I’m a racist. I’m nervous saying this out loud, but yes, of course I’m a racist.

It isn’t something I want, don’t get me wrong. Nobody wants to be a racist. But I am. I’d change that if I could, and I do change whenever I can, but I’ll never find all the racism in me. It’s not something I’ll realistically be able to do. And unless I somehow do the impossible, I’d be stupid to claim otherwise. Yes, I am a racist.

Why would I admit such a shameful thing? Everyone else is running away from the very idea. Republicans will light you on fire if you even suggest they might be even the littlest bit racist. And that’s from people are openly and obviously racists.

Let’s do this in order. The first part is easy: yes, I’m a white guy. (I wasn’t sure if you’d noticed.) Seriously, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, glow-at-the-beach, fish-belly white. So I’m in the right cultural group.

Second, I was raised in the segregated south. That part isn’t exactly what you might expect, though. This was Northern Virginia, a suburb of Washington DC, which doesn’t sound terribly southern, and it was the 70’s, which sounds way too late to be segregated. Fooled me, too. God knows, I didn’t notice at the time.

There were no blacks in any of the neighborhoods I grew up in. (Or Hispanics, or Filipinos, but let’s start with the most obvious.) There were no blacks anywhere in the neighboring developments, either. We did have one Hawaiian kid, for what that’s worth. There were no African-Americans in my two Elementary schools, and none I remember seeing in my Intermediate school that drew from several local districts. By the time I got to High School, there actually were a couple dozen blacks in the same school (out of just over 2000 kids). I think they all fit in one classroom.

Interestingly, all the black students had lockers in the same upper floor hallway, at the same end. Odd, when lockers were assigned alphabetically. Maybe all their names next to each other in the alphabet? Most of us fairer types bounced all over the big, sprawling complex of wings and facilities, taking classes where they were. All the duskier students somehow had all their classes in that same short hallway their lockers were. They might have all fit in one classroom.  I can’t remember ever having gym class with any of them, although I won’t swear to that. I once had a minor brush-up with one black kid in the lunchroom. (That’s probably overstating things; I fell down in panic before any real blows landed.)

The weirdest part, for me, is how I never noticed how odd this was until years later. I’m pretty gullible, sometimes, but I’m not that impossibly dull. I’d have thought I’d see something that big, but I didn’t. Maybe it was because I didn’t see any of the mechanisms for it. There were no declared rules against extra-deep sun tans, no obvious fences or other barriers, no signs outside of town saying ‘No Coloreds’, none of that. Blacks just… weren’t around during that part of my childhood.

So I didn’t hate blacks, or love them, or even miss them. They simply weren’t part of my life, or the lives of anyone I knew.  I saw them in papers and in the news.

(I’m not saying that Northern Virginia was better or worst than other places, just that it was the only place I knew.)

Third, I was taught history in what I know was a southern state. There was a certain… slant to what was included, and what wasn’t. Again, this was the 70’s, and I’m hoping that Virginia now is much different. (I don’t live there now, so I can’t say.) My teachers explained how the Civil War was an economic conflict, not racist and not about slavery. and how Lincoln would have kept slavery if it kept the Union together. They explained how Robert E. Lee was a reluctant warrior, who was nonetheless an honorable man, and so on. Confederate names were everywhere. There were many boring hours of class time on Reconstruction, heavy on the carpetbaggers, but I’d never heard more than passing mention of Jim Crow, or lynching, and nothing about Redlining. (Or the Ottoman Empire, if that makes anyone feel better.)

We do have JEB Stuart High School, Robert E. Lee High School, Stonewall Jackson High School, and [famous segregationist] W.T. Woodson High School. US Route 1 — the first route in the nation, is Jefferson Davis Highway in the Northern Virginia part. I’d be proud that the city of Alexandria, Virginia, formally revoked a law that required new north-south streets to be named after Confederate military figures. If they hadn’t only done that in 2014. Alexandria has [CSA General Pierre G. T.] Beauregard Street, CSA General Braxton Bragg gets both Bragg Street and Braxton Street, there’s [CSA Vice President and CSA Brig. General John Cabell] Breckinridge Place, and I’m not even out of the damn B’s yet. There’re more, but you get the drift. These weren’t exceptions, they were just ordinary, the things I was surrounded with as I grew up.

Finally, and possibly worst, I believed the lies. I believed the stories that police were fair and generally honest, and when something bad happened, those rare criminals were held accountable. I believed the stories that discrimination was something we’d stopped during Civil Rights, and not something modern. I believed that corruption was the exception, and that towns didn’t finance their local governments from crushing fines. I believed the local and state governments were reformed, and followed democratic principles. I believed all the lies.

It’s inconceivable to me that you would take what we think now and apply it back then. I think it’s just very, very dangerous. It shows you what — how much of a lack of appreciation of history and what history is.

I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which in 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War. And men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had to make their stand.

— White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, Oct. 301, 2017, Fox News Interview with Laura Ingraham (quoted from PolitiFact).

Yeah, I believed that stuff too. I needed Ta-Nehisi Coates to point out that this logic only holds so long as you never ask black people. During that same time, slaves in the south ranged from substantial minorities, to majorities in states like South Carolina.

Want to bet they felt differently?

With each new revelation, I try to learn. Ferguson was a terrible thing, but now I know. Black Lives Matter opened my eyes again. Lynching, Poll Taxes, Jim Crow, voter suppression, redlining, all were surprises I didn’t believe at first. Then I looked closer. And again. And eventually, when the facts bore things out, I believed. Each time I learn something new, and I find out it’s real, I move another step closer to what’s right. Kicking and screaming all the way.

Am I a racist? Sorrowfully. yes. How could I not be? I do my best, but I’m coming at this from so far out in the fields of lies, I’ll be dead long before I find them all. The most I can claim are good intentions.  I have no idea what new lies I’ll find, or what unnoticed assumptions I have that I haven’t questioned. Yet. I try hard to fix the broken parts of my understanding because it’s goddamn important. I don’t want to be racist. But, like a huge number of white people with reasonably good intentions, I’m clueless to the lives I’ve never seen and only barely understand. No, I don’t get it. I’m trying, but I’m not there yet.

This is an explanation why I’m a racist, not a justification for why it’s OK. Honestly, I don’t know if I’m OK. I know I try to fix the nonsense when I find it. I hope that helps. I know I’m not great at that, either, but I’m trying.

Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, and John Kelly, and Laura Ingraham, and especially Donald Trump, they’re all racists, but they’re unrepentant racists. Show them a lie and they double-down on the lie. They want to go back that awful time. I cannot understand that. Reality is already so hard to find and know; why would anyone deliberately turn away?

Is the current Republican party racist? Obviously. Take the word of an old, white guy: no way a bunch of that many old white guys could avoid it.

Are they trying to learn how to become better, and not worse racists?

Not that I can see. That’s the difference.