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"In all seriousness, do you think it's possible for someone who is
racist to the bone to change? (I know you said stupid, not racist...but
it is sometimes interchangeable)"

I don't know whether he was ever racist "to the bone", but my father
once told me that when JFK was shot he was glad. . .one less
n****r-lover in the world. He said it with a great deal of regret,
looking back on the boy (well, teen-ager) he was then from the
perspective of the man he's become. He's now a great advocate for
racial tolerance and embraces the students of the school at which he is
guidance counselor (98% are African- and/or Latin- American) with love
and respect. Several of them have mentioned that he changed their views
on the "White race" single-handedly (he was the first pale-face they
ever met who DIDN'T look down on them). And he goes to great lengths to
make sure the teachers and staff of the school, as well as the students,
are educated on a great many topics (like aspects of history and
geography having to do with persons of the students' rather than the
administration's ethnic backgrounds) which were never addressed at the
school before he got there. My best friend jokingly calls him her
"White daddy", and he considers her an extra daughter. When I told him
we'd decided that if anything happened to us she'd be the one to raise
my son, he applauded it as an excellent choice and said she was just who
he would have chosen. He didn't even mention her hot-cocoa coloring. .
.it's not what's important to him, any more.

What did it for him was intimate exposure. It started when he was in
his early teens, and started spending summers with his grandparents and
the African-American woman who helped out with the housework they
couldn't do anymore, and escalated when he entered the Navy and found
himself in a mixed company. (When push came to shove, the unit split
into two social groups along geographic rather than race lines. . .he
and the other White Southerners decided they'd rather hang out with the
OTHER Southerners than the damn Yankees.) He got to really know some
people of color then, and after then, and gradually came to see that the
attitudes about race he'd been taught growing up, the ones that were
universally accepted in Memphis and Mississippi in the 1950s and early
60s when his worldview was being formed, were simply unfounded. By the
time I hit highschool, he didn't have any objection to my dating across
race lines, though he felt it important to mention that I might want to
move out of the South if I decided to have "mixed" children. And today,
he proudly points out pictures of his uncles and grandfather and states
his conviction that we, ourselves, must be mixed (there's a "missing"
great-grandfather on his side, and that's his theory as to why granny's
lips stayed sealed). It certainly doesn't show in me (I'm another
glow-in-the-dark type), but he's probably right; my grandmother's
brother looks eerily like Gregory Hinds after a few weeks of summer sun.
Most of his cousins would like to string him up (no, I'm not joking).
Maybe they never had the opportunity he had to learn first-hand how
wrong what they were all taught is. Maybe it takes a kind of openness
that he has and they don't. Maybe the spirits of our ancestors picked
him out specially to work on the hatred and bigotry into which he was
born. Maybe he just got lucky. I don't know how or why he was able to
overcome his racism. But he did.

So I, for one, not only believe but KNOW it's possible to change that
kind of thinking. . .though only in yourself.

Misty Blagg

P.S.--I'm new to the group and will try to get to an intro soon. I just
thought I had to answer this question.

Ashling Ranch

Hi Misty,

I'm rather new to the group also. Your post on the AAH list was most
helpful during one of the flame wars that occurred not too long ago. The
points you made about race are good and have made me more reflective and
open to the possibility that racists can change. I grew up in Mississippi
and got into several scrapes because I wasn't going to put up with the junk
racists used to say and do (and sometimes still say, if not blatantly do)!
Things haven't changed all that much in some parts of the South. My husband
tells a story of traveling to Mississippi from Texas (for a family funeral)
at the time of JFK's death. In fact, they were on there way to
Philadelphia, MS.

Many people were thrilled to see JFK fall. Apparently the flags were not at
half staff in MS and many kids cheered in schools around the state when his
assassination was announced on the intercom.

Somethings have changed----but not nearly enough. Periodically, I return to
the state and think somewhat wistfully of moving back to some of the family
land. Then I encounter another blatant racists and come to my senses!
Thanks for sharing the uplifting story about your father. There does appear
to be hope!

Melodie
Ashling@...