68: Lincoln's Second Inaugural

From WBE Chicago and Public Radio International, it's this American Life. I'm Ira Glass. I started in 1865 and ends this year, today, the moment in 1865 when we started, on March 4th, the day Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address. I don't know if you've ever read this speech, but it's this incredible document, just four paragraphs long.

the time that he delivered that, the Civil War was ending. Over a half million Americans dead. And Lincoln used this speech to ponder the question, why have we been visited with this war? Here are his words.

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude of the duration which it already has attained. Each look for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray the same God, and each and folks is saved against the other. The Almighty has his own purposes.

And at this point in his speech, Lincoln posits this incredible image that slavery is a kind of original sin on this continent, an original sin for which all Americans must pay. He says, finally, do we hope for firmly, do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away, yet if God wills it to continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with a lash shall be paid with another drum with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work ran to bind the Phnician's wounds, to care for him who shall born the battle and for his widow and his orphan to do all which we achieve in cherish just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. But today in our program, in this fourth July weekend, we raised this question.

How are we doing absolving ourselves of our original sin? To answer that, let's fast forward to the 1990s. You hear how I'm talking now? I don't talk like this when I'm allowing my friends who don't speak like this.

I mean, it's just, you know, when I go to school like this, go to school like this, everyone's speaking like this. So, you know, I have to do my best to blend in, you know, which I kind of do pretty good. They don't, you know, I pretty much have everybody thrown off about me. They.

They Pretty much know nothing of where I come from. So this is Eliaku Miller. When I recorded this, he was a sophomore to Chicago High School named Franklin Lincoln park in a rich neighborhood in Chicago's mostly white north side. Elianny, who rode the bus for nearly an hour a day to get there from his home in the neighborhood in Chicago's mostly black, mostly segregated south side.

One measure of how far we have to go in healing the wounds of the past is the distance El had to go between home and school. It is hard on a person, you know, to come to Lincoln park, and your friends, they have. They have, you know, $50 in change, you know, and then some. And they have these expensive things, and then you go home and you're slapped in the face by reality.

That's why I spend so much time at school. I hate to go home. As for me, my whole life I haven't been prejudiced. And up until this year, I've been totally free of all prejudice.

But it's just gotten to the point where I can't hold it back anymore. This is Chris, a senior, Lincoln park at the Arrival, America's biggest experiment in integration. Integrated schools left Chris intolerant, mostly because of 10 slow interactions he used to have all the time black students, some of them were in his phone set, some of theirs. There was an incident recently where I was trying to go out of the door that someone was standing halfway in, halfway out.

He said, excuse me, you know, so I went through. Guy started saying, oh, all these doors, you have to go through this one. I said, that's right, yeah. So he started saying, you better go keep walking, white bar and beat your ass and all this.

And I. I just stopped and said, excuse me, you know, and said, you heard me. And then just, you know, wanted to get into it. And I just, you know, basically blew it off.

And I continued. I went to class, I came out, and a whole bunch of people surrounded me. This the one? This the one.

And I'm just standing there like, what? And then one of them said, yeah, he called this dude a nigger and all this. And I said, hold it. I didn't say any of that.

Seems at one point the whites were at a higher level than the blacks as far as social standards are concerned now, rather than it being equal, I think in a black's mind, I'm speaking in a black's mind, the blacks are much higher than the whites, and they're band together, and they're not gonna accept any whites in that band. There's still just a lot of resentment from that 50s, 60s, slavery, whatever times. But you know, if you look at history, how long things have been, you know, as far as slavery, you know, how long did that go in for? How long did it take before it ended?

So how long is it gonna take before blacks and whites can get along as well as blacks and blacks and whites and whites do? What's today in our program, four attempts at answering that question. Act 1 Another politician, his God and the Confederate pride. Act 2 Nelson Mandela and Abraham Lincoln.

Act 3 Good blacks and bad blacks A story by New York writer Malcolm Gladwell. Act 4 Racial Cheerleaders Storyteller something he's attituded by race, state change. See what this. A modern politician, his God and the Confederate flag.

But not long ago the governor of a southern state made his own attempt to binding up the nation's wounds and chiefing lasting peace among ourselves. And frankly, it has not gone too well for him. The governor was David Beasley of South Carolina. His state is good place to examine how well the wounds in the Civil War healing.

It is the only state in the Union that flies the Confederate flag over its state house. Our contributing editor Jack Kidd is from South Carolina and this past Thanksgiving he watched the television address where Governor David Beasley proposed that they remove the flag from the state house flag pole. The governor of the state, he's a Christian Coalition candidate, one of the few who actually won high office in the elections of 94. So Beasley took control of the governor's mansion and not long after that a number of different things happened.

Some churches were burned, there were some drive by shootings both of blacks and whites, by, you know, people of the other race. And tensions get very, very high. And Beasley is, you know, a good, decent man. Actually one of the things that I've tried to explain to people when I've written about him is that it's a mistake to think that everybody in the Christian Coalition is like Ralph Reed, I.

