I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [15]
I’ve told people that I found an environment with a lot less racial tension when I got to Auburn, and people have said to me, “Well, it was that way because you were a star athlete and you were treated differently.” That could be true, but for whatever reason I was comfortable there. Out of 22,000 students, which is about the number Auburn had at the time, only a tiny percentage was black. But I felt good there, befriended people, had people of different races befriend me.
It was then that I realized that whites and blacks could not just coexist but get along and live comfortably together. Some people may not think that’s much of a revelation, but growing up in Alabama you just always felt a certain racial tension. And I never had anything overtly bad happen to me, but there was just tension all the time. I felt it throughout high school, people not knowing how to act around somebody of a different race, people not knowing what to say, being afraid. Maybe it was because people didn’t talk enough, didn’t have any real conversation about what they were feeling or about what these differences really meant . . . if they meant anything at all.
How can you know each other when, in most places in Alabama—and definitely my hometown—blacks live on one side of town and whites live on another? We’re talking separate lives. One of my best friends in high school, Joseph Mock, is white. When I think back on it, we didn’t know anything about race early on. Kids don’t know. And that’s the thing about racism and prejudice that is really sick. As kids, we didn’t know. We just hung out. My mother and my grandmother didn’t allow any of that garbage. They told me, “Hey, boy, all white people are not bad.” Between my mother, my grandmother and having Joseph as a close friend, I never bought into any of that hatred. Funny thing is, it’s pretty obvious when two friends are of different races that they aren’t natural enemies, even though we grew up in the midst of all that tension. We had to be taught that BS at some point. Put a little black kid and a little white kid in a room and all they’re going to do, before their minds are polluted with a bunch of BS, is play with each other. That’s all that’s going to happen whether those two little kids are put in a room in Alabama or New York or wherever.
And to me, that’s the proof of just how unnatural prejudice and racism are. It ain’t something natural; you have to be taught it. How sick is that? You go from being naive as hell to having all this tension by the time you’re a teenager. It’s learned behavior, it ain’t something you’re born with. It just makes me sad, that ultimately people teach young people to dislike other people because of the color of their skin. And we do this generation after generation after generation. A lot of people reject that shit and they befriend who they want to and associate with who they want to and date who they want to. But everybody ain’t that strong, to break away from the stuff they’ve been taught.
A whole lot of kids are brainwashed and get fanatical with the stuff they get from adults. You’ve got all these militia groups talking about being mad at the government. About what? Man, if black people aren’t mad at the government for our condition, then who has the right to be mad at the government? What, these militia guys aren’t getting a fair shake?
I don’t want to make it sound like it’s simple, because I know it’s complex. Economics is involved. Poor white people and poor black people have been pitted against each other, even though they have more in common than not. A lot of rich white people will treat you fine,