I don’t follow auto racing, so I’d never heard of Bubba Wallace, a black racecar driver who in June 2020 was told that what appeared to be a noose had been found in the garage stall assigned to him at the race track in Talladega, Alabama. I’ve had CNN on all through the coronavirus time, and they were going on and on about this hate crime of this noose. 

         American institutions, which are said to be “systemically racist,” took the noose seriously. The racing association issued a statement that “there is no place for racism in NASCAR, and this act only strengthens our resolve to make the sport open and welcoming to all.” Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, Republican, said she was “shocked and appalled” by the “vile act.” The Trump administration’s Justice Department and FBI began an investigation.

          They quickly found that the noose — which really was tied like a hangman’s noose — had been on the pull rope for the garage door since at least October 2019, when the garage was assigned to white drivers.

No hate crime, then.

I accept the argument that under certain circumstances putting up a noose can be a crime — for the same reason Justice Clarence Thomas accepted that a burning cross on a black family’s lawn can be a crime. A threat of violence is not protected speech. But here it wasn’t a threat. It was just a knot on a rope to pull down a garage door.

CNN reported the FBI’s finding. They didn’t argue with it, but they kept talking about it on national television as something that might have been a hate crime, and how serious that would be had it been one. There have been other stories like this, the import of which is that America is a racist country. A deeply racist country. A systemically racist country, meaning that white supremacy is baked into the cake and not merely an ornament on it. And the message this conveys is that nothing has changed.

Nobody actually says that nothing has changed, but essentially it means that. To the young this is deep wisdom. They style themselves “woke,” and I think, yeah, that’s about right. You just woke up. You just got here. I am nearly 70. I have been here a long time, and you are telling me that nothing in my country has changed during that time, or at least, nothing important enough for you to concede to me. But you weren’t here.

I am reminded of a passage from George Orwell: “One ought also to stick to one’s own world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one’s intellectual roots.”

Growing up in suburban Seattle the 1960s, I never saw a “whites only” sign, though there were some color bars I didn’t know about. To take an example of a comparatively minor but very insulting practice: The Seattle Times ran wedding photos in the Sunday paper. Until the late 1960s, they never pictured African-American brides and grooms. I didn’t notice; I wasn’t looking at wedding pictures, and I wouldn’t have noticed anyway. I heard about the no-blacks picture policy after I retired from that newspaper. The features editor who changed the policy had died, and the publisher announced her death to a gathering of retirees. And of all the things she’d done in her career, he remembered her for her change in the picture policy back in the 1960s.

The world has changed. A lot.

When I was a kid in the 1960s, the message from adults was that racial prejudice was bad. Teachers in school said it. But almost everyone in my school was white. Just about everyone on TV was white. Except for Sidney Poitier, just about everyone in the movies was white. Some of the songs I liked on the radio were sung by black women (remember the Shirelles?), but the disc jockeys on my favorite top-40 station were all white men. I remember the first time I heard a white female DJ. It was a shock. I accepted it; there was no reason not to have a woman on the radio. But it also struck me that I had never questioned that all the DJs had been men.

Years later, I experienced something similar. I went to a US government office to help a person who was not white. The clerk took down my name and motioned us to sit in a waiting room that was full of people who were not white. After a minute, a government agent, who was white, called my name and we went up to the counter. Instant service! As we walked out the door, the person I had helped said, “That was fast! Next time I’ll know to bring you along.”

And I thought, “White privilege.”

On second thought, probably it was US citizen privilege. The office where it happened was the United States Consulate in Hong Kong, and the people in the waiting room were probably not citizens.

White privilege in Hong Kong was real enough, and it occasionally revealed itself. If my wife wanted some purchase returned to the store, it was my job to take it back, because I was white and she was Chinese, and if you wanted a refund it went much better if you were white. Another case: we had a Filipina maid. I commented once how amusing it was that on Sundays, a day off work for both of us, she would dress up and I would dress down. She replied, “But sir, if I don’t dress nicely, the people in the shops will think I don’t have money. You’re white; they know you have money.”

Those were eye-openers, but it was not in America.

I try to imagine what it was like in America for the generation before me. The difference between their experience and mine is at least as much as the difference between mine and the “woke” generation of today. Probably more. My parents lived in the South during the war, and my mother told me about segregation. At the bank, the black men in line in front of her stepped aside so she could go first because she was a white lady — but she was a Northern white lady, and it felt wrong. When she wanted yellow cornmeal, she was told that was what the Negroes used, and she had to go to the Negro store for it. Earlier in the war, in the spring of 1942, she had gone to downtown Seattle to say goodbye to her Japanese house cleaner, who was being put on a bus to an internment camp in Idaho. She told me she cried, but nobody dared object to the internment.

When I was growing up, all this was ancient history. She was telling me these stories because she had experienced them and I would not.

Step back to the years before the war. In my reading of historical newspapers, I recently came across a news story from July 1929, when my mother was still a teenager. America’s new First Lady, Lou Hoover, invited the wives of newly elected congressmen to the White House for tea. Among them was Jessie De Priest, the wife