Though I currently live in the Pacific Northwest, it is often difficult for me to disconnect myself from my early days spent in the Deep South. Recent events just do not seem to let me forget my roots. Harper Lee is releasing a new novel set in Alabama, my home state. If it deals with racism, the subject of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” I am sure it will make me cringe. The movie, “Selma” has served to revive long buried memories of civil rights violence in the city of my youth, Birmingham. The report of police violence against a non-English speaking grandfather from India in a small Alabama town which left him partially paralyzed illustrates the lack of cultural awareness and racial bias. And the murder of three young Muslim students in North Carolina, presumably over a sparking space, has left me numb with disbelief.
Short clips of my youth in the 1960’s in racially tense Alabama continue to roll across my mind’s screen each time I hear or read such accounts. They demonstrate my belief that these types of intolerance and hateful acts are more a product of nurture than nature. We are not born bigots, we must learn that. The act of passing bigotry from one generation to the next is not new in our world. Far too many parents teach their children the prejudices they have learned themselves from generations past. This was a reality I witnessed day in and day out as I spent my teen years in the South and which I have tried to escape.
There was the day my father returned in a rage from a day of golfing. He could be heard clamoring in the basement, and out of curiosity, I wandered down to find the cause. His response to my asking, “What’s wrong, dad?” was to angrily throw his golf clubs and bag into the corner. “We were on the 12th hole when the guy told me he was a Jew!”
“So?” I asked.
“He as a Jew!!” was his answer.
If my father’s prejudices had only extended to Jewish persons, that would have been one thing. It was much broader. I never heard my father talk about an African-American in any other terms than by using the ‘n’ word. Asians and Hispanics were equal victims of his disregard. Sadly, my father was typical of many male parents of that day, and far too many fathers today. They have taken to heart that old proverb of “training up a child in the ways he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” And today, it seems, that attitude and fatherly ‘mis-‘ guidance is still pervasive in many parts of the world.
A full half century has passed since those days of my youth. My hopes that things have changed are too often dashed. Examples that appear in local newspapers from Ferguson, Missouri, or Cleveland, Ohio, or New York City or Chapel Hill, North Carolina say that maybe change hasn’t happened as we all had hoped. Perhaps it’s the prevalence of social media that brings to light incidents of intolerant behavior or perhaps there are societal changes that push us to acknowledge that we all have biases that have been too long hidden but are now seeping into our awareness. It is all around us, it seems.
Our familial roots run deep. Many positive lessons my mother and father taught are still with me today and I am grateful for those. At the same time, it took a great deal of effort to shove aside their teachings that as a white male, I was superior to other non-whites. It has taken a long time to cease to label those who are of different race or economic standing or education or any other trait that is not my own. Even now I spend time ‘un-training’ myself from that parental nurturing.
In the final years of my mother’s life, I recall a telephone conversation about her hiring some domestic help to do the household chores that age and arthritis no longer allowed her to do. She said, “I’m going to hire Lula to come over and help me.” “Who’s Lula,” I asked. “She’s that Colored maid.” And, disrespectful son that I must have become, I asked, “Oh really? What color?” It was my small attempt to “train” my mother in a new way of seeing the world. Surely there is much work yet to be done in this “train up a child” business. Now it’s my turn with my adult son. The jury is still out on that.