E. A slick media wise focus group opinionated, you know, Washington lobbyist, insider. At one point I remember he described Ralph Reed as being sincerity challenged. And the irony of that is that most of the people that I know in the Christian Coalition in South Carolina are in fact deeply sentimental about the efforts to bring equality to the races in the state and the whole, you know, civil rights effort.

And in a funny way this is going to be Beasley's downfall because what he did after these very shootings and other acts of violence was decide that the Christian thing to do was to Take down the Confederate flag from the State House. In other words, it actually was a change of heart, and there was not much political advantage in it for him. He did not gain politically from this move. I have asked everyone I know at South Carolina what would be the political advantage of a Republican bringing down the Confederate flag, and there's none.

I mean, it might be one of the few cases in American politics right now where when the politician said, you know, I went and I prayed and I decided to take down the slide, that. That is, in fact, what happened. So, I mean, he wins no points in his own party. It'll be so costly that I feel certain he will be thrown out of office at the next election because of this candidate.

Because. Less. Because of this. Yeah.

Okay. So he comes on television. And he comes on television. What was.

Really. I'm sitting with my entire family. We're all watching this, and everybody in the state is clearly watching this. It's on all the channels.

That's been talked about in the papers for days. The governor's going to address the state and his two. You know, the two rebuttal arguments put forward are by, oh, the Republicans. No, Democrats spoke.

No black person spoke. Right. And the other two people who spoke, Glenn McConnell, a local state assemblyman from Charleston, and Charles Condon, the attorney general, clearly have their eyes on, you know, the governor's chair, especially Condon. What was amazing about Beasley's argument for taking it down and Condon's argument for keeping it up is that they both managed to stake out rather nuanced positions about the meaning of symbols in contemporary American culture.

I mean, it was strange as I sat there listening to the governor talking about how meaning works, you know, and as you know, there's a. An entire academic discipline devoted to how we interpret signs. Right. And this is the field of semiotics.

Semiotics. Very arcane in a certain way. Academic discipline which has swept across academia in this country in the last 15 years. Right.

Not the kind of thing which appears in our American political debate, period. Not very often, in fact. You've written about this. I'm going to read from your writing.

You say the speeches themselves are novel for their departure from the debate's old terms. Flag is evil. Flag is not evil. Rather, these speakers put forward nuanced arguments of semiotics, the science of symbols.

I don't think they argued that the flag debate signified other issues beyond race. No. I mean, they were actually arguing semiotic theory. Yeah.

So let me just read you the. This is Beasley Talking as he's explaining why we should take the flag down, he says, you see, this is a quote. You see, the Confederate flag flying above the State House flies in a vacuum. Its meaning and purpose are not defined by law.

Because of this, any group can give the flag any meaning it chooses. The Klan can misuse it as a racist tool, as it has, and others can just use it solely as a symbol for racism, as they have. And so he's basically articulating what is the central tenet of modern semiotic theory, which is that you have this object, a flag, and any meaning can attach to it. Right?

And then. But then what was amazing is that the other people who were refuting him or rebutting him basically delved into the same kind of theory. For example, here's. Here's Lynn McConnell, a state senator from Charleston, talking about the flag.

He says, quote, we are told this flag lacks definition. It must be moved to define it. But the flag was defined years ago on a monument on the State House grounds which says it in the hopelessness of the hospitals, the despair of defeat, and the short, sharp agony of struggle, these South Carolinas who entered the call of their state did so in the consolation of the belief that here at home they would not be forgotten. In other words, the flag has a meaning, and that meaning is stable.

That meaning is stable. If the flag means honor, it's always going to mean honor. Other people can try to attach what they want. It'll still mean that it doesn't do any good.

It's a point of view in the south and especially in South Carolina. This is why I'm saying that I think Beasley has sort of wounded himself fatally. You know, one of the things that I find most interesting about this in light of Lincoln's second inaugural, is that the second inaugural is essentially a Christian document. I mean, it's about a political document, and it's a document arguing about faith.

What do we make of this as people who believe in God? The fact that the war happened and so many people have died? And it's interesting that Beasley would also basically come to this conclusion that we need to heal. The same conclusion that Lincoln comes to as an act of faith.

Right. Well, you know, I mean, I understand his thinking, and he came very close to pulling it off. You know, if you appeal to the Christian sentimentality in South Carolina for good race relations, you have enormous support because, you know, most of these people, they don't want this antagonism. They don't want the kind of bad feelings between the races publicly, privately.

And this goes right to the heart of, I think, not just the south, but America's ambiguity on race, which is at the same heart that can get very weepy and sentimental about rebuilding black churches, can also get infuriated with, you know, black leaders talking about how we need more formative action. So, Jack, I know you have your modest proposal on how opponents of the Confederate flag flying over the State House might be able to actually get the flag off the State House. Well, yes, I do. And in fact, it's based on semiotic theory.

