San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Not possible to write too much about race
In Jasper on Easter weekend of 1999 is when I first tried to redeem the soul of white America.
That’s not how I thought about it then. If I had, I’d have known it wasn’t original, that when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was founded by Martin Luther King Jr. and other ministers, it was with the goal to “redeem the soul of America.”
I simply wanted to give Jasper a chance to not be defined by the most notorious race crime since the civil rights movement. In 1998, a black man named James Byrd Jr. was beaten by three white supremacists who then chained him to the back of a pickup and dragged him for 3 miles along a blacktop road, a gruesome journey that tore off his head and right arm.
I chose Easter weekend to visit because it was between trials and I thought I’d get a more accurate feel for the East Texas town. I left thinking it was a town with problems and a history, but it shouldn’t be defined by its most heinous act.
Next came Tulia in 2003. The tiny Panhandle town was infamous because 46 people — 39 of them black — were sentenced to prison although there was no evidence to back up a white rogue undercover agent who claimed he made the drug buys from the defendants. I left thinking a community shouldn’t be labeled racist because of one bad law enforcement officer.
I took my Redeem White America tour to Mississippi in 2004 for a nine-day driving trip because I thought it was too easy to scapegoat the state. I left thinking that its well-earned reputation for racial violence didn’t minimize the same problems in other states.
The first time I wrote about race I was in the third grade and we had some free time in class one afternoon. I wrote a onepage essay titled “Black People are People Too.”
It was 1968, and I have no idea what prompted it or what I wrote. What compels an 8-yearold to write about race? What compels his 59-year-old self to write about race?
When I began writing a column for the Express-News in 1994, I made a conscious decision to avoid race for as long as possible. I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a “black columnist,” with whatever limitations that implied.
That lasted through four columns.
My then 10-year-old nephew was wrestling with why his being a black male scared white people. He was 10. So, I wrote “Life’s lessons on being black,” a primer on what he should expect as he got older.
In my first go-round here, I wrote more than 2,300 columns for the paper. The great majority of them weren’t about race. I did write about race more than other columnists.
I also wrote more about child abuse, nonviolence and Halle Berry than the other columnists. But no one ever accused me of writing too much about child abuse, nonviolence or Halle Barry.
Yet any column on race elicited complaints from some white readers that I “write too much about race” or “only about race.”
Though I wrote about race to inform and not inflame, to build bridges and not walls, I was always ready for the slurs that filled my emails and voicemail. I now realize I wasted too much time defending myself.
During my time away from the newspaper, thinking about those trips to Jasper, Tulia and Mississippi, I realized I was playing defense for whites, doing my best to be honest and create necessary discomfort while making clear I don’t believe most white people are racist or more susceptible to prejudice than anyone else.
I do think many casually accept that their encounters — or lack of encounters — with race are the norm and nullify the experiences of those whose encounters with race aren’t so infrequent or casual.
As individuals and generations, we aren’t responsible for our ancestors’ actions, but we are obligated to understand the consequences, good and bad, of those actions. The more we can candidly discuss this, the better we shall be.
I should have written more columns about race, but I was cowered by the “you write too much about race” voices who never wanted to have a meaningful dialogue with me.
This will change. I don’t like writing about race. It’s exhausting and extracts psychological, mental and physical tolls. But this nation and its immense promise are worth it. The children in my life are worth it.
I have new nephews growing up in a country where some will view them with baseless fear. I’ll write more about race if it reduces the chances of my nephews and nieces being profiled, stalked and having a knee on their neck as they plead, “I can’t breathe.”
I don’t like writing about race. It’s exhausting and extracts psychological, mental and physical tolls. But this nation and its immense promise are worth it.