Race

My recent trip to the Hmong Marketplace made me think about race, the discomfort of being different, of considering that a stranger is black/asian/white/etc and knowing that I am aware of other's race as a white woman. I make note. Sometimes I feel something along with the note, a black man walking down the street towards me can sometimes make me consider my surroundings. It is an awful feeling, to judge without thinking. I did not grow up here, I grew up in a much smaller and more diverse city. I went to grade school with lots of black and asian and hispanics. I can watch myself now and see how I am not used to seeing and interacting with so many people of color. I watch Byrd and note that he does not react to darker skin, older skin, uglier skin, beautiful skin. He is not shocked or interested. At the gym a gorgeous african woman in the day care will hold him and he is happy but seems unaware of both her distinctive good looks or her very dark skin.

In college I formed a group of friends, four of us are asian, two of us are white. We talked about race as a construct, one of the asian girls who I was closest with told me that she and I would never be as close as she was with asian friends. I remember how unfair that seemed. It was not true. A different one of these girls married a chinese-american man recently, she makes all sorts of comments about how asian men are best, it rings insincere, or like a performance, this is the first chinese-american she has ever dated. I think something about being chinese-american married to someone else chinese-american feels good to her. But it makes me, as a white friend, feel like she wishes I were chinese-american too.

For seventh grade I started at the local public school, I had been at a small semi-private school that was mostly italian-american. I was the only jewish kid. There were a handful of black girls in every class. I was friends with everyone, it was a small school. I learned that race was meaningless. That we are all created equal. That people who thought one race was better than another were bad. My local public school was 98% minorities (according to the no child left behind reports). They had divided the class into two groups and you had all the same classes and classrooms as your half. All the white kids with college educated parents from the neighborhood were in one group, I was in the other. I made friends with cambodian girls with slicked back ponytails that hung down to their waist. They had long names that no matter how many times I asked I could not pronounce, they gave me short names to use, like Mimi. We sat together at lunch and I felt very other. I saw the white girls in their vintage bohemian cloths walk by my table and I wondered how I would ever meet them too. The first gym class I changed my cloths, but noticed that most people did not do this. We played kickball inside the large gym, there were probably seventy girls so most of the time we just waited in line for a turn to kick the ball. It was really boring. The gym teacher sat in a chair, he looked bored or asleep. I slouched against the wall. A tall black girl with huge breasts came up to me when I was about ten people from the front of the line for kicking, "You just get back at the end of the line, if you kick that ball I am gonna kill you." I looked up at her, I was short and skinny, no one had ever talked to me in that way before. At my sweet private school I had lead a fight for the kickball field for girls. The boys in fifth grade had taken over the field and told us girls we could not play, we inserted ourselves into the game, this boy Matt once stood real close to me and told me, "Girls have no power." I pushed his skinny ass down and he fell into the mud. Our fifth grade teacher tried to have a class discussion about sharing the field. I was called a feminist, boys complained about why did us girls have to make a fuss over this. Anyways, in the end girls and boys alternated days or something like that with the kickball field.
So here I was, a new student, twelve years old, in this old gym with ceilings about three stories up, nine people in front of me to bat before I had to make a choice. The gym was a cavernous wicked feeling space. I thought about Julie of the Wolves when Adena King, the tall black girl stood over me, "If you go up to kick, I will kill you." I tried to radiate my calm, to not show fear, this alone, I thought, will be powerful enough for her to walk away, to protect me.
I went up to kick the ball, I got to second base. A short squat girl came over to me and told me Adena was gonna kill me. Adena came over as I stood on second contemplating third, she told me her last name was King, "Do you know what that means to us black people." I knew what King meant, peace, change, strength, standing up for what you believe. I am now married to a person with the last name King, though he is white. It made me a little sick to think of changing my last name to the one this leering tall girl held over me as a symbol of violence and anger.
After gym class the teacher came over and told me to be careful and do what those girls said. I went home and did not want to leave. Each morning I lay in bed refusing to get up, I cried. I did not want to go to this big dusty building and have six foot tall girls beat me. I remember my step-mother coming in after about a week of this, she said, "So what are you gonna do now, just lay in bed?" That struck me as a good point. What was I gonna do. So I got up and went to school after that. I say the same thing to myself now sometimes, "What are you gonna do self, just lay in bed." My parents had me moved to the seventh grade group with all the other middle class white kids, all the middle class white boys wanted to date me since I was new. All the girls wanted me to be their friend. Adena never bothered me again. I never went in the locker room or changed for gym, I sat against the wall instead and talked to my two best friends, we called ourselves the "Chuck Chicks" and wore all different colors of converse with our cool vintage outfits. We were friends with girls of all races, but we did not see the black/asian/hispanic girls outside of school. I saw girls fight, rip clumps of weave-in hair out, throw each other down stairs, carve their initials in the other one's neck. If someone were to come up to me again and tell me not to kick I did not know what I would do, I probably would not kick. I had learned fear. I knew that when a tall black girl with huge boobs tells you she is gonna kill you it at least means she might pull out a good chunk of hair, cut you with a knife, or throw you down the stairs.
In college I worked as a residential advisor (except at Brown I was called a woman peer counselor) and we talked about race. Racism was defined as something white people could do, but not something other races could do. Only when you are in the position of power can you be racist. I tried explaining what my middle and high school were like, I was told I was wrong. Adena was not racist because she was not really in a position of power in the greater world. Only I, the white one, the entitled one, had the option of being racist, explained Kena the asian-american woman who ran the residential advising program. I had learned my lesson from Adena,instead of insisting on kicking the ball I just sat against the wall, talked with my friends, and held my tongue.