It is based on semiotic theory. I think the remedy would be for blacks in South Carolina to start flying the Confederate flag, adopt the stars and bars as the symbol of the new South. You know, in our culture, especially, where signs and symbols can turn over so quickly. Right.

It's very easy to do what none of these guys on television were proposing, which is add even more meaning to that symbol. That's the only way you can actually alter a symbol's meaning. You're never gonna. Even if you took the flag down, its power would remain.

Its power that was in a windshield or on somebody's front lawn would still remain. And I would just, you know, I would love to see baseball caps with, you know, Malcolm X's sort of rejiggered into the stars and bars configuration or the Confederate flag washed with a little, you know, African liberation colors. And only blacks in South Carolina could possibly pull this off. Right.

It's our south, too. And my further prediction is that if this did happen, if blacks did start wearing it on their T shirts, on their cars and on their, you know, on their coats and flying it in their front lawns or whatever, that the first group to rush to the state capitol and insist that the stars and bars be lowered would be the daughters of the Confederate veterans. So enraged they would be that the symbol's true meaning was being altered. I mean, in a certain way.

Look at the distance of, you know. You know, a century and a quarter after Lincoln. How are we to view this entire debate? I don't know.

On the one hand, it seems to me so many of the truly meaningful acts of integration have been accomplished. I mean, in a way, it's the kind of fight you would have after you've done all the hard work. Yeah. You know, we're really arguing almost literally about window dressing.

But I have to say, I mean, there's another way to look at this debate, and that is the fact that this is what's being debated about race relations and the place of blacks and whites gathering society. I mean, if this is what being debated, that means there are all these other things that we have not solved which are never. Which are never discussed with the same fervor and political heat. I mean, the gut.

You're saying the governor of South Carolina is going to lose his governorship over this symbolic question of whether the flag. Flag. He is not losing his governorship over whether black children are educated as well as white children. That's true.

That's probably. That's absolutely true. Check out the magazine writer and contributing editor here. This American Life.

After he published his idea the flies of Ducks, Stars and Mars, he discovered that two black entrepreneurs in South Carolina have a company called New south that's trying to do exactly that. These two guys, Sherman Evans and Angel Quintero, have a full line of clothing that featured a Confederate flag rendered in the colors of African liberation red, black and green. They have a story on Main Street, Main street and downtown Charleston. They hope to expand to all 13 original comedies.

Realistically, we all know that the character flag is a negative image and it creates a new south flag as kind of active move and which, you know, we figure it's like the oppressors worth thinking all. So we take that and we wear it with pride. It's kind of like a strategy whereby you go right into the fair thing and you claim it. Do they have a website?

Well, of course. Www.newsouth spelled n u s o u dash t h dot com. Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton Old times are not for look away look away look away Dixie land oh, I wish I was in Dixie Away. Act 2.

Nelson Mandel and Abraham Lincoln. What they do with symbols of the white supremacist past. Well, after the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln did not ban the confederacy's national anthem, Dixie. Instead, he had to play on the White House on saying in effect, we're all one nation.

This song is all of ours. It's a tragedy. I think Nelson Mandela would understand. In fact, that story about Lincoln and Jacket's story about South Carolina remind me of a story that I've been told by a friend of mine named John Madison Johnson from South Africa.

During apartheid, he was the chief political correspondent at the leading opposition newspaper with Randy Mao. For a while, he was National Public Radio correspondent in South Africa. That's how I know him. When Nelson Mandela was released from prison, John was the reporter given the honor of asking Mandela the first question at his very first press conference.

Now he's a member of Mandela's government. And a few years ago he told me about the Springboks. The Springboks are a rugby team. Under apartheid, rugby was the favorite game of South African whites.

And the black's favorite game in national game was soccer. Whites was rugby and the Springboks were the national team competitions, things like that. And it was all white or almost all white with one or two black players. The Springboks were seen as a symbol of white South Africa and apartheid.

When NES Mandela's party, the African National Congress, came to power, there was this big debate of whether to get rid of the team's name and its logo. Springboks like a deer. And just like the flag debate in South Carolina, John Addison says the debate got very emotional. And I would have to say that most people in the ANC camp would have argued strongly that the Springbok cannot be retained.

It's too. It's too toxic a symbol. It had to be removed and replaced with something else. And there was even discussion about alternatives.

And the plan was that a decision was going to be taken after the World Cup. During apartheid, international sanctions it kept out of battle of the World Cup. And so at the first World cup game, the post apartheid era hosted by South Africa, Nelson Mandela settled this issue of the Springbok symbol once and for all. Mandela walked out onto the field wearing a Springbok jersey with a number six, which was the same number as the captain.

