The Day I Learned I Was a Racist

...I wanted desperately to wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, to remove with my pure white skin any trace of this defiling substance...

...Bobo's mother was named Jeanette...

...Only then could I fully reclaim my racial purity and restore my shaken sense of superiority...

...Jeanette, you owe me $75 on this account...

...As he and Howard Lee stared at me, Bobo's eyes filled with anger, Howard's with surprise, each probing to find a resaon for my outburst...

...Yet she held her family together...

...We played into the afternoon, interrupted by frequent trips to the air compressor...

...James Robert drove a truck for the Tart Lumber Company, making short runs to scores of hamlets in eastern North Carolina and Virginia...

...Bobo turned, bounced the ball once, hard, caught it, and moved toward the basketball court...

...First, someone wet the needle by sticking it into his mouth or spitting on it...

...He was a soft-spoken man with a gentle voice and bluegray eyes...

...Such moral considerations, however, rarely accounted for the behavior of upper-class whites towards blacks...

...Standing across a wooden counter from my grandfather, she would pause and begin to shift her weight gently from foot to foot, and in hushed tones she would plead her case...

...As a child I played football and basketball with Bobo, wrestled with him, and competed against him in other games that were actually boyhood tests of physical strength...

...Although Jeanette was still young, probably less than 30 when Bobo was 12, she, like most black women of the village, had few skills that the society valued...

...This time, chance dictated that playground procedure would fail...

...Still, I felt defiled...

...We grew up in Wade, North Carolina, a village of about 1,000 people, during the 1940s and 1950s, when rumblings of racial prejudice were in the air, but before the tumultuous civil rights struggles of the 1960s...

...When we reached the air compressor I pulled from my pocket the required needle and without thinking handed it to Bobo...

...I filled my mouth with water then forced it through my teeth and onto the ground...

...Pickup games between integrated teams were nothing unusual...

...He lived Melton A. McLaurin is a professor and chairman of the department of history at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington...

...After her appeal was delivered, Granddaddy would turn and pick up his ledger book from the counter and read from Jeanette's account...

...It never occurred to me that such actions would violate my racial purity...

...all in all she seemed a terribly vulnerable figure...

...I had to cleanse myself—to purify my body of Bobo's contaminants and to rid my person of any remaining trace of his negritude...

...I walked to the other side of the store and located a faucet, out of sight of the five boys on the basketball court...

...I realized, too, that his blackness threatened me...

...He did so unintentionally, yet irrevocably, in the fall of my thirteenth year...

...Lonnie...

...University of Georgia Press...

...I took the ball from Howard, pulled the needle from the valve, and placed it in my mouth, convinced that my spit would somehow get the needle into the ball and us back onto the court...

...He was a year younger than I, and I had known him all my life...

...Startled, he clutched the ball with both hands, holding it tightly against his midriff...

...Lonnie, honest I will, but I needs some things right now...

...I relished the chance to play opposite Bobo because he was no quicker or taller than I and couldn't shoot as well...

...I knew Bobo's entire family...

...Ma Ma, of course, was bent upon getting as many people into heaven as possible...

...The village was located in the heart of southeastern North Carolina's cotton and tobacco country...

...Those awful African diseases, I now imagined, would claim me as a victim...

...The needle was the carrier of the human degeneracy that black skin represented...

...The role required that Jeanette project an image of childlike naivete and innocence in order to deserve the beneficence of her superior...

...Colored people have souls too," my grandmother, whom my brothers and sisters and I This black child had the power to reach the innermost regions of my being and challenge the sureties of my white world...

...I knew that there was something wrong, even sinister, about this power Bobo held over me, this ability to confound my world simply because he was black...

...Since there was an air compressor at Granddaddy's store, I was charged with keeping the ball inflated...

...Bobo stuck the needle in his mouth, applied the usual lavish amount of saliva, and handed it to Howard Lee, who held the ball...

...Mr...

...It was unimaginable that mine would be the last generation to come of age in the segregated South and that the Wade I knew would soon collapse beneath the irresistible pressures brought to bear by the forces of social change...

...I knows we owe you, and I'll pay you as soon as I can, Mr...

...He changed my comfortable, secure racist world...

...Well, all right...

...Since team captains (who were always white) wanted winning teams, they selected the best players first, regardless of race...

...I knew, for I had been told since birth, that whites were superior to blacks (and for that matter, that members of my family were superior to most whites...

...Lonnie, I needs some things, and I ain't got no money, nothing, Mr...

...in fact, they were the norm when blacks and whites played on the same court...

...My existence as a superior being, the true soul of all southern whites, had been placed in jeopardy...

...I had triumphed...

