WHEN DID GOD MAKE COLOR A SIGN OF QUALITY?

When Did God Make Color A Sign of Quality?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005


Prejudice is the child of ignorance.

William Hazlitt (1778 – 1830)
English critic

When I was in graduate school as a mature adult, having gone back for my doctorate after a career spanning the United States, South America, Europe and South Africa, I thought I had experienced the ultimate in societal prejudice in South African apartheid.

For those of you not familiar with this policy, the Afrikaner government of white South Africans, after coming to power in 1948, created this policy of “separate development of the races.” It was designed to send the majority of South African Bantu or blacks into several different homelands, homelands that were outside the urban-industrial wealth bearing regions of the country, while expecting the Bantu and Coloreds, or those of mix races to carry identity cards to validate their presence in the white areas.

Moreover, the policy was such that a person of race could be held ninety days without charges, and this could be extended another ninety days should the courts so desire. When I lived there, the white population was about 3.5 million mainly of Dutch, French Huguenot and British ancestry, while 14 million were Bantu and Coloreds.

I lived there in 1968 when apartheid was being fully enforced. It is gone today with the majority Bantu population now in power. What made the policy especially disconcerting to an American is that I was in South Africa at the same time Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was being assassinated, which made it hard to defend our American policy of tolerance and freedom.

Still, at the time a young man in my thirties, the South African experience was so wrenching that I resigned my executive position with a chemical company, and did little more than read, write a little, and try to understand what I had experienced for a period of more than two years. At the end of that period, I went back to school.

During this self-imposed sabbatical, I wrote some articles on South Africa attempting to create a balanced view, but abandoned a project of writing a South Africa novel. Now more than a quarter century later, I still haven’t written the novel, and I still try to understand how my company, and my fellow Americans with whom I worked were not as deeply wounded by the incongruity of my company’s principles and actual policy in the field.

Some of my colleagues accused me of being an idealist, others a romantic, and still others of being a breast-thumping liberal. I saw myself as none of these, but only as a person growing confused seeing the company playing games of duplicity, while purporting to being upstanding and holding to the beliefs that all men are created equal with certain unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Then only the other day I read of Reginald Pitts, a black man, who carries out an assignment of a white colleague, who wasn’t available, to buy season holiday gift cards from Wal-Mart, something that his company has done for years to the tune of $50,000 per year, and he is subjected to the nightmare of being treated as if a criminal attempting to pass a bogus check of $13,600, something that had never happened before to anyone in his company on a similar assignment. And I was outraged. South Africa came back with a vengeance.

A Wal-Mart spokeswoman stated, “Our company is built upon respect for the individual and we have no tolerance for discrimination of any type.”

The statement made me think of my company in South Africa. It not only made such statements but put out brochures to that same effect. But in practice, and I know directly from experience, if you were too familiar, too relaxed, and too accommodating to Bantu, as I was my driver, and the servants in my home, you were called on the carpet with a statement to the effect, “This is not your country. Do you want to get deported?”

My point is that the offending party in this case, the Wal-Mart person who might be reprimanded or possibly even fired for this prejudicial behavior, is not the boogeyman.

It goes far higher up the tree, if it is anything like my own experience. The rhetoric, the official policy, and all the company’s talking heads when the mike is on will serenade the listener with the same melody of tolerance. It is, however, the casual conversation one hears among executives or employees during relaxed periods on the job, or in the privacy of their homes far away from the crowd that you are reminded from the highest to the lowest in the pecking order what is the prevalent mindset. Then there are those sidebar conversations, like the one that I alluded to, where you are told the lay of the land, but “don’t quote me on that.”

We have seen it with Katrina in a most blatant way, but we see it every day in little ways, ways that irritate but are not life threatening as they were with Katrina. Reginald Pitts, who experienced this shopping nightmare, sadly, may speak to the rule rather than the exception.

Curtis Stokes, who is a 37-year-old Tampa vice president with the Fifth Third Bank, a member of the private University Club, an exclusive Tampa business and professional organization, and a father, and first vice president of the Hillsborough County (Tampa) chapter of the NAACP, said he isn’t surprised at what happened to Mr. Pitts. He says people see him first as black, and stare at him with fear in their eyes, why he doesn’t know. He has had undercover security officers trail him in department stores, cops pull him over when he’s driving a block from his Tampa Palms home, one of the upscale neighborhoods in Tampa. “It’s one of those things no matter how you dress or act, you’re a black guy at the end of the day.”

What is especially sad about Mr. Stokes’s remarks is that he is now teaching his seven-year-old son to dress and act in non-confrontational ways, to act essentially invisible so that no harm will come to him. I heard about the same words from my driver in South Africa for his son. “You’re a Kaffir,” he told his child, “remember that, don’t look them (whites) in the eye, just go about your business.”

A few years ago, when Barry Bonds had yet another tremendous year, a Tampa businessman said to me, “He’s one hellava black player.” I corrected him, “He’s one hellava player who happens to be black.” He looked at me as if I were tilted, turned away and said, “Whatever.”

This problem is not one of color but culture, and it is deep in our society’s veins, and cannot be changed without a cultural value transfusion, especially now that Caucasians are increasingly the minority in the world’s population. Ignorance is no longer bliss.

The referenced articles appeared in The Tampa Tribune, Nation/World section, December 3, 2005.