“Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Mo. Catch a….” Are you expecting “tiger”? Well, I didn’t learn it that way. In the small, all-white town where I grew up, we said “nigger” and used the expression when we picked sides for games. By the time I got to high school, we didn’t say it much anymore, but we had other expressions like it that we used almost every day. I call these expressions racethets, epithets with an overtly racist intent that are no longer considered racist. They’re a hidden form of racism.
In college, I tried to take a more open-minded approach to race, but I didn’t think much about it. My a-racial upbringing followed me. I met people from different races and treated them as individuals, but I didn’t make an effort to meet anyone who wasn’t white. My friends were all white, and most of them were from backgrounds similar to mine. And we all used racethets. Frankly, I didn’t care about race, apart from my own.
Years later, I discovered African-American history, and I was shocked at what I had missed. This country was built on the backs of slaves. Blacks fought with distinction in every war, although not for their own freedom. This brought to mind what I had grown up saying and believing, and I realized my college approach to race was fake.
Growing up where I did in southern Illinois, it was easy to be racist. You could shout “nigger” from your rooftop, and someone might walk by with a “Tsk, tsk,” only to go home and use expressions far worse. While the “N” word was frowned upon, others were acceptable.
One day while arguing with my sister, I shouted, “Nigger!” My mother immediately corrected me, saying it was wrong to use that word. A few years later, when we were at the horse races, I got up to get a drink of water. My mother stopped me and handed me a paper cup. “Here,” she said, “use this. The colored people drink out of that water fountain.” I was young, but I saw the contradiction. My mother was born in Alabama and grew up in an all-white town in southern Illinois. And I’m sure she grew up using racethets, too.
Correcting this problem starts with parents. If they grew up using that kind of language, they must not pass it on to their children. They additionally need to watch for racethets in their children’s speech, telling them that there’s no such thing as good racism. Nothing that puts another person down is acceptable, even if funny.
Church is the ideal place to learn this, and the Catholic Church should take the lead. Race has never mattered to the Church. We’ve had two African popes, SS. Victor I and Melchiades (though their race was never recorded). There are even predictions that the next pope could be black. But really, who cares?
Society should adopt the policy of the Church, and race should never be a consideration. Remind children of the diversity that defines us and teach them to respect that diversity. We’re all equal before God (Galatians 3:28), and we should stand equal before each other.
It doesn’t much matter if a man who is not white can vote or if a black woman can buy a home in your neighborhood. So long as we use the language of prejudice, prejudice will remain. And as long as we’re taking paper cups to the water fountain, we still have a long way to go.