I think it was somewhere around third grade that I figured out what racism was.
My parents had bought the old house on Pine Street, the one with the boarded up windows and broken floor boards. But they thought it was beautiful, a dream house.
"It has potential!" I remember my father saying.
And even though I recall being pretty impressed that none of the other houses were touching each other, I also remember the stares that came from the children who lived in the house on the corner, a smaller house, whose father’s eyes grew dark with unprovoked fury after I asked the little girl to play and she shook her head, ‘no’.
But it wasn’t all that traumatic at the time. It was the early eighties after all, and the other little girl who lived two houses away, Destiny, and I played happily together almost every afternoon. Her parents seemed to hold no such contempt for me or my family, her mother always offering cookies and grapes, so I just pegged that guy as some crazy old man; an anomaly among a street lined with neighbors who were civil if not friendly.
Then there was school. A new school, South Elementary, filled with a diverse group of kids but different than the friends I used to have who were used to the way I looked; the light skinned girl with the fuzzy hair and weird eyes.
The black kids told me there was no way I was black, but that’s what my dad told me and that’s what my mom told me so that’s what I told everybody else. They pulled at my hair with its goldish tint and examined my eyes and claimed to have a cousin like me down South somewhere or diagnosed me as being Albino.
The white kids were equally as confused. I mean, colored kids came in a lot of shades but they weren’t that light. They’d touch my hair without permission, tell me that it was impossible that I was black - saying it like it was a compliment – or just stay away from me, unsure of exactly how to act.
But neither group of kids ever did me any lasting harm. Their curiosity was honest, never intentionally hurtful, and was only sometimes tinged with the racism that their parents may have held.
No... the thing I recall the most about my beginning days at South Elementary is me, sitting at the kitchen table one day after school and listening to my father over the phone, his voice calm and eloquent but his face filled with fury as he uttered the words, "If she tested into the gifted program, why isn’t she in the gifted class?" and overhearing the person on the other line answer, "The gifted teacher simply felt like she’d be more comfortable in the regular class."
I have to say, it took me years to really understand what had happened, what would have happened if my parents hadn’t challenged the school on the bigotry hiding behind the proclamation that they were only trying to make me more comfortable and not wanting to subject me to an all white gifted class with a white teacher who rarely looked me in the eyes. A teacher, whom even after my parents had won the battle at the school to have me placed in her class only bought a certain number of tickets to see a professional production of "The Hobbit" because according to her they had sold out. Short by one. I remember walking home the day before the field trip, Destiny telling me gossip to cheer me up, and feeling numb and rejected as all the other kids prepared for the trip.
But the lone African American schoolteacher, Miss Ellis, arrived at my house that night with two tickets she'd purchased that same evening in hand and informed me that I would be going with her instead. She bought me a soda and we were three rows ahead of everyone else. I'll always be grateful for her doing that.
I’ve been thinking about the ways in which people who are different are regulated to their ‘places’ in this world by those with the ability to keep us there, sometimes without us ever knowing it. It's because of this that we take a risk every time we trust those who claim their intentions are pure, and it's the lack of understanding of the repercussions of placing that trust in them that they complain about those who would choose not to.
The one thing that Obama’s election has done on both sides of the aisle is to challenge people’s comfort zones. As minorities, we’d grown content with the meme that we were prevented from reaching our goals by the white people in power, but now that excuse is fading. A black man is our country’s leader. It both delights us and terrifies us. We try to not feel personally attacked when he is, but our history of self preservation as a people makes it difficult. Even though it’s more visible with him, it certainly didn’t begin with him. I recall many a day remaining silent as others criticized Condoleezza Rice because while I loathed her politics, I felt protective of her nonetheless. It is part of our being, part of our means for survival in a culture that for most of our lives has told us we were inferior.
I watch as black people lash out at the white politicians and conservatives who attack Obama’s policies and the tension is high. It's painful and divisive. Political disagreement is healthy and I don’t think those who legitimately disagree with Obama’s policies or positions should be labeled as racists, but I understand where it comes from. And when another day goes by where another prominent white conservative is caught sending hate mail or another angry white woman is caught on video declaring that our elected President isn’t a real American it becomes difficult to maintain that position, let alone get others to understand it.
One cannot know how important it is for those of us who have experienced racism to find ways of maintaining our dignity. To the more educated, it comes in the form of essays like this one, reaching out to those who would listen and attempt to understand why the wounds are so deep and why we can never stop listening to the opinions of others. To the less educated, it comes in the form of dismissing even legitimate political dissent as racism, as hatred, as nothing more than an excuse to wage war on our first black president.
And to make things even more complicated, there is truth in both positions.
There are those who are racist and hide behind their fringe issues like white robes. And there are those, who like Mike Castle, are put in the position where they have to both defend their point of view to us liberals while simultaneously defending Obama from these racist attacks. And I applaud him for doing that. Because a good number of conservatives certainly aren’t.
And THIS is where my anger is coming from.
This is why even their most mainstream voices are beginning to blend with those who would shout 'Nigger' from their doorsteps. This is why it hurts them far more than it does Obama because at some point, even those of us who would have before, will simply stop listening.
My first year in the gifted program at South Dover elementary was both a curse and a blessing. The classroom was filled with white kids, all of whom seemed comfortable enough with me being there, but the teacher maintained her distance the entire year. She rarely called on me, often ‘forgot’ to tell me assignments when I had to miss school, and only complimented me once when she looked at me one afternoon, genuinely surprised, and told me, "Your writing is pretty good."
But I got through it. I made some good friends, too; Alyssa, Brian , Destiny. All white kids who never seemed fazed when I got a higher grade than them on something. How funny now that they were wiser in that regard than the person that led them. And unfortunately, how commonplace.
These days I truly hope, especially since this teacher taught there until retirement, that even if I didn’t learn a lot from her that year she at least learned something from me. Even if it was only that some black children can write pretty good, too.