THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT  
              Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Sunday, October 22, 1995               TAG: 9510220004
SECTION: LOCAL                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON
                                             LENGTH: Medium:   69 lines

WHITES ARE GETTING A TASTE OF WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE ON THE OUTSIDE

You know that feeling you get when you find out something really important happened - and you weren't invited?

That's how I felt the day of the Million Man March. Even though there was debate - among blacks and whites alike - as to the march's value, there was a power and a passion in the throngs of African Americans that I could only watch.

I was on the outside looking in. I felt left out not so much as a woman, but as a white person.

It's a common feeling among whites lately.

Between the march and the O.J. verdict, between welfare reform and affirmative action, this has been a time of reckoning for whites, of looking inward and admitting that we don't always ``get it.''

I saw that in the faces of the races after the O.J. verdict. Whites standing there with blank looks, blacks with smiles on their faces.

Now it's my turn to be the outsider.

I am a white middle-class woman. I grew up in a white Midwestern town. And the scant lessons I learned about race relations could fit on the thumb-sized pages of a Cracker Jacks' book.

Sensitivity training back then consisted of a couple of themes: Treat everyone the same. Be colorblind. Those sing-song lessons now seem so achingly simplistic as to border on the ridiculous.

But back then those phrases were a novel approach in my parents' eyes, radical to my grandmother, who talked about ``coloreds'' while I winced in embarrassment.

I was going to be so much better, so much more enlightened than my ancestors. I thought I understood, that I was clean of prejudice. And now, all these years later, I find I am wrong.

I discover I can't be colorblind, that I can't ignore skin color and expect race relations to improve. I learn that my life experiences have dealt me a racism I may not even recognize. A racism that surprises as much as dismays me.

It surfaces when I use a phrase like ``black on black'' crime without realizing I never use the term ``white on white.'' Or when I call child care my generation's biggest issue without seeing that black working women have struggled with the issue for ages.

So I sit, eyeing the racial divide warily, realizing I have many miles to go.

I feel fear sometimes when the issue of race arises. I'm afraid to wade into the discussion, fearful I'll find myself on treacherous ground, that I will make some inadvertent slip that will show some racism I didn't know was there.

I fear being called racist, or dismissed as some well-meaning, but ignorant, white person.

So I shut down. Keep my mouth shut. Avoid the issue. Better to be deaf, dumb and blind than to stick my foot in my mouth.

But this should not be a time to stand back, blank-faced, like those pictures of whites in the aftermath of the O.J. verdict.

In this time of feeling alienated by a jury's decision or a march, whites can try to understand what it must have felt like for African Americans to be outsiders in the past, and what it must feel like even today.

This should be a time to replace confusion with deeper understanding. A time to learn how to be color sensitive instead of colorblind. A time to listen.

I am in the throes of learning. And I'm hopeful that my children will grow up to teach me race lessons as enlightening as any I taught my parents. by CNB