Carmen Van Kerckhove, co-founder of a diversity consulting firm in New York, described the dynamic this way: "Human beings tend to be really focused on their own oppression, and tend to be less interested in hearing about the oppression of others."
Old resentments
North, 50, grew up in integrated Detroit. He went to school with black friends. He played ball with them, swam with them. Every now and then, fists would fly over a racial insult. Then they'd all go back to hanging out together.
As far as North was concerned, everyone was equal. If anything, he said, blacks were better off because affirmative action gave them a boost into college. His own grades weren't good enough for a scholarship; he ended up building engines at Ford.
A few years in, he tried to get shifted off the heavy jobs -- but his boss, he said, dismissed him with a curt: "You're a white boy. What're you crying about?" North looked around. He noticed that when minorities complained, "they got moved to a different job, because [the supervisors] were afraid of the race card."
Now North has a good job repairing tractors and trailers in Franktown. But when he reflects on his days at Ford, he feels the old resentment.
"I kept hearing: 'Minority this, minority that. Blacks aren't getting this, blacks aren't getting that.' I'm disgusted with it," he said. "OK, fine, they've gotten stepped on for 400 years. Let's give them something [to make up for it] and be done with it, the way we did with the Indians."
He's had enough, he said, of identity politics: "If you're born here, you're an American. Period. Act like an American." A fellow mechanic began listing racial and ethnic groups: African American, Hispanic American, Chinese American.
"It's tiring," North interrupted sharply. "These people had the same opportunities I did. . . . And they want everything handed to them."
Same opportunities? Same schools, same sports teams, yes.
But Wayne Sledge, who is 48 and black, went to an integrated school in Georgia -- and he doesn't remember everything being so equal. Sledge said it was clear that "the white people didn't want the black people in the school." There were bloody brawls. A pep rally was interrupted by a student in a Ku Klux Klan hood. "It was pretty rough," said Sledge.
Pam Miller also went to an integrated school in the mid-1970s, in suburban St. Louis. Her most vivid memories are of terror:
Two white men chasing her with crowbars.
