Prejudice is Soul Deep

A friend asked me to sell his Cadillac convertible for him. That was not one of my duties as a pastor, but he was out of town too often to answer adds and sell the car himself. I had several interested people look at the car and take it for a test drive. I was too busy to go with them, so I tossed them the keys without a worry. Then a black man came to see the car and showed interest. He too asked to drive the car and a bolt of fear ran through me. Should I let him take the car by himself or should I go with him? He was better dressed than any of the others who had driven the car. His speech revealed a cultured, well-spoken, educated man, but he was black. I handed him the keys and worried until he returned. Then I began to wonder where that fear, that prejudice came from? I thought I was past that. I was a fan of the civil rights movement. I thought the “I have a dream” speech by Dr. Martin Luther King should be added to the Bible. I had made friends with two black ministers and we had lunch together on a regular basis. I had made progress but now I came face to face with what must be some kind of embedded prejudice that burrows deep into our very souls and hides from our consciousness.

As I struggled and searched for where that came from and what caused it in my life, I shared that story with a black friend who told me he had experienced the same thing inside of himself when, working as a security guard and responding to a call he automatically thought a group of young black men were the problem when they actually were the victims. Evidently prejudice is deeper that just its outward signs. Evidently it hides in the corners of our souls and must be dug out, admitted to and fought.

This led me to try to understand were my prejudice came from because I don’t think I can move past it until I deal with what caused it. It seems to have had several sources in my life.

 PREJUDICE BY OSMOSIS

I was not raised by prejudiced parents, at least the language of prejudice was not part of our home. I never remember my parents using the N-word though they may have done so on occasions since that was such a normal part of the vernacular at that time. They did not teach me to be prejudiced but they did not make any effort to prevent it from being part of my life. They just did not talk about race pro or con.

I was raised in a small town in Southwest Oklahoma that could have fit well in Alabama. We had an unusually large black population due to the large amount of cotton grown there and because one man imported a train load of ex-slaves. Many houses in our town, unlike any other Oklahoma town that I know about, had “servant quarters” in the back yard. These were one room affairs with no electricity, gas, or running water where black people lived while doing some housework to pay the rent.

Our house had a detached garage with one room on the end where Easter Pipkins lived during most of my childhood. I spent a lot of time with Easter who served as sitter for the three of us boys and did laundry for our mother. I would visit her in her one room quite often and remember helping her make lye soap on occasions. Easter had a rather profound impact on my raising. She was always someone I could talk with and enjoy.

I had close relationship with a young black man named Jessie who shined shoes in a barber shop. My Sunday School class would climb out the window and go visit with Jessie instead of going to church. I enjoyed his stories without ever realizing what he could have achieved if given a chance.

And yet, I was eating lunch in a cafe and saw a black man being sent to the alley where he would have to eat lunch and I remember thinking that I would be too nauseous to eat if a black person was sitting at my table. I wasn’t taught it and I had positive experiences with black people I admired and loved and yet I was that prejudiced? Why? Because it was all around me and just a way of life.

Most of the black folks lived in an area across the tracks called the Flats. Why were such places always across the tracks? It was almost a forbidden place in our minds and we never went there. I have no idea what the living conditions were, and it never crossed my mind to even care. One of the most respected men in town owned many of the “houses” there and it never dawned on us that he was a slum lord.

I visited the small museum there a few years ago and they had just found a room upstairs from a building downtown that had been the meeting place for the Klan. The membership role was still in the room. It reads like the who’s who of the city. I was intensely pleased that my father’s name was not there but most of the people I looked up to were. I think I became prejudiced by osmosis.

 PREJUDICE FROM IGNORING AND ACCEPTING

I accepted the idea of “place.” “Place” means we see a people as inferior to us. They are limited intellectually, socially, with no ability to do better or even the motivation to try. They are where they belong and should be content with their lot. If a black person dared to step out of their “place” they were called uppity and that alone could lead to a lynching.

After “place” is accepted it becomes easy to not notice the separate drinking fountains in the courthouse, the separate bathrooms, separate waiting rooms at the depot and the bus station… not allowed in restaurants or even cafes to eat, no motel or hotel for them to stay the night. The list is endless and was never noticed.

I am ashamed of not noticing that our back yard had a wash house built over the storm cellar. The passage between the wash house and Easter’s front door could not be over eight feet and yet the wash house had running water, the wash house had a gas heater, the wash house had electricity and none of these could reach eight feet to Easter’s room? And I never noticed? An extension cord would have given her lights and the ability to iron without pumping up a coal oil burning contraption. I did not notice, I just accepted it as the way things were.

 NOW WHAT?

A rather unpleasant man accosted me with the question, “Where is the most segregated place in America at eleven o’clock Sunday morning?” I don’t know what I said, but a day later I wish I had said, “you mean besides your house?” The most meaningful and exciting thing I have done is to make friends with not only black people but people of all colors, cultures, races, religions, and sexual preferences. I am a long way from covering them all, but every step has been a time of learning and of great joy. We cannot defeat prejudice from a distance. It must be up close and personal. It is there that we can lay down our deep-seated reluctance and see the beauty we missed. I have become entranced by the beauty of colored skin. After all I am a follower of a brown skinned Palestinian Jew. What is so special about white skin? White women lay out in the sun until they get cancer trying to be brown.

I have a long list of people from every race and culture that I admire greatly. Some of them I rank as ones I would most like to know personally. I have read the life stories of some of them and consider them as heroes. But nothing takes the place of having personal friends. That is the only way we will ever get to the ideal of not even noticing color at all. Just human beings living among human beings with differences that matter about as much as being left or right-handed. That may not happen until the next life but when we get there, I hope God is a woman of color.

 MY FEAR

Preachers have tried to scare me with the threat of judgment day for most of my life. They pictured me having to stand before the whole world and confess every sin I have ever done. Knowing God is love has relieved me of that fear, but I do fear having to explain to God why I failed to love the folks He loved. How will I ever explain having accepted “place” for a whole race of folks He created in His own image? Then I hope I can find Easter Pipkins and Jessie; I have some begging for forgiveness to do.