Talking about race

A newspaper reporter asked Vernon Jordan, “You just spent the Fourth of July in Jackson Hole right? Were there many other African-Americans out there?”

She got a cool answer from the polished, self-assured corporate director, Wall Street banker and pal of President Clinton: “When I go to Jackson Hole I’m not thinking about race, I’m thinking relaxation.”

She threw him another: “So you don’t notice if there are other black faces around?” He replied: “Jackson Hole is not exactly representative of the American melting pot.”

Later in the interview, the reporter asked him about the time when a white racist shot him in 1980. What impact did the experience have on how he thought about race or about racists?

No longer cool, but speaking in his characteristic measured tones, Jordan told her: “I have not talked about being shot, ever, and I’m not going to talk about it with you. I have only one thing to say about that, a great passage of Scripture that talks about forgetting those things that are behind and reaching forth unto those things that are before. I find anger to be a corrosive emotion. So my view of all this business about race is never to get angry, no, but to get even. You don’t take it out in anger; you take it out in achievement.”

What was this all about? That exchange was one of many conversations recounted in a special issue of The New York Times Magazine titled “Talking About Race.” The magazine was the concluding installment of as 15-part series about a subject that is often thought about but rarely talked about, at least across racial lines. A mixed-race team of reporters worked more than a year, watching specific interracial situations in places including a church, a football team, a university, a meat packing plant, another newspaper, a police department and a marriage.

The articles reported the ups and downs of across-race friendships, rivalries, business partnerships and love affairs in a wide-ranging examination of race in America today. One piece told of a dispute between a black and a white newspaper columnist, longtime colleagues and friends, over an official’s use of the word “niggardly.” Both knew that it meant stingy and had nothing to do with the notorious n-word, which hardly anyone dares to say or print these days. The black columnist condemned the official for using a word that would be offensive to many. The white columnist tried to defend the official but risked sounding as if he were saying that many blacks were too ignorant to know the true meaning of “niggardly.”

The articles made the major point that, long after segregation has been outlawed, racial tension remains. Getting people to talk about it came forth as a way to cope in the new era.

One of the editors of the series, Gerald Boyd, a deputy managing editor of The Times, summed up the present racial situation in a recorded conversation with reporters and other editors: “When I started out in the early ’70s, it was very popular to be black. Every white had to have one. And so you’d go to dinner parties and you’d sit around the table and you could tell lies for days and nobody would challenge you. And the assumption was if you were a black professional you could speak for 12, 14 million black people: all black people think this.”

Boyd went on: “And then something happened in this country as more and more blacks got into the workplace and became professional; it became clear blacks disagreed and we didn’t see things all the time alike. But that was 15, 20 years ago. What has happened since then, I think, can basically be described as racial fatigue. I think whites have, in their view, tried to reach out and accept and understand and they feel, for the most part, that blacks have not been responsive. I think blacks feel they have tried to be heard and that whites haven’t heard them, haven’t been responsive. And so what you have is just indifference.”

What does all this have to do with Maine, the second whitest state in the union, after Vermont? Maine’s blacks amount to only one-half of 1 percent of the population. American Indians, Asians and Pacific islanders, and Hispanics are roughly the same. But those nonwhite numbers in Maine are growing rather rapidly. More important, modern transportation and communication is drawing Maine closer to the rest of the country each year, and there are lessons in civility within the questions of race relations that extend to everyone. If you don’t see The Times and want to know more, you can read the articles on its Web site: www.nytimes.com. One note, however, the Gray Lady, as The Times is known, also is the Green Lady – it charges $2.50 per article in its archives.