[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 68 (Tuesday, June 6, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4558-S4560]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

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                        A RETROSPECTIVE ON RACE

 Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I wish to share with my colleagues a 
moving autobiographical article written by Ward Connerly. Mr. 
Connerly's intelligence and personal experience with racism blend 
together into a truly insightful analysis and I encourage my colleagues 
to read about Mr. Connerly's uniquely American story.
  Mr. President, I ask that the article which appeared in the June 2000 
edition of The American Enterprise be printed in the Record.

                     Laying Down the Burden of Race

                           (By Ward Connerly)

       Not long ago, after I'd given a speech in Hartford, 
     Connecticut, I saw a black man with a determined look on his 
     face working his way toward me through the crowd. I steeled 
     myself for another abrasive encounter of the kind I've come 
     to expect over the past few years. But once this man reached 
     me he stuck out his hand and said thoughtfully, ``You know, I 
     was thinking about some of the things you said tonight. It 
     occurred to me that black people have just got to learn to 
     lay down the burden. It's like we grew up carrying a bag 
     filled with heavy weights on our shoulders. We just have to 
     stop totin' that bag.''
       I agreed with him. I knew as he did exactly what was in 
     this bag: weakness and guilt, anger, and self-hatred.
       I have made a commitment not to tote racial grievances, 
     because the status of victim is so seductive and so available 
     to anyone with certain facial features or a certain cast to 
     his skin. But laying down these burdens can be tricky, as I 
     was reminded not long after this Connecticut meeting. I had 
     just checked into the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco to 
     attend an annual dinner as master of ceremonies. After 
     getting to my room, I realized that I'd left my briefcase in 
     the car and started to go back to the hotel parking garage 
     for it. As I was getting off the basement elevator, I ran 
     into a couple of elderly white men who seemed a little 
     disoriented. When they saw me, one of them said, ``Excuse me, 
     are you the man who unlocks the meeting room?''
       I did an intellectual double-take and then, with my racial 
     hackles rising, answered with as much irritation as I could 
     pack into my voice: ``No, I'm not the man who unlocks the 
     rooms.''
       The two men shrank back and I walked on, fuming to myself 
     about how racial profiling is practiced every day in subtle 
     forms by people who would otherwise piously condemn it in 
     state troopers working the New Jersey Turnpike. As I stalked 
     toward the garage, I didn't feel uplifted by my righteous 
     anger. On the contrary, I felt crushed by it. It was a heavy 
     burden, so heavy, in fact, that I stopped and stood there for 
     a minute, sagging under its weight. Then I tried to see 
     myself through the eyes of the two old men I'd just run into: 
     someone who was black, yes, but more importantly, someone 
     without luggage, striding purposefully out of the elevator as 
     if on a mission, dressed in a semi-uniform of blazer and gray 
     slacks.
       I turned around and retraced my steps.
       ``What made you think I was the guy who unlocks the meeting 
     rooms?'' I asked when I caught up with them.
       ``You were dressed a little like a hotel employee, sir,'' 
     the one who had spoken earlier said in a genuinely 
     deferential way. ``Believe me, I meant no insult.''
       ``Well, I hope you'll forgive me for being abrupt,'' I 
     said, and after a quick handshake I headed back to the 
     garage, feeling immensely relieved.
       If we are to lay this burden down for good, we must be 
     committed to letting go of racial classifications--not 
     getting beyond race by taking race more into account, as 
     Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun disastrously advised, 
     but just getting beyond race period as a foundation for 
     public policy.
       Yet, I know that race is a scar in America. I first saw 
     this scar at the beginning of my life in the segregated 
     South. Black people should not deny that this mark exists: it 
     is part of our connection to America. But we should also 
     resist all of those, black and white, who want to rip open 
     that scar and make race a raw and angry wound that continues 
     to define and divide us.
       Left to their own devices, I believe, Americans will 
     eventually merge and melt into each other. Throughout our 
     history, there has been a constant intermingling of people--
     even during the long apartheid of segregation and Jim Crow. 
     It is malicious as well as unreasonable not to acknowledge 
     that in our own time the conditions for anger have diminished 
     and the conditions for connection have improved.
