Robert Simpson: Color me blind

The year was 1959. Our unit’s second-in-command had recently received orders reassigning him from Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, back to the continental United States. It would be a loss to the unit and to me. He was a tough, smart, disciplined soldier, senior to me and more experienced, and I had great respect for him. I enjoyed his friendship, a friendship that flourished despite our different backgrounds. He was an African-American from New York City. I was a Caucasian from rural North Carolina.

My friend had just told me that he would be shipping his automobile to New York and flying to the East Coast. I, never shy about offering advice, was insisting that he should drive across the country instead. I’d driven from sea to sea in the opposite direction, and I thought it would be a great trip for him and his family. When he had heard all my arguments, he said, quietly, “I understand, but you can stop and eat or spend the night wherever you want. I can’t. And I’m not going to subject my family to that.” I was stunned. Because of the color of his skin, a better man than I was denied simple freedoms readily available to me, a denial tacitly accepted by the government whose uniform he wore and which he had sworn to defend even to the death if necessary. This pernicious system had existed all my life, yet I had not bothered to give it a second thought. Feeling a deep sadness for my friend and guilt for my obtuseness, all I could manage to say was, “Jack, I am sorry.”

Fifty-seven years after that day, things are a lot different. And some things, not so much. A tendency to blindness remains with many of us. And a tendency to defensiveness when anyone suggests that we have a race relations problem. And a tendency to deny history, on the grounds that it’s unpatriotic to point out shortcomings in our own nation, which we must insist is near perfect, lest someone think we are traitors.

All of this came into sharp focus in the last two weeks as I read “Blood At the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America,” by Patrick Phillips, who grew up in Cumming, Georgia, and who wrote a thoroughly researched book about the 1912 lynching of young black men determined, on the basis of very questionable evidence, to have raped and murdered a young white woman. This travesty of justice was followed by a systematic brutal, terroristic ethnic cleansing of Forsyth County, Georgia. Black families, many of whom were solid citizens, long established in the county, were driven out. The exclusion of black citizens from Forsyth County continued until surprisingly recently.

During the same period when I was reading the book, I also watched the documentary “The 13th,” an unsettling examination of the history and persistence of racism in this country. The film piles fact on top of fact, example after example of the criminalization and massive incarceration of minority members of our society, until you want to say, “Wait, some of this must be overstated.” Always a possibility. But if only one half of what is shown in “The 13th” is correct, we have a huge problem, and it threatens to metastasize if we remain blind. The title of the documentary refers to the 13th Amendment, ending slavery and involuntary servitude. It was greeted with joy when it passed, but was only a tiny first step in a journey still haltingly under way. The book illustrates the existence of severe racial discrimination almost half a century after a bloody war and a hard-won 13th Amendment brought an end to slavery. The documentary shows how, even a century and a half after that supposed victory, we have not solved the underlying problems.

In all the years since that day at Schofield Barracks, I saw my old friend only once, twenty years later, for about one minute in a corridor of the Pentagon, I hurrying to a meeting, he hurrying to the Far East. I wish I had taken that moment to thank him for jarring the scales from my eyes, even briefly, in 1959. But considering our progress since then, and lack thereof, I would have had to say, once more, “Jack, I am sorry.”

This story was originally published October 22, 2016 at 4:47 PM with the headline "Robert Simpson: Color me blind."