The Day I Understood Racism
My naivete exploded when reality hit me in the face.
“Why didn’t my story get in the paper,” I asked my editor as I looked at the front page.
“I couldn’t run it,” he said.
“Was there something wrong with it?”
“No, there was nothing wrong with it,” he said and walked away.
I followed and asked again.
“Just forget it,” he said.
He didn’t say anything else and refused to talk about it.
It was just a simple story about the first baby born in the county that year. It wasn’t that big of a deal. Why should I care if it got left out? But I did care because, at that moment, I finally “got it.”
I didn’t forget. This was my first real experience with racism, and I finally understood what black people meant when they said: “that’s just how it is.”
I grew up in East Tennessee and went to the local state college. I saw very few black people, and the few that I knew didn’t seem any different from me. We were all people from Appalachia.
Racism was something I thought happened in big cities and was on the nightly news now and then. It was a very abstract idea to me, not something I even understood. Sure, there were jokes about…