...Her supplications followed a centuries-old script as humiliating as it was successful...

...Coming of age there, I was well-versed in racist dogma, having been instructed from birth in the ideology and etiquette of segregation...

...After a long silence, Granddaddy, like a judge sentencing a convicted felon, would deliver his verdict...

...Bobo's blackness set him apart from me in ways I had never understood...

...There seemed to be nothing unusual or special about Bobo...

...Jeanette was quiet, gentle, unobtrusive...

...The rules of segregation demanded that I retain my position as the superior, that I remain in control of the situation...

...Irritated by what struck me as their incompetence and anxious to return to the game, I decided to inflate the ball myself...

...He had the physique of many fine athletes—long, thickly muscled arms, long legs sweeping upward to a short waist, above which rested a powerful, well-formed torso...

...During these contests I was aware of Bobo's blackness, conscious that his was a black body pushing against my white skin, but that fact did not concern me and I was not repulsed or upset by it...

...Lonnie...

...A basketball court was as appropriate a place as any to gain such an understanding...

...The Day I Learned I Was a Racist by Melton A. McLaurin Growing up in the segregated South His name was James Robert Fuller Jr., but everyone called him Bobo...

...Race, like the trees and the school playgrounds and the dusty streets, was something I rarely thought about and never pondered—that is, until a commonplace occurrence involving Bobo made me aware of the tremendous impact a segregated society had upon my life...

...The main reason one was not expected to abuse blacks had little to do with the admission that blacks were fellow humans...

...With this baptism of plain tap water I was reborn, my white selfhood restored...

...Still angry, I flung the ball at Bobo, striking him in the stomach...

...In 1953, Wade was almost a perfect microcosm of the rural and small town segregated South...

...Some of the other boys, their game halted, would accompany me from the playground to the store...

...When the family fell behind in its payments for the groceries purchased on credit from Granddaddy's store, it was Jeanette who had to beg "Mr...

...I often had drunk from the same cup as black children and dined on food prepared by blacks...

...Although race was not completely ignored on the courts, it rarely influenced the conduct of a game...

...Howard Lee and I were the only whites in the game...

...I had no conscious understanding of a need to best Bobo because he was black, or to triumph because I was white...

...We don't use that word in our family'!—this was the standard response of women in our family to men who did use that word in front of children...

...The tainted substance on the needle also threatened my concept of what being white meant...

...But no more than $5...

...Instantly an awareness of the shared racial prejudices of generations of white society coursed through every nerve in my body...

...The needle in my mouth, however, had been purposely drenched with negro spit, and threatened to defile my entire being...

...I saw the white jungle doctor, Schweitzer, at Lamborini, dressed in a white linen suit, walking among row on row of rickety cots, each occupied by some wretched, rotting black...

...And I had to do so quickly, without the knowledge of others, before I could return to the game...

...I stood straight, shook the water from my face and hands, and walked back to rejoin the game...

...I remember him climbing down from his cab, his long legs stretching to meet the ground, and I recall the easy, loping strides that moved him away from the truck...

...he was just another black boy...

...I cupped my hands beneath the clean, clear water, watched them fill with the crystal liquid, then splashed it on my face, and felt it begin to cleanse me of Bobo's black stain...

...I also remember him drunk, for like many of Wade's poor male residents, black and white, he turned to the bottle to escape his problems...

...Thus lubricated, the instrument was popped neatly into the small rubber valve through which the ball was inflated...

...Lonnie" for additional time...

...This time...

...No one spoke, and I returned their gaze...

...Even more than I feared the poison of Bobo's saliva, I feared the slightest indication of loss of self-control...

...I suspect that she believed that white Christians would need a servant class in the hereafter, although she never elaborated upon her concept of the social status of blacks in the New Jerusalem...

...I accepted such episodes and others equally demeaning to blacks as normal events of daily life...

...The procedure for inserting a needle into a basketball was simple...

...I had challenged him in front of another white and forced him to confront my claim to superiority...

...I can't keep letting you have groceries without getting paid ." Jeanette would then acknowledge Granddaddy's admonition and continue to press her case...

...Not a nickel more...

...Yet I could neither gag nor vomit, nor could I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand...

...For women like Jeanette, who possessed little formal education, there was but one opportunity for employment: she "worked days" as a domestic, as did many of Wade's black women...

...Bobo played on the other team, opposite me as usual...

...Much of the time this play involved physical contact with blacks, and I thought nothing of it...

...The Wade of 1953, I later learned, differed little from that of 1933, or for that matter, except for the presence of automobiles and electricity, from the Wade of 1893...

...James Robert, his father, was a huge man, nearly six-and-a-half feet tall, who appeared even taller to a 13-year-old white boy...

