Racism 101

I wrote this one in Spring of 2008....

As Barack Obama stands poised to grab the Democratic party’s nomination for president from Hillary Clinton, we are hearing more and more often that we are a society that has arrived in the post-race era. Maybe in certain public ways, this is true. For me and group of twenty-odd college students, however, the idea that we are post-race was recently exposed as palpably and demonstrably false.

Two weeks ago, I asked students in a course on children and childhood to get out of the classroom and actually observe some children. Because they are not too far removed from being considered children themselves, I wanted my students to ground their comments about children in what we social scientists like to call data. I wanted them to move away from speaking about children through the lenses of their own recent childhoods, or, perhaps, interactions over the holidays with younger brothers and sisters.

My students’ first task was to figure out where to find kids. They visited preschools, playgrounds, malls, coffee shops, and of course, Chuck E. Cheese. All came with wonderful observations about what kids were doing, whether interacting with each other, babysitters, or parents. All but one. One student, let’s call him David, came up to me both apologetic and worried he was going to fail the assignment, because he’d been unable to sit and watch kids. “What happened,” I asked him. Turns out everywhere he went – four separate playgrounds – he was approached by adults who asked him to leave (if they were being polite) or told him forcefully to “get the #$*##& out of here.”

There we were, smack in the middle of black history month, and a historic presidential run by an African American man, and the one black student in my class comes back with this story. David is tall and good looking, with a muscular build that makes him look like he might be a marine recruiter’s dream. He is also very much what my 94 year old Chinese Auntie would call “a nice boy,” and in fact spent three years working in a preschool because he enjoys children so much. “Did this happen to anybody else?” I asked my students. They all answered no, including the other men, one of whom is a self-professed flaming queen who had done his observations – and I quote – “dressed like a disco ball.”

David’s story made me mad. Mostly, I was mad at myself for not anticipating that he might have these sorts of problems, because as much as it is a parent’s job to protect their child from whatever it is that might harm them, it is my responsibility as a teacher not to throw my students into situations that, likewise, might bring harm to them. More than this, though, I was mad that the lesson that David learned during black history month is also an important lesson that children on at least four Los Angeles playgrounds were being taught – intentionally or not. That everyday lesson is this: that black men are scary, that black men are threatening, and that white people have the right to tell black men when to get lost, and to do so with the threat of violence hovering not-so-subtly behind them. Let’s face it, most racism is taught in just this way, through crossing the street, avoiding a neighborhood, or watching a customer. You don’t have to be waving swastikas and burning crosses on lawns to be racist. David’s attempt to do a simple classroom assignment taught that to me and my students, who know, too, that even if Barack Obama is sitting in the Oval office next year, we’ll be waiting quite a while to arrive in the post race era.

There is a town in California, let's call it oh, Los Elevados, one of those towns that I’d sort of thought had gone out of fashion and out of existence with the arrival of things like, oh I don’t know, the civil rights act. It’s the kind of place where one of its parks charges non-residents an entry fee on weekends, and there is no overnight street parking. It’s the kind of town that prides itself on well-kept lawns and Christmas-decorated city trees in winter; the kind of town where rental units are banned; the kind of town where everybody wants to live if they can because the schools have the highest scores going; the kind of town where, recently, a group of black and brown girls were rejected from the local girl scout troop because there wasn’t room for them.

While Los Elevados can’t be described as homogeneous, it isn’t exactly diverse either. The population is about half white and half Asian, and many of the Asians are immigrants, who, as my Chinese friend Grace says, “think race doesn’t have anything to do with them.” The black and brown residents number, all together, less than 1,000. The city has just over 10,000 residents, with a median household income of $125,000 and a poverty rate of just 5 percent. Which means, basically, that this is a very rich town; not even 16% of American families have incomes of 100k or above.

Now I have to admit that I do indeed take a perverse pleasure in gathering and archiving examples of the weird racist things that seem to happen in Los Elevados with astonishing regularity. One Chinese American woman told me once that during a community dance class she’d asked one of the moneyed trophy wives a question, maybe about the time, maybe about directions to a store, I can’t remember. This woman actually pretended she couldn’t understand what the Chinese American woman was saying to her – IN FLUENT NATIVE ENGLISH. Trophy wife simply ignored the request, refused to speak, all the while without a doubt having heard the question. Or the casual snobbery of the very rich who might say to my college professor women colleagues, “Oh, you choose to work,” as if the very thought makes them want to wash their hands. On Halloween, many Los Elevados households many houses prepare two candy caches – one to be dispensed to the ‘real’ residents of Los Elevados and another for the ‘other’ kids who come in from other neighborhoods. I wonder how they tell the difference under the costumes and makeup. Maybe it’s the smell?

