Chris Jepson: Who's your cousin?

My grandson and I go to the movies most every Thursday evening. It’s date night for my daughter, and my wife likes a break . . . from me. Ha ha! Hmmm? Regardless, it’s a boys’ night out. Literally. We hit the local Burger Barn (Steak & Shake), order the Triple Cholesterol Special and “burgerify” with fries and malts and then hit the cinema.

The beauty of going to the movies with a soon-to-be 10-year-old is that my Lad will see anything and, better still, he’s game for movies I would typically invest neither time nor nickel. The crash and burns, the superheroes, the latest Tom Cruise. It’s not named “Oblivion” for no reason. The Lad gave it a seven out of 10. He’s quite discerning.

For the past several weeks my grandson has been asking to see “42,” the story of Jackie Robinson. Or, rather how Jackie Robinson integrated professional baseball. It’s a sad story I am all too familiar with, and I just haven’t been up for an oversimplification of the “heroic” black man integrating a white sport. I haven’t yet had the conversation as to why he wants to see this movie. What context and understanding can a child have concerning the idiocy of his elders?

Sometimes we’ll be driving along, listening to 89.9 Jazz and invariably the top-of-the-hour news is a recount, a sad rehash of how many died in Syria today. Or, how many Sunni Iraqis were blown to bits and pieces. Or, American servicemen killed in Afghanistan. I’ll turn to my grandson and comment on how violent our world is and what does he make of it? He really cannot grasp the hatreds, fears, history and bigotry of the protagonists, but he believes stupidity must be a large factor.

He’s unaware of what a racist little hotbed (think KKK) of discrimination Central Florida once was. That Jackie Robinson was actually threatened, once-upon-a-time, told to leave and never return to Sanford. That Oviedo buried its public swimming pool in the 1960s rather than integrate. That’s right, buried. You can still see an edge of the pool in a public park.

Of course, it is argued, you have to judge a people in the context of their historic times. Racism was a perfectly acceptable societal value, so burying a municipal asset was preferable to “mixing” the races. The only problem with that argument (perspective) — that blacks are inferior — is that there were learned men and women quite reasonably arguing otherwise.

By the 18th century, English Quaker abolitionists had identified slavery as an indefensible abomination. It was being publicly discussed worldwide. You couldn’t have been a slaveholder and/or racist and not have been aware that just, maybe, your bigotry was “wrong.” So how to explain mid-20th century American racism?

Hundreds of years later, American prejudice had blacks sitting in the back of the bus as well as it being unacceptable to play with those darling “boys” of spring.

Thirty thousand years ago, it might have made survival sense to discriminate on the basis of “the different.” But that was during the end-times of the Neanderthal. Wait! What if Neanderthals survived after all? What if intolerance is gene-marked? What if racism, bigotry, homophobia, anti-Semitism, etc. are genetic traits, traceable back to our Neanderthal cousins? I’d much prefer that explanation to stupidity.

Stupidity is simply inadequate in explaining (justifying) the human condition. My grandson has yet to understand that.

Jepson is a 27-year resident of Central Florida. He’s fiscally conservative, socially liberal, likes art and embraces diversity of opinion. Reach him at [email protected]