"Wow! I bet white people get treated this way all the time!"

Empowerer

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Sun Jul-26-09 01:11 PM
Original message

"Wow! I bet white people get treated this way all the time!"

Edited on Sun Jul-26-09 01:28 PM by Empowerer

Several years ago, I purchased a new car from a dealership owned by longtime family friends. Because the salesmen and dealership employees had been instructed by the boss to take good care of me, I received the absolute best red carpet treatment imaginable.

When I went to the dealership with a friend to sign the papers and pick up my new car, he was blown away by how everyone in the dealership was falling all over themselves to serve me. When my salesman left the room for a minute, he turned to me and said, "Wow! I bet white people get treated this way all the time!"

I tried to explain to him that this wasn't "white people" treatment but "friend of the owner" treatment. But he was having no parts of it.

He truly believed that whites operate at a whole different level when no one is looking. And that perspective is understandable.

My father always told me that the primary purpose of racial segregation was not, as commonly believed, to keep the races separate. In fact, even in the most rampantly segregated environments, whites and blacks intermingled quite regularly - blacks were in white people's homes, cared for their children, bathed and dressed the adults. Their children played together - until time for school. White men frequently slept with black women, etc.

No, the point was not to keep blacks away from them. The point was to impose a badge of inferiority upon blacks, to make us feel there was something mysterious and special and unattainable about whites that we could never match or replicate.

For example, I can't tell you how many blacks who went from segregated public schools into integrated schools who told me they were flabbergasted that the white kids weren't any smarter than they were. They just assumed the white kids were smarter and the separation allowed that lie to be perpetuated.

We have run into the same thing in professional settings when we discovered that it wasn't that hard to get better grades than the white med student or to best a white lawyer in court or to beat a white political opponent, and so on.

Yet, a continuing remnant of the racial divide between blacks and whites is the misapprehension that all white people are treated better than all black people. Unfortunately, the result of this is a tendency of many blacks to presume racial bias whenever we are treated badly, even where it doesn't exist, which is perfectly understandable under the circumstances. It also leads to the tendency among some whites to dismiss actual cases of racial discrimination and to accuse blacks who are naturally suspicious in certain situations of "playing the race card," etc.

This is why continued open conversations about these issues are so important. But we can't leave it up to the president to do it - it's not his responsibility. It is ours.