I remember as a kid hearing racist jokes that mocked Asians
and African Americans. “Me Chinese, me
play joke, me put pee-pee in your Coke” rang out across the elementary school
playground as kids danced around pulling on the corners of their eyes. More than once family members and friends
asked me, “Did you know there are three main tribes of niggers? Motees, Mombacks, and Hodedos.”
When I was eleven, I joined a youth organization for
girls. After the elaborate initiation
ceremony, I attended my first regular meeting, where we were told not to bring
any black friends. The leader, an adult,
actually said, “We’re not racist or anything like that. They’re just not welcome.”
In junior high I invited a Filipino boy to a school
dance. For weeks, my friends and
classmates teased me endlessly and sang “Ebony and Ivory” every time they
passed me in the hall.
A black classmate’s family built a new house in a white
neighborhood. During construction it was
vandalized with racial epithets spray-painted on the unfinished walls.
In my high school, the cafeteria was segregated, not by
rule, but by custom. One side was white,
the other black. We jokingly referred to
the single row of tables in the center as the neutral zone. If you wanted to eat lunch with a friend of a
different race, that’s where you sat.
The clubs were segregated, too, with one set of service
organizations overwhelmingly white and another set totally black.
The school was nearly half black, but the honors classes and
AP courses were almost exclusively white.
In tenth grade, a girl whose friendship I valued told me one
day with wide, insistent eyes, that “black people are just different. They’re not like us.”
A year later, I was left alone for a few minutes with a
classmate’s mother. As we made idle
chit-chat, she told me how angry she was that “a nigger family moved in down
the street. Who do they think they
are? They don’t belong here.” Yeah, she said it. Nigger.
My middle school and high school history classes taught me that
the civil war was fought over states’ rights, not slavery. Some classmates earnestly insisted that the
war had been unnecessary, that slavery would have eventually ended anyway, so
the loss of life in the war was pointless.
Besides, they said, most slave owners treated their slaves really well
because it wouldn’t have made financial sense to abuse their own property.
In college, a girl in my freshman dorm purposely displayed a
large confederate flag when her black hallmates were around.
More times than I can remember, I heard white students claim
that black classmates couldn’t have gotten in without unfair affirmative action. Never mind that the black students they were
referring to were on the honor roll.
A good friend dated a man with olive skin and dark kinky hair. Another friend’s parents prodded about his
lineage, hopefully suggesting he might be Italian. Their disgust on learning he was Cuban was
unmistakable.
As a young adult, I spent a year working on a project about
the civil war. Multiple civil war
enthusiasts pointedly told me their favorite general was Nathan Bedford
Forrest, who was responsible for the massacre of captured black Union soldiers
at Ft. Pillow and later founded the KKK.
One man told me he grew up in Mississippi and had lived there during the
60s. He insisted that they’d had no race
problem in their town, “not until those damn Freedom Riders came. They started it all. Before them, we had no problems – because
everyone knew their place.” It was
thirty years after the Freedom Riders had come to Mississippi, and he was still
angry that people no longer knew their place.
I have a black friend whose daughter was a powerful swimmer,
one of the best in the league. She was
also a model teen, the kind of kid I hoped my young daughter would look up to
and emulate. Each year, the older team
members were asked to serve as junior coaches.
She wasn’t asked. The coach never
offered a reasonable explanation. She
was one of the only black kids on the team.
All of the junior coaches were white.
My friend tried to talk to the coach about it, but he blew her off.
A family member regularly referred to the Egyptian CEO of
the company he worked for as a “raghead.”
For years, this same family member couldn’t say Obama’s name without including his middle name, Hussein, which he emphasized to highlight Obama's "foreignness."
For most of my adult life I lived in Durham, known locally
as the black city. Coworkers at my
corporate job in a neighboring town were afraid to come to my house. One of them asked if he was going to get shot
in a drive-by. He thought that was funny.
One of my white neighbors in Durham once complained that the
mayor, the chief of police, and the school superintendent were all black. She said it wasn’t fair because she wasn’t
being represented. This was the year after
our white district attorney made a mess of the Duke lacrosse case.
I adopted my daughter from Guatemala. When she was little a coworker told me she
shouldn’t go to a predominantly white school because she should “be with her
own kind.”
When my daughter was in middle school, a white classmate
told her she didn’t belong with the white kids, that she should go hang out
with “the rest of the Mexicans, who, by the way, are ruining this country.” None of the other white kids objected to what
he said. My daughter stopped hanging out
with the white kids and struggled to find a new group of friends.
Some of the black girls in my daughter’s high school started
a step team. When they performed at a
pep rally, a white classmate took a video in which he made fun of them by
calling them slaves. He posted it
online.
This is a partial list of racist incidents I’ve experienced
or witnessed, just the ones I remembered as I wrote this in one sitting. I know of many other incidents, shared with
me by friends. But those are not my stories
to tell, so I haven’t included them here.
Today, conservative friends tell me racism doesn’t exist, at
least not on any scale that matters. When
I tell them that black friends have told me about their painful experiences with
racism, they tell me those friends are just jumping to conclusions, playing the
race card, buying into the mentality of victimhood, that they misunderstood,
misread, or misinterpreted the situation because they just see racism in everything. They tell me racism isn’t the big monster I
claim it is. They say we’re past all
that, and the only reason anyone thinks they see racism is because they’re
determined to.
I know they’re wrong.
I’m white and liberal. I don’t spend
much time around narrow-minded, prejudiced people. Even so, I’ve seen racism firsthand my whole
life. I still see it today.
As a white ally, the very least I can do is use my voice to
say #ISeeItToo.