Most of the racism and snobbery I try to chalk up to outdated insularity and plain stupidness. But the girl scout thing put me over the edge. Who in their right mind doesn’t let kids into the troop? They must have suspected that the black and brown kids weren’t actually from San Marino. By definition. Since everyone who belongs in Los Elevados is white or (grudgingly accepted) Asian. Luckily, salvation came along in the form of a no-nonsense Caribbean woman who insisted on starting a new troop, launching into the project with the declaration, offered in a rhythmic and pointedly non-elite accent, “We are going to put the BROWN back into the BROWNIES!”

Clearly this is going to be the hippest brownie troop in town. And all I can say is that I hope those girls out- badge, out -event, our cookie-sell and in every other way outshine their counterparts who I can only hope will someday learn the lesson that no, they aren’t better than everybody else who they’ve only vaguely heard or thought about. I don’t wish for those precious little hothouse flower girls to be wilted, but I do hope that they might at some point try some real fresh air and sunshine and maybe even try it with some kids who aren’t white. Hey, you brown brownies of Los Elevados, bring it on and bring it down! Yes girls, you and your moms, you go on and put the BROWN back into the BROWNIES ‘cause there’s plenty of us out here who know that blondies are, really, just a poor imitation of the real thing. And we’ll buy all the cookies you got to sell.

The Girl with the the Golden Hair

“Mom,” my daughter said to me a few weeks ago, “I’m singing this song at school where I have to say, “I’m grateful I’m the girl with the golden hair.” Hmmm, I thought. What the heck do I do now? See the problem is, my girl will never have golden hair and this is particularly obvious because she is half African American and one quarter Chinese and one quarter Caucasian. While her maternal grandmother DID have golden hair as a child, it’s now gone pretty white. Looking at her long, ringletty ponytail, the one she likes to leave in for say about a week without actually combing it much so that it becomes one giant dred, I said, “well, just say ‘curly.”

Turns out it was the Abba song “Girl with the Golden Hair” that she was singing. But as far as I’m concerned it’s still not much of an excuse. (Technically, the line goes “I have been lucky/I’m the girl with the golden hair.) Having to sing the line, whatever it was exactly, certainly was something my daughter was thinking about and it wasn’t hard to imagine why this line stuck with her, given that she’d also said she’d been getting teased about her hair in school.

I already knew that bringing it up at her school was likely to be not only thankless but actively deflected. Last year, when my daughter expressed some discomfort with not having taken part in a Lunar New Year Celebration, something that she felt had happened because people perceive her as black and not asian, and therefore not eligible to participate, I was first told I couldn’t meet with the principal to ask her about what had taken place. As this was unacceptable, I emailed her and described my concerns. Rather than meeting with me as a first response, what happened is that my questions were framed as an accusation that was then emailed to the school administrative staff. Why my private communication to the principal needed to passed on to the staff is unclear, except to warn them, I suppose, that I was, as far as they were concerned, a loose cannon for wanting to find out why my kid seemed bummed that she couldn’t participate in the Lunar New year celebration. So much for trying to address diversity issues in a mutually respectful fashion. This in a school where, as far as I can tell, all the teaching staff is white and asian, the support staff is black and latino, and the janitorial staff is black.

This is the everyday way in which racism scrapes away at us. My kid has to sing this stupid line, a line that could only reasonably apply to white kids, and if I go to her school to register discomfort, the answer I can predict is something along the lines of why are you so upset over a little thing and by the way you’re making me unfomfortable which is certainly inappropriate and in fact I think you’re something of a troublemaker and you should really stop acting like this. After all it’s only a little thing. But what if, for instance, the line went “I’m lucky/I’m the girl with the cornrowed hair” or the dredlocked hair, or the nappy hair? Call me crazy, but I don’t imagine my daughter’s nice little school would make white kids sing that line without thinking twice.

That ‘little thing’ was one I decided to address with a big old visit to my hairstylist, who along with everybody else in her shop, all four of them, lovingly washed, conditioned and combed my child’s waist length twirling hair, trimmed it, and showed me how to allow it to dry into gorgeous, springy, shiny ringlets. They told her how beautiful her hair is, how special it is, and she basked in the warmth they showered upon her. Later that night, in her hula class, her friends ran up to her to tell her how nice her hair looked and she beamed all over again. (Hula class is another – wonderful – story: the girls are black and brown and asian and white and latino and all the kinds of beauty they possess are refracted in and through the network of families and friendships we have forged together over the years.) It’s this lovingess that she needed, the warm lovingness of others, because no matter how many times I tell her she’s got the hair I always wanted, it just cannot make her feel so good and right as when the rest of the world tells her so, or at least a few of those who are out there in the world.

I am grateful she’s the child with the curly hair. I’m grateful she’s everything she is, but I am not grateful that she society we live in too often makes my child regret the glory that is her hair, her skin, her vivid imagination and her raucous vocabulary, and all because she is not white.