Great write up. I'll never be able to understand racism. It's just, yeah, all I can do is just shake my head and go "really?".

Oh, Roger,

It's so easy to read the articles about the hatemongers and despair.

When I read your writing, though, I'm reminded that the world I live in is one of hope, and goodness, and responsibility and conscience.

So I don't give in to despair. I read your pieces and I gain some more strength, like all your readers do, to fight the hate, word by word, and step a little further forward.

xx Van

Thanks for this. Thoughtful and moving. The haters will never read it, and there lies the sad truth of why they'll stay locked in their blind angry fear.

How do they get that way? They get that way through childhood indoctrination. They get that way in the same way that they get to be Christian. Unfortunately, the influence of Christ doesn't seem to overcome the racial bigotry. Never did understand that part.

Quote: "I wonder if she has ever forgotten that day. God damn it, how did we make her feel? We have to make this country a place where no one needs to feel that way."

Dear Roger,
I agree with everything you have written in this blog-entry. Except for that quote above.
It is not just your country that needs to be re-worked. Over here in Europe my grandparents had lived to witness what humans are capable of becoming as a result of racism .

Now, 70 years later, headlines are spreading that foreigners are beaten up in the subway by gangs of adolescents. Maybe 70 years, two generations, is to long to keep the memory alive of what radical racists are able to do, of the crimes they can commmit.
I hope we won't forget. Otherwise we humans as a species would have failed any purpose of our very existence.

It is not this country that has to become a place where no one needs to feel that way - it is our whole planet that has to become such a place. It's a shame that it is not already.

Best regards,
Jens Adrian

I also believe modern racism is more an expression of personal frustration, rather than the genuine feelings of superiority of pre 1960s whites. Every white person knows they aren't entitled to anything over a black person or a hispanic person. We're equals (more or less) and that's frightening when one's fictional advantage is gone. Of course, racists take this a step further, by arguing that all those blacks and Mexicans are gettin' welfare and gettin' my tax money and it just ain't right I tells ya!

Roger, I'm studying the Civil Rights movement at school in England as part of my A Levels to an extent that I'd never been taught before. Further down the school we were told about Martin Luther King and about Malcolm X (with clear emphasis upon who was the 'goody' and who was the 'baddie') and maybe a little hint at the KKK. It's now that I realise there was a reason for this, because the hatred and the horror of those years was really quite something, something that it takes a while to get used to. I'm a moderate person generally, but it fills me with rage to see how people used to behave, openly, brashly.

And I sometimes think to myself 'how lucky we are that we're all past that' and 'how America has moved on' but it's times like these that I take a cold hard look at the Southern parts of your generally wonderful country and I am filled with the same rage and anger. Why? Why are people still like that?

Very nice piece, Roger, imbued with the proper dignity, solemnity, and depth.

The racism of those drivers stems from a clawing, visceral tribalism more ancient than reason itself. It is a primitive sense, driven by, as Clint Eastwood wisely said, deep insecurity.

When one's life is limp, meaningless, and frustrated, so much easier to turn the snarling bitterness to Others - groups safely perceived to have lower social station and less protection. Therein, the glaring weakness of bigotry is revealed.

So fortunate are we that the forward march of history seems to recognize this. But chauvinism will always linger in the shadows, ready to pounce into inevitable moments of relapsed societal weakness.

Beautifully written - made me weep.

Quick thoughts:

- what an excellent post. No better post will be written on a blog on the internet this week.

- What a life you have lived! The experiences you have had. The people you have met. The people lucky enough to have met you.

- "Apparently" people were yelling at the mural. That behavior is disgraceful and indefensible. I'd like to see more than anecdotal evidence that this happened though. We have lots of YouTube video on the reaction. Any of the incidents?

- The distict officials seem sincere in their apologies on that scaffolding. No hesitation in saying they made the wrong decision. Good for them.

- I'd like to see a pic of the original mural and of the changed mural, and without the scaffolding in their way. I'll have to search for them.

- There is no doubt this will have a profound effect on the students in that school. A negative effect, probably in the way that you described it. Hopefully, they can work with the kids depicted and turn it back into a positive experience.

- What is up with the artist's hat?

- Lastly, when are we going to acknowledge that Arizona is in a state of crisis? This event did not happen in a vacuum.

Did you see the episode He's Alive from The Twilight Zone? That episode predicted this and other evil events would happen. Serling would probably be called a Communist by such upstanding people as Palin, O'Reilley, Limbaugh, Dobbs, Hannity. Their vision is anathema to anything and proof that Robert Kennedy has "anti-dopplegangers."

Mr. Ebert, I have long admired your takes on movies, whether I have agreed or disagreed with what you have had to say. It's obvious you love film, and your passion shows in your work, even though at some points, I have thought you to have grown too cynical. I guess that is bound to happen to us all.

I just want to say, you have written something here that really cuts to the heart of this issue. It's personal, real, and moving. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

"I believe at some point in the development of healthy people there must come a time when we instinctively try to understand how others feel."

This, a thousand times. I think there is a point in everyone's young life where you are made to feel bad, and that is actually a good thing, because you learn empathy.

You are taught that you can be hurt, and I think a healthy person then thinks, "I don't want to feel this way again... and I don't want to make other people feel this way, either."

Empathy, conscience, "the golden rule", they're all basically the same thing. It's what I will never be able to understand about the people who screamed at that mural, either. Presumably, they do love others- their parents, theirs spouses, sons and daughters, friends and neighbors. But then there is a place it simply stops, like a road unbuilt, or a wall that the same people often want built, for the exact same reason- to keep others out.

They can't empathize with them, they can't care about their feelings, and they might actively try to hurt them.

How DO they get to be that way? I wish I knew.

Ebert: "Like a road unbuilt."

I am white and nearing 50, raised in California. Somehow, my father grew up in the Deep South free of prejudice, which was how he raised me. His relatives however, including his father, were bigoted against blacks, in ways that ranged from a learned, rationalized prejudice (in those that went to college) to a kind of confusion about how things had changed so suddenly. My grandfather, watching TV one day in the '70s, said, "The black man has taken over baseball." My father asked him, "Well, sir, why do you think that is?" He didn't know, and didn't have the tools to figure things out. He was kind to the few black men he knew, but something had changed in the big picture and he didn't understand it.

I have another relative by marriage, about my age, also born in California but who moved to Texas as a young man. His prejudice is a bit like his breathing, steady and unending. When he's seen my annoyance at his jokes or other racial outbursts, he explains himself by saying. "You'd just have to live out here awhile. You'd see how it is." How did he get to be that way?

Thank you for raising that unanswerable question, one I've asked often, if only to myself. Maybe just asking "How do they get to be that way?" will make a few people reflect a little more deeply and ask the question of themselves, or, even harder, to ask it of others.

Roger, once again you've written from the heart. I am so glad Prescott is keeping the mural as intended. But your own thoughts of what the child might feel was shattering. And, to me, makes the point that the deed was done. Yes, reversed, but done. The pain from the first response still overshadows the corrected. My heart cries.

What an extremely enlightening review of humanity. What we are raised with cannot and will not be tolerated in this regard. I find that those whom I deem most immature are those who cannot see past the surface of one's appearance. The deeper meanings of our words and our actions speak louder than we, most often, think. Perhaps one day we will live in a world where a person of any colour can walk into a uniquely singularly coloured room and still feel comfortable. That my friends whom attended the college I did would not have dropped out because of racist attitudes from their professors and classmates. It is so unfortunate that these things happen. Perhaps one day this will be different. Change is coming. Embrace it.

Thanks for the highly educational (for this Gen-Xer) walk down memory lane. To me, the practice of radical empathy is as necessary as it is difficult, and it might be what Jesus meant by "love your enemies." Anyone can empathize with a victim, but how about the victimizer? Poets and storytellers (including filmmakers) can really help us here, I think.

As a person of color, I sometimes despair about America and then when I read an article like this, I feel a whole lot better and remember that hate is still a minority.

Thank you for posting this. We are currently experiencing the 3rd wave of Hispanic backlash in our country's history and it must be stopped!

I am 1/2 Hispanic and 5th generation American. I don't speak Spanish because racism prevented my mother from swimming in the public pool as a child in the 1930's - no Spics allowed, they said. Her life became very much like the movie "Imitation of Life". She was ashamed of her heritage, sought to marry the fairest man possible to whitewash her genes, moved away from her family, didn't cook Mexican food or speak Spanish. I grew up passing for Italian.

Sadly, I am now seeing my relatives who live in conservative areas become brainwashed against their own kind by the power of politics and religion that propagate racism.

Education, outreach and empathy are so important now! Thank you for raising awareness of the problem and for taking part in the answer.

A world of children. Our sanity waterline far too low. A high percentage of people, zealots of anti-rationality and anti-intellectualism.

There fewer sane people, and the gap continues to grow.

I am in Seattle, at the film fest, and a black woman with blonde hair made a joke that my 5 month old looked surprised by her hair color. He, of course, knows nothing of race or the fear of race. But she, a grown, attractive woman in a bastion of liberalism, is still that self-conscious. Last night, a very intelligent friend asked if my son could be Jewish because my wife is not. Are we not yet ready, even in a clatch of thinking people, to let our faith be bigger than our rules? Long time coming... long way to go.

It is fear based upon ignorance, Roger, the stupid racism that still rears its head in our country. And laziness and dishonesty, always easier to blame some other group for your failure to achieve fulfillment or meaning in your own life.

Like you, I have my own "Chaz", the first time I saw her, I did not see her race, I saw her beauty as a human being. After 15 years of pursuit, she realized that we were meant for each other, and we have spent 23 years since then as man and wife. When I look at her face I thank my lucky stars that I found this person, who is nothing if just an intelligent, moral, loving human being and who has done so much to enrich my life and care for me.

It is sad and pathetic when human beings become so lazy as to become ignorant of the real world, and fall prey to the fear and ignorance foisted on them by morally flawed people of influence.

A beautiful and very sane essay, Roger.

You got me thinking about my own childhood and how I interacted with members of other races. I'm a nearly 40-year-old white man who grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, and I still remember my kindergarten friendship with Lawrence, one of two black children in the classroom (who were often asked if they were brother and sister, despite their different last names).

We sometimes played in the city streets of Wilmington near his house, where I was probably the only white kid but I don't remember noticing that, and once we lost my G.I. Joe action figure down a sewer. I was upset, and told another friend of mine about it, who said "they'll probably keep it, because they like to steal things." That was my first, most direct experience with racism. I wish I could say it was erased when Lawrence's father fetched poor Joe from the sewer, cleaned him up, and brought him over...but it didn't. The question was there in my mind, and for the first time, Lawrence wasn't just my friend, but a "they."

Honestly, I think the movies were a huge part of making me understand that prejudice isn't just an idea, a cultural and personal institution that must be fought, but something that makes people feel bad - and not just those it is directed against.

"Do they fear their own adequacy? Do they grasp for assurance that they're "better"--which means, not worse?"

This is it exactly with their fear being such that they wouldn't look at the real issues (where the short-sighted-ness of politicians and business leaders have created the tenuous job market and off-base economy we currently live in) instead they focus on a group that they perceive as being easy to feel superior towards.

They are small, small people who don't have the nerve to tell their boss 'no,' or the strength to get out of an unhappy marriage, or the gumption to raise and control their children, plus they feel entitled to things being a certain way: The never-were-good-old-days.

And because of this smallness, this weakness, this deeply abiding shame over themselves, they lash out in racist/sexist/misogynistic ways.

I consider racism to be insecurity and in part xenophobia to a minor degree. I really don't understand it though, after reading Toni Morrison's Beloved I had a much better idea of how it started, but it still doesn't make much sense to me. I'm black, I was born in the late 80s, grew up in the 90s and was taught an odd version of racism which was more about being more distrustful. I have formed my own ideas, but I think what my mother taught me was based off of her experiences and the news. I see the news, I see the hate and I've formed my own opinions. I also see the people around me, and some times people don't present themselves much better than the stereotypes and I don't understand why. I've had white friends tell me that they're 'more black' than I am because I speak proper English, I don't just listen to rap, and I don't fit many of the stereotypes I should fulfill because of how I was raised. I laughed at first, but now I see just how ignorant of a statement that is.

Some people fear the unknown, some people hate what they fear. Following that logic, some people hate the unknown, but a different skin tone shouldn't be that big of a deal. So what I'm usually one of five black people in my class, a really small class, 20 people, I'm generally one of about 12 minorities. I'd rather be around people who have the same intellectual capacity as I do, who understand deeper concepts or will let me wax on the finer points of literature, writers or comics than be around people I have nothing in common with other than the few amino acids that make up how much melanin we have.

All in all this was a stupid situation. It's a painting, it's a representation of the school. I wonder how many people who drove past and shouted slurs at the artists had children in the school or would have children in that school. I think that the principal should have stuck to his gun from the beginning because it's not like he didn't see a mock up of how it would be painted. Race isn't even what the mural was about, why do people like to focus on things that aren't a point of the whole? The worst part about ignorance is that it can be treated by education and fact. It's not something that can be changed, it's not something you're born with, it's taught.

The Internet doesn't allow for inflection and changes in tone or demeanor, so let me assure you that the following is said with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek:

People are so varied, so intricate, so interesting. They love different bands, different movies, different books and different people. They vote for people across every hue of the political spectrum. They range from filthy rich to dirt poor, from pictures of health to hacking up lungs. Some have served their entire lives in uniform while others spend their lives decrying war. Some are wonderful and some are assholes.

With all this diversity of ideas and passions and personalities, people have a fantastic opportunity to get to know one another and hate for very intimate and personal reasons.
And to think there are some people who will only ever hate because of skin color...

Racists are fucking lazy.

Out of curiosity when did you marry Chaz?

Ebert: Nineteen years ago next month.

but I didn't go to see, because I never wanted to go near that bullshit mural again.

This, times 9000. Thank you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiX5p8NL040

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPIRKnaCKzo

Some nice audio from Steve Blair's radio show including the now famous:

"I am not a racist but.........," line as well as a conversation with fellow councilman John Hanna's wife Sherrie on their hatred of 'diversity'.

Thank you for writing about this as I am sure they are just waiting for the 24 hour news cycle to forget all about and move on.

To everyone in Prescott, the city council meeting is Tuesday @ 2 pm at

201 South Cortez Street
Prescott, AZ 86303-3989

.....right off the square across from the post office. Time for your voices to be heard.

I am the former Mayor of Prescott AZ (2007-2009). As a result of his racist remarks radio station KYCA fired Steve on Friday. I have called for him to resign from City Council for the good of the city. See: http://prescotttourism.wordpress.com/2010/06/05/steve-if-you-truly-love-prescott-you-need-to-resign/

Ebert: And here is a video of you making that call. So many of the videos from Prescott speak for the good people there.

http://j.mp/cc0QUq

Thank you for this beautiful piece, Roger. I'm a fan of yours on multiple levels.

I'm the little guy that filmed the apology video that's going around the web. There's some great footage of our protest that I think many would find inspiring. My coverage of the event is posted on youtube, and I'd recommend the "Prescott, AZ Mural Protesters" video (it shows a long line of locals, almost all white, holding up anti-racism signs at the intersection):

http://YouTube.com/PrescottDiversity

Thanks again.

Roger, your such a amazing writer. This is powerful. We often celebrate the outcast in this country, but than we turn around and do just that. We outcast people. This is one of the reasons I love journalism and I love movies. You said in your TV archive interview that one of the reasons film is important is that it makes us empathize with those not like us. As someone who writes film criticism, that quote has stuck with me. Journalism often serves the same function. It's when we start to empathize with those not like us that we see we aren't so different.

I currently working on a comic book about this subject (kinda like this one http://horseradishhen.com/read-comics/you-have-permission/) and your piece has really motivated me to finish it. Racism is hard to think about and write about. I think in a lot of ways I still don't understand it. I do know what it is like to hurt, and I never want to hurt other people; but sometimes it turns out that way. All of the hatred spewing out in Arizona right now is painful; but it is a way to see it, discuss it and decide what we are going to do. I lived in AZ for 19 years and now live in Mississippi, so I have plenty of raw material to work with; however, your story here has really helped me to understand that I really NEED to do it, and soon.

THANK YOU!

Ebert: Video posted by another commenter here:

http://j.mp/bqgpGu

Helps to provide some balance.

Roger, this is beautiful and I can't wait to share it with my friends. If there's one thing it's hard for me to understand it's how so many people lack this "empathy bone" that reminds us of our effect on other people, even when we don't pay as much attention to it as we should. To have that instinct buried and broken must happen at an early age and make for such an angry, unhappy life-- to be as oblivious to your own feelings and humanity as to those of others.

I'm a 20-year-old who recently visited my mom in a southern state to meet her fiance, a charming, heavily-accented "man's man" that my own prejudices quickly made me weary of. His teasing use of the word "Mexican" made me uncomfortable, and I was wondering if my mom had told him I was gay, and if she hadn't, how that would eventually change things. That night, with my mom in the other room and a little vodka in him, he pulled me aside. "You're family now, and you feel welcome here whenever you want to come," he said. He carefully worked out his next words. "Now your mother and I have talked, and she told me some things... and I just want you to know, when you're around here, no one's gonna mess with you. Not while I'm around."

I don't know if he felt that way before he met me or not, but I'd like to think he has that same potential to change his attitude towards the "Mexicans" in his town. Maybe he only needs to know one, to have a simple pleasant interaction, and he'll remember that he's changed his mind before. That he's capable of surprising himself. We're getting there an inch at a time, Roger. Those with your feelings are now in the majority, and that's what gives me hope for this country.

True story --

In 1958 or 1959, my mother's '57 Chevy convertible was in a crash and she was badly injured. She was a teenager at the time. When the ambulance got to the hospital, she was barely conscious because of bleeding. My mother is O-negative, which is a universal donor but can only receive O-negative blood in a transfusion, and the hospital only had one unit. That saved her life temporarily, but she needed more blood. In an emergency, the hospital sometimes got blood from a local prison where my uncle did volunteer counseling. Someone made a call, and when the prisoners found out who needed the blood, several volunteered immediately.

The blood was brought to the hospital some hours later, but by that point my mother was failing and almost unconscious. However, before the doctors would give her the transfusion, the nurse put a clipboard and pen in her hand. "You have to sign this. It's black blood." My mother, on the verge of unconsciousness and not thinking clearly, asked, "You mean it's not red?" "No," the nurse said,"it's black blood -- blood from a Negro. You have to sign this." Fortunately, my mother signed (little more than an X, I suspect, given her condition) and passed out.

The next day the nurse came to her room and said, "You were lucky. If you had been unconscious when they brought that blood in, we couldn't have used it, and that was the only O-negative we had. You wouldn't have made it."

And lest you think that is a typical story of southern prejudice, that took place in Michigan (somewhere around Jackson, I gather).

Racism isn't just morally repugnant, it's stupid. I'm always aware that I would never have existed (I was born six or seven years after that accident) if my mother had lost consciousness before that blood arrived.

The good news is that although young people today have many problems, they truly seem to have gotten past race. They give it virtually no thought. Interracial dating doesn't even raise an eyebrow at the university where I teach in northern Virginia. A woman I know asked her son what his new girlfriend was like, and he described her in fair detail, including a physical description along the lines of "She has dark hair, brown eyes, and is about 5' 4"." When he brought her over to dinner the next week, the woman was surprised to see that the girl was Korean (ethnically, though born in the U.S.). She didn't have any objection; she was just surprised that her son hadn't mentioned it. When she asked him later why he hadn't, he looked blank. He simply didn't think it was worth mentioning.

Incidentally, students are almost as accepting of homosexuality. I would say 90% or more see nothing wrong with it or think of it as a choice -- they all have friends and peers who are openly and even theatrically gay (think of the gay character on Glee). The idea of some of their gay friends being in a straight relationship is enough to make them double over laughing. Those who have successfully voted down gay marriage in one place or another had better savor their triumphs while they can, because they are in the same position as those who railed against interracial marriage in the 50s and 60s.

Ebert: Oh, the times they are a-changin'. But they still have some changin' to do.

Beautiful, Roger, just beautiful. Brought tears to my eyes.

This is probably a tad sappy, but I honestly credit Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird for being instrumental in catalyzing my personal evolution about race and hatred. Atticus Finch said it perfectly: "First of all...if you can learn a...simple trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

I was raised in Oklahoma and the panhandle of Texas where, as you can imagine, Hispanics and Native Americans were often derided with gusto. Because of demographics, African Americans were scarce and often were treated almost as novelties, which is just another facet of racism. When you're a child, you know certain things might be wrong, but if your caregivers don't address it, you enter the age of reason ill-equipped for the intricacies of life.

Then I spent 15 years in Mississippi and saw racism in its purest form. I will never forget driving through Pearl, Mississippi, and coming upon a busy intersection blockaded by Klansmen handing out pamphlets. Pamphlets for what? An all-white barbecue? A church bake sale? I was stunned; it was the 80s, for Christ's sake! Yes, they deserved their free speech, I suppose, but the experience left me saddened and disgusted. Mississippi is about 40% black. What if I'd been black? Surely African Americans had to drive through that intersection. I simply cannot imagine. It sickens me.

In the midst of all this adolescence and aging and maturing, I was also dealing with my own sexual identity. Admittedly I was as cruel and homophobic as the crowd I hung with. I wholeheartedly identify with the above Clint Eastwood quote. My cruelty and narrow-mindedness were just things to hide behind because I feared who and what I was. Other people hated gays, so why would I buck the trend? It wasn't until I began to love myself (thanks to a lot of good counseling and a network of the best friends in the world) that I gladly left the hate and the haters behind. Though I didn't step out of the closet until very recently, it's always better late than never.

In my experience, in the Deep South, people who have evolved in their ideas about prejudice and race seem to be more honest or forthright about their previous shameful, wrong-headed thinking. In other parts of the country, people seem to be giving mere lip-service to open-mindedness when at their core, they're still ruled by fear and distrust. They just don't talk about it. It's almost as if, in the South, the pain is closer at hand and thus makes the inhabitants more mindful of their mistakes.

Thank God we're able to forgive our own ignorance and move past it. Brings to mind something from the Bible: "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me." Deep-seated childhood learning can be overcome. It's not easy, but it's a fine goal to strive toward.

Ebert: Morgan Freeman once told me he preferred living in Mississippi to of Los Angeles because "down there, people know how they really feel."

Is your title ("How do they get to be that way") a real question? Are you asking?

One guess: the people in Arizona have a different life experience shaping their views than the Midwest 60's life experience that you eloquently described that shaped your views? Agreed?

What is the life experience of someone growing up in a border state in 2010? Or of an adult who has lived there since the 60s? I'm asking.

