What Color Are The Lens Of Our Glasses?

I've been thinking a lot about the filters we have in our minds that affect the way we think about things. These filters may have been put in place by the religions we were raised in or the life experiences we've had. They are probably what affect us most when we make decisions or opinions and we probably don't even think about them and the way they affect our thought, but I believe we all have them.

When I was very young, I lived in a world where there were very few opportunities to know any African-Americans and if I did, it was in the capacity of people (usually women) who worked for other people as maids. Thus, one of the first filters was placed in my mind:
Black people were the people who cleaned up after white people.
And believe me, this was not an untrue stereotype.

The first real opportunity I had to meet a black kid my own age was when the preacher of the little Community Church my family attended decided in the early sixties that it was time to do his part to integrate and he invited a black church to join our church one Sunday. He lost a lot of members that week, as I recall.

But one of the members of the other church brought his son with him and because our church was so small we didn't usually have Sunday school for the kids and for one reason or another, the kids were all excused to go and just play, which we did, by the banks of the Sebastian River where the church sat. I remember that boy and how amazed I was at the fact that although his skin was dark, his palms were as pink as mine and he showed me how to put the fingers of my left hand together and hold them with the fingers of my right hand and whistle between the thumbs- a talent I still possess.

The early sixties were a hard, hard time in this country. Signs like the one above were everywhere in the South and as a child, I didn't understand them. My family was not overtly prejudiced and were staunch Democrats and I recall when LBJ was running for president, being called a nigger lover because I supported him in the way that a child will support whoever her family is voting for.

I wondered about that. Was I a nigger lover? What did that mean? That boy who taught me to whistle with my fingers was awfully nice and he was the only black person I really had ever met, so maybe I was. I certainly had no reason to hate him.

Another filter had been put in place in my mind.

Or perhaps two- the one black person I'd met had been sweet and he'd taught me something, and the white kids I went to school with hated black people but there seemed to be no reason why, as far as I could tell. I don't think they knew any more black people than I did. I learned that hate did not have to have a basis in any true knowledge or experience. That it could just bloom wherever it was planted.

And then on the television I saw Martin Luther King and I heard his ringing voice of truth and grace. I saw African Americans sitting peacefully at lunch counters, trying to get a meal and being arrested. I saw little black children whom the National Guard had to protect in order to attend school while white people shouted oaths, the hatred and ignorance dripping from their faces, making them ugly.

These images gave me more filters through which to judge races, especially my own race.


And then came images like this:



And like this:



in magazines and on the news.

And yet another filter was put into place:
White people were cruel to black people. Black people were treated not just unfairly, but horribly.

And I was white.

Although I had never once in my life threatened a black person in any way, I felt guilty by the mere fact that my skin, like the skin of the hateful, cruel people, was white. And all my life I have wondered if black people hated me for this skin, the same way that many whites hate blacks simply for the color of their skin.

I have to tell you that I have never been treated hatefully by a black person. I have lived in black communities, I have been one of the few white faces in a sea of dark faces in bars or at concerts or once in a church. And I was never treated with anything but respect.

Which somehow made me feel more guilty and it made me wonder if that respect wasn't merely a culture thing- that African Americans have been raised (especially the older ones) to show respect to whites when no respect had been earned.

I've been called "Ma'am" by black men more than thirty years older than me, which always makes me want to scream. Instead, I have nodded and smiled, keeping my screams inside me.

I've tried so hard to be a representative of the white race which is not prejudiced, which is not hateful, which doesn't judge on skin color. But of course, I always have. I see a black person and all the filters put into my brain click in and I try my fucking hardest to be open, to be kind, to not show any sort of race-based bullshit superiority.

We can't help it- the way black folks generally treat whites and white folks generally treat blacks, has been affected so deeply by the fact of our history together here, starting with the fact that the black ones were enslaved by the white ones, which is such a hideous and basic truth that it has seemed that nothing, NOTHING could chip those filters from our brains.

I heard an interview on NPR yesterday (of course- where else?) with a black Southern Baptist minister who is also old enough to remember the whites only signs. To remember the way white law arrested, beat up, and brutalized blacks. To remember the spewings of hate from people like George Wallace. To remember when "separate but equal" was the law although "equal" meant nothing. To remember those pretty little children, being walked to school, their eyes shining with fear, their steps far more steady than anyone could imagine a child's being in that situation.

And this minister was saying that Obama's election gave him "cautious optimism" that things will now finally change the way white people think about black people in this country.

I completely understood.

And I wondered if it will also change the way black people perceive white people in this country, which isn't something that's being discussed as often.

I think it will. I think that finally, and at last, African Americans may have cautious reason to believe that all white people do not hate all black people for their skin color. That the powers that be did not somehow prevent a man of color making his way to the highest office in the land and one of the most powerful in the world.

This election has, I hope, given us an entirely new filter to view each other through. One that said not only "Yes we can," but also, "Yes YOU can," which may sound racist and may sound patronizing but dammit, it's true. NO- of course one race of people should never have had the ability and power and will to stop another race of people from doing ANYTHING because of the color of their skin but in this country, it's been the sickening norm and if you doubt that, you have not been paying attention.

The election of Barack Obama has not put an end to racism. Anyone who believes that is a pipe-dreaming fool. But we've put in place a powerful filter in the minds of us all.

Someone stole my Obama sign again this morning. I'm not sure why I've still had it up, almost a week after the election. Perhaps to bask in the glory of finally voting for a candidate who won. Perhaps to show my pride in him, in our country for doing the right thing, the unbelievable thing, the thing I never thought would happen.

But someone was pissed, I guess, and took that sign and I'm pissed because I wanted to save it for posterity.

But the election wasn't stolen. And that's what's important.

And the new filter in all our minds will be there forever and we will all of us, of all different races, see each other in new ways.

And maybe I can start feeling a little less guilty. Maybe, if another older African American gentleman calls me "Ma'am," I can say, "Thank you for that term of respect, but I am younger than you and I have not earned it."

Who knows?

I am cautiously optimistic and I am thrilled beyond belief.

And I have to tell you that this post was very difficult to write. I am trying to be honest and I am trying to say things that are hard, despite the filters I have in my own brain and I feel close to tears, having said them.

Change is hard and it can bring up deep emotions, especially changes having to do with such a long, long history of such profound hate and ignorance and guilt and power and enslavement and inequality and the deaths of countless people, both black and white, who fought to end these things.

One more story:
I was working at McDonald's in Winter Haven, Florida back in the seventies and a man I served left a card that said, "You have just been patronized by the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan."
I read those words and felt shot through with electricity, as if I had been touched by something deadly.

And I had. I had been touched by hate, which is the deadliest thing there is.

I am cautiously optimistic that there is less hate now than there was in the early seventies. I am cautiously optimistic that we are growing up. But I am sure that we are nowhere near done with the process we're going through to get to that place.

But at least we're on the path.

At least.

At last.