Growing Up White
By: Caterpillar Jones
Tags: White Privilege, Growth, Change, Racism, Personal Story

Growing Up White

Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash

When I started kindergarten in 1977, my school district was part of a nationwide busing program to further integrate public schools. I would arrive at my elementary school, situated in a predominantly white Oklahoma City neighborhood, and busses full of Black children would pour off of giant yellow steaming buses.

At five years old, these were the first Black people I’d ever come into direct contact with, and they were fascinating to me. These kids looked different. They sounded different. They even dressed a little different. I remember asking to my mother, “Why do they smell coconut-y?” a question that she hotly reprimanded me for asking, though I didn’t understand why. I was too embarrassed to ask any further, and soon learned it was best not to ask questions, or to even mention Black children at all.

Usually the two or three Black kids that were paired in each classroom hung together, but when I entered the second grade, me and my two best friends, Stacy and Anne, included a fourth member into our childhood clique: Dawn. Dawn was a Black girl.

My first black friend.

What I remember most about Dawn was that she wore her hair in three pony tails: two in the front, one in the back. They were held together with those little ball pony tail holders that I used to call knobbies; She had a knobby at the base of each pony tail, another in the middle, and a third at the tip. I wore my hair in a knobby too, but only one, a giant knobby on the top of my head. At seven years old, those knobbies connected Dawn and me. They were our “thing.”

Near the end of the year, I invited Dawn to my eighth birthday party — a pool party — and she said she would come. On the day of the party my young guests arrived one by one, Stacy and Anne arriving first since they only had to walk a few blocks over from their houses.

When I opened our front door to Dawn, she was standing with her mother. Back then, mothers were not invited. If you needed to be dropped off, your mom was supposed to pull up to the curb, then pull away before you even made it up to the front door by yourself. After all, kids like me walked to school alone in kindergarten.

Not only did Dawn’s mother come to the door, she stayed for the entire party. She chatted with my mother nonstop, and kept a close eye on her daughter.

Later that evening, when everyone had gone home, I said to my mother, “How come Dawn’s mom came!?” My mother’s remarks were puzzling to me yet again. She said, “Well, I know I’d CERTAINLY stay if you were invited to HER birthday party!”

I didn’t understand her meaning, but I understood her tone and knew better than to ask more questions.

Dawn was my first black friend, and we stayed friends until we both graduated from the fourth grade. That was the single year that white kids got bussed off to the Black part of town, and Dawn and I got assigned to different Fifth Year Centers, so we soon lost track of each other. In the three years that Dawn and I were friends, we never had a single conversation about race. Not ever. It was never even referenced. In fact, I never spoke about race, any race, ever — to anyone. It was never discussed, not even when my family gathered around the television to watch The Jeffersons, laughing when George called Mr. Willis “honky” before slamming the door in his face. These shows were part of another world, they were fiction. We didn’t talk about them afterward.

What I Learned in Junior High School

Naturally in school I was taught of the occasions when racism impacted our country’s history. Our studies covered the seemingly-ancient problem of slavery, but mostly focussed on the tremendous progress that had been made, and the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. It was clear to me at the time that racism (which I understood to be an overt, angry expression aimed at a person of color) was a shameful moment from the distant past. After all, we never even had to talk about race anymore.

It wasn’t until the eighth grade that I had an actual conversation about race. One afternoon there was a choir concert after school. I was in the girl’s bathroom curling the ends of my long hair under with my curling iron and spraying them with Aqua Net, as the ‘80s dictated. Two Black girls were also in the bathroom and they were also curling each other’s hair.

One of the girls said to the other girl, “Look at her,” (meaning me) “I didn’t know white girls used a curling iron.”

I said back to them, “I didn’t know Black girls used a curling iron.”

We stood in reflective silence, curling irons in hand.

What followed was a very enlightening conversation about our hair. We were honest. We asked questions. We were respectful, and even fun. I was finally able to put my childhood curiosity to rest — it wasn’t Black people that smelled like coconuts, it was the product they put in their hair.

I Married A Black Man

At age of thirty, much to the astonishment of my parents, I dated and eventually married a Black man. For over a decade he and I talked about race all the time. Every day some aspect of systemic racism entered our conversations, and I developed a deeper understanding of the Black experience. I became an advocate — joining the Black Lives Matter movement. Signing petitions. Calling Representatives.

We used to joke that I was “Black by marriage.” And sometimes I got lulled into the feeling that, because of my closeness to black culture, that I *knew* the black experience.

But I didn’t. And I don’t. Because I’m white.

No matter how woke, liberal, tolerant, inclusive, or “color-blind” I wanted to think of myself as… I’m still in my white skin, with all its history and privilege, in a country where white is the norm and everything else is other.

Throughout this time, I believed myself to be part of the solution. I was certainly not part of the problem. After all, I reasoned, one of my best childhood friends was Black. I had black friends in high school. I married a black man! Racism was a problem to be confronted in society. In others.

But for white people like me, not having to deal with racism until we are directly confronted with it — this IS the problem. This blindness is part of my white privilege, and admitting that I experience white privilege is a first small step toward validating the lived experience of Black people.

Having a Black friend, or colleague, or husband didn’t give me the experience of being Black in this country, just like not “using” white privilege to get ahead or subjugate Black people doesn’t mean that I don’t have it.

I do; I experience white privilege. This privilege includes a choice of whether or not to talk about, or even think about racism. But using white privilege to promote more conversation, listen to and amplify the voices of Black people is the only way that this privilege might possibly be good for something, and that is an ongoing choice I have the privilege to make.