MORE ABOUT PRESIDENT OBAMA AND THE “FULL-ON RACIAL DEBATE”…

I am white, so like most other white adults who recognize and acknowledge racism as a persistent, virulent factor in American culture, I came late to the race debate.  That is true even though I grew through childhood within a family unafraid to focus on issues and causes that championed the welfare of everybody. I didn’t know when I was a child that I was white.  The color of my skin was not something that got my attention, and it didn’t occur to me that the color of my skin had anything to do with the way the world related to me . The color of my skin was not what I expected the world to notice about me.  I walked out into the world every day of my childhood with a sense that I was whatever the world expected me to be. It wasn’t until somewhere in the middle of what has become my long adulthood that I became aware that most children of color growing up in America know they are “colored;” and therefore their growing-up-in-America experience is different from the growing up experience of most white children.  They know, really know, they are not white, and the white child walks out into the white world every day without constant present awareness of his whiteness.

I am much older than Barack Obama, so I can only guess at the differences between my childhood and the his childhood; it’s obvious that he was bright and was aware that his mother who loved him was as white as mine was and the grandparents who loved him were white as mine were… and of course he knew that his complexion didn’t match theirs. My white father was a daily presence in my life.  Barack Obama’s black father was not a presence in his childhood. The charge that the President isn’t addressing the “full-on the racial debate” in America is ignoring the fact that his whole life has been lived at the center of that debate. He has been addressing with his whole life the full-on racial debate. He went out into the world from early childhood aware that he was not white. I went out into the world from early childhood unaware that I was white because it wouldn’t have changed anything to be aware.  My world was a world where almost everybody was white… all the close neighbors, all my relatives, all the people in town government, and state government, and federal government, all the people in all the stores where my family shopped, all the policemen and firemen.  As a child I had no reason to think about whether it would have made a difference if I had been a person of color.  I didn’t know when I was a child, but that doesn’t excuse careless insensitive responses I might make to the way the world is now as an adult who knows. I do indeed know that my being born white was an enormous advantage. I was born a healthy male into a stable American middle class family, biologically programmed to become tall with no physical or mental impairment, and white. 

People like me who were born with major advantages must assume major moral responsibility for standing with all people for whom justice is denied… whatever the reasons.