George Pyle: Racism and stupidity — mostly stupidity — still drive us apart

Round about 1945, a young man with my name, my single eyebrow and my short attention span was bored with his college studies and seized upon an opportunity to stir things up for a good cause. And for fun.

The city of Lawrence was settled by abolitionists, burned to the ground by a pro-slavery militia and even now has a reputation as a liberal stronghold centered around the University of Kansas. So much so that Republican members of Congress keep trying to get it gerrymandered into some other congressman’s district.

But, as was the case in so many other places before the the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, or at least before Wilt Chamberlain, the city and its public accommodations were segregated. Black people were restricted to certain sections of the local movie theaters and weren’t allowed into most restaurants at all.

My father joined the resistance. Just for something to do.

Coming from a farming community in northeast Kansas, he was familiar with a few American Indians — the basketball team from the Kickapoo Nation School down the road in Powhattan was much feared — but no so many black folks. So his determination to help bring down the racist establishment wasn’t so much personally felt as, “exciting and fun,” he wrote in his memoirs.

He and his cohorts paid their way into movies and then stomped and clapped and carried on, making it impossible for patrons to hear the show until theater owners agreed to do away with seating restrictions. They went into bars and restaurants popular with students and just sat there, not ordering anything, until members of the KU football team were recruited to pick them up and toss them into the street.

“I think we invented the sit-in,” he told us.

I can think of a few folks who, in just the last several days, wouldn’t think that was very funny. Those two young black men arrested and held for hours for the offense of sitting in a Starbucks, for example. Or, more recently the two black men — one a paying member — thrown out of an LA Fitness gym in New Jersey.

Or the family of the black man shot to death by police officers in someone else’s garage in West Valley City a couple of weeks ago when he apparently was too slow — and then too fast — in showing his hands to officers.

That man wasn’t being denied service in a public accommodation. He was in a place he clearly should not have been and police were right to pursue him. But did anyone have to read to the sixth paragraph of The Tribune article to guess that a criminal suspect who was carried to the morgue rather than to jail was black?

Thanks largely to the son of a Syrian refugee with a thing for gadgets and style, we are now being flooded with video documentation of the mistreatment of African-Americans. Steve Jobs’ iPhone and its competitors has shown us all so many cases of racist behavior — from embarrassing to fatal — that we are being forced to notice and deal with an apparently chronic disease that we were previously allowed to ignore.

The ignoramus in the White House is part of the problem. His rise to power is clearly linked to an increase in white nationalistic sentiment and behavior, though it remains arguable which is the cause and which the effect.

My father would be disgusted, but probably not surprised, by all of this.

His view was always that people of all ethnic groups are not so much racist as clueless, as they are about a great many things, not thinking through much of anything, making pessimistic assumptions about people they don’t know.

Never attribute to evil, he taught us, that which can be explained by stupidity.

Whether it’s the manager of a coffee bar or a police officer with his gun drawn, we are clearly dealing with white people acting, not out of a thought-through feeling of racial superiority, but out of a reptile-brain fear that the black person standing before them is a threat. A feeling they would not have if it were a white person there doing the exact same thing.

A quick count of arrests and shootings would make it clear that it is the black folks, not the white ones, who have cause to be afraid.

My father would be the first to admit that his adventure in social activism was white privilege in action. No arrests. No gunfire. A little boys-will-be-boys understanding. And it worked. By the time my father left Lawrence, the town’s theaters, bars and restaurants were, officially at least, integrated.

But, if he were still alive, looking at all this news, my father might get a little testy with my generation, and those since.

It’s been 73 goddam years, I can hear him sigh. Haven’t you people figured this out yet?

George Pyle, The Tribune’s editorial page editor, was often the only white face on public transportation in Buffalo, N.Y., for the four years he lived there. Nothing ever happened. gpyle@sltrib.com