During a beach trip our junior year, I almost started a fight with several of my guy friends (football players who played offensive line) when I angrily ripped down the Confederate flag they had hung from our beachfront balcony. I say almost started a fight, but in reality, they wouldn't have dared touch me even if I had hit one of them. I was able to stand up like that because I come from a place of such privilege that I knew I would come to no harm.
By the time I was a junior in college, I had redesigned my social circles so that they were made up of people who celebrate others for their differences instead of vilifying them. Frankly, I was tired of constantly having to call out people for their racism (I have always considered it an obligation to speak up). That spring, however, I got a nice reminder of why it's so important to refuse to remain silent when you do encounter everyday racism.
In April 2004, I attended the wedding of my dad's cousin's son (my second cousin). I had to work that day and wasn't able to make it in time for the ceremony but I arrived a little while after the reception began. Making my way through the reception hall, I found my dad, who was standing with several relatives, including the son of another one of his cousins, my second cousin Bubba.
Bubba is one year older than me and the son of my dad's favorite cousin. He grew up on Sullivan's Island and we had a condo on the Isle of Palms from the time I was 5 years old until right about the time I turned 15, so I saw Bubba a lot growing up and always enjoyed it. I didn't see him much after we sold the condo, but I knew that sometime after high school he had enlisted in the Marines. He was deployed on one of the first tours of duty for the war in Iraq in 2003. Back then, deployments were only three months long and by the time of the wedding, he had already been on at least three tours of duty. He volunteered to go again and again because, as he told me, he really liked it.
So the way my dad tells it, Bubba was quite a presence at the wedding. Dressed in his uniform and fresh from the battlefield in a war with overwhelming public approval at the time, especially in the South, he had people coming up to greet him left and right. He happily chatted with them all, but kept repeatedly asking my dad if I was coming to the wedding and when I would be there. He really only wanted to speak to me. After my arrival, once the greetings/hugs/niceties were completed with the group, Bubba immediately pulled me aside and told me there was something he really wanted to tell me.
Looking me in the eye, he said he wanted to thank me for always getting on his case about using the n-word when we were younger. He wanted to thank me for insisting to him that black people were people just like us and we shouldn't hate them just because of the color of their skin. He said that when he was in Iraq, there were some black men in his unit who were his best friends. They had risked their own lives to save his on many occasions, and he had done the same for them. They were truly his brothers, and he would never dream of using that word ever again. He said he understood now.
That experience made me feel very good at the time, but thinking about it now makes me feel a bit down. People in my own family - good people - were still being raised to believe that black people don't possess the same basic level of humanity as white people. Overall, my family is a progressive Southern family, but this mindset still exists to some degree. This story, however, is an example of how minds can be changed. The problem with so many white Americans living in the comfort of their own homes is that they don't experience a life-altering event like combat to make them see past the illusions about race that have been placed upon them by society.
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