What began as a routine trip for groceries a few Fridays ago was a jarring reminder of how entrenched racism is in American life.
I was searching for a parking space outside the New Tampa Wal-Mart when a metallic-beige pickup truck headed in the opposite direction eased beside me.
Nothing could have prepared me for what was about to happen next.
"What's up, n---?" a man yelled, his baritone voice tainted by a slight Southern drawl.
His face obscured by a pitch black tinted window only a quarter of the way down, all I could see was his forehead and his tightly cropped blond hair.
He cackled like I'd missed the punch line to a joke.
He drove off.
I could feel the heat rising in my chest. I seethed inside.
That word. . . . See. I can't even say it. That's how I refer to it: That word. Only six letters, yet loaded with so much hate.
And for a moment, time was suspended.
The aisles inside the store seemed longer and wider.
The memories of those tumultuous racist experiences at a prestigious university in the Midwest and my first year as a professional journalist started gushing back.
Like the time I sat in the dining hall with six of my college suite-mates who were ranting about how blacks barred them access to Columbia, Harvard and Yale. The discussion abruptly halted when everyone finally realized I was sitting at the table.
Or the time a professor gave me a low grade on a term paper with the comment: "Your thesis isn't arguable unless I'm a racist or something." I was the only black in the class.
Or the time World Church of the Creator leader Matthew Hale stood on the campus steps spouting white supremacist ideology just a few months after one of his cohorts gunned down a former college basketball coach just because he was black.
And the time I went to an all-white country club for an interview and before opening my mouth was asked, "Are you educated?"
Before I knew it, an hour had passed. My shopping cart was filled with CDs, not the frozen pizza I came to the store to buy.
My appetite was long gone.
As I drove home, I began to retrace the moments leading up to the parking lot incident. What if I hadn't gone to Wal-Mart and bought a sandwich at Quiznos instead? A $2 Quiznos coupon still sits in my passenger seat as if time stopped that Friday. Why did I pass the Quiznos by and keep driving?
And then it hit me. This, like all of the obstacles I've overcome, was meant to happen. It was supposed to happen. To make me stronger. And wiser.
Until then I'd gone through 23 years of life privileged, not understanding my place in the world, my vulnerability as a black man.
I was never naive enough to believe racism didn't exist. But somehow, I thought I was immune from the "n" word.
I grew up in an urban metropolitan city in Texas and attended school with Asians, Hispanics and whites. Unless there's some repressed memory, I cannot remember experiencing even the most subtle form of racism. And that was in Texas!
It would take 18 years and moving more than 1,000 miles north before I started to see the world in black and white. Still, until that now-important trip to Wal-Mart, no one had ever called me by a racial slur.
Most of my peers were shocked it took so long. They recalled vividly their first, second, even third times being called the "n" word. I expected them to be surprised, to ease my pain. They couldn't get beyond the fact that I'd never been called a n--- in more than two decades of life.
"Welcome to America," said one of my young black colleagues.
I joined their fraternity, albeit a little late. We all remember our first time. The exact day. The exact hour. Where we were. And what we were doing.
It's a hurtful and regrettable moment that evokes images of James Byrd being dragged along a rural Texas road; H.W. Walker being burned at the stake just a few months later; and former college basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong being gunned down in front of his children by a white supremacist.
It's a moment in which you begin to see just how little America has evolved when it comes to race.
Sure, my generation has had access to things our parents and grandparents never imagined possible - some of the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities, board rooms of certain Fortune 500 companies and even being able to eat in a restaurant and drink from the same water fountain.
The man in the truck didn't know anything about me.
Had he cared, he would have learned that my high school senior class elected me the friendliest.
That I graduated in 31/2 years from one of the nation's most selective universities.
And that I've worked at two of the country's top newspapers.
None of that matters.
Not to the man in the truck.
- Times staff writer Rodney Thrash covers New Tampa. He can be reached at 269-5313 or rthrash@sptimes.com
