This is going to be a lot harder to write than my last post (“Confessions of a TERF”), and that last post was really hard to write. BUt….
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Critical Race Theory has become the new boogie man of the right and it scares me how effective that has been. I’ve been saying for years that the most effective way to wake up white people is education. As it is, we’re given less than Cliff notes on the topic- in fact, I truly believe that if the Civil War hadn’t happened we wouldn’t have been taught about slavery at all.
My public education taught me that yes, racism is bad, but we fought a war to end it. Then it bubbled up again in the fifties, but a black pastor from the South made a speech and it ended again. It was never a constant, never built into the fabric of our society. Racism was a bad thing that bad people did way back when, but good people stopped it and it has been stopped since.
I was just a child. Hadn’t even reached five feet in height yet, and I had no reason to doubt the adults in my life when they told me racism was a thing that only happened in the past before a better generation fixed it.
That one of my best friends was a black girl proved this.
To be fair, I was, at the time, colorblind like people preached we should be. I didn’t see Ella as a black person, she was just my friend. I never thought anything about us being friends until adults pointed out it was “good” that I befriended her, or “compassionate” for including her.
On some level I understood what the adults were saying but it really made no sense to me otherwise. Ella was just another friend. I didn’t spend time with her for egalitarian purposes, I spent time with her because we were a lot alike and I felt comfortable being myself around her.
I wasn’t picked on or bullied back then but I wasn’t popular, either. I was this sort of in-between, and Ella was right there with me. We loved to read, but we’d take our noses out of our books if there was a game of kickball happening. We loved Math, but not enough to defend it to our other friends when they complained about assignments. We loved going to the library together, but when our other friends saw us in there amongst the pile of books we amassed they made fun of us and we didn’t even care.
Thirty years later I still don’t understand the pride so many Americans take in being barely literate. But Ella and I, we loved words. We loved stories.
We were excited about the upcoming field trip our class was going to take to the airport. We got to see a lot of cool stuff so I shouldn’t roll my eyes about it, but it was a very small airport with maybe five to ten arrivals or departures per day. The entire airport was smaller than our school, and we started getting bored and restless as we were shown and led through yet another conference room.
I don’t remember what we were being led to at the time, but we were all following a woman to an upstairs area. A boy from class looked back at me over his shoulder, laughed, and asked why I was hanging with a N*****.
I had never heard that word spoken out loud before and I immediately got angry and lunged toward the kid. Ella and our friend T grabbed me and held me back, but I promised Doug I was going to kill him when the final school bell rang.
My threat didn’t stop the boys from picking on Ella and I had never seen anything so cruel in my life.
They kept picking at her and I kept fighting back and Ella kept grabbing my elbow and telling me to let it go, it was OK. BUT IT WASN’T O FUCKING K. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing as the boys in our class taunted and tormented her. I couldn’t believe the adults there heard most of it but kept threatening me and never told the boys to STFU.
When we got back to school and into our class, our teacher called me to follow her into the hall. She was furious. Demanded to know why I was so disruptive through the entire field trip. So I told her.
I told the truth and nothing but the truth. She furrowed her brow and looked deep into my eyes. “This really happened? I need you to name names if this is true.”
So I fucking named them.
Named every fucking name.
Brandon.
Jesse.
Chad.
Doug- especially Doug. He was the one who used the N word.
Mark.
Dan- he was the one who said something I won’t repeat.
Cory.
And Derek.
I always thought Derek was my friend and a good guy. He didn’t say anything, but he stood there with them as they taunted Ella. And when I wanted a fist fight to settle the score he just walked away.
The teacher thanked me and said I did the right thing but I was still in trouble, then she opened the door to the classroom to let me back in and yelled the names I’d just named. I thought justice was coming.
I’ll spare you the drama, but at the end of the day I was the only one who faced consequences.
At some point, I remember it being the next day but I could be wrong, my mom barged through the school doors and ripped the principal a new one. It was so embarrassing- it was a small school building but that didn’t justify her voice ringing through the halls for all the school to hear.
To ten-year-old me, this wasn’t a case of racism. It couldn’t be because that didn’t even exist anymore except among really awful people. They were picking on her because her hair was weird and her clothes were old. They were picking on her because she didn’t know who or what or where her mom was. They were just picking on her to be mean, like the time the same boys cornered another girl- a white one- and spit loogies on her for what was probably two minutes but seemed like an eternity.
Ella, T, and I all stood back watching it happen, glancing back and forth to each other expecting someone to say something, but if WE did, we would be the ones with loogies in our hair, so we just watched it happen, stoic and silent.