A few years ago, Robert St. John (chef, restaurateur, cookbook author, newspaper columnist, friend) wrote an essay called "My South." It’s become a kind of signature piece for him. It was published as a gift book that became highly popular in Mississippi around Christmas time. I love this essay. I’ve had my students write their own versions of it. I’ve smiled and laughed and begged Robert to read it at special occasions right along with everyone else. It depicts a South we all know and love, a South of fresh cut grass, humidity, creek swimming, and fig preserves. It also depicts a nostalgic, idealized view. It’s effective in counteracting the stereotypes of Southerners as ignorant, shoeless Neanderthals, but it doesn’t speak to the underlying social issues and very real problems in the South.

That’s okay. It isn’t meant to. I, however, have been thinking about these issues lately, and I keep coming back to Robert’s description of the South as the only one the people around me want to believe. And yes, I count myself in that number. It could only be coincidence that in the year of Richard Wright’s centennial, America has its first black presidential candidate, yet there is a poignancy here, a poignancy that has contributed to my own experiences of social tensions and questions of how far the South has come in matters of prejudice and race.

I’ve often quoted an example from an argument textbook I once used. I believe the book was Richard Batteiger's. The example had to do with debates surrounding abortion, and it pointed out that the crux of the argument lies in definitions of what abortion is. No one argues in favor of murder; therefore, when a person argues against abortion on the basis that it is murder, she can be assured that her opponent is not going to use the same point to argue the other side. In most cases, those arguing for or against will never be able to reach consensus because they aren’t talking about the same thing. On one side, abortion is a very different act than it is on the other side. The first step to effectively debating it then is to analyze the definitions, to promote with real evidence a particular concept of what abortion is.

The same can be said for racism. The days of blatant arguments for white supremacy are gone—for the most part. Those who would don the Klan robes now are misfits, socially condemned, thought of even among racially isolated country-folks as backward and immoral. If you want to start a debate about racism, no one is going to volunteer to argue in favor of it. We’ve reached social consensus that racism is wrong.

Yet nothing is that simple. What we haven’t determined is what exactly racism means.

This year Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children is the Mississippi Reads selection. The purpose of the organization is to promote one book a year by a Mississippi author and to attempt to get as many people as possible in the state to read the same book roughly at the same time. It is a literacy push similar to the NEA's Big Read program, but it is also meant to raise awareness in the state of our local literary heritage, and to spark conversations about the books and the images and ideas within them.

I read Uncle Tom’s Children recently for the first time, and I tried to get others to follow along. I was astounded by the power of Wright’s voice. I was even more astounded by the resistance I met in people who like to read but did not want to read that. Granted, the book contains violence and horrors no one wants to think about, but the hostility I saw in some toward reading it was disproportionate. For whatever reason, those things we didn’t want to think about hit a little too close to home.

One person told me she didn’t believe the stories were realistic because she’d lived in Mississippi her whole life and never witnessed any racial violence. Again, I have to wonder what your definition of violence is, what your definition of racism is.

Another said he was just tired of everything having an agenda. We’d all jump on the bandwagon for Richard Wright, he said, but we wouldn’t do the same for a white man because that wouldn’t be politically correct. Last year the Mississippi Reads selection was Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner. Next year, it is Eudora Welty’s Collected Stories. From my perspective it does not look like a concentration on black authors has overwhelmed anyone’s wagon in Mississippi. They’ve simply been brought on board.

The next said he was just tired of people harping on racial violence. He said there were no victims left, and it was time for everyone to move on. He conceded the point when I mentioned that Wright’s stories were written during the Depression, but his comment that there are no victims left still perplexed me. What is your definition of victim?

I repeated this conversation to my sister. Of course, there are no former slaves left alive, I said, but what about those who lived through segregation? It hasn’t been that long since our schools were integrated. “We still have segregated schools,” she said. And she’s right. Due to middle class movements into suburbs and people sending their children to private schools, our students do remain largely segregated. One public school might be 80% black and another 80% white in the same town. What’s more, in smaller towns, we still have places where the proms are segregated with the white students renting out an all white country club in order to hold their own prom apart from the school-sponsored one. What’s your definition of victim?

People have made similar comments regarding the presidential election process. “I’m not sure a good old boy like me can vote for a black man or a woman,” one man told me, and he said it in a way that was self-chastising, guilty, uncertain, aware of its own irony. He really didn’t know, and it bothered him that he could not say unequivocally that he could vote for a black man or a woman without qualm.

I feel his pain. I don’t believe I would choose to vote against anyone based on gender or race. I might even vote for a candidate because she is a woman or he is a black man, at least in part, because I would enjoy the idea of being part of historical change. But is this its own kind of racism? I know plenty who would accuse me of it.

I look around at people who are educated, sensitive, kind, and otherwise self-aware who astound me in their prejudices, but even as I point the finger at them I know I am not without blame. We are all products of our surroundings, and I grew up in a small town in Mississippi in the 1970s.

I have spent long hours contemplating how my friend could say she had seen no racial violence in Mississippi. She lived in the same town as Vernon Dahmer at the time that his house was fire bombed. I can say only that denial is a powerful means of self-preservation, and that when talk of racism comes up, people so often take it as a personal accusation. My friend wasn’t in on the attack on Dahmer and his family. She was only a child. Probably no one in her family was directly involved. But it was her parents’ generation in charge at the time, shaping politics and social mores, balking at integration, and living out their parents’ fears. To say that the prior generation was unforgivably violent would be to her like condemning her own mother to the lower regions of Dante’s Inferno. She simply wouldn’t be capable of doing it.

