When I was a child, my parents volunteered for a prison outreach organization, which arranged civilian visits to inmates. On one such occasion, my father took me along on a drive to the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, a men’s minimum security prison.
About the first time I visited a prison, there aren’t many details I can recall. I remember sitting across a wood table from a man who looked a bit haggard — not officially middle aged, but as if it had arrived prematurely.
He was doing time for robbery and gave all the earnest gestures of someone trying to turn his life around while serving his sentence.
Admittedly, I tuned out the conversation between my father and the inmate in question the very moment I saw a Black man and Caucasian woman stand up from a table they were sitting at, across the large room, to embrace each other.
I felt shame and shock at the very same instant, as if I had walked in on someone disrobed. I cannot account for my reaction as a consequence of my particular upbringing.
My mother provided child day care from our home. I had enjoyed ample time in the company of Black siblings (Jerry and Terry, seven and thirteen years of age, respectively) whose repartee kept me in stitches.
Growing up, I cannot recall an occasion when either of my parents spoke disparaging of any POC, much less use the racial slurs favored by bigots.
It has been my experience as an observer of a few of my peers and the values they reflect from their parents, that the fruit rarely falls outside the shade of the tree. The kids telling racially-charged jokes or plying the N-word, had parents who did very much the same.
Years later, after reflecting upon my raw reaction to watching a interracial couple share a moment of tenderness, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that somehow I was sheltered, wittingly or not, from understanding or acknowledging such relationships existed.
I believe the social conditions that informed how I reacted, would fall under the category of de facto segregation; i.e., a separation or exclusion of the Black community by custom or habit, but no less harmful than a law decreeing such a division.
It also meant that my mind, as I conceived the world of social relations, was also segregated. My visceral reaction to the interracial couple revealed that I had absorbed a taboo which persisted twelve years after the Loving vs. Virginia Supreme Court decision.
I think of the reaction of my seven-year-old imagination whenever I encounter the conversation about racial strife in America. As a result of my experience in that Norco prison decades ago, I believe racism is as much a transpersonal affliction as it is about individual attitudes.
I didn’t seek out my visceral response to the interracial couple, but I should reflect upon it as evidence of a greater force of hostility at work in opposition to the well-being and livelihoods of our Black compatriots. It should go without saying that my experience didn’t take place in a socio-historical vacuum activated after the Emancipation Proclamation.
That racism operates as a transpersonal scourge means it wields acts of hostility, depravation and exclusion without the perpetrator having to pause a single moment for a deliberation of one’s conscience.
I doubt Apple engineers intended for dark complected customers who bought the Apple Watch to get inaccurate readings of their blood oxygen. However, I suspect the parameters of product testing most likely didn’t account for how the watch measures the oxygen levels of darker pigmented subjects. So facile an oversight — it could have been done in one’s sleep.
The public health crisis prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, exposed the higher rates of detrimental outcomes for people of color who caught the virus versus the white population. No steadfast individual of conscience could have prevented the unfavorable disparities in healthcare quality, much less than preventing the original outbreak of the Coronavirus.
Yet, so many Americans who deny the role and influence of structural racism want the conversation only to be about individual conduct — and of course, their behavior is beyond reproach.
What I believe is at stake for the deniers is a loss of privilege, perhaps even a loss of status — social conditions they’ve never had to admit they benefitted from; it’s a humbling experience to have acknowledge that benefitting from privilege or status based on race or skin color is wrong.
As for myself, I don’t want for anyone to imagine for a moment that I was born a bigot. However, it’s a far more grievous act for me to pretend that racial prejudice ended long ago.
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Previously Published on Medium
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