I am a white man, thus I have spent most of my life in a white world. Every school I attended until I got to college was predominantly white. When I think back to kindergarten through sixth grade, I can barely recall two black kids throughout the experience. Middle school (7th and 8th grade) were no better. By the time I got to High School, I'm pretty sure there were three (3) black kids in the entire school.
There were no black people in our neighborhood until I was around eleven years old. That was the summer that a black family - the Robinsons - moved in right behind us. This caused quite a stir. My mother was the only woman on our block who went over and welcomed them to the neighborhood (she brought a bundt cake), and she brought me, my brother, and my sister with her. I can still see Mrs. Robinson's smile when my mother handed her the cake. After that, we became friends. Our backyards butted up against each other and we would say "hi" and chat over the bushes. I remember one summer, the Robinson's had a big family barbecue, and they invited us over. We were the only white people there and for the first time in my life I felt aware of my skin color. After about three years, the Robinson's moved because of a job relocation. The day they left, Mrs. Robinson came over and hugged my mother to thank her for being so nice. That's when it hit me that no one else seemed to talk to them while they lived behind us. It was like there was something wrong with them.
How many white people go through life having black friends? If you are white and live in a predominantly white community ask yourself how many black people you hang out with. Have you ever been in a black person's house? These are relevant questions right now and too many of the answers speak to our current state of race relations.
In a great piece from today's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof writes how the current black/white income gap is is 40 percent greater than it was in 1967. In addition, the average life expectancy of a black boy is five year's shorter than that of a white boy. The net worth of of the average black household here in America is $6,314 dollars. The net worth of the average white household: $110,500 dollars. The US now has a worse wealth gap specific to race than South Africa during apartheid. There's something wrong here.
Kristof also mentions a study done by The Public Religion Research Institute that states within a network of 100 friends, a white person, on average, has one (1) black friend. There is a disconnect between "us" and "them". We can all sit around and pretend that it doesn't exist, but we still live in a very segregated society. Yes, we elected a black President, but obviously we need to do more.
How are we supposed to know or understand what's wrong in our black communities when no white people are going to them? How are we supposed to understand the differences between blacks and whites when we don't really know each other?
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