...But I'll pay— just as soon as I can get the money and get an extra day's work somewhere...

...He must have understood that he could not respond to my challenge because of who he was within the village social structure, and because we stood in the shadow of Granddaddy's store, in a white world...

...On what turned out to be our last trip, Bobo and Howard strolled along with me as I went to inflate the ball...

...Infuriated with myself because I had momentarily allowed a black—even worse, a black my age—to intimidate me, I grabbed the needle from my mouth and slammed it through the valve into the basketball...

...We were using Howard Lee's ball, which presented a challenge because it leaked air and had to be inflated every 30 minutes or so...

...Black germs would ravage my body with unspeakable diseases that would rot my limbs...

...In all the years I played in integrated contests, I never saw a fight provoked for racial reasons...

...But Bobo, a child I often looked down upon because of his blackness and his poverty, showed me the emotional power that racial prejudice and segregation held over whites as well as blacks...

...Some of them will go to heaven with us...

...What I remember is an awareness that things had changed...

...we couldn't fully insert the needle into the valve...

...He paused and glanced at me again, this time his eyes expressing puzzlement rather than anger...

...In a pickup game in which Bobo and I were on opposing teams we were often matched against one another since we were roughly the same size and age...

...But this knowledge began to raise questions adults didn't want asked and, as I would later discover, that they never answered...

...Howard struggled to push the needle into the valve, with no luck...

...In my childhood, physical proximity to blacks was natural and accepted...

...I know it seems a lot, Mr...

...The urge to gag, to lean over and vomit the black saliva, was almost unbearable...

...Although my court skills were average at best, I loved the game and played at every opportunity...

...In Wade, basketball was the premier sport, played continually by boys, black and white, from September through May...

...I jerked the air hose from its rack and inflated the ball to its normal hardness...

...I don't remember who won or lost...

...On the other hand, I had also been taught that one should never mistreat a black, insult a black, or purposely be rude to a black...

...At such times he was a sad figure even to a white youth: he was a giant to be pitied, his physical size somehow overwhelmed by the circumstances of his life, few of which he determined, and most of which he could not avoid...

...She looked after James Robert, mothered her children, maintained the household, and brought home a supplemental income...

...This article is adapted from his book Separate Pasts: Growing lip White in the Segregated South...

...By refusing to question my actions and returning to the game, he had acquiesced in that claim, though he never acknowledged it...

...Segregation was serious, as serious as life and death, perhaps as serious as heaven or hell...

...The social patterns of the village had emerged after Reconstruction, had been refined by the turn of the century, and had not changed much since...

...I felt deprived of the ability to reason, to control the situation...

...called "Ma Ma;' reminded us more than once...

...And I want something on your account next week, you hear...

...The realization that the needle I held in my mouth had come directly from Bobo's mouth, that it carried Bobo's saliva, transformed my prejudices into a painful experience...

...Rather, it was because superior people never treated inferiors in an unseemly manner...

...Bolts of prejudice that I could literally feel sent my head reeling and buckled my knees...

...In my family, one didn't say "nigger," not because the use of the word caused blacks pain but because it indicated "poor breeding ." Nigger was a word poor whites used, a term they hurled at blacks (whom the adults in my family always referred to as "colored people") the way my childhood friends from less affluent families hurled pieces of granite from the railway track beds at hapless black children their age or younger...

...Ironically, the same prejudices that filled me with loathing and disgust also demanded that I conceal my feelings...

...I felt compelled to jerk the needle from my mouth, to spit it to the ground, and rid myself of the unclean thing...

...in a small white frame house in the black neighborhood behind Granddaddy's store...

...It transmitted to me Bobo's black essence and made me feel what I imagined him to be: less than human...

...A split second after placing the needle in my mouth, I was jolted by one of the most shattering emotional experiences of my young life...

...Of her four children, Bobo was the oldest...

...That's a lot of money...

...I swallowed a large gulp, felt it slide down my throat, and in my mind's eye saw it wash away the last traces of Bobo's blackness...

...Foreign missions' films, occasionally shown at the Presbyterian church, flashed through my mind...

...I knew that I could count on a good game against him and that I would score some points—a welcome prospect for one not blessed with athletic prowess...

...I reeled from the knowledge that this black child had the power to reach the innermost regions of my being and challenge the sureties of my white world...

...One fall Saturday afternoon six of us were matched in a hotly contested game, with neither of the equally untalented threesomes able to gain much of an advantage...

...None of it made much sense at the time...

...When she sought an extension of credit or time in which to pay her debt, Jeanette would ease into the store, head bent slightly forward, eyes downcast, her face a sorrowful study of helplessness...