I was watching a cable news interview with the Arizona Superintendent of Schools last week. He's the guy who drafted the ethnic-studies ban law. I'm sure that you consider him a bad guy. he was decrying the new segregation that is happening in Arizona, particularly in the Tuscon district - which has divided into distinctly separate educational tracts along racial lines, pushed along by the ethnic studies proponents. He's trying to stop the segregation, and being vilified for it. Yet, La Raza and MEChA and other groups that are facilitating the segregation get a pass from liberals and the media. You only see racists on one side of the tension in Arizona. Is there anything more "racist" than La Raza ("The Race")?

Plenty of blame to go around in the racial pressure cooker that is Arizona in 2010.

We in the MidWest get to look into the fishbowl of Arizona and make our observations and judgements. Easy to do. We don't live there.

But, we can acknowledge that Arizonans and others on our border have a different life experience than we do. Yes?

Wow. What an eloquent and beautifully written essay that speaks the truth. But I've come to expect no less from you. I don't have much to add, since you said it all, except for this.

First, although things have changed greatly from the days you describe, it is important to remember these things happened a very short time ago. So to all those who like to pretend that this is ancient history, think again.

Second, you identify a crucial aspect of racism, one which lies at its root, namely the lack of empathy towards others. Racism is very much a function of seeing "the other" as not quite as human as yourself, as something less than that. This makes it very easy to objectify and reduce someone to a mere color.

Why do people become this way? Who knows. Acres of trees have been sacrificed in the pursuit of this question, and we still don't really have an answer.

And also, we should realize that racism doesn't only express itself in the loud, ignorant rantings of the mural-haters. In a way, they're more preferable to deal with since they're easier to identify, avoid and/or respond to. The more insidious form of racism is among those who are non-prejudicial in theory, but when it comes to practice and with actual people, it is quite different. The unspoken and unexamined assumptions are the ones that are much harder to get rid of.

The story you relate of the girl who changed her hair color is very telling in this respect, of the reactions of those who step beyond the parameters of what "people like us" should do. Trust me, I know the feeling well.

So I too, just like you, would like to live in a country where people are not made to feel this way. And many days I fear that we are a long way off from that. But these beautiful words you have written will help bring that day closer.

Your friend in cinema,

Chris

Thank you for writing this Mr. Ebert. I read your blog regularly and am often moved by it. This, however, spoke to my soul. When I was in high school in the late 80's, a friend of mine used the word nigger in front of a black friend of mine, Chris. He got embarassed and told my black friend that he wasn't a nigger and that he was alright. I said nothing. I was embarassed, but I said nothing and I live with that. How did Chris feel that day? I still have shame and I wish there were some way I could go back and change my reaction to actually having one. I try not to let those moments go by without a reaction from me anymore.

Thank you so much for writing. You inspire me.

What I find so amusing is that so many people love Mexican and other Latin American food. They love the music. They love the actors. But they don't love the actual people and the history of the land seems to suddenly change from the distant past of the conquistadors and missionaries to current day Arizona or even California.

I was born and raised in a community that was predominately Latino and very close to the border, but I, being Asian American, was curiously an outsider to the cultural conflicts that I saw in my community.

And yet people were proud of our heritage and the cultural events were distinctively Mexican-related with the food, music and dancing of that country.

I DO know what it is like to have a hard time crossing the border because although at one time it was enough for a white person to have a CA drivers license it wasn't enough for an Asian American. I DO know what it is like to be refused service at a bus station or restaurant. And to be told that my spoken and written English is obviously non-native, but I speak and write well.

I've also known some people who were Mexican American and whose families pre-dated many white Californians. Why are they and I still more foreign than people of lighter skin whose families came after ours?

I feel sad that for many immigration instantly means Latino still and that non-white still means non or not truly American to some people.

Arizona was the place where my mother's family spent time in a place called Poston after the bombing of Pearl Harbor (having been transported from San Diego to the Los Angeles area racetrack Santa Anita in the February after the bombing of Pearl Harbor). In California, I remember some pretty racist remarks on Pearl Harbor Day and I'm sure that doesn't even come close to what my mother and father experienced.

Being an American and not being considered American enough is at best bittersweet.

Mr. Ebert,

This article is beautiful. There needs to be more people like you in this world who is willing to embrace things that are unfamiliar to them and have the will to learn, appreciate, and speak about it. Thank you for writing this..

Sincerely,
Edward

I don't cry easily but this essay made me cry. I was horrified by this story. I am familiar with that town but now it seems very alien to me. This is all very personal to me.

But I don't think I'd thought about it exactly the way that you have framed it, about the human dimension. I think I am terrified by those racist people. There are people I love who are personally involved in this struggle and I am scared for those people. I am terrified of the rise of white supremacy. I am scared one of those crazy people will kill someone I love. There are so many guns there and almost everyone I love goes to these rallies or is doing something else.

So I just felt afraid--and just like you said, that made me angry. Spitting with rage angry. But I didn't think about the kids, and how they would be happy about their place in the mural and then what it would be like to face that shameful, disgusting hate. And the vulnerability of children and how utterly cruel it is to force them to face this adult pathology. I just didn't think of it.

That story about the girl who colored her hair just hurts my heart. I remember random cruel incident like that from childhood that I was a part of. I wish I could go back and erase it. It's like the most awful memory.

There was recently a racist incident where we live and my husband and I were talking about it and our 5 year old kid overheard. She became OBSESSED and I mean OBSESSED with it. She incessantly talked about the perpetrator. She even made physical threats--horrible things she wanted to do to him. We laughed to hear this teeny kid concocting these savage plans but it was clear that she'd been really shaken by the incident. I really started to get worried for her. I'm trying to be more careful to shield her now. But heck yes, racist name calling freaks kids out and damages their sense of security, which is what children desperately need.

I think you hit where the reality is--it's in the people who are harmed and humiliated. And in the fear and smallness of the people with the urge to degrade. They just degrade themselves but they do damage.

Yes, we must make this country into a place where we don't do that to others. It's a sick poison.

Maybe it's strange but even the people with beliefs I deplore I don't want to hate. I think things in this country are devolving into hatred. I don't even want to hate these insane racists. Hatred in response to hatred just confuses the mind. I think you can fight people more effectively if you don't hate them. More and more I think I really, really get Martin Luther King's non-violent movement and why that was the right way to approach this toxic stew of racism we all are forced to brew in.

Thank you for sharing, Mr. Ebert.

As a Black man on the brink of age 30, I take great interest living in this so-called "post-racial America" while a backstep such as your story shows that we haven't made all that much progress from "separate, but equal America".

I've heard it argued that the election of a Black man to the highest office in the land is less a forward step in the state of race relations, but rather a statistical inevitability (like the collision of two comets) after centuries of American miscegenation.

Then again, I've also heard that the election - strengthened by a record-setting turnout of younger voters - is proof that newer generations are showing a "mental evolution" over their predecessors (sort of like the kind you described between you and your mother). Even the new breed of conservatives apparently lack the intolerance that often stains their allegiance (John McCain's daughter, Meghan of TheDailyBeast, often backs conservative politics, but has also been a vocal proponent of Gay rights).

Which do I think it is? I honestly don't know. As a film aficionado, I've also taken note of how Hollywood (if it is to represent Middle America as a whole) regards its ethnic Actors. Yes, Will Smith now holds the "Golden Boy" title held for so long by Tom Cruise, but how many Black producers have as much (or any) recognition as Jerry Bruckheimer? When was the last time a non-independent film placed a Latino front and centre? Can anyone recall the last time an Asian actor had a kiss scene, let alone be the romantic lead?

So as to not miss my point, I will conclude by saying that incidents such as the mural incident (and the "Tea Party/Birther" debacles of the past two years) are a societal necessity in the grand scheme: they remind us that while a great deal of progress has been made, we've still a long way to go. Complacency does not lead to progress.

The ability of the wronged to respond to such hate with dignity, love, and forgiveness never ceases to amaze me.

That there are people who believe this is a post-racial America, it is because they don't live the life of a non-Caucasian. It isn't the overt racism of segregating schools or having colored bathrooms (though if go to college or have been to college lately, some might notice students self-segregating themselves). But the idea that non-White is not seen as appealing to general population. When it comes to film too, the faces are changing. But all of the feelings that people have about The Last Airbender or The Princess and the Frog tell me that people would still rather see a Caucasian face than an Asian or Black face.

People are entitled to their opinions about Barack Obama as a president, but I've never felt more like there was more animosity toward minority populations than there are now, perhaps partially as a reaction to having a black man in office. Similar feelings towards Proposition 8 in California. I was so sure California was a liberal state, but it looks like there are still some things that are not safe to share about yourself in this country.

I'm sure changing the face of the mural was all about protecting the nation's border. Perhaps the business behind this mural is all the worse because erasing it intrinsically tells Latino children they are of less value than Caucasian children. So much for having a safe and welcoming educational environment...

Roger - You are making a big mistake making this about race. For a few it may be but for most it has nothing to do with race and is so much more complicated. When liberals (I count myself as one) try to scream RACIST instead of looking at the whole picture they dangerously simplify it all and end all reasonable discussion. The worst thing you can do is call someone a racist.

I am an immigrant. I was lucky and came here legally. I recognize my luck. But I also recognize that we cannot just have an open border without creating huge problems. In fact, the illegals are the true victims here - taken advantage of on both sides. People like you, who seem to favor open borders, allow a permanent underclass to exist and allow these people to be taken advantage of by big business. I can go on here but a full discussion on this topic would be longer than your article.

This is not about race. This is about following laws and creating a healthy and fair society for all. We as a country need to decide the best immigration laws based on reason and fairness. If the best thing to do is let everyone in then lets decide that and rewrite the laws. Do you believe in any immigration laws? The world is full of poverty - why not let everyone in? Just because Mexico is on our border they have the exclusive right to flaunt or immigration laws?

And, again, I can go on here about how unhealthy it is for our society to allow a disproportionate amount of one part of one ethnicity in (what about Guatemalans? Colombians? etc.?). Let me tell you - I grew up in a very multicultural part of California (Asians, East Asians, Blacks, Whites, Hispanics - just about everything) and the ones who would be considered racist (by your definition as described in your blog) would be the hispanics (unfortunately). The society you described as a child? Well that still exists in Mexico. Ask a regular recent migrant from Mexico about Blacks or Jews - lets just say the answers would remind you of your childhood.

And that's my issue here with you. Liberals do this all the time today. The reality of a "racist" person of color cannot exist. And yet the people who experience the most pain form this illegal migration (the working class) - they are racist because they just want laws followed.

Anyway - I went on too long here. I am a big admirer of yours and love everything you write. I just thought that this was just another example of oversimplifying the situation while equalizing it with the ugly racism of our country's past. It just isn't.

Ebert: My entry was actually not about immigration.

So beautifully written.
It has brought me to tears.
Thank you.

Forgive me for saying Roger this but the way I see it THESE people simply want to have it both ways. They did so two hundred years ago when they wanted the free labor. They do now when they want to go to Walmart to buy cheap stuff which in order to remain cheap has to be made in China or India (They might even complain about the unfairness in the loss of "American jobs"). They want to go to a McDonald's or, for that matter, any other restaurant in the US and have cheap food which can only be acomplished by having every restaurant kitchen worked by illegal inmigrants.
I have no idea if the Arizona law will actually discourage illegal inmigration. It's just sad that a country that prides itself in being THE world democracy, would resort to something intriniecally wrong. When 9-11 came along I heard Rudy Guliani say the terrorist acted because they hate the fact that "America is free". Be this a populist declaration or not, if this was ever the case I would think nobody has to be concerned anymore about THAT in the future.

Well thought, well remembered, well and timelily said. Wish the mural artists had stuck to their guns and refused to whitewash. Wish there weren't so many dimbulbed haters. (Remember the "cheerleaders" in Steinbeck's TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY IN SEARCH OF AMERICA? These vermin as as persistent as cockroaches...) Wish the fellow with his also-well-said video rant knew how to pronounce Prescott--most Arizonans would say "Press-cut" and not "Presscaught." Some dimwits might scoff with, "Well, he doesn't even know how to pronounce it..."

Keep up the good, Roger; we need more eloquent voices!!

I would be embarrassed if I were that racist. I certainly wouldn't be yelling out slurs! I really do feel sorry for people who have so much hate in their hearts. They can never enjoy how beautiful and wonderful the world is if they spend their lives looking for places to direct their hatred.

You saw the prejudice against blacks and see them against browns. We had them against Asians. We have them against Middle-Easterns. We have them against different religions. We have them with different sexual orientations.

Basically, the prejudice seems to be against anything different than us. Is this instinctive, like how ants will attack ants from other colonies? Are humans by default prejudice creatures, and only learn to not be prejudice through proper education and experience?

When someone goes on TV and puts down an entire subset of humans, such as gays or Muslims, are they uneducated? Are they giving the wrong education to those watching?

I wish I had answers to these.

Yawn. None of this ever happened. Keep patting, your back isn't going anywhere.

Hello Mr. Ebert,
Thank you for bringing some humanity to this discussion. I am a native of Arizona and never have I felt so unwelcome in my own home. I am of Mexican ancestry and my family has been here for more than 120 years. This state has a very long history of institutionalized racism, well before the ex-governor Evan Mecham and the debacle of the MLK, Jr. holiday in the 80’s. When my state was admitted to the Union, there was a law that said white people couldn’t marry non-whites whether they were Mexican, Native American, Asian or African American. When people ignored the law, lived together and had children, then there was a law that said co-habitation was illegal. Luckily they were stupid laws that were ignored and didn’t stop my grandparents from marrying.

While there is a problem of illegal immigration, vilifying people who look different isn’t going to do anything to help the situation. It is a complex problem that won’t be fixed by promoting fear and hatred. Before people jump up to say it is fair to pick out people who look like they don’t belong, I counter that I really don’t see all the winter visitors that come from Canada for six months at a time being stopped and harassed since they look “white.”

I have never had to worry about carrying proof of my citizenship anywhere in this country, but now it feels like I have to do so to drive across MY state. I won’t, just like I won’t stop speaking Spanish with my mom or other relatives and friends when we can easily do so in English. I probably won’t be singled out because I have fair skin and don’t speak English with a Spanish accent, but some of my relatives and friends have a lot more melanin than me.

I know part of this problem has nothing to do with immigration, but with the dismal economy and high unemployment partly brought upon by the housing boon that has gone bust. A lot of people from the rest of the country came here thinking they would get rich and their bubble burst. Rather than seeing mistakes in their own business accumen, the conservative leadership here is ignoring the problems they made and pointing at a group of people and saying, "Look, there, THOSE people are the cause of all your problems- get rid of them and everything will be OK." It is working too because the problems we are facing with education, unemployment, and a near dead economy are being ignored.

Ebert: Meanwhile, a great deal of the state's economy depends on undocumented workers, and everyone knows it. Sooner or later, one of those blowhards is going to turn up with an undocumented nanny, gardener or employee.

This is probably my favourite of your blog posts, and believe me -- I have a list.

I have no better idea than you what's going on in the minds of those who drive by and jeer. Not being American (me = Canadian), it's especially difficult for me to figure out.

What I do know: it's rare to be empathetic in a totally conscious way -- the way you describe so well. Ugly truth or not, I think you hint at this when you typed "... but my mother had not evolved past that point at that time."

People may feel inadequate and shout things at schoolchildren who've never done much if anything wrong -- and definitely nothing to warrant shouting and screes and hate. But also people, some people, adhere to liberal social values (god bless them; and those values) out of a sense of inadequacy, too. They follow an overwhelming social obligation, rather than following their gut instinct to further equality. Simply being tolerant and liberal and accepting will only be a surface solution if there isn't a deep and profound understanding of the why and how of empathy.

You've said before that universal (and by universal, I mean national American) health care is right "because [you] feel it to be right" or something along that line. That's a brave and way more than admirable position: it's right in the same way that, say, the Good Samaritan knew it was right to stop and help a damaged man. But we're not all of us so learned and experienced and wise.

What would be most helpful in a world where some people think it's okay to shout at elementary school kids is to be focussing on teaching not a set of values or a code of behaviours in which it's possible to love and dance and make friends with all sorts -- but to teach a way of looking at other people that doesn't separate you from them, but shows the utter and inescapable connection between any two groups.

This is a beautiful piece, Roger. Your response to Howard Stern is especially moving.

I'm reminded of a comment left by a Youtuber on a video of Toni Morrison; in it, Morrison is speaking about the real-life incident that inspired her first novel, "The Bluest Eye." After watching it, I scrolled down to read the comments, and there was one that was so simply and indelibly stated that it has stuck with me:

"i'll never forget the day.
I thought one white girl in my 4th grade class was the most beautiful girl in the world. and i wanted to be like her. Then one day she told me she thought i was the most beautiful and wanted to be like me."

It still makes me cry.

Everybody is thinking it, so I'm going to say it: This is proof that racism is still alive in America and that it played a part in the controversial Arizona immigration laws. There, I said it.

Moving on.

Roger, I have a story to tell you. A couple years ago, I went on a weekend mission trip with my youth group to one of those camps that teach good boys and girls about how God loves them. When everybody assembled for the first time in the auditorium, I noticed something interesting. About half of the youths were black and from the inner city and the other half were white and from the suburbs. Each group sat on their own side of the auditorium. There was no rule to say that we needed to do that, it just happened naturally. The black kids wanted to be with their friends and the white kids wanted the same. Sure, we would talk to each other and have fun when we broke into groups, but as soon as the activities ended, the races would break apart and go to their separate sides.

But that all changed one night. On Saturday night, we were in the auditorium watching a movie when our youth group minister called us together and told us to go outside. We were informed that not more than an hour or so ago, a fire broke out in my friend's home, suffocating his father to death in his sleep. That boy was one of my best friends and was standing right next to me.

You can imagine what happened next. There was lots of crying, apologies that meant nothing, and feeble attempts to provide some kind of comfort to our friend who's father had just died. But then something incredible happened. The movie stopped, the lights in the auditorium came on, and the ENTIRE assembly was informed of what happened.

At that moment, it was like the floodgates opened up and race didn't matter. The black and white kids mixed together as we shared our grief and despair. I looked out, and the crowd was a mosaic of color. Being a close friend of the boy who lost his father, I was particularly shocked and hurt. I was crying and cursing about how it wasn't fair when this African American mother, not unlike Chaz, came up, grabbed me, pulled me to her chest, and cooed that it would be alright. I felt a sense of safety that I had never felt outside of my own mother's arms. Here was this black woman from the inner city who had never meet me before going out of her way to comfort me.

That was the day that my preconceptions about race were shattered. I came from a fairly liberal home and was raised to know that all people were created equal under God's eyes. But no matter how many black people I meet and black friends I made, there had always been this nagging in my head that they were different. But this night changed everything. It was that night that I learned that we were truly the same. That's my story. I hope you liked it.

I don't have words. Very moving. Very insightful. Need more statements like this from everyone, everywhere. Music was particularly wonderful after the other two videos.

"I am not that American child. I am an American who was born before the schools were integrated in the South. I am an Midwesterner who went with his mother on a trip to Washington, D.C., and my cousin's company driver showed us the sights, but when we stopped for lunch at Howard Johnson's he explained he couldn't go inside because they didn't serve colored people. "But you're with us!" I said. "I know," he said, smiling over my head at my mother, "but they don't know who you are." Inside, I asked my mother why they wouldn't serve him. "They have their own nice places to eat," she said. I don't believe she was particularly upset on his behalf."

How do I nominate that paragraph for "Best Short Story" in some contest? That is just awesome prose. Three developed characters, a beginning, middle and end, and all in so few words.

Roger,
Liberals often have the ability to see things in shades of grey and look for root causes except when it comes to racism. Crime is often excused as a symptom of poverty, but the cause of racism is always hatred and the domain of Republicans. Your statement that "We have a black man in the White House, and I suspect they don't like that very much" is very telling. I wonder if our Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas became President, and many Democrats were complaining about his policies, would you assume it was because he was black? Of course not, you would assume it was about ideology. Yet when many people disagree with Obama, the underlying reason is often implied to be racism.

It is hard not to be disturbed by the Prescott Mural story as reported. I was not there and suppose that the story could be fully truthful and not one sided. However, in my experience in life, I have met few outright racists and the few I have met were just as likely to be Black as well as white. Is it possible that the people who were offended by the mural are really reacting to a perceived double standards, Political Correctness, and reverse discrimination that so many white people face every day?

Roy

Ebert: For me, the decision to alter the shade of an actual student's skin in response to ugly protests is, quite simply, racist.

i was in the doctors office this week and saw this on CNN; its a test given to 5 and 6 year olds. drawings of children of various races were presented and the tester would say ,"point to the pretty/ugly/smart/naughty/good/dumb child "

this scared the bejeezus outta me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYkUMqxr_o8

When Grace Wang, and I were crossing the street to enter a Chinese restaurant in Urbana, a car drove by, an angry teenager stuck his head out and swore at us for no reason. I wonder if it was because she was Chinese, and I was a brown Egyptian.. Maybe he was just drunk, that's what I thought when it happened. We chose to ignore him.

You know what I love about you Roger. It's when you mention us foreigners in your blog entries, interviews and twitter pages. You say that you're having conversations with people from India, Egypt, etc. You don't just mention it, your state it with pride, and I love that about you. I love how you're very accepting and welcoming to all cultures. You're a treasure my friend and this blog entry has the capacity to make people change.

Thank you.

Ebert: And then, as I recall Grace saying, it turned out to be a lousy Chinese restaurant.

Thank you for such a well-conceived and well-written piece on racism's origins. It's unfortunate that we are still facing in the new millenium, instances such as the pressure to repaint the skin of students in a school's mural in Prescott, AZ to make them appear more Caucasian. That reminds me of the troubling times of the 1960's that I thought we had evolved beyond. However, it seems many have learned how to suppress their racism or hide it through anonymity. I still believe there is hope that we can learn to accept each other.

A scene from In The Heat Of The Night still resonates in my mind. No, not Poitier saying "They call me Mr. Tibbs" but another, after Poitier has ranted about a rich white man who he obviously wants to be complicit in the current crime. When he finishes Steiger looks at him in amazement and says "Man, you're just like the rest of us, ain't ya?"

i was in the doctors office this week and saw this on CNN; its a test given to 5 and 6 year olds. drawings of children of various races were presented and the tester would say ,"point to the pretty/ugly/smart/naughty/good/dumb child "

this scared the bejeezus outta me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYkUMqxr_o8

Thanks for this article.

When you live in Germany, a black person sticks out because there are so few of them. Every time I saw a black person (in my earliest years, one of my closest friends was an african, but after he moved away I hardly saw black people again in my small town), I asked myself, if I had to consider myself a racist because of noticing the difference. I was young, I should have known it is only normal to notice something that you don't see often. But that's just part of being raised in post-WWII-germany, I guess.

