Whenever I hear a politician say, "this is not a racist country," two things happen. First I wonder who they might be (usually a Republican) to make such a ridiculous statement. Either they never studied US history, or they have lived an incredibly sheltered life.
My first 20 years on this planet were spent in relatively all-white neighborhoods. I was aware of other nationalities through the Latino, Black, and Asian populations that surrounded my neighborhood. To be sure we had diverse groups in my school and community, but for the most part, everyone and everything was white. I idolized Black baseball players as a kid, but even then I had little knowledge of the context in which they played and the unwritten rules they were subject to.
In college I studied US history and because of the zeitgeist of the late 1960s, I ended up majoring in African American history. Reading books about the brutality of slavery and the autobiographies of enslaved people, I learned of a reality that never entered my jr. High and High School history books.
So there I was in 1969, fresh out of college with a newly minted history degree boarding a plane for Texas. Within a month of that landing, I had witnessed racism first hand. I bore witness to what some folks can never acknowledge.
During my training as a VISTA Volunteer, I was sent with two other trainees to Temple, Texas. We hereto spend a weekend in this small town south of Austin, and file a report on what we noticed with respect to the poverty and the social structure. In a shabby hotel room that first night I found a small phone book. It was about half the size of normal phone books with both white page and yellow page sections. My partners and I used the phone book to determine which groups of people lived where so that we could determine what kinds of services were available, for whom. In the yellow pages, certain businesses were labeled (colored) so that the residents of Temple could know where their business was welcome and where it was not.
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