The Race Card Project
By Michele Norris
Don O’Neal,
Charlottesville, VA
I was raised to be a bigot. But I grew past that and raised a son to be different than I was raised. I live in Charlottesville VA. When the white supremacists came to town I literally stood arm in arm with diverse neighbors, willing to fight to keep hate out of our town.
Robert S. Davis,
Hanceville, AL.
My southern blue collar father said that he never voted for the party but only for the man. Most of his life he voted for Democrats but in his last years he voted all Republican. He always voted for the biggest bigots running, even if only by party association, Dad told me (seriously) that he was unaware of any intelligent black person and that all women should be homemakers and raising babies unless they were too ugly to find husbands. Today millions of Americans feel as he did an, although even to themselves they deny their unreasonable they deny their unreasonable prejudices. They, vote that their fears and hatreds, even against the best interest of themselves and their families, in the privacy of voting booths. To change the world for the better, we must first change hearts and minds.
Anonymous
Plattsburgh, NY
I grew up in a rural upstate NY town–hating everything that seemed bigoted or prejudiced. I loathed a lot of the people I knew in adolescence who held tight to old racist values. I went into college with an open mind and an open heart.
I don’t know what happened next. Our University has a large black population and–even though they had done nothing to me, I began to feel a lot of animosity towards them. The girls who seemed just to act so over the top. The guys who wore suits and tried to compensate for…something? I don’t know. I even began to think that these people smelled ‘different’…
I don’t want to be a racist. I believe we all should have the opportunity to achieve our goals. Yet for whatever reason, I can’t abandon this horrible way of thinking. I disappoint myself a lot.
Tom Woodworth,
Chicago, IL.
I was never a bigot (I would like to claim), but a disturbing epiphany came when I realized my troubled personal relations were much my fault, due to my blaming it on “how those people are,” overgeneralizations I just had, just absorbed somehow, somewhere, and never been caused to question before.
Paul Meyer,
Chicago, IL.
I am a bigot toward bigots. My so-called best friend in third grade gives me, a Jew, a Nazi ring saying, “my father wants you to have this.” My fiancé when I’m 33 hurls slurs toward hispanics. Others throughout my life condemn my race or other peoples’ races. I just disown these racists, until last year, with the horrific killing of a 17-year-old unarmed black high school student by a racist Chicago cop. It moved me, at age 69, to start marching for the first time in my life. I feel that maybe my activism, although I was only one of 500 marchers, helped quash the reelection of the Illinois Prosecutor who was part of the coverup for the young man’s murder. And I feel good about that. But not satisfied. So I brought the young man’s story and my stories to the stage (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwwNMBFf0jM), beseeching my fellow North Side Chicagoans “to march with our fellow citizens from Chicago’s South Side.” I have no data on the impact of my performance but conservative folks I know have weighed in favorably on my message. Perhaps if more of us could elevate our activism to “actionism,” if we could expand our race card in creative ways to non-activist audiences, we may at least open some otherwise closed minds.
Alyssa Yates,
Orlando, FL.
I was going to say something about how it pis*** me off that some people assume that my life has been easy just because I’m white (in some 6 word format), but then I thought about how bigoted I am against rich people. I’m not even a hateful person, and it’s wrong for me to feel this way. Bottom line is, there will always be someone worse off and someone better off than you or me or anyone else. Why do we have to belittle what someone has gone through by saying that other people have gone through worse?
Paul,
Colorado Springs, CO.
I am not the enemy. I am a 40-year old white, middle-class male- the prime demographic; according to some. It hurts me when people assume that I’m bigoted, racist, sexist or homophobic. To many racial and gender-based groups; I am looked at as the enemy. Neither I, nor my family has ever committed a hate crime and yet, I am treated as though I’ve done a great wrong.
Justice Poppe
San Francisco, CA
It seems that everyone is calling for “tolerance” and “acceptance”, and yet do they realize that when they call us bigots, racists, homophobics, sexists, etc. they are succumbing to the same intolerance they charge us with?
Christopher Saldaña
Seattle, WA
While I was helping my ex’s father move from California (my home state, from which I have since moved), he took a break to talk to some neighbors. He then decided to say the new state he was moving to was better because it “didn’t have as many Mexicans”. While I was standing no more than ten feet from him.
Jeff Bowlin
Kingsport, TN
Throughout history the white race has been the dominate race for only one reason, struggle. Humans with lighter skin lived further north and had to endure cold winters. In order to survive, they had to invent better places to live, and more ingenious things to survive in harsher environments. Humans with darker skin generally lived in more temperate climates where the daily struggle is mostly limited to food. Necessity is the mother of invention and that is the only reason that the lighter races progressed faster than darker races. Whites need to remember that they are where they are today not because they are smarter, stronger, or better, but because they were not content to stay where they were. Whites have no reason to look down upon other races. The reality of the story of the white race is that they were just too stubborn, arrogant, or short-sighted to stay around the fire with the others. They wandered off into the wild like disobedient children and then had to keep inventing things to make a life for themselves. All that the white race has fought for is the life that their darker brothers and sisters already had because they were smart enough to be content with what they had.
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