Share a lesson you wish you had learned earlier in life.

Actually the title is bait. But I really do hate crackers. Ritz, Saltines, Wheat Thins, all of them. I don’t care if you give me the most expensive cheese or Beluga caviar, I will not eat crackers.

That’s what the title really means. But it may not be the way you saw it.

That’s because once upon a time, it referred to a hillbilly, a dullard with no education and a hatred for freed slaves, usually African Americans, and this hatred was absolutely deadly. The expression, a derogatory slang, once conjured the image of an old man wearing a battered straw or felt hat, shirtless beneath bib overalls, bare of foot, a corn cob pipe hanging from a mouth with no or few teeth, and in his hands a side-by-side double-barrel shotgun.

More recently it’s been used as a derogatory name for any Caucasian, used by African Americans.

Down in the southern and in the midwestern United States it is more prevalent, but since the late 1990s has faded further north. But you can still hear it.

Racism is everywhere and is a part of everyone’s life, whether we want to believe it or not. You may not think that you are racist, but no matter how you may try not to be, the need for and effort itself means that there is something within you that’s being fought, something you try to bury deep, crammed into shadows you never dare let see the light of day. That’s a great thing. It is noble, this fight, and remember that many before you have fought the same personal battle, each one of them making the world a slightly better place. No brave effort is ever wasted.

Of all the regrets I have that haunt me most, being a blind bigot is at the top. I’ve hurt people, almost exclusively with words. I would sling the “N” word from my mouth as often as the word “fuck”, and that goes way back to childhood.

In my school in elementary grades, what they call “primary” school now, there was one African American girl. Same grade I was in. And did we ever punish her. Also the girls who never washed or bathed, who showed up in white blouses that went as unwashed as they, well we gave them hell too. I got bullied, but when it was the rare girl who set her cross hairs on me, I would be shocked into frightened silence, and the sickening language I used on others would come back to me, but strangely, because there was a certain finesse and panache added in. I hated Cheryl Gant and admired her at the same time for being sick, but eloquent in her loathing for me. After a time, she became attractive to me!

I could never figure out why she hated me, and it spread to her mother, who had the balls to knock on my door after I passed her once on North Shore Road. I thought that was funny, but let my mother handle it because at 17 years of age, I had no way of holding back my emotions and I’d have used language like “cunt” on her. Yep. I’d have done that. Maybe worse.

What Cheryl did, unknowingly, was teach me that hate can come from anywhere. It isn’t restricted to race, gender, religion, or any other factor. Sometimes, it’s just there.

Other times, it’s taught. When parents are both southern bigots, true racists, you do what they do. You say what they say. You feel what they’ve taught you you feel. Being young in redneck Pasadena in the 1960s, lots of prejudice existed, and if a black family moved into the neighborhood, they’d be shunned by most, befriended by few, and invariably suffered vandalism. I rarely heard of violence, except on Walter Cronkite in 1968.

Maryland went into panic as riots broke out in Baltimore City that year, and Governor Spiro Agnew activated the MDARNG. A conservative, Agnew would go on to be Nixon’s vice president before being caught with fraudulent tax records. He was replaced by Gerald R. Ford.

These riots, so close to the cloistered suburbs of Pasadena and North Shore, scared my father silly. He kept a .22 revolver with a 10-inch barrel loaded. Ready for (“the ‘Ns'”) to walk into his yard.

They weren’t coming, but his blind terror of blacks rendered him hysterical and unreasonable. I felt the fear that he did. It made an indelible mark on my soul, and I got worse. If I was a mentally ill loose cannon before, I became a monster later. And the African American girl in my class suffered additional reactionary punishment not just from me, but others. By sixth grade, she’d grown an impressive bosom. The girls wanted to be her because they had nothing in the breast department. Weren’t supposed to, really, but everyone matures at different rates.

By junior high, the bussing situation threw together kids who weren’t prepared. Shock naturally occurred, but with dire consequences. Rednecks regularly carried switchblade knives, and came very close to murder. Fights, rumors of riots,fistfights in the hallways were more limited to the redneck guys, but other scenarios happened. It wasn’t a conducive learning environment. And I hated black people more until I finally got suspended for hate speech. Several times.

I didn’t care. Not for decades would I feel differently.

Being grown, working every day, I was always going to interact with people I’d been taught to hate.

And slowly, ever so slowly, I became less fearful. I interacted with customers, asked stupid questions, but always, they understood and praised my eagerness to learn, to overcome. I wanted the hatred and fear to end, to be no more. I began to see beauty in all people of all races. Women whom I’d never have paid attention to became ravishing. And almost always, and to this day, women of color are nicer to me than most others. They sense things in me: no threat, no danger, always sympathetic and ready to listen, not a man seeking a relationship, but a friend.

And the girl in my class all those years ago, who alone had to bear racism from white students surrounding her?

One night I read a newspaper article. She’d made the headline. Babysat one night. And the baby wouldn’t stop crying… she tortured and killed it. I never knew, and never will, if what she went through in school, because of boys like me, played a part.

You know what I’d like to think.

But the abuse we piled on her for years would almost certainly be part of her hell.

All actions and words have consequences. And the potential to harm, and harm greatly. I wish I could have learned that lesson much earlier. Then, maybe, though damaged and full of my own sorrow, rage and bitterness, I could have learned respect and how to love…instead of having so many hurt left behind me in time. A painful lesson that hurts more because I took so long to learn it. I often think back to those who I had hurt and hated. Too late to apologize. Too distant. And some are long gone. As is one infant whose name I will never know.