Racial Microaggressions 101: All I Wanted Was a Quiet Breakfast at BK
I live in a sleepy little unadjusted town called Columbus, Georgia…at least for the time being.
It’s a place I left in the early 1990s after being brought here by my mother when I was five. I wasn’t alone. There were three other siblings, including a six-month old baby girl.
We came here from Denver, Colorado, our birth home, and Detroit, Michigan, her birth home, to Columbus, our mother’s birth home (or close enough). Mama was actually born in Girard, Russell County, Alabama (now known as “Phenix City”) and then removed to neighboring Columbus by her parents by the time she was two. Needless to say, when we came here from up North on a “midnight train to Georgia”, we knew nothing of southern racial atrocities. But she did.
We weren’t taught to think of ourselves as “Black” or “colored” or even Afrocentric, so coming to a small town in southwest Georgia in the mid-1960s, one that was still essentially skin-color segregated, was off the beaten path for us. My older sister was old enough to “get it,” but she wasn’t accustomed or acclimated. I was old enough to sense something was discomfiting and strangely absurd, but I would later say I sensed the absence of the white people because I had been around them since I was born.
Our younger brother and sister were too young to remember much of anything at all. For all they knew, they had been in Columbus all their lives, grew up with racism, and knew nothing of the backward progression of time from the present to the past.
It was the sunset season of visible, viable and blatant racial discrimination in the deep south and I had no concept that I would end up being one of the frontline beneficiaries of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “dream,” a dream that I was already living before we came down south.
That move turned my life topsy-turvy, so instead of going forward and progressing, we were tossed onto a backwoods spinner going nowhere fast. Personally, I had no love for the place or the people in it, and I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to leave and go back to Denver.
“When I turn 18…”
I did turn 18, of course, but by the time that happened, I was already shot dead in my mind and spirit, soul and body.
I remember tugging at my mother’s skirt when we got off that train and telling her not to bring us here, or I was going to “die.” She thought I was being childish and overly-dramatic, but that is actually what happened over time.
When I finally got to the point where I could leave, it was a chance I took in my early thirties to go and try to make some sense of a world that no longer made any sense. In my youthful mind, I wondered why would some loving God created a race of people just so they could be used as a toilet and dumpsters for others? That alone was an easy enough reason not to believe in God, or “Jesus.”
But I finally left after 25 years, and through what I can only define as “a series of unfortunate circumstances,” I realized that I had been so sensitized to my skin orientation that I could never recover my sense of humanity and the delicate balance that God created me to be.
A weed had been planted in my garden of life and my self-esteem was thoroughly destroyed, along with any possibility of having a good life or a decent future—living in Columbus had done that to me. No hope, no life, no beauty, just superficial crap made to cover up all the dead men’s bones beneath. I saw the Chattahoochee River as nothing but a dock for smaller slave ships, a place where my own ancestors were lynched and tossed into the river to be eaten by crocodiles and alligators, and where others were run off on the Trail of Tears from Fort Mitchell, Alabama, to Fort Gibson, Oklahoma.
So, miraculously enough, when I returned 25 years later, I learned the meaning of the old adage “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Columbus had changed superficially, externally, like it was trying in earnest to become some ‘wannabe Atlanta’ cliche, but couldn’t get out of being stuck in the muck and mire of the #PodunkUSA towns surrounding it.
In Atlanta (fka Terminus), a large city with a population of just under two million when I arrived, I found out the darndest thing about tactical institutionalized racism: The more white people had to compete with Black people for even the most meager of meaningless dead-end jobs or the mere right to survive, the worse the racism got.
Dorothy was trying to leave Kansas, and found a bigger, brighter, lucy in the sky with diamonds, Emerald City version of it. Tornado not included.
I won’t discuss how I landed back in Columbus after the 25 years it took me to get out and the 25 in which I stayed gone and also lived in East Bay, then San Bernandino County, California, then in Tempe/Mesa/Phoenix Arizona for three years — long story.
I will say that when I returned to Columbus, I had been trained by some of the worst racists in the land to hate them as much as they hated us. It made no sense because the short of the long story is that the most pain and suffering I have ever experienced in my entire life came at the hands of other Black people.
