S02E03 - MLK Holiday and the Confessions of a Closet Non-Racist

Verimour Speaks

My usual launch schedule has been shot to hell recently, but this is a topic I didn't want to pass on and today was a good day to at least open the door to the discussion. What follows is the text version of the blog post I share while recording.

Confessions of closet non-racist - Originally written July 2016

When I was in elementary and middle school I lived in Indianapolis, Indiana. During the years that spanned Kindergarten through 6th grade I only remember one black student. There may have been others, but they didn’t live in my neighborhood and I didn’t interact with them. After my parents divorced I moved to Florida and briefly attended the very small private school associated with my grandparents church. There were no black students there either. About the time I was starting high school my grandparents bought a farm in the rural areas of Tallahassee. The middle school bus that picked up my brother drove toward town and the more affluent neighborhoods. The bus that transported me headed the other direction toward the poorer mostly black community.

There were only three white students on my bus. I was the first picked up and so had the longest ride every day. Next was my best friend who lived in the middle of that small community and whose mother owned a store where most all the residents had credit accounts. The last girl was a very cute, quiet student who got on as the last pick up of the route only a few blocks from the school.

Because I was on the bus the longest I had the most opportunity to get to know the other passengers. If you were to meet me today you would likely have a difficult time pegging me as timid, or shrinking. But even now confrontation is not my first line of defense and one that raises my blood pressure. However, back then was a different story. A few of the guys I rode the bus with took a shine to me and would often make verbal advances and plead their case for why I should hang out with them. That alone was uncomfortable for me. But the really difficult part was that their attention made me a further target for the girls.

On one day in particular I sat in complete terror during the bulk of the trip while one of the girls continued to flick pennies at the back of my head. As my first significant exposure to members of the African-American race this was not a positive experience for me. As I got older I found myself attracted to black men on more than one occasion. However, while there had never been any discussion about it I’m sure I would never have taken one of them home to my family or even have been seen regularly in public with them. I couldn’t have explained it I just somehow knew it wasn’t acceptable and not a battle I had the strength to wage.

When I joined the Marine Corps in my mid 20’s there was an admin clerk who worked in my office. She was white, but only dated black men. The other Marines in my shop referred to her as a mudshark. The significant difference with this young woman was that her entire personae changed when her love interests were around. Suddenly her actions and speech changed completely and she became very “ghetto” an act that disappeared when she was among her primarily white coworkers.

As an unrelenting observer of human behavior always in search of answers about my motivation and that of others I’ve long been bothered by a strange tendency I see in our conversations. How many times a day do we hear someone tell a story and point out the ethnicity of the parties involved even when that fact has no relevance to the story at all? It said to me that despite what we tell ourselves or want to believe, most of us still see skin color in a very distinct and --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/verimourspeaks/support