Robin Lindley: Your book is candid and timely, and I’m sure readers appreciate your frankness about your own racism and what contributed to the “blindness” you describe. It seems you were a fair-minded and sensitive boy, yet you learned racism through what you call “osmosis.” What do you mean?
Professor Charles Dew: That word was chosen carefully because I think I did absorb the Jim Crow culture with simply the observations of my family and how they behaved in the presence of African Americans.
I talk about that etiquette of race relations that governed the way black and white interacted in the South. The limited range of topics you could talk about. The no shaking of hands across the color line. The fact that in our kitchen cupboards there was jelly glasses and some orange china that wasn’t in good shape and they were exclusively for the use of the two African Americans who worked in our home: Illinois, the woman who the book is dedicated to, and Ed who mowed the grass.
You realize that if they can’t eat off the same plates that you do and if you can’t eat off the plates that they do, then something is very powerful here, and your parents are there to reinforce all of this. It mattered not that Illinois cooked the meals for us because that was what domestic employees did and yet, at the same time, she couldn’t eat at the same table with us. She couldn’t eat from the same plates we used or drink from the same glasses.
Robin Lindley: I was struck that you dedicated the book to Illinois and the story of you eventually getting to know her once you were in college and learning the history of the South is very moving.
Professor Charles Dew: Yes. I really began to get out from under the Jim Crow culture I had been raised in when I arrived at college, although it was an evolutionary, slow process, as I describe. It didn’t happen overnight. Anything but. I was slow, and in retrospect, I find on the one hand it’s disappointing. On the other hand, I think that culture I grew up with was very deeply embedded and it took a combination of experiences and being in a different part of the country to get out from under that culture.
I did make that point that my conversations with Illinois, which were so important to me, sort of smacked of a Hollywood cliché of well-meaning white folks being educated by the black folks that worked for them. I was very careful to say that this sort of smacked of that, but that happened. It was incredibly important to me to have the experience of speaking with her and getting to know who she was as a person and getting to know what her life was like. That really brought home the whole injustice of the system for me.