A Little Off the Top: How far have we come?

This weekend marks the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s entrance into major league baseball — a cause for celebration for race relations in our country — but it also has me contemplating just how far we’ve come since then, if at all.

Race is a touchy subject for Southerners like me, if only because it’s an ugly part of our collective past. Growing up in Virginia, I saw plenty of evidence that we still have a ways to go, but nothing prepared me for the four years I spent in college in South Carolina in the early to mid-’90s.

As I noted in an earlier column, my grandparents were missionaries who raised my mom and her two sisters in a small town in South Carolina. My mom actually went to a high school called Dixie High, and white students were generally not allowed to walk to school with black students. That was the norm for that day and age, and not just in that part of the country.

Despite social norms at the time, my grandparents were the most non-racist people you could imagine, which was quite unusual for people their age. Even today, many elderly Southerners still use the term “niggra” as a pseudo form of “negro” and the still oft-used “N” word (I can’t bring myself to say it, let alone put it in writing).

Given my mom’s upbringing, I was totally unprepared for the world I encountered in Spartanburg, S.C., where I attended a well-known liberal arts college, which presumably encouraged progressive thinking.

While the college professors did their best to foster open discussions of many topics, they were woefully inadequate in changing many of their students’ mindsets.

One student had the familiar statue of the black boy eating some watermelon, proudly displayed on a shelf in his dorm room, with the name of our black dean taped to the figurine. Another student had a bumper sticker that said “If I had known you all were going to be this much trouble, I would have picked my own cotton.”

His SUV didn’t get keyed once during his entire four years there.

One sorority gal once found a purse behind one of the dorms, and as she stood staring at it, I asked why she hadn’t turned it in to campus security. She replied that she was scared to touch it because she noticed it belonged to a black student, and “it probably has germs all over it.”

I didn’t bother to ask whether she was aware that white people also have germs.

Scenes like these were, unfortunately, quite common. I often would hear a racist joke in a public setting, with the joke teller assuming that any white people in earshot must be accepting of it simply because they were white.

“Private” clubs still exist all over the south, where you pay a nominal annual fee for exclusive membership. Because membership is based on an application, and the clubs are private, they can stay below the civil rights radar screen and create an all-white environment, which is exactly what their patrons are paying for.

I often laugh in cynicism when board members from Augusta National golf club cite the two or three gratuitous blacks who are allowed membership there as proof that they aren’t racist.

I once went down the list of my fraternity brothers and counted five non-racists out of 55 total. After four years of confronting things like this, I felt a lot of anger and resentment toward many of my classmates. The Kappa Alpha fraternity still celebrated “Old South” weekend there, when all the brothers dressed up like Confederate soldiers, literally, while their dates looked like Southern belles from the 1800s. I’m not really sure what they were celebrating.

A lot of my shock at such racism had to do with how unprepared I was for how blatant it was. I just naturally assumed that because my grandparents raised my mother in such a non-hateful way, that good progress must be taking place in the South.

My four years at Wofford College taught me otherwise.

Still, as baseball lovers like me turn our attention to the April 15 anniversary of Robinson’s joining of the Brooklyn Dodgers, I still see glimmers of hope. While there is still some valid discussion about a lack of black coaches in baseball (and other professional sports), baseball remains the one professional sport that most accurately reflects the racial make-up of America if you look at the percentage of the many nationalities that make up each team.

Then we have morons like Don Imus who put us two steps back.

If you happen to watch the ceremonies this weekend devoted to Robinson’s anniversary, it might be a good idea to talk to your kids about their feelings on race. I’m a firm believer that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

And thankfully, there are still people like my grandparents who worked hard to make sure hateful feelings of the past don’t find their way into our future.