Ponte Vedra resident Mike Mulhern was recently named a finalist by the International Book Awards for his volume, “The Repentant Racist” (Best Seller Publishing; $4.95 e-book; $9.95 paperback; $19.95 hardback; available from Amazon.com).
The book recounts his evolving racial attitudes as a child growing up in New York and New Jersey in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s until the present day.
As a boy, he believed that being white made him superior to Black people.
“It was the way things were, so they must have been that way for a reason,” he adds. “I was the beneficiary and not the victim of this, so why should it have been any concern of mine?”
All that changed when he went to college in the South in Louisiana and Mississippi.
“There, I learned the region specialized in two cottage industries,” he said, laughing, “racism and football.”
As his contact with Black people grew exponentially compared to what it had been in the North, he was able to witness overt racism firsthand. He characterizes himself as “a New Jersey Yankee in King Cotton’s Court,” living in the 1960s where racism was the norm, and he was expected to accept it if he wished to be accepted himself.
His interest in history caused him to develop an unusual hobby: driving around – tape recorder in hand – interviewing the reported last-surviving slaves who had been liberated from involuntary servitude by the Civil War.
“None of them escaped a lifestyle of poverty, but they were survivors, hangers-on, making the most of the lives that Southern society at large forced them to lead,” he said.
Some of his slave interviews are recounted in the book.
While in Louisiana, he lived in an integrated neighborhood where there was a lot of racial tension. This helped him get over the last vestiges of racism he still had in him.
“I learned that if I wanted to hold all Blacks responsible for the actions of the worst of them, then I had to be willing to own the deeds of people like Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin, who, like me, were white,” Mulhern said.
In addition to his own personal recollections, Mulhern follows the course of unfolding racial tensions in America starting from colonial times in an effort to show how we got to where we are today.
“With regard to race, America has been plodding on a course of two steps forward, one step backward during the 157 years that have elapsed since the end of the Civil War,” Mulhern said. “Lots of anti-racist measures have been enacted on paper, but these have done little to create change in the human heart. Don’t despair! The prospects of hope are as brilliant as the rising sun, and the change that is needed will appear when both Whites and Blacks decide enough is enough and work together to allow that new day to dawn.”
Mulhern wrote for The Ponte Vedra Recorder in 1997 and during his tenure at the paper, he won an award from the Florida Press Club for “General Excellence in Sports Writing.”
