All About Race

This is an uncomfortable issue for me to write about. It’s all about race, black and white. In my other life, my “on the street” life I had a good number of opinions about race issues. Growing up, our family only knew one black couple in our church. I still recall my mom commenting on more than one occasion “they are such a credit to their race”. Even at a young age I knew my mom’s comment was ignorant and wrong.



By the time I became the company’s in-house claims attorney, I had the most black employees working for me of any manager: five women. They’d come to my house for outings. I thought I was “color-blind”.


Yet, our family had no black friends. My wife, for all her liberal leanings, had no black professors working with her. Our church was all white, our friends the same.


Our kids were somewhat different. The schools they went to – Prince Edward County Public Schools – were part of the four consolidated cases that made up the historic Brown v Board of Education decision. Virginia’s history of school integration is as clouded as it’s handling of criminal justice and prisons. Rather than integrating the schools, Virginia politicians instituted a policy called “massive resistance”. Public school systems shut down. White children attended newly opened private academies. Black kids were deprived of school. An entire generation of black children failed to be educated.


As a result the Prince Edward schools were majority black. Our sons had black kids in every class, every grade. And, in another unfortunate twist, many of the black families in Southside Virginia, besides being under-educated, are also under-employed and poor.


After I was arrested, I learned rather quickly what it meant to be a minority. At the jail and here at prison, whites account for only about 30% of the inmate population. Blacks make up the vast majority of the men incarcerated here as well as the staff that works here.


I used to think blacks just needed to “get over it” – the whole “I’m a victim of slavery” mentality that seemed to me to permeate the black community. “Work hard; get an education, quit bitchin. You’ve got great opportunities. Get over it.”


I was wrong. I have gotten to know a large number of black men in this prison experience. A fair number I am fairly close to. I count them as friends. Almost my entire creative writing class is black. To a man, when they open themselves up, there is a self-hatred, a feeling of alienation that comes from their perception of being less than equal. It is a feeling that is generational and is a direct result of this nation’s abysmal record of dealing with blacks.


Whites don’t get it. But, for blacks there is no escaping the fact that they were brought here in chains and were deemed chattel, not persons.


White liberals, in their quest to show they “get it”, end up being condescending. Conservatives don’t even attempt to think race has anything to do with class status, crime, employment.


Fact is, America is hung up on race, whites and blacks don’t talk the same, think the same. There’s a funny song in the musical “Avenue Q” called “Everybody’s a little bit racist”. The sad truth is, it’s true.


Blacks are suspicious of whites. Whites suspicious of blacks. On the “street”, whites are in charge. In prison, blacks control and they take a good deal of frustration out on whites. As one of my students told me:


“You’d get a pass at a higher level ‘cause you’re a lawyer, but other white guys get their asses kicked.”


I sit in class and listen as guys describe childhood experiences. “My you are dark.” I’ve come to empathize with their comments about the police and the courts. As one guy in class told me after hearing about my experience with the detective and the judge: “Welcome to our world. You just became an honorary black man.”


I don’t think I’m responsible for slavery. But I know I have to be open to understand exactly what the slave experience has meant to black Americans. And, I have to be willing to call it as I see it. You start a sentence with “I’m not racist, but . . .” you are racist.


Everyone has prejudices, preconceived notions of how people act, how they are. We’ve all got to learn to see people, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.


The sad truth is, blacks are disproportionately ill treated in the criminal justice system. Crack cocaine convictions are predominately a black crime. Until recently sentences for crack cocaine were significantly greater than for powder cocaine (a “white” crime). Child porn sentencing (another white crime) carries lesser sentences than crack.


I’ve been made an “honorary” black both in jail and prison after guys heard and read about my case. It’s taken that experience and hearing the stories these guys tell to know things have to change about race.


We’ve got a long way to go and it starts first with just listening and sympathizing and understanding.