“(The outrage over Sterling) doesn’t serve to encourage honest discussion but rather to silence questions and honest interchange as politically incorrect. This is a cause of real concern because political correctness fosters fear, suspicion, and misunderstanding and those are the steps back toward racism not away from it. The process of overcoming fear and prejudice rooted in ignorance will be much more successfully addressed naturally, patiently, and through experience and persuasion rather than through fear, intimidation, and coercion.”

I grew up in a mostly white neighborhoods but, for several years, I went to mixed-race schools. There was a lot of racial tension in my hometown back then. There were “race riots” in 1968 and tensions simmered for years after. Maybe they still do, I don’t know. There was busing (an attempt to create racially integrated public schools) which created new tensions. There was lots of racism around me on all sides. The African-American kids used racial epithets and the white kids used them. I brought an African-American friend home and a neighbor, about our age, came out on the porch and began shouting racial epithets at him (and me) for daring to be in the neighborhood. I wasn’t being enlightened. I didn’t think about it. It was ugly and beyond awkward.  I later lost that friend and, looking back, I think it was over race. He invited me to the movies, to a mostly African-American theater. I had been before and was willing to go but I didn’t have the money and for reasons I didn’t want to explain to him I couldn’t ask for it. I think he assumed that a white kid must have had a quarter for movie and so, the only reason I didn’t want to go was because it was a “black’ movie house. He never talked to me again. It took me decades to figure out what happened and even today I’m only guessing. There are lots of other stories and episodes but you get the picture.

Many white folks in my part of the country, in the 60s and 70s, had almost no personal experience with people of other races and racist expressions were commonplace. They weren’t directed at anyone in particular but at “that group over there” who was different from us. Many of my friends, in those years, were African-American. That changed when we moved to a smaller town but the experiences stayed with me.  Since then I’ve watched folks of various races mature as they became more familiar with people from different backgrounds. Depending on where one lived it wasn’t always easy to become familiar with different cultures and races. Most of the African Americans in Nebraska lived within a few miles of downtown Omaha and it’s a long ways from Big Springs to downtown Omaha. In the 60s and 70s there weren’t many African-Americans on television and those who appeared often played stereotypical characters. I suppose that The Cosby Show (1984-92) was the first time a lot of white folks ever saw a stable, prosperous, middle-class African-American family.

The recent ugly episode with Donald Sterling has, I fear, set back genuine progress in race relations in a couple of ways. First, people everywhere, in the media, in conversation, had to express their outrage at the horrible things Sterling said. Some of those expressions of outrage were probably genuine but I judge that many were for show, to demonstrate to everyone else how enlightened the outraged person is. This is a concern because these shows of moral indignation don’t really help us make progress in overcoming prejudice.

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