Guest Opinion: The wounds of a racist history don’t heal themselves

“The purpose of sharing the post was only in my mind a tongue-and-cheek poke that nowadays, it seems that the only minorities are the white male.”

Franklin County Coroner Dan Blasdel made this comment to the Tri-City Herald after he was criticized for a meme he posted on Facebook about white power. He apologized and removed the post.

Blasdel himself is a white man in a position of power. The majority of the city councils in the Tri-Cities are made up of white males. The prime, high-paying executive jobs in this community are dominated by white men.

According to the Benton-Franklin Trends website, the percentage of all non-white races combined in both counties is nearly 38 percent as of 2016. Even if we compare white men to the largest non-white racial group in the Tri-Cities — Hispanics (31 percent) — white people outnumber them two to one (62 percent).

White men have a long way to go before becoming minorities.

In the 1950s, Kennewick was dubbed the “Birmingham of Washington” by the NAACP. This was not done out of hyperbole. It was based on a long history of abuse that flourished particularly during Hanford’s growth with World War II, when in the span of a few years (1943-45), 15,000 black people arrived in the Tri-Cities, as documented by Robert Bauman in his article, “Jim Crow in the Tri-Cities, 1943-1950.”

In Bauman’s article, he documents the systemic segregation of the Tri-Cities. Segregation of housing, restaurants and the bus system. He documents black men being threatened with arrest for crossing Kennewick’s green bridge at night, and the lack of clean water and sanitation facilities east of the Pasco railroad tracks.

East of the tracks was where blacks were forced to live because of a combination of covert and overt racist covenants and policies in Kennewick and Pasco.

According to Bauman, in Pasco “no hotels or boarding houses accepted blacks; only 2 of 12 restaurants in Pasco welcomed black patrons (those that did not displayed “Whites Only” and “No Dogs or Negroes Allowed” signs); and the lunchroom at the bus terminal refused to serve African Americans,” among many other offenses.

Let’s not forget Richland, where only seven black people lived in 1950 because of racially restrictive practices preventing “non-white-collar” workers from settling there.

There’s nothing wrong with pride in your family history. There’s nothing wrong with looking at people’s actions in the context of their time.

What is wrong is to conveniently forget the infrastructure of racism that was created and perpetuated in our towns. Just because we may wish it hadn’t happened, doesn’t mean it didn’t.

Racism is a form of cultural abuse. Like any kind of abuse, there’s a generational cycle. We would like to think that we’ve escaped the sins of our fathers, but we are our parents’ children, and their legacy lives in us.

To be the inclusive community we claim to be, we must proactively seek to root out old biases and attitudes. We need to understand our coded language of exclusion by asking ourselves where our assumptions come from.

When I first moved to the Tri-Cities I was repeatedly told by long-time residents to not move to Pasco, that it wasn’t safe. I didn’t question that conclusion or where it came from, I simply accepted that it must be true.

In reality, Pasco was named the third safest city in Washington state last year by Safehome.org, ahead of Richland and Kennewick. It is also has the highest proportion of non-whites of the three.

We need to actively seek to desegregate our cities and celebrate the beauty of our cultural differences. Our differences lead to exchange, cross-pollination and innovation; they make us a stronger, smarter community.

It’s wrong to fear living the life of a “minority” without actively working to make being a minority something that no person needs to fear.

This story was originally published March 31, 2018 at 2:36 PM with the headline "Guest Opinion: The wounds of a racist history don’t heal themselves."