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- True gray
I just spotted an essay that brought back memories—memories of a moment in my long-lost youth that I hadn’t thought about in roughly two days.
Mr. President! For God’s sake, and America’s sake, quit so often calling crimes that involve a black person “racist”! As the president who came to office, a black man promising to bring people together, a man ideally suited for that job since you were born both black and white, you had a God-given chance to actually proclaim and demonstrate that racial divides and prejudice had greatly diminished and that our society was truly becoming colorblind.
“And yes, I said, ‘inspired by Satan’! Though this had a racist element, to be sure, it was more than that and of far greater significance to America than that. This boy wasn’t just a sadist, or even criminally insane—he was carefully prepared and led by the Devil himself to kill as many Christians as he could. The fact that they were black was an excuse more than a reason.”
“Pat Boone was a KA!” I remember saying aloud, in surprise, to anyone within earshot. I went on in roughly these words, “I’m surprised an all-American guy like Pat Boone would join a racist fraternity.”
I didn’t mean anything judgmental by this. . . . Clean-cut Pat Boone could easily have exercised his irrelevant disapproval [of Jim Crow] by joining another fraternity. That he didn’t was interesting. Not that interesting, really. But worth remarking on. Whatever. I spoke out of idle curiosity.
The member of the fraternity who’d invited me down—he’d been a year ahead of me in high school—took me aside. You can’t talk like that around here! he said.
