A Breakfast Encounter

I had breakfast with a man from Pittsburgh the other day. Actually he was from a small town just outside Pittsburgh. And while we were having breakfast, at a very pleasant B&B in a town called Harper's Ferry 66 miles outside Washington DC, he told us (I was with my wife and son) that "we don't have any blacks in our town -- that's a good thing of course". Avoiding a collective choke on our freshly baked blueberry muffins, (oh, yes - on this blog you get recipes), one of us - not me - batted this away with "well, different people have different views". Reflecting on it afterwards, it occurred to me that what was worrying about the episode was not just that he held the views he did -- of course many people in the USA and probably in the UK hold those views -- but that he felt quite able to share them with complete strangers. As someone who is rooting for Obama, it was a reality check. Will Americans really elect a black man to the highest office in the land? And if they do, how will my breakfast friend react?

For social justice philanthropoids, this kind of thing reminds us of the importance of attitudes, and of what becomes respectable in polite society. I'm not sure whether somewhere in the universities there are bright people who understand how these things change and change for good. When I studied law at Manchester University in the late 1960s, my most inspiring teacher was the late Harry Street (sadly no easily findable link to him - he wrote the first edition of a seminal book called 'Freedom the Individual and the Law', still published but in a new edition by Geoffrey Robertson) who at that time was working with a young lawyer called Geoffrey Howe (wonder if he ever made anything of himself...?) on the UK's second Race Relations Act. Harry believed in the power of legislation to shape expressed attitudes, if only because generally people want to be law-abiding. Given, he said, that legislation had made racism respectable in South Africa, why should it not make it disrespectable in the UK? I have always thought that time has proven him right in the UK (with other 'isms' as well) but I’m not sure about the USA.

There are some ironies here - Harper’s Ferry is the site of an 1859 raid by John Brown on an armoury, in order to use the weapons to liberate slaves (he was caught and hanged in neighbouring Charles Town, which is why his body lies a moulderin’ etc, though I guess it would be by now anyway). And it’s the USA which may be about to elect a black head of state and chief executive; no sign of anyone non-Caucasian anywhere near the monarchy or number 10 yet. As so often with this blog, I’m not sure where this rumination takes me, except I do wish we’d spend more time understanding how attitudes change, at least to the extent that people don’t feel it’s OK to say prejudiced things to complete strangers over breakfast.