I’ve heard it said many times in recent years that there is so much anger today in public discourse, particularly as to racial matters. The country is more divided, animosity is higher, people are so at odds. When I hear such sentiments I go back in my mind to what it was like when I was a kid. Is there more racial animosity today than 40-50 years ago?
First, I think it is impossible to objectively and impartially measure such things. We can take all sorts of data and assume that the data accurately measures racial attitudes and interactions, but in the end how reliable can such statistics be? We can rely on police reports and crime statistics, but when a violation of the criminal code is and is not reported, is and is not prosecuted, is and is not found to have occurred, is undoubtedly affected by the biases and personal prejudices of people. Police officers, prosecutors, judges, and most importantly, members of juries, are people like you and I, we all have our own biases and prejudices, conscious and unconscious. Even less reliable is what is or is not reported by the media, which itself is not unbiased, and whose biases change over time and from place to place. We can rely on self-reporting, but can someone else really accurately report the motivations of another, especially when it comes to an issue of race? In the end we’re left with statistics that are all unreliable, some certainly more so than others, and our own personal experiences.
I graduated from the Cleveland Municipal School District’s Collinwood High School in 1983. At the time the school was about 90% African-American. Ten years or so earlier the school was about 90% White. The decade or so from the late 1960’s, early 1970’s to the late 1970’s, early 1980’s was a time of great racial strife at Collinwood High School, with “race riots” of various intensity occurring intermittently, especially when the school was divided roughly 50/50.
At Collinwood I took an Honors Chemistry class. Although the classroom was of normal size, it had risers like a college lecture hall and I was sitting all the way at the top, in the back. Of the 20 or so students, I was the only White student.
One day toward the end of class the subject turned to rumors that the Reverend Jesse Jackson was preparing to make a bid to become President of the United States. Jackson was a well-known Civil Rights leader at the time and this was a time when political power in the African-American community was centered in Black churches. Then, as now, African-Americans were the most loyal Democratic constituency.
The discussion around Jackson’s pending Presidential bid didn’t really involve me, that I remember, but I volunteered my point of view. “There will never be a Black president of the United States.” I didn’t make the statement as my opinion of what should be, such as, “There should never be a Black president of the United States,” but as an opinion about my view of the state of racial politics and relationships in the country. As a White teenager living in one of the most segregated and racially divided metropolitan areas in the country, a Black President just didn’t seem a realistic possibility. To me, it seemed out of the realm of possibility. Of course, a few decades later we saw the first African-American President of the United States, Barrack Obama.
What surprises me now is that only one student, a girl a barely knew, called me out on my proclamation. A friend of mine, who was Black, even told me I was probably right. These were no subservient, cowardly kids either. Everyone of them had been through the wars, so to speak, and so had their parents and their parents before them. Growing up in Collinwood at that time for an African-American, or anyone for that matter, was not for the faint of heart. But as I said, except for that one girl, no one questioned me, at least to my face. And she was mad. I remember her walking out at the end of class with her best friend, who I knew better than her, and she was looking up at me sitting at the top and she told me I was wrong, and I would be proven wrong. And I was proven wrong.
At the time her anger at me seemed odd. I was just expressing an opinion, what at the time I think many if not most people, African-American and White, agreed with. What I think probably angered her was the nonchalant way I said it. That I was accepting of the idea that no Black person would EVER be elected president, without expressing regret that it was so, angered her. Should any group of citizens in this United States, founded on the principle that all men are created equal, feel that the highest aspirations are forbidden their children? I was blind to her feelings and the source of her anger.
When I hear today those who say that race relations are worse today than ever, I really think it’s a product of people not really appreciating how bad it used to be, and how far we’ve already come. As a nation we are certainly not where we should be, but we’ve come a long way from where we were. Racially divisive rhetoric is certainly not a thing totally of the past, from the Left, the Right, and the Center. Many still use race as an emotional accelerant to push agendas contrary to everyone’s best interests. But we are better, and we’ll continue to get better in the future.