       We all know the compelling statistics about the 
     improvements in black life: increased social and vocational 
     mobility, increased personal prestige and political power. 
     But of all the positive data that have accumulated since the 
     Civil Rights Act of 1964--when America finally decided to 
     leave its racial past behind--the finding that gives me most 
     hope is the recent survey showing that nearly 90 percent of 
     all teenagers in America report having at least one close 
     personal friend of another race.
       My wife Ilene is white. I have two racially mixed children 
     and three grandchildren, two of whose bloodlines are even 
     more mixed as a result of my son's marriage to a woman of 
     half-Asian descent. So my own personal experience tells me 
     that the passageway to that place where all racial division 
     ends goes directly through the human heart.
       Not long ago, Mike Wallace came to California to interview 
     Ilene and me for a segment on ``60 Minutes.'' He seemed 
     shocked when I told him that race wasn't a big topic in our 
     family. He implied that we were somehow disadvantaging the 
     kids. But Ilene and I decided a long time ago to let our kids 
     find their way in this world without toting the bag of race. 
     They are lucky, of course, to have grown up after the great 
     achievements of the civil rights movement, which changed 
     America's heart as much as its laws. But we have made sure 
     that the central question for our children, since the moment 
     they came into this world, has always been who are you, not 
     what are you. When we ignore appeals to group identity and 
     focus instead on individuals and their individual humanity, 
     we are inviting the principles of justice present since 
     the American founding to come inside our contemporary 
     American homes.
       I won't pretend this is always easy. While a senior at 
     college, I fell in love with an effervescent white woman 
     named Ilene. When Ilene's parents first learned how serious 
     we were about each other, they reacted with dismay and spent 
     long hours on the phone trying to keep the relationship from 
     developing further. Hoping for support from my own relatives, 
     I went home one weekend and told Mom (the grandmother who had 
     raised me) about Ilene. She was cold and negative. ``Why 
     can't you find yourself a nice colored girl?'' she blurted 
     out. I walked out of the house and didn't contact her for a 
     long time afterward.
       Ilene and I now felt secretive and embattled. Marrying 
     ``outside your race'' was no easy decision in 1962. I knew 
     that Ilene had no qualms about challenging social norms, but 
     I was less sure that she could deal with exclusion by her 
     family, which seemed to me a real possibility. Nonetheless, 
     she said yes when I proposed, and we were married, with no 
     family members present.
       I called Mom the day after and told her. She apologized for 
     what she'd said earlier. Ilene's parents were not so quick to 
     alter their position. For months, the lines of communication 
     were down. Sometimes I came home from work and found Ilene 
     sitting on the couch crying.
       Finally her parents agreed to see her, but not me. I drove 
     her up to their house and waited in the car while she went 
     in. As the hours passed, I seethed. At one point I started 
     the engine and took off, but I didn't know the area and so, 
     after circling the block, came back and parked again. When 
     Ilene finally came out of the house, she just cried for 
     nearly the entire return trip.
       Today, people would rush to hold Ilene's parents guilty of 
     racism.
       But even when I was smoldering with resentment, I knew it 
     wasn't that simple. These were good people--hard working, 
     serious, upstanding. They were people, moreover, who had 
     produced my wife, a person without a racist bone in her body. 
     In a sense, I could sympathize with my new in-laws; there 
     were no blacks in their daily life, and they lived in a small 
     town where everyone knew everything about everyone else. Our 
     marriage was a leap nothing in her parents' lives had 
     prepared them to take.
       But their reaction to me still rankled. After having to 
     wait in the car that afternoon I vowed never to go near their 
     house again.
       For a long time we didn't see Ilene's parents. But we did 
     see her Aunt Markeeta and Uncle Glen. They were wonderful 
     people. Glen, dead now, was a salt-of-the-earth type who 
     worked in a sawmill, and Markeeta had a personality as 
     piquant as her name. They integrated us into their circle of 
     friends, who became our friends too. In those healing days, 
     we all functioned as an extended family.
       If I had to pick the moment when our family problems began 
     to resolve themselves if would be the day our son Marc was 
     born.
       Not long after, we were invited to come for a visit. This 
     time I was included in the invitation. I remember sitting 
     stiffly through

