When the Racism We Hate Comes From People We Love

A special kind of anguish claws at us when someone we love is also someone who is racist.

It's one thing for a stranger to post a racial slur on a blog or forward a hateful e-mail. The vigilantes who used to hide under white hoods and sheets now cower behind the anonymity of the Internet. They are vile and they are vocal, but they are also easy to dismiss because all we really know about them is that their numbers are small, their beliefs are contemptible, and they are cowards.

The story is painfully different, though, when the appalling epithet erupts from someone who otherwise is beloved in our lives. Our responses, usually silent, run the gamut from shock and embarrassment to disgust and rage. There's also a lot of sadness. The question seldom is asked but often wondered: How can we be so different from these people we love?

In the past, I've written about how my father was a factory worker who made many sacrifices so that I would be the first in my family to go to college. He played a central role in my personal history, but there is much more to the man who raised me.

My father taught me how to tie my shoes when I was 4, his big gnarly hands gently guiding my tiny fingers over and over. He growled that his daughters never would "throw like girls," and he taught me to hurl a ball so hard that I once knocked the wind out of my childhood friend Allen Sawicki.

Dad ran alongside me the first time I rode my bike without training wheels, and when I was in eighth grade, he took one look at my tearful face and offered to break the legs of the boy who had just stood me up at the spring dance.

That was my dad. The best parts of him, anyway. But there was another side to him, and it was the reason that months sometimes went by without our speaking.

Most of his life, my father struggled mightily with bigotry. And I do mean it when I say he struggled because the older I got the more he saw what his views were doing to my view of him.

That hurt him — and me — and for years, the only thing we knew to do was yell about it.

It's hard for me to talk about this, harder still to write about it, because I want everyone to know only what I loved about my dad. It feels disloyal to acknowledge this part of him and shameful to admit that this is part of my legacy.

In the past few months, though, I've heard from so many whites whose hearts are breaking over what Barack Obama's candidacy has brought out in some of the people they love. Time and again, from strangers and some of my oldest friends, I hear about an awful remark that usually is followed by guilty silence.

"I hate that my uncle said it, hate even more that I didn't say anything," one of my friends said. "But I didn't want to throw a grenade in the middle of the family picnic."

A whole lot of us know that feeling, and in the past, most of us tried to avoid bringing up the issue of race when we knew it was bound to flare tempers and wound hearts.

Those days came to an abrupt end during this presidential race. Suddenly, even those who seldom utter a peep now are sharing views on race that make our skin crawl. They are not idiots or knuckle-draggers. They are people we love, and that's what makes this so difficult. We can't defend their views, but we can't stop loving them, either.

What we can do is have the conversation we fear most.

By the end of his life, my father had softened considerably about race. To some extent, this was simply a matter of exposure. The more black people he got to know the more exceptions he was willing to carve out.

But he also had three daughters who never gave up on him, never stopped having the tough talks with him. Sometimes he thought we were ganging up on him, but he also knew we never would stop loving him.

These conversations might not change any minds, but in the end, maybe that's not what matters.

What matters most is that we try.

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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