Guest view: Many whites learn racism, rather than choose it
Our nation is experiencing an uproar from its citizens, both black and white, demanding an end to institutional racism against blacks, once and for all.
In the aftermath of relentless killing by law enforcement officers of unarmed blacks — George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, to name a recent few — we are engaging in conversations and finding that our views on the systemic promotion of inequality and injustice are largely the same.
As a result of these conversations, I am becoming convinced that many whites have not elected racism by choice but rather by indoctrination.
I am recognizing that the perspective held by many whites of blacks as dehumanized and less evolved than members of their own race have not been formed by their actual experience but rather by instruction.
Beginning from the forced transport of blacks from Africa over 400 years ago, efforts to demean the humanity of people of color has never ended. It has only taken different forms.
It has morphed from slavery to the implementation of “Jim Crow” laws — separate and supposedly equal — to the passing of United States Supreme Court cases such as the Dred Scott decision, a victory for supporters of slavery, to the rampant lynching of countless blacks.
Yet another form of injustice is the use of American institutions, like the educational system, to promote and maintain white supremacy — the goal being the same 157 years after the end of slavery, the continuation of racism and exclusion.
As a young child attending public primary school in Georgetown, Illinois, I struggled with confusion, which as I grew older, I understood to be rage. I was required to stand next to my desk, place my hand over my heart and recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of this great nation and I did so with pride. Yet at the same time, I was prohibited from eating at the public restaurants in town, was not allowed to use public restroom facilities or water fountains, forced to sit only in the balcony of the local movie theater and suffer countless other acts of mistreatment, simply because white people had decreed it so, due to the color of my skin.
In those same classrooms, where the teachers were charged with developing young minds, injustice was present every day.
Schools across the nation taught young children, both black and white, with books entitled Dick and Jane, which portrayed white children as being from middle-class families, with parents dressed in nice clothes and using proper English. Other books carried titles such as Little Black Sambo and Buckeye which contained images of little black children as wide-eyed, scared, submissive and with unmanaged hair. There were also Tarzan and Jungle Jim, which illustrated blacks as being illiterate and speaking broken English, books which misrepresented the continent of Africa as a land of savages.
Some say things are different now, that things have changed. For those who genuinely believe that, I have a bridge I would like to sell you.
• The Rev. Clyde H. Brooks, of Arlington Heights, is chairman of the Illinois Commission on Diversity and Human Relations.