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…
