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.