A year or two ago, UVA board of visitors member Syd Dorsey gave a talk in which she explained why she chose to work on subcommittees other than the diversity subcommittee. Dorsey's party affiliation is not the issue here, and I have no idea what it is. What's important is that in discussing her choices she rendered functional two painfully obvious points.
1. Minorities have talents and passions beyond their minority status.
2. Real diversity requires commitment, work and leadership on the part of the majority.
At the time Dorsey's public speaking skills didn't impress me one way or the other. But it is a tribute to her particular leadership style, that many months later I return to the ideas she chose to emphasize.
Here's something that happened over 30 years ago. I barely knew my three year old stepson, and we took a trip to K-Mart. He had spent a number of months with his extremely prejudiced grandparents. On the way into the store he shouted, "Would you look at all those jigaboos!" Yes, I was shocked and appalled. I was also quite young myself and humiliated. But this goes back to Dorsey's second point: the situation required my commitment, work and leadership. Not just that day, but over many years. And by the way, I did not need the explicit opinion of the people in the parking lot to confirm that this was unacceptable behavior.
I was not responsible for creating that situation. But I was responsible for trying to impart a sense of the most basic decency and fair-mindedness to a young child in my care. And I was angry at the deepest level. I had naively hoped that moving out of the South meant moving away from racism altogether. My stepson's comment that day was only a symptom and the barest tip of the iceberg. I found myself dealing with a familial and societal legacy that I viscerally rejected and wanted to remain "beneath my dignity."
This is very much how I feel about George Allen's macaca comment, though the situations are hardly comparable. My stepson was only three years old, and his words hurt and humiliated not only me but also the people who overheard them. George Allen is an adult. I could hardly run away from a three year old in a parking lot, but I can't run away from George Allen either. And I didn't take George Allen to raise. Like it or not, as our Senator George Allen speaks for all Virginians.
We know that incident is just the tip of the iceberg. We did not create that situation either, but it is our responsibility to do something about it. This macaca comment was public behavior post Allen's highly publicized reconciliation experience in Farmville. Macaca was the new, improved and reformed George Allen speaking. The best he had to offer was unacceptable.
It makes us feel big to forgive, doesn't it? There's something voyeuristically addictive about fighting and making up. It's so easy to get sucked into a cycle of offenses and subsequent apologies. Duke Cunningham may have raised the bar on that one. But now I try to remember that whenever one of these mini-dramas is going on, the real work is not getting done.
You done heard it ten times or more but
I swear I done changed.
I swear I done changed.
-- Harold Melvin
Now that some of us are older we have a tendency to let those type of remarks slide because of our own guilt from our youth.
What I cannot forgive from the video is the arrogant display of superiorty from someone with a mic on a stage. Racist or not it was done to completely embarrass some one of a diffdernt race and to boast the speakers image.
A display that is not acceptable for an elected official.
Furthermore I say who ever supports this individual should go look in a mirror and examine their principals.
Many white people were furious, terrified or both over school integration. Though I haven't seen it articulated, I do believe that for many older folks court-ordered busing is what is triggered with the phrase "activist judges."
Then in the St. Louis during the mid-80's, when my stepson was in school, we were again dealing with busing. He was in a small neighborhood church school whose administrators immediately wielded their newly found power less than gracefully. Well, more than that. It turned into a white flight school, and people were all but pounding on the doors. There was a near hysteria in the community that I just did not see in Richmond. We opted for public schools then, because it was very obvious even to the kids that this was a white flight school.
And that's the point. In my view it was the responsibility of people like the administrators of that little school to reach out. It would not have been at all difficult for them to offer scholarships to black students and set an example. But no. Their hot commodity was all white all the time.
To answer your question, we started with explaining that some words are not nice and hurt people's feelings. It was more difficult to "teach" my in-laws that they could not say the n-word around the children.
Between your and Gordie's posts, I wonder if those of us who are a little older shouldn't talk about our more recent racist past - and present - more explicitly.
I left St. Louis in 1985, and things got much worse out there. Thanks to your comment, I did some googling on busing and St. Louis. I'm not surprised to encounter Gordon Lee Baum of CCC infamy and John Ashcroft
Bugel is no obscure figure in St. Louis. Between 1987 and 1993 he led a white militant faction on the city's school board, fighting against implementation of a judicially-ordered busing plan. During that period, when urban school integation became the hottest political issue in Missouri, Ashcroft served as state attorney general and governor.These days, however, Bugel's cause célèbre is the strange matter of Dr. Sell, a dentist whose friends (and former patients) include Gordon Baum, the "chief executive officer" of the national CCC. In May 1997, the dentist was arrested in his office by FBI agents on charges of Medicaid fraud. Later that year, the FBI was approached by a St. Louis couple who made a stunning accusation against Sell and his wife Mary. They claimed that the Sells had tried to hire them to murder both the FBI agent who had arrested Dr. Sell and a former employee of the dentist who was the chief witness against him in the fraud case.
Here's another source: http://www.thecommon...
St. Louis also had more than its share of crime families and their violent activities.
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On the other side of the spectrum, there are many people in St. Louis who have spent years working their butts off for justice, equality and the environment. Here are two that I remember fondly.