Whites (Working It Through & Discovering What Work Is)

I betcha she couldn't believe what was happening either.

"When Hoover explains how vagrancy laws forced black residents to work as day laborers or else hide out during work hours, white customers often say they didn’t know,...

It is not unusual for white visitors to feel prompted to apologize for Jim Crow, Hoover said. But I felt accused and reflexively defensive as an incensed world watched. It was a personal lesson in how the human mind is built to deflect unwelcome information.

As Hoover described the vagrancy laws, I noticed my reluctance to believe what he was saying. Wasn’t his description of forced labor at the very least an exaggeration? I wanted to deny information that further indicted my white ancestors as wrongdoers,..."