A white Southerner searches for the source of his family’s racism

In my day job, I often receive emails from people like Charles B. Dew.

I am a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who (a) is African American and (b) writes a fair amount about the ongoing complexities and inequities of race. It is a confluence of circumstances that makes me a frequent sounding board for white Southerners of a certain age. Over the years, their emails have become as predictable to me as a blues couplet.

Invariably, something I’ve written has put the reader in mind of some fondly remembered black cook, mechanic or acquaintance from childhood or young adulthood.

Invariably, the reader wants me to know that this person’s decency and wisdom deeply impacted the reader and helped him or her to locate the humanity in African American people.

"The Making of a Racist: A Southerner Reflects on Family, History, and the Slave Trade" by Charles B. Dew (Univ. of Virginia)

Invariably, the reader rhapsodizes about how his or her experience with that sainted person could serve as a model for resolving race, which, nearly 400 years after the first African slaves (indentured servants, actually) arrived on these shores, remains the most vexing conundrum of American life.

I don’t mean to doubt or denigrate the sincerity of those emails. I only mean to say they tell a story I’ve heard often and whose moral feels facile in a nation where the Voting Rights Act has been all but repealed, where polls show that many white people now consider anti-white bias to be America’s biggest racial problem, and where it is necessary to say that black lives matter because some folks forget.

At times, “The Making of a Racist,” a slender volume by Dew — himself a white Southerner of a certain age — veers dangerously close to replicating the cliches of those emails: His lifeline to the humanity of African American people is a family housekeeper named Illinois. To his credit, though, Dew isn’t interested in the facile moral. He has a more ambitious objective. Namely, to grapple with the larger question, as obvious as a gorilla in church, that somehow goes unasked.

In a word: why?

When you consider the sheer inhumanity it took for people — good Christians all, in their own estimation — to buy other people, or sell other people, or rape other people, or cheat and restrict other people, or just to kill other people outright with a bestial sadism you wouldn’t inflict on an ailing dog . . . why? What was it in white Southern mores, folkways or history that made this such an indelible — though not unique — characteristic of theirs, that allowed so many of them to do such things or simply to stand in complicit silence, without a peep from conscience, as such things were done all around them?

Why?

The author Charles B. Dew (Courtesy of Charles B. Dew)

It is the triumph of Dew’s book to pose that question at long last. Unfortunately, that is about the only triumph it offers.

Written with more earnestness than artfulness — Dew has a distracting habit of directly addressing the reader, often to set up long digressions that add little to the narrative — “The Making of a Racist” is at its best in its early chapters as it recounts the author’s childhood indoctrination into the casual racism of the Jim Crow South. Racism was in the books he read. It was in the history he was taught. It was in the social conventions he observed. It was in the jokes he learned. It was like air or water, something that you didn’t question or think about, something that was just . . . there.

In Dew’s telling, his father’s racism was overt — he roars in incandescent rage when a black tradesman makes the mistake of waiting for him at the side door of his house instead of knocking at the back — while his sainted mother’s was more genteel; she just thought segregation was in the best interest of both races.

But both were racists in an explicitly racist region, and both passed that to their son. One comes away from those coming-of-age chapters with renewed appreciation for the subtle yet ruthless efficiency with which systemic bigotry reinforces itself. And Dew’s recounting of his slow break from that system is compelling.

It is when Dew turns his attention to that big, difficult question that the book begins to sputter. “Why,” he asks at one point, “did we not see the evil that was so clearly before us.”

Dew’s rather odd way of answering the question is to delve into the business records and correspondence of slave merchants in antebellum Richmond. By way of driving home the cruelty of slavery, he recounts almost obsessively the methods by which these firms assigned dollar values to human lives — little boys and girls going for maybe $500, for instance, or a 26-year-old man going for as much as $1,500.

For those to whom this is a new subject, this might have the desired effect of leaving them appalled at the inhumanity of this business. But for those with even a rudimentary grasp of what slavery was and how it operated, it will be weak tea, at best. More to the point, it’s weak tea that doesn’t address, much less answer, the question Dew poses: why?

Ultimately, he offers two answers, greed and race, that are both simplistic and unsatisfying. Greed, as Dew concedes, may or may not explain slavery, but it sheds no light on why his mother and father — or that matter, he — were racists.

And race — what Dew calls “the absolute belief in white supremacy — unquestioned white superiority/unquestioned black inferiority” — only deepens the question. What does that mean? Where does that belief come from? What sustains it?

In her book “The History of White People,” Nell Irvin Painter argues convincingly that race — the idea that there are certain immutable characteristics tied to some mysterious melange of blood and physical appearance — is an artificial construct that has been with us for only a few centuries. That artificiality was underscored in 2000 when researchers on the Human Genome Project told us that race had no basis in science. Yet, it survives.

It survives, I think, largely because after all these years we cannot imagine ourselves without it, because we are emotionally invested in the intellectually lazy notion that eye shape, hair texture or melanin content can somehow be correlated to individual destiny, honesty, athleticism, musicality, intelligence and worth. And because race has always provided a convenient tool for the political and economic exploitation of the white underclass. Consider that, in the era of the Industrial Revolution, white labor was kept from demanding better working conditions by the ever-present threat that their jobs would be given to immigrants or, worse, “Negroes.”

Race — more specifically, whiteness — thus became a valuable form of social capital. Indeed, it was all the more valuable to those on the bottom end of the economic ladder who owned nothing else of value. As Martin Luther King Jr. once put it: “If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.”

It might have been edifying to hear a white Southerner who came of age in the world created by that exchange — even one who lived in relative middle-class comfort — speak about that. But “The Making of a Racist” never quite gets there.

In fairness, Dew is not the first white Southerner to be defeated by the question. In an interview in “Freedom Riders,” a 2011 documentary, Tennessean John Seigenthaler, a journalist and onetime aide to Robert Kennedy, grappled with it movingly, if unsuccessfully.

“I don’t know where my head or heart was,” he said. “I don’t know where my parents’ heads and hearts were, or my teachers’. . . . We were blind to the reality of racism and afraid, I guess, of change.”

Dew spends more than 160 pages plumbing the depths of that same conundrum. You never doubt the sincerity of the question he poses.

But you are not remotely persuaded by the answers he finds.