What it means that two white strangers stopped me while I walked to the gas station | Opinion

I picked up my red gas can and began the roughly mile-long-walk to the nearest convenience store. I needed gas for the lawnmower. I could have driven my truck but decided to take the stroll on that clear-hot summer late morning.

I barely made it out of my neighborhood before being stopped by a white woman. Listening to music through my headphones, I initially didn’t notice her car slowing.

“Can I help you?” she asked, startling me.

I smiled and told her no thank you. She drove on. Maybe two minutes later, a white man in a truck pulled up, offered me a ride. I thanked him, too, and kept moving.

It’s been about 1,300 days since Ahmaud Arbery was murdered by three white men for the sin of jogging while black through their Georgia neighborhood, more than 3,000 since Dylann Roof massacred nine people during a Bible study in a historically-black church in Charleston, South Carolina, the church where my wife and I first attended a faith service together. It’s only been a couple of weeks since a white supremacist walked into a Dollar General in Jacksonville, Fla., and killed three black people.

It’s those events I can’t quite shake. After the Roof killing, the small mostly-black church where I was a member began urging a couple of parishioners to carry concealed weapons and locked the front door during service. While I was absorbing news about the Arbery murder, my son, a track athlete, was out running through areas much like the one where the murder occurred. A friend of mine lost her sister to Roof’s bullets. I teach about some of this country’s worst eruptions of racial violence.

For most of my life, the Confederate flag flew at the statehouse of my native South Carolina. Neighbors flew it from their front porch, proudly displayed it in their garages, and still do. I drive roads named in honor of Confederates, past memorials and statues dedicated to enslavers. White developers routinely add the word “plantation” to upscale housing developments to give it a “Gone with the wind” feel.

In Southern state after Southern state, there’s an ongoing attack on the teaching of basic American history, the kind that might discomfort young white kids whose parents don’t want them to know how this country came into existence. It’s hard to ignore all of that.

Still, the white man and the white woman who offered to help me are not anomalies in the South. They are commonplace, even in a place like Horry County, where 71 percent of voters chose Donald Trump in 2020. I knew someone was going to offer help because as much as racial hatred and violence are hallmarks of this place, so is everyday cross-racial common courtesy and kindness.

That’s the odd thing about this place. To reduce it to either is to distort reality. It’s also true I’m more likely to run into people like that strange white man and strange white woman than I am to be hunted down by the likes of Roof or the other white supremacist who killed black people in that Jacksonville, Florida, Dollar General. And yet it would be foolish for me to forget about men like Roof and those who murdered Arbery. Because they’ve become emboldened during the Trump era.

That’s the difficulty of living in a region like this during a time this. I’m surrounded by good Samaritans of all races in a region that overwhelmingly supports policies and politicians that deepen inequalities that have been with us since before this nation’s founding. I have little doubt a large majority of the population – white, black, Latino – would take my side against Roof or the neo-Nazis showing themselves publicly with more frequency in Florida, little doubt they’ve been as horrified by Arbery’s murder and the Dollar General shooting as I’ve been.

I appreciate the everyday individual good deeds here that too often go un- or underreported. If only they weren’t constantly being undermined by disturbing political realities that are worsening by the day.

McClatchy Opinion writer Issac Bailey is based in Myrtle Beach and teaches at Davidson College.