During summers, when I was a young boy my two younger brothers and I would skip across the street to the elementary school where for hours we would play catch and hit baseballs. I remember how those days were all blue skies and sunshine and how we would imagine ourselves to be "real" baseball stars. Back then, our heroes were the sad New York Yankees of the early 1970's, so our ambitions as ball players remained rather modest.
During one of these outings, our summer joy was ruptured by twenty black boys and girls who rode their bicycles onto the field like descending Valkyries. Several of the boys dismounted their bikes and one began accusing me of calling his mother a "bitch." Through my chattering teeth I told him that I didn't know his mother, but my protests didn't lessen his rage and after repeating himself a few more times, he jammed his right fist into my brother's stomach (I had had the sense to fold my arms in front of my body defensively,) As my brother slunk to the ground the assailant and his comrades jumped on their bikes and rode away.
For several years after that episode, I struggled not to fear and resent blacks. Luckily, the home I grew up in discouraged racial prejudice and bigotry. Shortly after I began college, Ronald Reagan was elected president; his race baiting politics and policies together with the liberal education I received at college also helped me uproot the weeds of racism seeded in my youth. I would love to say that I am no longer capable of any prejudice, but I know too well that no one can be completely immune to tendencies of racial bias. Yet, I hear people regularly claim, (and read about so many others who also claim, e.g., Donald Trump) that they have no racial bias in them whatsoever. They often add that blacks have the opportunities as any other white Americans, if they would only take advantage of the economic possibilities this country offers.
Many whites are quick to point out that today blacks, as well as other minorities, have made great progress since the 1960's. They have jobs in professions once closed to them. They hold seats in Congress, state legislatures, one on the Supreme Court; why, one was even elected president. Blacks also dominate several sports, making millions of dollars in the process. It all sounds quite good. But is it what it seems?
I have lived on Long Island, just east of New York City, my whole life. Over the years, people have spread east across the Island as the population has risen significantly. Town and villages have matured into fashionable communities with fashionable restaurants and chic coffee houses. Among this rising middle class, are successful young black men and woman, sprinkled here and there among their upscale, white neighbors. It seems the once deeply racist white residents of the past have move aside for a more enlightened generation. One might say that the Island has matured beyond racism. But that would misstate the true situation.
The obvious truth is that blacks are generally segregated from whites. Any survey of the Island's population will reveal that blacks are clustered in areas separate and distinct from white neighborhoods. Is this segregation intentional or not? Do whites prefer to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods (or therefore, public schools?) My liberal friends are quick to tell me they are not in the least prejudice. Maybe they aren't. But it's impossible to tell, since they live their lives apart from blacks. They are genuinely upset when the police shoot down an unarmed young black man; they expressed horror when they watched the video of Eric Garner being subdued, then killed by the police. Yet, when their child or friend's child has been denied admission to an Ivy league university, and they subsequently learn that a minority has been admitted, they are quick to deprecate Affirmative Action or Diversity in Admissions for admitting the boy or girl whose "skin color" scuttled their child's chances.
But was it someone's skin color that thwarted their child's dream of Ivy? Try to convince them there might have been some other factor, and you'll find yourself persona non grata. To them, the perception is fact, though they have not a whit of concrete evidence to support it. It reminds me of what I mentioned above, a perception held by many whites that blacks can enjoy as much progress as whites, if they would only take advantage of the opportunities available to them.
An essay by Tracy Jan, The Washington Post, September 18, 2017, cites a recent Yale study that calculated the perceptions whites (and blacks) have regarding the economic progress of blacks. In the Yale study, the researchers' work "showed that African Americans were the only racial group still making less than they did in 2000." The study, conducted Jennifer Richeson and Michael Kraus, indicated that "both black and white Americans of all income levels remain profoundly unaware of the economic inequality between the two groups...participants overestimated progress toward black-white economic equality, with average estimates exceeding reality by about 25 percent." This overly optimistic view about racial equality can be attributed, in part, to wishful thinking, because the majority of whites want blacks to succeed. The one group that the Yale study singled out as having the most troubling perception of racial progress was wealthy whites: "Most delusional are wealthy whites, the only group that was overly optimistic about racial economic equality even before the civil rights movement." (Italics mine)
Norman Podhoretz, in his 1963 essay "My Negro Problem-And Ours," frankly chronicles the twisted feelings he experienced as a result of his many encounters with blacks while he was a boy growing up in Brooklyn. By the end of his essay, he bluntly acknowledges his racist attitudes and confesses how difficult it has been, and continues to be, to free himself of his bigotry: "The hatred I still feel for Negroes is the hardest of all the old feelings to face or admit, and it is the most hidden and the most over-larded by the conscious attitudes into which I have succeeded in willing myself."
Perhaps some of Podhoretz's points in his essay seem a little dated, but his most instructive insight, the difficulty of facing one's own racism, no matter how small that racism might seem to be, addresses one of the points the Yale study crystallizes: our perceptions of race, of blacks, are always skewed, regardless of how firmly our liberal and enlightened minds try to persuade us otherwise. Has America become a more tolerant country? Less discriminatory? The answer to both is, of course, yes. But has the country, and all of us, shed every vestige of prejudice? Just ask the two young, black men who were arrested for not drinking coffee at a table in Starbucks in Philadelphia.
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