I don’t know about you, but I don’t encounter many racists. Maybe I’m naive, and maybe people just tell me what I want to hear, but I don’t associate with white people who despise black people or vice versa. I’m not personally acquainted with anyone who would advocate white supremacy or black supremacy. I don’t overhear racial slurs or otherwise witness ethnic hatred during my daily life. I can’t say it has never happened, but my 8- and 10-year-old children can.
Obviously, there is still much raw hatred in the world: Internet chat rooms and comment sections seem to have been created to breed it. Talk radio and TV add their own layers of vile stereotyping of people by race—especially dehumanizing African-Americans—and it is beamed out around the clock, both locally and by satellite.
But the vast majority of folks in my acquaintance do understand that all of us were created equal. I imagine the same is true of yours. Most would like very much to see us start living up to Martin Luther King Jr.’s ideal that people be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Even as we fail to do that, I get the sense that it’s more because of bad history than bad intentions.
Still, this is St. Louis, and it truly is a place of bad history in this regard—really bad history. From its days as a slave-trading capital and the site of the notorious Dred Scott decision to the horrid distinctions of having some of the most segregated school systems and redlined residential neighborhoods in America (perhaps second to none), to the ugly resistance to baseball’s integration, to the newest worldwide shame called “Ferguson,” St. Louis can’t run from the racism. It’s our reality.
If you’d like a nice chill down the spine, check out Jeannette Cooperman’s compelling historical account, then review the awful statistics in the November issue's cover feature. That racist history is clear, and so are the resulting numbers: For all of its positive attributes, St. Louis has been torn across racial and ethnic lines for all of its celebrated 250-year history. And there is so much injustice to show for it.
How does this all compute? If we’re living in a place known far and wide for its awful race relations, why isn’t it a common occurrence for us to encounter racial hatred and tension? With due respect to those living in some of the toughest parts of town—where such tensions are felt much more often—there’s a real disconnect for many people in St. Louis between the reality of our lives and the reality of our reputation.
Even for those of us living in diverse communities, it’s hard to reconcile daily lives free of ethnic animosities with the knowledge that the community as a whole is plagued by them. It’s even harder for those in homogenous places, where interracial interactions are less frequent.
And consider this: As one who has gone to thousands of sporting events and cultural activities and festivals over five decades, and excluding some moments in and around the bar scene, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a racial fight break out. How is that possible in a racist city?
You cannot have racism without racists, but am I figuratively living in a well-appointed cave as I wonder where they all are? What causes the disconnect?
Segregation. That’s my oversimplified answer: segregation. We are not a gated community; we’re a walled community. The great racial divide—ironically defined by one of the grandest of streets, Delmar Boulevard—has been the single greatest hurdle to progress and prosperity in St. Louis and remains so. For whatever reasons, our ancestors could not or did not embrace sociological changes over a period of decades and even centuries, and up went the walls.
Somehow, we never got it right. For generations, we’ve maintained a plantation mentality without the plantations. We kept the schoolhouses segregated without blocking the schoolhouse doors. We weren’t Northern enough to provide the African-American community with the opportunity for freedom and upward mobility. We weren’t Southern enough to carry some guilt about the legacy of the Confederacy.
And now we have Ferguson. On one level, this is the ultimate racial tragedy as Michael Brown’s death fits squarely into the national narrative of unarmed blacks getting killed by white police officers. There’s a real chance that no indictment will be forthcoming of Officer Darren Wilson, and that would line up with another national reality, which is that to African-Americans, the judicial system is summed up as “justice and just us.” The case is also widely perceived as a racial-profiling one, because you won’t sell many African-Americans of any walk of life—or others like myself—on the notion that the fate that befell Brown would have happened had he been white.
But as much as Ferguson has been a story about race, it is also about the police, and had there not been images beamed across the planet of smoke and tear gas being shot at peaceful demonstrators by a militarized police force, the story would have lost its international news value much more quickly. Now, we can deconstruct all that and debate it and give credit to the overstressed police forces for having survived the ordeal with no fatalities on either side. But our reality is what it is: St. Louis’ reputation for racial tension and division just got exponentially worse.
Ironically, Ferguson hasn’t been a story about segregation, except that it has featured a nearly all-white police force in a city that is two-thirds African-American. Indeed, Ferguson’s population is statistically less segregated than a great many of St. Louis County’s other 89 balkanized municipalities. But this is such an enormous story, and such a defining moment, that our best hope is that it actually moves the needle on St. Louis’ racial problem.
That brings us back to segregation. Let this be a moment to consider what St. Louis could be if the walls of racial separation came down.
For whatever it’s worth, I want to share my own personal perspective on this, because it might speak to the healing power of a little integration. When I graduated from Parkway Central High School in 1970, I believe we had one black kid out of an enrollment of 2,200. (If I’m off, it’s not by much.) I’m a product of segregation.
But just a couple of years earlier, I’d been blessed to have a life-changing experience. Thanks to a program championed without fanfare by my father, Charles Hartmann—my ultimate hero—the Eagle Scout Association offered a Boy Scout camping program at Beaumont Scout Reservation to kids from the inner-city housing projects. I spent about six one-week sessions over a couple of summers as a youth leader for groups of 15 to 20 African-American kids. I’m sure it was a good experience for them, but it was a better one for me.
The scout camp typically had something like 200 kids in attendance, but the only ones I knew by the end of the week were my small group of scouts. And even though I was one of the wimpiest teenage scout leaders ever and from the most lily-white background imaginable, I was one of them for a week, and they treated me as such. As I’d look around the swimming pool, it would hit me: The only people that little white me knew at all were the black kids. They were my friends for the week. We knew each other’s names and were comfortable together. My “fellow” white kids were the strangers.
I cannot overstate how that changed and shaped my perspective on race. It certainly turned me into an unabashed integrationist. Now, I’m sure some would say it was for the worse: I know lots of white people got sick of me whining during my days as owner of the Riverfront Times in the following terms:
“Why should 30 rich white guys in Civic Progress be deciding everything? Do you think that if 30 poor African-American women called all the shots, our biggest priorities would be new skyscrapers and a football stadium?”
Well, Civic Progress has faded as the sole source of local power, morphing into a less-dominant organization of quiet good deeds as St. Louis has transitioned from a town of corporate headquarters to a town of corporate outposts. And it even has a distinguished African-American member. So I’ve moved on from that speech.
But I haven’t moved on from this: I wish everyone on either side of the segregated divide could have the opportunity to feel what it is like to be identified solely, even fleetingly, with the other side. It really changes your perspective.
I won’t back down in stating that our racial divide is the worst problem facing this town. But I also refuse to believe that we’re a place overrun by racists and racism.
We just need to come together, literally, to push back against our legacy of segregation.
We need a new movement called integration. And we need it now.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
