It is possible to be less racist, but in order to do that, we have to be willing to admit we're already at least a little bit racist to begin with.
There is no way to address a problem that you can't even acknowledge you have. Which is what I see playing out in the streets today. Too many white people have been pretending that racism is a thing of the past, and black people are outraged because it so clearly is not.