[[Page S4559]]

     the event, which had the tone of the recently released film, 
     Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? I was supremely uncomfortable, 
     but I also sensed that the fever had broken. And indeed, a 
     peace process was in place. The visits became more frequent. 
     The frigid tolerance gradually thawed into welcome.
       There was no single dramatic moment that completed the 
     reconciliation; no cathartic conversation in which we all 
     explored our guilt and misconceptions. Instead, we just got 
     on with our lives, nurturing the relationship that had been 
     born along with my son. It grew faster than he did. Within a 
     year we were on our way to becoming what we are now--a close-
     knit, supportive family. Today, my relationship with my in-
     laws could not be better. I love them very much, and they let 
     me know that the feeling is mutual.
       The moral is clear. Distance exaggerates difference and 
     breeds mistrust; closeness breaks down suspicion and produces 
     connection. My life so far tells me that our future as a 
     nation is with connection.
       Most people call me a black man. In fact, I'm black in the 
     same way that Tiger Woods and so many other Americans are 
     black--by the ``one drop of blood'' rule used by yesterday's 
     segregationists and today's racial ideologues. In my case, 
     the formula has more or less equal elements of French 
     Canadian, Choctaw, African, and Irish American. But just 
     reciting the fractions provides no insight about the richness 
     of life produced by the sum of the parts.
       A journalist for the New York Times once described my 
     bloodline as being right out of a Faulkner novel. He was 
     right. And my family was always trying to understand how the 
     strands of DNA dangling down through history had created 
     their individual selves. They had their share of guilty 
     secrets and agonized over the consequences of bad blood, 
     whatever its racial origin. But in their actions, they, like 
     Faulkner's characters, treated race and other presumed 
     borders between people as being permeable.
       I grew up with my mother's people. My maternal grand-father 
     was Eli Soniea, a mixed-blood Cajun born in the tiny 
     Louisiana town of Sulphur. He eventually settled in 
     Leesville, not far from the Texas border, a sleepy town with 
     hazy foothills stretching behind it like a movie backdrop.
       Eli died ten years before I was born, and I never knew him. 
     But photographs of him have always intrigued me. He was light 
     skinned, had straight black hair, and a serious look. I've 
     been told he spoke a pidgin French and English and was an 
     ambitious man. He worked as a carpenter, sometimes ran a 
     construction gang, and amassed enough money to buy some land 
     and build a restaurant and bar in Leesville, He was evidently 
     a no-nonsense type who didn't like anyone, especially his own 
     kin, putting on airs.
       Eli's wife, my grandmother Mary Smith--or ``Mom,'' as I 
     always called her--was half Irish and half Choctaw. This 
     latter element was clearly evident in her high cheekbones and 
     broad features, and in the bloom of her young womanhood she 
     was sometimes referred to as an ``Indian Princess.'' Mom was 
     born and raised in Texas. She married Eli Soniea as a result 
     of an ``arrangement'' brokered by her parents, after which he 
     brought her to Louisiana.
       In their early life together, the two of them lived in that 
     part of Leesville known as ``Dago Quarters'' because of the 
     large number of Italian immigrants. After Eli's early death--
     when I was growing up you didn't ask why or how someone died; 
     the mere fact of it ended all discussion--Mary's only income 
     was from the restaurant and bar he had built, which she 
     leased to people who did business with the servicemen from 
     the nearby Army base. Because money was tight, she moved the 
     family to a less expensive neighborhood, the predominantly 
     black ``Bartley Quarters.''
       The complexions of Mom's own six children ranged from light 
     to dark. (William, for instance, was always known as ``Red,'' 
     because of this Indian look and coloring.) But whatever their 
     exact coloration or facial characteristics, they all had 
     ``colored'' on their birth certificates. In Louisiana in 
     those days, being ``colored'' was not just a matter of blood; 
     it was also a question of what neighborhood you lived in and 
     what people you associated with. ``Colored'' is on my birth 
     certificate.
       The Sonieas' race problem came not only from whites but 
     from blacks too. Leesville's social boundaries were 
     reasonably porous, but if you were falling down through the 
     cracks rather than moving up, as the Sonieas were doing after 
     Eli died, you attracted notice. My grandmother often recalled 
     how her new neighbors in Bartley Quarters called her and her 
     children ``high yellers,'' a term coined by white Southern 
     racists but used with equal venom by blacks too. In fact, 
     Mom's kids had so much trouble that officials tried to 
     convince them to transfer out of the school to escape the 
     racial animosity. This experience left some of my relatives 
     with hard feelings that never really went away. During the 
     campaign for California's Proposition 209, for instance, when 
     I was being accused of selling out ``my people,'' my Aunt 
     Bert got annoyed one day and said, ``When we lived back in 
     Leesville, they didn't want to be our ``brothers and 
     sisters'; they didn't own us as `their people' then; so why 
     do they think we owe them something now because of skin 
     color?
       My biological mother Grace, Bert's little sister, was the 
