I am going to give in to Denise Oliver Velez's request to turn a comment into a diary. The aversion to length (TL;DR) is a peculiar modern affliction, but I will make it easier for people who suffer from it primarily because this issue is so important.
Southern segregation prior to the 1960s and automobility was different from segregation outside the South in that it was a matter of legal institutions and enforced with occasional violence. Being institutional, it was a matter of status and not geography. In fact, having black workers closeby was an advantage. The geographical segregation then was widely distributed and on a micro-scale instead of being the huge segregated neighborhoods of the big cities or the concentrated black communities of lesser non-Southern cities.
My wife, who is from Michigan experience the black customers of her grand-dad's garage in Benton Harbor as "shadow people" and first met a black person face-to-face in a church program at the age of 13. A good number of my earliest friends growing up had black domestic servants (called "maids") who looked after their employers' children all day -- and that included any friends of those children. I cannot remember a world without black people in it an close by. So much so that when in the mid-1970s I moved from Atlanta to Green Bay it took me a while to figure out why the city felt so strange. You never saw black people on the street, but you occasionally saw a black man or a black family driving a Mercedes. That's a strange awakening to yet another aspect of racism.
My take on how I unlearned the racism that I have so far unlearned is below the orange curlicue.
Where to start?
Maybe with this insight that I've gained from 50 years of reflection on exactly this issue. Something like this. The personal is political, deeply political. The institutional constructs the personal. There are contradictions within and between institutions. Dealing with those is where personal and institutional change happens that transforms people and restructures and reorients institutions.
Until the city buses in my small city painted out the "White patrons seat from front. Colored patrons seat from rear." signs I was not aware there was a civil rights movement. I was in junior high school, likely around 13 years old, when that happened. It was so striking that you see I remember the exact text of the signs over 50 years later.
There was no "Negro problem" in my world. Southern apartheid society functioned seemingly smoothly. Avuncular janitors and maternal maids acted in loco parentis to call us to account and in this our school principal and my friend's parents (mine did not have a maid) trusted their judgement or soon found a replacement. In Georgetown SC, African culture still persisted in the kerchiefs that the school workers wore and the balancing of laundry on their heads (second jobs) as they walked the five or six blocks from school to their rented shotgun shacks in the "quarters" just outside the town. But in the textile town of Anderson SC, the black people in my world were maids, janitors, and the residents and kids of a community on a creek just outside of the town limits (more cabins than shotgun shacks). On my suburban street at the creek were two stores: one for whites (the larger nicer one with a concrete floor) and one for blacks, the earlier country store with a dirt floor, a drink cooler and a small stock of groceries and run by an elderly white guy who drove his Model A to work every day. This was mid- to late-1950s. Until the major civil rights push from the 1961 sit-ins onward, I was not aware that I had any racism to unlearn.
But there were still rules. Don't tell that joke that your neighbors told about black people around black people; it might hurt their feelings. Only much later did I understand the loyalty-testing function of racist jokes and comments. Be polite to to maid/janitor. Call them [it was always their first name, never Mr. X or Miss X or Mrs. X although some black people had last name first names. McAllister, Christie, Hayes.
By 1961, I was becoming a news junkie as my family sat and watched the news on the TV every night right before supper. Fritz Hollings was governor of SC, had embarked on a "progressive" agenda, creating technical education centers, educational television, and pimping industrial relocation. Because of Sputnik, science in the schools was being emphasized. Most white Southerners were increasingly proud that their states were beginning to shake off the image of decadence. What was on TV was instant cognitive dissonance. What was going on? What was the talk about "freedom" and "equality" about? It took me five years to sort that last question out. And it was not until I read Melville Herskovits's The New World Negro and Basil Davidson's Lost Cities of Africa that all of the pieces finally clicked into place about the big lie of white supremacy.
Before that happened, I experienced some institutional change. I went to Clemson University as a freshman the year after Harvey Gantt desegregated it through court order. There were then two or three more blacks who had been admitted. Because of these changes in the institution I experienced my first peer relationships with black people my own age. (My parents had childhood peer relationships with black children on the farm growing up but those relationships were ended at around age 10.) I, being raised Methodist, was also a member of the Wesley Foundation, the college ministry of the United Methodist Church which in that very year had both "unified" and recognized Dr. Martin Luther King after his Nobel Prize. The campus minister of that Wesley Foundation was active in the civil rights movement and was intensifying the religious education of the Wesley Foundation to look at some heavy intellectual subjects, all institutional changes. And as a service project, it had a tutoring project for the small black neighborhood in town (still segregated schools in 1964). I tutored the daughter of a truck driver and a school lunchroom worker in math for a semester. And learned that her birthday always came on a Saturday (celebrated when dad was home). She taught me to tutor; I hope that she learned not to be afraid of math.
It was during this year that I received a recruiting letter from the White Citizens Council sent to every college student in the South. Enclosed was a brief on the inherent inferiority of the Negro by a psychologist from Columbia University who testified for segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. His name should be as infamous as the psychologists who designed Guantanamo's torture regime. Also enclosed was a membership form and a request for dues. Apparently some college students did join and later became members of Congress. I was appalled at the poor logic of the professor's argument. Ironically, it ran counter to my then conservative notions of equality and liberty and natural law governance. "All men are created equal" wrote the slave-owner Thomas Jeffoerson. I drafted a counter-argument and tried it out on some of my dorm peers who had received the same letter. I was surprised at how resistant they were. What was going on here? Weren't my professedly patriotic peers interested in liberty and justice? The real world of prejudice ran into my schooled world of land of the free, equality and civics. Kids are much more jaded much earlier now. Or maybe I resist giving up well-socialized principles. At least now I was aware that racism existed.
