I See Color
I was born in 1965 on the same Sunday afternoon in February that Malcolm X was being gunned down in Harlem for being too Muslim and not black enough for Elijah Muhammad. When I started school a few years later, I did so in one of the first cohorts in my area of North Carolina to go through 12 years of public school as an integrated class. In fact, my county had to combine not two but three school systems since Native Americans were also no longer forced to go to segregated schools.
Except for two years in a South Alabama school that only had one black student, the son of a teacher, I spent most of my schooling in the racially mixed central and eastern part of NC. Not only were my classmates racially diverse, my teachers were too. I went to high school in a large military-associated community. The Army was desegregated in 1948 and for years served as a meritocracy where soldiers like Colin Powell rose through the ranks. In 1981, my high school football team reflected the racial makeup of the student body. Our captain was a black nose tackle named Bubba Hardin, and he was everybody's captain, not just the black players.
I went to basic training 11 days after I graduated. I had a black drill sergeant and a white drill sergeant, and I never really thought about their race at all, just about staying out of their way and as under the radar as I could get. I encountered my first prolonged exposure to Latino culture while in the military after I hung out with a group of guys from a Puerto Rican National Guard unit.
Throughout all of this, racism wasn't invisible. There were adults I knew who used the N-word, and telling racial "jokes" was tolerated a whole lot more than it is now. The KKK had an infamous billboard beside a nearby highway, and interracial dating was exceedingly rare. Churches were segregated, and there were certain cultural elements in dress and music that were tied in with one race or another.
Then I got out of the military and went to work in the prison system, and things stopped making sense. I'd see jail buses come rolling in from communities like Durham and Charlotte, and the new inmates for admission would be overwhelmingly and disproportionately black. They were just about all poor and just about all of them had had a public defender. Even though I was only in my early 20s and lacking a college education, I could see that I was working in a system with a stacked deck.
The wonderfully segregated high school I'd gone to had morphed into something different. By the time my cousin, 12 years my junior, played football for my alma mater, there were only three white kids on the whole team. Somehow, it had become part of people's racial identity to choose a sport.
Around this time, I met the organizers and activists who have shaped the rest of my life. They look at the racial mix of every situation and they taught me to do the same. I got invited to join a ceremonial military unit in my hometown that dates back to the Revolutionary War called the Fayetteville Independent Light Infantry. I asked if it was all white. It was. I didn't join.
I went to work in a county adjacent to the one where I was from. I remember realizing that one of the biggest schools in the county, a rural middle school, didn't have a single teacher of color except for coaches and special education. I looked at the group photos for things like Battle of the Books and Science Olympiad, and all of the kids were always white. This was in the first decade of the current century. My own kids were in high school at this time, and I was flabbergasted to see all white and all black football and cheerleading squads from different schools. It was far removed from my own experience.
My post-retirement job is at a small liberal arts college with a diverse student body, an active DEI department, and a sizable international contingent. I love it, and I am proud to work there, even if we do have a few old white guys who complain out loud about diversity hiring. My own boss, the school's CIO, is a solid progressive with the hiring record to prove it.
I continue to look at the color makeup of spaces where I put myself and I try to avoid whites-only environments like the plague. There is a 99.99% white country club nearby, and I have zero interest in having anything to do with it. I think it's funny every four years when the area's white voters put up many, many more signs than our POC politicians do. White folks get all excited looking at the signs, and then on election day, when 7 out of 8 city council members turn out to be POC, I laugh my ass off and feel gratitude for the people who were knocking on doors and organizing voter drives while Bubba was putting up MAGA signs.
I wish people would drop the old "I don't see color" lie to explain away their apathy on race. You'd better see color, or else you could find yourself at a Klan meeting thinking you were going to a political rally. Ask Charlottesville.
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