And he walked out into the middle of the field and he just wished them well and cheered and the crowd just roared. And he wore a scream like a cap as well. And then at the end of the game, South Africa won and he walked down onto the field and hugged the captain of the warning team. And so you had jersey number six hugged jersey number six.

The two captains, the captain of the rugby team and the captain of South African. Back when it happened, you told me that grown men were crying in the stand. Oh, yeah. It was very emotional.

People at tears and hours. And I think it had an amazing impact because South Africans, black South Africans just adored it. They adored him and white South Africans as well. They adored the fact that he'd embraced all isn't all and hadn't rejected them and made a bit quite divided into something that could have potentially atheist at a symbolic level been ugly.

And at the same time, black South Africans said, well, you know, it had the effect of people saying, well, it's ours. It's not their team anymore. It's our team. And I think I told you the story that I was at Christmas Party, our own Christmas party.

And nearly all our staff are black South Africans. And half the black South Africans wore springbuck caps to the Christmas party. Which if you sort of seeped in local political folklore, as I am, it was just an amazing and very moving sight. And frankly, now it's just not an issue.

It really isn't. Nelson Mandela has systematically tried to diffuse the old symbols of apartheid. All of them of their power travelled to formally all white neighborhoods, made the Yoda apartheid national anthem part of the new national anthem, one point at lunch. And he invited the wives and widows of all the prime ministers from during the apartheid era.

And he also invited the wives and widows of the black widows who met there as well, including Steve Biko's widow. And of course you know that Steve Biko was killed in prison by policemen in support of the old government. And that was in the time under the premiership of John Forster. And Mrs.

Forster was there. John Forster died some time ago, but Mrs. Forster was there. And there was this remarkable scene which was shown in television and reported in the newspapers where they're all in the garden sitting with these garden chairs and Mrs.

Forster see Mrs. Biko looking for a place to sit and she sort of jumps up and offers her her seat. And as you know, John Forster was really regarded as one of the worst authoritarian leaders, was minister of police at the same time he was the Prime Minister. And Mandela went up to her and he sort of brought a chair and she said, no, no, don't give him my chair.

And Mandela looked at her very sternly and wagged his finger at her and said, Now Mrs. Forster, you must sit down and do as I say, otherwise I'm going to be as authoritarian as your husband was. And everybody laughed quite uncomfortably, not quite sure what to make of it. But of course, the next thing, Mrs.

Forster dinner, she was told by the President and she sat down and Mrs. Biko sat down in the chair that Della brought for her and they got into conversation. I mean, I mean, this actually leads to the thing I was going to ask you next, which was, I mean, how important do you think these symbolic changes are in changing a nation? How important are they versus, you know, say, building houses and getting the economy, you know, working in a different way?

Well, you know, I must say I, as a sort of a hard bitten political journalist all my life, probably didn't take them as seriously as the government did. I, you know, I looked at housing statistics and educational changes and budgets and all those kind of things. But I have to concede I was Wrong. I failed to appreciate the importance of these symbols.

They've been extremely important. I still need black South African friends who surprised me by telling me about perhaps their less political family members who went in after these symbolic changes, went to parts of white Cape Town and white Johannesburg that they'd never been before. And frankly, they could have gone before because they were not actually legally prohibited for some time before that, but they never felt comfortable doing them. And so the symbolic change mean suddenly people felt symbolically they could go to areas where they might have been legally entitled to for some years, but they wouldn't go there at that time.

They still felt uncomfortable. That's, I think, for success. You know, if you had to ask me what has changed for the average black South Africans since the election in terms of housing and so on? The improvements are modest.

You know, the vast mass of black South Africans and material conditions haven't improved radically and in many cases not at all, one has to admit. But what has really changed is a genuine change for people is psychological liberation, feeling that this is their country and that they have opportunities and possibilities in the country. You know, the country is. I have to shut up because John Madison in South Africa.

Coming up, good whites and bad blacks. Good whites and bad whites. That's all in a minute when our program continues. From WTC Chocolate International with this American Life.

My blast. YouTube got a problem, of course, which is a theme and a variety of writers and performers and reporters who tackle that theme with original documentaries, radio monologues, found tape, anything they can think of. Today show for the footage of July weekend. How we doing as a nation?

Healing the wounds Our nation's original sin of slavery. Red act three Good blacks, bad blacks. For a perspective on how far black America and white America have come integrating into one America, consider this story from New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladbaum about his cousins who immigrated this country from Jamaica 12 years ago. Script and saved to make a life here.

My cousin Rosie and her husband Noel live in a two bedroom bungalow on Ardell Avenue in Uniondale, a working class neighborhood in the west end of Long Island. From the outside, their home looks fairly plain, but there's a beautiful park down the street. A public schools are supposed to be good and Rosie Noel built a new garage and rented the basement. Now that Noel has started his own business as an environmental engineer, he has his own office down there.

