Racism, Interrupted

Several of my Twitter buddies are blogging about racism, and it inspired me to blog about the topic myself.


I was born in Bloomington, Indiana, and grew up mostly in Tennessee and Georgia, where sadly, racism is even still today quite rampant. My maternal grandfather was Cherokee, and my maternal grandmother Irish. My grandmother's family basically disowned her for "marrying an Indian".


One might think this would mean that my grandfather would be very sensitive to the fact that racism is painful, but he was quite racist against black folks himself. As a result, my mother almost became an "accidental racist", not knowing that there was any other word to refer to a black person other than "nigger" when she was a toddler, having heard her father say it many times.


She told me that she thought black babies were the cutest babies as a child, and when she was asked what she wanted for Christmas one year, she said "I want a nigga baby!" She was only a few years old, so one can understand and excuse her use of the word then. Luckily, she learned better as she grew up.


My mother spent her early years in Euclid, Ohio. She told me that there was a little black girl at school that she was very good friends with and enjoyed playing together on the playground during recess, until, that is, the school personnel realized what was going on. My mother told me with sadness in her voice how she had been forbidden to play with her friend, or any other black children, by the powers-that-be at her school. I learned all of this after my own mistake at four years old using the "n" word.


We grew up in what I would call a lower middle-class neighborhood. There was a kid named Scotty in the apartment next door to us, and he and I played together every chance we got. Scotty was a few years older than me, so I trusted and looked up to him. He frequently used the word nigger, and at four years old, the topic of racism hadn't come up in our household yet.


One day, Scotty asked me if I wanted a booger. I didn't know what a booger was yet, and I trusted that it must be a good thing if Scotty was offering it to me, so I said yes. He told me to hold out my arm, as he pulled a disgustingly snotty booger out of his nose and put it on my arm.


At first, I was repulsed, but then I decided that maybe it was some kind of worm or something, and marveled at the thought that a living thing might live in my nose as well. Suddenly, I was proud of the booger on my arm, and I wanted to show my mother.


In my excitement, I ran into the house and, as children often do, got my words mixed up. "Mommy! Look!" I said. "Scotty gave me a nigger on my arm!"


My mother's gasp and shriek could be heard across the nation that day as she immediately began washing my arm under scalding hot water. However, it wasn't the booger that had upset my mother so much as the fact that the word "nigger" had come out of her four-year-old daughter's mouth.


I got a lecture on what the word meant, that it was a hateful word that I should never ever use, and that's when she educated me on how painful it is to be discriminated against based on the color of your skin, and how my own grandfather had been looked down on by my grandmother's family because he was Cherokee. Picturing my mother as a child not being able to play with her friend on the playground because of the color of her skin broke my heart, and from that day on, I have fought against racism at every opportunity.


Actually, though, there is another aspect of racism that my mother hadn't mentioned, and that aspect is the fear of other races, which is at the seat of the hatred that spawns racism to begin with.


Later that year, the first actual real live black people I had ever seen were knife fighting in the parking lot of our apartment complex. I was terrified! My parents opened the door and told them they were calling the police, hoping to get them to stop before they killed one another.


I had never seen any fighting in my life at that age, and the fact that the first real-life violence I had ever seen involved black people created an irrational fear of all black people in both my brother and I for several years, even though my parents didn't know this.


We moved to the larger apartment complex across the street a year later (movin' on over, as opposed to movin' on up), and there were a couple of black kids that lived in one apartment. We stayed away from them, and if one of us wanted the other to play hide-and-seek and the other didn't want to, we would threaten the other by saying "If you don't, I'm going to go play with those black people." The other would immediately acquiesce out of fear that harm might come to the other sibling.


My parents discovered what was going on and explained to us that not all black people are violent, just like not all white people are non-violent. This helped, but we were still fearful until we started school.


There was one black teacher at our elementary school. My father taught music at the same elementary school, and he introduced me to Mrs. Hardy, a very nice lady. Finally I was able to interact with a real live black person, and she was just like everyone else at the school. She didn't pull a knife out and try to cut me. Whew!