The most amazing and beautiful thing that has happened to me, since I came from Germany to Brazil 10 months ago, is that I have gone blind for recognizing the color of the people in front of me. It fades into the background, just like you wrote it. I am so thankful for this, as it showed me that human recognition is not based on outwards appearance so much, and it helped me to be sure that I am not a racist. I feel kind of pathetic for needing this proof to be sure, but then again I'm still young and have a lot to learn. :)

Roger,

It is admirable that you had such a response to Howard Stern's response on that instance, but where you not mad at him in this instance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPkoxox3sb0

I know I would fell quite ticked off.

You write about an evolution from theory to feeling. That is the journey that we as a society need to take. You are surrounded by creative people. It will be an act of creation that takes us there. This blog post is part of it. Thank you for writing it.

I would like to say that my daughter was deeply horrified of people with darker skin than hers from the age of 2 until 4. I honestly don't know why. She was around people with a variety of skin tones. She was also afraid of men, but I had less concern about that one. I spent a lot of time talking to her about the various colors of animals and flowers with no real effect. But a few years later she was over whatever it was. It makes me wonder if there isn't some fear of difference in us, that sometimes has to be educated out. This is a pretty different theory than the idea that prejudice is made, not inborn.

Glad you wrote this, Rodge. Back at the panel on racism at the Conference on World Affairs, I had a question for Chaz (your Chaz) and Ike Wilson especially. I raised my hand for it for awhile, then took it back down. It wouldn't work.

It was this: "In your most private lives, has it ever occurred to you that white people are crazy?"

How to avoid a predictable yes-cum-chuckle was the reason I took my hand down. Setting the question up so that the "yes" might hit home would have taken too long.

Edgar Hopper wants an essay from me about it. When I think of doing it, I get so weary.

To say that the racists don't have their reasons is to dehumanize them as surely as they dehumanize the targets of their racism. Most (but not all) racists are poor and relatively uneducated, in a lineage that has grown increasingly poorer and less educated, again relatively speaking, over time. They feel powerless about their own destinies, feel the direction of the nation leaving them behind. And they resent it. To them, America as they see it is a birthright---in some cases, it is the only birthright they can take any pride in. Anybody that dilutes their vision of what America should be is therefore an enemy of what little they have to cling to. When their ancestors held all of the advantages, the family did alright. Now that those advantages have been taken away, they're struggling. In their minds, it must feel like a sort of robbery. President Obama provides a useful lightning rod, because not only is he black but (in the minds of many racists, at least) a Muslim and a foreigner. Because they wanted to believe these things about him, these lies will never go away. His time in Africa and Indonesia growing up only cements the idea that "He's not one of us." Effectively Othered, Obama serves a convenient lightning rod -- the source and cause of the deep, intractible problems that have been plaguing our country since America's post-World War II prosperity began to wane. The Obama administration has proven itself cynical and crassly political when we were hoping for open and unifying, to quick to blame others and to slow to take action. But that makes it roughly as mediocre as most recent adminstrations, and certainly not worthy of the vitriol directed at it.

That Obama's inauguration coincided with the worst economic downturn in more than eighty years virtually guarranteed an uptick in racist feeling. Millions of Americans across the country saw their fortunes decline as Obama stepped up. They would have suffered roughly equal calamity if John McCain had won the election, to be sure, but McCain DIDN'T win the election so the buck stops with Obama. Americans, particularly since the rise of the baby boomers, love having someone to blame. We love having someone to blame more than we love solving the problems behind the blame. It's why Obama comes out day after day chewing out BP instead of working to address the crisis in the gulf, and it's why conservative radio and Fox News are so effective at hammering Obama for problems that largely resulted from decisions made during Bush's administration. And when people look different, or talk different, or dress different, it's easy to lump them together for blame.

We see that impulse on both sides of the debate over Arizona's immigration crack down. Many supporters of "comprehensive immigration reform" lump together all of those who fail to share their point of view as a great white racist mass. Many of them indeed think the very idea of immigration controls across the Southern border to be racist; any Mexican that should want to come into America should be welcomed with open arms. Many supporters of the crackdown look at the drug crime coming over the border, which has become rampant across the state, and the violence that is increasingly a part of everyone's daily life in Arizona, and see a common denominator in their brown faces. The guilt of the criminals flooding across the border is universalized to be a guilt shared by all Mexicans in the state regardless of legal status. Nuance is difficult for America.

I support the immigration crackdown in Arizona because I support the right of all Americans---white, brown or otherwise---to be secure in their persons and secure in their homes. I do not support whitewashing our culture, or those who use fear and intimidation to make their political points. I do not support a constitutional amendment to strip future American-born children of birthright citizenship, because I do not believe children should be punished for the crimes of their parents. When I read that the white firefighters in Ricci v. DeStefano, I felt vindicated because I do not believe racial quotas should be imposed at the expense of the most qualified candidate. When I read in last Tuesday's New York Times that there are counties in the South where more than 75 percent of black jury pool members are regularly struck in capital cases, I was horrified because a jury of one's peers is at the basis of a just legal system.

On Twitter, you cited Andrew Sullivan's quote that "political correctness is really just multicultural good manners." If so, it is multicultural good manners at the expense of a truly honest national dialog about race. "All in the Family" was far from politically correct, but it spoke to the American experience in a way that no show in our politically correct age could get away with. When we silence those who don't follow the politically correct norms, we don't eliminate their feelings or ideas, we just drive them underground where they poison with festering resentment. The best part of this current period of discontent is that the truth of modern American society is finally coming out into the open. Only in the open can there be any progress.

Ebert: Yes, we must have empathy with those we disagree with, and you are eloquent.

Yours are insights utterly lacking in Beck, Coulter and company.

Although everyone can profess the altruistic sentiment that racism should be eradicated, which I believe it should, however I have grave doubts about whether we can ever realize this ideal. Even in my home country of Canada-a country which posits multiculturalism and tolerance as it's defining characteristics-I have seen virulent racism inculcated in our youth. Perhaps the most overt example is Canada's implicit racism towards First Nations (Native Americans to you). While it has become taboo in Canada express racist ideas about other people's ethnicity, many self-proclaimed liberals will disseminate the most racist and hateful speech towards First Nations without any embarassment and then attempt to negate the racism of their statement by claiming they "aren't racist but..."
The issue comes from First Nations receiving what whites and other ethnicities perceive as unmerited government assistance, even though the government is making (a poor) attempt to redress long standing institutionalized and systemic abuse of First Nations.
Without a second thought people will talk about "filthy indians this, lazy indians that" and in the same breathe might chastize someone for making a racial slur against another ethnicity.
It is a deep seated shameful hypocrisy that makes me embarassed when other Canadians exult in our alleged progressiveness yet refuse to recognize their own racism. Being of aboriginal descent, but possessing a white skin colour has allowed me to observe the most hateful and vile speech about First Nations because no one would assume I would be offended as I look almost entirely white.
Many Canadians condemn Arizona but they should look in their own backyard before they judge others for their racism.

By Wael Khairy on June 6, 2010 2:53 PM: "When Grace Wang, and I were crossing the street to enter a Chinese restaurant in Urbana, a car drove by, an angry teenager stuck his head out and swore at us for no reason. I wonder if it was because she was Chinese, and I was a brown Egyptian.. Maybe he was just drunk, that's what I thought when it happened. We chose to ignore him."

I was a grad student at Indiana University in 1979 when the Shah of Iran was deposed and the American hostages held. One day, as I was walking through campus, a convertible full of guys drove past, and one of them yelled, "Go home, foreigner!" My father's family was from Sicily, my mother was Cuban, and so it doesn't take a lot of sun to make me brown(-er). But I'm from NJ--which at that moment felt like a foreign country, compared to Bloomington. The times, they aren't a-changin' fast enough.

To paraphrase cartoonist Berke Breathed: "Crayola doesn't make 'flesh' anymore. It does make 'Indian Red', though. You suppose they have 'negro brown'?"

I think that the most important thing to remember about racism and combating such paranoid self propaganda is that everyone, no matter how liberal or conservative, has within them the seed of a racist heart. How so? The simple acknowledgment that one person is different from you simply by the tone of their skin is, in fact, a racist observation.
Again, you ask "How so?"
I'll tell you. Every man, woman and child looks upon themselves as the definition of normality in the world. I am the way I am, therefor that is normal to me. The introduction of a a person or idea which challenges our normality is usually met with a feeling that it is, somehow, abnormal. With this initial distinction of normal vs. abnormal we, as human beings, have primed ourselves as the harbingers of racism.
With that said, the core of racism is not hatred but distinction (which is no less malignant, although, in it's infant stages, much less immediately destructive). One looks at another and sees a difference, therefore setting up a barrier between that which is perceived as normal and that which is not. It is not until these distinctions take on the radical approach of hatred does it become seen as a threat.
The problem, therefore, begins much earlier and exists in every one of us who knows to say that one is different from the other. However, since it is next to impossible to weed out the notion of difference (as well as incredibly dangerous) we must use education to teach our people to embrace difference. This is the only answer to an age old question.

Ebert: Every single person in the world is different from us. If we want friends, we have to start someplace. It just depends on how wide your arms will open.

The answer as to how they got to be that way? It's the Rodgers and Hammerstein song from South Pacific. You've Got To Be Carefully Taught.

Greetings Roger!

Such a breath of fresh air amid the stagnancy of intolerance. Very well written, to say the least.

The view from north of the 49th is that Americans are still grappling with their inner demons on racism but that progress is being made (witness the current reaction in Arizona to the latest upset).

Canada has achieved a reputation as a tolerant society. That reputation was hard won. It is a reflection of the successful actions of many over generations.

Building an empathy-driven society takes time, committment, courage, and persistence. It requires effort every hour of every day. Once won there are no assurances it will be lasting.

Thank you so much again for the inspiring essay and thank you to those of our American friends who continue to exemplify the best of the human spirit.

Chris Alders
Ottawa, Canada

Perfect post. I loved reading it. I am a brazilian guy and here we have experienced a different type of racism throughout our history.

Here racism took a social meaning, with less hate against black people, but a lot of indifference and contempt, which is sometimes worse than plain hate.

Anyway, I don't agree black people belong to a different race... They are part of the human race, the only thing that changes is the color of the skin. That's my opinion, cause I don't see them belonging to another race, so I see the "racism" as mere irrational prejudice, fed by several generations of intolerance and stupidity that haunt us until today...

Sorry for my english somewhat limited. :)

Dear Roger,

Having lived in Naperville in the mid-60's I was outraged to hear that realtors would not sell to blacks (I don't know if that was true, but it seemed believable). Now living in Prescott, AZ, I am again outraged at prejudice rearing its ugly head. However, prejudice revealed may be more honest and somehow "safer" than prejudice that is hidden or disguised. Recalling city councilman Steve Blair may be one step towards creating a more compassionate environment in our small town.

Adam L:

Those are CAUSES, not reasons. The words have markedly different connotations in this context. A cause, in this case, explains - a reason justifies. And the things being discussed are unjustifiable.

Also, Adam L., concerning dehumanization - a racist or a fool or a savage or a hateful man - men who, by their actions and decisions, make themselves something less than men - such men have dehumanized themselves. They are to be understood, but not in order to sympathize or even empathize, only to correct or otherwise eliminate. No one has any moral responsibility to care about the racists' feelings.

I tweeted in response while still enjoying the read, and I liked the Clint Eastwood statement that you cited. My own experience is consistent with his, "The less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice."

Now that I think about it (because the topic does not want to go away), my thought is that your tweet’s question, “How do racists get to be that way?”, is a sort of sub-question to How Do Extremists Come About? And I still feel that the answer is about this psychological complex resulting from said feeling of insecurity that may be visible or it may be kept inside the poor devil, camouflaged even from himself – possibly by extrovert behavior. I suspect that there are more males like that than females; one of the gender differences that are a subject of prejudices and extremism, too.

Another trigger that made me want to “talk with you” was when I read how you had read “incessantly during high school, and I met them in the novels of … William Faulkner”. So did I, except that it was in the middle of Europe, under extremist political circumstances (aka communist party control of society, THAT despicable experiment in social engineering).

American literature was read strictly outside of school curriculum, as a part of the inherent, silent but all pervading, protest. And this is what I want to share: America was to me NOT a beacon of liberty (hard to have much of a concept for the word under the circumstances) but a strange place with the romanticized cowboys and Indians on the one hand and this incredible and off-putting racism in its core, in its foundation, in its every day life. In my high-school days, I could never imagine that one day I might travel “to the West”, let alone to go and eventually live or strive to make it in America. But, when after college, as we say in American, I flew to visit the U.S. as soon as I could from my postgrad school in England that summer of 1968, it was with apprehension about the images of America from sources such as Faulkner’s books.

The point to make is this: To me it went without saying that there were bad things here, and bad people, and never mind that one should say, bad things and bad people like everywhere else. I never forget how, when the Greyhound brought me to Oklahoma City on my way to California, and I read the headlines with the first news of the Russian invasion of my country, I did not believe and considered this some kind of a distorted nonsense by the night shift of the mid-western ultra rightist journalists probably running this rag – much like the ultra-leftist jokers who wrote the unreadable nonsense in the official newspapers back in the motherland. Here, they were not descendants of Mark Twain, either.

But my point is that, thanks god for progress, thanks god for more tolerance that makes the country more liveable. When I first came for a temporary stay in Colorado a few years after the summer of 1968, they were telling me that only something like 3 years ago this was a “dry place”. But, more to the point, there used to be also those racist signs in some shop windows and doorways, directed at “the Mexicans” here, of course, and reminiscent of what I read and heard about the Nazi Ordnung over there before I was born. Fuj fuj fuj or pfui pfui pfui, the same difference. And yes, how do people get that way?

Oh, lest I forget to say: Bad people = stupid people. I abhor stupidity.

Vaclav
@bioZhena

Haha! Yes, it was a lousy restaurant, but I enjoyed our conversations there. Michael was there too. The only thing that kept us there was the dicussions we had. It was very nice...the mood of that night.

Anyway, thank you for this post Roger. It's funny that I read this post and another dealing with somewhat the same topic, both on the same day.

It's quite good, you'll like it:

http://www.touchingfromadistance.co.uk/2010/06/a-rage-in-my-heart/

God bless you, Roger!

Roger, you may not realize it, but this URL/article are making their way through the science fiction community. Our little world of authors and readers tends to be more "liberal", or at least, less bigoted, than most, probably because we deal in "humankind" rather than "mankind."
It is perhaps a bit easier for those of us who imagine extra-terrestrial beings, endowed with all the salient characteristics of Earthlings, and wonder what our reactions would be. Once your scope widens enough to think of non-carbon life-forms as the true aliens, it's very difficult to see any human being on Earth as alien!
I have often thought that if extra-terrestrials represented a real threat to us, we on Earth would forget all these stupid differences - skin color, language, religion, nationality - and band together against the common enemy. What a shame to find, yet again, that "the enemy is us".

Last weekend a friend from Japan visited me here in Nashville. The rest of us were busy ducking the heat by immersing ourselves in a local pool, then laying out in the sun. In our world, Tan = Healthy Glow. (Please don't all jump on me about skin cancer...)
My Japanese friend asked for a hat and umbrella, because in her world, Tan = Lower Class.
I find it ironic that the so many Caucasians struggle so hard to become browner, even as we continue to discriminate against the darker-skinned among us. Although perhaps people in Arizona will no longer sun themselves, in case they're pulled over?

Ebert: It's my impression, too, that the sci-fi community is mostly liberal. They're drawn to fiction about spheres beyond themselves, and to satire, irony, fantasy, and other areas that lead to progressive thinking. Back when I was a teenage fanboy mailing out my own mimeographed fanzine, it didn't occur to me, but yes, thinking back about fandom, it was decidedly Left. And not only Harlan Ellison.

Great essay. I've always wondered that myself. I supposed it was like the song in "South Pacific," "You Have To Be Carefully Taught." I am a gay man who lost his partner in 2008. He was raised by his step-father to be a bigot, and he thought that Martin Luther King Jr. expressed violent overthrow of the government. I spent a great many hours catching him up on what the "real world" thought of MLK and pointing out the prejudice he'd been spoon-fed by his step-dad.

When he realized he'd been wrong, he was shocked and angry. And sometimes the old word usage crept in - "the N word." But mostly, I was able to turn his attitudes around. It is possible to un-learn what you have been "carefully taught."

Responding to two things:

(1) Why racism? Why hate? It's just tribalism once again rearing its ugly head. There's "them", and there's "us". "We" are good; "they" are bad. Add to that the tendency in a lot of people to blame their troubles on everybody but themselves. Throw in a bully's cowardice: it's easier and safer to pick on a bunch of people with whom you do not directly interact.

(2) Wouldn't it be wonderful if that girl (now a 60-something woman, of course) who dyed her hair were to see your blog and respond? I think it would be amazing to find out that somebody who you upset 50 years ago knows you still feel ashamed about it.

Ebert: To tell you the truth, I don't remember myself joining in the laughter. I certainly don't remember myself saying anything to her to make her feel a little better.

Ebert: My entry was actually not about immigration.

Actually, it was. You asked in your title how people there became racist. It didn't happen in a vacuum. It happened in the context of a broken border and the crisis environment that has caused.

Context. The answer is found in context.

Unless you think these people were just born bad.

Ebert: In a state with a 25% brown and black population, how do you explain a law that requires them to prove THEY weren't born bad? How would that feel to you if you were a Native American?

"God damn it, how did we make her feel? We have to make this country a place where no one needs to feel that way."

This is an issue that extends beyond racism and into the more basic matter of treating other people with dignity. Race is just one of many vehicles for marginalizing others - and one I think that fortunately our society at large has decided is unacceptable (even if not everyone has the message yet). "Diversity" has, ironically, become a word with an increasingly narrow definition, limited to race or sexual preference. Even we try to become more enlightened as a society towards this definition of diversity, we ignore diversity in body type and age.

If you truly want to understand how those people can shout those things, and feel the way they do, perhaps you can substitute something equally meaningless in for race. Weight, for instance, is a pretty good one, and the societies of the world seem in agreement on weightred (sorry, couldn't help it) right now. If they had chosen to paint an obese child (and statistics suggest that you'd have to try hard not to), we might have also seen a backlash from a different group.

The saddest part for me is that they gave in to pressure and lightened the mural. Every time we cater to special interest groups in this way, we reduce the value of our First Amendment rights.

I am not sure I believe in the existence of racism anymore, at least racism perpetrated by white people. Why? Because so-called "anti-racists" (an Orwellian term if there ever was one) have stripped the word of all meaning by ceaselessly accusing everyone and their dog of racism to the point where merely existing as a white person (of any nationality) makes you not only a racist, but guilty of any real or imagined injustices any white person perpetrated against non-white people decades, centuries or millennia ago. And whenever they complain about an instance of racism, it is almost always something they have imagined or outright fabricated. What does it tell you when people need to fabricate problems? It means there are no real problems left. At least as far as they are concerned.

Naturally, racism perpetrated against white people is not even considered to be racism. After all, white people invented slavery and blah blah blah.

One thing I've noticed about this Arizona debacle (not just the mural, but past events as well) is that people are quick to get very outraged or even condemn the entire state, but at the same time they insist, for example, that each and every Islamic terrorist attack (there are several every day) is an "isolated incident" that's neither important nor an indication of anything (and was probably made up by Fox News). It doesn't seem like there any isolated incidents in Arizona, however.

In short, liberals are intellectually and morally disingenuous. They will only care about an issue if they can cast white people as the villains. If the issue fits the liberal narrative.

Also, what do they expect to happen when two cultures of different ethnicities and nationalities are thrown together? The result is usually a conflict. If the definition of insanity is to repeat an action and always expect a different outcome, the geniuses who keep running these social experiments should really be sent to the funny farm. Multiculturalism only has a chance of working when everyone is forced to abide by the same rules and values, but this is considered far too politically incorrect these days. Unfortunately, a lack of multiculturalism is likewise politically incorrect. The only option, then, is perpetual conflict. Thanks a lot.

Ebert: This is, of course, the standard line of the Right when it comes to anything described as racist. Some things, you know, actually are racist.

Not only did I LOVE the essay, Mr. Ebert, I also found the comments enlightening as they offer a window into what readers of your blog feel, experience, think and want to express.

Unfortunately, those who need to read and reflect on your words will more than likely not do so. I want to thank you for bringing tears to my eyes with your moving testimonio and for reminding me that there are people like yourself out there in my country. It is hard to remember that or to be hopeful when we are under such vehement attack. I sense that in Arizona and elsewhere there is a sort of backlash going on, but that does not fully explain why these folks hate us so much. Your question remains unanswered. I do not know the answer, but I do know that we must not stop trying to find the answer and--optimitst that I am--I know we will survive this crises as a country and in the end be better for it. With dignity and respect for all, we can still make this United States of America work. Thanks for doing your part!

I'm a white Arizonan. I also happen to be liberal enough to think that illegal immigration is a symptom instead of the problem (the real problem are the people who hire them), and idealistic enough to think that all races could live in peace. Unfortunately, the rest of my state seems to be under the impression that we need to ship out anybody brown. I can't begin to apologize for all of this, but why should I have to? I'm not the one in power.

However, I do have a little bit of power, in that I'm intelligent and somewhat intellectual. As soon as I saw the story, I immediately began to track down the school. Google took three minutes to figure it out. Soon, I found that, as I'd expected, the principal who had ordered the repainting had a link to his email sitting on the home page. I immediately wrote the following letter, which I can only hope that he takes to heart.

We're living in the middle of a controversy about race in Arizona, and most of the country sees us as racist. So what do you do? When a few idiots complain about a mural having (gasp!) colored people in it, you change it.

You claim you're just trying to fix "shading." Bull. It's a mural. Is it supposed to look realistic? Do you seriously think people will complain about the shading of a mural? Art critics, maybe. But most parents and children are not art critics, especially in Arizona.

You ought to have stood up for the mural. The people who complain about a black child being prominent in a mural are nothing more than racists. Especially when, reportedly, the kid comes to your school. Schools are meant to teach lessons to kids. What lesson does this teach? It teaches that morons rule over the sensible, that their race will be a hindrance to them for the rest of their lives, and above all, that they should be ashamed of themselves for not being white.

Stand up. Cancel the "repair" of the mural. Tell the skinheads and racists that, if they have a problem with race, they need to grow up and realize that it's not the 1800s anymore.

If you don't, then you should be ashamed of yourself. You're letting the worst of us speak for everyone.

Looking over the comments, I see that the district backed down. I can see that this won't be the end of it; I fully expect the mural to be defaced. But this is a minor victory for people who aren't paranoid, unintelligent weaklings. Now we need to attack SB1070, hard.

Here are some brief films made by my students. The times, they are a-changin'.

