After seeing the film “Hidden
Figures,” my 9-year-old granddaughter Katie sent me an enthusiastic voice message,
and then asked me a question that took me aback: “Did you ever see a Colored
water fountain?”
I grew up in Virginia in the 1950s, so
intellectually I know there were segregated water fountains in those days. But I could not actually remember seeing one. How could this be? I think the answer is that such things were
such a normal part of the environment in the segregated south that they weren’t
considered anything special.
Segregation, racism, bigotry and bias were the norm, and one doesn’t
take much notice of things that are normal and routine.
About
10 years ago, another film sparked a similar epiphany in me. “Remember the
Titans” (2000) recounts the true story of an African-American football coach trying
to integrate the team at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria Virginia in
1971. Watching this film, I was stunned
and incredulous. I graduated from McLean
High School, just a few miles from Alexandria, in 1965. Wasn’t McLean High School integrated by then,
I asked myself?
After all, I started high school seven years after the landmark 1954 Supreme Court
decision (Brown vs. Board of Education) that required the desegregation of
public schools in the United States. I
knew all this intellectually. As a
professor of political science, I knew my constitutional history.
While
watching “Remember the Titans,” I racked my brain trying to think of
African-Americans who must have been my high school classmates. I couldn’t think of one. I called my sister, who graduated from the
same high school four years later. She
thought there might have been one or two African-Americans when she was there. We finally resorted to our accumulated high
school yearbooks, scanning for darker faces.
I didn’t find a single one in any of my four yearbooks. My sister finally found one, a girl, in
hers.
It
finally occurred to me, 35 years after the fact, that I had attended an
all-white, segregated high school. But I
had not realized it at the time. White
was normal, so what was there to notice?
Segregation and racism was the norm, and therefore unexceptional and
unmemorable.
In
the aftermath of this stunning revelation, I began to read about the history of
school desegregation, and learned about the campaign of “massive resistance” to
the Brown vs. Board decision that was led by U.S. Senator Harry Byrd of
Virginia. The state, and most of the
schools in the state, simply refused to implement federal law, and this went on
in some school districts for more than a decade after the Brown decision. This controversy had apparently been swirling
around me when I was in high school, but I was oblivious to it. Too many other things going on in the world
and my life: the Vietnam war, pimples,
the Kennedy assassination, all-state marching band, the Cuban Missile Crisis,
junior prom.
The
philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” in a 1963 book
about Adolph
Eichmann, a top administrator of the Nazi death camps. The phrase captures how easy it is for evil
to become routine, even banal. The
Holocaust may have been one of the most extreme and horrific examples of this,
but we have seen it in this country too with the massacres of Native Americans;
the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II; the Jim Crow laws and
segregation in the south; and with continuing manifestations of bigotry,
racism, and intolerance, even coming from our top political leaders.
Perhaps the teenage me could be forgiven for
not noticing the evil of segregation, and the underlying racism and prejudice,
in my own environment. As adults, we
have no such excuse.
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