In the third grade, the first black student entered our school. Her name was Tara. She was accepted with hesitation by the other kids in our class until Mrs. Freund, my third-grade teacher, educated everyone on the fact that racism is wrong and that treating Tara any differently than any other child would simply NOT be tolerated. Thank goodness we had made some progress by then compared to when my mother was in school!


In junior high school, there was a black kid named George Mitchell. I believe he lived with his grandmother, and he was the kindest, most gentle, well-spoken, talented kid at the school. I remember him sharing his poetry with me in American History class. I miss him.


When I was nine, my parents divorced after eleven years of marriage because my father decided he was gay. While homophobia isn't based on race, it's another form of bigotry, and I experienced the pain of being made fun of at school because of my father's suspected homosexuality. (Other kids knew he was gay before I did, apparently, just based on their gaydar.)


My mother fell in love with a black Episcopal priest from our church who was twice her age. They had quite the on-again off-again affair for years, but both of their personalities were too fiery for the relationship to ever develop into more than that. Still, I would say that it was the most exciting relationship with a man my mother had ever had, in that she never seemed as obsessed with anyone else as much as she was with him, except for maybe Johnny Mathis. (To this day, I can't think back to my childhood without hearing Johnny Mathis singing "Chances Are" in my head.)


I grew up and began working in radio. I was seduced by and fell head-over-heels in love with a fellow air personality from a country station who happened to be black. Unfortunately, it turned out that he was already married and hadn't bothered to tell me that. Luckily, I had matured enough at that point that I didn't hold his behavior against all black men.


I remember that I had been dating a white man who was divorced with children for a while before I began dating a black man, and my paternal grandmother had expressed concern to my Uncle Greg about the fact that I might be having a serious relationship with a black man. My uncle Greg ever-so-poignantly pointed out that he was more concerned about me dating a white man who was divorced with children than he was me dating a single, never-married black man.


In 1989, I was offered almost twice as much pay at an urban contemporary radio station (what most people called the "black" radio station) as I was making at an adult contemporary radio station. When I made the change, I was asked by my attorney why I had "taken a step down" in the radio world. "They must have offered you a lot of money." His assumption was that I had gone to work at a station of less popularity because it was not music he liked. It was "black" music. In actuality, I had been working at the number seven radio station in Chattanooga, and the "black" station was the number three, as in "top three" radio station. I got rid of that attorney.


I was (and still am) a very bold human being most of the time. I had a racist Uncle Paul who would use the word nigger often and every time I heard him do it while I was growing up I would launch into a tirade about how he shouldn't use that word. It didn't matter to me if I was a guest in his house or not. He didn't have the right to say that word in my presence because it was wrong. Period.


Today, I don't get angry when I see racism as much as I am saddened by it. It is clearly born of ignorance, and anything born of ignorance in our society is sad to me. Ignorance is so unnecessary. We should know better by now. We should have been able to overcome this by now.


I once wrote a paper on how racism is born of fear, and how that fear is born of our natural reaction to people who are different than us. The limbic system kicks into high gear in order to protect us from possible danger when we encounter someone different than us, but we haven't quite developed an awareness that this is where the fear comes from and when it isn't actually serving a purpose to protect us as much as confusing us into thinking there may be danger where there is none.


As an adult, I have experienced racism from black people. Even though I have Cherokee blood in me and used to be quite dark, the Irish apparently took over as I grew up and I'm now a fluorescent glow-in-the dark white.


As someone with O.C.D. and anxiety issues, I don't do well in crowds. Once in a hotel and presented with an elevator full of people, I said "I'll just take the stairs." The problem: the elevator was full of black people who made it clear that they thought I was afraid to get on the elevator with them because they were black. I could feel the hate, and I was angered by their assumption. Still, it's understandable, given the amount of racism still so prevalent not only in this area, but all over the world.


I know many people who have great friendships with people of different races, but the first time a disagreement comes up, racism seems to become an accusation in some way, regardless of whether the disagreement had anything to do with race or not.


Unfortunately, I think that human nature is such that there will always be racism to some degree. However, we can continue making progress if the authority figures in our lives will speak up and correct irrational fears and behaviors when they present themselves in children. Parents, teachers and others can all play a role in interrupting the destructive thought patterns that give birth to such ugly lies as racism is based on, and the responsibility for doing so belongs to all of us.


-A.M.