Sweet two beats as a stationary and every morning he puts on a suit and goes downstairs to make calls and work on a computer. If Noel's business takes off, Rosie says She'd like to move to a bigger house in Garden City, which is one town over. She says this even though Garden City is mostly white. In fact, when she told one of her girlfriends, a black American, about this idea, her friend said that she was crazy.

The Garden City was no place for a black person. That's just the point. Rosie and Noelle from Jamaica, they don't consider themselves black at all. This doesn't mean that my cousins haven't sometimes been lumped together with American blacks.

Noel had a job once removing the asbestos at Kandi Airport. His boss there called a nigger and cut his hours. But Noel didn't take it personally. That boss, he says, didn't like women or Jews either, or people with college degrees, or even himself, for that matter.

Another time, Noel found another white guy working next to him in the same job who had the same qualifications as making $10,000 a year more than he was. He quit the next day. Noel knows that racism is out there. It's just that he doesn't quite understand or accept the categories on which it depends.

The facts of his genealogy, of his nationality, of his status as an immigrant, made him, in his own eyes, different. This question of who West Indians are and how they define themselves may seem trivial, like racial hairsplitting, but it's not trivial. In the past 20 years, the number of West Indians in America has exploded. There are now half a million in the New York area alone.

And despite their recent arrival, they make substantially more money than American blacks. They live in better neighborhoods. Their families are stronger in the New York area. In fact, West Indians fare, but as well as Chinese and Korean immigrants.

What does it say about the nature of racism that another group of blacks, who have the same legacy of slavery as their American counterparts and are physically indistinguishable from them as well, can come here and succeed as well as the Chinese and Koreans do. Is overcoming racism as simple as doing what Noel does? Which is to dismiss it, to hold himself above it, debra it, and move on. Why is one group of blacks flourishing when the other is not?

The implication of West Indian success is that racism doesn't really exist at all, at least not in the form that we'd assumed it does, it implies that when the conservatives in Congress say that responsibility for ending urban poverty lies not with collective action, but with the poor themselves. But the right. I think of this sometimes when I go with Rosie in the. Well, to the church, which is in Hempstead, a mile away.

It was once a white church, but in the past decade or so has been taken over by immigrants in the Caribbean. They've so swelled as membership of the churches, bought much of the surrounding property and is about to add 100 seats or so. It's sanctuary. The pastor that was white.

And when the band up front is playing and the congregation is in full West Indian form, the pastor sometimes seems out of place, as if he cannot move in time with music. I always wonder how long the white minister at Rosie Noel's church will last, whether there won't be some kind of crown swallow among the congregations to replace them with one of their own. But Noel tells me the issue has never really come up. Noel says, in fact, that he's happy with the white minister for the same reason that he's happy with his neighborhood, with the people across the way.

Are Polish and other neighbors Hispanic and still not as a black American. He doesn't want to be shut off for anybody else. I said it with the narrow confines of his race, he wants to be part of the world. And when he says these things, it's awfully tempting to credit that attitude to what he and Rosie have accomplished.

Is this confidence, this optimism, this equanimity, all that separates the poorest of American blacks from the house on Argyll Aven. This idea of the Westing as a kind of superior black is not a new one. When the first wave of Caribbean immigrants came to New York and Boston in the early 1900s, other blacks dubbed them Jew Macons in derisive reference to the emphasis they placed on hard work and education. In the 1980s, the economist Thomas Sowell gave the idea of serious intellectual imprint by arguing the West Indian bandages of the historical legacy of Caribbean slave culture.

According to Sowell, in the American south, slave owners tend to hire managers who were married in order to live with problems created by sexual relations between overseers and slave women. But the West Indians were a hardship host who had a large and settled white population. There, the overseers tend to be bachelors, and with white women scarce, it was far more commingling than the races. The resulting large group of colours soon formed a kind of prolo middle class, performing various kinds of skilled and sophisticated tasks that were not enough whites around to do.

As there weren't. The Americans out there were carpenters, masons, plumbers and small businessmen, many years in advance of their American counterparts, developing skills that required education and initiative. My mother and Rosie mother came from this colored class. Their parents were schoolteachers in a tiny village buried in the hills of central Jamaica.

My grandmother and grandfather's salaries Combined put them, at best, on the lower realms of the middle class. But their expectations went well beyond that. My mother and her sister were pushed to win scholarships to a proper English style boarding school the other end of the island. And later, when my mother graduated, it was taken for granted that she would attend university in England.

My grandparents had ambitions for the children, but it was a special kind of ambition, one of certainty that American blacks did not have. That their values are the same as those of society as a whole and that hard work and talent could actually be rewarded. This, I think, is why Noel cannot quite appreciate what it is that weighs black Americans down. He came with age in a country where he belonged to the majority.

