The Sin of Our Silence

When I was in seventh grade, I was grounded for having a crush on a black boy.

Like so many white Americans in the late 1960s, my father was afraid of the shifting sands in his universe.

He was afraid of a race of people he never had known until he married and left the family farm. He was afraid of the rage of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. And he was afraid of his 13-year-old daughter, who was so taken with Motown and civil rights that she permed her hair into a white girl's Afro and grinned herself silly whenever a boy named Adrian walked past the house.

My father couldn't control Malcolm or Marvin Gaye, but he could pull hard on the reins on his daughter. Despite his iron will — or maybe because of it — the seeds of my activism took root in the fertile ground of that long and hostile summer.

I've referred to my working-class roots in this column many times. My parents wore their bodies out to give us kids a better life, and I am proud to come from the blue-collar tradition of hard work and big dreams.

But it's important not to romanticize the working class. My neighborhood and my own family harbored many stereotypes about race. My father, in particular, wrestled with a world that kept changing before he was ready. I can't tell you exactly when I decided that his way would not be my way. All I know is that at some point, I said to myself: "It stops with me."

My father loved me more than his fears, and so he worked hard to meet me on higher ground. In the last year of his life, he acknowledged that many of the changes he once hated were good for the country he loved.

He'd made some real friends in the black community, too. The issue of racism had become personal for him, for all the right reasons. Finally, my dad and I could talk calmly about race.

That's the kind of conversation we need right now.

Most white Americans do not hate black people.

You would not know that from listening to my voice messages in the past week.

You wouldn't know that by what you hear on conservative talk radio, either, or by reading many of the comments posted on blogs and newspaper sites.

That's the thing about racists. They may be outnumbered, but they are loud and they are relentless.

Meanwhile, most decent white people in this country remain silent.

There are many reasons, of course, for this reticence. Most try for colorblindness, but shades of gray sneak in, and guilt can render a person mute. So can fear, especially fear, and it's the rare person who isn't afraid of the consequences of taking a stand. And some people are just plain shy.

These are reasons for our silence, but they're not excuses for standing by as hatemongers try to take our country hostage. I've supported Hillary Clinton, but what is happening right now to Barack Obama transcends politics. This is about who we are and who we want to be as Americans.

Those looking for an excuse to denounce Obama found it in 30 seconds of videotape of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. His language was incendiary and divisive to a lot of Americans, particularly those who are white. When I wrote that no one, including Obama, should be expected always to agree with his pastor, the response from some white readers was the ugliest that's come my way in a long time.

These racists are a minority, but they were the majority on my voice mail.

It takes courage to speak out against racism, especially when we're among family or friends. Someone we know or love says something we can't quite believe, and we're sure that if we say something, we will bring the conversation to a spine-tingling halt. But that's the only way we start another one.

No good can come of our silence. We can sit by and hope that someone else stands up for what we believe.

Or we can smack down the rhetoric of hate and make it clear where we stand. One person at a time, we can insist:

It stops with me.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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