Anti-Racism Girl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvieohqHoXY

The Bigot Award
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWtr4Yfcbvw

Born Without Hate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23iisoQ95lY

Diversity Is Strength
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_KjzhCGT0g

The Pink Shirt
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDnS8SLCJHc

We in Arizona have been faced with many heartbreaks over the past two months, first the passing of SB1070 that allows police to racially profile Hispanic Americans in the hope that somehow we can drive all the undocumented people out of our state; people who pick our crops, landscape our yards, clean our hotels and homes and who actually fuel our economy. These are people who come here to work... yes illegally but only because no other avenue is presented to them. These people are scapegoated as criminals and the lies perpetuated by our governor about rising crime and lawlessness are just that... lies. Crime has fallen to its lowest level in decades in our state and border crossings have fallen precipitously as the economy has waned so the question begs, what exactly is the reason for this kind of punitive law that not only targets the undocumented but every person of color and Spanish language in our state? We already are seeing rampant police abuse of citizens by our well-known bully sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose immigration sweeps that arrest-them-all-and-sort-out-the-citizens-later are becoming notorious.

And then the passing of the law banning ethnic studies in public schools was a slap in the face to the Hispanic communities as well as those of us who wish for our young people to have a well-rounded view of history that doesn't only include white people and their accomplishments.

Now the attempted whitening of the faces of children on a mural in Prescott has left us jaw-dropped and wondering if things could get worse.

And unfortunately that answer is yes. More laws are planned including violating basic 14th amendment rights by not allowing children born to undocumented aliens on US soil to be citizens and charging tuition in public schools to undocumented children (and those who say that these people do not pay taxes completely ignore the fact that not only do they pay income taxes and into social security to the tune of billions of dollars per year—that they never collect-- but they also pay sales taxes and property taxes that directly fund schools).

But we are fighting this and will continue to fight to get the word out, the correct information out, and most importantly the vote out. Thank you for presenting this to your readers and I urge everyone to read this information about the true nature of SB1070 before believing all that our so-called leaders in Arizona want you to believe. It's a law written by a known hate organization and sponsored here by a congressman who has ties to white supremacists. It must not stand. Thank you.

Information brochure on SB1070:
http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/docs/SB1070_Guide_060210.pdf

Randy Masters,

You're a disingenuous troll with atrocious politics.

You wanna have some real fun, imagine being a borderline socialist who thinks that the Democrats are too conservative and then move yourself to Phoenix. Oh, it's wonderful fun living in a state where even the guy I'm in love with (another flaming liberal), will, at least to a point, defend SB1070. Drives me bonkers sometimes.

It's very annoying living in a state that includes that law, John McCain, the infamous Sheriff Joe, a state senator who thinks children born in the USA to anyone here illegally should not be granted citizenship, a law that allows people to carry guns bars and other forms of insanity. Basically we're slowly morphing into a state that makes Kansas and Texas look rational.

But I remain here. After all, someone has to bring light into dark places.

Mr Ebert,
There aren't enough eloquent or effective words to express the kind of gratitude that I have that there are people like you in this world. Your strength, character and insight represent a beacon of hope for a society that, during these difficult times, seems to have regressed back to a time of ugliness, shamefulness and ignorance. It is my hope that the more people of position in our society like you who are willing to stand up for and speak loudly about justice, fairness and what it means to be human, the more people will change.

A wonderfully evocative piece. I am ten years younger than you but the experience was much the same for me. My first sweet, trembling kiss was with a young Black woman at a party much like yours save that I was in high school. Thank you for reminding me of the optimism of that year.

Once upon a time and before the wheel, families were gathered in small clans. As the population expanded, countries began to take shape, giving rise to male-dominated religion and politics and economics, commerce and trade.

And the old saying: "blood is thicker than water."

Family first. Strangers second. And why men hope for a son.

You don't look like me = we're not related. You're not me = screw you, get your own. I've got mine. And over time, that plants deep rooted seeds of racism.

I don't mean to suggest that women can't be racists, don't misunderstand me, but rather, that I think it originates from a want of greater empathy and compassion, and which a more competitive nature doesn't readily afford - I really do think that. Wanting what's good for YOU and your own family "first and foremost" isn't a good thing in the long run.

As how does that encourage "sharing" eh?

By nature, males compete with one another. Females are more co-operative. I think the underlying dynamic of racism is more masculine than feminine. And I mention that because I think the solution is to encourage MORE empathy and compassion in society. Not celebrate its absence by way of rewarding those who enable racism via conservative religion, poor education and divisive economics.

I know Roger's seen this clip before; smile

This dog is black and these kittens are not, nor even puppies for that matter; and that's okay.

I find it interesting that in the animal world, while not all will adopt an orphan, those who do are capable of great compassion.

Direct quote from paragraph 20:

"Who benefits by feeding off their fear?"

Themselves and only themselves; or as they are we: ourselves and only ourselves; yes, from insecurity and lack of self-esteem.

I think we might be religious creatures and it might appear in the wrong places, such as with the Nazis; it was lacking and so they allowed Hitler to fill that vacancy into the form of a prophet. Also, everything is religious; so self-esteem within culture is a kind of religion. So, when self-esteem doesn't come about in the usual way (good job, child); so when that religious self-esteem is taken away in the equation in us, that thing that makes us a higher level of specialness for others, what we are left with is the a blank need to be special FOR OTHERS but without all the specialness; so the next step is to, in a sense, elevate ourselves to god, which, like a primitive animal, we go around trying to hurt others self-esteem to help our self-esteem; and since it is a kind of religious self-esteem, we have to continue crushing others until eternity, that being where we want to go: all of us.

When I think of the drive-byers or the ones who insult and judge complete strangers, such as on youtube and blogs etc, I think to myself "That's just too simple and easy"; calling a complete stranger a fag or whatever else is just such a primitive easy way to get self-esteem, you know, "you're a fag...and now I shall beat my chest with my fists." So, they elevate themselves to god and judge and crush us mortals, but isn't that what all of our actions are--the elevation part of ourselves? These people are ourselves at our lowest. Murderers, I think, not only takes something faulty wiring in the brains to make them murder, but it also takes some abuse, which is a kind of self-esteem thing; taking it out on the kids--and everybody else they come in contact with--the kids not being able to do anything about it. Everything's all about appearances. Charles Manson got those girls to kill because he elevated himself up to god with his crazy look in his eyes. What they need is to feel they have something special to offer, like all of us feel. If that's not a religious culture--even as it may claim it isn't--, then I don't know what is.

Roger,

You say that "we must have empathy with those we disagree with," but that seems somewhat hypocritical to me, if I recall correctly, in reference to the numerous tweets bashing Rush Limbaugh while he was hospitalized not even six months ago.

It's interesting to me. If you were just caught up in the moment, or if it just slipped out one day, I think most people, including myself, would give you the benefit of the doubt that you regret it and acknowledge that it was tasteless. But do you think said people would also just as easily forgive guys like Michael Richards or Don Imus for the same reasons? I doubt it. Those guys were burned at the stake.

Of course, one could easily argue that resentment and hostility based on political beliefs is much more relevant and acceptable than that based on race. Without question.

But then you brought out the fat jokes.

How would I feel if I were a brown student at Miller Valley Elementary School in Prescott, Arizona, who also happened to be overweight? A blog entry was created by Roger Ebert, defending myself and my race in such an eloquent, emotional way. He made me feel so alive and genuinely good about myself, more than anybody ever has. Then I followed him on Twitter, and stumbled upon his jokes making fun of a man's weight. I heard that he went back and apologized, but I didn't bother to check, because I never wanted to go near that bullshit website again.

Christian Bale says in Batman Begins: "It's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me." I also think that Benjamin Franklin once said something similar, but you get the point.

As always, great read, Roger.

Ebert: Those tweets came after he announced he would be fine, but they were over the line, and I apologized for them.

To add on to my comment right above:

"How would I feel if I were a brown student at Miller Valley Elementary School in Prescott, Arizona? A mural was created to depict some of the actual students in the school."

You wouldn't feel very "special" now, would you? That's why I think we might all be religious creatures. We all need this feel we are special for others, which is called self-esteem.

To add AGAIN, onto this comment:

"Then I moved to a suburb in Houston at around age 12, where racism was a kind of new concept, but as I said, I don't think of it as racism; just those who aren't getting their religious self-esteem."

The first day I rode the bus to school in middle school (I moved there at the end of elementary, 5th grade), a white girl that I was sitting next to me, abruptly asked as we were approaching the school (having said nothing the whole time): "Do you think you are superior or inferior?" I thought this was just some vocabulary test to kind of see if I knew what this meant, hoping I would pick the wrong one and look stupid, so I said, "superior" kind of proud that I'm not the type to be trying such games. And that was the end of the discussion. I think that was the first and very small sign that there was something racist going on. It's a small clandestine thing, for when we grow small; there's a reason racists are synonymous with retarded hillbillies: that's how they actually feel inside.

My father is a huge bigot and always has been. My best friend in elementary school, who was black, was not allowed in our house. For my tenth birthday I had a slumber party, and my mother took advantage of my father working nights and made sure Gidget was included. Since he went to bed immediately after coming home and we were in the basement he had no idea that my "little nigger friend" was in the house. And this was not the south, this was New Jersey. Fast forward thirty-plus years, and he's belittling his oldest granddaughter, married to a Mexican-born nauralized citizen, because he doesn't know why an "illegal immigrant" would be allowed into the U.S. military (my nephew-in-law is a Marine about to be deployed into Afghanistan) and calling her son--his great-grandson--a "half-breed wetback bastard." He called me the day after Barack Obama's election saying "I hope you didn't vote for that nigger, the country's going to hell now." Then he has the nerve to complain that my siblings and I don't call him. There's part of me that knows his father was an abusive racist alcoholic and his mother was a cold abusive racist and it comes from them, but at the same time he's smart enough to have overcome that but he chooses not to. He is the audience to which Fox News and the like panders, and he happily laps up their message, to the detriment of his grandchildren and great-grandson.

Thanks for the kind words. Glenn Beck actually is one of the sad people I was talking about, who got dealt a really bad hand growing up and looked for people to blame. His mix of paranoia, naivete and ignorance is to be pitied.

Coulter and company, on the other hand, are smart enough and educated enough to know better. Coulter's success depends on notoriety, and so the hateful venom she spews is a form of PR for the morally bankrupt. Rush Limbaugh is the sort of person you'd hate to be acquainted with in real life, someone who delights in belittling his lessers, pushing his opponents' buttons, and generally being a contrarian. Sean Hannity is the worst of them all, someone with rigid ideological beliefs declared fervently and angrily all night long. If you don't agree with him, he's not interested in knowing you or finding out why. His positions are the moral ones, and everyone else's are leading to the destruction of the country. He believes in America, and therefore any actions America takes are justified. He supports Israel, and therefore any actions Israel takes are justified. Even an old conservative war horse like Pat Buchanan is a traitor because he opposes the Neocon vision for democratic Iraq and Afghanistan. The murder in international waters of humanitarian activists carrying food and building supplies to the world's largest internment camp is somehow transformed into armed terrorists carrying weapons of mass destruction into a slimy den of Arab rodents. The more certain a person is of any situation, the less I trust their point of view. Hannity's absolute certainty makes him terrifying.

... thanks for that, Mr. Ebert.

I just recently gave up a life-long friendship because of her racist, hate-filled email forwards and comments that had no basis in fact.

Surprisingly, it felt kinda good. I realize now that I was slowly building a tolerance for her stupidity and allowing her racist remarks because I thought she was just ignorant.

She is. And I told her so.

But that's her choice. To remain ignorant, I mean. My choice? I'm not going to dumb down to save a friendship.

Reply to: Is it possible that the people who were offended by the mural are really reacting to a perceived double standards, Political Correctness, and reverse discrimination that so many white people face every day? - Roy

Reply to: Ebert: For me, the decision to alter the shade of an actual student's skin in response to ugly protests is, quite simply, racist.

Look at the photo at the top of the entry.

Two people, a man and a woman, are sitting on a scaffolding in front of a mural.

Behind them... see the mural?

Look at the face in the mural.

Look at the forehead. There's a rectangle on his forehead that's a different color. That's where the artists started to paint a flesh tone that was lighter than the original skin tone.

Now, look at the rest of the boy's face in the mural. It looks grey to me.

Do you think the boy IN THE MURAL looks like a young Barack Obama? If you were driving by, I think you MIGHT think it was a tribute to "Obama as a boy" in the same way that Obama's face has appeared on magazine covers with some creative Photoshopping.

That's what the controversy was about, the motorists who thought it was a mural with a young Barack Obama riding a bicycle.

Nobody tried to alter "the shade of an actual student's skin in response to ugly protests."

The motorists said the mural looked too much like a young Obama, and the principal asked,

"Can you make it look MORE like the boy in the photograph?

Can you make the skin tone look MORE like the design the students voted on?"

Not like a white student, but more like the Hispanic student in the photo.

80 comments and no one knows what the controversy is really about. Sad.

Reply to: Back at the panel on racism at the Conference on World Affairs, I had a question: "In your most private lives, has it ever occurred to you that white people are crazy?" - Tom Dark

I've found that people don't always get ALL the relevant facts straight. Replace "white People" with "human beings who evolved from single-celled organisms with many random variables at work" and the question makes more sense.

Ebert: Come on, Bill. This is bullshit.

I would suggest that all racists go and become a minority in another country for awhile. It might open their eyes a bit.

When I was living in Japan (which has its own issues with racism concerning Koreans and Chinese people, but who treat white foreigners extremely well), I sometimes felt like an "other," due to language and cultural barriers. That I didn't feel it more often is because the people around me didn't treat me like an "other," but like a human being. While I was always aware of the nationalities of my Japanese and non-Japanese friends, it rarely became an issue when I would talk to them, unless I had some culturally-specific question. Even when I spoke to one of my Japanese friends in Japanese, I never felt that I was talking to a Japanese person, but rather to one of my friends.

And when I saw Japanese children acting the same way as American children would, or family members enjoying vacation the same way my family would, I noticed that, no matter what cultural or language barriers might exist between people, there's always common ground, and that common ground resides in our natures.

So, the best way to combat racism, as at least one person above mentioned, is through empathy and understanding. Make a bunch of racists the minority. They will either implode with hatred, or learn how to interact with the people around them as human beings.

Or, to put it another way:

Travel is fatal to prejudice.--Mark Twain

Thank you Roger for your blog. This was beautiful and a wonderful reminder of our racist history that we cannot escape, but must face head on.

I live in Prescott, AZ and can respond to some of the questions about this story. First, the artists and children from Miller Valley school have said there were a few cars driving by yelling "n-----" and "s---" during school hours. There is no video of this happening and does not need to be.

Because of pressure from our overtly racist councilman, Steve Blair, (some of his comments about the mural include "I'm not a racist by any stretch of the imagination...but I can't stand the word diversity" and "I don't like having diversity shoved down my throat" to name a few) the school district and school principal were pressured to ask the artists to "lighten" the Latino and black kids faces. Last Sunday the artists began to change the skin tones when they realized the paint was rotten. Thursday morning our conservative local paper ran a front page article about the "lightening" of the mural kids faces. Immediately there were numerous on line comments. A friend called me saying she wanted to protest on Sat. and wondered if my family would join her. I called, emailed, texted and facebooked everyone I know letting them know about the planned protest. My contacts let their contacts know, etc., etc. A friend of a friend has media connections who contacted me to be videotaped for ABC news and quoted in the local paper. My Unitarian Universalist congregation made a great show at the protest. I brought coolers of water and cups and extra signs. BUT, the point is this protest was a completely organic gathering of the good people of Prescott. There was no one organizer.

The day I read the article in the our local paper I walked down to the library with my son and happened to see the leader of the group of artists (Mural Mice). He told me about the paint being rotten and not finishing the "lightening" of the kids. I told him that there would be a group protesting this racist behavior. He was completely shocked, but so happy to be supported by the community. He never would have known so many of us supported NOT changing the mural if we hadn't gathered together to make our voices heard.

All of the kids (Latino, black and white) on the mural are actual kids at the school. Most of these children were present at the protest. It was incredibly powerful to see the children who are actually depicted and imagine that ANYONE would say to them "your skin is not the right color." The apology from the superintendent and principal certainly did seem sincere. It must have a been really hard to say "I was wrong." - no disclaimer, no excuses. The mural will remain as the artists originally envisioned. Superintendent Kapp said it best by saying "now everytime I drive by and see this beautiful mural I will know that this is Mario."

My multi-racial family has had a very difficult time living in this small conservative, white town. We've wanted to move from this place for years, but no opportunities have not made themselves available to us. Four or five years ago I realized that maybe we are SUPPOSED to be here. If we leave this town, how will anything ever change? For people of color AND white folks.

I never thought I would say I am proud of this town, but I AM PROUD OF PRESCOTT!! In the face of ugly racism our school officials (while in a perfect world never would have even asked the artists to change the kids skin color) admitted they were wrong and recanted. Over 400 people came out to protest this racism and WE DID IT!! It feels so wonderful!!!

Ebert: Of course there's no video, because who's going to stand there waiting to make one? For me, the proof is in the tapes of the Blair programs and fact that the school felt enough pressure that it ordered the changes in the first place.

Roger,

Thank you for writing this great journal entry as well as bringing larger attention to this debacle. As a resident/employee in Prescott, AZ I was shocked and appalled to learn about this when I read it in the paper. I have lived and worked in Prescott almost my entire life and have never heard of anything like this. Perhaps it's my own naivety but I had always thought that Prescott was always a peace promoting town; that because we were small and relatively progressive thinkers we always had avoided the large racist problems of larger, more political, cities. I felt that, at least for Prescott, the race bating of the 60s was in the past and the concept of racism was a minority of itself. Diversity was celebrated and encouraged during my tenure as a student in Prescott.

And now that I'm older and more perceptive, I find myself asking the question "what happened"? It's a shame to think that Prescott is falling down this path; with both this homegrown issue and the recent passing of SB1070 (of which I do not support). Perhaps it's always been this way here and I have just been blind or chose to ignore it? If that is the case, what a tragedy...

Roger, I have never enjoyed criticizing your other readers but I have a couple of things to say about Holly Martin’s comment. I just couldn’t help it.
No, I’m not even remotely offended about it. I just find some of the comments so very full of ignorance, they are downright laughable.
Fact is, after living most of my life in Mexico City, I’ve yet to meet my first black Mexican. Not everybody’s skin tone is the same of course and I’m sure there are quite a few dark skinned people in the coast, maybe a few black Cubans there and what have you, but to say that there are black people being discriminated in Mexico is very close to saying there are Mexican people currently being discriminated in the Ukraine.
There are quiet a few Jewish people here, many live close to where I live. I doubt there are too many people around who are even aware they are Jewish and on the street they pass as anyone else.
Does that mean there’s no discrimination here at all? Of course not, but segregation like the one you mention about in your childhood??? That’s never even been an issue here.

I agree, you blog wasn’t even about immigration but it seems to me like it would be so very easy to drive the illegal immigrants out of the US. If the law came down truly hard on any business or company that hired them, that would pretty much mark the end of “the problem”.
Why doesn’t the US government do this? There’s not too much of a mystery there. Can you imagine the number of US business that would have to close, how many of their employees of all races would lose their jobs? Can you imagine what the prices would be in any restaurant chain that actually has to pay 7 bucks an hour for those fancy jobs of cleaning toilets and washing dishes?

I don’t condone anyone breaking any law but I wonder if Ms. Martin had been born in this side of the border, whether she would have been so very respectful of it.
Like Jack Warden tells Paul Newman in THE VERDICT, “what’s the first thing they taught you at school? Never ask a question if you don’t know the answer”
These are words to live by.

Ebert: Undocumented workers are a godsend for haters of the minimum wage.

"Holly Martins," BTW, has the same name as a certain famous writer of pulp westerns.

Reply to: Ebert: Come on, Bill. This is bullshit.

I don't see my first message. The counter still reads 71 on the "Journal" page, and 106 comments when I hit "Preview." But when I do that, I can't see the photo.

can YOU see the photo? Do you see the rectangle on the forehead that's a different color?

Am I an expert on what happened here? No. But I'm not trying to mislead or misrepresent anything.

Here's the first half of my comment, again:

First, in the interest of accuracy:

Reply to: A mural was created to depict actual students in the school. Let's say I was one of the lucky ones. As my face became recognizable... The mural was shown on TV, and everybody could see that it was me... And the artists got back up on their scaffold and started making my face whiter. - Ebert

The (name of school) in Arizona is designated K-5, which I assume means kindergarten through fifth grade.

The students at the school voted on designs for the mural. The students chose a design that featured four real-life students from the school. A Hispanic boy is the dominant figure in the chosen design.

The student in the original photograph is clearly Hispanic.

And the dominant figure in the mural appeared to be African-American.

Reply to: Now the attempted whitening of the faces of children on a mural in Prescott has left us jaw-dropped and wondering if things could get worse.

The original request by the school principal to "lighten up" the boy's face was to make it look MORE like the photograph, not less. It wasn't to hide or change his identity. It was so the boys' parents could look at the mural and NOT say, "That doesn't look like OUR son."

The artists applied some lighter paint on PART of the face, on the forehead, to try to find a skin tone that was closer to the boy in the photo. And they painted enough that they could see what it would look like, and stopped.

Because neither color was right. They didn't have enough artistic skill to make the mural look like the actual boy, so the principal decided to stick with the first attempt.

This is a mural. When you see it from the street, you see a different perspective.

(2) Off the topic, but Tucson, Arizona had a heat advisory and a high temperature of 106 F. Which might explain why people are irritated while they drive home in cars without air conditioning...

(3) Reply to: Steve Blair went on his local radio talk show and made comments about the mural. I didn't hear him, but I can guess what he said. - Ebert

You could guess, but it's better just to read the transcript. By the way, the FOX affiliate KYCA has fired him, so Blair no longer has a job at the station. He's still a City Councilman.

Steve Blair said the mural "looks like graffiti in Los Angeles."

I've seen more graffiti murals in Los Angeles than anyone here. And that's what they look like. Maybe more elaborate, maybe more Hispanic iconery and gang symbols in the details, but yeah.

On his radio show, Blair made a comment he shouldn't have made: "I am not a racist individual, but I will tell you depicting a black guy in the middle of that mural, based upon who's president of the United States today and based upon the history of this community when I grew up, we had four black families—who I have been very good friends with for years—to depict the biggest picture on that building as a black person, I would have to ask the question, 'Why?'...The focus doesn't need to be on what's different; the focus doesn't need to be on the minority all the time."

The reason Blair was fired... well, I couldn't find an official statement from the station.

Blair's comment was as much a racial slur aimed at President Obama as it was about the mural, and it was out of line.

The face in the mural was never "based on who's President of the United States today" unless the students at that Elementary School thought the kid in the photo looked like Obama.

But the comment Blair made was under the assumption that the face in the mural looked too much like Obama. And the principal said, "We should make it look more like the design the students chose."

You had to do this during the Lakers-Celtics game, didn't you? Yes, I may have made mistakes. Without me, Kobe is lost.