It is tempting to use the West Indian story as evidence that discrimination doesn't really exist, as proof that the only thing in a city African Americans have to do to be welcomed as one against West Indian is to make the necessary cultural adjustments. But in fact, studies of workplaces that higher West Indian show they're not places where traditional racism has been discarded. They're actually places where old style racism and appreciation of American values are somehow bound up together. Listen to a white manager who was interviewed by the Harvard sociologist Mary Waters.

Island blacks who come over, they're immigrant. They may not have had a good life where they are. They're gonna try to strive to better themselves. And I think there's a lot of American blacks out there who feel we owe them.

Enough is enough already. You know, this is something that happened to their ancestors. Not now. I mean, we've done so much of the black people in America now it's time they got off their butts.

Here then, are the two competing ideas about racism side by side. The manager issues a blanket condemnation of American blacks even as he holds West Indians up to a cultural ideal. The example of West Indians as good blacks makes the old blanket prejudice against American blacks all the easy to express. The manager can tell black Americans to get off their butts without fear of sounding his own racist, because he has simultaneously celebrated island blacks for their work ethic.

The success of Western news is not proof that discrimination against American blacks does not exist. Rather, it's the means by which discrimination against American blacks is given one last vicious twist, as if to say, I'm not so shallow as to despise you for the color of your skin, because I've found people of color that I like. Now I can despise you for who you are. I grew up in Canada, in a little farming town an hour and a half outside Toronto.

My Father teaches mathematics at a nearby university. My mother is a therapist. For many years she was the only black in town. But I can't remember wondering a worry or even thinking about this act.

Back then, color meant only good things. Met my cousins in Jamaica and the graduate students from Africa and Indian my father would bring home from university. My own color was not something I ever thought about much either because it seems such a stray fact. But things changed when I left for Toronto to 10 college.

This was during the early 1980s when West Indians were immigrated in Canada in droves and Toronto becomes second only to New York as the Jamaican expatriates capital in North America. At school in Gunning Hall, I was served by Jamaicans. The infamous Jane Finch project in northern Toronto were considered the Jamaican projects. The drug trade then taking off was said to be the Jamaican drug trade.

In the popular imagination, Jamaicans were and are welfare queens and gunpowdering gangsters and dissolute youths. After I moved to the United States, I puzzled over the seeming contradiction. How West Indians celebrated New York for their industry and drive represented 500 miles northwest crime. In this patient, didn't Torontonians see what was special and different in West Indian culture?

That was an IYU question. The West Indians were the first significant brush with blackness that smug white Torontonians ever had. They no bad blacks to contrast with newcomers. No African Americans to serve as a safety valve for their prejudices.

No way to perform America's crude racial triage. There must be people in Toronto just like Rosie and Noel, with the same attitudes and aspirations, want to live in a neighborhood in Nisses Ariel Avenue who want to build a new garage and renovate the basement and set their own business downstairs. But it's not completely up to them, is it? What has happened to Jamaicans in Toronto was proof that what happens to Jamaicans here is not the end of racism or even the beginning of the end of racism, but an accident of history and geography in America, someone else to despise.

In Canada there's not in the new racism as in the old, somebody always has to be the nigger. Gladwell's story first appeared in the Yorker magazine. Oh well, oh well. I've been so good today we just drag around on an international Runway.

Act 4 Good whites, bad whites. This next is Seminar, A state of national racial healing from radio producers to silly vice men and Christina Egloff with Jay Allison about a woman named Carolyn Shannon and her neighbors. My mother was telling us that one time when we were younger my father was very prejudiced and I come home from school with this friend and he was like on the recliner with a newspaper. And I said, mom, can my friends stay over for supper?

And my father like dropped the paper to look to see who wasn't a little black girl. She said my father swallowed his false teeth and she's like, honey, I don't really think that's a good idea. She said I come in that. My father was like horrified because I was, I was.

I really didn't see things. I don't know. I was colorblind really till that incident. Then we kind of got the rules that that wasn't accepted.

Who you calling three F I G H E. Fight. Fight. My mother and father are both from Charlestown.

All my great grandparents are from Ireland. All four of them. And that's how the majority of this community works. Most of them, when they come over on the boat, they all work together and kind of settle together.

And that's sort of how this community has stayed the same. You'll find that a lot of people in this community are related because I think there's some security having family around. And people are proud that they're Irish and they're proud that they're Catholic. And I think people, they stick to their own.

Like when we were in grammar school, there was one teen who didn't. Who was Protestant. And we pooped on them because he didn't believe in the same thing as us. Cuz no one understood what a person was.

Just that he was different. You ready girl? Follow her. We are the girls from Childown.

You hear so much about. Most everybody looks at us whenever we go out. We're noted for our reputation, all the things you do. But what the hell do we care?