     youngest of Mom's children. I wish I had more memories of 
     her. I have only one sharp image in my mind: a face resting 
     in satin in a casket. Old photographs show my mother as a 
     beautiful woman with a full, exotic face. But she wasn't 
     beautiful lying there with a waxy, preserved look, certainly 
     not to a terrified four-year-old dragged up to the front of 
     the church to pay his last respects. I still remember 
     standing there looking at her with my cousin Ora holding my 
     hand to keep me from bolting as the pandemonium of a Southern 
     black funeral--women yelling, crying, fainting, and lying 
     palsied on the floor--rose to a crescendo all around me.
       According to family legend, she died of a stroke. But I 
     suspect that this claim was really just my family's way of 
     explaining away something infinitely more complex. Two other 
     facts about my mother's life may have had something to do 
     with her early passing. First, she had been in a serious car 
     accident that left her with a steel plate in her head. And 
     secondly, she had been physically abused by my father.
       I didn't find this out until I was in my fifties. The 
     information accidentally escaped during a conversation with 
     my Aunt Bert, who said, when the subject of my father came 
     up, ``You know, your Uncle Arthur once said, excuse the 
     expression, `That son of a bitch once took out a gun and shot 
     at me!' ''
       I asked her why.
       ``Because Arthur told your father that if he ever beat your 
     mother again he'd kill him, and your father got out a gun.''
       I guess Roy Connerly was what they called a ``fancy man'' 
     back then. Judging from his photos, he was quite handsome, 
     with light skin and a wicked smile, and a reputation as a 
     gambler, a drinker, and a womanizer. He worked odd jobs, but 
     it seems that his real profession was chasing women. I've 
     been told so many times about the day he got tired of me and 
     my mother and turned us in at my grandmother's house that it 
     has come to feel like my own legitimate memory.
       He arrived there one afternoon with the two of us and with 
     his girlfriend of the moment, a woman named Lucy. My Aunt 
     Bert was watering the lawn when he walked into the yard.
       ``Is Miss Mary here?'' my father asked.
       Bert said yes.
       ``Go get her,'' he ordered.
       Bert went in to get Mom, who appeared on the porch wiping 
     her hands on her apron.
       ``I'm giving them back to you, Miss Mary,'' Roy said, 
     gesturing at my sobbing mother and at me, the miserable child 
     in her arms. ``I want to be with Lucy.''
       Always composed in a crisis, Mom looked at him without 
     visible emotion and said, ``Thank you for bringing them.''
       A few days later he brought my red wagon over. Then Roy 
     Connerly vanished from my life.
       Later on I learned that Roy Connerly eventually got rid of 
     Lucy and, at the age of 39, entered a relationship with a 15-
     year-old girl named Clementine and had a couple of kids by 
     her. But nothing more than that for over 50 years. Then, just 
     a couple of years ago, a writer doing a profile on me for the 
     New York Times called one day.
       ``Are you sitting down?'' he asked melodramatically.
       I asked him what was up. He said that in his research about 
     my background he had discovered that my father was still 
     alive, 84 years old, and living in Leesville. The writer gave 
     me his phone number.
       I didn't do anything about it for a long time. Then, in the 
     fall of 1998, I was invited to debate former Congressman 
     William Gray at Tulane University in New Orleans. One of the 
     things that made me accept was how close it was to Leesville. 
     But I didn't actually decide to go there until after the 
     speech. I came back to the hotel, rented a car, and got 
     directions from the concierge.
       It was a four-hour drive in a dreary rain. I warned myself 
     not to surrender to counterfeit sentiment that would make a 
     fool of both me and my father.
       I stopped on the outskirts of town and called from a 
     convenience store. My father's wife Clementine answered. I 
     told her who I was and asked if I could come by and see him. 
     There were muffled voices on the other end of the line, then 
     she came back on and said that I should stay put and she'd 
     send someone out to lead me to the house.
       A few minutes later, a couple of young men in a beat-up 
     blue car came by and motioned at me. I followed them down the 
     main street and over railroad tracks to a run-down 
     neighborhood of narrow houses and potholed roads without 
     sidewalks.
       We got out of the car and went into a tiny, shuttered house 
     whose living room was illumined only by a small television 
     set. I introduced myself to Clementine, and we talked about 
     my father for a minute or two. She emphasized that the man I 
     was about to meet was very old, quite ill, and easily 
     confused.
       When she led me into the bedroom, I saw him, sunk down in 
     the mattress, a bag of bones. His hands and feet were gnarled 
     and knobby with arthritis, but in his face I saw my own 
     reflection.
       I touched his arm: ``How are you feeling today?''
       He looked up at me uncomprehendingly: ``All right.''
       ``You know who I am?''
       Seeing that he was lost in a fog, Clementine said, ``It's 
     Billy,'' using my childhood nickname. He looked at her, then 
     at me.
       ``Oh, Billy,'' the voice was thin and wavering. ``How long 
     you're staying?''
       I told him I couldn't stay long.
       There was an awkward silence as I waited for him to say 
     something. But he just stared

