The Racism I Was Born Into
In the summers of 1950, ’51, ’52, I was nine, ten, and 11 years old. Each of those summers I attended a week-long Presbyterian Church camp called Camp Smyrna. In notes from that experience I find two references of interest:
· Tribes – Navajo, Choctaw, Pawnee
· Mess hall – Confederate flag, spirit of camp
We didn’t think, I’m sure, about offending Native Americans. I had never seen nor known a Native American at that point in my life. We were ennobling ourselves by connecting ourselves into the clan-loyalty and the athleticism of the American Indians. I grew up wishing I had some American Indian ancestry so that I could be closer to nature and so that I would be that much better physically.
Now in my 80’s, have I put away the ignorance of my youth? I do now know that the indigenous people, who came across the Bering Peninsula 15,000 to 18,000 years ago, embodied resourcefulness difficult for me to fathom. “These early Americans deserve our admiration,” says archaeologist David Anderson of the University of Tennessee. “I think they exemplify the spirit of survival and adventure that represents the very best of humanity.” (Source: Scientific American online)
And yet, in the 100 years from 1750 to 1850, from Blue Ridge to Columbus, in Georgia we shattered treaties and drove out these, “the very best of humanity,” as if they were a sub-human species that stood in the way of our greedy and insatiable land grab. Have we ever acknowledged the eradication that we practiced against the Cherokees? By the end of the Revolutionary War, the Cherokees had seeded half of their land to state and federal governments. In 1838, 4,000 to 5,000 Cherokees died during their forced march on foot to what is now Oklahoma. All of Cherokee land in Georgia was confiscated by self-righteous white men.
During the bulk of my adult years I have thought of America’s indigenous people as being almost extinct and that those still surviving were relegated to ghetto life on Reservations located in lands that were barely habitable. Most of my concern about Native Americans was rooted in our treatment of them in the past.
It has only been in the last three or four years that I’ve realized that a small portion of the American Indian population is flourishing and that the recent focus on justice/fairness has uncovered the needs of the majority who we have essentially forgotten. State and Federal courts have recently verified treaties made with Native Americans, some dating to the 1830’s cases involving sovereignty of American Indian tribal laws and lands. Some of these victories have occurred in the summer just past (2021). For the first time an American Indian, Deb Haaland, holds a cabinet post – the post being that of Secretary of the Interior which has primary responsibility for the interface of the U.S. Government with sovereign Native governments.
And, we didn’t think that we were offending anyone by singing Dixie at our church camp or by latching ourselves to what had effectively been portrayed to us kids as the nobility of those generations of Southerners who preceded us. In 1950 we were only eighty-five years away from the close of the Civil War (aka “The War of Northern Aggression”). At that point in history, we were the only part of the country that had experienced defeat. Maybe there was a group psychology that encouraged us to believe that the more Christian, the more righteous people had been taken down by an overwhelming rabble of pagans.
That Blacks might have felt excluded from our jubilation over Dixie and the Confederate battle flag never crossed my mind as a kid. In fact, it has only been in recent years that I’ve learned that the bulk of the confederate monuments and statues were erected around the turn of the 20th century and the couple of decades to follow, to say to Blacks, “Hey, we Whites still own you, and let these monuments remind you of that as you go past them every day. If you forget, lynching awaits you.”
As a kid, I certainly saw the outcroppings of Jim Crow laws. I didn’t know that term; and I didn’t consider that things could be any different. I may have asked a time or two why Negroes had to go to the back of the bus. But my concerns did not go much further. Now, even with the Civil Rights victories and an African American president, I know that the playing field is not level. When one starts a 100 meter race ten meters behind the starting line, it’s nary impossible to catch up. The metaphor of the ten-meter handicap represents unequal educational opportunities, lack of home ownership, and disparity in wealth, to name a partial list.
I have tried my part to bridge the gap between the economically disadvantaged Blacks and the prosperous Whites by creating equal opportunities in education, and, more recently, by providing the stability of attainable housing. The housing enables the parent to get to and from employment, and it enables the children to remain in the same school instead of changing schools every time the rent comes due.
“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” I Corinthians 13:11 (NIV)