//Think of her. She wanted to try her hair a lighter brown, and perhaps her mother and sisters helped her, and she was told she looked pretty, and then she went to school and we laughed at her. I wonder if she has ever forgotten that day. God damn it, how did we make her feel? We have to make this country a place where no one needs to feel that way.//

Roger this paragraph is one of the best pieces of writing I have ever read. If I can ever come close to the beauty of this passage with my own writing then i will be very happy. Thank you

Roger,

I have always admired your eloquence and decency. But you also possess the quality most required by situations like the current idiocy in Arizona: Tenacity.

It's easy to mock the stupidity of the Arizona immigration law or the insecurity of those who would feel threatened by a mural featuring a non-white child. But such snark accomplishes nothing. What America needs is your attitude: The majority of us believe that all people are created equal and we will not compromise with idiots who do not.

Our country has become less racist with each passing generation since the Civil Rights era, that trend will continue, and there's nothing the idiots can do about it. I hope that thought keeps them up a night.

Just add other minorities that are represented in Prescott. The artist could do that!

From KPHO in Phoenix: (current temperature 108 degrees) and Arizona Republican:

R.E. Wall, director of Prescott's Downtown Mural Project, told CBS-5 News that he was asked to lighten the skin tone of the most prominent child.

"I thought that was ridiculous. We felt this was perfect representation of a Hispanic child," Wall said. "It shows beautiful children on their way to school and diverse people. This is astounding to me."

According to Wall, the request to lighten the boy's complexion came from
*** the school's principal, who Wall said told him this wasn't about race or politics, it was about making the children appear happier and brighter.

and "they want it to look like the children are coming into light."

Lane said that he received only three complaints about the mural and that his request for a touch-up had nothing to do with political pressure. "We asked them to fix the shading on the children's faces," he said. "We were looking at it from an artistic view. Nothing at all to do with race." (end)

If you know anything about photography, photographers use the words "light" and "brighter" incessantly.

That isn't racism.

(Insert Happy Face here.)

(2) A statement by Steve Blair: "I didn't even know the largest child was Hispanic, people were saying the child was a Negro.... I just think the mural is misplaced. I don't care who they put on it or what they paint on it."

Blair was a City Councilman and a talk radio host at the time. People called in and said the child was African-American.

How many random people do you need to call in with the same comment before you admit that maybe the figure in the mural looked like an African-American instead of Hispanic?

Ebert: African-American or Hispanic, it makes not the slightest difference to my argument. Why do you think it does?

Voila, Mr. Ebert.
Being afro latin and reading your reviews from way back with Siskel and Ebert, I've noticed even then, a wonderful sensitivity to hollywoods incessant stereotypes of black characters as buffoon comedic types, second bananas, dying off before the title credits had left the screen. Then, one day I found out that your wife was black and I wanted to grab you by the shoulders and furiously kiss your cheeks! (I'm heterosexual) Films are so obviously impressionable to everyone especially to a younger audience and so, even at 12 or so, when the inequities and cliches of Hollywoods social strata begun to unfold and be made clear upon my consciounes,your wonderful, wonderful film reviews would often uncover Hollywoods miasma of sterotypes and ridiculous cliches. It has alway been fresh air from a system stank with old ideas. More and more we are slowly breaking from that old tradition, especially with the rise of new film makers of color such as myself.

"i can't believe that i have
t' hate anybody
an' when i do
it will only be out of fear
an' i'll know it"

- Bob Dylan

There is an incredible amount of fear-mongering going on, against the blacks and the Hispanics. I've met people that seriously believe that if blacks move in your neighborhood, the crack and the guns follow. I've met people who think all of the illegal immigrants will somehow end up on welfare and honest, hard-working Americans will have to foot the bill.

I've met more white folks who have free-based cocaine than blacks who have smoked crack. I can't tell you any white person I've ever met who lost a job to an illegal alien. So going by personal experience, there is no reason to fear. But then Lou Dobbs gets worried, then my uncle gets worried, and I hear about it all the time... when nothing in my life or my family's lives has changed at all.

People need to lighten up.

Roger:

This is one of the most beautiful things you've ever written. Very moving.

I also can't understand how people can hate so much. I wasn't raised that way. Maybe if I grew up in a different time or a different part of the country, I might be able to see things differently, but I don't think I would be a racist.

The fact is, these folks are an endangered spiecies. Yes, we have a black President. Some people object to his politics. I can respect that. But I do think many of these tea party activists are dyed in the wool racists and incredibly ignorant. You can't reason with them, but you can defeat them. In fact, we already have.

-Nathan

There are many parts of the country where personal identity is, unfortunately, based on color. Along with this association to a group comes certain passed down behaviors and attitudes. These behaviors and attitudes then perpetuate themselves by attracting certain types of people to similar types, and raising offspring with these behaviors and attitudes. You may not have been raised with this duality, and neither have I.... But it exists, and it is the unfortunate reason that potentially intelligent and productive people are being turned into monsters.

This happens to both black people and white people. Once you start to view the world with this racial duality, and are raised in an environment where this perception is perpetuated by your family, the result is the type of people you speak about.

What is wrong with them?? Racists need to be called out. Racists need to be confronted. Shame on the school board!

So...your post is not about immigration, but it is about Coulter & Limbaugh & Beck & Hannity? :)

Ebert: They are also not mentioned in the post.

Hi Amy

We in Arizona have been faced with many heartbreaks over the past two months, first the passing of SB1070 that allows police to racially profile Hispanic Americans...

No, it does not. It explicitly specifically does not allow for racial profiling. Why is this still being misrepresented at this point?

Ebert: Randy, Randy, Randy. You weren't born yesterday. It doesn't "allow" them, but we have already seen that it encourages them.

What if there were a law against citizens with red hair? Of course you couldn't question somebody only because he had red hair, but how many black-haired people would be halted?

As a visible minority, I've run into more than my share of white people who pooh-pooh my concerns about racism as "racial oversensitivity" or "playing the race card". These people do not consider themselves racists. They simply turn a blind eye to it, and demonstrate their prejudice by discounting my personal testimonies because ... well, because I'm a visible minority myself, and that makes me "biased". Or something.

The fact is that at the end of the day, they say they're not racists but they're dismissing my claims because of my race. If I were a white person saying I'd seen the same things, they would believe me. What does that say?

I've explored the mindset of racists by reading some of their literature. It expresses the EXACT SAME fears that "moderate" people express about immigration, "pollution" to American culture, demographic shifts, etc. The volume is just turned up. Quite frankly, the only difference between the guy at the water cooler muttering about immigrants and the guy driving past the mural shouting obscenities is the emotional intensity.

But let's be realistic: racism is part of human nature. We like people who look more like ourselves. It takes education and social intermingling to overcome that natural prejudice, and some people just aren't getting enough of it.

Then you should move to Africa where it's Heaven on Earth.

Or maybe you'd prefer Mexico.

Hi Roger,

Inside, I asked my mother why they wouldn't serve him. "They have their own nice places to eat," she said. I don't believe she was particularly upset on his behalf.

You kinda threw your mother under the bus there, to demonstrate your own evolution past that bigoted time, in much the same way that Barack Obama did with his white grandmother in his Philadelphia racism speech. I doubt that either would appreciate the tire tracks.

Not intentional, I know.

But, in doing so you granted permission for your commenters to jump in with stories of how bigoted their relatives are - to show how decent and evolved they are too. It's already started. Let's see how it plays out.

Ebert: Randy, it was the truth. Should I have lied? In time, she evolved, believe me. In 1952 all sorts of residents in the District of Columbia, with infinitely more advantages than my mother, played along with Jim Crow. That might include Eisenhower, who a few years later sent troops to Little Rock. People learn, think and change. You do approve of Eisenhower calling up the National Guard, I assume?

It is hard not to be disturbed by the Prescott Mural story as reported. I was not there and suppose that the story could be fully truthful and not one sided. However, in my experience in life, I have met few outright racists and the few I have met were just as likely to be Black as well as white. Is it possible that the people who were offended by the mural are really reacting to a perceived double standards, Political Correctness, and reverse discrimination that so many white people face every day?

You don't have to be "outright" racist to be racist. I don't go around openly saying "I hate white people". In fact, I'm going to invoke that loathesome excuse people give to say they aren't racist, "My best friend is a white person."

So the child in focus of the mural had a darker skin tone. Exactly why is that a problem that has to be altered? Making it a White child simply for the sake of making it White sends a message: White children have more intrinsic and attractive worth than non-White children. That is about as racist as it gets.

I'm sure everybody on a film blog has heard of the whole Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Last Airbender fiasco, the one where the film makers took a cartoon that had a strong base in Asian culture and mythology (and did so without being insulting) and made all the heroes white for the film. You know what's wrong with that? It tells kids that Asians are seen as less worthy of being seen than Caucasian kids.

So there is 1 mural on the wall of the school with a Hispanic kid on it. That is 1 in hundreds of murals in AZ that probably all feature White kids. Just try to imagine being non-White kid and turning on the TV every single day and there never seem to be any positive portrayals of people like you on TV. Then maybe you will get why non-white people always feel as though they are constantly made invisible.

Does the mural of a Hispanic kid make white kids feel invisible? Non-white kids have to personally identify with white icons all the time. Would it kill you to identify with a picture of a Hispanic kid on a painting on the wall?

“If you tell a kid he’s worthless once, you won’t really cause much damage. You tell a kid he’s worthless every day for six months you’re going to mess with his head.”

People celebrate their own ignorance, then cry foul when they're labeled racists. That, to me, is a lack of conviction... They know they're wrong, and they don't seem to care.

Nearly thirty years ago, as a brown boy with cerebral palsy, growing up in North Dakota, I was told by another boy to, "Go back to where you came from." His ironic lack of proper grammar aside, how could a descendant of German immigrants could tell me such a thing with a straight face? Willful stupidity, that's how.

Born an optimist, I grew up with an even more horrifying realization: Contrary to my beliefs, not everyone employs logic and reason.

But what separates us? Is it heredity? Is it environment? In 1996 the American Association of Physical Anthopologists issued a multi-part statement documenting that race is not a biological construct. Stupidity is, though. Or, more accurately, cognitive potential... or lack thereof. But I don't believe that racists are biologically inferior. Also, we grew up in the same state. Why were my ideas about race different than that boy's?

While we all went to the same schools, my parents had the benefit of a worldly experience and exposed me to the same as much as possible. Suffice it to say, I also knew many, many white kids who grew up in North Dakota with progressive views and are far more liberal than I am. Where did these ideas germinate? There is no one explanation, as evidenced by some of the stories shared by commenters here who didn't turn out anything like their racist parents.

It comes down to one's overall experience at life... the environment and resources that they are either given, or pursue on their own... and also their own sense of curiosity.

The greatest failure all racists have in common is a failure to be curious... They don't want to know what it's like to be me. And yet here you are, asking the question: What is it like to be them? That is perhaps the most critical difference, Roger, separating us from them. And it is a learned one... for curiosity is the crowning achievement of evolutionary biology that has made human beings successful in adapting to every environment/climate/region on Earth.

This is perhaps why there's much in common with racism and a vehement disbelief in evolutionary theory... because if evolutionary theory teaches us one thing, it is this: Adapt or die.

Ebert: On his tombstone, Studs Terkel wanted the words:

Curiosity didn't kill this cat.

One more thought... Not only is it imperative to adapt, but diversity is key to survival. If you want to see homogeny at work, go to an Amish or Hutterite colony and count the number of children with coke bottle-thick eyeglasses.

informed by a nun that he was "just as precious as the rest of you in the eyes of God."

Modern genetics has not been kind to any sort of racism, whether it's hateful or patronizing. In fact, genetics is always playing cruel jokes on racists: it turns out that the black Africans (the ones that stayed there) have the purest human genetics; it's everyone else that has the Neanderthal genes. So much for 20th century theories of racial purity.

And it's easy to measure the genetic difference between races. Normal variation and human evolution produce genetic variation over the entire human population; the difference between any two humans is about 1 difference for every 1000 nucleotides. The genetic distance between races is simply the fraction of this total variation observed between two racial subgroups. If the fraction is 100% (all of the 1/1000 nucleotide variation), well, that would be a big difference between two races, and would in fact lend material support to anyone claiming there's a big difference between the two races.

So what's the actual genetic distance between human races? It's minuscule, ranging between 5 and 10%, and at most 20% between Africans and everyone else. These numbers are so small that they cast real doubt on race as a meaningful scientific concept.

We can safely say that any two white idiots screaming "Nigger!" and "Spic!" at this mural were about as closely related genetically to the Niggers and/or Spics as they are to each other. Of which of the 1 in 10000 nucleotides that are different from their own do these people hate?

This would all be absurd, if it wasn't so hateful itself, and if the coward school hadn't painted over the faces of its own students.

Roger

I'm glad you wrote about this. Your experiences growing up and the fact that you married a black woman, give you a bit more insight than the average white man.

We have come a long way, but I would say America is more "tolerant" than "accepting" for people of color. I was born in 1968 from an interracial marriage between a black man and woman. I have spent all of my life with the pressure of being "different". Not just to the white community, but to the black community as well.

I went to school in a mostly white suburb in the Midwest and I can remember the one day in 7th grade history class when we talked about Black History (the dedicated a whole class period). When the teacher red about "crow laws" and used the word Negro...every single person turned and looked at me. I'm 41 now and I remember it. So that girl you all laughed at, you can bet she still remembers how that feels.

There is more opportunity for blacks and I feel its how you maximize those opportunities that can make a difference. I'm educated, have a good career and live in a nice community. In the big picture there still is a significant gap in education, career, and housing opportunities in this country. It's only been 46 years since the Civil Rights act, there is a lot more work to be done.

It's still not easy being "Brown".

Laura

Ebert: You probably saw this, about the doubling rate of interracial marriage:

http://j.mp/9AtDaW

I'm in favor of every marriage where the partners love one another and want to be married. Those should be the deciding factors. The rise in interracial marriages may simply reflect more opportunities for people to meet one another.

Dear Roger,

I'm not old enough to have the experiences you have. I'm only 21, so I didn't have to live through the Civil Rights movement or segregation. I have had to live through my father, however, who may be one of the most racist men I have ever met and whom I recently severed my ties to. I don't know why he is the way he is, but I do know that he was the reason I was a right-winger who listened to Rush Limbaugh and a bigot up until I went to college and started thinking for myself, up until I stopped being afraid of what my dad thought of me.

Let me start by saying my family is predominantly Irish Catholic, at least on my dad's side (my mother's is Russian-German Jewish). I grew up, like my mother and father, in Boston, Massachusetts, which I would like to think is a rather progressive city. I was brought up, from a young age, listening to conservative pundits and being told that black people were just not as civilized as us, that they had a hatred for white people like me, and that the media was twisting things around to hide it. I also lived through the Boston priest scandal, where I was an altar server. One of the priests from my church was arrested. I was told that it was a homosexual issue, and to just keep following the Catholic church.

I grew up in a household where inter-racial marriage announcements in the newspaper were met with a cry of 'Jesus Christ, what is this country coming to' and black people were often called 'fudgicles'. Immigrants got similar treatment, though it wasn't that big of an issue where I lived until we moved to Florida. My father wasn't the type to be blatantly racist in public, nor admit he was racist in private. Racism was a 'liberal guilt'-word and he couldn't possibly be racist because he had black friends. I feel ashamed that I ever agreed with any of this, ashamed to the point where I want to cry for days on end because I feel like a terrible person.

My boyfriend is Hispanic- Cuban, to be specific. He doesn't speak Spanish, but his father is from Cuba and speaks in a very thick accent. (His mother, incidentally, is Irish.) I didn't tell my parents about Rob (my boyfriend) for the longest time because I thought my dad would forbid me from seeing him because of his race. When I expressed my hesitation to my dad, his first question was "what, is he black? Because we have to have a serious talk if he is."

I went on ignoring my father's comments for a long time. He would send me racist emails, I would ignore them. One day, I started responding with rebuttals (sometimes snarky ones, admittedly) and, in his crazy brain, he decided that Rob was the one writing the replies, not me. On my 21st birthday, he decided it was a good idea to forward me a long email about how blacks should be forever grateful to white people for bringing them 'Christianity' and 'civilization'. I pointed out that Ethiopia was a Christian state before the US even existed, and asked him why he couldn't put shit like this aside for one day instead of making me go through my birthday upset and angry. Instead of apologizing, he told me he never wanted to see me again because I was too "willfully ignorant" and "hateful" of things me and my "mentor" disagreed with. He was supposed to come see me in a show that night. He never showed up.

He also never apologized for that incident, just started calling me and sending me emails again a few weeks later. I, like an idiot, decided to pretend it never happened. I went down to visit my parents this past weekend, while Rob was in Chicago. My father and I got into a huge argument the second day, over an email he sent decrying Muslims as 'evil' and 'torturous'. (I believe my response was something like: "This is kind of ironic, coming from a man who continues to support a church that continues to cover up pedophilia", to which he responded that pedophilia was a "homosexual issue, not a church issue".) It turned into an all-out blowup, and I told him exactly what I thought of his stupid, racist politics and views, not to mention some of the things he told me (for example, when I was seven: "I only love you because you're my daughter and I have to." When I was ten and my mother was in the hospital: "You know she's only in the hospital to get away from you, right?"). His response was to say that my stupid [a very derogatory term for a Hispanic person that I won't repeat here] of a boyfriend had 'ruined' me and that had been 'such a good conservative' before.

I feel so ashamed to have come from that stock, and I continue to loathe myself every single day for buying into it. Thank you, Mr. Ebert, for writing this. I don't know how my father got to be the hateful person he is, but I feel better knowing that I'm not the only one who doesn't understand why, and who feels pity and sorrow for people like him instead of anger. I was greatly moved by your writing, and I think you are without a doubt one of the greatest political writers of our time.

Ebert: You have nothing to cry about or feel ashamed of. You were raised in one way, and now live in another. Not everybody makes that transition as quickly as you have--or at all.

And...don't feel ashamed of your stock. Nobody from any stock is born a racist. The song from "South Pacific" has been quoted here: "You Have to be Taught..."

Roger,

Thank you for this post. For about a year I had the great good fortune to work with international students on campus. We had something like 250 international students at that time out of a student body of about ten thousand. It literally felt like the world was coming to me every day I was in that part-time position. Our student body was so homogeneous at that time that some of these students would volunteer to be on panels in freshman orientation classes so that there could be interaction. Diversity in action.

At the same time I was working in the athletic department as an academic advisor.

The two jobs intersected one day when a baseball player sat in my office. He came for school and to avoid the military draft in his home of South Africa during what proved to be the death throes of apartheid. We must have had a radio on because we both heard the story about the pope refusing to kiss the soil of South Africa when his plane had to land there unexpectedly. I just looked at Gary and said “No, the land is not evil.” I could see the hurt in his face.

We need to treat each other with kindness as much as we possibly can. There is enough hardness already.

Ebert: Randy, it was the truth. Should I have lied? In time, she evolved, believe me.

It was an incomplete and uncharitable truth.

You do approve of Eisenhower calling up the National Guard, I assume?

I do.

Roger: I was the first black reporter at the daily Chicago Trib at about the time you started at the Sun-Times. This is a lovely piece. I can relate. Glad I discovered this blog and that you are still sharing your exceptional talent. Best

Ebert: Joe, the Tribune got its first black reporter in around 1967? But other papers weren't much better.

This was a moving read. I have been raised largely by people from Brooklyn in middle class suburbs so there has been little racial tension in my life.

I will say what I thought while reading this.

I thought "I didn't know his wife was black," as a passing thought - and then had to pause and tell myself, "Well why does it matter, Tom? It's his wife. That's what matters."

Hopefully there will be a day when our ethnic backgrounds, whatever they may be or become, will merely be a subject of minor curiosity and idle conversation over the dinner table.

http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/principal-asks-artists-to-lighten-faces-of-children-in-arizona-school-mural/19504774

Here's an interesting comment:

R.E. Wall, who painted the "Go on Green" mural, told AOL News that the artists would work to make the most prominent child look more like a Mexican-American but that they "weren't interested" in simply lightening the skin tones.

Let's put that comment under a microscope.

The artist who painted the mural... admits that lightening the skin tones would make the figure in the mural LOOK MORE LIKE A MEXICAN-AMERICAN.

Is there any legitimate reason to try to make the child look like a Mexican-american?

Oh, yeah. The kid in the photo WAS Mexican-American. (Or Hispanic. Not sure how Hugh Collins at AOL News is using the term.)

So how could the request possibly be racist?

AOL News: The mural aims to fight childhood obesity by encouraging children to walk or cycle to school.

Students examined different options for the design of the mural, before passing on their recommendations to the school's teachers, who had the final say.

"The teachers selected this design because it focused on children and their role in the environment," Lane told the AP. (end)

Not exactly supporting your theory that the faculty was racist or caved in to racist demands... why would the teachers, who had the final say, pick a design with a Mexican-american child in the most prominent position if they were racist?

AOL News: As the controversy grew, school authorities requested the artists lighten the skin tones on the forehead and cheeks of the main boy depicted, and to make the children appear happier.

The school's principal denies that he was motivated by any kind of political pressure relating to racism.

"We asked them to fix the shading on the children's faces," Lane told The Arizona Republic. "We were looking at it from an artistic view. Nothing at all to do with race." (end)

Here's the thing, Roger.

You've got two people.

The high school principal, Jeff Lane.

And the artist, R.E. Wall.

Both men say that the request had NOTHING to do with race.

A request that came from the principal and was conveyed directly to Wall.

If BOTH men agree the request had NOTHING to do with race, then why do you slander the principal by saying it did?

Reply to: I guess the artists went back up and started making my skin darker again, - Ebert

No, you can see in the photo that they didn't do that.

And the artist R.E. Wall said they were still considering the option of making the skin tone lighter to more resemble the Mexican-american boy.

I went to high school in a suburb on the north side of Detroit, and I spent three years in Ann Arbor, about sixty miles away. If you need an expert witness to testify about racism, I can do it. I've got the scars. You don't want to hear the stories.

But on the basis of everything I've read, the principal of this racially-diverse elementary school in Arizona deserves an apology.

He did NOT ask the artist to change a brown skin color to white, and he did not cave in to demands from racists.

He asked the artist to show the children painted on the outside of his building as being HAPPY. Wow, what a mistake in judgment.

If Jeff Lane is an elementary school principal in Arizona, I wonder if he's a photographer. Seems like a natural fit. And a photographer would use terms like "lighter" and "happier" and "put more light on the cheeks and foreheads."

Not a racist... just a photographer who uses terms that sound like something you don't like. Not the actual terms, but just words that sound like them.

As long as both the principal AND the artist agree that there was NEVER a request to change a brown skin color to white, you don't have a leg to stand on. Seriously. They've explained it.

Ebert: If the principal agrees with you that he did nothing wrong, why does he say "we made a mistake" and apologize in the video below?

Thank you for your essay.

