Racism not a thing of the past

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Brad Wallace

All I can do is admit my own hypocrisy and ignorance regarding racism. Raised in an affluent Phoenix suburb, the closest I came to a multicultural understanding was listening to the Cypress Hill.

And then I met Ro Harris. You couldn't imagine a stranger pair of friends - me, the tall goofy, uber-white dude, and Ro, the black, hip New Yorker from the projects. We stand on opposite sides of the cultural schism that is race in America. While I was making Homecoming floats and attending pep rallies, Ro was dealing drugs to feed his younger siblings and worrying about getting killed.

From prevailing attitudes about race, you'd never think we'd be friends: after all, white folks watch MSNBC, black folks watch the WB, and that's the way it is.

However, within a few hours of meeting each other, we were talking giddily until dawn about music, drugs and sex - the great unifiers of young America. I discovered that he liked the Talking Heads as much as I did, and he made me listen to A Tribe Called Quest until 3 a.m. So there we sat, me in a dirty T-shirt, him in freshly pressed Tommy Gear, both of us marveling that everything we'd heard about "the other folks" was dead wrong, and that there really is only one kind of person.

We became good friends. He called me "his nigger," and looked forward to taking me home to New York to show his friends that not every white in America was a Honky.

Once we went out to a bar, in central Florida, which is a place where confederate flags are still flown. I was with Ro and another black friend, and we walked into this sleazy dive full of backwoods bikers. Their looks of hate and whispering as we strolled in still burn me today. I heard someone mutter "nigger" and there was nothing kind about it. We left in a hurry, and I was beginning to get the vaguest notion of what blacks must endure every day.

I wore white privilege unconsciously. Of course, I could go anywhere in America and be welcome - after all, there's no more racism, right?

The real truth is that being white makes it easy to believe that the world is better, after all we're not the ones who have to deal with persecution every day, and we're not the ones who face discrimination in job availability and wages.

There isn't a decent person in the world who would admit to being racist, nonetheless not taking proactive steps towards equality and integration is racist.

Not that it's just the whites. Look around at our diverse student body. African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans - we've got it all. Nonetheless, when is the last time that you saw a racially integrated group of friends sitting together in the Union, bullshitting about this or that?

We live in our very separate worlds, thinking that it's enough merely to exist in the same place, without existing together.

Last weekend I heard that my friend Ro had killed himself, without explanation or warning.

I was devastated. Another wonderful life, gone. I'll never sit on a porch and talk about David Byrne with him, and he'll never get to rave about the Fugees' first album to me again. He died in a world as divided and lost as the one that our grandfathers lived in. Despite our hopes of raising children together in a world where it didn't matter what you wore, or who you listened to, and most of all, what part of the world you ancestors came from, Ro will never get the opportunity to experience such an America. And unless things radically change, neither will any of us.

Whenever the weight of racism seems more than I can bear, and hopes for better world seem foolishly idealistic, I turn to a quote by Franz Fanon, multicultural philosopher and social critic, who always identified himself as a writer, not a black writer: "Always make of me a man who questions."

We're all questioning here, friends. Can we find some answers together?

Brad Wallace is a creative writing and molecular and cellular biology senior. His column, Handful of Dust, appears every Tuesday and he can be reached via e-mail at Brad.Wallace@wildcat.arizona.edu.