I met Bruce Horst at The Woodlands Coffee Party which is affiliated with the Coffee Party USA Movement. Bruce was very easy to talk to and was always genuine. He invited me to write at his blog and I have written several articles there.
I must admit that while I have admired Bruce for the work he has done at SearchWarp.com, I never realized he had the insight on so many social issues and the permutations thereof. I hope that he in fact follows up his initial intent and make this a series as he is uniquely qualified to tell.
I’m skipping around in this series, "The Long Road Here." I’ve predicted 8 installments to this series, but I’ve been finding it difficult to write my experiences. Frankly, what I’ve learned along the way can be pretty offensive to people in my past, and I’m reluctant to offend them. For this installment, I’m going to skip forward a few years to something less personal to me. I grew up in backwoods Pennsylvania. James Carville somewhat offensively describes Pennsylvania as "Pittsburg and Philadelphia, separated by Alabama." In light of this, I grew up in south-central Alabama, right next to Gettysburg.
I really didn’t know any minorities growing up, except for a kid our family took in one week every Summer from an organization called the Fresh Air Fund. His name was Raymond Maning, and he was from The Bronx, New York.
My grandmother had an above-ground pool that we would swim in during the Summer, and occasionally we took Raymond to the pool to swim. I had an uncle who would drain the water every time after we left, because Raymond was black. I was always intrigued by this, but I didn’t really understand it.
As I got older, I remember asking those around me, if blacks can have a Black History Month, why can’t whites have White History Month? This seemed like a legitimate question to me.
When I reached my early 20’s I heard Rush Limbaugh in his faux eloquence ask the question, "if we have to pay restitution to blacks to for past discrimination, then how do we know when we’ve paid them back enough?" I couldn’t find fault with this question.Then there was reverse discrimination. Obviously whites have been discriminated against because of equal opportunity laws. At least that’s how it seemed. Because of my very limited exposure to minorities I realized that I didn’t have a very good understanding of discrimination against minorities. I did know, however, how main-stream white male conversation typically went when it came to minorities.
In the early 2000’s I was spring-boarded into management as the national tech trainer at Best Buy. As part of this, I was required to spend a few weeks in management training, with one week in sensitivity training.
This was an incredible week for me. In hindsight, I see it as a week that I had been longing for most of my life. I remember coming home after late nights and putting my young children to bed, and telling them what I had learned during the day. At the center of this training were the Jane Elliott videos.
Jane Elliott was a 3rd grade teacher in the 1960’s. After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, she decided to take her students through an exercise to help them understand racial discrimination.If you haven’t seen them, you need to watch these video’s on YouTube. In her experiment, she first told her blue-eye’d students that they were superior. They could have a longer recess, and drink at the normal water fountain.
The Long Road Here – Starting to Understand Racial Inequality | Bruce Horst