I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [14]
I bought my mom a car, though I don’t remember what kind. I bought it before I had even signed a deal with the 76ers. I bought my grandmother a car, I think it was a Lincoln Town Car. I think they’ve been through about four cars apiece since then. After the first one I bought my mother, she came to my room three times that night crying. I bought them both houses, and bought my brothers houses beside them.
The one thing I would change is that they still look at me as “Little Charles.” It gets to be a problem when people—even your mother and grandmother—don’t want to treat you as the person you are, but as the person they remember. But I’m grateful they’ve been there every step of the way and that they worked so hard and sacrificed so much.
“You’re Always Saying
Stuff That Inflames
People”
Fighting prejudice is hard. Sometimes I just sit and try to figure out how it came to be in the first place. I don’t have the solution to the problem of racism, because it appears to be a problem in every culture on the damn earth. But I do know where we have to start: by talking about our prejudiced and racist feelings. That’s got to be the first step.
The hardest but most important thing is to get a dialogue going on racial issues. I think people want to do better, I really do. I just think they’re afraid. They don’t know exactly what to do. Nobody wants to make the first move. Guys figure they might get ostracized by their boys if they open up and talk about this stuff. I just try to create conversation because that’s where I think we have to start. . . . People rarely talk about race until something tragic or ugly happens.
Once you have some violent situation, where a black person kills a white person, or a white person kills a black person, neither side can talk sensibly or rationally because everybody’s already angry. You can’t talk about it then; it’s too late. When I get together with my white friends, Jewish or Asian friends, I bring up race when we’re doing nothing more than sitting around drinking or sitting around having dinner. That’s a good time for people to talk and see where everybody’s coming from because it’s not a conversation that’s a reaction to something ugly.
But even then I get both white and black friends saying to me, “Charles, you’re always saying stuff that inflames people.” And I say, “Wait a minute. Why do you look at it as if I’m inflaming anybody?” They say, “Can’t you do it in a nicer way?” And I say, “It’s never worked in the last two hundred years with anybody approaching it in a nice way.” There isn’t anything nice about prejudice, is there? It’s a catch-22. It isn’t a nice subject, but if you address it you’re inflaming folks. There’s no comfortable or easy way to get at it. Because if you accuse somebody of prejudice, you are saying they don’t like somebody because of race or color. It’s some serious shit.
People are so afraid to talk about it, they can’t even get to the real issues, the difficult stuff that should make us uncomfortable. We can’t get past worrying about disagreement, so we don’t have enough meaningful conversations to make a difference. Damn, to me there’s a lot worse than disagreeing with each other. What’s worse, people hating and acting on that hate, or disagreeing?
Growing up in Alabama, race was always an issue. It’s just different growing up black in Alabama. I noticed it, I felt it pretty much all the time. It wasn’t something that people just put in a drawer somewhere. It was always out there, if not right up there on the surface, then just below the surface. You think I’m exaggerating? We had a black homecoming queen and a white homecoming queen. At the time,