That You Know Is Wrong

When I was in my late forties I met a gentleman of seventy-five, a colorful and spirited old fellow, a barber most of his adult life, now retired. He loved to talk about the early days around Denver and Boulder, and our first couple of little chats were interesting and fun---but then the weather turned around, as Dylan Thomas would say. His face lost its light and sparkly facade and became hard and shrewd and stupid as he let loose with a moderately ugly racist tirade about the spics and the blacks (I think he held back on the Jews because he wasn’t sure about me, and this was probably just a test run anyway). Such a nice old fellow, salt of the earth, and then this.

What struck me most was not the racism itself but that this man had all those years to learn something so patently obvious and basic about the human condition, being a human, and he never did. Age might not be expected to confer wisdom necessarily, but after all, live and learn, as the saying goes, and also live and let live. Of course it’s not just racial or ethnic, it’s also ‘religious’ hatred. How can one not see that it’s utterly stupid for Protestants to hate Catholics for their Catholicism, and vice versa, or Shia to hate Sunni, etc. Most, I think, come to understand that, which is to say they learn just as they learn everything else about living in a culture. How much simple everyday human reflection does it take to come to despise racism and its related social pathologies---at least when one sees it in others?

But then there’s this, to revert to personal experience: even before my lower teens for quite a few years in Jacksonville, Florida, negroes tended to look heroic to me, particularly the men. Many seemed like superior beings, they seemed somehow more authentic, stronger and even more noble as human beings in my eyes. If love is the opposite of hate (though Jung says the opposite of love is power), then I loved them for their blackness. Of course I was a kid, but was my love as dumb and irrational as the hate of the racist? I don’t think so, I think in those days what I saw was real. And now if much of what I see in black culture turns me off, is that the racist in me or might it just be an unbiased observer doing its thing?

Obviously much of racism is cultural in origin as well as form, but it is also deeply genetic. In much of primate social behavior, the we/they model goes way back---it’s a part of us on a very deep level. That has nothing to do with its being stupid and destructive: that was then, this is now. But it’s those darn genes, the lag of DNA. Makes you do things that you know is wrong, as Billie Holiday so mournfully concluded. But she was singing about love, and that’s a whole other matter, for sure.