An Open Letter to Racism (Re-Post: 9/28/07) ---WILLIAM HOSTON

Dear Racism,

I have missed you. Thank you for overtly coming back into my life. While I know that you were here in spirit, your noticeable presence has been absent. When I am in your presence I better understand our relationship, know how to handle our differences, and can work to make our relationship more tolerable. But when you are at a distance, it seems like I don’t know you anymore.

I have longed to see you. In fact, I contacted your Uncle Bill (O’Reilly) last week and we met for lunch. We went to Sylvia’s a small soul-food place in Harlem, New York. He was impressed that the black-owned restaurant that primarily caters to black patrons was such a fine dining establishment. Uncle Bill was amazed at the fact that “there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all” and “there wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming MF'er I want more iced tea.”

I love talking to Uncle Bill because we can have a variety of discussions. I told him about a friend of mine in West Virginia whom was held captured for a week and sexually abused, beat, stabbed and called racial slurs. He couldn’t believe that a family of six, all white, would abduct a 20-year-old-African-American female and do these awful things to her. My friend’s mother told me, “I don’t understand a human being doing another human being the way they did my daughter.”

Uncle Bill didn’t seem fazed, so I began to ask his opinion on the racially charged case in Jena, Louisiana where Mychal Bell, a 17-year-old African-American male was tried as an adult after the beating of a white student when he was only 16. What preceded this incident was the hanging of three nooses from a tree traditionally occupied by white students. Again, Uncle Bill didn’t seem concerned.

I also asked him did he believe race played a role in the slow evacuation efforts following Hurricane Katrina. This time he looked at me in disgust.

All Uncle Bill wanted to talk about was the Michael Vick case and how O.J. Simpson continues to garner national attention. I told him that while I do not condone dog fighting, is the Vick case really about dogs? As for O.J., is white America still disgruntled that the criminal justice system in which they created failed them? He got a chuckle out of that and said that he was glad that black people are “finally” beginning to “think for themselves.”

Uncle Bill’s opinions are so insightful and I absolutely love how he blames the culture of rap music for many of the social ills of society and uses implicit racial messages to make his points about African-Americans. He is not deliberate like Don Imus but subtle in his conversations on race.

Racism, the real reason that I contacted Uncle Bill is because he reminds me of you. They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder. I am glad that we are still together.

William T. Hoston is an Assistant Professor at Wichita State University in the Department of Political Science.