Intolerant history casts a long shadow

Not lost in the past, racism is a ghost that continues to haunt America.

By: M.K. Irwin

Posted: 10/10/08

Friends, my heart catches and chokes like a heavy stone in my throat as I write this. I awoke today, I thought, in the year 2008.

America has finally nominated a black man for president and a woman for vice president. Regardless of one's political position(s), voters' choices this year seem to indicate that America continues to progress socially, culturally and politically. But as I sat breakfasting late this morning at a local dining haunt, I saw something that gave me sickening pause and caused me to rethink my notions of American progress.

A robust, barrel-chested man seemingly suffering from some kind of ambulatory disability shuffled incongruously on pencil legs up to the counter of the Texas Avenue Whataburger. He sported a weathered collection of various cheaply-drawn tattoos emblazoned up and down his arms. On his left forearm sneered a hideous, multicolored skull. On his right (I had to look thrice to verify) and situated prominently for maximum effect, stood a hooded Klansman brandishing a flaming torch in one hand, the severed head of a black person clutched by the hair in the other and white-robed arms outstretched before a burning cross in the foreground. This was an elaborate and disquietingly frightful scene on anyone's flesh, but somehow eerily at home on this dark-eyed, hobbling, unkempt fat man.

After finishing chewing and swallowing the bite of now sour-tasting biscuit of which the odd moment made me forget I had partaken, I wondered sadly (because you absolutely could not miss the tattoos) at the feelings and first impressions of the tired, young black woman at the cash register. She tried to muster a wan smile as she accepted the man's money thrust out from the end of that same hate-covered arm. I wondered, too, his massive, sleeveless, flannel-draped back to me almost eclipsing the girl, what he must think having to interact so closely with this anonymous black someone who some sick other someone once taught him to hate preemptively solely on the basis of her skin color. I didn't want to ponder such thoughts any further than this bizarre moment, but his ugly, angry, arm art compelled me to.

I hadn't felt this saddened about any so random a human happening for some while. Did this poster-child of human hatred really feel somehow justified or righteous or good in despising someone he's never even met? Did she sense creeping up her spine a chilling kinship with her ancestors, connecting with them in a painful way she hoped she'd never have to feel publicly? Will the fact that people still walk around broadcasting such misanthropy haunt her thoughts all day? All of her days? Did I just witness someone publicly losing her ethnic innocence? Does he still bear in his heart the same malevolence he vulgarly displays on his forearms? Or prayerfully, has it become a lurid badge of dishonor and shame, the ideological origins of which have faded within him as much as the dark message his arm still silently but forcefully conveys without?

I know this one man's pathetic pictographic manifesto shouldn't cause me to question the degree to which our nation has grown through or past the racial paradigms of the 1950s (or 1850s, 1750s and 1650s). I suspect that he constitutes a thankfully ever-diminishing minority here in Texas or anywhere else in America. And I trust that the fact that most of Obama's detractors could care less about his skin color and instead merely dislike some of his politics proves that as a culture, we have continued to distance ourselves from our historically more destructive race relations tendencies.

But that won't likely soon erase what I saw or felt this morning. A man's grotesque, antique tattoo ghostly echoing our all-too-recently shameful past, and in that present moment, witnessing it intruding on the consciousness of that young, black woman still sickened me to my core.

May heaven have mercy on both their hearts and mine, as I continue trying to shed the burden of my sole-surviving personal paradox: I'm only prejudiced against bigots.