By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

On last Friday’s PBS News Hour Judy Woodruff asked Michael Gerson and Mark Shields what the recent racist episode at the University of Oklahoma has to “say about whether we can ever get rid of racism in this country.”

Less than satisfied with their answers, I felt like the annoying kid in elementary school who strains his hand as high as possible, intoning, “Call on me. Call on me.” Had I been called on, this is what I would have said.

Yes, but we have a long way to go, longer than many of us feel comfortable acknowledging. The journey ahead stretches beyond our ability to see because we are human. It is often difficult to acknowledge this because we are American.

We believe that Americans can accomplish extraordinary things, and we have historical evidence to prove it. Paradoxically, some of the strongest evidence is how far we’ve already come in eliminating overt racism.

What we have accomplished over the course of my own life is astonishing. We have done much to transform ourselves, and willful self-transformation is simultaneously the God-given potential that distinguishes us from other living creatures and the one that most challenges us in its achievement.

Of course, whether the glass looks half full or half empty depends on whether you’re pouring or drinking. If you are one of the aging activists who reunited in Selma on March 7^th, the distance that we have come over the fifty years since Bloody Sunday is one that you would have dreamed of achieving, but not realistically expected to traverse by now.

If you are a young African-American man who routinely risks being pulled over for Driving While Black, or a young African-American woman who risks being shot by police after falling asleep in her disabled car, the journey ahead may seem never ending.

As I ease deeper into the geezer stage of my life, Judy Woodruff’s question evokes two sets of memories. One is from the Jim Crow South, and the other is from distant countries and cultures.

My mother’s people were from coastal Mississippi and Louisiana, though my immediate family lived in the far West. Because we were poor, we were not able to visit her extended family until I was ten years old. On the second morning of the trip I woke up when the Greyhound stopped at an East Texas bus station.

I looked out the window and things seemed frighteningly wrong, like Bizzaro World in the comic books that I treasured, but more hateful. It wasn’t just that I could see separate water fountains and lunchroom entrances. Or that the ones that read “Colored” were shabbier than the ones that read “White.” It was the people.

They looked so different from those in the integrated neighborhood where we lived. I didn’t have words at the time like “demeanor,” or “posture,” or “facial expression in repose.” Remembering the Black folks that I saw that morning, I would today use words like “wary,” “painfully self controlled,” “hypervigilant,” and whatever the opposites of “playful” and “spontaneous” are.

Remembering the White folks, I still don’t have the words. But I can tell you that what I beheld scared and confused me. When I turned to my mother for reassurance, she would not look at me, or out the window. The words that I would now give to what I saw in her would be “shame,” “uncertainty,” “confusion,” perhaps “guilt,” and deep discomfort.

I didn’t now how to name what I myself was feeling, or what to say to my mother, or questions to ask, so I remained silent. It was a loss of innocence that continued as I was exposed to her family’s casual contempt for people different from them and ignorance that was flagrant, even to a ten-year-old. I never spoke out, and I never again felt safe on that trip.

In recent years when travelling through the South, I have not witnessed hyper-vigilant and wary, or playful and spontaneous, or sullen and defiant demeanors arrayed along racial lines. And the extent to which I see people of all cultures and colors comfortable in their own skin is, for me, a measure of how far we have, or have not, come.

When I visit other countries, I enjoy spending time with their citizens. They are mostly well-meaning people of goodwill, as are Americans. But the more extensively I’ve travelled, the more persuaded I am that no other people could have emerged from slavery’s residue as far and as fast as my countrymen have. It makes me proud of America.

I was listening to Tom Ashbrook interview John Ridley last Thursday when I had another smart-ass-kid moment. Ridley is a screenwriter whose work includes “Fresh Prince,” “12 Years a Slave,” and now, “American Crime.”

He expressed a belief that the kind of “more real” stories that he prefers to tell can now meet with commercial success because Americans are becoming more mature.  A zealous young man called in with a speech disguised as a question. He asserted that we are maturing because incidents like the Sigma Alpha Epsilon racist chant or shootings of unarmed Black youth are increasingly in our faces.

Ridley gave him a nice, but I thought unresponsive, answer. As the Selma marchers taught us, being nice can get in the way of being good. My response would have been this.

No. The incidents that you describe are more likely to polarize us than to heal our estrangement from ourselves and each other.  Maturity involves not acting on impulse, considering our impact on others, examining differing viewpoints, forming our own, taking the long view, and deferring gratification to achieve our goals.

We are maturing as a people because three generations of us have spent time living, working, studying, playing, fighting, and knowing each other. Many, if not most, of us have blessedly caught glimpses through the eyes of people who are different from us, whether by sharing their popular culture, or deciding together on actions requiring mutual participation, or just cohabiting.

Once we have experienced another’s reality, we can never completely return to the one we began with. We learn that no one person or culture or class is always right. We discover more to the world than we imagined. And we are empowered to trust the authenticity of our own experience rather than mindlessly obey others’ dictates.

Slavery was our nation’s original sin, written into our Constitution. But in pursuing the founders’ ideals toward their full expression, we have banished slavery, banished Jim Crow, and become more developed as people.

If we continue this pursuit, we will increasingly find that racism’s deforming mutilations are inextricably bound up with an increasingly invidious economic inequality. We cannot move beyond either without moving beyond the other.

Dr. King foresaw this and turned his attention to the struggle for economic justice. He died while supporting a 1968 sanitary workers’ strike.

When we consider that 1968 was the year that Americans were the least economically unequal since we’ve been collecting valid data, the road ahead seems daunting. But if we teach our children well, they will keep on keeping on.