The Race Card Project
By Michele Norris
Bob Preston,
Seattle, WA.
On Location: Seattle Community Colleges
I thought of this while being told about this project, immediately, and since it has helped me through my transition back to my regular life from military life.
Mike Snow
Spotsylvania, VA
I have listened to the Race Card Project for some time on my NPR station and it has encouragd my own thoughts on the subject. I admitted to my self many years ago that I had thoughts and views that one could deem as “racist”. This smacked me in the face when I was in 8th grade and at a assembly of some sort. I was sitting in a row of students and on my left side was a classmate of mine who was African American. While watching the program I blindly turned to him and made what I thought at the time was an innocuous comment that was blatantly racist. I knew it, he knew it and I to this day am not sure if I have ever been so embarrassed and ashamed in my life, even at that middle school age I began to rethink how my actions affected others. I went on through my teens and early 20’s wrestling with my thoughts and beliefs as well. It was not until I entered the military and subsequently served in combat. During my career in the Army I was able to go overseas to Europe, the Middle East and throughout the USA. Seeing other cultures and worlds is a real eye opener, seeing the violence and devastation people can wreak on each other because of idealogical, racist and religious beliefs is astonishing to me. Seeing real suffering up close puts your own life in perspective. But, my biggest thought changing experience still is that how well my unit(s) worked together, overcoming obstacles together. Speding time in that vacuum together with people from all walks of life, differing religious, race and gender backgrounds, and putting everything aside to accomplish a goal or a mission, suffering equally together and rejoicing when we could. Now I’m not naive enough to think everyone feels the same as I do but for me anyway being in a position where one’s race, gender or religion ultimately did not matter brought a lot into perspective for me. That perspective was even clearer upon returning to the States and reading, seeing and interacting again and seeing and identifying the tendecies of people and discriminating behaviors. While I think there have been strides in race relations in this country, that there still exists a racial divide and some deep racism is apparent. My thought is “if these people (by that I mean people who harbor some ignorant positions) could look outside this country and see the plight of the rest of the world maybe they would have a different opinion” and that peoples true colors show through in times of austerity and difficulty and that should be the measure of a person, not a generalization based upon an incorrect belief. I make it a point not to look at each person I come into contact with for who they are an dlet their own actins speak as to what kind of person they are. This Project just makes me think more, to keep it in the front of my thoughts and to try and be a better person. Thank You.
Michael Snow
Virginia
Ralph Brown (Coach~B :)),
Dallas, TX.
My six words are in response to these six words: “We don’t allow colored in here” which were said to me on March 19, 1963 by a young female movie ticket clerk at the Majestic Theater in Dallas, Texas. I was attempting to see the world premiere of “How The West Was Won” but was rejected because of the color of my skin. I’m from New York, and was in the process of traveling across the country from southern California. It was the first time that institutionalized racism confronted me face-to-face, but sadly enough, it would not be the last!! Two years later, as a member of the USAF, I volunteered to go to Vietnam!
Julian Riggs Smith
Durham, NH
Growing up in a little town in Louisiana during the Second Word War, I found nothing strange about the fact that my white grandparents often ate breakfast and lunch at the kitchen table kitchen with ‘Stell, their black cook, and John, her husband–and that John and ‘Stell never ate with us in the dining room.
Nor did I find it strange that I was expected to address respectable older blacks like John and ‘Stell as “Uncle” and “Aunt”.
Uncle John had a mule and a wagon and a regular trash-collection route and sometimes let me ride with along him when he had a full load to haul to dumping ground in a swamp several miles from the center of our little town. I liked going to the dump because Uncle John let me shoot rats with his old .22 rifle.
One day in early 1945, when I was seven, I was sitting on the buckboard beside Uncle John when a dog began snapping at the legs of the mule.
“I wish I had my n*****-shooter”, I said, using the local slang term for a sling shot.
“What’d you say, boy?” asked Uncle John, stopping the wagon.
I repeated my words and pantomimed using a sling shot.
To make a long story short, Uncle John told me to get down, walk home, and tell Miss Rachel, my grandmother, to wash my mouth out with soap.
My grandmother didn’t wash my mouth out with soap, but she did tell me why I must never use that terrible word again–and that Uncle John was my uncle, was my grandfather’s older half-brother, begotten on his cook several years before their father, a Confederate veteran, could afford to marry. And how her father-in-law, my great grandfather, sailed to Baltimore to woo and marry a cousin and brought her back to Louisiana to his fine new house where the kitchen was run by a former slave with a little boy who resembled her new husband and the two boys she eventually bore, a little boy who looked after his too younger half-brothers, took them hunting and fishing.
Although I was seven, had attained the age of reason and made my first communion, I did not know what that terrible word meant. But using it that day on my uncle’s wagon unlocked the door to many mysteries and set me on a path that would one day result in my own mother calling me a n*****-lover.
Leo Howard Galloway
Oakland, CA
Retired military. As PIC of the annual Veteran’s day celebration at St. Benedict Catholic Church, I knew despite the outcome of the election I would have to stand before my church family regardless. That Sunday, November 11, 2012 I was able in uniform to stand tall before them and say my journey from that Sunday 7 December 1941 to this Sunday November 11,2012 and my Sheperd-in-chief Father Jay Matthews
orders to carry on,allowed me to recall, remember, reflect and reminisce about my journey to this day.
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