On the Myths of Being White and Being Exceptional
By: Stillpoint Magazine
Tags: Non Fiction Story, Shadow

My first memory of saying something racist is from when I was four. I was with my mother and her friend in our Brooklyn kitchen. My mother, descended from German Jews, has light hair and green eyes. Her friend, like me, has dark hair verging on black and olive-toned skin.

“You aren’t Black?” I said. “Are you?”

Startled, she shook her head.

“Oh,” I replied. “Good!”

They must have wondered how, in this ‘liberal,’ open-minded home, I’d arrived at this certainty that it was better to be white than to be Black. Certainly, it wasn’t something my parents told me. As in the majority of white American households, race wasn’t a topic we discussed at all.

Studies by researchers like Kristina R. Olsen, PhD now show that children as young as two or three have already internalized racist views, regardless of their parents: the ideology of racial hierarchy is, to borrow Beverly Tatum’s metaphor, like smog: “sometimes it is so thick it is visible. Other times it is less apparent, but always, day in and day out, we are breathing it in.” Whether we want to or not, and whether our families resist it or not, all of us who grow up in this culture receive endless messaging — some subtle, some blatant — that white-bodied people are superior.

I wrote that that was my first memory of saying something racist, but to be honest, it’s the only one I have. Not because my racism vanished, but because I learned that to express racism overtly was socially unacceptable. I was born in 1983, three years before Ronald Reagan declared that racial progress meant to perform colorblindness — an ideology whose grip is only beginning to loosen. It wasn’t only at home where race was avoided, but in my classrooms, on television, and in movies, in conversations I observed among kids and adults.

A more recent memory of a racist thought — this time, unexpressed. Out with friends at an Irish pub after a poetry reading on Lake Street, near the border between Minneapolis and St. Paul. It had been only a few months since the United States had elected Trump, a man who journalists like Vox’s German Lopez have shown, has a profound history of racism whose campaign revived the foundational American tradition, dating back to the seventeenth century, of elites dividing working-class people by race to maintain power.

We sat in a big, U-shaped leather booth. Everyone there was white except for one woman of color: a Black, biracial friend. She leaned over the table as she spoke. “I mean, wouldn’t it be amazing,” she said, “if we could have a future where race just didn’t exist?”

That future is one that, theoretically, by that point I had committed to working toward: training to facilitate anti-racism dialogues, attending anti-colonial workshops, and participating in organizations like Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ). But the reality felt (feels) so far off that I’d never pushed myself to actually, viscerally, imagine how I’d experience it.

In that moment, reflexively, I did. And what I felt wasn’t the joy or liberation collectively envisioned in those movement spaces I’d begun to frequent. It was the opposite: terror.

A hollow core in my stomach and tightness in my chest.

Of what was, of what am, I so afraid?