This is not easy for me, but I suppose most people have difficulty exposing skeletons in their closets. Other than family members, I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of persons with whom I've discussed this matter.
Several years after his death, I learned my maternal grandfather had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. In a way, it was one of those "shocked, but not really surprised" moments.
I'd figured out by about age 10 that he was a racist, based on things he'd occasionally say in front of us grandchildren, as well as the white supremacist literature I'd sometimes see when I visited him. Anyway, plenty of other people were running around saying the same things then, so I didn't think much of it. I certainly never believed he might have been a full-fledged Klansman.
A couple of decades later, I discovered otherwise.
Like all of us, he was complicated and conflicted; not all good or all bad. He owned a small grocery story in southwest Arkansas, and older relatives have told my generation he would extend credit--including to Black families--during the Great Depression, and occasionally donated food for some of the neediest in the community, regardless of race.
When I grew up in the mostly segregated South of the 1950s-60s, it was implied, if not outright expressed, that not everybody was equal. Whether it was skin color, gender, sexual orientation, money, religion, or some other factor, there was a divinely inspired pecking order that, as long as it was not disrupted, would maintain stability and peace. At least that's what those in my demographic group were supposed to believe.
My parents did not overtly try to instill that doctrine in me, although they were "products of their era," and had their prejudices. But they worked too hard to provide for my younger sister and me to spend time indoctrinating us in such matters. They neither told us to hate anybody, nor encouraged us to join the ACLU.
Then one hot August afternoon in 1963, I watched television coverage of the March on Washington. I listened to a man--Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.--who had been called all sorts of insults by those around me since he'd become the leader the emerging civil rights movement. As I heard his eloquent and impassioned speech, it dawned on me that he was not seeking special privileges or considerations; he only asked for the same rights all citizens supposedly had been promised in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
It wasn't quite like being struck blind on the road to Damascus, but it caused me to start questioning everything I'd been told in my 13 years of life, and anything else I'd later be told. It didn't take long to realize that I and many others had been told a lot of lies. The lying continues; if anything, with more frequency and less subtlety.
My wife came from a similar background, growing up in Alabama and Arkansas, and with loving parents who also did not teach hatred, but were still trapped inside their own upbringing. We've both had relatively successful professional careers, but we agree that our proudest accomplishment has been raising two children who've been taught (and embraced) the principle that all human beings are worthy individuals who deserve to be treated equally and equitably, based not on demographic factors, but, as Dr. King said, "by the content of their character."
The United States is now 245 years into our great experiment, which began with noble words about freedom, equality, and justice for all. Unfortunately, it's never lived up to those promises. That doesn't mean it never will, or that we citizens shouldn't keep working to achieve those ideals.
Racism is not a gene passed on to each new generation via DNA. Children aren't born knowing how to hate; it is taught to them. The cycle of hatred that continues to inflict discrimination and injustice on some U.S. citizens can--and must--be broken if we are ever to establish the kind of nation our fundamental documents claim we want to have.
Doug Szenher lives in Little Rock.