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The Crime of Racial Prejudice
My siblings and I were blessed with under-educated, but brilliant visionaries for parents. Had they been afforded the opportunities to achieve to their capacity, their lives would have been far different. Their paths, more than likely, would not have crossed. And, there wouldn't be a reason to sing their praises, today. Maybe, in their poverty, God was testing their nettle and ingenuity. Seeing what these two young parents could make of their lives in the deep south, sharecropping white men's land; and, raising 17 children in the midst of poverty, prejudice and hardships. The 40 years of dire poverty not withstanding, God surely gave James and Ethel Kearney an A+ for their efforts and their successes. He must have scratched his head at the sheer ingenuity of this couple: All 17 children graduating with scholarly recognition; 16 college graduates, many garnering academic scholarships from America's elite schools…the Kearney parents passed their test with flying colors. The only expectations they didn't exceed, was their own. Life for African Americans during these times were extremely difficult. During the four decades that spanned my parent's years of raising a family; America went from mules and wagon, to the pick-up trucks. In the over 40 years of raising children, my parents and their children produced more than 1,500 bales of cotton for the white man who owned the land we worked. They raised tons of watermelons, cucumbers, and various strains of peas and beans. My mother must have canned 100,000 jars of pickles, peaches, okra, and pears, and froze more tomatoes than one thousand families could eat in one year. I can imagine the two young people sitting down with their heads together in the early years -- a time when they hardly had two coins to rub together -- and, mapping out how they would pass God's test. They wouldn't let him down, and they would go further in raising a family than anyone would have possibly dreamed. They were dreamers in the largest sense of the word. There is no other way they could have been such successful parents and guides for the 17 children they raised together. My family was the cocoon which allowed us to withstand the ugliness of life. We didn't have a vocabulary for that ugliness, but instinctively knew there was something wrong about the way we were looked at, and treated by whites in the southern delta. We knew there was something unfair about somebody as smart and hardworking as my father never seeming to pull ahead. There was something heart-wrenching about the way the fat white agriculture man would look away from my daddy as he talked about his crop; while my father explained to him why there were less bales of cotton this year than he had expected. He looked down at daddy, as if my father wasn't the smartest, hardest working, best teacher alive. He should have asked us. Because church was such an important part of our lives, we believed that God would one day make everything right. Daddy loved to read out loud, that verse about `the meek shall inherit the earth…' We all had our own impression of what that meant, but I can bet that most of us saw a picture of daddy owning riches and jewels, and that white agriculture man coming begging. I don't remember the real advent of civil rights talk. I remember daddy being glued to the television set when he wasn't in the fields working with us. I know he loved to read the newspaper, and am convinced that he sometimes read them more than once since he knew it would be a while before he could buy another one. But, it was in daddy's eyes, and then in his whispers to mama that I first came across the civil rights talk. My first impression of this was, "Oh…that's what was happening all these years." It was as if the puzzle of why I'd felt uncomfortable about our poverty, and the interaction between my parents and white folk suddenly fell into place. It was around this time that I realized we were targets of racial prejudice, and were viewed as a lower class of human being and treated accordingly. As if scales had been removed from my eyes, I began to notice how grown-ups I respected and feared, refused to look into the eyes of young white folk, as they addressed them; that, young black men whom I knew to be especially nice and polite, automatically stepped off the sidewalk when a white woman passed. For years, I hadn't paid attention to the fact that the textbooks we received each year, bore the names of the same white children we sat next to when school integration finally came our way. That, of course, is the power of racial prejudice. If no one articulates it, vocalizes it…we just go on acting and reacting, not knowing exactly what this dirty dance between the two races is all about…just, that we seem never able to completely wash the dirt away. Racial prejudice is not a crime. Historians call it `America's lapse in morality.' Would that be something akin to not paying a bill on time, or lying to your parents? Mr. Webster defined morality as: virtuous conduct; a system of ideas of right and wrong. Surely, racial prejudice goes deeper than that. So, it's not a legal crime. Racial prejudice is certainly an unforgivable crime against humanity. One man's worth pitted against another's -- assigned by law, to be less than another's. The real crime of racial prejudice is that it steals the human spirit, encourages hopelessness in our young. A thief who brazenly snatches a race of people's value in broad daylight. The shameful crime of racial prejudice is that after more than 200 years on this hallowed land, black America still cannot shake its dark, heavy scales. The virulence hangs on in spite of the handful of changes spawned by the Supreme Court. New laws and new rights that are still being fought and argued in that great court. It hangs on, in spite of the anointed month of celebrations, the HBO documentaries, and the Black History Month specials. Child's fingers holding back the flood. Racial prejudice remains alive and well. The southern Delta began the book on racial prejudice when slavery became lawful and acceptable. What began as simply the bartering of human beings for the sake of money; evolved into a festering sore of hate and fear. America's Southland epitomized the term `southern comfort'. The comfort of understanding one's place, the comfort of accepting one's lot in life; the comfort of being invisible -- all rooted in a fear of not being good enough, docile enough, or subservient enough. Rooted in a horror of being compared, and not being found up to snuff. What many brilliant historians call the heyday of the south; people I know, remember as a time and place in which America showed its true colors of racial intolerance and brutal injustice. A time and place in which truth became the enemy; forcing parents to accept their lot like Shakespearean martyrs, refusing to curse or rant about the despicable southern crimes. It was a time and place whereas parents such as mine, taught their children the love of God, the sin of hate and the glory of forgiving; when their fear made them cleave to us, and implore us, too, to ignore the dark and ugly truth. It was such an environment, that southern delta, that those more lofty of ideals -- acceptance and tolerance -- were merely far-reaching dreams, illusions. Much as a child, hungry and cold stands at the dark window, wishing upon the faraway star, knowing in her heart that the distant light is nothing more than a meteor, an illusion, having nothing to do with her hopelessness. Neither Webster's, nor the Holy Bible define sin as a child going to bed hungry at night; or a pregnant mother joining her sharecropping family in the cotton field, from morning till night; or, a shot-gun house with four rooms, to accommodate 12 children at a time; or, clothing that is either too big, too little or too far gone; or, a dirt road the county refuses to pave, even though it floods into an impassable lake, each spring; or a cotton crop that goes bad, forcing a family of 18 to live off their truck patch through the winter; or, even a school bus that regularly breaks down half-way to school, forcing a child and her 8 siblings to walk the last five miles. There is no sin, no crime in such dire existences. The crime, the sin is in the root cause. Racial prejudice is much, much more than a mere lapse in America's morality. It is America's scarlet letter. It is Black America's haunting cross to bear. Janis F. Kearney is a Chicago writer, former journalist and diarist to President Bill Clinton. A Harvard W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow, she is currently completing William Jefferson Clinton from Hope to Harlem; and a personal memoir, Cotton Field of Dreams. Kearney Communications 5138 S. Kenwood Ave.#2 Chicago, IL 60615 (773) 493-2007 --ph (773) 493-5747 -- fax janisfk@aol.com |
I was 12 or 13 years old, when I realized that whites viewed me and my family as "less" than them -- surely, less than any other whites. I was born on the cusp of the civil rights era, born in 1953, in the southern Delta, in a world that I sometimes describe as cotton and molasses country. My childhood environment was a mixture of joy, hard work, and daily gratitude for the small wonders of our world.