Recent history explains much about rules of racism

I want to thank Carol Olsen-Whitney for her recent letter to the editor regarding racism.

So many ways to talk about this subject, and maybe using the term racism is a trigger that causes people to get afraid that they are being criticised for who they are. But to Carol’s most important point: “This country has a long history of treating people of color as second-class citizens based only on the color of their skin.”

I’ve been reading “The Warmth of Other Suns, The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” by Isabel Wilkerson. This is the best thing I’ve read in a long time in my efforts to understand the history of racism in this country. It reads like a novel, with the story of three individuals born in the South, and what happens to them and their families as they seek a better life in the North and West. In the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, people went through years of planning and saving to “escape” the restrictions of the Jim Crow South. They get on a train in Florida, making sure they are getting in the colored section (the worst seats), and then once in the North, they look for the Colored Only and White Only signs, but such signs are now gone. Do they dare to sit anywhere, go anywhere now? But, a young man is beaten for daring to swim across the invisible color line at a public beach; no signs, yet he is supposed to know the unwritten rules, still enforced by bully mandate. That’s just one anecdote. A black physician drives for 3 days from Lousiana to California, and finds no motel or inn to take him in. Sympathetic whites are afraid to offer him a room for fear of losing all future customers. What is going on? That was 1953, a decade before Civil Rights legislation.

We white people need to educate ourselves on this history. I grew up in north Seattle where the covenant of the nice neighborhood said that no negros or people of other races would be allowed to purchase lots. Think about that.

Sylvia Stauffer

Bothell