OPINION

JOHN BRUMMETT: Privilege of being Bubba

"I've got some questions," Bubba McCoy declared contentiously seconds after I got him on the phone. I told him to cut loose.

"First off, what's systematic racism?"

The word is "systemic," I corrected meekly. It means that the race problem anymore is not individual prejudice. That's a personal problem.

Instead, the contemporary race problem is a deeply pervasive system that still keeps white people advantaged over Black people, no matter how much better some white people may be doing in their individual racial attitudes.

"So," Bubba said, "it's got nothing to do with me."

Oh, dear, it has everything to do with you, I told Bubba.

I reminded him that he was an average high school student at best and yet he got to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville in 1968. A young Black man in the Delta with his grades might well have had less money or opportunity at that juncture to go to college there.

Then Bubba sat around in the student union playing dominoes, hearts, and spades, and flunked out.

Yet he married a well-off farmer's daughter from the next county whom he'd met in college. From that, he got set up in the car business by his father-in-law's money and prominence.

That wouldn't have been nearly as likely an opportunity in 1968 for a young Black son of the Delta who, even if he'd gotten to Fayetteville, had flunked out.

"I made this car business work all by myself," Bubba said.

Alas, he didn't. It takes a bit of a village to sustain a charmingly irascible good ol' boy.

Bubba's money for his property and his beginning stock of vehicles--where did he get that?

"I paid him back every cent, plus interest," Bubba said of his daddy-in-law.

Well, sure. But the point is Bubba had his own private bank. Did he think that the similarly situated young Black man in the Delta would have had the same opportunity?

"Is that my fault? What am I supposed to do--sit around and do nothin'?"

He is supposed to make the best of his opportunities, as Bubba admirably had done. But he wasn't supposed to try to tell me that he was excepted from white privilege and systemic racism.

"What about you?" Bubba asked, his voice rising.

It was the same thing, if not more pronounced. A Black kid not finished in college who had just been fired at the Log Cabin Democrat for lethargic indifference was probably not going to be hired in July 1977 by the Arkansas Gazette.

"What are we supposed to do about it, then," Bubba asked. "Tear down all the statues?"

No, I replied. We should destroy or relocate the ones that celebrate the Confederacy or individuals simply because they were leaders of the Confederacy.

Blatant celebration by white people of Black bondage is a deep affront to, for example, that Black man who didn't have a rich father-in-law to hand him a business to run.

"You're going to end up with no damned American history," Bubba said. "We'll have to mark through George Washington and Thomas Jefferson."

No one is proposing to rip a single page from a history book. Washington and Jefferson are celebrated for being founders of our very republic. We don't put up monuments to them because they had slaves or waged war against the very country they founded.

Bubba said he just didn't know. He said it all seemed silly to him.

"And this business about hate crimes ... I don't get that, either. I hate you right now. Is that a crime?"

I told Bubba I was quite sure he didn't hate me. And I said he could shoot me dead and probably escape additional penalty beyond that for basic murder--which is plenty--even if he did hate me.

Being an obese Caucasian senior citizen is not covered among victims in typical hate-crimes laws. Those laws are designed to protect people from harm based on race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

"You've got an answer for everything, don't you?" Bubba said.

I told him I didn't have an answer for everything, but that law and logic contained an answer for everything he'd asked so far.

"All I'm saying," Bubba said with a sigh, "is that this is a crazy time."

I said we could agree on that and pivoted to ask Bubba how he was doing amid the virus.

"Ain't no virus over here," he said.

What was Bubba doing for the Fourth?

"Can't go anywhere. The wife is afraid. And the kids and grandkids won't come over for fear of giving us old folks the virus.

"So, I reckon I'll just sit at home and celebrate the slave owners who started our country, if that's all right with you."

That's fine by me, I told him, but to be sure and fly our American flag instead of the shamed Confederacy's.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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