Healing the Racism Disease
Confronting Childhood Experiences to Teach My Children Anti-Racism.
A day before the Black Lives Matter protests started, I was passing through South LA (formerly South Central) on a work errand, kids in tow. “Why are there so many brown people walking around here?” An innocent question piped up from my 6-year-old in the back seat.
I stumbled through explanations as he peppered me with the kind of “why’s” that are beyond most elected officials, “Why does it look so poor here?” “Why don’t they have grass in their front yards?” “Why would anyone want to live here?”
It was as if I walked in late to a pop quiz in calculus on the first day of class. I didn’t know what to say, so I scrambled. “Skin color is just a genetic variation. Where people live has a lot to do with how much money they have or where their family is.” He sensed my discomfort. I felt bad. Uneducated. Powerless.
The rapid fire questions were timely considering the next day the Black Lives Matters protests would curfew our already tethered lives. His innocent observations and questions were characterizing the questions of a movement.
“Why don’t black people have the same things we have?”
That’s what he wanted to know.
Since Black Out Tuesday, I’ve dutifully scrolled to that beat of the voices of the BLM movement. As I struggled to make some sense of the upheaval, hearing stories that are so depressingly infinite, the song of black lives was stuck on repeat. And has been for over 400 years. Systemic racism is monotonous at this point. A cultural institution. A thoughtless way of life.
How was it that I hadn’t talked about race with my children already? I realized that the responses to my son’s curiosities are important because parents have all the right answers… at least that’s what the kids think.
But we don’t. To make matters worse, ALL the anti-racism children’s books were sold out everywhere immediately when BLM protests took hold. So I was left to figure out an explanation for injustice from my own experience.
To avoid idling in place on Instagram, I turned off my phone and tuned into my inner voice. Turns out, this felt like something I could do. Before simply declaring — flat out — that I am not a racist, I reflected on my history. “How am I contributing to racial injustice? What moments in my life set up how I view people of color?”
In keeping with the current cultural mood of epidemiology, I have started seeing racism as a disease permeating our culture, an epidemic that presents with a range of symptoms, affecting everyone in different ways with the main side effect of treating those with differing skin colors as “other”.
As I carefully tip-toe around the white-washing of subtle biases that I could bring to the table, I try to find all possible exposures to racism. To do that requires a big trip down memory lane to a time when there were birthday parties… Remember those?
In a different era set in the Appalachian Mountains of southwestern Virginia, I remember R.J.’s 7th like a photograph. His birthday was on Valentine’s day and his mom brought chocolate cupcakes with pink frosting into our 1st grade classroom. This was notable to me for 2 reasons: it was the first and only time we had a birthday party at school and R.J. was black.
He was the only black kid my grade, which doesn’t say much statistically since there were only 19 others. But his presence in my life turned out to be first person transformational: an entrée into the idea that a contrasting exterior color meant very little. Actually, R.J. and I had more in common than not — we were both shy, quiet and good students.
What luck to have a smidge of diversity. My first impression of a different race was a positive one — or a neutral one, which is, to my mind, the ultimate goal.
I don’t mean to pretend it was all a sugary utopia. This all happened in the mountains where confederate flags are still cuddled. I mean, R.J.’s address was a dead end road known locally as N***er Holler.
Fortunately in the late 90’s proper street addresses replaced Rural Route 1 for emergency response calls. Then N***er Holler got a painted sign with a decent name: Old Deerfield Road.
But, many years later, on a report a police officer referred to N***er Holler as a residence thoughtlessly, forgetting the actual street name. To him it was a name of a location. A statement of facts. Printed street signs couldn’t change that. It was the country version of “The Hood.”
What happened if there was an emergency, maybe a cross burning in their front yard, like the one that happened recently in a nearby town? If that had happened, how would R.J.’s family tell the police where they lived? Turns out yes, even the black residents called it N***er Holler, or so my mom says.
