Commentary by Tracy McCue, Sumner Newscow — Last summer, when my son Quinn was too young to drive and was at a music camp in northwest Wichita, I spent a week at Starbucks.

Not sure the coffee was all that great but it had free Wifi and it was quiet enough to give you the Sumner Newscow reader the news of the day. Needless to say, it was summer and after a couple of cups, I needed to use the restroom.

Tracy “Cueball” McCue

That put me at a quandary. I had a laptop computer but needed to go do my business. Do I leave the computer there on the table or do I head into the bathroom with it? There was this 50-ish year old lady sitting nearby. She seemed harmless so I asked her if she could watch my computer. She politely said yes.

So I did my business came back and the computer was there. I said thank you. She smiled and that was that.

This became a routine for a couple of days when one day an African American male, I’m guessing in his early 20s, was sitting nearby and I needed to use the restroom again. I hesitated and decided I would take my computer to the bathroom with me. He wouldn’t have known I didn’t ask him like others before him, and I justified to myself at that particular time that it really isn’t a good idea to leave your laptop computers to strangers.

So I made a decision. From this point forward I was going to take my computer to the restroom and I’m going to drink less coffee – no matter the person who was sitting across from me. A civil rights leader I am not.

Later in the evening when I had time to reflect on the day, I thought about my actions and there was no denying I was borderline if not fully racist. There was no proof that the African American male was anymore likely to bolt off with my computer than the 50-year-old white woman. Yet I entrusted her and not him. I don’t think of myself as a blatant racist, and usually go out of my way to not be. But there I was – judging a person based on his skin color.

And I began to wonder, just how many times is this scenario repeated every single day by millions of people? This isn’t about blatant racist hatred, but the quiet subtleties. And it is an illustration of why African Americans face a harder life, and why we white Americans could possibly never understand.

I have been quiet about this self discovery for 10 months now. I wanted to write about it during the NFL National Anthem protest controversy of last October. But the topic was so hot, that the world didn’t need one more opinion on the matter at the time. So I stayed quiet.

Yet, now every time I see an African American protest, and then people on the white side mock their right to do so, I want to shout, “who are we to judge? What makes our opinion more important than theirs and they don’t have the right to express it?”

“It’s a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his bootstraps.

And many Negroes, by the thousands and millions, have been left bootless … as the result of a society that deliberately made his color a stigma…” https://t.co/ycN2yl4qhP #MLK50 pic.twitter.com/2yi0fZhaW7

— NBC News (@NBCNews) April 5, 2018

While I was scrolling through Twitter the other day, I came across this video of a 1967 NBC News interview with Martin Luther King at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Ga. I urge you to watch it and if your are inclined watch the full interview here.

Yes, I realized the horrors of slavery and the Jim Crow laws in the south, and the systematic approach to preventing African Americans an opportunity to vote. These were blatant acts of racism. But when King spoke about the ‘stigma’ that the African American faced throughout U.S. history, he was addressing something entirely different. He states:

“America freed the slaves in 1863 through the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, but gave the slaves no land or nothing in reality… to get started on. At the same time, America was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest which meant there was willingness to give the white peasants from Europe an economic base. And yet it refused to give its black peasants from Africa who came here involuntarily in chains and had worked free for 244 years any kind of economic base.”

In other words, while we were busy patting ourselves on the back for freeing the slaves, we didn’t even think about providing the black man an opportunity to make a living. And I wonder to myself, was this deliberate or another example of white America inadvertently treating the black person differently, much like me and my computer at Starbucks?

I don’t know if there is a solution to the race issues in America. But I know one thing. In order to solve them, it is going to take a change in how we automatically view the other person sitting across the way in the coffee shop. And that starts with you and me.

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