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Confessions of a Small Town Racist
Racism is still racism, even if no one says it aloud.
I was born in a small Midwestern town in Iowa where African-Americans represent only around 4% of the state’s population. My birth state is very white. People generally don’t talk about that. People are nice and friendly, even if they are almost all blonde and blue-eyed. But that doesn’t change the fact that there is Silent Racism everywhere. When you keep people of different races separate, it creates a problem. Different equals bad. White equals superior. No one ever said it aloud but I felt it everywhere. It wasn’t my fault then: I was born into it. It wasn’t something I thought about consciously until much, much later in life, after I’d left behind my small town and state and moved far away.
In my family, I personally never heard a bad word uttered against African-Americans. Even if there weren’t many blacks in our town, my family seemed on the surface to be quite accepting. My grandfather had a very close friend at work who was black. My grandmother worked with a black woman too and seemed on friendly terms. Since my grandparents were European immigrants and I knew our family history, I was relieved that we’d never had anything to do with slavery. I was taught in school all about American civil rights and our sad history of enslaving Africans in the United States. All of these facts made me feel we weren’t Racist. Except that we were Racist, without saying so.
In my entire elementary school, I only remember a handful of black kids. I never had any black friends. In my neighborhood and in my church, there wasn’t a single black family. In fact, if a black person came into my environment, the adults seemed uncomfortable. I could sense their caution and alertness, even if no bad words were exchanged. Everyone would go quiet and watch them. Was that normal?
Although he was a blue-eyed white Frenchman, my dad was raised half his life in West Africa and worked in Marine Biology. He loved Africa. He brought my mom there, hoping to show her why, but unfortunately, she hated it. Later on, she said the reason was that she never felt comfortable nor safe. I didn’t question it at the time and I kind of thought she meant an unstable political situation but now I know it was the black people she was actually…
