Separate Pasts: Growing Up White In The Segregated South

“The past, on the other hand, was a palpable reality in the Wade of my youth. For all of my life I had been nurtured on tales of the past, stories of family events and local occurrences that I had come to know by heart. I was also well versed in racist dogma, having been instructed from birth in the ideology and etiquette of segregation. Caught up in the rhythms of village life, I naturally assumed that the stable, constant Wade with which I was so familiar, the ordered village life my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had known, would go on forever. It was unimaginable that mine would be the last generation to come of age in the segregated South, that the Wade I knew would soon collapse beneath the irresistible pressures brought to bear upon it by the forces of social change.”

The tension between tradition and change animates McLaurin’s memoir. McLaurin foreshadows that structural change—desegregation—is coming, yet Wade seems immune to the winds of change, somehow outside of history. McLaurin gradually realizes that ignoring change won’t make it go away. The memoir details how change happens on both institutional and personal levels. In this quote, McLaurin highlights the importance of recognizing and understanding the past, a key theme in his memoir. He suggests that without dealing with the legacies of racism and segregation, institutional change is insufficient.

“Blacks, adults and children alike, called my father and grandfather mister; my mother and grandmother, miss. When a black person approached a doorway at the same time as a white adult, the black stepped back and sometimes even held the door open for the white to enter. The message I received from hundreds of such signals was always the same. I was white; I was different; I was superior.”

Segregation was a set of laws that restricted the free movement of African Americans in society, dictating where they could live, eat, and work. But it was also a set of social conventions. Throughout the memoir, McLaurin highlights how these laws prevented African Americans from participating fully in society. This lack of participation was then used as evidence of their inferiority. For instance, someone points out there are no African American quarterbacks as a confirmation of African American inferiority. Segregation prevented African Americans from crossing the color line in professional sports.