Discrimination has long been embedded in our county’s fabric. So have we changed?

A friend of mine recently described a young acquaintance by saying: “She’s beautiful, but she’s Black.” Pausing, my friend then barked: “Damn!”

Because it suddenly struck her that the word “but” made her description racist. We two friends are nearly 90 years old. We grew up amid the ingrained racism of our era. Strangely, her blurting out of that “swear word” proved she’s emerging from it. Then my friend said:

“No, she is Black and she’s beautiful.”

Despite today’s tidal wave of bad news, most of America is also coming out of its stupid, racist, homophobic, savage history. For more than a half century now, we have been slowly making America greater.

You have to be old like my friend and me to understand what a cruel nation we grew up in. Twelve years before I was born, and six miles from my birthplace, white attackers burned Tulsa’s integrated Greenwood district, which was once called the Black Wall Street. They shot, clubbed and killed 100 or more residents in the nation’s worst race massacre of the 1920s.

To my great benefit, the Tulsa school district bused me four miles to Park Elementary, a brick building with a cafeteria, an auditorium, a gymnasium and a library. Meanwhile, only three blocks from my home, Black kids in South Haven attended a two-room frame hovel without running water served by stinking raw lumber outhouses behind. Troubled as we still are about race in America, today we are better than that.

As a Kansas City Star reporter in the 1960s, I knew John Wood as a fellow journalist. I became better myself when I met him later in a 1970s writers group, by which time the fine, funny writer was out as a gay man. I wasted 40 years of my life before learning to treat people like John simply as friends, as Jesus might have.

Because why is it my business who John, or any other person, chooses to love? Gallup’s 2022 poll showed 71% of Americans now support legal same-sex marriage. Who we decide to love is nobody’s business but our own.

Though conservatives may scorn it as “political correctness,” movies and books improved us. In the film “A Man Called Otto” and the series “New Amsterdam” about life in a hospital, we see black and white and brown people meeting agreeably. We see men kiss men, women kiss women. We oldsters may flinch a bit. Slowly we catch on that love is love.

Finding it hard to revive full-on hatred of gay people, Republicans switched their aggression to trans people. This very desperation of Republican efforts proves how far most Americans have come toward decency.

Recently a conservative doctor friend of mine told me, “Government can’t do anything right.” Really? What about the law, signed by Republican President Ronald Reagan, that guarantees every human brief treatment in hospital emergency rooms?

In 1963 my wife, Lenore, now gone, was among the earliest women structural engineering graduates of the University of Kansas. When she applied for a job at a Kansas City engineering firm, the top boss told her, “I would never hire a woman engineer.”

Not anymore, thanks to the 1964 federal law against such discrimination. The same goes for racial discrimination in hiring, outlawed through the same law.

Would you believe Republican lawmakers helped pass that legislation?

Republicans were different then. They helped pass Social Security in 1935, the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act in 1956, Medicare in 1964, the federal disability act of 1990 and many more. Yes, it’s true. Republicans in the past have actually joined Democrats in efforts to make America great.

I yearn to see more of that.

Contact the columnist at hammerc12@gmail.com.