Jim Rice: "It's Still Hard For Me [At Age 67]. If I Get Pulled Over, It's 'Is This Your Car?' You Get Pulled Over, It's 'License And Registration'."

Jim Rice talked with NESN's Tom Caron talks about his experiences with racism:

You got to realize that all lives matter, but what you see right now, you're seeing a lot of Black lives are being taken, for no reason at all, just because you're Black. They say Blue Lives this and Blue Lives that, but the blue lives are the ones that are killing the Blacks. ... I regret, as far as not being able to make a change [long pause] but all sports figures [now] are making a change.

What I saw [growing up] in South Carolina ... downtown, where the Blacks had to go in one way and the whites had to go in another way, and then you go get water and you see "colored" over here and you see "whites" over here, on the fountains, those are the things I grew up with [Rice was born in 1953*]. ...

It's still hard for me. I'm lucky to be able to have played the game of baseball, to have a nice car, nice house, and everything else, but still, when you think about being pulled over, you don't know. They don't know you, they don't know if you played baseball, anything can happen.

Like I was telling one of our co-workers, you don't see this. It's like if I get pulled over, it's "Is this your car?" You get pulled over, it's "License and registration". So I better make sure I have all my documents. I better make sure that I say "I'm going into my glove compartment to get my registration". ... And "Do you have a gun?" I have a permit, but I don't carry a gun. ... Those are some of the things you, as a Black man, have to be very careful of.

*: Anderson, South Carolina, had a population of about 19,000 in both the 1940 and 1950 Census. It jumped to approximately 41,000 in 1960, before dropping back to around 27,000 in 1970 and remaining at that level for the next five decades.

Chadwick Boseman, who played Jackie Robinson in "42" and the Black Panther in the movie of the same name, also grew up in Anderson. Boseman (born in 1977) is about 25 years younger than Rice.

It's not hard to find [racism] in South Carolina. Going to high school, I'd see Confederate flags on trucks. I know what it's like to be a kid at an ice-cream shop when some little white kid calls you "n-----," but your parents tell you to calm down because they know it could blow up. We even had trucks try to run us off the road. ... When I was shooting "Captain America: Civil War" in Atlanta [in 2015], I used to drive back on off-days to go see my family in Anderson. It's about two hours. And I would see the Klan holding rallies in a Walmart car park. ... People don't want to experience change, they just want to wake up and it's different.

James Yeh, a journalist, is also from Anderson (born 1982). He wrote this for Vice in 2015:

Just about every time I'm in the Carolinas, something racist happens to me. ...

Last summer, when I was walking in downtown Anderson, South Carolina—my hometown—I overheard the distinct sound of ching-chonging being directed my way, the same kind of "Chinese" sound I'd get from the other team whenever I played organized sports. ... [M]y parents still live in Anderson, where they've lived for over 40 years. ...

Although the days of the antebellum South are long gone, there is still a strong undercurrent of white supremacy in the air. I remember sitting in the waiting room with my mother last year for treatment at the cancer wing of a hospital and an elderly white man with a breathing tube staring unrelentingly at me with hostile, blood-rimmed eyes until my mother was finally called in to see the doctor.

Along the backroads, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, there are certain shops I know better than to walk into, shops with the words Dixie or heritage on their signs, rebel flags in the yard—places that sell T-shirts and hats with M-16s over a Stars and Bars background with the message/threat: "Come and take it." ...

When people of color or from other backgrounds turn up in places they aren't welcome, white supremacy is often maintained through violent action.