As a black middle-aged woman, what I appreciate most about the comments on this site is that nearly everyone who has contributed a comment recognizes a possibility of a reality outside their own sphere of experience. This is certainly more encouraging than what I usually have to hear. There is evidence that what the average black person experiences is much different from whites, but I don’t necessarily think every black person perceives these differences.
My own teenage child, for instance, raised protected, nurtured and overwhelmingly sheltered, has no idea what I am talking about when I try to teach or impart the significant challenges that blacks endured and experienced throughout American history. How can he? He has been taught a standardized curriculum by people who have only the most cursory understanding of that history themselves. And he hasn’t had intimate and long enduring experience with the experiences that would illustrate the subtleties of racism.
In my youth, I don’t remember a single unkind word spoken in our home about white people and we entertained many white friends. I grew up in the ‘burbs and attended a white protestant church. What I have that my son doesn’t have is first hand knowledge of the struggles of my own parents and grandparents who were intelligent, educated people clearly short-changed and limited in what they could attain in society. I personally saw their struggles, heard their stories and visited their once Jim Crowed homesteads. I was given an opportunity to glimpse history in the immediacy of their personal experiences.
They never had to lecture me on what it means to be black, I saw it first hand and therefore had some concept of the great injustice that is served by ignorance. I have lived a few years now and my experience as a black person has borne out an insidious racism that is not necessarily overt, though that has been the case at times. People should understand that this baby boomer generation is truly appreciative of the people who loved us, guided us and enlightened us, and died for our right to be considered full fledged human beings. As our knowledge base and personal experiences have highlighted the truth of our experiences, we have arrived at the same conclusions a “rabble rouser” like the Rev. Wright so ardently expouses. Without a sense of history and perspective, my son will eventually find his own way to many of the same conclusions, and nothing will invalidate that experience.
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A man only becomes wise when he begins to calculate the approximate depth of his ignorance.” Gian Carlo Menotti
