Race Awakening

“But Mr. Darrow,” I protested, “we skipped the seventh commandment. What does it mean to commit adultery?” I had not the slightest idea that this would prove to be an embarrassing or difficult question, but it soon became obvious that my query had caused Mr. Darrow great distress. He sputtered, looked away, mopped his brow, and then blurted out, “You’ll learn about that when you get older.”

What he communicated to me was that whatever adultery was, it was clearly the worst of all sins. That, too, was part of the code of the South. I would learn that Southerners committed adultery as much as anyone else, but they did not seem to enjoy it. Sex was something that was not to be enjoyed. It was a kind of duty of married life and a prohibition outside of it. I had disturbed that uneasy repression. This was also an all-white church, which meant that neither sex nor race was allowed to be discussed.

These realities would come together, however, in the racist jargon used in the social order as the reductio ad absurdum of all race conversations, at least as I began to hear those conversations in my teenage years, “Do you want your sister or daughter to marry a Negro?” The answer was assumed to be so obviously “no” that the argument for justice or equal opportunity was supposed to be stopped in its tracks. I did not understand at that time this strange intersection between sexual attraction and racial fear.

I was not then aware of how frequently in the days of both slavery and segregation in the South black women had been sexually violated by white men. That is why there are so many shades of black people in the United States to this day. Nor did I understand that the emotional castration of black men was a prerequisite to this violent sexual behavior. So black men were whipped, physically castrated, or even hanged for looking at a white woman in a way that might express desire, and keeping black people uneducated, dependent, servile, and powerless was necessary to enable this sexual pattern to continue to exist.

It also meant that the deepest subliminal racial fear that white males had was that if black men ever got real power and escaped the intimidation of fear, they might well do to white women the same thing that white men had done to black women for generations. There was also in this Southern white male shibboleth the not so subtle implication and dread that if white women ever had a choice, they might actually choose the sexually virile black male over the sexually sedate white male. This was an expression of what I would later call the “Othello factor.”

But the fact remains that I did not at that time know any more about sex than I knew about race or segregation. I was simply picking up the vibrations of a way of life that even then was doomed, although its adherents did not yet know it. Racism was and is an omnipresent irrational force. So were the sexual fears that were deeply entwined with that racism. So deep were these fears that even my fifth-grade Sunday-school teacher felt he had to skip over the commandment on adultery.

It is also a fact that when that class talked about murder, neither the dehumanization of blacks nor the activity of lynching ever came up. Nor did we talk about how we stole the labor of the black people by conspiring to keep wages at rock bottom when we discussed the prohibition about stealing. Never were sex and race allowed to meet in a religious setting. In my overtly pious home, racism was an operative assumption.

I do not believe anyone could have been raised in that society without being a racist. We would, however, never have pled guilty to that charge. In my home we had “colored” help in the house and in the yard, but black people were not allowed to enter our house by the front door. Public parks and the public library were available only to white taxpayers. Drinking fountains and public toilets were clearly marked “white” and “colored.” No black people ate in public restaurants, slept in public hotels, or used the rest rooms of commercial gas stations. In department stores no black woman could try on a dress before purchasing it.

The economic system kept many of these things from being too obvious a problem, however, since the standard wage of five dollars a week for full-time domestic help did not lend itself to the ability to eat out, travel far, or wear “store bought” clothes. It was a cruel system, and I was one of the unknowing beneficiaries of it. Once again, I profited from this evil, though at that point in my life I remained blissfully ignorant of it.

The first dawning on my consciousness that there might be something out of sync about the way of life I accepted as normal occurred when I was no more than three or four. Yet it settled into my memory bank and over the years acted like a pebble in my shoe. For me it marked the first moment of self-actualization, the first step out of my Southern upbringing. A decorative brick wall was being constructed on the side of our home. Two black men whom I presumed to have been bricklayers were employed to assist my father in the construction. One of them was an older man whose heavy head of hair had turned gray. The other was a much younger man, perhaps in his late twenties.

My father had told me about this project and that he would need my help, and I had anticipated the day we would get the new brick wall with excitement. During the day, I stirred cement, carried bricks, got in the way, and asked hundreds of questions, all of which started with “How come?” For the two bricklayers I must have been a chore indeed. My parents had drilled into me their understanding of Southern manners.

The first rule in that Southern code was that a child never responded to his or her elders without saying “ma’am” to a woman or “sir” to a man. “Yes sir,” “no sir,” “yes ma’am,” “no ma’am” were essential ingredients of politeness. If I, as a child, were ever to say either a simple “yes” or a simple “no” to my parents, they would respond “yes what?” or “no what?” Their voices would have that kind of animation that convinced me to blurt out the appropriate “sir” or “ma’am” quickly for fear of the consequences. I had learned this lesson well, probably at some cost to my personal comfort.

On this particular Saturday morning, however, the elderly black man had asked me a question, and I had responded just as I had been taught with a proper “yes sir” or “no sir,” whichever was appropriate. My father stopped what he was doing and took me forcibly into the house, where he lectured me sternly on the fact that “you do not say ‘sir’ to a Negro.” I was crushed. I did not understand why doing what I had been taught to do was a cause for discipline. There must be something different, I concluded, about my elders if they were black. The rules somehow did not apply to them. There were unstated assumptions in the sacred code of Southern etiquette, and I had clearly violated one of them. I remember feeling deeply conflicted over this episode for days or even weeks.

The fact that I can still recall it vividly at this moment indicates its even deeper, indelible quality. I tried to process my father’s hostility internally, but it made no real sense to me. I felt wronged, and although I could not articulate it at the time, I was certain that my father had been unfair. I learned that day that my father was not always right. That does not seem like a revolutionary thought today. Human fallibility is a universal assumption, but for me, as a three-or four-year-old boy, to decide in a deep and significant way that my father was wrong, morally wrong, in what he had done opened doors in me to a radical new self-consciousness that would never go away.”

~ John Shelby Spong, Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love, and Equality