Ethnicity in America

Pat Buchanan

New York Times opinion writer Charles M. Blow, in "White Extinction Anxiety," talks about the racial views of longtime Republican stalwart Pat Buchanan. Buchanan says that we white Americans are poised to lose our very identity due to demographic trends which mean that the country will be majority-minority even sooner than experts used to think.

Buchanan has said, "You cannot stop these sentiments of people who want to live together with their own and they want their borders protected."

Buchanan's wrong. White people who "want to live together with their own" can instead learn to accommodate themselves to multiculturalism.

My own life is a case in point. I grew up as a racist. I'm no longer a racist.

I was born into the white American middle class in 1947. At that time, virtually no progress had been made in civil rights. I imbibed my parents' view that blacks were inferior to whites intellectually and morally.

I knew very few African Americans during my childhood. My family had a once-a-week "colored" maid, Frances. She was a nice enough person, but she could barely read and write.

My elementary school was all-white, but the janitor was a black man, Rev. Snowden. I assumed he was just a janitor because of his racial inferiority.

In the early 1960s the civil rights movement began to pick up steam. I was opposed to it. I thought racial integration was never going to work. I also thought all white people felt the same way.

In 1963 and 1964, I had a summer job in the mail room of the National Republican Congressional Committee. No non-whites worked at the NRCC. Our mail room was, however, occasionally visited by a young black man who was a message courier. One day, not knowing he was in another part of the room, I accidentally uttered the N-word in his presence. My co-workers shushed me. I was quite embarrassed at having hurt the courier's feelings by using a word that I usually never spoke. The next time he arrived in our mail room, I apologized ... and he accepted my apology. It may have been the first time I ever dealt with a black person as an actual human being.

When I was a freshman at Georgetown University in 1965, I let it drop to a new friend — a white man with whom I am still friends — that I thought blacks to be inferior to whites. My friend reamed me out for believing such a thing. It was the first time I ever knew that white people could truly accept "Negroes" (as African Americans were then called) as equals.

For quite a while from that time on, I was on the fence with regard to black equality and civil rights. But I was no longer an out-and-out racist. Looking back, I can't quite explain why I was shifting my views. I guess it may have been because I found I had very few white friends who were themselves out-and-out racists.

There came a time perhaps 20 years ago when my nearly all-white neighborhood turned multiethnic. My next door neighbors were black. Then, by about 10 years ago, my neighbors on the other side of my house were also a black family. I was at first scared that the neighborhood was going downhill. But that didn't happen. In fact, I found I got along well with my new black neighbors.

As time has marched on, I've come to know any number of black people ... and found that I like all of them.

You can't really like people unless you realize they are like you. Black people are not different from whites in any really important way. Oh, there are a great many differences between black cultural norms and white ones. But those differences are only superficial ones. Deep down, whites and blacks are just alike. The realizing of that fact was what has (gradually) made it possible for me to stop being a racist.

If that can happen to me, it can happen to anyone who is a white racist. It can even happen to Pat Buchanan.