By T.W. Burger
I grew up in the Deep South, a place where many assume, incorrectly, racial prejudice reigned supreme.
It wasn't true of course: The Deep South was just noisier about it than most other folks. The town in western PA where I was born, for example, had some schools that were racially integrated, but I believe that was just because they were too cheap to build to the hilariously inaccurate "separate-but-equal" model.
The main thrust of racial segregation is that if you keep people completely enough separate from one another, you can make up whatever ridiculous lies you want about the "other" group without having any representatives to counter those lies by example.
Speaking of lies, the most egregious one I commonly hear about DEI is that it was an evil scheme by the communists, elitists, libtards, (choose your villain) to prevent qualified white people from taking a job that would then be given to a nonwhite man or, horror of horrors, a woman.
A vocal and unpleasant segment of our culture was and is determined to bring all that to a screeching halt before life as we know it comes to and end and the cosmos is plunged into everlasting darkness.
As often happens, the yahoos have it bassackwards.
Let me tell you a story featuring my friend and co-worker, Robert, and our boss, a good man named Wallace.
The scene is set is a good-sized little town on the banks of the Mississippi River in the deepest of the Deep South, not quit three-quarters of the way through the 20th century, when I was a young man. folk think, the world was in color, the music was terrific, and we had cars that make us geezers giggle at the silly things people drive now.
We didn't have personal computers or cell phones, though we did have payphones, which we fed with dimes. They worked OK and gave Superman a place to change clothes.
I worked for a testing laboratory. Most of what i did was in the engineering department,testing soil mechanics, designing and testing concrete mixes, and drilling holes to check the ground where big buildings are to be built.
I had a pickup truck for my daily use and a larger truck on which was strapped and bolted an ancient, homemade drilling rig for doing those deep tests.
I was 20, and in charge of engineering. At first, I had no idea what I was doing. But on most of the projects we were hired to oversee, I could bring things to a screeching halt if there were problems with aspects of the soil or concrete on the job. Tempers would sometimes flare. i received threats, and one foreman swung a spade at me, but that was the worst of it.
Overall. it was a great job, and i loved it.
But it shouldn't have been MY job.
Robert was nearly 30, had been at the lab for years and knew the job backwards and forwards.
But Robert was my assistant. Robert was black.
Not long after I started the gig, I spent a long day running test holes out in a soybean field on which a large building was planned. Robert had patiently taught me the tricks of running the homemade drill and identifying the various soils we discovered in the sampling tool. At the end of the day, when I handed Wallace my report, I couldn't resist asking why Robert was my assistant instead of the other way around.
“Robert knows all this stuff," I said. "He should be my boss.”
Wallace, to his credit, agreed.
“But let me ask you...can you imagine what would happen if Robert tried to shut down a job like you have to do sometimes? They wouldn't listen to him. And they might hurt him." None of them are going to take orders from a black man. It ain't right, but that's how it is.”
Robert was absolutely qualified to do the job. I was absolutely not, but I had the most important qualifications, then and there: I was white and I was male.
Feeling guilty, I shared my feelings with Robert. He laughed, thanked me, and basically said I was an idiot. He appreciated the sentiment, but said it would probably get him killed.
I have known people who refer to that time as "the good old days," and it is they, and that, that is our great shame.
T. W. Burger was raised in town and graduated from Athens High School in 1967, then worked as a driver of everything from fork trucks to garbage trucks and concrete mixers, has been an apprentice mortician and ambulance attendant.
Terry is now a semi-retired journalist who resides on the banks of Marsh Creek, just outside of Gettysburg, Pa.