Other Opinion

SELF-PERCEPTION CLOUDS RACIAL REALITY IN TULIA

I read the article in last Thursday's Globe-News in which Swisher County
Sheriff Larry Stewart asserted that Tulia is not a racist community,
despite the fact that the now infamous "Tulia Drug Bust" would suggest
otherwise.

After reading this piece, I found myself wondering what Sheriff Stewart
would have said if Tulia really was a racist community.

A generation ago, the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force found themselves in a
similar position.
With America's armed forces facing the transition from the draft-oriented
Vietnam era to the post-Vietnam all-volunteer force, the perceptions of
minority service members took on significance for the first time.

The perceptions these men and women held about America's military leaders
displaying racial preference were explored and analyzed, and guess what we
discovered.

Many leaders, both officer and enlisted, behaved as racists even though
they denied it.

The conclusion? A denial of one's racist attitude isn't persuasive, isn't
even evidence. Even blatant racists will assert they are not if accepting
that label denies them career advancement.
Well, before this development in the U.S. military, I was a junior officer
on the staff of the admiral who was commander of U.S. Naval Forces in the
Philippines.

While I served on that staff, there were episodes of race riots aboard Navy
ships, the most significant being aboard the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk.

Blacks in the military, you may recall, carried a disproportionate share of
the burden in the Vietnam War.

That was bad enough, but in doing so they were subjected to all kinds of
bigotry, from racial insults to official oppression. This was a mess that
simply had to be cleaned up before we could expect blacks to volunteer for
military service.

As it happened, I participated in this cleanup.

As a lieutenant commander, I was trained to be an internal consultant to
the Navy, working with admirals and senior captains in charge of large
shore commands to improve their handling of all the people they led.

Part of this work involved confronting these officers on their attitudes
toward blacks.

But before I could do this work, I first had to confront my own attitudes
toward blacks, women, and those older and younger than I.

I was raised in a socially liberal atmosphere.

My father was a career Air Force officer, a man who insisted that we take
other people one at a time.

We were never permitted to utter racial slurs at home, never allowed to
generalize about the races or genders.

We were taught that at the level of individuals, we could meet worthy and
unworthy blacks, just as we could meet worthy and unworthy whites.

Even so, I discovered that my own behavior fell into racist patterns.

These patterns involved where I chose to live, whom I chose to socialize
with, the kinds of jokes I found to be funny, a difference in performance
expectations between blacks and whites.

In short, I was part of an overall military culture in which there were
individuals who were not racist but in which racism was "institutionalized."

To get along you had to go along. Boat rockers found themselves isolated
and left behind in the competition for advancement. The prevailing attitude
was that we needed blacks, but not for the important stuff.

So I understand denial. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, paid the
price.

In fact, being in denial of one's own racist attitudes is a key element in
sustaining racial prejudice.

By consistently asserting that I am not a racist, I look for evidence to
refute the charge and ignore the evidence that the charge is true.

I might even, as Sheriff Stewart did, speak to times and circumstances in
which I did something that was clearly not racist, maybe something in the
distant past with no relevance to contemporary reality.

This is known in behavioral circles as a "fig leaf" - the tiny thing that
makes me technically "dressed" from one vantage point even as it leaves me
naked from all others.
But a fig leaf doesn't get me admitted to a restaurant that requires a coat
and tie, and it would be foolish to demand that others look at me only from
the front to decide whether I am dressed at all.

If we are to establish whether an individual or a community is racist, we
must look past self-perception.

Our perceptions of ourselves can be delusional. We must look instead to
behavior and the products of behavior. An action that isn't racially
motivated but which produces a good outcome for whites who deserve less and
a bad outcome for blacks who deserve more is racist.

And there is evidence that this is what happened in Tulia. So maybe the
good sheriff is in error about both himself and his community.

Maybe these "outsiders" who don't know Tulia as well as Sheriff Stewart
nevertheless see the bald spot the community cannot see for itself.

So I offer a different approach, a piece of advice my mother has given me
since my earliest childhood.

When three people tell you you're drunk, lie down.