A well-off white kid from Charleston SC pointed out to some of us when we were bemoaning the racism of our surrounding (i.e. having our white Southern-ness embarrassed by all the racists around us) that we too had imbibed the Kool-Aid.
All this in a year that saw all of us going off to the Quadrennial Conference of the Methodist Student Movement (the folks in New York wanted them a movement) at which the keynote speaker was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, whose homiletic style was traditional Baptist. The preaching style was so familiar to me having many white Baptist friends that I was far from electrified by the sermon. My loss.
In the spring the the Methodist Student Movement of the South Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church met in its first desegregated session in history - with students from colleges sponsored by the UMC - Central Jurisdiction joining those from the all-white Southeastern Jurisidiction colleges and campus ministries. There were only two full-time campus ministers in the state; most campuses were served by the minister of a congregation near the campus. Both of those ministers were active in the civil rights movement. And they planned the program of the conference which brought as a speaker the then controversial Rev. Dr. Joseph Wesley Matthews, former professor of ethics at Perkins School, Southern Methodist University, and then Dean of the Ecumenical Institute - Chicago, whose message among other things was that the church's primary mission to society in the 20th century was about dealing with poverty, war, and racism. Full stop. It was a full-throated assault on inequality, militarism, and racism and not the boring pabulum then heard in Southern pulpits. It hit many attending like a bombshell and immediately provoked a backlash from more conservative preachers, now worried about "kids losing their religion". That summer was very much a "which side are you on" summer for me. One of the catalysts for that was a good friend who was at the conference summing up the educational issue as "Freedom is deciding your own brainwash for yourself." You decide what culture and to a great extent what institutions shape your attitudes.
That summer was the year after Mississippi Freedom Summer and the strategy apparently was to broaden the effort geographically. I was working to earn money for next year's college, but I hung out around the fringes of a local student summer project organized by some Southern Student Organizing Committee members and organizing one of the local black neighborhoods. Yes, white radicals trying to organize more tutoring programs and a domestics labor union and advocacy for child day care centers. This effort was partnered with the NAACP and the local Baha'is. I was still at the "desegregated picnics are still transgressive and big deal" point in my journey.
I also did my homework, reading Gordon Allport The Nature of Prejedice, John Howard Griffin Black Like Me, and James Baldwin The Fire Next Time. Griffin's book opened me to hearing what Baldwin had to say in The Fire Next Time.
The next year I had a summer internship at a then one-year-old community action agency implementing the war on poverty. That summer, my main accomplishment was to pull together a meeting of residents and shopowners in the then perceived worst 10-block neighborhood in Greenville SC. It was 10 blocks of investment property by the worst slumlord in town and was listed in both his an his wife's name. All of the census data supported the general perception of "worst". I met with some caring and smart people twice and outlined some political and neighborhood strategies for accomplishing their vision of dealing with local issues. They kept their group together and accomplished many improvements by going as a unified group to the city council. They did that. I just invited them to a meeting and for 20 minutes spouted some simple-minded BS before letting them work out their own plan. That was my first view of black community power, and it earned my respect.
Two years later, studying now in Baltimore, the riots after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King brought the 82nd Airborne to police the streets outside my university. I had the determination then of "never again". That summer I worked in a project on the West Side of Chicago that brought me face-to-face with urban issues and the reality that we liberal white folk weren't the ambassadors bringing the white ways of doing things to the folks deprived of them. The problems in those neighborhoods really were that difficult short of a different relationship with the Chicago economic, political, and cultural power structure.
A decade later I worked for my first black manager, still among the best experiences I had in my career. I had my first experience of the sort of collegiality in which unique culture could be mutually appreciated (one of the institutional problems is not having the handed-down language for talking about relationships of respect without coming off as corny or kum-ba-yah naive.)
For the past twenty-five years I've lived in a suburban neighborhood near Research Triangle Park. That assemblage of corporate technological research facilities has created a less racist environment in general because until recently corporations were very much into proving the non-discrimination and taking affirmative action through managerial diversity course to change attitudes throughout the corporation.
Twenty years ago, the city and county school districts of my county merged leaving no place for white people to flee short of charter or private schools. In addition, my neighborhood was assigned to the historically black high school, which was provided a new campus and buildings and a significantly upgraded educational mission (International Baccalaureate program for one item). White families move out to the next high school district over, which did not have the stigma of "historically" anything in its profile. As a result, my neighborhood became more diverse. As these new people became involved in community activities and took up some of the leadership roles (the doing kind, not the status kind) that makes this a great neighborhood, my racism was challenged again with dealing with ordinary neighborhood conflicts without it triggering a whole racial matrix of thinking. Who knew that unlearning racism could be so hard and how wired in it is that under stress it reflexively appears.
My experience is that the attitudinal change comes after the institutional change establishes a different set of social relationships. It is that all of my efforts to wilfully bridge the divide turned out to have an implicit sense of white privilege and supremacy in them. And that pretending that you've finally unlearned racism is a set-up to an encounter with your own reflexive unwilled racist propensities.
But it's been one whale of an interesting journey to have been on.
As usual, Dee, I've rambled on too long.