How I Learned the Truth About Race
And lost my liberal illusions.
Once when I was in high school, I annoyed my conservative parents by asking a cute Hispanic girl to a dance. I knew this would bother them, but I never understood why. They had occasionally given me vague hints to find a mate of my own race so as to “keep my heritage white.” However, they failed to explain exactly what that meant, or why it was important. Perhaps they took too much for granted. They had spent most of their lives in white towns and I also grew up mostly among white people.
In my younger days, my libertarian views clouded my understanding of race, which I thought was a corrupt, collectivist concept. To add to the confusion, my mainstream, 1980s Christian upbringing had taught me always to look past the surface and into the heart–a teaching I interpreted too broadly. I had a self-righteous moral universalism that was sometimes openly hostile to the values of my own parents. In my arrogance, I saw my elders much the way Michelle Obama sees older white people: as misinformed throwbacks who needed to be enlightened by young people.
This was my view of race throughout my college years, but what happened after graduation changed all that. The shock of making a living in a large, multiracial city shattered my race-denying idealism and set me on the path to truth.
I had a liberal arts degree and little interest in graduate school, so I made ends meet by working as a security guard and as a substitute teacher. When I was growing up I had a few black and Hispanic friends, but my background sheltered me from the madness that is the majority-minority high school. I learned more about race in one semester of substitute teaching than I did in all of my formal education. Nothing could have prepared me for that.
Certainly, the one-day orientation class I got from the school district didn't prepare me. We covered very basic policies and procedures, and I thought it odd that I didn't learn anything that suggested I was actually supposed to teach. . . .
Posts