Following the story, what I want to know is what the artist said when they were asked to alter the mural. Were they ever actually asked? Did they say yes or no? As a designer and illustrator, I am used to clients sometimes asking for revisions I disagree with. Often, I talk them out of them, for various reasons.

An artist needs to be responsible for what they create, despite the paycheck.

We are still at war with the Taliban, who are known for destroying art works that offend them. I imagine many of the folks who were yelling at the school playground mural consider themselves supporters of our armed forces.

http://j.mp/9AtDaW

Roger, I did see that article on the increase of interracial marriages. I agree that there is more opportunity to meet people of the opposite race now and more "tolerance" which most likely contributed to the increase. We are Global, the Internet and social media sites make it easier for people to meet and possibly try "something new".

I would love to hear your perspective on the topic. You may have already covered this, I'm fairly new to reading your blog. If you haven't covered it, maybe it's a future blog post...with an interesting angle that we haven't heard about. (smile)

Laura

PS. Sorry for the bad grammar and typos in my earlier post. (bad editing)

PSS. Have a great week and I look forward to the next piece.

I think it's hard for people who don't live in the Southwest border states to understand the atmosphere surrounding incidents like the one discussed in the essay. It's certainly not a unique one. Living in Arizona and being white, I've seen open hostility towards Mexicans from co-workers, friends, even some family. But I disagree that it's purely a contextual thing, framed in the popular resentment of illegal immigration. There's a racist element that wouldn't exist if the illegals were, say, Canadian. There's entire neighborhoods here in Phoenix where all the signage, billboards, store fronts are completely in Spanish. Some whites openly resent that, despite the obvious history of the American Southwest having once been part of Mexico. I don't expect the situation here to improve much any time soon, despite the many protests and boycotting of the state.

I found it pretty obvious, though, that the heart of the essay had nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with race relations. Having had a long-term interracial relationship myself that had zero negative incidents from racists or anyone else, I think the times are certainly changing. And apparently interracial relationships are growing.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/06/04/pew.interracial.marriage/index.html

That can only be good.

I've been waiting for you to write about how you met Chaz. I think you should do an entire blog on your courtship, if that's not too personal. You might not know it, Roger, but I've been reading you since I was 12. I'm now 27, and I feel like I know you better than I know my own dad. Your writing means the world to me.

Reply to: Ebert: If the principal agrees with you that he did nothing wrong, why does he say "we made a mistake" and apologize in the video below?

http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local/report/060510_prescott_fired

Here's a better look at the mural.

Tucson Sentinel: The school district has reversed its request to lighten the faces of the students in the mural, after attracting national attention with the move.

"Shame on us if we can't say, 'We made a mistake and we're sorry,'" said Prescott Unified School District Superintendent Kevin Kapp on Saturday.

"From the very get-go, every time I drove by this beautiful mural, I got a wonderful feeling of pride and pleasure at the work these Mural Mice have done," said Kapp at a rally in front of the mural.

"Miller Valley made a mistake. When we asked them to lighten the mural, we made a mistake," said Miller Valley Elementary School Principal Jeff Lane. (end)

OK, the mistake. Insulting the artistic integrity of the team of artists who created the mural, by saying "You need to lighten the face on the boy in the front."

They call themselves the Mural Mice. Their self-esteem must be dangling by a thread.

But look at the mural. The kid looks badly sunburned. It takes an artistic eye to look at a photo and say, "You need to add more light on his face." But if you know anything about TV work, that's ALWAYS what the image needs. Actors go blind staring into lights trying to make their faces stand out. There's a saying, "Don't stand between me and my light."

Adding more light... is just the way you make faces look better in a photo.

The mistake was insulting people by asking them to change their work. Maybe.

(2) Second possibility. Because he used the term "lighten the face" and didn't explain what the term meant. He didn't anticipate that anyone would put his words under a microscope.

Same reason they put erasers on the end of pencils.

Sometimes I give my effort on a project a rating, a certain number out of 100. I hardly ever get a 100. I was going to work in the library this afternoon, and forgot that the police had closed off all the streets for the annual Chili Cook-Off and some street fair thing. Did I make a mistake by not remembering the streets were closed? Does that make me a racist?

Here's another article, from the NY Daily News, Friday June 4:

Sean Alfano: Wall said his artists began touching up the mural earlier this week.

"They want us to lighten up the forehead and the cheeks [of the boy in the center], and make him look like he is coming into the light," he said. The school told Wall they want the children to appear more "radiant and happy."

The school's principal, Jeff Lane, told the newspaper he asked the artists to "remove some shadowing that made the faces darker than they are."

He added the negative comments over the mural have mostly ended.

"I think I only received one this past week."

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2010/06/04/2010-06-04_arizona_school_asks_artists_to_lighten_face_of_hispanic_student_on_mural.html#ixzz0q8sNzWG8

Maybe you could have someone call the Tucson Sentinel and get an update. Or, the Phoenix TV station. But if the negative comments about the mural have mostly ended, and Principal Lane still has his job, his explanation held up. It passed the test.

You might be able to crack it, but I have no idea how.

Remember the old adage that you need two independent sources to run a story? You don't even have one.

Ebert: What do you think about the subject of my entry? Nothing you say engages it.

Thanks for another very thoughtful essay. Your way of seeing into this situation, from the child's POV, is beautiful. I think most importantly, it's something that could heard by some of Steve Blair's radio listeners, which of course is part of the point. Again, thanks.

It seems the more prejudiced or paranoid a person is, the more the word "They" peppers his or her vocabulary. "They" separates us from others. I've noticed this with ordinary folk and with pundits on conservative networks and radio shows. Sorta sad, I think.

I'm looking at the mural (before they started making changes) and the kid's face appears to have a large fibroid growth covering his entire left cheek. It sticks out far enough that it hides part of his left ear.

WIKI: Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, was once considered to have been affected with neurofibromatosis type I. However, it is now generally believed that Merrick suffered from the very rare Proteus syndrome. This however has given rise to the common misconception that Neurofibromatosis and "Elephant Man Disease" are one and the same.

If I just came across the mural by accident, I'd say it was an ad for large yellow, lavender and maybe green flowers. Or maybe hummingbirds and blue jays. There's no way that I'd connect it to a campaign for environmentally friendly transportation, or healthy eating and weight loss through riding bicycles to work.

I'd say the haircut of the student in the foreground makes him look African-American.

But mostly, what I would say is, as a mural, it needs to be painted over and Mural 2.0 started.

Reply to: Ebert: If the principal agrees with you that he did nothing wrong, why does he say "we made a mistake" and apologize in the video below?

Possibility Number Three. The appropriate comment was to say the whole thing was bad. Picking out one part and saying "Put more light on it" was insulting to the person who did that part, and grossly unfair to all the other Mural Mice who failed to the same degree. But, since this is an elementary school, why say anything bad about anyone?

Just say "Good job, it makes me feel proud every time I see it" Saying anything else would be a mistake.

I hope you realize, Roger, most people in AZ do not hate hispanics, or blacks or native americans, or any other minority that lives here. We simply want our borders safe, we want to reduce the crime caused by drug trafficking immigrants (if you doubt this is a problem, go watch Traffic again). Probably there are better ways to go about this, but all I hear (particularly from those who don't even live in AZ) is criticism, and very little of it constructive.

The issue of racism is complex. It is not only caucasians that practice it. There are many among hispanics, blacks, and native americans that hate caucasians. My parents once attempted to work as missionairies at a Navajo church, but were forced out in favor of Navajo workers. The issue was skin color; not qualification. I don't say this to deride the Navajo's (among whom are many good people), but to point out that if we are to ever eliminate racism, people of all races are going to have to make the effort together.

>Janice Ian

It is wonderful that you chose to share your thoughts here. Just to remind my fellow readers, Ms.Ian's very first major hit is muy appropriate to this discussion. I remember "Society's Child" so well and the captivating young thrush who sang it--herself not much more than a child. It was 1967. Here's a taste:

"Come to my door, baby,
face is clean and shining black as night.
My mother went to answer, you know,
and you looked so fine.
Now I can understand your tears and your shame. She called you "boy" instead of your name.
When she wouldn't let you inside.
When she turned and said
'but honey's, he's not our kind.'
She said I can't see you anymore, can't see you anymore."

"She said I can't see you anymore, can't see you anymore..."

That refrain has lingered hauntingly all these many, many years. Listening to it yet again. Hope the world of today finds you as well and as at peace as possible.

Yes, I would say that there is racism in Mexico. Against Blacks? to some extent, yes, but as Gerardo pointed out, there aren't that many Blacks in Mexico. There aren't that many "Asian" (Chinese, Japanese, etc.) either but yes, we do have a certain degree of racism against Asians.

The type of racism that is most obvious in Mexico and we see it daily is racism towards Indians (Indios; "natives", if you will), just as one commenter from Canada said. In fact, in Mexico, the worst personal insult is to call someone "pinche indio" (f-ing indian), meaning ignorant, lazy, filthy, etc. And one sad fact is that when you bring this up to people, usually the reply will be "Hey, we are not racists. We had an Indian president: Benito Juarez..." Yes. In the 19th century...

It's true, we don't have laws for segregation based on race in Mexico, but we have other types of legal segregation, based on, of all things, immigration status and... Yes, based on sex. In certain states in Mexico, if you are a woman and belong to certain Indian ("native") ethnicities, you are banned from certain places and activities.

We in Mexico still have a lot to fix before we can go tell/ask other countries to do so. To me it is disgusting, revolting, to have our President speak in the US Congress and ask to change US laws, when he is not even allowed to do the same thing in Mexico's Congress.

How did we get to be this way? In my personal experience: by nurturing ignorance.

"I believe at some point in the development of healthy people there must come a time when we instinctively try to understand how others feel. We may not succeed. There are many people in this world today who remain enigmas to me, and some who are offensive. But that is not because of their race. It is usually because of their beliefs."

Mr. Ebert, this says it all. It is as if our nation is in some perpetual high schoolish mentality, stubbornly refusing to grow up.

Thank you for yet another truly meaningful piece with real impact.

The only racists are the ones who refuse to be race-blind in their thinking and relations with other human beings. That includes hate groups, of course, but also all ethnic "empowerment" movements and all ethnically based groups.

As far as politics go, the american progressive (or "liberal" as he calls himself) is the most racist of all mainstream parties, as he is utterly obsessed with color and race. This fixation is unhealthy and sordid but he refuses to understand it.

Ebert: Anything to say about the point I was making?

I just recently gave up a life-long friendship because of her racist, hate-filled email forwards and comments that had no basis in fact.

robert
i too just lost a friend because of the inanity of the sb law here...more than the fact that she was on the wrong side of the debate, the vitriol that came from her and her boyfriend (and i must give them credit for this) wasn't the ususal name calling and such but because of thier justifications which were the same as any CATO institute memo...this has torn us up here in az and i for one see no end in sight as the republican party here holds such sway and thats mostly due to the high population of retirees in sun city and elsewhere that stay to thier segregist platform...ironic since they complain about people who dont contribute yet here are people hoarding away SS and medicare and living totally apart from the rest of the city yet vote making the decisions for rest of us...i cant wait til im out of this place...im losing too many friends but then i see where they are and have to wonder, how much can i grow and evolve as a human if i allow these anchors to weigh me down?...sometimes it is neccesary to make that decision and face the air of lonliness than to be submerged in the sludge of ignorance...
thom

I still remember the first time I was told of the Ku Klux Klan as a kid. I was told they hated people with black skin. I remember trying to puzzle that out for myself; not thinking they were narrow-minded or disapproving of their belief, just not really understanding it at all and wanting to know the reasons behind it. To me at the time, it seemed to make as much sense as hating someone for being blond, or having green eyes, or for being tall or short. I was too young to grasp the historical and cultural reasons underlying it, and the era I grew up in was much less accepting of racist ideas than the era you grew up in. Certainly it couldn't be just because of darker skin? What would be the point of hating someone over that?

When I imagine grown ups in the year 2010 so enraged by the image of a little brown boy that they start yelling curses at it, I thank god for my upbringing and the fact that I am not one of them. For all their venom and for all they catch the spotlight, I think the last few decades have shown they are on the retreat. They're a dying breed. Or at least I hope.

Luckily, your questions have logical answers (if you consider psychology, sociology and biology useful tools of analysis).

YOUR QUESTION: "They simply hate. Why would they do that? What have they shut down inside? Why do they resent the rights of others?"

MY ANSWER: They haven't shut anything down inside. In fact, I'm guessing some of the people yelling racial slurs were just bored rednecks getting their jollies. To think that all "racists" are twisted, tormented souls is ludicrous. Racism is currently out of vogue for the majority of this country, but not everyone has received that dispatch yet. Remember that today's "racist" was yesterday's admired colonial kingpin. Some people are slow to catch up.

YOUR QUESTION: "Do the drive-by haters feel insecure?"

MY ANSWER: Racism has a neuropsychological basis, and it takes education and exposure to diversity to overcome it. See below for why insecurity doesn't factor in...

YOUR QUESTION: "How are they threatened? What have they talked themselves into? Who benefits by feeding off their fear... [blah blah] Those poor people. It must be agony to live with such hate, and to seek the company of others so damaged."

MY ANSWER: They're not agonized at all. You are way off-base with this insecurity issue. Did you read that study in the 1990's that dispelled the myth that bullies are insecure? To the contrary, the study indicated that bullies were *very* secure. They were just bullies because they weren't nice people. It had nothing to do with "insecurity." That's something non-bullies tell themselves to make themselves feel better (ie "My persecutors are all screwed up in the head, etc"). And the people yelling racial slurs are, of course, bullies.

NOW, MY QUESTIONS FOR YOU:

1. Why write on eggshells whenever racial issues are discussed? Are you afraid of causing offense?

2. And why all the personal anecdotage here? It's fun to read, of course, but seems to muddle your message. It's almost like you feel the need to establish your liberal/racial bona fides. Already you strike a defensive posture--a defense against potentially offending someone, but also a defense against being called racist for daring to write about issues of race. It might not be the best approach.

3. Why give so much digital ink to the racists? Maybe the racists enjoy the attention they receive as a result of their actions. Have you considered that you might inadvertently be encouraging their racist acts? A local story (racism, mural, etc) has been magnified into a national one--and you are complicit in that. You are different from the tabloids in what way?

4. I know you are aware of the hell that BP has unleashed in the gulf... So are you aware this effects *all* races in that region much more than some silly mural ever will? Perhaps you've already written about the ecological disaster and I missed it. I hope so. BP is a cover story. The mural belongs on Page 7.

5. I'm bored with your recent writing. I know, that sucks, and it's harsh to say... But I haven't heard you really enthuse about film for a bit. I've been reading your site for many years, but only started commenting in the last couple weeks. Perhaps because of the boredom. I hope you don't lose your passion for film... Is it harder to locate it with time? Or are films just not doing it for you this year? Or are you just bummed out about the state of the industry--one that has little room for "real cinema?"

About 20 years ago, I was in a store with my two-year-old niece (we are white) she came face-to-face with another little girl (black)- they looked at each other, and then both held out their arms and hugged. It was a beautiful moment. All of the adults looked at each other and smiled.

Everytime I confront a racist on their racist feelings, they have a litany of abuses and offences committed by people of that race ready to justify their feelings. But when I ask them if nobody of the same race as themselves has ever committed an abuse or an offence, their voices always trail off uncomfortably.

I think that racists often feel that the rest of us are blinded to the crimes of people of different races by 'political correctness'. Far from it, they are the ones who are blinded--to the crimes of their own race. Only by realising that people of all colours are equally capable of committing evil do we realise that people of all colours are equally capable of committing good, and ultimately, that people of all colours are equally capable; period.

Bill Hays might be right. Although, I'm not too familiar with the story and these drive-byers or whatever, I can tell you that in Arizona we have these drawings all over the place, consisting of mostly dark-skinned children. So, I have reason to believe it was not about race, because somewhere nearby I'm sure there was another one with all dark-skinned children.

Oh, okay, I just watched the youtube videos and I also didn't realize it was Prescott, AZ, which I'm not too familiar with; I thought it was somewhere near here. Yeah, it seems that they caved into the racism probably out of fear for the children or something, just like with 5 kids wearing the united states flag clothing and of course along with the neo-confederate right-wing brainwashing on the radios. So, I think this is more brainwashing by the right; how they use those emotional triggering words, such as: "based upon whose President of the United States"; "city did not approve that" or "had nothing to do with that"; "promotes one race over another"; and of course "conquer and divide." These people are so brainwashed by these right-wing think tanks.

Before someone wants to respond to my comment above, read this (posted by me earlier; edited for length):

I think we might be religious creatures and it might appear in the wrong places, such as with the Nazis; it was lacking and so they allowed Hitler to fill that vacancy into the form of a prophet.

Self-esteem within culture is a kind of religion. So, when self-esteem doesn't come about in the usual way (good job, child); so when that religious self-esteem is taken away in the equation in us, that thing that makes us a higher level of specialness for others, what we are left with is the a blank need to be special FOR OTHERS but without all the specialness; so the next step is to, in a sense, elevate ourselves to god, which, like a primitive animal, we go around trying to hurt others self-esteem to help our self-esteem; and since it is a kind of religious self-esteem, as we are totally symbolic creatures, we have to continue crushing others until eternity, that being where we want to go: all of us.

When I think of the drive-byers or the ones who insult and judge complete strangers, such as on youtube and blogs etc, I think to myself "That's just too simple and easy"; calling a complete stranger a fag or whatever else is just such a primitive easy way to get self-esteem, you know, "you're a fag...and now I shall beat my chest with my fists." So, they elevate themselves to god and judge and crush us mortals, but isn't that what all of our actions are--the elevation part of ourselves? These people are ourselves at our lowest. If that's not a religious culture--even as it may claim it isn't--, then I don't know what is.

I loved this piece. Less than a year after 9/11 I met a wonderful man who just happened to be Arab. At that time, a racist comment against African American would've have at least raised an eyebrow, but negative comments against Arabs would usually be greeted with support (films are still some of the worst perpetrators of stereotypes against Arabs.) During our relationship I was always on alert for people singling him out for his race. Unfortunately, it would happen when I wasn't around and he's just too polite to say much in his own defense. We've now been married for almost three years and I so feel fortunate to be open to people of any race. Had I been a racist, I would have never gotten to know him. Racists live such limited and angry lives!

@Randy Masters
I'm from Tucson and graduated from Tucson High School, the school targeted by Arizona's ethnic studies ban. The problem with history taught in American schools is that the majority of American History books are written to please the Texas education system. There, textbooks are selected for the entire state, rather than for each school or school district. Publishers want Texas to choose their book because it would mean a very large scale purchase. So, publishers choose content and viewpoints that correspond with the Texan mainstream idea of history. No offense to Texas, my father and grandparents are from there, but it is infamous for its euro-centric ways. Most American History textbooks, therefore, focus on "white" history, rather than a history of all people.

Ethnic studies provides an opportunity for ANYONE to learn the larger picture. Ethnic studies is a huge asset to the education system and society. Ethnic studies classes never caused any tenses between students on campus. I suspect that you yourself might have benefited from a class or two.

Fear of minorities and losing a position of being the majority comes from a lack of confidence. People who feel like they have to be in the majority think that the only advantage they have to make money and succeed is their racial privilege. It's time for those people to hone up on their skills and stop depending on race to carry them through life.

A lot of people are mentioning homosexual stuff, but I think I agree with Rita Mae Brown, when she said in this Time magazine interview:

"'You really never came out, did you? You were out.'

'The funny thing is, I don't believe in straight or gay. I really don't. I think we're all degrees of bisexual. There may be a few people on the extreme if it's a bell curve who really truly are gay or really truly are straight. Because nobody had ever said these things and used their real name, I suddenly became the only lesbian in America. It was hysterical. It was a misnomer, but it's okay. It was a fight worth fighting.'"

Me again. I kind of roll my eyes when people are so quick to distance themselves from the other side, although I am much more bothered by the macho straight types; on the one side you got the all-in-your-face-cuz-you-ain't-man-enough side (see Texas man-rapers), and the other I'm-officially-out-of-the-closet-and-fabulous-in-your face type (see Adam Lambert's Suddenly Face Humpers). I wish we'd all get pass this and just not really care about these "sides, which is what a lot of this discussion is about. (click my name if you want to see why "sides" don't need to matter)

Ebert: Of course some things actually are racist, but when the boy has cried wolf too many times nobody has any reason to believe him anymore. You can't spend 95 % of your time making things up and then insist that this time you are being serious. But that is what "anti-racists" keep doing.

Another problem with anti-racists is that they put dark-skinned people on a pedestal where they are treated like royalty and do not have to abide by any rules. They are treated as children. How is this not racist?

Amy M: "And then the passing of the law banning ethnic studies in public schools was a slap in the face to the Hispanic communities as well as those of us who wish for our young people to have a well-rounded view of history that doesn't only include white people and their accomplishments."

"Ethnic studies" only perpetuate segregation. If the pupils are supposed to be Americans, shouldn't they be taught the same history as everyone else?

Ebert: Uh, it's the white people who might benefit from ethnic studies.

The movies and books I like most are those that inspire me to be the best person possible. I wonder how many people think about themselves as a character in life’s drama, as it unfolds each day. In this particular instance, who are the heroes and the villains? Would I want to cast myself in the role of someone mindlessly looking out from their car so eager to let other people do my thinking for me that I see Barrack Obama in a child’s face—and I don’t like the child because of it. Would I choose the role of the person who orders the repainting? If I were casting myself as a character in life’s play, and I am, would I want to be a nobler person or a villain? Uhhm, let’s see—the noble one, not the villain.

This same school might have an assignment for its students to read one of Steinbeck’s books about migrant workers during the Great Depression and have them consider the lives the workers led. This is done with the idea is that we ought to be able to place ourselves in someone else’s shoes, if only for a moment. This is, of course, with the hope that the empathy persists somewhere in the recesses of our minds and comes to the fore when required. What do we do when the beliefs we hold are unpopular? On a personal level, does a book or a movie make me value the unique life of every individual? Do I take a brief moment to recall an instant that inspired me from something I saw or read that places me in the shoes of rich or poor, the majority or the minority—and does this me lead to some greater understanding? Or have I simply enjoyed reading a book?

The only way for me to give myself a reliable answer to these questions is to note what I do and reflect upon the judgments I make. Consider for a moment the issue of a shallow party lifestyle. Can I make a value judgment? I think so. I think it is justifiable to hold Hugh Heffner, or “Hef” as some people fondly refer to him, with a level of disdain. I won’t elaborate because the continued debauchery of this man, now in his eighties, is self-evident.

Yet, I have digressed into the realm of the famous, when we are considering ordinary people. So I must return to judgments of value. I don’t admire the people who had the painting “reconditioned.” Do I understand them? I think so, to some extent. The values ones parents held, the values in a culture can persist. So I can understand them without admiring them. Moreover, because this is a free country and we are free to do our own thinking, the notion that someone would willingly be a “natural slave” and relinquish their freedom is repugnant to me. I think we can do better.

