Once again, our national shouting match about race is reaching a crescendo. But as always when our conversation about race becomes difficult, Americans stop talking to each other until the next verbal riot explodes.
But if we expect our constitutional republic to survive, citizens of all races ought to talk to each with truth and charity. We need to share the personal stories that form our own attitudes and fears about race. Here’s mine.
As a child, I was so preoccupied with my escape from orphanage poverty that I wasn’t much aware of racial issues until I turned 18 in 1965. That summer, the Watts riots broke out.
In 1974, 20 years after Brown vs. Board of Education, this new teacher faced a brutal, racial reality: American public education wasn’t prepared to desegregate, to offer a first-rate education to its African- American students. Instead, it would systematically prolong into perpetuity the Slave Code prohibitions against black literacy.
In all but the last school where I taught, too many educators saw my color and that of my students, first and only. They reacted fearfully and angrily to the color of my skin and to the content of my curriculum. I was “uppity;” my curriculum was “elitist.”
Yet, after 30-plus years in the classroom, I’m optimistic that, among other benefits, schools can make a positive contribution to an honest conversation about race. For one thing, they can speak honestly with African- American parents and their children and demand the highest behavioral and academic standards from all students.
But if public education can contribute to our racial dialogue, the media and those it covers have an even greater responsibility to enter into that conversation with courage, honesty and decency. That’s what my student prisoners at Denver Youth Corrections taught me whenever we conversed about race. As a matter of fact, they talked about race better than all the high-profile adults involved in latest racial debacle at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Most of us know the facts. Folks at the NAACP told Tea Party activists to expel the racists in their ranks. In retaliation, someone sent a conservative blogger an already-edited video that gave the impression that Shirley Sherrod, an African-American Agriculture official, was herself a racist. In too quick a succession, she was fired, the full facts became known and the administration, the NAACP, and even a popular Fox television host who had called for her dismissal reversed course and apologized.
So, how does this fiasco inform our admittedly difficult conversation about race as we stumble forward? First, the New Media can take a tip from the Old Media. Last Sunday, Bob Schieffer, host of CBS’s “Face the Nation,” scolded everybody involved. Old Media folks, he said, “still call people involved in a story to get their side; editors fact-check . . . .” While it may not be politically correct, it’s simple, common-sense decency.
Do the same with race conversation. Lose the stereotyping and check out the facts. In many cases, we’ll find that Americans from across the racial spectrum agree on any number of issues, including education and family.
I had another lesson delivered at my doctor’s office. For this Uncle Tom — enraged against an educational system that stubbornly refused to work for so many young people — it was the most difficult lesson of all. About 25 years ago, my white doctor told me that my heart attack and stroke-level blood pressure and cholesterol were the result of my anger. He also informed me that hypertension kills more African-American males than all guns, drugs and violence put together.
In the end, our conversation about race isn’t going to get any easier anytime soon. But we can choose to reign in our combative selves, lower the decibel (and hypertension) levels, listen respectfully and carefully to one another, and appreciate one another’s fears.
