Are We Through With Racism? Let’s Walk Down a Road in Texas

Trying to make sense of the horror of Jasper County, Texas, this week led me to Pauline E. Merry, vice president of student services at Irvine Valley College.

It turns out Merry and I both grew up in the Midwest in the 1950s. She was the middle-class daughter of two college graduates, I was a blue-collar son of a railroad worker.

Merry lived in St. Louis. I was raised in southern Indiana, but because our hometown was along the railroad line to St. Louis, it was our city of excitement.

It’s famous for its zoo. But St. Louis also had a large and popular amusement attraction called Highland Park, since torn down. Better than Disneyland, is my memory of the place.

Pauline Merry could afford Highland Park easier than my family. But she never stepped foot inside its gates. Highland Park was “whites only.” Merry is black.

She and I, like most of America, were horrified by the images of the death last Saturday of James Byrd Jr. The black man was tied to a pickup truck, allegedly by three white men, in Jasper County and dragged to death, his body parts spread across two miles of roadway.

Racism is one of those issues that I conveniently tuck away so I can concentrate on my children, bills and owning a home. Sadly, sometimes it takes an incident like Jasper County to give us perspective on how far we have to go, despite how far we think we’ve come.

Merry told me that her first thoughts after the news from Texas were of her own grandchildren. Though they live here in Orange County, she said, “it makes you wonder if they are really safe, anywhere.”

It’s the kind of incident that helps build walls between the races. I’d been thinking about those racial divisions lately because of something that happened related to my column: A UC Irvine staff member wrote me a while back, accusing me of being a racist. Columnists get angry mail; scatological name-calling is part of the deal when you agree to give your opinion in print. But nothing has been more painful than this attack on my character.

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I had done a column on a group of essays that UCI faculty, staff and students had written about important women in their lives. I mentioned half a dozen or so by name out of some 50 essays submitted, but I hadn’t used hers. She’d written a poignant piece, but I didn’t have room for everyone. Any of the 40-plus essayists I hadn’t quoted might have argued that his or hers was best.

This staff member’s complaint was damning: that I had deliberately ignored her essay because she was black.

It hurt that she judged my motives without knowing anything about me, without taking a look at my body of work as a whole. I carefully crafted my written response. I dissected in detail, politely but forthrightly, why she was wrong. I’m sure it didn’t dampen her anger. She might well have loosely interpreted my response as “To hell with you, lady.”

No matter how righteous I believed my indignation to be, I regret now the response I sent.

I regret that my hurt feelings had led me to lose sight of this country’s history of race. In a sense I had passed judgment on her too, without knowing anything about her. Without knowing what slights or outright racist affronts she perhaps has endured in her lifetime. Incidents that made it easier for her to judge me.

And if you’re black, those incidents are there.

Besides the tragedy in Jasper County, a network documentary ran on TV this week showing how African Americans are discriminated against in some of the nation’s largest department stores.

Store detectives admitted to undercover investigators (looking into employee racism) that they singled out black customers to follow with hidden cameras because “most of our shoplifters are black.” Records showed that, actually, most of the shoplifters were white. But it’s this stereotyping that further isolates us.

Merry has known racism all her life.

“Growing up, I would hear the adults talking, how angry it made them. Here my father was a graduate of Columbia, my mother from the Pratt Institute, yet they could not attend the privately owned legitimate theaters in St. Louis because of their skin color.”

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But Merry is proud of how her parents raised her. “It wasn’t fair, and it hurt, but my parents saw to it that racism did not become the focus of our lives.”

She’s faced only one series of overt acts since moving to Orange County about 20 years ago. After she and her husband were pictured in a local newspaper a few years back, they received telephone threats laced with racial slurs. In another incident, when they lived in Westminster, their black neighbors were victims of a cross burning in their frontyard. It helps you understand how Merry could see Jasper and Orange counties as perhaps not so far apart.

The kind of racism that Merry usually faces is more subtle. Like knowing that, despite her doctoral degree from USC, she’s the one the store detective will focus on as a potential shoplifter. The kind of racism where, at a meeting, someone will address her white peers as “Dr. Jones or Dr. Smith” and her as “Pauline.”

But to understand the impact of the Jasper County incident, she cautioned, you have to know that she does not speak for all African Americans:

“There are many African Americans who do allow racism to become their focus. I’ve gone to meetings where that is all they talk about.”

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Which is why we need to take steps to counteract the hostility that Jasper County helps further. Small gestures can mean a lot, like the one from Renee D. Flores.

She is a loan officer for Western Financial Bank in Irvine who wrote to The Times this week, asking how she could contribute to a fund for James Byrd Jr.’s family.

“I do not have a lot to give,” she wrote, “I guess I just want them to know there are people who do care.”

That brings me to why I sought out Dr. Merry.

She is president of a fledgling group called the African American Community and Cultural Center Foundation. The dream of its members is to create a home base in Orange County for cultural and social activities for local African Americans. It’s a terrific idea, but Merry and her fellow foundation members are on the search for talent, money and people with time to give to the project. Their address is: P.O. Box 18285, Anaheim, CA 92817-8285.

They just need someone to step forward and show that we in Orange County understand why it’s needed--and that we care.

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by faxto (714) 966-7711, or e-mail tojerry.hicks@latimes.com