One day when I was about 7 years old, I came home from school rhyming a nifty-sounding little ditty I’d learned from a classmate that started out, “eenie meenie miney moe,” and mom – about as even-tempered a person there ever was – exploded, her eyes flashing an anger I did not know. Don’t remember the words much, but, by God, she did make me feel like I’d been riding with that devil guy she’d warned me about.
Race per se wasn’t a big deal in our family, as Mom and Dad met every person as equals and either was apt to say, “You can learn something useful from anyone,” and as we got older added the addendum, “Every person deserves a chance to show what they can do without prejudice.” How could it be any more fair? But, it turns out, it could be less. There were lots of white people on both sides of the civil rights movement; some felt their heart beating every day, and some just felt the fist of their fathers. The much-touted Christianity was often nowhere to be seen, while people whose ancestors were stolen from their African homelands, chained and sold like livestock, were cut, dragged, lynched, raped and burned alive by white people. God was apparently out to lunch those days.
Then, in 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King — the man of beautiful words, and even better wisdom — was silenced by the hate inside an assassin’s heart. And cities burned. During all this, our Christian mom was always reminding us to honor the Golden Rule. She’d say, “If everyone would just respect the Golden Rule, everything else would take care of itself.” Trouble is, humans are apparently too stupid to handle one simple rule.
At that time in history, I was a delivery boy and apprentice in a print shop in Anchorage. At 20 years old, I was bottom man. I had recently discovered the paperback Western, and to pass our twice-daily, 15-minute coffee breaks, would sit by myself on one side of the press room while the rest of the guys gathered on the other side. Problem for me was, while distance muffled a lot of the talk, I could still hear the n-word wrapped with hate whenever heated voices rose to a certain level. I heard enough to know that most of the hatred flowed from one mouth, and then, one day, something just broke in my head. I got up, hands clenched and hot, and walked across the room, where a fight broke out — mainly due to the fact that my anger was greater than my ability to speak my mind. All this led to a company meeting, discussions and both of us still employed. I was just happy I didn’t hear racist talk again during my last year of employment there.
All my life I’ve fought against bullies and racism, and now, 52 years later, it feels like nothing has changed; in reality, racism had just crawled underground, shaded by code words, until a rich charlatan bully and white supremacist sympathizer came along adding water and fertilizer to the soils of hate.
Look into your mirrors, people, to see if you can find your soul. Here’s a hint: If the first thing you do every morning is put on your cruel shoes, you have a problem. I know for a lot of people, bullying and racism might feel a little comfortable because that is the way Daddy did it, and because that is the way their Daddy had done it before him, but wrong is wrong, no matter who’s done it and for how long. The perfect parent hasn’t been born, but here is one thing we all can do to make the world a better place: Take the single thing that most angered you about your parent or parents and try not to repeat it yourself.
Karl Braendel was born in 1948 in Anchorage; he now lives in Chickaloon as a self-employed hunting guide.
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Racism is a passed-down behavior. That's how we can end it. - Anchorage Daily News
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