On white supremacy
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The first time I was called a nigger, I was 10 years old. I beat a white boy in a foot race and as I looked over at him to declare his defeat, he launched his assault. I remember the look of vitriol and triumph in eyes, knowing there was nothing I could launch as a counter attack. He walked away as I stood frozen — heat rising in my face, my arms and legs growing numb and tingly. As I regained feeling in my limbs, a cold pit formed in my gut that sat there for two days. My heart never recovered.
That was not my body’s first experience with knowing racism. A few years earlier a white man in a convertible sped through the parking lot of a small shopping center and almost hit me and my brother as we were walking with our dad to get dinner. My dad snatched both of us back and yelled at him to slow down like any parent experiencing the mix of anger and fear that comes with the thought of their child’s death would. The man quickly parked and jumped out of his car. With a switch in hand, he headed toward us while yelling. My dad rushed me and my brother into the pizza place and told us to wait inside. He went back out. I still don’t know what happened as I sat in the dark, wood-walled pizzeria terrified, numb, and nauseous, but my dad made it back in and we ate together, mostly in silence.
My brother and I weren’t there to snatch our dad back when a car hit him almost a decade later. He was killed in a crosswalk by a white woman who failed to stop.
The first news article that came out about the accident blamed my dad for his own death. The reporter, also a white woman, made a baseless accusation that he was drunk, while reporting that the woman who killed him was an attorney who was fully cooperating with the police. As an 18-year-old in the fog of grief, I had to pick up the phone and convince a white woman that my dad was a human being — a man with a loud, infectious laugh that filled rooms almost as generously as the smell of his famous bbq’d ribs, who woke me up at 4am to get on fishing boats so we could catch fish he’d put in sushi later that night, and a man who taught me the gentleness, but tenacity we must carry for ourselves when we’re in our beginner’s mind.
Throughout my life, like all Black people, I have continued to live with the onslaught of everyday racism in America. The unsolicited hair touching, the questions about my lineage, the attributing of my accomplishments to some made up idea that in a white supremacist country, I was given a leg up. Yet the most pervasive and frustrating aggression of all has been white people’s denial of Black people’s experience, whether in the form of outright refutation, questioning, or ignorance. In denying Black people’s experience, white people have largely been unwilling to confront their own whiteness.
But this past week, thanks to the thousands of people marching in the streets and decades of groundwork laid by activists, I’ve felt a shift. Books to help folks address white supremacy are sold out everywhere. My white mom is emailing me about which racial justice podcast is the best place for her to start. White friends who I haven’t spoken with since college are asking which organizations to donate to.
While I have been tremendously sad, I am also feeling hopeful. Perhaps because I’ve known the imperfect love that is possible in the midst of racial tension and white supremacy. I know what it is to be loved by an old white man who hated my brother’s afro, but always kept his freezer stocked with vanilla ice cream and stayed at the ready to offer me a root beer float because he knew they were my favorite. Or to have the love of an old white woman who did not like my mom’s choice to marry a Black man, but never let me leave a visit without finding a moment to give my hand a soft squeeze with a little wink. My grandparents were never perfect, but they also never stopped trying.
So, amidst all of the pain, and knowing the fight we still have ahead — I’m reminded — we don’t have to be perfect to dismantle white supremacy, we just have to love each other enough to never stop trying.