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see where everybody’s coming from because it’s not a conversation that’s a reaction to something ugly.
    But even then I get both white and black friends saying to me, “Charles, you’re always saying stuff that inflames people.” And I say, “Wait a minute. Why do you look at it as if I’m inflaming anybody?” They say, “Can’t you do it in a nicer way?” And I say, “It’s never worked in the last two hundred years with anybody approaching it in a nice way.” There isn’t anything nice about prejudice, is there? It’s a catch-22. It isn’t a nice subject, but if you address it you’re inflaming folks. There’s no comfortable or easy way to get at it. Because if you accuse somebody of prejudice, you are saying they don’t like somebody because of race or color. It’s some serious shit.
    People are so afraid to talk about it, they can’t even get to the real issues, the difficult stuff that
should
make us uncomfortable. We can’t get past worrying about disagreement, so we don’t have enough meaningful conversations to make a difference. Damn, to me there’s a lot worse than disagreeing with each other. What’s worse, people hating and acting on that hate, or disagreeing?
    Growing up in Alabama, race was always an issue. It’s just different growing up black in Alabama. I noticed it, I felt it pretty much all the time. It wasn’t something that people just put in a drawer somewhere. It was always out there, if not right up there on the surface, then just below the surface. You think I’m exaggerating? We had a black homecoming queen and a white homecoming queen. At the time, I’m not sure I even noticed or knew the significance of it. And this ain’t ancient history. I graduated from high school in 1981. It’s just the way it was at the time. But I never felt at peace with it until I went to Auburn. Once I was in a place with all kinds of different people and playing on teams with black kids and white kids and making friends with people different from myself, I looked back on where I came from and it was amazing to me.
    I’ve told people that I found an environment with a lot less racial tension when I got to Auburn, and people have said to me, “Well, it was that way because you were a star athlete and you were treated differently.” That could be true, but for whatever reason I was comfortable there. Out of 22,000 students, which is about the number Auburn had at the time, only a tiny percentage was black. But I felt good there, befriended people, had people of different races befriend me.
    It was then that I realized that whites and blacks could not just coexist but get along and live comfortably together. Some people may not think that’s much of a revelation, but growing up in Alabama you just always felt a certain racial tension. And I never had anything overtly bad happen to me, but there was just tension all the time. I felt it throughout high school, people not knowing how to act around somebody of a different race, people not knowing what to say, being afraid. Maybe it was because people didn’t talk enough, didn’t have any real conversation about what they were feeling or about what these differences really meant . . . if they meant anything at all.
    How can you know each other when, in most places in Alabama—and definitely my hometown—blacks live on one side of town and whites live on another? We’re talking separate lives. One of my best friends in high school, Joseph Mock, is white. When I think back on it, we didn’t know anything about race early on. Kids don’t know. And that’s the thing about racism and prejudice that is really sick. As kids, we didn’t know. We just hung out. My mother and my grandmother didn’t allow any of that garbage. They told me, “Hey, boy, all white people are not bad.” Between my mother, my grandmother and having Joseph as a close friend, I never bought into any of that hatred. Funny thing is, it’s pretty obvious when two