Growing Up White

In the early 1960s, mom would take us kids to swim at a nearby beach, called Maywood Lake, on the southwest side of Indianapolis.

I was so young then that I don't remember a lot of details, but I always had fun there. There are vague impressions left in my memory: the smell of coconut oil, the warm sand, splashing in the waves, transistor radios blasting out the Beach Boys and the Ventures, kids making sand castles. It was an idyllic way to spend a summer, just me and my siblings whiling away the days at the beach with mom.

It was the summer of either 1964 or 1965 when we stopped going to Maywood Lake. "Mom, why can't we go swimming?" we asked. Mom told us the lake had closed. Nobody could go there anymore. Mom offered no explanation of why, and maybe I wouldn't have understood anyway.

When you're a kid, all you know is what is going on in your immediate little world. My world was my neighborhood. Up to the age of 10, I guess I just hadn't paid much attention to anything going on around the rest of the planet.

Some time afterward, I overhead my grandpa talking to my dad, complaining about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and some of the businesses that had been affected by it. "He shut the place down," grandpa was telling dad.

"What place?" I interjected.

"Maywood Lake - he just shut the place down," grandpa replied, "He told me that he would close the place before he would let the government tell him that he had to let the colored in there."

That was my introduction to racism in America. It amazed me that a man would hate black people so much that he would rather go out of business than have black customers.

I started paying more attention to racial issues after that. I soon realized that a lot of people I knew really didn't like black folks one bit. Probably half the adults in my family were quite vocal about their fears of blacks "taking over the country." A lot of the kids in the neighborhood would make crude racial jokes, or derogatory comments about civil rights protesters. The "N-word" was frequently tossed around in casual conversations, and it seemed like someone was constantly coming up with new and crude racial jokes.

I had an acquaintance in my late teens who was related to some honcho in the Martinsville KKK. Once he brought me a really crude Klan "comic book" of rude, ignorant and hateful cartoons filled with all of the standard racial stereotypes of the day. He actually thought it was funny. I thought, How can people have so much hate in their hearts? And for no good reason?

I always admired the courage of the people who led the civil rights movement, because I knew they were up against some serious generationally-ingrained hatred and prejudice. I knew how bad white folks' attitudes were in Indiana. I could only imagine how much worse it was in the deep South.

So eighteen months ago, when Barack Obama was campaigning for the Democratic nomination, I would not have given him a snowball's chance in hell of ever being elected President. Whatever the campaign issues would become, I just could not believe that America would elect a black man to the highest office in the land. I grew up knowing too many people with too much irrational prejudice. I could not conceive how any black candidate could overcome such an enormous political handicap.

I knew that racial harmony had improved noticeably since the 1960s, but I assumed there was still a lot of tamped-down racial animosity that just wasn't as openly expressed as in the past. I reasoned that in the solitude of the voting booth, ingrained prejudices would ultimately hold sway.

Although I supported John McCain (reluctantly) and I am in staunch ideological opposition to President Obama's policies, I freely admit that I am happy to be wrong about the current extent of racism in America. With this election, we have turned a corner. To be sure, there are still some white people who will never see the light. There will always be some folks who carry darkness in their hearts.

But President Obama has proven, by his historic election victory, that our country is indeed moving past the era when we divided ourselves by race. Hopefully, we can continue to mature as a culture, and someday achieve a truly color-blind society.

A color-blind society with strong moral values, a culture of personal responsibility, a robust national defense policy, strict constitutionalist judges, healthy free-market capitalism, low taxes and limited government interference would be even better.