I was looking through one of my old journals the other day from a creative writing class I took in high school and intrigued by the number of things I wrote about racism. I've always been sensitive to inequalities that I see around me based on sex, sexual orientation and especially race, but it seems like the older I get, the less passionate I am about such things.
I can't decide if it's because I'm just older and have more responsibilities and am focused on things like working and raising a son or if it's just become less of an issue in the world around me. I mean, I live in San Diego, where my race is the minority, and I have a family that is blended racially. My stepbrother and stepsister are Filipino and my brother recently married a Taiwanese woman.
Even when I lived in Alabama, where the racial tension was palpable, I always had the understanding that you don't treat somebody different because of the color of their skin. I don't recall anyone in my family ever teaching me that, I just knew it -- even just shy of my 10th birthday when we moved away from Alabama. I do remember feeling the racism all around me when I left California during the summers to visit my dad in Birmingham and it felt like black men were afraid to even look in my direction. In San Diego, they'd hit on me and neither one of us gave it a second thought.
Then when I lived in Naples, Italy, and went to a high school for employees of the Department of Defense, I was reading things like "Soul on Ice" by Eldridge Cleaver and was the only, or maybe one of only a few, white members of the Black Student Association. I don't think I went to very many meetings, but I remember feeling scared that the other members would think I was somehow intruding on their conversations and very determined at the same time to let them know I "got" it -- whatever "it" was.
On the flip side of that, I spent my junior and senior years of high school in a suburb of Minneapolis and I have a very clear memory of walking around the school on my first day thinking, "Where are all the black people (and Filipino and Mexican people, for that matter)?" I'd never lived anywhere so white before. Maybe that's where I began to be desensitized.
Or maybe I just decided I couldn't handle the intense emotions that racism brought out in me anymore. I went to college at St. Cloud State University, about an hour north of Minneapolis, because of the good Mass Communications program there and because my best friend and boyfriend -- now my husband -- went to school there. I found out after I started going to school in St. Clous that the town and college were nicknamed White Cloud for a variety of reasons.
During my senior year, a freshman woman, who happened to be black, found swastikas and other remarks written on the white board on her dorm room door. The university's administration, to its credit, did not take the incident lightly and neither did I. As co-news editor I was insistent that it was an important story and I covered all the twists and turns in the case for months. I followed up soon after with an Indian professor who had swastikas carved into her car door.
It was a difficult story for me, because of the subject matter and the emotional toll that it took talking to the student and the professor repeatedly about how these things made them feel. I thought I understood how they felt -- as if someone had carved these marks into their skin for all the world to see and judge -- and I felt ashamed and hurt, because I knew the perpetrators were white. After three or four months, I told my fellow editors I'd had enough. Someone else was going to have to take over, because I just couldn't take it anymore. And a few months later, I graduated and moved on.
Now, I reflect on race in subtle ways. I was at a commercial real estate function a few years ago where an economist made some sort of comment about fast food jobs being the only means of employment for young black men and the words pierced my brain like an ice pick. I imagined for the one and only black man in the audience, who was trying not to visibly react to the blatantly racist observation, that it was like a blade right through the heart. When I saw him leave before the end of the presentation, as many other people did to get out of the hotel parking garage before it jammed up when the event officially ended, it took a lot of strength for me not to run after him and ask him how he felt about what we'd heard. I wanted to complain to the event's organizers, but of course, it got lost in the shuffle of the 20 other things I had to do that day.
But, I can't be the only one who feels the way that I do. Many of us must think, "Oh, things have gotten better. We all have the same opportunities now. It's not like people are getting lynched." But, I still see it. I see it in the socio-economic separations between races, even in a diverse place like San Diego. I see it when a black man and his white wife draw stares from other couples who are not mixed-race. Sometimes I still think to myself, "They are brave."
What I hope is that the mixing of races that we see at an increasing pace and achievements by young people who feel uninhibited by their race will change things so that by the time my son is old enough to think about these things, he won't have to. He won't know what racism means and won't be able to fathom someone hurting another person just because of the color of their skin -- or gender or sexual orientation. I hope.
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