When I was learning that the sky is blue and the grass is green, and that the surf tickles when it rushes between my toes and pulls the sand out from under my feet, I learned that people were a pinkish-tan color called “flesh” in the crayon box. ALL of society was that color, without exception.
Well, there were some other people- “colored” people, and they lived in one little junky part of town that I was told to stay away from. “Colored Town,” was one of the names for it. It had a lot of nicknames and some were real insulting and humorous. We steered far clear of colored town most of the time, and we never went through it- always around.
The colored people were human beings like us, and deserved to be treated kindly (except when they didn’t deserve it), but they were DEFINITELY inferior in every way- or so we thought. It wasn’t that we considered ourselves the cream of society- oh heavens no. We did not like snooty people. We would have laughed at the suggestion that we were privileged. And it wasn’t exactly that the coloreds were of a lower social standing. It was more like they did not have a social standing. They were not a part of society. They were functional, and otherwise invisible. They were a bus driver here- A maid or a cook there- A lot of garbage men and janitors. But that’s all they were- functions. They were not a part of the society for which they functioned.
They were expected to stay out of the way- to perform their functions without fanfare. I didn’t think about what they were doing when they were not driving the bus or picking up the garbage. If I had thought about it at all, I probably would have thought they were sitting in a junky little house in colored town, waiting for time to drive the bus again.
They didn’t shop in the stores, eat in the restaurants worship at the churches, or come to our side of town at all unless they were performing their functions. They didn’t go to our doctors or hospitals or schools or parks. And they didn’t set foot on our beaches. All the years that I was enjoying the tickle of the surf between my toes and under my feet, I NEVER saw any of our black residents at the beach and it did not seem unusual that they weren’t there. It would have seemed unusual if they HAD been there. My hometown is surrounded by water on three sides, as is my home state, with some of the most beautiful white sand beaches in the world. Yet I never really even noticed the absence of colored people enjoying those beaches. It was just the way things were and always had been. I didn’t think about colored people at all most of the time. I certainly thought about them when racial issues came up. I sympathized with the colored people, or African Americans, if they preferred to be called that. I thought they were being treated unfairly. I felt quite self-righteous about my compassion and I was judgmental of those who were not as sympathetic. But I rarely thought about the colored people in my daily life because they were not a part of it. That is just how it was and how it had always been.
Over the years since then, I have known a lot of black co-workers, classmates, teachers, colleagues, next-door neighbors, and even a few friends. I have also gotten to know some black criminals, alcoholics, drug addicts, and child abusers. I have discovered that EVERYTHING I learned about black people in the first 2 decades of my life was wrong. They are just people like us. In fact, they ARE us- not “them.” But I have to keep reminding myself of that fact, and creating a new understanding of the world to replace the mistake. It is as if the sky had been pink, and it is now blue- beautiful blue. I love looking at the blue sky, but I am still often surprised to find that the sky isn’t pink, while I come to understand more and more that it never was. We once thought it was, but it was not.
Confessions of a Southern White Woman 