I asked fellow Daily Item editor Cheryl Charles, a Black woman, what code switching means and she explained, “Every interaction a Black person has every day factors in race. A white person gets bad service at a restaurant and writes it off to someone who can’t do their job or who is having a bad day. A Black person factors race into the reasoning behind someone’s reaction. So every interaction I have to adjust, or switch how I speak to them. Imagine living day in, day out like that.”
Ask me if I’m a racist and I will tell you, “No, I get along fine with Black people and I believe they should have the same opportunities I have. But don’t talk to me about reparations or anything like that.”
Viewed through the spectrum of systemic racism, even I can see how transparent and absurd that statement sounds.
I was raised by a father who would point to Black people and “jokingly” refer to them as “jigaboos.” I grew up with media and cinema stereotypes that cast Blacks as athletically-gifted and sexually-supercharged people who were ready to beat up white people if they looked at them wrong.
During my childhood in Colorado in the mid-1970s, I knew two fellow students in my high school who were Black. The only Black adults I met included a junior high school teacher and a man who served on the local city council with my mother.
As irony would have it, one of the most influential people in my decision to choose journalism as a career was a Black man named Acel Moore. Slender and dressed in a suit, he stood in a Boston University lecture hall in 1977 the same year he won a Pulitzer Prize with Wendell Rawls Jr., for reporting on mental health institution abuses.
Sitting bleary-eyed in that morning class, I snapped to attention when Moore started talking in a clipped, no-nonsense manner about how their reporting uncovered the violent physical abuse of mentally ill people.
Listening to him speak, I remember feeling like a raw recruit meeting a grizzled veteran who had just returned from combat. Moore painted a picture of news reporting as tough, even dangerous, work that a select few people are cut out to do.
By the time he finished speaking and fielding a few questions, I wanted more than ever to be one of those people.
A year later, I was the only white student enrolled in an African-American literature class. I read Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but I didn’t interact with any of the Black students in the class.
Forty-two years later, I wonder, why? Why did I miss a golden opportunity to ask questions about race in a class focused, to a large degree, on race in America?
Honestly, the answer is simple: I had no reference point for asking those questions. I was like someone who says, “Well, I know what I will say once I reach Mt. Everest’s summit,” all the while lacking a plan for getting in shape for the climb, buying the right equipment, and hiring a guide.
Talking about race is a conversation I would just as soon not have — remember, I’m the guy who “gets along fine with Black people.” But if I really want to live up to the standards Acel Moore set for me, then I have to vigorously challenge hard-held assumptions and push back against my comfortable perceptions about race.
What do I know about race? Nothing. But I’m starting to ask questions.