I couldn’t possibly say if R.J.’s family ever felt threatened, but as a child even I was aware of the KKK. And though it’s shameful for me to admit, I have a shadowy recollection of my bearded white hillbilly dad locking a KKK flyer in the bottom of the oak gun cabinet along with his precious Marty Robbins cassettes and loaded bullets. A point in time when my Dad was not as his peak in terms of his alcoholism and mental health, to say the least.
To be fair, Daddy probably had very few interactions with anyone non-white. My first time seeing a black person was in Kindergarten. Though I surely stared at him at first, I always thought of R.J. as just another kid in my class but with a darker skin. We sat on the tape, played house, dress-up and ate lunch together and I thought nothing of it. That is, until I did.
R.J.’s hair was black, curly and cut very short. Any 5-year-old would see that there was a difference between his hair and all the other boys. And once I noticed it, curiosity took over and I asked to touch his hair. Just one little pat.
I came home from school that day and proudly told my dad that I knew from experience that R.J.’s hair felt like velcro. I am embarrassed just typing it now, though it was obviously a purely innocent observation.
I was laughed at, shamed by my dad. I was also told not to touch that black boy’s hair again. There was nothing said overtly about R.J., his family or where they lived, but it was clear that I had crossed a line. So, by the age of 5, it was made clear that I should never have a black boyfriend.
And you know what, being honest, that idea never really left me. I was always sure that in no world would a black man be acceptable to bring home to dinner. But at the same time, I was also never taught that I was better than anyone, regardless of race. One thing we had in common in that tiny mountain community is that we were all poor folks.
If racism is a disease, then these stories and cultural experiences are my pre-existing conditions, my vulnerabilities to racism.
But what I don’t know is how carrying these memories influenced choices that I have since made. I don’t know what I have lost. I didn’t even know I was sick.
Though I will not be able to fully undo whatever prejudices remain, and it sounds so cheesy, but I know that light is the cure. The healing power of getting this out into the open, where the sunshine and air flow can do what it does best, to heal existing disease, and dilute the spread to younger generations. To grow them up right.
And because of the light, I can see the disease of racism for what it is… fear of the unknown. Fear of loss of heritage, and fear of looking inward… fear of exploring the possibility that many generations of American’s really screwed up.
It’s hard for anyone to admit to making mistakes, and it’s even harder to acknowledge that your parents also did, and your grandparents did too. It’s hard to fathom that racism has been going on so long that we can’t know where it started. I can only see one generation back at this point, but that’s enough to see how I may have been “infected”.
But thankfully, racism isn’t a contagious disease.
It’s a series of choices that turned into normalized bad habits throughout our nation’s history, from grandparents, to parents, to children and on and on. In a way, that’s good, right? Habits can be changed if acknowledged and consciously redirected. It’s not easy, but necessary.
Just like it’s not easy, but necessary for a mother of a black 7-year-old boy to explain why he must always be on extra perfect amazing behavior in all interracial situations, and particularly with police. So when these black sons reach another annual milestone, these families must rejoice far and wide that they survived one more year. Cupcakes for everyone.
To be fair, I don’t think that’s what R.J.’s mom was doing. Our community was mostly accepting of his family, so long as they stayed in their neck of the woods. But bringing a surprise party on a school day could only help her son fit it with his white classmates. Ironically, those pink frosted cupcakes should have been forgettable, but weren’t because of the color of R.J.’s skin.
Thank you to her. In that moment, R.J.’s mom unknowingly shed a ray of light that has stayed with me all of my life. I can’t change what otherwise influenced me but I can do my best to understand it, how racism spreads, thereby hopefully not infecting my own children. I hope for them a life lived by the Golden Rule, to treat others as they wish to be treated, no matter if they live in the Hood or the Holler, or anywhere in between.
So I will keep looking through my memories, collective and individual, to find a solid path to anti-racism by shedding light and speaking my shame, a la Brené Brown, not only for my kids, but for my community. Living under the oppression of racial injustice for hundreds of years has been everything except a piece of cake. This unearthing of my personal history, and the racism that has been passed down for generations won’t be either. It shouldn’t.
*Names were changed to preserve privacy.
