Race Card Background
I grew up in a ‘sundown town’ in Ohio – an all white community where African Americans were implicitly required to leave before sundown each day. This was never verbalized or codified, but everyone somehow knew it. Our neighbor was overtly racist; he actually had a full size Swatstika flag hanging in his basement. He openly talked of the need to ‘get rid of’ n—— frequently. One day 12-year-old me saw a black family – mom, dad & kids – over at his house for a cookout in the back yard! I went to investigate – they were friends from their old neighborhood in Cleveland. When I later asked how he squared this with his views on black people, he shrugged and said, “Oh, he’s one of the good ones”. I then thought about my own family, where we all praised MLK and racial equality, but at the same time we never once had a non-white friend or visitor in our house. To this day I wonder — which family was really more racist?