The boys and naughty to. We are here at my aunt Mary Ellen's house on Elm street in Charlestown. I'm here with my aunt Linda, my cousin Patty, my cousin Donna, my sister in law Mimi, my cousin Marianne, my aunt Barbara, my cousin Sheila and my aunt Mary Ellen. My grandmother who is the matriarch of this wonderful family.

Mary Wren. Wonderful woman. She had seven children and she had 32 grandchildren and 43 great grandchildren. I'd say about 70% is still local.

Most people don't understand if they're not from the town. There's always that Childstown they want to be. They wish they were. They don't understand what it's like.

And that's what happens here. Everybody knows everybody. So it's a kind of strength that you don't find in other Areas. I mean, to have 17,000 people and the majority of them have major relatives around, it makes a big difference in this community.

Once busing occurred, that wonderful year of 76, 1976, when the Federal government mandated busing code. Already busing my junior year was totally insane. Everything changed. There were new faces.

People were never exposed to minorities. And all of a sudden, you're thrown in a classroom and there's turmoil in the streets, and there's turmoil in your house, and there's turmoil in the news. In the cities erupted with racial violence. And everyone's following everyone wherever the crowd does.

If they throw rocks, you throw rocks. If they beat up a black person, then you stand and watch. Where's. As a Catholic, you realize that you don't treat someone like that.

But everyone forgot everything. It was like this total mayhem. School wasn't the same. There were metal detectors put in the classroom, in the entrance of the schools.

There were policemen everywhere. At night they would burn cars. It was total crazy. There was a major rally on Boston city hall plaza, and a black man was attacked with an American flag because he was black, and walked in front of their rally, which was all white.

They spared him with the American flag. It was a horrible, horrible scene. It was all over, like, the news, like, across the world. Charlestown's healthy.

They're racist. Boston is a place full of hate. And it was. It was.

When I was in junior high, the biggest thing was to get up to the high school because that was where your mother went and your father went and those teachers were still there, and you could still talk to your mother about the bathroom story or. But that doesn't occur anymore because there is no Chaon High like it used to be. And now the school itself is predominantly black. My kids will probably go to parochial schools.

They won't do chaos on high chairs. They may do, you know, St. Clement's cheers, but, like, when my aunts get together, they all sing cha high songs. And it's like a little pep rally when we're all at a family gathering.

But that won't happen for my kids. And I think that's kind of sad. Forget me. Yes.

And we'll do it. Regular coach Pete say, ready, go. Tammy. Teeny means let the ring any way you back fill it.

All right. Very good, girl. What happened on the Oprah show was she had on a white man who was married to a white woman. He disowned his children for being associated with black men and then, in fact, disowned his grandchildren because they Were.

They were black in them. And I was saying that's a disgrace. That's your blood. You don't disown anyone.

And Danny said no. What did I say? He said that he thought he was right. I don't know what I would do, but I understood his feelings.

So you wouldn't mind your daughter's marrying a Bartelia? I didn't say that. Which we have discussed at great length that I would. That is definitely fair of mine that I would like to think I'm open minded about race more so than I've ever been.

But if it came down to my daughter's choosing another race, I don't think I'd be happy with that. I mean I'm definitely, I wouldn't say I'm racist, but I definitely bit of feelings towards black. I was raised that way too. I mean my father's an axe punter so I think he rubs off on you.

Like I would never, I would never say anything to my girls. But they'll learn. They'll learn what's theirs and, you know, what's your role and things like that. Just growing up around the same type of people.

They'll look at anyone that's not like them differently. I don't have to tell them that. It sounds ignorant, but I had no problem. I like the way I grew up and Carolyn's out of the same old.

And I don't, I don't have a problem with that. I'm not going to push it on him at all. But I hope someday they marry an Irish Catholic boy. And you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

Other people say that's being racial. I think it's natural to like your own kind of people. I love you, you love me, we're a happy family. This is great because I get a kiss from you, dad, you won't.

You say you love me too. You know, I think it's a rare breed of personality. You must have to grow up somewhere where you walk down the street and there's a black kid, a Chinese kid, a white kid and a Puerto Rican kid playing together. I just can't even imagine that that's some kind of made up fairy tale, I think where everyone gets along together.

You know, I can't imagine it. Life teaches you sometimes very painfully and I think that's your best teacher anyway. Like no one can tell you not to be racist and they can't tell you to like your black neighbor. You have to, you have to learn.

So I think It's a person's choice. So you can choose to be ignorant, or you can choose to be fair. I was captain of cheerleading. I remember Ms.

Kastner, which was the cheerleading coach, was also the physic director. And she said she hadn't chosen the Captain Jet. And this was something I wanted my whole life. This is my big goal, like, to be cheerleading captain.

And she said to me one day, if a black girl tries off for cheerleading, will you accept her? And I thought to myself, I'm going to be a jerk if I don't go along with the crowd. It was a very difficult decision for me. And I knew this would.

