On My Personal Racism

 

On My Personal Racism

February 20, 2026

This is an entry I just put on my personal diary edited just slightly for posting:

I just saw an ad in which two children, one Black and one white, are playing patty cake. It made me think. I have said that I am trying to see the person first and race second. But I have been so conditioned by American racism that I can hardly do it. How do I get over race being so unconsciously significant? It’s not consciously significant. I get how immoral and stupid racism is. But cultural conditioning is a powerful thing, and the American culture in which I grew up is profoundly racist. No one ever told me Black people were inferior. But when I was a child we chanted “Ee Meenee  Miney, Mo, catch a nigger by the toe.” And I thought nothing of it. My Mom said she didn’t like watching the NBA on TV because the players were all Black and they all looked alike. I though she was being silly, but I never really thought of her a racist; but clearly she was. The few Black students at South Eugene High School when I was there in the early 1960s were always outsiders. I never knew any of them, nor did I particularly want to. I remember the Black couple I once spent some time with In Germany. The husband was a professor at Wayne State University, no small accomplishment of course. His wife was a beautiful young Black woman. Mom, my brother Pete, and I wandered around Frankfurt am Main with her while Dad and her husband were off doing something or other, and I though nothing of it except I found it odd how the Germans stared at us like they’d never seen a Black person before. Or perhaps they’d never seen a Black person and white people being friendly with each other before.  

When I was a parish pastor, I had a few Black parishioners. They were both problematic in their own ways, one worse than the other. The Black parishioner I had for the longest time, and I, I like to think, got along fine. Late in his life he told me I was a good man, that despite the fact that we disagreed about many things about the Christian faith. I took him to mean he didn’t see me as racist, and I flatter myself that in my relationship with him I never was.

Yet when I see a person I don’t know, the first thing I see is race. I like to think that I don’t react negatively to anyone’s race, but I can’t help but wonder why it is the first thing I see. Maybe it’s because I’ve never lived anywhere where there were all that many people of color. I did have many Black clients at the Legal Action Center, where I worked for five and half years as a legal services lawyer representing low income tenants in eviction cases; and I flatter myself that I treated all of them with appropriate respect and saw them not just as Black but as Black people. I learned a bit about Black American culture from them, something I very much appreciate.

Well, whatever. I was brought up in a racist culture, and I can’t undo that fact. So I just try to be aware of it. To counteract it and to reject racism whenever I’m with a person of color. Still, my limited personal experience of it tells me how deeply, radically racist white American culture is. Even those of us who try so hard not to be racist are, deep within, racist. I can’t deny it. All I can do is hope and pray that I am able sufficiently to reject it.