I’m posting this with permission of the writer, a friend of mine via social media thanks to shared interests. It makes a connection that too many fail to see. We talk about racism, but shouldn’t forget it’s part of the larger problem of unthinking prejudice. It can hit anyone, but unless or until it hits home, it’s very easy to overlook.
Some people may wonder why I am incensed about the death of Mr. Floyd, more than I might otherwise be.
Some may wonder why I have a fair deal of sympathy for the protestors.
You deserve an answer.
I've had a taste, a tiny, infinitesimally small but bitter taste, of what black people go through.
I'm from West Virginia.
For a long time, we were considered to be a land of dumb, inbred hillbillies. I would imagine to some others, thankfully not my friends here, that would still apply.
When I was an auditor, I had an assignment on a restaurant franchisee that was headquartered in Virginia, and operating in West Virginia and Virginia. My contact was a person from West Virginia.
I asked him, "A fellow West Virginian, what town would you be from?"
He: "It's a small place, I'd bet you never heard of it."
Me: "Maybe, maybe not. Where is it? You have me curious."
He told me the name of the town, a very rural name. Think of a name with a hick connotation like "Hooterville," from "Petticoat Junction," or the real Possum Grape, Arkansas, or Kickapoo, Kansas.
Me: "Oh, I know that place, it's in my territory. It's where three roads come together and form a wye or triangle. Most of the town is inside that wye. One leg leads to Romney, the north leg goes to Ridgeley, just across the river from Cumberland. The third leg goes to Keyser. There's a grocery store at the point of that third leg, and an old woman lives in a green house across from the store."
He laughed--"Oh, you've been there!!"
He continued on--
"A lot of people would laugh at the name of ----- --- , so I just tell them I'm from Keyser. It's OK, the high school is there."
There was more--
He--"The managers here don't think think much of me being from West Virginia. I've been passed up on promotions because I'm not from Virginia."
I asked him why he was even staying in the company.
He replied, "I'm still going to work my way up. They can't ignore me forever, not if I do better than anyone else here."
That was one incident.
Another was an accountant in another town in Virginia, who had a West Virginia client. Among the comments he had were that a lot of people in West Virginia couldn't read. We wound up doing kind of OK when I commented about how hard it could be to read tax forms and their instructions (which have to follow tax LAW, and recall who writes laws)--but those remarks I think would be considered inappropriate at best. I wonder what, if anything, his client knew of this person's opinion of where he was from.
There have been other things, including portrayals of West Virginians that were in poor taste by rival football team halftime shows when our people were playing out of state. I am proud to note some people from those other states were also impressed that Mountain State athletes have been among the most polite and gentlemanly of travellers when they were seen in public, say at a restaurant going to or from one of these games.
In any case, I hope you can see how I have sympathy for black people.
And I'm a white guy. I've never gone through anything like they have. I've never worried that my life might be in danger just because I look funny or scarey or different to somebody.
In short, I am about as clueless as anybody about what they live through daily.
We don't need such a lot of garbage in our society.
Don't we have enough problems to fix without blindly, ignorantly, making problems by writing off part of the population--part of us--based on appearance, or even just where we are from?
P.S.--Some of you may recall how the auto builder Volkswagen got caught cheating on emission tests.
A laboratory doing research on alternative fuels, working with a tiny budget, found it, at West Virginia University in Morgantown.