I am not a racist (and you are too)

Fifty years ago, when I was a graduate student at Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, North Carolina, I lived in a cheap row-house apartment built during the Depression. My next-door neighbor was Mike Coe, a young, self-proclaimed redneck.

Mike was white, but his best friend was a young black guy named Main. They were more like brothers, raised by single mothers who lived in apartments next door to each other. All through their childhoods, they all ate their meals one day at Mike’s house, the next at Main’s, because the mothers decided it would be easier that way.

One day Mike and I sat on my front stoop and Main walked up. Mike introduced me to him, and after we chatted for a while, I said, “Well, let’s go in and have a Coke or something.” I walked in the front door, followed by Mike, as I continued the conversation with Main.

But when I heard no answer, I turned to find that Main was gone. “Where did he go?” I asked.

“Around back,” Mike said. He explained that this was North Carolina. Black men do not walk in a white man’s front door. Under any circumstances.

When Main got to the kitchen back door, he waited for me to invite him in again. He came in and I said, with annoyance in my voice, “No, we’re not doing it like this. If I go in the front, we all go in the front.”

To my surprise, Main shook his head. “No,” he said. “That’s not how we do it here.” There was no anger in his voice, no look of hurt or shame on his face. That’s just how it was, like the weather.

I grew angry, and I argued that it was 1970, not 1840. Things change.

Both Mike and Main shook their heads, and now they were angry. “Don’t come down here from Chicago and think you’re going to change things. Because when night comes, it won’t be y’all’s windows that get broke. It won’t be y’all that don’t get home.”

That shut my mouth, because it was my first real encounter with the reality of systemic racism. Oh, I had seen racism on individuals, and even in groups. But this was something larger.

From that day on, whenever Main was with us, we all walked around back to go in.

And just like that, I was now part of the system.

Was I racist? No. But my passive complicity was a firm support of the architecture of systemic racism.

A quarter of a century later, in the mid-90’s, my son Dave was a student at University of Illinois, and when he and a couple friends drove down to New Orleans for a break, their car broke down in a Burger King drive-through in Jackson, Mississippi. There was a service station across the street, and when the tow truck pulled up, Dave asked where they might spend the night, because it was evening and too late to fix the car that day.

“Ooh, that could be a problem,” the man said—because one of Dave’s friends was Japanese, and the other Black. No room at the inn for a group like that in this town.

The man—who was white—towed them to the outskirts of town. “I’m taking you to a friend’s station to get it fixed there. I’ll tow the car into the yard, lock it in. You should sleep in the car. He’s Black. He won’t mind. He’ll fix it in the morning.”

“But why wouldn’t you want the business?” they asked.

“Oh, I’d love the business,” he said. “But you wouldn’t be safe sleeping in my yard in town.” He shrugged, as he might at the weather.

Was he racist? No. But his passive complicity, too, was a firm architectural support of systemic racism.

Today, another quarter-century further on, much has changed—but much has not, despite protestations from our president who claims: “There is no systemic racism in America.”

But he never lived next door to a Southern white guy with a Black brother who couldn’t walk in the front door.

He never had to leave town in a mixed-race car that broke down in a Mississippi Burger King drive-through.

He never personally knew a handcuffed Black person choked to death by a cop.

So he doesn’t see America’s systemic racism, any more than a man who never leaves the house would ever feel the rain.

In his heart, is the president racist? Only he knows for sure.

But if you are the only person in America who actually has the power to change the structure of systemic racism, then your passive complicity not only supports its architecture—it makes you the architect.

Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.

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