[[Page S4560]]

     at me. We looked at each other for what seemed like a very 
     long time. Finally, a lifetime's worth of questions came 
     tumbling out.
       ``Did you ever care how I was doing?'' I asked him.
       ``No,'' he replied uncertainly.
       ``Did you ever try and get in touch with me?''
       ``No,'' he looked at me blankly.
       ``Did you ever even care what happened to me?''
       ``No.''
       At this point Clementine intervened: ``I don't even think 
     he knows what you're asking.''
       I stood there a moment, resigning myself to the situation. 
     I would never get an explanation for his absence from my 
     life. Then Joseph, one of the young men who'd guided me to 
     the house and who I now realized was my half-brother, 
     beckoned me out of the room. In the hallway, he asked if I'd 
     like to visit some of my other relatives living nearby. I 
     said yes and he took me outside. We crossed the street to a 
     narrow house where an elderly woman was waiting for us. 
     Joseph introduced her to me as my Aunt Ethel. She cordially 
     invited us in.
       Ethel had married my father's brother and served as the 
     family's unofficial archivist and historian. As we talked, 
     she asked if I knew anything about my father's family. I said 
     no. Ethel showed me some photos. She told me that his mother, 
     born in 1890, was named Fannie Self Conerly, and that they 
     spelled it with one n then. She said that Fannie's mother was 
     Sarah Ford Lovely, who had died at the age of 98, when I was 
     a boy. This woman, my great-grandmother, had been born a 
     slave.
       After I walked back to my father's house and sat for a 
     while beside him. I stood and said, ``I've got to be going. 
     You take care of yourself.''
       ``You too,'' he said to me. ``You ever coming back this way 
     again, Billy?''
       I smiled and waved and left without answering, and without 
     asking him the one question that was still on my mind: Did 
     you beat my mother like they say? Did you hasten her death 
     and thus deprive me of both of you?
       On the drive back to New Orleans I thought about my 
     discoveries--this sickly old man who was my life's most 
     intimate stranger; the fact that his blood and mine had once 
     been owned by another human being. I felt subtly altered, but 
     still the same. My father's gift to me, if you could call it 
     that, was a deeper realization that it is not the life we're 
     given that counts, but the life we make of the life we're 
     given.

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