Great essay.

I wanted to tell about a personal experience I had growing up in the suburbs of NYC. I lived in a primarily Jewish-Italian neighborhood. I was fortunate to have been raised by two very liberal parents. My dad had been an attorney but we didn't really have a lot of money -- I didn't know until very recently that that was because my dad wasn't always paid. After his death a couple of years ago, my mom explained to me that he used to do mostly pro bono work for poor black and Hispanic people in the city. A church in Harlem actually honored him years ago, and invited him, a white Jewish lawyer, to speak to their congregation.

Anyway, sometime in the mid-70s, a near riot broke out in front or my house. Most of our neighbors were out on the street, and there was a lot of shouting going on. My dad told me and my brother to stay in the house, and he went out to see what was going on. I could only watch what was happening from my window, but I could tell that people were angry.

Apparently, a neighbor 3 or 4 houses down from ours, was selling their house to a black family, and people were all riled up about that. My dad tried to calm everyone down, but without apparent affect. At some point, a brick was thrown through a window of the house, and a car sitting in the driveway was vandalized.

I was completely shaken up by the whole event. I couldn't believe that these were my neighbors. The incident changed my whole world-view. It's one thing to learn that people in some remote southern town are racist, and quite another to find out that people you've known (or thought you knew) for most of your life were racist.

Note that I can remember as a child, driving down to Florida with my parents in the '60s, and when we hit the Carolinas, being warned very scarily not to let anyone know that I was Jewish. After an experience like that, how could I believe that fellow Jews could be guilty of the same sort of racism. I felt the same sort of fear of my neighbors that my parents made me feel while driving in the south. I've tried to explain that to non-Jewish friends, but very people that I've told the story to seem to grasp it.

I can still remember when people – at least in the South – were unapologetically, unrepentantly proud to admit their racism. Perhaps it is a small sign of change that today, even most Klan members stumble over themselves denying their racist intent. Then again, perhaps not. Racism has morphed like some shape shifting mutant, constantly changing to try to blend into the background, exploiting the cover of whatever resentment du jour happens to be. I have no doubt that this is simply a conscious tactic by the demagogues at the top of the food chain. Unfortunately, I fear that many of their followers are actually blind to their own motivations.

I recall noticing a few years ago that the label on a package of cat food was in English and Spanish and I felt a tinge of resentment. I felt the same reaction when a local fast food chain outlet was replaced by one of what seem to be an endless stream of taquerias. Racist, yes. Perhaps because I am Black and I’ve been on the other side of the issue, I am able to recognize my own racial resentments and reject them. Many people are not. How do they get that way? In large part because they see things changing and most human beings I believe, are instinctively afraid of change. They perceive their lives – and yes – the prerogatives they have become accustomed to slipping away. I have also always been convinced that at bottom, white racism (and possibly every other variety) is about sex and miscegenation, but that is a topic for an essay all its own.

Morgan Freeman’s comment about preferring the South raises an interesting point. I think that perhaps our [rightful] demonization of racism has had an unintended consequence. By making racism so unsavory that even the racists run from it, we have forced it to adapt new guises. Welfare, jobs, taxes, crime, national security and sovereignty etc. all make far more attractive rallying cries. They also give their proponents the self satisfaction of feeling that they are not racist, but rather patriotic, law-abiding, hard working Americans – which by and large they are. Race, they will tell you, has nothing to do with it. They get to maintain their attitudes towards minorities and sleep at night in the bargain.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of this feat of mental gymnastics is how their opposition to diversity is transformed into supporting equality. The same kinds of people who 50 years ago were demanding separation of the races, are now saying that recognizing racial differences is keeping us apart and promoting disunity. It is truly mind boggling. We need to recognize how treacherous our own minds can be. We need to recognize that as human beings, we are all conscious of differences and that at times, we are tempted to use them as scapegoats for our own insecurities. That is not inherently evil, it is simply human. The evil comes when we fail to be aware of our shortcomings and listen to the better angels of our nature.

The short version:

they have no self-esteem, so crushing others is their self-esteem which means we can solve this problem by simply building their self-esteem.

Show me a man or woman proud of the work they do and I'll show you someone who isn't racist.

Roger - yes I apologize. I jumped the gun on my comment after reading the first paragraph. After sending it I realize your article didnt have to do with immigration.

Gerardo - you didn't read my comment thoroughly. I wasnt born in the country. I had no choice but to obey the law because I didnt live on the border. And it isnt about that anyway. Millions of people all over the world want to be here. Sad, but we cant have everyone in. Just cant. I would love it, I love a multicultural society (which incidentally is being diminished when we have just one culture migrate).
Also, I was speaking of Mexicans I encountered here in the US. I have been told personally shocking views on Jews (they all have money, etc.) and have you ever heard about Vicente Fox's statement about Blacks and work? Why is it hard for you to believe that there are non-white racists? Would you believe that story if I said it was a white southerner? Im sure you would. Sorry, but hispanic patriarchal catholic societies tend to have their "views" just like every other homogenous society. Sorry that you dont think latinos can hold these views. But it is possible.

Finally, I dont believe in race. Its all a human construct created to divide and conquer IMHO. We can take on any cultural "marker" of any race simply by adapting what our current society thinks, is black, white, latino, etc. Its all bullshit and we are all the same and I feel sorry for anyone that spends more than ten minutes as a an adult thinking there are real differences besides upbringing.

Thinking of listening to "Summer in the City" on teh AM radio in Anaheim, California, now. Thanks again, Roger, for tripping the memory-wires, evoking.

I've been beaten up by racists of several colors back in the days of junior high; we grew up in a neighborhood about one-third Mexican/Indian, one-third Black, one-third White.

So, I guess I've always seen racism as something that is prevalent -- you know, there. But luckily for me, not widespread.

My brother these days is something of a racist, at least, publicly. I suspect if one of his friends were down on his luck, he'd help him out regardless of skin-tone.

Funny thought: you joining the Democratic Society during the Civil Rights era, instead of the Young Republicans.

And as for laughing at the young woman who'd lightened her hair? I would like to think all of us have such moments of shame branded in our souls (I know I have more than you or I could count). I think they goad us into being better people, if we let them, and I personally use them as reminders to pray that those people whom I wounded -- or even merely think I've wounded -- end up better than me.

Thank you very much for this. I was born in Noo Yawk and am of Indonesian and Filipino descent. Growing up in 70's Long Island, I often felt marginalized under many circumstances, and outright discriminated against under others, but if what happened to the brown kids of Prescott had happened to me, I would have really felt ... displaced.

I remember when my family moved to L.I., it was just as the Vietnam War was ending and some parents would tell their kids right in front of me and my brothers, "I don't want you playing with those gooks" and worse. And while I was not as well assimilated into U.S. culture, pop and otherwise, as my younger brothers, I could avidly talk about comic books, science fiction and other things. I was quirky but often (I thought) I fit in. Until the parents of a girl I dated (and who had been my close friend for many years) gave her crap over dating me.

Anyway, I won't go on much more. But thank you again.

I have hope. My grandfather grew up and lived in a 30 mile radius in Minnesota his entire life. He grew up in racism - I learned from him all of the nasty slang for minorities - nigger, kike, spic, eye-tye, etc. Then the local Tyson plant started hiring Ethiopian immigrants - elegant men and women who had moved into the area with help from some of the churches. He said he admired the beauty of these people.

His last Christmas, we spent time with him and we watched the movie "Corrina, Corrina" with Whoopie Goldberg and Ray Liotta. As the movie ended, he said "I sure do like that Whoopie Gal." My parents and I were in shock at that statment.

When he died, his funeral plans specified that a local minister preside over his funeral. This was a minister from the local boy's school, who was not affiliated with the cathedral my grandfather attended. Grandpa had gone out of his way to attend services at the school because he enjoyed the minister so much. We quickly discovered that the minister was black - a fact that delighted us. Grandpa, a born and bred racist had trusted his spiritual health to a man whose race he had been taught to hate. His final send-off was a testament to the fact that people can change their racist views.

If my grandfather could eventually learn to appreciate people for who they are, I am convinced that there is hope for the rest of us.

To those who commented here about the "reverse discrimination that white people face every day", did you know that a person with a "white sounding name" is twice as likely to get a callback on a resume as a person with an ethnic-sounding name? Researchers did an experiment, sending out identical resumes with English-sounding names and Indian-sounding names, and guess what: you are between 50% and 100% more likely to get a call for an interview if you have a "white-sounding" name. A second group of researchers tried the same experiment, with similar results.

So don't complain to me about the trials and tribulations of "reverse discrimination"; we non-whites still face good old-fashioned white discrimination every day.

I have a scar on my forehead from where a white boy tried to kill me when I was a child, attacking me with a brick because his father told him that people like me were taking all the jobs. The white principal didn't even suspend him. This was in the 1970s, not the 1950s. And then, in the 1990s, my white girlfriend's parents told me to "stay with your own kind".

Frankly, it makes me incredibly angry when I see white people claiming that THEY are now the principal victims of racism. If only you people could have lived my life, you would never say that. The problem is that white people have no idea what real racism feels like. That's why they actually think they can whine about white men being portrayed badly in movies as proof that they're suffering too, or make up claims (with no sources) about how it's impossible to get certain jobs if you're white.

Here is a story from my husband's childhood; in grammar school a child who lived on a pig farm called my (then 10 year old husband) a dirty Jew. For you city folks a pig farm is not only filthy but it is the worst smelling farm of all and the people who live on a pig farm carry the smell with them on their clothes. Prejudice is not only ignorant but totally lacking in self awareness!

Very thought-provoking, Roger.

Perhaps we should be asking a different questions: How did YOU get to be this way? (That "you" includes others like you, who are open to change and empathetic of others' situations.)

Trying to understand another person's viewpoint is a rare trait. In spite of your mother's social limitations, something was there that allowed you to "see" the injustice. Some of that is part of you, and some of that is what you learned from people around you.

I suggest we focus on what facilitates this evolution of thought, understanding, and forgiveness. That's where the real answer lies.

Ebert: My mother was more limited in 1952 than she came to be later. I think I was given a good start in life at Catholic grade school and Urbana High School, my family's Democratic politics, and my reading. We never discussed politics in grade school, but anyone who spends an hour studying the New Testament for an hour every morning in the eighth grade and doesn't develop the instincts of a liberal must not have been reading very closely.

Ebert: Undocumented workers are a godsend for haters of the minimum wage.

Roger, assuming that you are supportive of the minimum wage, how do you feel about undocumented workers?

Ebert: I believe they should be paid the minimum wage.

When I've heard interracial couples getting asked that question - Do you think of them as being black/asian/white whenever you look at them? - I always thought, "How could you not? They are."

And now that I'm marrying someone who is of a different race than me, well, I don't think of it. I love her. I see her when I look at her, and not her skin.

Roger, weren't you at Urbana High with James "Rasta Jim" Wilson, one of the other well known Urbana High graduates?

I think he graduated in 1959 or '60.

He would have been one of the black students that you might have known.

Ebert: I indeed was.

Mr. Ebert,

Thank you for such a moving piece. As a Big Sister in the Big Brothers, Big Sisters program (www.bbbs.org), I see racism every day. My little happens to be a girl of significantly brown skin, where as I am very obviously influenced by my Irish heritage. It doesn't matter where we go, what we are doing, or how we present ourselves, someone always looks at us funny... or I hear some snide comment behind us in line at the ice cream parlor. I'm so lucky that she often doesn't notice, as the innocent don't.

One day she asked me what made us different. I had no idea what to say... and then this little idea popped in my head. I told her we aren't different at all. For it occurred to me that everyone has melanin in their skin, it's only a matter of how much. When I explained this too her, she sighed in her regular -I accept your answer way- and said, "oh." If only grown adults could realize this, they'd be more rational for it wouldn't they?

I'm printing your piece for her to read. I'm sure I'll have to help her with a few words. She's ten, after all. Thank you for sharing a little piece of your soul with us.

Amanda
Oklahoma City, OK

The Liberals need Racisim the same way the Joker needs Batman.

Ebert: I am thinking and thinking and thinking about this.

Thank you for this most recent essay, and for all you put into this journal.

I recently attended the Without Sanctuary photography exhibit at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, OH. The photographs -- along with the other exhibits at the Center -- left me stunned. I'm 40 years old. I know racism and prejudice exists, was expressed through overt physical violence against individuals and communities in the past, and finds subtler ways to poison us today. Having it matter-of-factly presented as the Freedom Center does so well is something I will not forget.

Your essay helps with my struggle to figure out the legacy of racism and prejudice in the United States, why "race relations" seem to have few common-sense connections to "human relations", and what the hell to teach my children about it.

Does Randy Masters ALWAYS have to play apologist for the bigots?

Roger, your tolerance for Randy is admirable, because he is one of the most consistently nasty posters you have here. The sheer depth of his ignorance continues to astound.

Ebert: In his mind, that's not what he's doing. I find him valuable here. Not everyone in the choir has to sing on key.

Bill Hays on June 6, 2010 11:59 PM wants to put this situation "under a microscope," and the by the time he's done, "terms like 'lighter' and 'happier' and 'put more light on the cheeks and foreheads'" indicate the principal is speaking from a photographic/aesthetic point of view, simply using "terms that sound like something you don't like. Not the actual terms, but just words that sound like them." Mr. Hays seems to be using a kaleidoscope rather than microscope. Shutterbug or not, the principal is certainly using words that relate to the racial appearance of the figures--as well as their state of mind.

To explain the suggested changes as simply "artistic" is to assume that aesthetic choices are divorced from affective responses. In other words, let's admit the obvious: Changing an image changes the way the viewer feels about it. And given the complaints and incidences of racial epithets and broadcast anger, certain viewers certainly had feelings and exercised "democracy by yelling," something school principals have to deal with every day--and, like Lane, often must cave in to. He reports three complaints about the mural; first, I'm going to assume these weren't of an "artistic" nature; second, I can assure you three complaints is a democracy-by-yelling majority vote in a principal's world. Lane may not be a racist, but it is safe to assume he is acting on pressure from racists. Even his apology is a reaction to pressure.

But before we sidetrack ourselves by bemoaning the effect of such pressure, let's not forget where Roger begins this discussion: not from a safe remove, parsing and second-guessing, but from the perspective of a "brown student" who has to put up with this situation. Hatred isn't an idea to be debated but an experience to be endured--and we should do everything we can to protect each other from the harm that comes with that experience. Mr. Hays indicates he understands hatred; at the least, let's worry more about that brown student than the grownup who's supposed to protect the student--and all the others.

I cried. I cried for my dark skinned mother who still has doubts about her own beauty. I cried for my children whose white grandparents are reluctant to meet them because I am a black woman. The grandparents have accepted their eldest grandchild (my husband's daughter from a previous relationship, although he says that he had to force her on them). I guess they have reached their mixed race grandchildren limit. I cried when you described how you see your wife, because that is exactly how I see my husband. Yes, he knows I am a black woman and I know he is a white man, but I just see Nahum when I look at him. I see my best friend, the father of my children, the man I share my hopes and dreams with. I don't know if his parents will ever come around, but I do know one thing; they are missing out. Our children keep us laughing every single day. I am so thankful for you writing this, for sharing the beauty of love, that it has no color, no limits. Thank you for sharing the purity and innocence of your point of view, especially from childhood. I often ask my husband the same question, "How do they do that?" More often that question revolves around someone hurting a child or lying or stealing or being evil. There is so much I don't understand and I answer my own question most of the time. I will never understand that way of thinking, because my own mind does not work that way.

My wife, son, and I live in Rogers Park -- a neighborhood we picked partly because so many people there look different than one another. People living there (and their parents and grandparents) come from India and Africa and Poland and Pakistan and Ireland and Mexico, and it's wonderful to walk down the street and see these people.

I want my son (who's not yet even 2) to see that people can look different and talk differently, but I also want him to realize that they're different and there's nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with having a different skin tone or a different slope of the jaw or a different type of hair. I really think we're doing disservice to kids by telling them that we're all the same when they can see that we're not.

Roger,

You really should read "Waiting for the Galactic Bus", by Parke Godwin. Also "Will the Last Person to Leave the Planet Please Turn Off The Sun", a short story by Mike Resnick. I found both insightful.

Your reply to a comment about "opening arms" also leads me to recommend to you "A Fair Country", by John Ralston Saul. It's about Canada, so the applicability to you is less so than to me; but he speaks much of the Canadian tendency, learned from our First Nations peoples, to "widen the circle", to be inclusive.

To be sure, as some Canadian commenters have pointed out, Canada too has elements of racism in its society. My wife's family is from Manitoba, and came to Canada from Iceland. I remember talking to my wife's grandmother, who told me about the "Help Wanted" signs during the Great Depression, with the addendum underneath, "Dirty Little Icelanders need not apply".

My mother, a Québecoise who grew up in Hull, across the river from Ottawa, told me about how when she was a child there was a Jew who would push his cart down her street, selling rags ("Guenilles à vendre!"). He was a millionaire, but he still sold rags. Why was he a millionaire? He was Jewish.

My sister, who went with me to one of my mother's doctor appointments, noted his name, and asked if he had a strong accent. I said no. She said, "Good. I don't mind if they come to our country and make their lives, but..." His English is as good as or better than hers. And she had no idea whether he was born in Canada or elsewhere.

My wife's cousin set me a joke via email, in which a man goes into a doctor's office, and his right arm, which has a tatoo of an Indian on it, is atrophied and he can't use it. The doctor asks what the problem is, and the man replies, "Ever since I got this tatoo of the Indian on my arm, it won't work."

I am against racism, which I define as anyone characterising any person or group of people based on race, skin colour, or ethnicity without any knowledge of that person is as an individual (or who they are as individuals).

I remember reading about 15 years ago, of a bunch of school children being escorted into school in a downtown area of Dublin. They were Catholic. The neighbourhood was Protestant, as were the crowds of adults howling insults. All I could think of was, "There - you've just created the next batch of IRA gunmen."

Gwynne Dyer wrote an article called "Multi-racial Britain", in which he cited statistics that show that young people in Britain are not getting involved in race wars. Instead, they are marrying each other. Hopefully, the United States will follow suit eventually. Better late than never.

Good by the inch and evil by the yard, as a saying goes, and, good moves at snail-pace. I'm also reminded of what Dr Johnson said about patriotism. Hatred is almost a biological trait, and it's love and compassion which are hard to learn. Even the family can become a viper's nest. Hatred so easily finds comrades but any collusion for good invites vicious opposition and persecution. Hope for the future can only be based on the likes of King. Modern Buddhism teaches that there is a Dr King-like power in each human being, just as we partake of the most heinous evil. Indeed, there is no choice but to overcome.

I've lived my entire life in states that were once a part of the Confederacy. But, I was raised in a family with roots in the greater New York area. I have often had the sense that I should flee north to escape the ongoing racism and racial tension in the south, yet some of my most lasting memories of racism from my childhood are not my memories at all but stories that my sister brought with her from her time in a public high school in New Jersey.

As I grow older, I see that racism evolves along with our society. There have been obvious improvements in race relations and institutionalized discrimination, but we still have a long way to go. De facto segregation is back in full force in our schools. The ideological and geographical center of the fight may be on the move (it is always moving) but the problem has not gone away.

It all boils down to tribalism. It infects everything today, from our churches and cable news channels, to our schools and neighborhoods. It is so easy to see the other as the enemy. It's no longer enough to have a respectful disagreement about the best way to run the government, we have to demonize each other. Multiculturalism and technology have opened wider conduits for communication and understanding, this type of tribalism should be waning. But those who mean to lead us, or to sell their products to us, cynically reopen those wounds of tribalism as a way to control us with fear.

My faith teaches me that I have a purpose, and that purpose is to love. Simply. Care about people, help them when I can, grieve with them, celebrate with them, share a meal with them. I believe that sharing with someone in grief and in celebration can breakdown all barriers of tribalism.

Earlier posters have described bigotry as the act of perceiving people who are different from you as "the other." That would imply that the bigots see themselves as some kind of default state, the "normal," ground-zero state, rather than just another unique flavor of humanity.

I got one of those "call-to-action" phone calls a few weeks ago from some kind of religious political organization that greeted me by name and then immediately started prattling on about how I should be outraged about some of Obama's policies that were a "SLAP IN THE FACE TO ALL CHRISTIANS." Well, I'm Jewish and my area code is based out of one of the most diverse neighborhoods in America. I often do my laundry alongside a neighbor in a full chador, while using my limited Spanish to try to figure out the plot of the soap opera blaring on the TV above us. I've got no real beef with specialized public interest groups, but what ticked me off was the staggering ASSUMPTION that they could just dial any random phone number and expect that the person on the other line would be exactly like them. (Or that they could be so dense about who's doing the religious slapping here.) It gets me wondering just how pervasive that assumption is.

Steve Blair said, "To depict the biggest picture on the building as a black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?"

That's a question that could have only come from someone who expects faces on murals to be white. It's not just the fact that he questioned why there was a non-white face on the mural that galls me, but his asking why it "had to be" the biggest. That to me implies a more frightening worldview than just fretting about the presence of ANY African-American or Hispanic faces on the wall, which is "RACISM" in big neon letters and can be safely scoffed at by almost everyone. His statement was more complex, and more insidious. Sure, toss in a few "minority" faces in there. Let's have a rainbow of children. Just as long as they're all flanking a white kid. Because if they're not, well, THAT'S NOT RIGHT.

WELL, WHY NOT?

I lump Blair in with all the people who start sentences with, "Now, I'm not a racist, BUT..." and then go on to say something stupendously racist.

Haters hate, because it's easier to do that than it is to make yourself better.

If you base your self-worth on the color of your skin, there's not much more you need to do. It's easy. If someone disagrees with you about that, then put on your white sheet and go do something stupid on their lawn

Base it on how much you know, or what you do, and there's a lot more work to be done.

--James Rosse

It's ironic, I'm starting to feel like my wife and I have a big target on us, we've worked hard for many years to develop specialized skills and now people want to take away the fruits of that hard work for no particular reason, certainly we've done nothing wrong. Imagine you spend a life tending an orchard very carefully, then someone comes along who wants to "spread the fruit around" because we "have more than we need."

It's pretty cynical for politicians of any stripe to manipulate envy of any kind to set up an "us against them" mindset merely to stay in office.

Eastwood's comment was right on target, people who feel insecure are easily manipulated on whatever bias comes to hand for the demagogue.

Institutional racism has had its back broken in this country. But racism will be forever with us as long as the primitive psychological defense mechanisms of "denial" and "projection" are in use. To take the worst example in history, Hitler could not believe (denial) that Germany's loss of WWI was due to any failure of the German superman, and so he projected that fault (and many more) onto the international Jewish conspiracy. And then he used denial again to keep from having to explain the complete lack of facts supporting the existence of a international Jewish conspiracy.

