In Black History Month, a Reminder Racism Still Persists

When we think of the racial battlegrounds of this century, our thoughts turn to the American streets where so many vivid examples of social strife have been played out.

Big dramas require big stages.

Precisely because those dramas seem fewer and farther between, we applaud ourselves for making progress as society verges on the 21st century.

I’m not one to suggest we’re not.

But I’d suggest that battles still rage every day--perhaps quieter, perhaps in miniaturized venues that don’t qualify for the evening news.

A venue, for example, as ordinary as a shoe store.

Which is what happened earlier this month in a Penney’s outlet at the Westminster Mall, where Trudy Roe of Huntington Beach was buying a pair of shoes. A white woman in her early 50s, she was assisted by a black salesman named Glendon Hewston.

It would have been one of those unremarkable, largely forgettable transactions of daily life were it not for a man in an adjoining area buying socks.

Roe and Hewston were at the cash register. The man buying the socks asked another clerk to ring up his purchase. The clerk indicated that Hewston could handle that for him in a moment or two.

The man again asked the woman to handle the sale, and she again assured him that Hewston would be right with him. Just as everyone was wondering if the man was simply in a hurry to leave with his new socks, he said loudly, “I don’t want him touching them.”

Roe hasn’t forgotten the moment.

“In this day and age,” she said last week in recalling the incident, “you might think someone would think like that but they wouldn’t say it. I considered saying something like, ‘Shame on you,’ but these days you never know if someone might have a gun and pop you. So I just swallowed it.”

Roe was sufficiently bothered, however, that she wrote to the newspaper. She began her letter by saying, “I live knowing racism is out there, without experiencing it in a personal way. . . . Like the proverbial donkey who needs the whack between the eyes, it came to my attention that racism is alive and well today in Orange County.”

She told me that after everyone froze for a second, shocked and silenced by the man’s remark, she offered an apology to Hewston. “I said, ‘For whatever reason he said that, I’m sorry,’ ” she recalled. “He said it was all right, it doesn’t matter, and shrugged it off.”

The department manager said racially tinged remarks to Hewston, while rare, were not unheard of. On another occasion, he said, a customer used such offensive language toward Hewston that it sent another clerk to a back room, crying.

Each of us can apply our own sense of proportion to the sock-buyer’s remark. What it shouts to me is that it’s the kind of moment, even if isolated, that minority citizens potentially face in even the most mundane of settings.

That’s not the way people should have to greet each day.

One more person had to be contacted for this story.

On Friday, just as he began his 5 o’clock shift, I spoke to Hewston, a 27-year-old married man from Cleveland who has been in Orange County for nearly three years. He recounted the incident as Roe had, including his casual dismissal of the man’s remarks. He confirmed he had never waited on the man before and had never seen him until that moment.

Why didn’t the remark bother him? “It doesn’t pay for me to say something,” he said. The remark was such a bolt out of the blue, Hewston said, that “when he said it, I was confused at the time. I wasn’t going to say anything to him. I just left it as it was.”

Growing up in Ohio, Hewston heard an occasional racial slur but hadn’t experienced such direct contempt as an adult as he’s gotten at work, he said. When he got home that night, he didn’t tell his wife about it, because he feared it would upset her, he said.

I told Hewston it seemed odd that Roe was more upset than he. “It bothers me to a point,” he said. “But you get over it. You may think about it, but that’s about it. She stood up for me. I felt good about that.”

End of story. Nothing more, nothing less, perhaps, than an isolated moment in the life of an American citizen.

It’s Hewston’s business how little or much he should be bothered. I’m glad Roe was, though.

Like her, I probably wouldn’t have chastised the sock-buyer, either. Free speech and all that.

I just thought the incident was worth telling as we work our way through Black History Month and a lot of nonblacks still wonder what all the fuss is about.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.