Not long ago I visited Memphis, Tennessee. There are two major tourist attractions there. One is Graceland, a shrine to a demigod named Elvis. The other is the National Civil Rights Museum. I’ll bet you can guess which is the most popular.

I had the weird experience of visiting both on the same day—and I suffered extreme cultural whiplash. One is a place where a bunch of rockin’ good ‘ol boys ate fried banana sandwiches and shot holes in the walls with no mamma to tell them no. The other is a fine museum housed in the Lorraine Motel—a perfectly preserved artifact whose exterior looks like it did the day Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered there. It looks so much like a functioning motel that I met at least one person who tried to check in.

Graceland, with its tour busses and endless souvenir shops, would never be mistaken for an ordinary place. It’s a high temple of kitsch culture where you see what a million bucks worth of Naugahyde and shag carpet looks like. At the more understated Civil Rights museum, you wander through exhibits that put you in the middle of the black experience in America. There’s no Elvis Cadillac, but you can sit on Rosa Parks’s bus; and you can peer into the room Dr. King was in moments before his assassination—it’s just the way he left it.

Elvis might have sung Heartbreak Hotel, but the Lorraine is the real deal—the site of a national tragedy, the place where “the dream” died. It is an archive of a history that is powerful, and one we should all know better.

When so-called “race” problems come up, you hear people say, “We’ve got to put race behind us.” When I hear that, I know one thing: the speaker is white. That’s because white people think they don’t have race. Other people have race: brown people, black people, yellow people, red people, foreign people... you know, the people who are constantly complaining. But we white Americans like to think of ourselves as race neutral—we’re like glass, invisible when it comes to race. The fact that we can live with the illusion is a testament to the power we hold. Well, hello America: Elvis is dead and race lives.

But one of the things that becomes inescapable when you’re standing in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis is that what we think of as “black” history is also “white” history. The experience of African Americans cannot be told without both slaves and slave merchants, without Abe Lincoln and the Ku Klux Klan, without Martin Luther King and James Earl Ray. By shifting the lens from a traditional white perspective—where race doesn’t matter—and looking at the American experience from a Civil Rights perspective—where race does matter—you find a storyline that is shocking, agonizing, inspiring, and profound. You realize how impossible it is to banish race from today’s problems and discourse because it is so much a part of what we’ve fought about, so much a part of what we’ve done to each other. Or let me say it this way: so much a part of what we’re still fighting about, so much a part of what we’re still doing to each other.

To put race behind us is to bury the truth.

Clayton E. Cramer - 6/15/2001

It is true. If you do not think about what color you are, it is probably because no one has made an issue of it. I am white. I live in largely white community. I work in a company that is mostly white, and race is irrelevant to the jobs we do. Since I received my MA in History, the only times that I think about my race is when I am researching a topic in which race plays a part.

When I was in college, my race was a subject I could not avoid. If I filled out a scholarship application, it wanted to know my race. When a professor handed out scholarship applications in class one day, they were only for black students. Each time that I was reminded that the color of my skin mattered more than the content of my character, it rankled me a bit.

I was fortunate. I was not a traditional age college student. I was in my 30s, married, with a good job during the day. I have plenty of self-esteem, acquired in the manner that it usually is, by having made something of myself. The petty nuisances of being reminded that I was only a representative of my race, not Clayton E. Cramer, were brief flashes.

I noticed, however, that there were plenty of traditional age white college students, and it was astonishing, when the issue of race came up, how tremendously angry they were. My wife, a graduate student in English, noticed it also. She was doing the T.A. thing, lecturing about Samuel Johnson's "A Brief to Free a Slave," talking about slavery in 18th century Britain one day, and a couple of the white students became quite incensed at her assumption that slavery was wrong--and they used all the moral relativist jargon that most universities breathe today for their argument.

Is it a coincidence that so much racial animosity is appearing among younger white college students today, now that race is continuously being thrown in their faces? The generation that is now in school did not attend segregated schools. They played no part in the bad old days, and the benefits that the enjoyed by being white are fading fast. Yet a generation of professors are still playing the race card at universities--and I suspect that the effect it has on young, still emotionally immature white kids with self-esteem problems is not positive.