EDITOR’S PICK
My Journey into Blackness
And the unraveling of my whiteness
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. —James Baldwin
From the moment I entered kindergarten through my high school graduation and into my first two years of college, I knew not a single black person.
I was raised in Orange County, the white suburbs of Los Angeles, contented in my white neighborhood, white school, and white church. I knew black people existed; I was a child of the ’60s who saw the headlines of the Civil Rights protests, the pictures of fire hoses and police dogs set upon black protesters, the face of Martin Luther King under the headline telling us of his murder. I lived too far away to see Watts burning, but I watched endless coverage on TV, the breathless reporting of Happening Now in Los Angeles: The City Is Burning. I was curious about what was happening, but incurious as to why or to whom these events happened. The answers given to me as a pre-teen were satisfactory, “Black people were just never happy with what they had. We’ve come so far since the olden days. Everyone has a chance now.”
“If we could all just get along as Americans, we’d be fine.”
