This morning something deeply disturbing happened to my 13 year-old nephew, Christopher. He got a text message, which had been forwarded around from person to person, from one of his best friends, a girl we’ll call Ashley. It went something like this:
"America has elected a nigger. Today in school show your support for the KKK by refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance."
Christopher lives in Alabama, where this kind of ignorance isn’t terribly hard to find, and he’s a bit more advanced than some of his classmates where racial issues are concerned. He grew up in Charlotte (and NC urban areas are a lot more progressive than the outback), has always had black and biracial friends, and like so many kids of his generation he simply doesn’t see race as a big deal. He’s not blind to the fact that racism exists, of course, but it’s never been a factor in his personal life. A couple years ago, though, my sister and her family moved to Huntsville, and she reports that things are very different on the cultural front.
Christopher was beside himself. When he saw the message he told his mother that he thought he was going to be sick, and when I talked to him a few minutes later he was obviously shaken. He couldn’t believe that Ashley, someone that his whole family really likes (my sister says she’s almost become family), would pass something like that on. He was going to talk to her, when he got to school, to see if she even had any idea about what she had done.
You know kids, you know school, you know what it was to be that age. We all did appalling things, and maybe this is a case where a fundamentally good girl did something simply because she didn’t grasp what it meant. Christopher wants to make sure she understands some things about the Klan - he doesn’t think the kids in his school really know what it is - and he wants her to understand the group’s history, to understand things like church bombings and the struggle for civil rights.
Christopher understands how remarkable last night was: a black man elected president, when not very long ago - during his parents’ lives, in fact - a black man had to drink from a separate water fountain, sit in the back of a bus, and so on.