Could jeopardize whether I become captain or not. And I said I wouldn't accept her. She put her head down, and she walked away. So the day of cheering tryouts, she came into the room of all the girls, and she said, traditionally, Chaos on High has had two cheerleading captains.

This year, there'll only be one. I put my head down. I started to cry because I knew. I just.

I knew I blew it. It was like my first experience with race and making the wrong decision. So we're all in the room, and she says, the chilling captain for this chair is Carolyn Wren. I said, of all my highs.

I was like, oh, my God. And I looked up at her, and she knew that I knew that I had made a wrong choice. I knew I made the wrong choice, but I made it for my hat. Because I was raised in a house where race wasn't accepted.

It's embarrassing. I think they're embarrassing the child Sun High cheerleaders because, well, they don't cheer like irregular cheerleaders anyway. They cheer like Chickables or something. I don't know.

Carol, that is not sharing. It's BO. They're like. Like, clapping and singing and, like, getting down with their chairs.

It's not even. It's Jack, Sharon. Yeah. It's not.

They teach a chili in camp. The All American cheerleader. It's not that style. It's more ethnic.

It's more cultural. It's very different than what we're used to. Definitely. My sister went cheer for Charleston High because of it.

I can't even think of a chair that we could compare it to other than how funky is your chicken. We don't need no music to cheer. And they snap their feet and they do like, the. Oh, you wanted to slap them and say, stop.

You look so foolish. That's what they're taught, and that's what they're excited to do. Nobody's excited to handle. Everybody just wishes they'd go away.

I remember sitting beside a girl in school, and she had an afro, and we had common pins. In health. Not health sewing. It was homec.

And we used to put paper at the end of the common pin and toss the common pin, and the paper would allow it to weigh it down so you could send it. And we would, like, put them into her hair. And this was, like, hitting her head. These common pins were.

We tortured that girl because she was different, because she had an effort. None of us did because she was black. And I was a battle that I was as racist as the next one. It's not something I'm proud of.

And I think working with teenagers, it's a constant effort to remind them that you don't judge them by the color of their skin. Okay, tonight it's gonna be on racism. We realize it's a very sensitive issue. We're not here to try to change anybody's mind.

What we want to do is raise your consciousness. What I want to talk about it. We'll have a lot of fun with it. Couple rules.

Watch your mouth. Swearing, a little respect. You can go and speak your own opinions, but with a little taste. Understand?

Okay, we're gonna start. If you asked me when I was 10, would have you worked for the city with other black people, I would have told you you were crazy. That I'm above them and that I don't. I don't work with niggas.

That's what I would have told you when I was 10. Yeah. When I first took this job, I actually had trouble working with people across the city that I was racist, But I was. I was in the high school when there was busing, so there was a lot of racial riots.

It was total mayhem every day. I hated them. I used to throw things in their afros. I hated them.

I didn't want to look at them. I didn't want to talk to them. I was the class vice president and almost lost the post because I wouldn't accept black students in Charleston High. I've taken incredible strides as far as accepting.

I'm matured, I'm educated. It's very different than when I was 17, filled with a lot of hate and was surrounded by a lot of people who hated because of the color of their skin. Okay, this warm up, guys, you need to listen. This warm up is called motion circle.

So what I want you to do is walk straight out a little more, and I want you to walk. Come this way. Walk in a circle. Okay, now I'm going to tell you to do something.

I want you to all of a sudden do it. Okay. Walk like a second quicksand. What?

Stuck in quicksand. Walk like you're Irish. Okay, Keep walking. Walk as if you're carrying something heavy.

Okay. Walk like you're black. My father, who's to be incredibly racist and has grown out of that and I can't even believe it, he's just not the same person and he accepts people for what they are, which is, was very important for the rest of, for all of us to see because you lead by example. And if you can't lead by example, it's such an important part of, I think each family and I would say on the whole that the majority of racism is learned in the home.

It's what you brought up with, it's what you hear, it's what you're told and it's how you're raised. And if you go out and you think that battering someone because they're black, then I would, I would bet my paycheck that in your home racism is a serious issue and also a serious problem. And it was for me and it's taken me a long, long time to overcome it. Although this, I still have fears of, I still have fears.

Although I'm open minded, educated, I still have some of those fears. The story was first produced in slightly longer form for WGBH and Jay Allison's Life Story series engineering by Jane Pippic. Cilly Weissman did the original reviews. My program was produced today by Lee Spiegel and myself with Nancy Update Angelique Snyder Musical Helping Serve Al contributing editor of Al Jaika Kid Marty Rock and Paw Tough the Bike said of this program.

Call us at WBEZ in Chicago. 312-832-3380. That's 312-832-3380. Our email address radio well.com funny this American Life is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the John D.

And Catherine T. McCarthy foundation and the listeners WBEC Chicago. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEC Management over who makes most of his management decisions this way I, you know, I went and I prayed.

I'm a glass back next week for more stories of this American Life. Pri public radio international.