And racism is always more complicated than that. All of these people I’ve mentioned have in common that they think of themselves as good people who don’t let race interfere in their treatment of others. Largely this is true. Their students, their clients, their colleagues probably are all judged by individual standards, not by collective measures of race or creed or any of the old social dividing points. If they saw someone in need, they would reach out to help, regardless of race. In this we have all come so far. Yet some of these same people send their children to private schools, in part out of the belief that the large numbers of black students in the public schools drag the standards down educationally and/or socially. Some of them would not vote for a black man, and some of them would experience the worst kind of agony if their daughters chose to marry black men. In this we have so far to go.

I’d like to believe I am not racist. I don’t base my treatment of others on race. I don’t base my literary tastes on race. I don’t think race makes any difference in the quality of a political candidate. Yet I realize my world is very small and narrow.

I go to work. I go home. I go to church. I go to the gym. I go to professional conferences. I visit family. I go out to eat or to movies with friends. I don’t do a whole lot of other going, and in all of these places I encounter only a handful of black people who are not my students. With students, there is always a social distance no matter how much I like them, so I can’t say I really live in an integrated world.

I look at my Facebook profile, and I wonder where the black people are on my friend wheel. The answer is that the only black people I’ve seen on Facebook that I personally know are people who have been my students. I haven’t invited any student to be in my friend network because I’m not sure they want me in their personal business. I have accepted friend requests from students, but I haven’t offered them, and so far no black students have asked. I could walk around at work and at church asking black people I know to join Facebook so that I can have an integrated friend wheel, but that hardly seems as though it would make my life less racist in any meaningful way.

A few months back, I went to a Barack Obama rally at Jackson State University. It was not only my first time to go to a political rally for a black candidate. It was also my first time on the Jackson State campus, a school that is historically black. The fact that I work in education and had never been to the most prominent African American school in my state probably says something. I can’t remember ever consciously avoiding the campus before, but neither can I remember having cause to go, and in some loose way I connect that in my mind to the question of whether even professional organizations are still segregated.

So what should have been normal, visiting another school, was monumental, and was made downright historical by the large numbers of white people who came out to the JSU campus to cheer on Obama. When my father headed up a church related school in the 70s, he became the first person to admit black students to the school. This decision was so controversial that it tore apart both the church and the school.

My father was not even actively fighting for civil rights. He simply found himself faced with a choice and made the one he believed to be right. This is a man who is not above telling racist jokes or worrying about what’s happening in “the black community,” but on an individual, case-by-case basis, he unfailingly chooses the more moral option as he sees it. That particular brand of moral determination landed him in the middle of civil rights battles he did not seek out.

My memories of these events are vague, elusive. I knew only that people were easily angered, that there were parts of town where white people didn’t go, and that there places where the presence of black people was still a very sore subject—the public pool, the movie theater, the public library, the schools. There was an implicit social resistance to integration whether anything overt was done about it or not. Yet at the same time, on an individual basis, most people seemed to get along, which made those eruptions of controversy over the entrance of black people all the more surprising and confusing.

What remained steadfast through all of the 70s turmoil over where black people could go was that “we” stayed away from “their” side of town. Which is why it was a big deal to me to go to Jackson State, a place that was back then most decidedly in “their” territory. It’s why it made me a little teary-eyed to sit in an athletic arena packed to capacity with black and white alike, singing together, “I’m so happy I’m voting for Obama,” and even praying together.

If Barack Obama never makes it to the White House, what he’s accomplished in proving that some of those decades old racial divides can be bridged now with no violence or eruptions of controversy is immeasurable.

I think he understands this. His speech on race was incredibly thoughtful and compelling, recognizing complexities on all sides while still delivering a hopeful message. If you have not heard it yet, go immediately to YouTube to listen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWe7wTVbLUU

I’m not writing this as an endorsement of Obama’s campaign. I don’t believe it is my place as a teacher to publically endorse anyone. I want my students to feel free to express their own beliefs, ideas, and concerns in my classroom without fear of political reprisal. I am, however, saying that if we fail to use the opportunity of his campaign to foster public dialogue on issues of race and racial healing in America, more’s the shame on us.

I remember a time when my nephew was little, and he was upset by a boy in his kindergarten class who told him not to touch a black person because the black would rub off. Since his babysitter was black and had been holding him and rocking him his whole life, he was understandably quite confused. What we know as adults—that parents told fairy tales of such twisted natures to their children in order to keep them socially segregated in an integrated classroom—was not obvious to a child. He was just upset without fully realizing why.

We can all hope we’ve come far enough that these are no longer the tales passed around the kindergarten playgrounds of our country. But we also know we can’t guarantee they are that far behind us.

Read Richard Wright if you will. Burying the past means we also bury our awareness of why we do not want to go back. Vote for whom you wish, but take the opportunity to examine where your definitions of race and cultural identity now stand. As Obama pointed out, we do not live in a stagnate world, and moments of genuine reevaluation are oh so necessary to moving forward in positive directions.

My South is a South of progress. It’s a South of black and white alike splitting watermelons and churning ice cream at the same table. It’s a South of gospel music and grandmas of every color bowing their heads in prayer for their children. It’s a South in which neighbors of all descriptions bond together to help each other out in times of need. This is the reality I choose. Let’s keep it that way by not neglecting to fix the problems that are just are real as the beauties of My South.