My Racist Roots (written after the death of George Floyd)
I was six when I was shopping in Woolworth’s with my mom and
saw something unusual. A tall black
woman in a simple pants suit pushing her toddler in a shopping cart. Yes, in this Long Island neighborhood that
was an unusual sight. The wiry little
girl with her hair in two tight braids with pink bows and a flowery pink dress
to match was fidgeting and whining like any toddler in a shopping cart and her
mother was shushing her, but differently than my mom shushed me. More urgent, like their lives depended on
it. I watched the little girl with
fascination as children watch each other in stores. And there was an awareness
I had.
I went home with a thought in my mind that I pondered for
hours, days, hell, perhaps a lifetime.
Here is what I, alone in my room playing with my white dolls, ruminated
on. Why had that child been born
black? Why not I? But something more. I felt lucky, and I pitied her. I understood, not that I was better, but that
IT was better to be white than black.
Where the fuck does a six-year-old get the audacity to pity another
human being?
Where indeed? My
mother told me stories of being raised in a Pennsylvania state home and being
teased by other children and reprimanded by the adults for playing with a younger
black child. I suppose she was trying to
teach me compassion. But she
inadvertently taught me racism.
My father taught it to me, too, when PLUNK he locked the car
doors because a black man stood on a street corner in Central Islip where we
stopped for a light. My older sister
called him racist, and he became incensed and indignant. “I am not.
I just smiled and held the door for one of them at the store. But this is a bad neighborhood. See how smart you are when he rips you out of
the car and does God knows what to you.”
My cousins who lived
in Ozone Park overtly taught me racism when they proudly told stories of
confrontations they had with black students at “their” school, calling them names
that sounded like venom spewing from their mouths. “Why do you hate them?” I asked.
“Because they’re black,” they said, as if I was the idiot.
All this before that day in Woolworth’s when I was six years
old, and I knew it was all wrong.
But fast forward ten years to a perfect May evening when
Charles Robbins, one of only eight black kids in my high school and drop dead
gorgeous with dimples that surfaced often with his easy smile, and warm brown
eyes that a sixteen- year-old girl could live inside of, at least for one
summer, rode his bike to my house and knocked on my door. My father answered. It was not unusual for me to have boys
knocking on my door, not because I was cute, but because I was a tomboy who
could play an assortment of pick-up games in the dead-end across the
street. No big deal for my father to watch
me go off, basketball or baseball glove in hand, with a boy known or unknown to
him.
That night, looking out the front door at the boy who asked
if I was home, my father pivoted sharply to where I stood in the hallway behind
him and glared at me. He clenched his
teeth and spit that familiar venom, “Get rid of him.”
As I sat on the porch with Charles, I felt my father’s
presence everywhere, especially in the open window behind us. I did not know why Charles was there. I suppose he saw something in me that he
liked when we were in math class together and I didn’t even know he was
watching. Charles liked me enough to
look me up in the phone book and pedal his way from one end of the school
district to the other and knock, unannounced, uninvited, but hopeful.
And I know I could have liked him. He could solve for x, make other kids laugh, do
brave things, and most important, he looked at me like I was something other
than a first baseman. But whatever he
saw in me in school disappeared that night when I went mute on my family’s
porch on that warm spring evening with my handsome gentleman caller.
Not because I was shy.
I wrote in my diary about it May 19, 1981. “My father was really mad. I hope Charles never comes back.” He didn’t.
