The Racism of Your Peers
Just before Christmas every year I would get together with a group of guys from high school, most of whom I’d played football with, guys I’d known for forty years. We’d meet at the same restaurant with white tablecloths, have dinner and laugh and catch up on our families and work.
For a few years it was a euphoric event. I felt high being around these old chums and there was plenty of good-natured ribbing and war stories, laughter and drinks.
The Christmas before the 2012 election, politics came up, and fifteen guys at a long table started talking like there was no way President Obama would be reelected. They scoffed at the idea. Who’s it gonna be? they said. Gingrich? Romney?
“I think the President’s going to be reelected,” I said, and there was a shocked hush at the table. “I voted for him, and I’ll vote for him again.” A couple of former teammates pushed their chairs away in a joking way, like I was tainted, or had some disease, staring at me. There were giggles down the table, as if reelecting President Obama was a joke.
Immediately they started attacking the President for not okaying the Canadian pipeline, which they claimed would’ve provided jobs, but really only a small number. There were mumblings about him being a Muslim, a communist, wanting to take our guns away, all of the usual phony accusations made against the first black President. After a few minutes I looked down the table and said, “What the hell’s wrong with you guys? You sound like a bunch of rednecks.”
“Hey,” our team quarterback said, taking the lead, “I liked Martin Luther King and all, but they’ve got everything we’ve got now, what do they want? I really want to know, tell me.” “Yeah,” a couple of other guys said, “What do they want from us? All they do is complain and whine, while they’re out there killing each other. People like Al Sharpton are out there grandstanding, encouraging racism themselves. When do we get our rights?”
By this time I was almost speechless. They? Really? Is this all you’ve got? I thought. Because I thought there was more to you than this. More objective discernment, more vision and intelligence. So all of these middle class “Christian” white guys I’d grown up with, believed to be fair-minded people, saw this as some “they” against “us” game? The first black President and “his” people against the rest of “us.”
I sat there with a knot in my stomach, knowing it was over. What else was there to say? Millions of white Americans had helped elect President Obama on his merits, which were considerable, and still believed in him, and I was pretty sure we were going to elect him again. But I had to sit there and listen to this thinly veiled racist palaver.
If this group of white Americans at this table couldn’t appreciate the character and work of this wise, scholarly President, because they saw this as some black versus white thing, what the hell was I doing with them?
And then the quarterback told a flat out racial joke, and everybody laughed, and I was in the twilight zone. Because there’d been this sudden segue from, what do they want? (As if that wasn’t condescending enough) to literally ridiculing, making hateful, bigoted jokes about the very people you’re claiming are out of line for simply wanting to be treated the same as yourself.
The irony in the conversation was deafening. The quarterback had made my point for me, but he really didn’t give a damn that everything he was saying was racist now, and that the whole table’s real motive to hate President Obama was primarily racist. Because there were just no grounds for hating this earnest and capable leader, who, after the disastrous administration before it, had brought us and the world back from the precipice of financial Armageddon.
Who had been left to pick up the pieces of two wars, one with the wrong country in no way connected to the people who had attacked us on 911. And I knew, and know damn well, had this man’s skin been white, and especially if his party had been Republican, he would’ve been regaled and celebrated for doing exactly what President Obama had done. His loyalty to country, spiritual faith, and birthplace would never have been questioned.
Disagreeing with him? You bet. There had always been that with any President. I disagreed with him on a number of things. We could all disagree.
“They don’t want racial jokes made about them for one thing,” I said. “They want the same respect you and I have, that we give to one another.”
But it was like I was talking to first graders now. Deaf first graders. They had already doubled down on their racial beliefs. They had dug in a long time ago.
We’d grown up in the same white middle class neighborhoods, had every advantage of education, and higher education, and didn’t have to deal with being victims of crime. We had it easy. In high school most of us seemed respectful regarding race, or so I assumed, with some crazy exceptions.
But heading into middle age and beyond, something had happened to these spoiled white men. Their parent’s racism kicked in, or generations of it, along with a stubborn mental laziness, and just not wanting to be bothered with anybody else’s problems. Rather than realizing racial justice was necessary for a healthy society, they slid back into a cynical smugness, a klanishness, selfishness, and finally a cavalier hatred. What did they have to lose?
President Obama represented an existential threat to them. He was smarter than they were, to begin with. He had class, was a constitutional scholar, and spoke well. To most of them, deep down, he was that uppity black man who dared to tell white people anything, how to live, how to behave, how to treat one another, especially how to feel about race.
And so they called him “divisive,” although there was no evidence he’d divided anybody. If a white man had made the same statements about race he had, he might have been ignored, even praised. But when President Obama, a half black man raised by a white mother and white grandparents, spoke about race, it was somehow outrageous, unseemly, out of place. How dare he.
Looking down this long table of my peers, I realized I was pretty much alone. I loved these guys, but I was not one of them. Racial injustice had burned in me since I was a child, since I first observed white people speaking down to black people with coldness and surliness, as if they had an entitled right to treat them differently. And I’d cringed and watched black people accept it.
But it did not jive with the scriptures I’d been taught in church: “If you do it unto the least of these, my brethren, you do it unto me.”
Or what my parents had taught me and exemplified in showing respect for every person I met.
That night I was disheartened and disappointed by the racism of my peers. I knew when I said goodnight to them I wouldn’t be coming back the next year, that I was all done with that ritual. I have many other good friends who are not racist, and together we reelected President Obama for a second term as President in 2012. I’ve never been more proud of anything I’ve done.
My respect for the man and his humble sincerity have grown every year. Regardless of the veiled hatred of racists in America, he’ll go down as one of our finest Presidents. I’ve seen twelve of them in my lifetime.
The truth of the matter is, being black while being President is being “divisive” in the United States of America, because racism is still a thriving disease here.
And it’s a strange thing to wake up one day, seeing the racism of your peers, and realize that, like the Joe South song says,“These are not my people.”
Ron Clinton Smith is a film actor, seen on “True Detective” and in “Hidden Figures,” a writer of stories, songs, poetry, screenplays, and the novel Creature Storms.
