Senior Column: One Last Lesson

Appeared in the April 30, 2007, edition of The Chronicle, Duke University's independent daily newspaper.

It's probably more my style to write something lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek for a senior column, but I feel compelled to share a story with you.

I was leaving campus late one night in February, and a black man approached me in the Bryan Center parking garage. His battery was dead and he needed a jump, he told me. Would I help him out?

I froze. To be quite frank, it was an empty parking garage, it was late at night and he looked like the type of guy who might try to pull something on me. I should play it safe and get out of there, I thought.

I'm kind of in a hurry, I said. I really should go. OK, he said. He understood.

I paused. I don't know if his disappointed reaction was just what I needed as assurance that he wouldn't mug me, or if it simply pronged my stomach with the guilt of knowing that I could've helped someone and chose to leave him out in the cold, but I changed my mind and decided to jump his car.

We struck up a conversation, and my fear and anxiety quickly dissipated. Turns out he worked at the Dillo and went to North Carolina Central University. (He still had a paper to write that night.) After I had feared the worst, turns out he was a student whose life wasn't so different from my own.

But it was different in a very significant way. And it actually brings up the point of me telling you this little tale. See, I wasn't the first person he asked to help him that night. He had been alone in that chilly parking garage for nearly an hour, begging passersby to lend him a hand. Each had soundly rejected him. I asked him why, even though I already knew the answer.

It was because of the way he looked.

I'm not going to lie--at the end of the night, it made me feel good to have gotten past my own prejudice and to have done a good deed for this person. I labeled those other passersby morally inferior and slipped into a self-satisfied slumber.

But the more I thought about it in the following days, the more I realized that I was one emotional flick away from doing the exact same thing to that man as the others had done--fearing him because of the bagginess of his pants and the color of his skin, and making some perfectly rational-sounding excuse to him and another to myself about why I had left him there.

My experience that night helped me gain insight into what I consider the most dangerous and pervasive type of racism that exists on our campus and in our country. The subtle, the instinctive--the racism that many would consider a perfectly logical application of past information and experience to new situations. The racism that led a police officer in my neighborhood to go door to door warning us to be careful because a "black man" was roaming the neighborhood. The racism that led one of my classmates to doubt that our professor had really been chairman of the FCC, because after all, his name was Tyrone. And the racism that led police on a routine traffic stop for outdated car tags to arrest that same professor, who actually had been chairman of the FCC.

Maybe diverse environments like Duke can help us to chip away at such innate prejudice. After having few experiences engaging with the black community before coming to Durham, the friends I've made here and the people I've been surrounded with have certainly helped me to rid myself of some of the knee-jerk racism that was within me before I came here.

And maybe the backlash against the Michael Richardses and Don Imuses of the world will play a role in eliminating some of the subtle, unchallenged racist things we say when we don't think about who it might affect.

But here's the hard part--like my brush with the unfortunate man in the parking garage, most "racism" isn't overt--it's hinted at, it's beneath the surface and it's a bit morally ambiguous. It's not as easy to rally against, and therefore not nearly as easy to eliminate from society. And it may be just as effective in denying countless deserving individuals opportunity or delivering them unjust punishment or making them feel less than human. It's a problem that is very difficult to solve, but the first step is admitting that it's in each and every one of us.

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