That morning, I dropped my car off to be serviced at Autonation near Bradley Park Drive at seven a.m.
The service desk guy said it would take a couple of hours, so I walked around the road and headed to the Burger King on Veterans for breakfast. It was a little misty morning from impending rain, but I knew I needed the walk and the fresh air and some coffee, so I didn’t let the little droplets bug me, just prayed it wouldn’t go in harder and leave me soaking wet on approach.
I figured on a quiet morning meal, on watching the news on my mobile phone -mainly waiting for news on Donald Trump- and on waiting for my phone to ring with the outstanding news that my car was ready.
What I got was noisy loud cursing rap-music playing in the section in which I was sitting, so I got up and walked around the corner to the other side of the restaurant where there appeared to be some “nice white folk” talking about nothing that concerned me, except I knew that my bite of breakfast wouldn’t be spoiled on my stomach by loud early morning cursing.
As I turned the corner, some faint whispers of their conversation leaked into my hearing.
They were talking about “Jesus” and some scriptures in the Bible. That was pretty easy to tune out, since they weren’t as obnoxiously loud as Rap Girl, but it seemed like the more I sat there concentrating on my own newsfeed (volume-free), the louder they got.
I heard “And by the way this thing with Trump…” and my ears jumped to attention. It wasn’t like I wanted to hear what they were about to say, nothing about them surprised me any more; but it was as loud and obnoxious as that rap music on the other side.
Tick tock … I remember saying, because I already knew the white supremacist side of Trump’s cult, and what they were about to say — as per typical, so since they were trying ever so hard to make sure the little chocolate drop in the corner heard them, I tuned in. But I never turned in their direction. It didn’t take long … but there it was.
One female was talking about “Jesus” and quoting scriptures, the two men were listening and chiming in when they could cut between the two hens, and the other female kept saying like a broken record “I don’t care if they kill them all.”
This “Love of Jesus Person” said the word “kill, kill, kill” at least five times -each time a little louder than the last- before I finally got disgusted and said “Bullsh*+” and NOT under my breath either.
I tossed the rest of my partially uneaten sandwich in the bag, grabbed my iced coffee, and got up and walked out.
Jesus kill, or kill Jesus, I don’t know which one she wanted more, but that nasty-mouthed horny-toed unchristian ungulate was just as deplorable and debased, in my mind, as that young Black woman listening to disgusting rap music that early in the morning.
As I neared the Autonation store, my phone messenger rang to tell me that my vehicle was ready. Timing couldn’t have been better.
As to timing, I can’t say the same for the angry Black woman listening to music inspiring her to hate and kill other Black people, or the angry white one listening to scriptures that apparently told her “Thou shalt not kill” was no longer a ‘thing’ with God. Apparently, folks that claim to be men and women of God these days are nothing more or less than little rappers in Christian disguise.
They could have had a go at each other for all I cared at the moment, but I had no intention of being caught in the middle of either of them.
I drove back onto Veterans Parkway headed home, and I was sadly reminded that “kill kill kill” had been so violently plugged into Black people’s minds by lynching and tormenting white people over the years that we could no longer tell which demon was which, except one of them had the gall to be spouting off about some character named “Jesus” while she simultaneously espoused murder — for a belligerent accusatory juvenile delinquent old dusty crusty white male that they thought would be their Salvation and Glory Road back to partying like it was 1859.
Donald J. (#CrookedDon) Trump (five children with three women) and Lil’ Boosie Badazz Hatch (eight children with six women) — no wonder Trump likes gold-flashing rappers with pending murder charges so much. He’s just like them, and criminal street gangs of a feather flock together.
The accumulation of daily interactions and micro-aggressive behavior over the years has had a severe impact on my mental health and wellbeing, and I wasn’t here for the worst of it. My mother and my grandparents and their parents and parent’s parents lived through all of it, barely.
Yet, I’m not the one who would normally stand in a gathering of white people claiming to talk about “Jesus” and caustically use the word “bullshit” to apply to their version of scriptures.
I can only imagine what it must have taken over the centuries for Black people to get to the point where they could glorify #craprapp and accept significant amounts of fiat to do the same thing to one another.
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