"Because We're Black?" Those three words made up the headline on my column Sunday.
Posted: Thursday, January 8, 2009 12:00 am
“Because We’re Black?”
Those three words made up the headline on my column Sunday.
They came from an e-mail two high school students sent in December. Cornell Leffler and Drew Haverman are black. They wanted to know why some parents wouldn’t let them date their white daughters.
Honestly, they wrote. We want to know.
And readers told them. The paper published 88 reader responses on its online edition. I read almost all of them.
Many were thoughtful and most seemed honest. (“i’m white and i will not let my daughter date any one other than a white guy call me what you want but i have to look out for her.”)
Some empathized with the teenagers. (“I am sorry you have run into so many closed minded racist people … Believe that there are many of us that do not think that way.”)
Others wondered if the issue was less about race and more about demeanor. (“Meeting parents is kinda like a job interview … Sometimes it is not race but body language and appearance that turns parents off.”)
I don’t think the answer to race relations in Lincoln has been revealed.
I do think talking about them is a good first step.
And paying attention to what other people have to say is good, too. Even if you disagree. Especially if you disagree.
And this will probably get me in trouble, but especially if you are white.
Like I am. Like most people in Lincoln are.
Because it’s easier for us to believe racism really doesn’t exist in our town, state, country, world. Especially when we read the mostly reasonable comments on the Web site of our hometown paper.
But the newspaper doesn’t publish all the comments people write.
For instance, it didn’t publish the one that read: “Abe Lincoln should have left well enough alone.”
Or the one that said: “Post up a picture of these kids and I’ll let you know in a second if these kids are being discriminated against because they are black …”
Or this one: “My guess is that if you wear Obama gear like you say, your chances of dating someone’s daughter is slim to none.”
To be fair, it also didn’t publish a few that made disparaging remarks about the two black students, describing behavior they found offensive.
But it also seems fair (and relevant) to look beyond the woes of two 17-year-olds. And to continue the discussion in a bigger way.
We can all fess up to prejudiced thoughts, if not behavior, based on something other than race. We look at someone and see age, size, gender, sexual orientation.
They drive the wrong kind of car, live in the wrong part of town, own the wrong kind of dog.
But prejudice and discrimination based on skin color still divides us, in a big, big way.
Racism isn’t behind every sideways look a person of color gets. (“To my Black friends and community members,” wrote a black commenter on our Web site, “this is not something we can point to in every situation as the reason why misfortune has found our doorstep once again …”)
But for me to say it doesn’t exist — or to minimize its effects — because I don’t see it also seems so very short-sighted.
I received a long letter Monday. The writer was a college basketball coach in the South. A white man who had grown up in small town Nebraska, married into a prominent Lincoln family, gotten divorced. He came back to visit a few years later with a black woman he was dating.
“As we spent time in Omaha together, at times holding hands … I was absolutely horrified at how people looked at us, judged us … and just looked down their noses at us. It truly was one of the more unsettling events of my life, for I had always held the people of Nebraska in such high regard. We were scoffed at several times … and I asked her if it bothered her how people were reacting to us, for it truly bothered me. And her response to me was priceless … (and I am paraphrasing) … ‘I’ve grown up a black woman, having spent time in many places in the US … and it’s how it is, nothing new …’”
Like the man who wrote the letter, it’s hard for me to fathom what that must feel like.
Because like the man who wrote the letter, I’m not black.
Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.