And I did not have a clue!

I found out something today and it made me feel really horrible because it showed me how little I understood the very world that I live in.  It told me that I lacked empathy and understanding on an issue I really thought I knew about well.  You see, I found out that there are blacks in this state that just don't feel safe in Western North Carolina, these mountains, even to the point of reacting in terror at the site of the confederate flag that hangs by a lot of businesses and homes in this area.

I did not grow up around hatred of different races.  I did grow up with little knowledge and little understanding of people of different races.  And it was a source of annoyance when the year after I graduated from high school in 1970 in south Florida, my younger cousins had to get on a bus before daylight to ride across West Palm Beach to attend a school that had been exclusively black.  

No one in my family ever said a bad word about black people, though I did have a few from my mother's side that used the "N" word.  They didn't say it with malice, it was just a word to describe people with dark skin.... the only word they seemed to know.  I didn't much like that word, but I couldn't say anything when they did it, I was just a kid.

In the West Palm Beach area, you had to go North to get to the south, culturally.  As a kid, I didn't know any blacks.  Once in awhile, in the summer, a station wagon would drive slowly down our street.  There'd be a black woman driving and a few black kids on the back bumper with baskets of tomatoes.  The kids would jump off and go to the houses.  And we'd always buy from them.  Fresh tomatoes from the Glades were a treat, and we bought them to support the people who worked hard and were poor.  And I remember very well, the day I learned that little black girls with bunches of tiny braids were called pickaninnies.  Again, it was not a derogatory word, just what they were called.

I had my first black friend in California when my then husband was in the Air Force.  It was just as the war was winding down in Viet Nam.  The black guy worked with my husband and he had the oddest name, in my opinion.  He was called "Pork Chop".  It was hard to find work as a military wife, so Pork Chop's wife and I hung out at a swimming pool.  I learned that black skin does sunburn, it just doesn't show as much as my white skin that turned red.

Years later and back home, I taught at the middle school and watched the kids, black and white, play together like there were no differences and figured forced integration had actually done some real good for this country.

A few years later, I went to work in the mental health field as a case manager.  One of the other case managers and I had trouble getting along.  She was black and about my age, which meant she grew up before integration. And she seemed ready to blame me for all kinds of things.  Our third office mate- also black but young enough to have experienced integrated schools- tried to solve the differences.  We ended up putting a line of duct tape on the floor down the middle of the room.  When I left there five years later, we were fine- hugged and honestly said we'd miss each other and it was so nice working together.

At the time I left Florida, I was living in a suburb of West Palm Beach and it was of mixed races.  And the very next suburb was also of mixed races, though more heavily black.  The streets were completely blocked on Martin Luther King's Day for the big parade.  I always marched in the parade, you might as well, as you couldn't go anywhere.  And I was active with several peace groups, and some of them would be there.  There was never any racial tension that I could feel.

But things have changed in recent years.  And I'm in the real South, in North Carolina.  I'm a founding member of the local NAACP chapter, though, admittedly we don't have very many blacks.  The focus these days is on poor people, income inequality (not necessarily just by race) and immigration issues.  And I have been unobservant, at the very least, and unfeeling and prejudiced, myself, at the worst.  

And I am so, so, sorry!!!!  You know, I do have C-PTSD and I know about terror so frightening that you have to take off and run as far as you can.  But I did not realize that many blacks feel this way, every day, too.  I know now.  And I encourage all whites who think they are so very liberal and understanding to think hard on this themselves.