After a stint in a Mississippi prison, Darryl Robertson began his writing career working for the local newspaper in Laurel (Salon):
For the first time in my life I had to interact with white people. I’d never really been around white people before. Because of my ignorance, I believed that all white people were godly intellectuals. This is not to say that now I believe that white people aren’t intelligent. Many white white people are. It’s just that before I knew any, I assumed that all white people had to be experts in the study of life.
My ideas about whiteness were shaped by society. On television, most people were white. My teachers were white. Politicians were white. And white people lived in big houses in safe neighborhoods, which looked very expensive. My mind associated all of this with intelligence. But my stereotypical notions of whiteness waned as I began to spend time around all kinds of white people, from public officials and police officers to working-class whites in my community.
A friend my wife met years ago while electioneering told her the same thing recently, confirming Robertson’s early impressions. He’d grown up thinking white people were simply smarter.
The former staff writer for VIBE found new experiences revealed the unfair stereotypes he’d held about white people. It works both ways, of course:
I’m convinced that America will never cure its racial sickness because no one wants to begin with what they do not understand. Beginning with what you do not understand is to expose your ignorance. And America, academia, liberalism, capitalism, and extremism frowns on ignorance. But in actuality, all of us are ignorant. But we’ll never understand our ignorance, because America has made ignorance a taboo.
What I learned from my early interactions with white people in downtown Laurel, along with my former college classmate, is that everyone — whether consciously or unconsciously — is on the hunt for answers. I think it would benefit everyone if we understood that people’s experiences and educations, however flawed, shape their thoughts and ideas. What we know, or think we know, is minuscule compared to what we don’t understand.
Faking it until you make it does not work with race relations. Robertson’s tale is one of those reminders it is useful to get regularly enough to remind us what we don’t know. Two things I tell myself often:
1) I’m not as smart as I think I am.
2) There are libraries filled with things I don’t know.