Our racism problem has been mitigated by direct attacks on the concept over the years. No well educated person would admit even in private to being a racist. But somehow people must be taught to use more rational methods of comprehending and dealing with problems, if this is possible.

I've been lurking reading your journal for a while and recommending it to my family and friends.

I wanted to post before, but thought I'd finally do so today. I'm the child of two civil rights protesters from that time, so my time-frame is a little later, but I was in grade school in the 60s and remember the protests and the subsequent busing uproar later on well.

Your entry is a wonderful read once again and it leads me back to a thought I've had a few times since Sotomayer's nomination to the Supreme Court.

It seems to me that empathy is the key thing here and could help so many evolve their thinking. What a shame now that it's gotten slapped with a negative connotation by the folks who probably need it the most.

Kind regards,
Anna

PS - I've provided a link to a small blog entry by me about Obama, my parents and a small glimpse of the setting I grew up in. Here it is again if necessary: http://mynotquitetherelife.blogspot.com/2008/09/closing-circle.html

Thanks for the post, Roger. Listening to the women on the radio who was of Mexican descent herself was disheartening (at least I assume she is who she says she is), and a little mind boggling. I don't understand how people can have such hate in their hearts and not realize that it's because they themselves are insecure and unhappy with who they are. I know we have made a lot of progress in this country with racism, every time I read or hear a story like this it just fills me with sadness. I will simply never understand how one person can hate another person or entire race so completely simply because they are different.

How do they get that way?
Observation and watching the news.

In my area, we have a shooting pretty much every day in the "black" area of town. It is incredibly rare to see the same in the "white" area of town. As a result, most white people and some black people will not go to the "black" side of town.

A few days ago, I went out and I was sexually harassed by a group of young black men who followed me and would not leave me alone. This is something that has happened several times before, but never from white young men.

If black people don't want to be stereotyped, they should stop acting the part or ask their peers to stop.

Roger:
Thank you for writing such a great journal entry. Your observant, sensitive perspective is always refreshing; particularly right now.

As I tend to follow along reading political news from both CNN and the Washington Post websites, I have lately been dismayed by the large numbers of anonymous "commenters" who seem to love nothing more than to disseminate hateful rhetoric about our president and the work he is doing. I see the same thing on Facebook, upon pages that are supposedly for supporters of the White House. Undoubtedly emboldened through their anonymity on the internet, it seems that many folks do little more than spew out ridiculous assertions, day in and day out. You know the type..."Obama is a Socialist/Marxist/Facist/Whatever-ist, hell-bent on spending all of our tax dollars to help out masses of free-loading parasites, pouring across our borders..." Their comments always follow the same, narrow pattern. Anyone relying on facts and history to counter such arguments is immediately labeled either elitist, unpatriotic, or any number of names unprintable here.

I intuit that more than a few of these sorry folks simply cannot handle the fact that President Obama is black, and are performing the internet equivalent of driving by, shouting out their expressions of rage and frustration. Reason seems to have completely taken a back seat, pushed away by the ugly siblings of fear and hate. I've always believed education (and worldwide travel) to be good antidotes to ignorance, but I wouldn't mind seeing Faux News go away in the near future.

WOW! This was very thoughtful and inspiring. I live in Arizona and reading this was very encouraging and reminded me why I am in this fight...because what some people are doing in this state is WRONG, UNJUST and just plain CRUEL.

Thank you for sharing this

And am I the only white man who seems to always find this crap out in a public forum while relaxing at a bar and bullshitting with at least one black person you just met? Why does this always happen to me. You're sitting at the bar next to a couple black dudes and everyone's enjoying their beers and explaining the concept of a "perfect game" or something to a hot waitress, when suddenly the tv over the bar starts blaring about some dick in Prescott whose eyes are burned by the sight of non-white people, or some white kids dressed up head to toe in american flags to try and irritate Mexican American kids on Cinco, or comments Glenn Beck made about Obama being racist, etc., etc., ETC. There's always another ETC. Awkward for all. No one comes out and asks you about your take on it or even expects you to have one, yet you feel some bullshit need to explain a bunch of psycho strangers who happen to have the same skin color as yourself. Like since you're the only white guy in the group, you can possibly understand crazy thinking and translate it into a language that resembles common sense so everyone can say, "AH! Collin speaks ancient dying languages like a modern day Indiana Jones!" Yet I never learned to speak it, so instead we talk about movies, or sports, or videogames (sorry Roger) or whatever. I'm about tired of crazy white strangers making me feel embarassed in front of people.

Ebert: Smiling so say...yeah.

My wife sometimes asks me, "Why do you love me?" I tell her it is because of her innate "Jo-ness" (her name is Jo) and she thinks I'm avoiding her question. When you wrote "Chaz-ness" I immediately knew what you meant by it and I was both surprised and pleased to know we both understand that concept. Until now, I thought I had discovered it on my own.

P.S. I immediately forwarded this entry to my wife. Maybe now she will believe my response.

Many of the comments are more focused on racism in the immigration bill than racism in general. I wish you would have picked an event from California like this, then you could have avoided that debate. I understand that when something as ludicrous as this happens, you don't get to pick the state it happens in or which state is under the media microscope.

I am surrounded by overt, blatant and obvious racism. And thus being so, I understand it. I am constantly given reasons for people's racism, how they arrived at their conclusions. Sometimes they are events, sometimes they were "brung up" that way, sometimes it developed out of a lifetime of fear perpetuated by a few experiences and the fuel of media hyper-realism, in which every single isolated event is a pressing issue to you, the viewer. I only talk about white racists because I have an incredible amount of access to it. It's hard to avoid them considering Kansas City was founded during bleeding Kansas. Nearly everyone that lived around my hometown at that time fought for the South. They were Bushwackers (for you movie fans, see Ride With The Devil, filmed here). My own ancestors were split. My suburban hometown is named after Robert E. Lee. I work on top of a major Civil War battle site. It's in the earth here.

As odd as it may sound, much of the cause is laziness. Few have a desire to amend their dominance in society, so they are racist. Many are unwilling to extend empathy because they have their own problems, so they are racist. I think most are just too lazy to discern between good and bad. It is easier to categorize an entire race as inherently problematic. Crime is primarily committed by black people, so its easier to say that black people commit crime and ignore the vast majority that do their best to deter crime. "It's their culture," they say. "They encourage violence." However, the people who say these things don't take the time to fact check. That would take too much time or it might even prove difficult to verify. So, they'll just say it. Racists don't understand logical fallacies and don't understand that they draw conclusions on corrupted information.

I see the same thing against Muslims on a national level and assume it is similar with Hispanics in Arizonan metropolitan areas. I do see racism from blacks brought on by a lifetime in the midst of racism from whites. I understand it, as I understand white racists, but it is equally detestable.

I don't have any tolerance for racism as the KKK or Black Panthers see it. They are beyond help or redemption in my eyes. However, I extend the empathy to them that they deny others. I try to talk them out of it using their own reasons for it. If I can't do that, then the person is just being obstinate and lazy.

Actually Eisenhower had to be persuades strongly to support integration. This is explained in Halberstam's great book "The 50s" The book does a superlative job of showing the nascent civil rights movement grow and attract national attention.

I'm double posting here, but I have to say to the youngster who is upset about her racist father, don't sweat it. Take it from a guy born and raised in Florida (almost 34 now), growing up with racist family members isn't everybody, but it's damn near a rite of passage. Your racial tolerance is scandal to them cause they're nuts. Real interesting scandal is like Anna dancing the Mazurka with Vronsky right in front of Kitty (hot stuff! First time Tolstoy reader and I love it so far!). So try not to take it so hard. YOu have crazy racist family. So do I. So do lots of people. It's makes us who we are to some extent, and it gives us interesting stories to tell. Especially to Northeners who grew up with liberal parents and the kind of upbringing we daydream about. They aren't good stories like the kind Roddy Mcdowall had about old Hollywood (Did you ever interview him, Roger?); they're shocking sad stories mixed with absurd comedy like when Robert Downey Jr. recounts his exploits in prison. I like his chipper way of telling sad stories. Go and do likewise, youngblood, go and do likewise.

Thank you for the historical perspective you've brought to the discussion. As someone who's grown up having to make allowances for certain things my parents or grandparents would say about race, despite being quite liberal people who taught their children to regard all people as equal, it really points out the amount of deliberateness and choice in being openly racist in today's society.

I simply cannot understand that hatred or fear either.

Roger, I remember being a teenager, and realizing one day (I matured much the way you did) that one of my mom's friends was black. When you consider my mom was born about 90 years ago, that was pretty remarkable back then. Now, not so much.

I remember back in the 80s meeting an interracial couple at work, and being startled a bit. I didn't have a problem with it - heck, they were both so smart and good-looking, it only made sense - but you didn't see a lot of that back then. Now, you see it more.

The answer is the way it's been the last 40-50 years: a person at a time. When different skin color, appearance, all of that stops being different and starts being normal, then everyone can judge others by more rational criteria, like whether they're kind, caring, interesting...or not.

So I think this country has made a lot of progress in the past 4-5 decades, although there's room for more. At least we're far enough that the quiet hypocrisy the north had in the 60s has been recognized, and has subsided.

Where Arizona and the rest of the southwest are concerned, we need to get past the hypocrisy where immigration is concerned, and work out a rational, American approach ("Bring me your poor, your huddled masses...") without bringing in the cartel wars. Northern Mexico is starting to look like Tombstone crossed with Al Capone...

From Fugitive Histories by Githa Hariharan (published a little over a year ago), a conversation between a victim of the 2002 Gujarat carnage and a woman who wants to make a documentary about them:

'You're a Muslim, aren't you, Didi?' she asks.
'My grandmother was,' says Sara. 'I have Muslim relatives and Hindu relatives. I'm neither. Sometimes I think I'm Indian. But most of the time I'm just Sara.'
Yasmin frowns, trying to imagine a world with such a range of choices. It's almost as hard as one of the labels in one of Akbar's biology notebooks, this imagining she need be nothing but Yasmin.

(Book is highly recommended, in case anyone is wondering.)

My husband's father changed his name from Grobowski to a more English sounding last name back in the early 50's because he was sick of being the target of racism in Vancouver, Canada. My husband is now pondering the idea of changing his name back to Grobowski to reclaim it.

Racism or bigotry of any kind is mainly visual. We see someone different and we react how we were taught. Being overweight is now the new target. I notice that a virulent level of offensive comments and finger pointing is aimed at people who are overweight and the justification seems to be that since being fat is within our control we "deserve" it. I don't know how many times I have read or seen vicious comments directed towards overweight people. I grew up being taught that offensive behaviour against anyone was wrong, everyone deserved polite treatment, and that you don't judge someone on how they look, be they fat, thin, dark, light, young, old, you listen first.

I hope we can get past our prejudices and learn to be more tolerant.

The Last Airbender should be boycotted and to embrace diversity, buy the DVDs of the original show to show the future generation the culture embraced by Hollywood isn't the be-all and end-all.

It truly was a great show and I hope you watch the original show before this, to quote Spongebob

"celluloid hoax."

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

I was a precocious 6 year old when I first heard this speech. I believed in the promise of Martin's vision then, I believe in it now. I am not perfect in this, I find insidious traces coming close to the surface from time to time. I recognize them for what they are and actively expunge them.

The same is true for our Country. We are better than we were, but there is still much work to be done.

My father was in the Army, and the only places the Army ever sent him was Colorado and Hawaii, so I had a really tough childhood.

Our heritage was deep Mississippi Southern; but the Army moved us to Colorado in 1968. That is one the things in my life that I am most thankful for, as it got me away from the poisonous attitude before it could become too deeply ingrained in me.

When we moved to Hawaii for the first time in 1972, I encountered a bit of what I now recognize as "reverse racism." In Hawaii, those of Caucasian descent are known as "haoles." It was always used lightly, (sometimes even in advertising) but it was a derogatory term. The last day of school was known as "Kill Haole Day." While I was never beaten up, it did keep me looking over my shoulder.

In 1977, when I was 13, my family went home to Mississippi for a family reunion. My grandfather on my mother's side was a Southern Baptist preacher, and before that, the chief of police in that town. We were sitting around his kitchen table while he made his "famous hotcakes," which meant he read the instructions on the side of the Bisquik box like everyone else.

He was telling stories of the old days as the chief of police; how they "used to catch niggers doing this and that." I got up and said, "I don't want to hear this," and walked out. My mother told me later that my grandfather looked at me and asked, "What's wrong with that boy?" My mother proudly answered, "He's been raised better."

You see, I had learned what it was like to be discriminated against because of the color of my skin. Oh, it was in no way comparable to the discrimination that black or brown people were going through at the time (or are going through now), but it was there, and I knew what it was.

Years later, after my grandfather had died, my grandmother was finally coaxed to come and visit us. We were on our second tour of Hawaii, and I had just graduated high school. I was dating a beautiful part-Hawaiian girl at the time. I never got the chance to introduce her to my grandmother, and after what she said to me, I didn't want to.

She had seen my Senior Prom photo, the one with me and my girlfriend, and took me aside to "warn me" about "going around with people like that." I asked her to clarify, and she said, "You know, them colored people."

I didn't cuss her out, or walk away or say anything disrespectful, because she was my grandmother. I also knew that she had spent 50+ years with my grandfather and meekly submitted to his requirements on what a good wife should be. For example, she didn't get her driver's license until after he had died because he wouldn't permit it.

I just regarded her comments as a case of "as the twig is bent, so grows the tree." She had never learned any better and her twig had been bent so much that she had no other way of interpreting the natural order of things.

Now I live and work in San Antonio, Texas; where we probably have a larger population of "brown" people than most other places. We do have places in town where "white" people shouldn't go, especially after dark. But we have very few cases of interracial violence.

Despite all the press being given to the Texas Board of Education and their "whitewashing" (pun intended) of the Texas schoolbooks, we're angry about that and we're hoping to get it back on track before the books are ordered next year. It might be that the State Lege will have to (or do so by choice) withhold funding on book purchases next year, which will give us time to "vote the bums out." I hope so. I definitely plan to ensure that my vote goes in on that.

I am a 33-year-old white woman who grew up in Los Angeles County in the '80s and '90s. Somewhere around here, I have a picture of my social circle from my high school at prom (which I did not attend), and when people still knew what I meant by it, I'd say it looked like a Benneton ad. There were Chinese kids, Armenian, Filipino, Hispanic, black, and even Vicki, a white girl! I grew up an ethnic minority, in short. As such, I also know that, yes, black people can be racist, as I was told I didn't like someone because I was white and she was black. (My response was that I didn't like her because she pinched me and teased me in kindergarten and had not improved by high school.) I also know that white people can be racist. I saw less of it, but I did see some.

Recently, a friend's four-year-old daughter asked when she was born ('77), and then asked if black people had to sit on the back of the bus when we were kids. The general first reaction is to laugh, and the second is to wonder how a four-year-old knew about that. However, as she grows older, she will hear stories, as I heard stories from college professors who lived in the South in the '40s and '50s. One of my professors had a threatening phone call once because he was the Orlando campaign manager for "that Commie," Eugene McCarthy. She will grow up friends with people from all over the world, as I did--I went to junior high or high school with someone born on every continent on Earth except Antarctica. She, too, will someday have to reconcile herself with the way things are.

I would like to think, though, that they will change as she gets older, that they will get better. Four faculty members at my high school spent part of their childhoods in an internment camp; my own grandfather was a guard at Santa Anita. My school district was under mandatory busing even in the '90s. And now, there is a law in the state next door which, let's face it, is a modern-day Fugitive Slave Act. We pretend there won't be any racial profiling involved, but how is that remotely possible? Come to that, even though her mother is at least partly of Italian descent, her mother looks a lot more Hispanic than white and could be stopped herself, if she ever goes to Arizona.

My own daughter lives with her adoptive parents in what is essentially a town of ex-hippies--but she will not really have to confront racism, because the town is almost completely populated by white people. The attitudes may be there, but she won't see it in practice. In this instance, I worry more for my friend's daughter, where cultural mixing will be a fact of life. I have pretty much nothing but pride in the diversity of my upbringing; my best friend, who was part Mexican and part Native American, was teaching Spanish to a couple of classmates in exchange for lessons in Tagalog. I know intellectually a whole host of reasons people don't like that, but emotionally, I can't understand why anyone would want to stop such a beautiful thing.

How do you keep them from being that way?
by Susanne Allen

My first grade class was the first year of integration at my Elementary school. Our school bus route was extra long and took place in the wee hours of the morning while it was still dark. We had to have enough time to drive down to, I kid you not, Jim Crow Road, and pick up just enough black people that there could be exactly ONE in each of the four first grade classrooms.

As we progressed each year the classes kept their one token black child. Classes were phased according to aptitude and the black child of the highest phase class was Joan. We never spoke to her of course because… duh … she was black. In about fifth grade a girl from Ohio moved to town and became Joan’s best friend. Caryn was on thin ice of course for being "not from around here" to begin with and she told us we were all stupid for not being friends with Joan. “It isn’t going to hurt you if you talk to her!” she said. Sure enough, I discovered I could talk to Joan and no golden hand descended from the heavens and ruined my life. It didn’t give me an incurable disease or cooties. I didn’t even turn black. We heard that Caryn’s mother let Joan come over to visit at Caryn’s house INSIDE the house and the two of them even had sleepovers the same way they would have if Joan had been a white person and nothing bad happened to Caryn either!

Sometime in sixth grade our teacher, Mrs. Rhinehart, sent Joan to the office with a note. While Joan was gone she spoke to all of us. “Look,” she said, “anytime color or race is mentioned you all turn and stare at Joan like you think she’s going to grow horns. Don’t do that. Think about how she feels. She’s a kid just like the rest of you.” I’d like to think we all treated her better after that.

Our high school was Robert Wood Johnson Memorial Comprehensive High School. It is important to note here that the band geeks, of whose glorious company I was a member, used to chant “Go! Robert Wood Johnson Memorial Comprehensive High School, Go!” at football games. Best cheer ever! Johnson, for short, had about 1500 children and was 4% Black with one Jew and a handful of Roman Catholics. The rest of us were painfully WASP. When I went to Georgia Tech a friend of mine who went there too, John Kater, used to respond to questions about where the Johnson contingent hailed from with “We’re from Gainesville, Georgia, Population: Baptist.”

It couldn’t have been easy to be non-white, non-protestant at Johnson. I remember listening to someone ask the Jewish student about her faith and race, “What are Jews?” She responded very dryly, “You know those people in the Bible? Those are Jews.” The questioner seemed genuinely surprised, “Really?” “Yes,” she nodded sagely, “Those are Jews.”

Popular pretty girls in school were either Cheerleaders or Flagettes. The Flagettes were a dance line in the marching band that dressed in pretty shimmering costumes and danced with small flags attached to batons. Not to be confused with Color Guard who spun larger flags and rifles. We were not so cool or popular. In my junior year, I was the Captain of the rifles and Vanedra was the Captain of the Flaggettes. I believe she was Johnson’s first black band officer. She was the best dancer and black was cool because it was the heyday of Michael Jackson. “Can you feel a brand new day” from The Wiz was part of our marching band repertoire. After Jackson’s death I heard people mocking Rev Al Sharpton for saying Jackson changed the world. Sharpton was right. For the children of people whose parents and grandparents used the “N” word, Jackson made black people accessible and even desirable as friends. Black was cool therefore Vanedra was cool.

As most good band geeks know, it is a common high school band practice for the officers of the visiting band to go across the field to visit the officers of the home team during the third quarter. Our drum major always formed us up in a line and marched over making a show of it.

On one fall evening I’ll never forget our game was against Forsyth County High School in Cumming, Georgia. This county is the setting of a book called “Savage Sundown” and was known in the day, whether true or not, as a Klan stronghold. I remember the band had to have special bus drivers for the games, as the black bus drivers were not willing to be in Forsyth County after sunset.

After our performance the officers formed up and marched across to meet the Forsyth officers. We relaxed into a small group chatting and suddenly something was wrong. There was Vanedra her back now turned to the folks in different uniforms. You could see her trembling hands and bright eyes brimming with tears. “They won’t shake my hand,” she whispered. Someone said “What?” We stood beside her walking toward the other officers, Venedra put out her hand to shake and the Cumming folks pointedly looked away and some giggled to each other. The insult was clear. They would not acknowledge Vanedra. Our drum major, James Dills, had a stormy expression on his face, a good ole boy turned unlikely champion. “This is ridiculous,” he railed, “if they won’t shake her hand we’re going back.” He formed us up in a line and we marched back to our side. Vanedra held her head high and was the picture of grace and we marched with her shoulder to shoulder back to our side of the field.

In a recent journal post by Roger Ebert, Ebert describes his turning point in his personal views about race. As a child he noticed his palm was the same color as the black child’s palm. Watching Vanedra march back from the Forsyth County band officers was my turning point. I decided I never wanted to make another person feel the way those people had made Vanedra feel. I’ve probably failed. I was raised with racist instincts reinforced by many people in my life. I remember in college referring to a Brazil nut by the horrible name I was taught to call it and my friend Ed turning to me with a shocked look on his face, “WHAT did you just say.” I had never really processed the word.

The only thing I feel certain I’ve accomplished is to make sure those reinforcements were not passed on to my children. After a soccer practice last spring the kids were telling me something about another child. I think the name was “John.” “Oh… which one is John?” I asked. “He’s the one with the darkest skin.” They were not being self-consciously politically correct. They weren’t avoiding the term black which I think would have been an okay descriptor had they chosen to use it. The child in their mind was simply the one with the darkest skin and from the way they said it, it seemed to mean as little to them as “child with blonde hair” or “child with lots of freckles.” I smiled.

In his journal post Roger Ebert asks “How do they get to be that way?” I know the answer to that. I once walked in on my grandmother, who in all other respects, was a loving wonderful woman that I adored, bouncing my son on her knee. They were watching “Different Strokes and laughing at something Gary Coleman said.” I thought it was such a sweet scene until I heard her talking. “Look at the little n…. boy. See the little n… boy. It’s a shame you’ll have to go to school with people like him. We tried to keep it from happening.”

I think a better question for Ebert is “How do you keep them from being that way?” There is no doubt that elements of racism are instinctive. The herding breed dog raised around one color of sheep will cut alternate colors from the herd. If you raise a herding dog with goats they will separate sheep as different and not belonging. People who breed herding dogs as pets have to make an effort to introduce their dogs to different color, sizes, and shapes of people and other animals so that they don't see the different as an “other” that elicits an alarm bark.

I believe large elements of bigotry and prejudice are learned and will disappear if not reinforced. A retrieving dog will not continue to retrieve if no one ever reinforces the behavior. You can overcome the instinct to be wary of “the other” through exposure to diversity. Honestly, I think a huge part of where my father went wrong in conveying his racism to me was that he was so busy laughing at Bill Cosby he forgot to point out that the funny man was black.

The mural Ebert talks about keeps