So in other words you’re not interested in a fair and just society.
By: Elisabeth M
Tags: Racism, Private School, White Supremacy, South

So in other words you’re not interested in a fair and just society. You’re a dime a dozen nothing new or unexpected. It’s interesting you said you don’t disqualify people because they are black as if your personal conduct can be applied to all HR managers. Here in the Southern US I had a white female friend who worked for HR point blank tell me she just couldn’t take the names of some black people seriously and she rejected them. I don’t agree with your white supremacist stance to protect the white supremacist status quo. I do agree with you that the problems start earlier before African Americans get to the hiring process. It starts with white females in the United States who treat their African American students as if they are inferior to their white students. I attended a 95% white private school for fifteen years. I was adopted and raised by a White family. So in a school my white parents were paying 20k a year (Southern US) for in first grade I had a white teacher refuse to let me read aloud for an entire year. She had placed me in the less advanced reading group but when she heard me read she realized her mistake. I was actually well ahead of all the white students in both groups. So rather than placing me in the more advanced reading group. She decided to not let me read aloud for my entire first grade year to soothe her white supremacy. A bit of backstory as to how I was so far ahead? (Since white supremacy requires me to give an explanation) The first reason was because I loved to read the Chronicles of Narnia religiously starting from the age of two. The second reason was because I spent the first four years of my life at home with my grandmother who was a retired elementary school teacher. She literally had nothing better to do than prepare me for kindergarten. So unlike white people I am not willing to take credit for things that I did not do. I don’t think I was ahead of all those white students in my class because I was born with a higher IQ or was genetically superior to them. I simply acknowledge my early advantages and privileges that they may or may not have had. Anyway back to Miss Southern Belle. She clearly had never had a biracial or black student in her class before who could so clearly express themselves. I would like to point out that this observation is not a slight on African Americans. It is a slight on white people making black children feel so uncomfortable that by the time they get to first grade they barely utter a word. I however went home every night to my white family members so I had no such anxiety about speaking my mind to white people. Or really anyone for that matter. I was that annoying kid that never stopped talking and pointed out mistakes adults had made. So not only was I on par with all her white students but I had the audacity to say things like *raises hand* “ Miss Charlotte that’s not what you said yesterday” So not only did she already hate how uppity I was in reading circles so she skipped over me. I was now sharper than she was. This is unforgivable to a white supremacist their brains cannot process it. So this was my first lesson in how white adults devolve into irrational childish behavior when met with a black child who seems to have escaped the message that black children are inferior. So she made sure by the end of that year that I knew for sure that I was black and I was to be treated differently than the white students. She took that oh so godly duty upon herself. This was a southern Baptist Christian private school. That same year a little white girl who just happened to be Miss Charlotte’s favorite student told me I could not attend her birthday party because I was black . So rather than letting me know that what little Sarah had said was wrong. After I burst into tears at my desk and began wailing at the top of my lungs. Miss Charlotte punished me for disrupting the class. She also decided to defend the white student and the white student’s parents who worked at the school as well. She decided to tell both of us to work out our “argument” and not to tell our parents because it would make them sad and angry. So she was engaging in some pretty heavy psychological warfare on a six year old. But of course all of this is what white adults do to black children all the time. It’s nothing new I realized. What I did realize was that most black children don’t remember these incidences in such stunning detail and clarity from when they were six years old. Maybe they log it as trauma and bury it deep. But all I know is that in the case of Miss Charlotte she won the battle but I won the war. Because I remembered it all. I logged it all up there in my tiny six year old brain and never forgot it. I really never forgot anything. I have 100s of memories I can still access from my childhood many of them before I even reached the age of 5. By the time I got to high school I basically just swam in every micro aggression imaginable. I probably dealt with 2–5 racist incidences per day at that southern “Christian” school. But because I was raised by white conservatives and always surrounded by other white conservatives I eventually just accepted my place. I thought that being considered inferior was just the way of the world. At this point I had never been outside of that conservative Christian bubble more than a handful of times. I attended public school for a week in fourth grade and my mom got cold feet and put me back in a different private school. I of course exacerbated her fears on purpose. I told her everything a parent would not want to hear about placing her child in public school for the first time. I’ll admit I was manipulative. I learned early on from my first grade white teacher that White people were not going to play fair and they were not going to do what they claimed they would. So I took matters into my own hands. By eight I realized white female teachers were my enemies. Because for a second time the teacher from public school was starting to display the same patterns as my first grade teacher. The assignment was write a creative story that’s two pages long. I wrote five because the story simply could not be told in two pages. Not only was she astonished that I had written it so fast but she decided I was “showing off”. She heard me read aloud and as if all white teachers have an oppressive switch that activates when white supremacy is questioned she punished me. She even tried to test me at first. “You really wrote all five pages so quickly ?” “Then read it aloud” My story was so enthralling that the students in the class came up to me after class to ask me what would happen to Fred the cat next. It didn’t help that I had come from private school and the public school my mom “tried out” was about two years behind my old private school. In elementary two years difference is noticeable. I would like to point out that I did trust plenty of white adults. My family being the most important. They showed me nothing but love encouragement and caring it was all the other adult white people that acted batsh** crazy around me. Anyway my point is that I will do whatever it takes to remove the white supremacist status quo. Even if that means you losing your comfortable HR position licking white people’s shoes. If you wonder why I never reported these incidences to my parents or the administration it’s because I had no idea what it was. I was raised by White people they had not prepared me for racism. They didn’t know anything about micro aggressions or white supremacy. I grew up thinking I was being targeted by random white people because I was ugly or weird. I had no idea racism was the culprit. But thank god when I turned 25 some very caring people realized what my upbringing must have been like. They spent two years carefully and tactfully challenging my internalized white supremacy. Challenging my statements that almost all perfectly lined up with Bill O Reilly talking points. Telling me that sometimes White parents who adopt black children are not equipped to deal with racism. Finally after three years of researching reading and mulling over what they had said I finally broke free. I was as they say in the Sunken place. I mistakenly believed that I was better than other black people because I was raised by whites and because I was biracial. I had internalized white supremacy so much that by the time I was seventeen I no longer wanted to associate with black people. All the stuff that dark skin girls say about light skin girls was horribly true about me but because I had been brainwashed to think that way. Anyway Miss Charlotte up until last year still worked at my old private school. She left for 6–7 years got married to a guy who wore rebel flags and then came back to teach. I’m still trying to decide if I’m going to file a lawsuit against my old private school. It may be too late. Since I really didn’t even know what was happening to me until I got out of that white supremacy bubble.